Trash update: yesterday, there was none - neither inside the containers, nor outside - and they weren't burning anything, either. It wasn't ideally clean, but compared to those really bad days, it was ideal.

It turned out to be a collective effort: our neighbor did call the district administration numbers I had given her and the guy I couldn't rich reach :-) talked to her, very politely. She took some photos, too, and is going to send them to the mayor - and, possibly, to some newspapers.

Now, jumping way sideways, sort of: it's really easy to talk about Ukraine's willingness to join the EU/NATO/WTO/whatever, it's easy to bullshit everyone saying we're moving in that beautiful direction, westward, away from Russia. It's really easy to talk about moving toward Russia, too, of course. But this is all such abstract talk. When that trash lay rotting for the second week in a row and no one gave a shit, I finally began to understand why certain countries make it very difficult for Ukrainians to obtain their entry visas - and I couldn't blame them for it. They have enough of their own shit to want some of ours. All our current political mess is as abstract as all those promises and statements made by Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, Moroz or Yanukovych - while the mess in the beautiful Pushcha Vodytsya is totally real, and so is the mess in many local administrations, and in many other places all over Ukraine, beautiful or ugly.