Nothing new today, again.

I've walked so much, my legs hurt.

First, I went to the train station, along Saksaganskogo, the route of trolley #14, which papa could've taken.

I walked through the market by the train station: what a dreary place. I still shudder thinking of what those people sleeping on the ground looked like.

After I searched at the train station, I took a cab to the tennis courts in Svyatoshin, Antey, where Andrei Medvedev used to play ever since he was a kid.

Then I took a cab back to the center, to Oktyabrskaya Bolnitsa, a huge medical compound near where we live. Papa was hospitalized there in December 2005, less than three weeks after Marta's birth, and one nurse at one of the buildings I checked out seemed to remember him from back then. When he had a stroke in December 2006, the third one in a year and the fourth one in general, mama took him there right away, but they sent him back home, didn't tell mama it was a stroke - because it wasn't their day to take in the new patients.

I really believe that a good way to learn about how things really are in Ukraine is by visiting a few hospitals - if the very central one in Kyiv is such a mess, then imagine what it's like elsewhere, in more remote places. Politics is irrelevant: politicians - Yushchenko and Yanukovych alike - go abroad for their treatment.

After Oktyabrskaya, I went to the Botanical Garden again, to look where I couldn't get to when I was with Marta (Mishah's here now, thank God; his cast was taken off yesterday, so he's able to take Marta for walks).

Then I took bus #62 to Kontraktova Ploshcha, walked to the embankment from there, and ended this day's search at Poshtova Ploshcha.

Mama was at the cemetery again, and then in the Botanical Garden neighborhood that we hadn't had the time to check before: the street that goes down to the river.

There, she talked to an elderly woman who was something of a guardian angel to the boat station for WWII veterans, which the Klichko brothers wanted to take away and build something fancy instead: this woman met with the one I voted for in the city council election (can't remember if that was Vladimir or Vitaliy) and described to him some of the people who kept boats there - a 91-year-old man, for example, whose only remaining pleasure in this life was a weekly sail. She made Klichko change his mind, but suffered a stroke soon afterwards and even spent some time in a coma.

After the boat station, mama took a bus to that place where they feed the homeless and where she'd run into the guy who used to know papa (he's not a guard there, by the way, but some sort of a manager).

I can't describe the despair that we all feel after doing so much searching in vain.

This hope thing, I don't know how it is still alive, but I also have no idea how it can possibly die while papa is still missing.

A thunderstorm here, again. The one last night was really wild.