Footprints on Cobblestone: It's raining cows and donkeys!

This morning we said goodbye to our hotel and very friendly hotel staff in Stanislau. They were probably the only people we've met and will meet (besides our guide) with such good English-speaking skills. Though, that doesn't mean that they didn't have their Ukrainian quirks. But more on that later. After breakfast we drove back to Kolomyja to see where the Birnberg family business was located, as well as the section of the ghetto that Papa Joe's family was placed in. The street of the family business was a narrow one, a few blocks away from their house and from the main square. It wasn't paved, and many plants on the side of the street were overgrown. This proved to be a very bumpy ride. We had a little more trouble finding the street that the ghetto section was on, since it was, according to a map, just off a different unpaved (and very bumpy) street further from the center of town, but it turned out that the street barely existed: all that was left was a short gravel path mostly filled in with grass and other plants. The ghetto area was probably completely destroyed, and it looked like not too much was rebuilt. We also went back to Papa Joe's house one more time to get a closer look at the surrounding area as well as to take a few more pictures. We did most of this from the car, however, since it started pouring rain! That's when two unleashed dogs appeared out of nowhere and started fighting.Our last stop was at the Sheparowicz Forest, a spot near the town to where most of the Jewish residents of Kolomyja were taken to be shot and buried in mass graves. We lit two memorial candles there, in memory of my great-grandparents. Before we left Kolomyja we stopped at the Pysanky (Traditional Ukrainian painted egg) Museum, a building shaped like a giant painted egg and filled with elaborate painted eggs. They also had little sculptures made out of bread and cake there. It was kind of odd. And made us hungry. Speaking of kind of odd, since we spent the rest of the day in the car traveling to Ternopil, we got to take in more of the typical Ukrainian oddities, such as flocks of ducks congregating on the sides of streets, Ukrainian ladies walking on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and potholes that haven't been fixed since Soviet times. Oh, and those cows eating grass on the road median, that's old news. You would think that, like in many European countries, the younger people would speak English. But, from what we've experienced, only a handful do, and some, "only 50-50," like our waiter at dinner tonight. And, like I said, no Ukrainian is free of Ukrainian quirks. The receptionist in our first hotel had cheetah-print dyed hair, because she "just loves this animal." Anyway, I'm sure we'll get to see more of this tomorrow when we visit Zborow, the town where my grandmother, Mama Manya grew up. Back to Mike-n-Ike's, a much needed break from beets and oily potatoes!