I still, against my better judgment, am considering making a trip to the Ukraine to visit the places of Alex Len’s youth. However, given the perilous political/military situation in that country, I’ve postponed the trip at least until the offseason. I don’t want to get kidnapped by armed Ukrainian insurgents or by armed Russian conquerors or by ultra-left Moldovan anarchists (also armed) and have to put my channel’s activities on hold. Because you know that if I were to get kidnapped, they wouldn’t care a bit that I was leaving 14,000 subscribers behind with no scrublights to watch. They would just be contacting the US embassy demanding sums in the millions of dollars for my release (sums that no sane negotiator would pay, because my life is not worth that much).
So, instead of a trip to Ukraine, I visited a local restaurant that purported to serve Ukrainian food. The food was pretty much like Russian food from my uneducated point of view, but I played along with it. I didn’t want to offend the owners by telling them that the borscht was very similar to many Russian borschts that I’ve had in my life. I also didn’t want to offend them by telling them the borscht sucked and that beets suck. I actually don’t even know why I ordered the borscht. I hate borscht. It blows.
The meat dumplings were pretty good, though. Overall, I enjoyed myself. I gave them a one star on Yelp because the waitress didn’t smile enough at me when I told her I was giving a five percent tip, which I thought was generous given that tipping is totally optional. I also called the health inspectors on them after throwing a handful of roach carcasses into their kitchen while nobody was looking.
Borscht sucks. The Ukraine is not a safe place right now. Alex Len is kind of good this year. And that’s all I have to say about that.