No, I Wasn't Arrested...

...Ukrainian utilities are just teh suck. But my cable is back up now. Yay. Let's see if that's still the case after Sunday.

Remember the Icon painter that I visited before? Above is the fruit of her labor (students of Mediaeval art should appreciate the absurdity of it). Obviously, Orthodoxy would revere a sainted British king...actually it's a gift for an American guy named Al that I get to mule back to the States as a favor for a Russian friend of mine. While it kind of looks like an Icon, it is NOT blessed by church figures. They wouldn't do it.

What was especially fun about this non-icon icon was the exercise in paperwork I had to go through today to get this thing out of the country. Apparently any piece of Ukrainian art has enormous cultural value, and it can only leave the country with special permission (even if it's something that you buy on the street, doesn't matter) so I got to make a 2 hour trip to some Ukrainian government ministry of some sort or another in order to get THREE documents signed and stamped saying that it was ok to bring the non-icon icon out of the country. I also got to bribe one official that printed out one page of these documents to do it in a timely fashion. Always fun when I get to do that.