Artiom

Artiom Komolov is a third year university student here in Kyiv and he has been the translator for our assignment with SASII.  He is an amazing young man, he's fluent in English and also speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and some Spanish.  He is more tech savvy then all of us combined (it's all about his iPhone and iPad) and he's probably not even 21 yet.  He was invaluable to our team not only for our assignment, but was kind enough to point out some places we should go and where the best seats were in the National Opera House were I'm going next Tuesday to see the ballet Swan Lake.  Artiom is studying Finance and minoring in Law and Paul, Shiva, and I have no doubt that he will be successful in whatever career he pursues.

We wanted to take his picture to add to our presentation and decided to take a few more of him with the team and then some more of our office and where we we've been working for the past few weeks.  As you can see there are two desks - a big desk and a small black one.  It shouldn't come as a surprise that I took the big desk.




Just had to show you what the lift looked like as well; I swear it is about the size of a coat closest back home and we would laugh everyday when the three of us were in there because you weren't sure if it was going to make it all the way to the fourth floor, tick, tick, tick, tick.  The three of us could just fit with our laptop bags, I can't imagine what the total carrying capacity is; who knows, maybe we weren't supposed to ride in it all together... We always wanted to know where the lift would take you if you pressed the buttons on the right because there are only four floors in the building but there are 10 buttons, hmmm... Willy Wonka anyone?  Or perhaps, Spinal Tap?

When we arrived in the building three weeks ago and took the lift for the first time, Paul said - sorry guys I can't do that again, it's too small.  So for the first week we took the four flights of stairs up in the morning, down for lunch, up again after lunch and down one last time to go home.  After a week, we were getting better with the stairs, but then Paul goes, "How about we take the lift?" so we've been taking it ever since.