A cake slice and everything’s nice

Today Iwoke up with awful hayfever. I never used to get hayfever, I would even mock my sisters for suffering all the time in spring and summer.

After making some… adjustments to myself, I guess I’m more like my sisters... even with hayfever. It hits me like a truck, red eyes, face, blocked nose, painful sinuses, and feeling like I have covid 2.

I guess I shouldn’t have made fun of them earlier in life as it has really come back to bite my ass.

My current routine for dealing with it is a sinus rinse followed by an antihistamine and a steroid spray. With my usual meds and this stuff I feel like I’m definitely on a bundle of medication in the morning.

Even with all of this, my nose still runs all day and I have to blow my nose every hour. It’s the grossest stuff ever to do in public and everyone thinks you’re sick and have a cold or flu, but in reality, the flowers are passively just busting all over your face.

[pic of hayfever foogles]

We know every Korean is called Kim, even Kyiv

We head out to 'Street Kim' for lunch. It's a spot we went to last year as well. We had something called a 'cheese coin' which is like pancake with semi-sweet cheese in the middle. It's gooey and amazing.

When you pull it apart the cheese is stringy and gooey and oh so good. I wish we could find something like that in Glasgow, but the best thing they have there is mediocre corn dogs.

We both got tteokboki - I got 'double cheese' so it's creamy with grated cheese and has a little bit of sausage. My wife got regular but spicy. Overall it was pretty good, the chewy tteokboki and salty cheese went well together, and with it being very spicy it cleared my sinuses and allowed me to breathe.

I didn't think I was one to like Korean food, but I quite like tteokboki and ramyeon. However, I feel like it would be just like eating an onigiri or a bit of sushi and saying you love Japanese food. To me these snacky, junk food type meals aren't really the full 'cuisine', and don't necessarily feel authentic.

When I eat an authentic meal, I want to be able to taste the history behind it.

Overall, Street Kim gets about a 6.7/10 (hehe). After all, yes the cheese coin is amazing but everything else is kinda instant noodle tier food, no?

There is also an iconic photo booth with a bunch of props and stuff you can try. We obviously took a bunch of pictures (making sure two copies each so we can leave our parents a copy).

However, a photobooth means pictures of ourselves - we have to have at least a little opsec, right?

Retro futurism, frutiger aero

We walked past a cool looking Apple Store, which instead of just being some white clinical laboratory looking thing like you'd get in the west, it had a museum of old apple stuff there with a neat looking display.

Speaking of museums...

We went to an art museum. It was totally my idea as I am clearly very creative from my writing.

In reality, my wife is an artist so that is why went. If I could describe the art displayed at this time in the museum then 'surreal' is the only thing coming to mind.

I have never really been one for art, or art museums in general. I much prefer history museums as that tickles my autism in a really nice way. Given that half of my uni degree was in History, then it makes sense.

However, since mulling over, meeting, and marrying my wife, I have learned to appreciate art as well as the visual beauty of things - not just her beauty, either. I also slow down now and try to read the story from the art itself, justifying my own interpretation and questioning my assumptions. I also have grown to appreciate the different interpretations and feelings that others have when viewing the same art, and that is probably one of the reasons why my wife is obsessed with it.

We also got to see a really big fucking ball. And the only way I could describe the feeling of seeing it taking up so much space was 'video gamey'. Like it felt like one of those backrooms games where you walk in a clean room and there's items in the room that are huge. I guess I am just literally describing the actual scene, rather than trying to explain it with any kind of metaphor.

Either after this or just before it, was a very weird "art video" display, which was just borderline porn. It was about Super Alina and her magical ass, when all traditional methods of relief have been exhausted, then you might as well try Alina's ass to cure your disease.

You can have a look here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXgKN6JjMhw/

Nom nom sip sip

After that we went to our favourite cake place in Kyiv - Namelaka. It's quite expensive for Kyiv, usually for rich people to go. It's about £5-6 a slice for cake and the same for drinks.

Wife got a black forest gateux type cake, and I got a mango cloud cake!

Both were very light, something that makes me borderline suicidal when we are in the UK is how fatty and overly sweet desserts are. Cakes feel like you are just shoving oily sugar paste in your mouth. When I asked for Alice's birthday cake to be made without as much sugar for the buttercream the baker lady looked at me like I had just walked in from another planet.

However anywhere in Kyiv things are much lighter. It feels like people understood the memo for 'light and fluffy dessert'. Everything tastes like what you thought desserts were supposed to be watching movies as a kid - or how desserts look in anime.

You put it in your mouth and the first thing you taste is not sugar at all. When eating a chocolate cake in the UK you might taste sweet sugar first THEN chocolate in the form of maybe cocoa powder. However, in this black forest cake that wifey got, it's more like you are tasting the concept of a chocolate cake. Then the 'cream' was almost like eating a cloud, barely sweet at all!

My mango cloud cake was even better, each peace of mango felt like it had been hand selected through generations of mango chunks. Each one had to go through a rigerous vetting process to get their security clearance to enter my plate. Juicy and full of flavour then the mango cream was like eating a mango cloud - hence the name of the dessert, probably.

The meringue didn't even taste sweet - how?? It is supposed to just be sugar and egg white and it didn't taste sweet..

Wifey had her favourite - Capuorange. It's americano mixed with orange juice. It sounds extremely strange but it honestly makes sense when you try it. Sure both are acidic drinks but the sweetness of the orange juice balances out any bitterness of the coffee. It ends up being a nice refreshing drink!

I just had a plain double cappuccino - something I have been missing since starting my ADHD meds last year. I went on a 'med holiday' and stopped taking them for a week so I could relax as much as possible, which also meant being able to drink caffeine!

That's all, folx...

I hope you are having a happy pride month my them/them he/she vegan/vegetarians.

Tomorrow we are headed to the dacha - if I come back alive, I managed to win vs grandpa in drinking vodka.