I met Andrii almost at home, near my entry door, in my apartment building.

‘The water counter is messed up, your counter is ours and ours is yours’ I approached him.

‘What you mean?’ I puzzled him.

‘You see, it’s our water counter, and it’s yours’ was I showing to him, ‘it should be vice-versa, and I think there’s nothing we can do with it, so at least we need to swap our documents for them.’

That’s how we met. Normally, I’m not approaching people right away, but it’s still easy to get with random people.

They fucked-up the water valves, the people who built our apartment complex. My apartment is on the left, and his is on the right. The water valve on the left is his, and on the right is mine. To confuse us, his water valve has my number, and my valve his.

It goes like this:

apartment 1     |    apartment 2
    valve 1     |        valve 2

• But valve 1 goes to the apartment 2,
• while valve 2 to the apartment 1.

So it’s confusing.

apartment 1     |    apartment 2
    valve 2     |        valve 1

And it has almost no relenance to the rest of this very long story.

Similarities #

Since this first interaction, we started having chit-chats about this and that. My memory serves me just a couple of details.

• It’s not his apartment, he’s renting it. (We bought ours.)
• He is an expat. As much as I am. He came from London, I came from Stockholm (but it’s another very long story).
• He has a Ukrainian wife, from Lviv. Me too.
• They have a newborn daughter, Olivia, and we have a newborn son, Hnat.
• He grows microgreens. I’m that computer geek, the guy who does something, works over the internet, and once was this digital nomad.

‘The fuck is that?’ was my first reaction. I’ve never heard of it before.

Later, we found many other similarities. We’re not like too similar, but there are many things we share.And that gives you something to start with.

• He is a bicycle person, me too.
• He was fat, very fat. And he got quite impressively strong and fit. Me too. However, I was slightly less fat, and slightly less impressively strong. And I’ve got some of my fat back. Still, there’s something to joke about.

‘You were fat? No way!’

I couldn’t believe him till he showed me some photos.

When we met, I couldn’t speak Ukrainian well —

he’s of Ukrainian origin, so his language skill is pretty good —

so sometimes we fall back to English. It was natural for both of us to use some English words in our speech. With him, it felt comfortable, as I feel weird each time, when I speak Ukrainian and lacking on words, I use the Enlgish counterpart, most people don’t know about.

Microgreens #

One day Andrii brought us this tray full of different microgreens. It was something very new for us. That how we first got to know about these food additives.

Microgreens were selling in the nearest shop, I just never paid my attention to that kind of a ‘vegetable.’ However, I kept highlighting him that they aren’t as good as his.