Progress on our 2nd hotel for Ukrainian refugees
The outside of our new hotel on Krakow’s main square. We have the upper two floors of the building.
ONLY my cousin Will was brave enough to take the under on us getting our new hotel space fully operational by last night, but I guess there’s probably a reason he doesn’t make his living in Vegas (not even my wife shared his optimism, but then she knows me too well). We have electricity on one floor but no water, and water on the other floor but no electricity. We did get the furnace installed for heat and hot water, but we’re waiting for somebody (the city? the utility? faceless bureaucratic entity?) to install a gas meter, because they won’t sell you gas for the furnace until they can figure out how much to charge you for it.
But we’ve made progress on the things we can control – see the pics for some of the private rooms we’ve got set up and ready to go for families who need a longer term stay. Also see the before and after pictures of the small kitchen space we’ve set up on the upper floor so each floor will have its own kitchen. The bigger kitchen downstairs is still a work in progress.
If we can get the hot water working today, we can welcome guests to the upper floor as soon as tonight. We still need to get the electricity functional on the lower floor before it’s ready to go.
Our first hotel is still used primarily for immediate arrivals and the majority of guests have been on short term stays, with a few notable exceptions – a family of 5 from Kharkiv that’s been with us a month and helps with the cleaning, laundry and other duties, Polina and Mr. Chekov (the cat), also from Kharkiv, who help with translation and mice hunting (don’t worry, we don’t actually have mice, maybe thanks to Mr. Chekov?), and Nadia, Mykola and Lev from our previous story.
The next step of our mission is to provide at least medium-term accommodations for those who need a place to stay in Krakow for a longer time. See also our pictures of some of our families who have moved into our residential flats. We have nine bedrooms spread across three flats in the same building, with one family per bedroom. The apartments haven’t been renovated in a while so they’re in modest shape, but the building is a quite remarkable art deco structure from the 1920’s.
All of this progress could not have been made without the tremendous support Zero Camps has received from all of you – thank you so much for your contributions and support.
Kitchen space BEFORE
Kitchen space AFTER
Private room ready to go, as soon as we can flush the toilet
Iryna, Tatiana and Alla from Slavyansk recently moved into one of our residential flats
