About girls ordering not much food: Done on purpose as they don't want to look like slobs in front of a potential western boyfriend/husband. Also their bodies don't need as many calories.
The idea that hungry Ukrainians are jealous of your steaks is misleading; they as staring because the "eat mass amounts of red meat will make me muscular" thing is an American affectation.
Go to, say, the supermarket at Gulliver in Kiev, it puts Whole Foods to shame, yet is filled with families and students buying high quality domestic and imported products. No one looks hungry there.
In rural Ukraine, Carpathian region, poorer on paper than Kiev, women at food stalls sell fresh sheep's cheese in blocks and homemade sausages for relatively cheap, like a perpetual farmers market, without SWPL. No one looks thin, even in not-wealthy Carpathia.
The idea that hungry Ukrainians are jealous of your steaks is misleading; they as staring because the "eat mass amounts of red meat will make me muscular" thing is an American affectation.
Go to, say, the supermarket at Gulliver in Kiev, it puts Whole Foods to shame, yet is filled with families and students buying high quality domestic and imported products. No one looks hungry there.
In rural Ukraine, Carpathian region, poorer on paper than Kiev, women at food stalls sell fresh sheep's cheese in blocks and homemade sausages for relatively cheap, like a perpetual farmers market, without SWPL. No one looks thin, even in not-wealthy Carpathia.