I got to talk to one of my clustermates last night, whom I haven't seen since we left for site. We had a ton of stories to swap, but her best one was this:
She has no hot water at her site (neither do I, and one of these days I will detail my shower ritual, because I think it's pretty damn funny). Unlike at my house, though, her family has it set up where you can heat water on the stove and then dump it into the bathtub. In any case, she's taking a nice, hot bath when her host mother bursts into the bathroom (Slavs seem to have no sense of privacy) and begins yelling at her in Russian. Liz learned Ukrainian, and has no idea what the host mother is mad about, but mad she is. Liz sits there in the tub, curled fetal to hide her nudity for a few more minutes before the host mother seems to realize that maybe this isn't the best time and leaves.
Later, Liz asks her host sister what the problem was. Apparently, Liz wasn't bathing correctly. You see, apparently you don't actually take baths in the bathtub in Liz's household. It's for washing clothes. What you actually do is fill the tub with hot water, sit on the toilet, ladle water out of the tub and wash yourself over the sink. Liz pointed out that would make it really hard to wash various parts of yourself. The host sister said those parts were not important.
Which brings us to the two As that I truly miss about America.
The first is availability. Possibly I can go into that later, but if I want something in America, they system of phonebooks and franchises means I will always be able to find it. Unlike, say, the three days and several trips to the market it took to find black shoelaces.
The other is acceptance. In America, we just sort of understand that there are multiple ways to do things. From what I can tell, in a Ukrainian household this is not the case. There really is only one way to take a bath, or one way to do the laundry, or one way to hang the towels and if you do not do it in that way, well, you're ignorant and they don't know how you survived this long. My Ukrainian mother could not believe that I would want to put cheese in my omelet. This is not how you eat eggs! Admitedly, this culture has been in survival mode for most of its history and if a certain set of habits kept you alive, you did them and taught them to your kids, and they did them and kept on doing them. That's my theory at least. But in Ukraine, it seems as if there are not many ways to do things, there is only one way.
Liz and I joked that there was probably only one way to have sex in Ukraine. And I vocally imagined that the first time I tried to roll over so that the Ukrainian girl could be on top, the girl would freak out and yell at me the way our host mothers do: "No! This is not the way this is done!"
Liz, for her part, is now semi-dating a Ukrainian man. He speaks no Ukrainian and she speaks no Russian, but apparently you don't need to talk when you're kissing. I'm slightly jealous, because I would like to make out with a Ukrainian girl. That's it, just make out.
I'm very into the British concept of pulling, which I was informed about last summer. When you "pull" a guy or girl, you've gotten them to make out with you. Which seems to me a much safer goal then trying to get them to sleep with you, and all the problems that entails, especially in this culture, which is simultaneously much more open about nudity and much more conservative on the idea of casual sex. And by casual, I mean having sex with someone you don't plan on marrying, no matter how long the relationship lasts. So I'd like to pull a Ukrainian girl and leave it at that.
But then she might tell me I was doing it the wrong way...