So not long after I got back to Zhytomyr last night, Diana came over and we hung out for most of the evening.
We've been spending a lot of time together the past month or so, and progressively our relationship seems to be moving back towards where it was: we've been getting more flirty and more cuddly the more we hang out, and there were a few moments last night where we almost kissed.
Problem: Diana wants a relationship.
Response: Some days I do, some days I don't.
This is a particularly bad time to be dealing with it because I leave in less then a week, and after that will spend a grand total of three days in Zhytomyr before August 22.
Part of me thinks it's stupid to rekindle something right before I hit the road.
Part of me thinks it's better to be unfettered while on the road.
Part of me thinks all that is stupid and immature and I'd probably be happier if we were together.
And then I remember every other time I've gotten into a relationship and started chaffing a month or two later. Robynne and I stayed together for three years, but there was always a time limit: it would end for summer break or it would end when I graduated or it would end when I started Peace Corps. For some reason that made me feel better and less tied down. That, and she was simply a fantastic girlfriend. Shauna and I lasted eight months for the same reason: she, too, was great and we always knew it was going to end when I left the country.
But I'm not leaving Ukraine for another year and a half. And I get the feeling that if Diana and I got serious, she would be SERIOUS about this, as in headed towards marriage. And that's not what I want. And a year and a half is a long time to date someone and then just break it off. I think it's unfair to her to get into something I have every intention of getting out of later.
But it's really hard when she's warm against me and we're laughing and she's playing with my hair to not just grab her and kiss her.
And that would be the Diana dilema.
Advice?
Friday, June 24, 2005
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Ukraine: A Breather and Funny Stories (With Pics)
Whew.
I'm in Kyiv, soon to go to Zhytomyr and not even bothering to go out with Tanya because I am too tired. Mind you, I've gone from the insane amount of work I had to do before I left Zhytomyr to the Extreme Marathon to the Moby concert to the camp in Sevastopal to three intense days of Russia lessons and now I'm ready for a break. It makes me wonder if I'm getting old: I have a month long trip planned to start in July and I really hope I burn out after two weeks like I'm doing right now.
In any case, I have a full eight days in Zhytomyr to relac. Mind you, I'm still working at my institute and will be until July 3 but I don't have to get on another marchrutka or train for over a week and that's a good feeling.
Two funny stories from the past few days:
As I got ready to got to bed on the train to the training I realized that I had left my toiletry kit in Sevestopal. Nothing was really urgent, and someone could bring it to Kyiv within a few weeks, but I did have this problem: what about my contact lenses? They were in my eyes and I had no solution and no case and was going to a backwater training area for four days. Amy had contact solution, but we still had the case problem: where could I find two small, water-tight containers that I knew wouldn't break for four days? I think my answer to the problem was elegant: my contacts are currently inside two condoms, one knotted twice to mark it as the right lens.
Second story: in the middle of a Russian class, Irina, the head of training for Peace Corps Ukraine, bursts in and asks for me. She's breathing hard from coming up stairs and in rapid Russian (the entire training: classes, announcments, everything, was in Russian) says: "you have to call Peace Corps Medical. They want to talk to you." She hands me her mobile phone.
We're in the boonies and there's no reception inside the building, so I hurry outside where it's raining and walk around in the rain until a couple bars appear on the mobile's screen. I'm anxious: a few weeks ago I had all those tests done for the stomach virus and I went ahead and had my quarterly STD tests done. I had recieved an e-mail saying I was all clear, but what if they realized they had missed something? I was also annoyed because I knew that the most they would tell me would be to come into Kyiv, because for some reason it's policy not to say these things over the phone.
So there I was, huddled next to a tree out of the rain and trying to keep the phone pointed towards the barest of reception and when I got through to to Peace Corps Medical, this is what they said: "Can we use your article for our saftey training session tomorrow?"
Anyway, some more pics from Sevastopal. When I come back through Kyiv, I'll do a batch upload of the best of that, Moby and Extreme Marathon.
Playing football with the kids. I'm playing the role of shirtless, yelling quarterback
Chilling on the beach in Sevestopal
Students climbing up to the ruins of Balaclava, a 14th century castle
Smoking the hookah in a Turkish-themed bar
Some of the Greek ruins at Hirsonese
The students and teachers from the sumer camp (I'm bottom center)
The Orthodox church at Hirsonese, seen through an arch from the Greek ruins
More of the Greek ruins. These are all building foundations
I'm in Kyiv, soon to go to Zhytomyr and not even bothering to go out with Tanya because I am too tired. Mind you, I've gone from the insane amount of work I had to do before I left Zhytomyr to the Extreme Marathon to the Moby concert to the camp in Sevastopal to three intense days of Russia lessons and now I'm ready for a break. It makes me wonder if I'm getting old: I have a month long trip planned to start in July and I really hope I burn out after two weeks like I'm doing right now.
In any case, I have a full eight days in Zhytomyr to relac. Mind you, I'm still working at my institute and will be until July 3 but I don't have to get on another marchrutka or train for over a week and that's a good feeling.
Two funny stories from the past few days:
As I got ready to got to bed on the train to the training I realized that I had left my toiletry kit in Sevestopal. Nothing was really urgent, and someone could bring it to Kyiv within a few weeks, but I did have this problem: what about my contact lenses? They were in my eyes and I had no solution and no case and was going to a backwater training area for four days. Amy had contact solution, but we still had the case problem: where could I find two small, water-tight containers that I knew wouldn't break for four days? I think my answer to the problem was elegant: my contacts are currently inside two condoms, one knotted twice to mark it as the right lens.
Second story: in the middle of a Russian class, Irina, the head of training for Peace Corps Ukraine, bursts in and asks for me. She's breathing hard from coming up stairs and in rapid Russian (the entire training: classes, announcments, everything, was in Russian) says: "you have to call Peace Corps Medical. They want to talk to you." She hands me her mobile phone.
We're in the boonies and there's no reception inside the building, so I hurry outside where it's raining and walk around in the rain until a couple bars appear on the mobile's screen. I'm anxious: a few weeks ago I had all those tests done for the stomach virus and I went ahead and had my quarterly STD tests done. I had recieved an e-mail saying I was all clear, but what if they realized they had missed something? I was also annoyed because I knew that the most they would tell me would be to come into Kyiv, because for some reason it's policy not to say these things over the phone.
So there I was, huddled next to a tree out of the rain and trying to keep the phone pointed towards the barest of reception and when I got through to to Peace Corps Medical, this is what they said: "Can we use your article for our saftey training session tomorrow?"
Anyway, some more pics from Sevastopal. When I come back through Kyiv, I'll do a batch upload of the best of that, Moby and Extreme Marathon.
Playing football with the kids. I'm playing the role of shirtless, yelling quarterback
Chilling on the beach in Sevestopal
Students climbing up to the ruins of Balaclava, a 14th century castle
Smoking the hookah in a Turkish-themed bar
Some of the Greek ruins at Hirsonese
The students and teachers from the sumer camp (I'm bottom center)
The Orthodox church at Hirsonese, seen through an arch from the Greek ruins
More of the Greek ruins. These are all building foundations
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Ukraine: Off to Training
We are all finally leaving the confines of Paty's tiny apartment for the confines of an overnight train. I'm surprised that we've gone a week without killing each other, a steady cycle of ten people using the bathroom, the shower, the kitchen, rotating clothes onto the clothes lines hanging outside the window. But it's gone stress free, save maybe for Paty, who's apartment this is. I give her all the credit in the world. Nine people in my place for two weeks? I'd have kicked them out.
From here on out we get double rooms in a sanitorium in Cherkasy (the center of the country) for three days of intensive language training. Should be fun, but I'll be off the web for a few days (go on, breathe a sigh of relief :-)).
I know I haven't been keeping up on e-mails, but it's hard to read anything through this cracked screen and I'm content just to type my thoughts and be done with it. By June 23rd I should be in Kyiv (and maybe hae a lunch date with Tanya, the girl I met at the Moby concert) and can catch up on e-mail then. And maybe post some of these great pictures of this beautiful part of the country!
In any case, I'm aboutto go to Chilentano's, the pizzeria where we have eaten every single day (it's close, cheap and good; the holy trinity of restaurants).
Peace.
From here on out we get double rooms in a sanitorium in Cherkasy (the center of the country) for three days of intensive language training. Should be fun, but I'll be off the web for a few days (go on, breathe a sigh of relief :-)).
I know I haven't been keeping up on e-mails, but it's hard to read anything through this cracked screen and I'm content just to type my thoughts and be done with it. By June 23rd I should be in Kyiv (and maybe hae a lunch date with Tanya, the girl I met at the Moby concert) and can catch up on e-mail then. And maybe post some of these great pictures of this beautiful part of the country!
In any case, I'm aboutto go to Chilentano's, the pizzeria where we have eaten every single day (it's close, cheap and good; the holy trinity of restaurants).
Peace.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Ukraine: Salsa, Pedophile Bert and Locked out at 3:00 AM
The last day of the summer camp went really well. At the end-of-camp party, for lack of better things to do, I taught some of the students to salsa. The problem was that there were very few boys at the camp, and fewer still that wanted to dance. For whatever reason, the girls were loathe to dance with each other, and so we were packed into this tiny, hot classroom, with two other male volunteers and I doing the basics with the girls. The camp ended with a volleyball game, and the volleyball game ended when yours truly went after a bouncing away ball and then thought it would be prudent to punt it back to the court. Instead it hung left, over a wall and down an embankment, to be recovered some twenty minutes later by one of the campers. Whoops.
Otherwise, the day turned out to be, in turns, relaxing and frustrating. I skipped out on another day at the beach to catch up on sleep, taking a nap and chewing through David Lamb's "The Arabs". Actually, his description of Cairo is uncannily like Ukraine: the refuse and pothole-strewn streets but the immaculate apartments; the bloated beauracracy issues and the government investing in grandiose projects rather than basic things like water and sanitation, the complete disregard for traffic laws and the police's inability to enforce them, the police being as much a capitalistic enterprise as a guardian of the people, the general malaise of the population and its reliance on government for problem solving rather than self-starting. These are all generalizations to be sure, but the fact that Lamb made them and that I have observed similar things here (although, admittedly, Ukraine is rapidly shedding these problems) it has made me wonder what the common traits are that produce these similar cultural traits in what are two wildly different cultures. So far, the belief that decisions are top-down, and cultural fall from grace that occured when an occupying power (France in Cairo) withdrew. I also found it interesting that "private" enterprise has solved some problems. Trash collection in Cairo is done by an underclass made up of Coptic Christians that haul it awy, feed their pigs the scrap, sell the metal and burn the rest. Somewhat similar to the army of mad marshrutka drivers that handle the majority of public transportation here.
In any case, we all prepped and went out to anther club. I kind of didn't want to go. We had been hardcore clubbing the night before in a section of the city called Omega, where a strip of tiny bars and clubs line the sea shore, each of them free. We club hopped until three in the morning before catching a marshrutka back. Still, Patty was adamant that we go to this club--Zepplin--because it was the "best" one in Seveastopal. The thing was that it had a 20 hrivna cover charge, steep for all of us.
We did go, though, and it was a really upscale club, with its own dancers dancing in front of video screens, art-deco glass-and-metal bars and a small squadron of white-shirted bouncers. The thing was, it was dead. Even at one in the morning it was dead. We danced a bit, but even our group of twelve was dwarfed by the size o the place and the dance floor. The tiny little Omega clubs had been a lot more fun, had a lot better vibe, a fact that was not lost as most of the night was spent at the tables, tired. Although where we were sitting did give us a view of the strippers. For 50 hrivna a person, you could go around a red wall to watch them. Our seats, though, gave us and angled view around the wall and we simply got the show a few grinning Asian men had paid for.
I got to have my first arguement in Russian. Maybe because they saw us looking that way or maybe because they just felt like being dicks, a manager came up and told us that each of our tables (we took up five, all pressed together) would have a 100 hrivna minimum, coming to 500 hrinva. As I felt pinched by the 20 hrivnas and wasn't even drinking, this did not sit well with me. We argued with this guy for ten minutes in Russian that this was ridiculous with the cover we had already paid and he said he would get someone to speak in English to us, as if we didn't understand him. He sent out some waitress whose English was worse than my Russian and after about ten words it dropped back into Russian. One of our group, indignant, walked over to another table to check this out while I asked the manager in Russian: "Do they have to pay 100 hrinva?" I asked, pointing. Our member came back: no, they didn't. Caught out, the manager said it was because our tables were pressed together, and that made us a bit party with a minimum. "So if the tables are not together (and I had just learned "together" the day before) we don't have to pay?" Finally the manager nodded and we seperated them. Really, we think they were just trying to hose the Americans. This bad attitude towards us seemed to go one all night. Our waitress brought four beers to the table when we only ordered three (maybe she thought I was drinking, too) and when we told her we only ordered three, she snapped at us in Russian and walked off. As we made up 60 percent of the clientele in the empty club, it might have been worth their while to be a little nicer to us. Or maybe they were just desperate for money.
To make matters worse, Pedophile Bert was with us. Pedo Bert is a 43 year-old American who says he designs jewlery for a living and had come to Ukraine to learn Russian. Mostly he hung around our students and, sometimes, hung around with us. I'm not sure who he knew in the group that kept inviting him; perhaps none of us. call him Pedo Bert because in addition to trying to invite students to come "hang" out at his apartment, he talked about how much older teenagers acted here and how "they have real opinons and maturity." Well enough, but when all our heads would turn to follow a good-looking Ukrainian in her twenties, Bert's head didn't budge. But when some students showed up at the clu (if Ukrainian clubs have age limits, they're never enforced), he was over and dancing with them. Most of us didn't like having him around, but I think we all thought he was with us at someone's invitation, although it was never clear who's that was.
I also didn't like Pedo Bert because he kept trashing on Ukraine, a steady stream of complaints. The complaints weren't unfounded, mind you, we all have them. I just feel that you have to live here to voice them, though. You can't show up in a country and pass judgement after a few days or even weeks.
Soon enough, everyone wanted to go back to Omega. I was a little annoyed at having paid 20 hrivna for a bad time when we could have had a good one for free. After one last bout of dancing, we decided to just go back to the apartment.
Pedo Bert stayed behind, still talking to the 16 year-olds. Amy had already called him out on it and he said he had no bad intentions. If I thought either of the girls were entertaining the thought of doing something with him, I would have stepped in. As is, they seemed to be barely tolerating him.
Hungry, Andy and I offered to walk Aliana, a Ukrainian girl with us, home and then grab some frozen pelmenni to make back at the apartment. It took an hour to walk her home because her marchrutka stop was pretty far. Then, food bought, we went back to the apartment. No one was there. It was now three in the morning, we were locked outside the apartment, I was hungry and just wanted to eat and sleep. No one was answering their mobiles. The hunger and exhaustion were playing big into it, but I was getting pissed off and did not want to just sit on a stair step waiting for people who could have been anywhere at that point.
Leaving Andy with the food, I started walking back towards the club, where we had left the group. I hadn't taken ten steps up the street when Tony text messaged me. They had come home, we had not come back, they had figured we were hanging with Aliana, and had gone out to a memorial to chill and drink beer, did we want to meet them there? No, I replied. Let us in, I want to eat and sleep. No one wanted to come back; Andy and I were the only ones who wanted to call it a night. Finally, twenty minutes later, John met me at an intersection with the keys to the apartment and I walked back to it, let Andy and I in, ate some Pelmeni and, at nearly four in the morning, went to sleep.
Otherwise, the day turned out to be, in turns, relaxing and frustrating. I skipped out on another day at the beach to catch up on sleep, taking a nap and chewing through David Lamb's "The Arabs". Actually, his description of Cairo is uncannily like Ukraine: the refuse and pothole-strewn streets but the immaculate apartments; the bloated beauracracy issues and the government investing in grandiose projects rather than basic things like water and sanitation, the complete disregard for traffic laws and the police's inability to enforce them, the police being as much a capitalistic enterprise as a guardian of the people, the general malaise of the population and its reliance on government for problem solving rather than self-starting. These are all generalizations to be sure, but the fact that Lamb made them and that I have observed similar things here (although, admittedly, Ukraine is rapidly shedding these problems) it has made me wonder what the common traits are that produce these similar cultural traits in what are two wildly different cultures. So far, the belief that decisions are top-down, and cultural fall from grace that occured when an occupying power (France in Cairo) withdrew. I also found it interesting that "private" enterprise has solved some problems. Trash collection in Cairo is done by an underclass made up of Coptic Christians that haul it awy, feed their pigs the scrap, sell the metal and burn the rest. Somewhat similar to the army of mad marshrutka drivers that handle the majority of public transportation here.
In any case, we all prepped and went out to anther club. I kind of didn't want to go. We had been hardcore clubbing the night before in a section of the city called Omega, where a strip of tiny bars and clubs line the sea shore, each of them free. We club hopped until three in the morning before catching a marshrutka back. Still, Patty was adamant that we go to this club--Zepplin--because it was the "best" one in Seveastopal. The thing was that it had a 20 hrivna cover charge, steep for all of us.
We did go, though, and it was a really upscale club, with its own dancers dancing in front of video screens, art-deco glass-and-metal bars and a small squadron of white-shirted bouncers. The thing was, it was dead. Even at one in the morning it was dead. We danced a bit, but even our group of twelve was dwarfed by the size o the place and the dance floor. The tiny little Omega clubs had been a lot more fun, had a lot better vibe, a fact that was not lost as most of the night was spent at the tables, tired. Although where we were sitting did give us a view of the strippers. For 50 hrivna a person, you could go around a red wall to watch them. Our seats, though, gave us and angled view around the wall and we simply got the show a few grinning Asian men had paid for.
I got to have my first arguement in Russian. Maybe because they saw us looking that way or maybe because they just felt like being dicks, a manager came up and told us that each of our tables (we took up five, all pressed together) would have a 100 hrivna minimum, coming to 500 hrinva. As I felt pinched by the 20 hrivnas and wasn't even drinking, this did not sit well with me. We argued with this guy for ten minutes in Russian that this was ridiculous with the cover we had already paid and he said he would get someone to speak in English to us, as if we didn't understand him. He sent out some waitress whose English was worse than my Russian and after about ten words it dropped back into Russian. One of our group, indignant, walked over to another table to check this out while I asked the manager in Russian: "Do they have to pay 100 hrinva?" I asked, pointing. Our member came back: no, they didn't. Caught out, the manager said it was because our tables were pressed together, and that made us a bit party with a minimum. "So if the tables are not together (and I had just learned "together" the day before) we don't have to pay?" Finally the manager nodded and we seperated them. Really, we think they were just trying to hose the Americans. This bad attitude towards us seemed to go one all night. Our waitress brought four beers to the table when we only ordered three (maybe she thought I was drinking, too) and when we told her we only ordered three, she snapped at us in Russian and walked off. As we made up 60 percent of the clientele in the empty club, it might have been worth their while to be a little nicer to us. Or maybe they were just desperate for money.
To make matters worse, Pedophile Bert was with us. Pedo Bert is a 43 year-old American who says he designs jewlery for a living and had come to Ukraine to learn Russian. Mostly he hung around our students and, sometimes, hung around with us. I'm not sure who he knew in the group that kept inviting him; perhaps none of us. call him Pedo Bert because in addition to trying to invite students to come "hang" out at his apartment, he talked about how much older teenagers acted here and how "they have real opinons and maturity." Well enough, but when all our heads would turn to follow a good-looking Ukrainian in her twenties, Bert's head didn't budge. But when some students showed up at the clu (if Ukrainian clubs have age limits, they're never enforced), he was over and dancing with them. Most of us didn't like having him around, but I think we all thought he was with us at someone's invitation, although it was never clear who's that was.
I also didn't like Pedo Bert because he kept trashing on Ukraine, a steady stream of complaints. The complaints weren't unfounded, mind you, we all have them. I just feel that you have to live here to voice them, though. You can't show up in a country and pass judgement after a few days or even weeks.
Soon enough, everyone wanted to go back to Omega. I was a little annoyed at having paid 20 hrivna for a bad time when we could have had a good one for free. After one last bout of dancing, we decided to just go back to the apartment.
Pedo Bert stayed behind, still talking to the 16 year-olds. Amy had already called him out on it and he said he had no bad intentions. If I thought either of the girls were entertaining the thought of doing something with him, I would have stepped in. As is, they seemed to be barely tolerating him.
Hungry, Andy and I offered to walk Aliana, a Ukrainian girl with us, home and then grab some frozen pelmenni to make back at the apartment. It took an hour to walk her home because her marchrutka stop was pretty far. Then, food bought, we went back to the apartment. No one was there. It was now three in the morning, we were locked outside the apartment, I was hungry and just wanted to eat and sleep. No one was answering their mobiles. The hunger and exhaustion were playing big into it, but I was getting pissed off and did not want to just sit on a stair step waiting for people who could have been anywhere at that point.
Leaving Andy with the food, I started walking back towards the club, where we had left the group. I hadn't taken ten steps up the street when Tony text messaged me. They had come home, we had not come back, they had figured we were hanging with Aliana, and had gone out to a memorial to chill and drink beer, did we want to meet them there? No, I replied. Let us in, I want to eat and sleep. No one wanted to come back; Andy and I were the only ones who wanted to call it a night. Finally, twenty minutes later, John met me at an intersection with the keys to the apartment and I walked back to it, let Andy and I in, ate some Pelmeni and, at nearly four in the morning, went to sleep.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Ukraine: Hirsonse (With Pics)
(Typed once again on Paty's broken laptop, so I can't really see the words).
Well, the day certainly went from worse to better. Waking up after a ostly sleepless night, sleeping in the kitchen with Sean and Carrie on steadily deflating air mattress. I opted out of that to sleep on the hallway florr, and then squeezed myself between Amy and the arm rest of the fold out couch. I woke up with the right side of my body asleep, woke Amy up and shoved her over, stole the sleeping bag that was entangled with the legs of Lauren (also lseeping on the pull out couch) and finally got a few hours of sleep.
This was after an eening smoking apple-flavored tobacco fro a hookah while sitting on cucshions in a Turkish-themed bar. I ended up talking politics (which I’m not supposed to do) with a Crimean couple in the bar. The girl spoke English and no Ukrainian, the guy spoke Ukrainian, but no English. We still got on, though. They think Yuchenko shouldn’t have won, believed that the Orange Revolution was largely western bought. This is nothing new in Crimea, which is actually an autonomous republic within Ukraine and in a narrow referendum nearly allied itself with Russia. Its populace is still largely Eastern-leaning at heart.
We went in search of a club, but found them wanting. Paty promises that the best club in all of Crimea awaits us on Friday, to a hefty 20 hrivn cover charge.
In any case, after a morning of teaching that was largely a blur (although apparently it went wel), we took the students up to Hirsonse. I made a mistake in my last blog (or, rather, I was mislead). Balaclava was not a 2,500 year old fortress built by the Greeks (I had wondered, considering it didn’t look remotely of what I thought of Greek architecture being; but I figured I was ignorant). No, that was a 14th century castle. Hirsonse was actually the Greek settlement, and was actually 2,500 years old, not 3,000.
It was, in short, amazing.
But we’ll get to that.
I have yet to actually get some description going on Sevestopal, which I think it deserves a bit of. In many ways, Sevestopal is a average Ukrainian city: the exposed pipes, crumbling asphalt, rusting balconies and plaster on the exteriors cracking and looking like the buildings have varicose veins.
But it feels different. There’s the tang of salt from the black sea in the air, the people are friendlier (as confirmed and repeatedly mentioned by all the volunteers in for the camp) and there’s an intriguing hint of history built into every nook and cranny. Stairs that are out of place, too old and the wrong style, lead up to Soviet apartment buildings. Columns and carved promenades, their edificases worn down to just a bare hint of themselves, peek at the end of alleys. Behind Patty’s apartment, past a basketball court surrounded in rusting chainlink fencing, the backboards splintered and the hoops gone, is an old stone arch, imploaded steps leading down to it, tiny black kittens playing at the grass at its base. Who built it? How old is it? Who knows? It just sits unrecognized in the courtyard between a cluster of aging apartments. I like Sevestopal. I really do. But I was reminded again that it is Ukraine when, twenty minutes into the first writing of this blog, the power to the building the internet café was in went out, and I lost everything I had just written.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of this great history is Hirsonce, the Greek sea-side settlement. In the pictures I’ve seen, it’s a couple of columns, and a famous arch that’s on the back of the one hrivna bill. Except I was shocked to find its more than that, so much more than that, the foundations of a whole city, stone squares marking houses, the spaces in between hem streets, spreading for acres and acres along the sea shore. That’s only twenty percent of the spectacle, though, because the majority of the foundations are underwater, in the shallow basin folled with the waters of the Black Sea after an Earthquake. After the students left, the tour completed, we spread out towels on the rock beach and swam out into the water, my swimming goggles (picked up in Zhytomyr in order to add swimming to my fitness regime) making the rounds to see the ruins we were standing on as the surge of the water buffeted us back and forth. The ruins were almost unregonizble, just smoothed stone covered in lichen and seaweed. Still, we were standing on underwater Greek ruins. Back on dry land, Carrie and some others tossed a Frisbee back and forth among Corinthian columns while Patty and I baked in the sun, lobbing seminar ideas back and forth for her upcoming training. They were playing Frisbee in Greek ruins. Sean and I hiked up to a small cliff overlooking the water. On the way were dozens of pottery shards amongst the rocks, so common that they were left. I picked up a few. The cliff was about ten to twelve feet high, but the water below was less than five. Still, I had never gone cliff diving before. We both jumped, my hands spread and my legs tucked to not slam into the sea floor. Survival assured, we climbed back up the rocks of the cliff and did it again.
Sean above, me slighly below, cliff diving into the Black Sea
Carrie took pictures of us doing it, one of the hundreds now rapidly filling up my 512MB card in my camera, which is nearly maxed out. I have so many awesome picures: vistas and castles and rstudents and ruins and friends and dolphins and moments and I feel slightly frustrated at my inability to share them. To even get one online is currently a process, a problem when traveling in a non-first world country and trying to share those travels with others in the world.
Still, they will be shared, although it will probably be weeks until I am in a position to do so. In the meantime, life is absolutely fantastic and every frustration I ever felt over the long winter has been evaporated by the summer sea-side sun.
Me, Carrie and Sean at the ruins of teh castle at Balaclava. There are no stairs to the upper window. I had to climb to it! If this were America, we probably wouldn't even be allowed to touch it!
Well, the day certainly went from worse to better. Waking up after a ostly sleepless night, sleeping in the kitchen with Sean and Carrie on steadily deflating air mattress. I opted out of that to sleep on the hallway florr, and then squeezed myself between Amy and the arm rest of the fold out couch. I woke up with the right side of my body asleep, woke Amy up and shoved her over, stole the sleeping bag that was entangled with the legs of Lauren (also lseeping on the pull out couch) and finally got a few hours of sleep.
This was after an eening smoking apple-flavored tobacco fro a hookah while sitting on cucshions in a Turkish-themed bar. I ended up talking politics (which I’m not supposed to do) with a Crimean couple in the bar. The girl spoke English and no Ukrainian, the guy spoke Ukrainian, but no English. We still got on, though. They think Yuchenko shouldn’t have won, believed that the Orange Revolution was largely western bought. This is nothing new in Crimea, which is actually an autonomous republic within Ukraine and in a narrow referendum nearly allied itself with Russia. Its populace is still largely Eastern-leaning at heart.
We went in search of a club, but found them wanting. Paty promises that the best club in all of Crimea awaits us on Friday, to a hefty 20 hrivn cover charge.
In any case, after a morning of teaching that was largely a blur (although apparently it went wel), we took the students up to Hirsonse. I made a mistake in my last blog (or, rather, I was mislead). Balaclava was not a 2,500 year old fortress built by the Greeks (I had wondered, considering it didn’t look remotely of what I thought of Greek architecture being; but I figured I was ignorant). No, that was a 14th century castle. Hirsonse was actually the Greek settlement, and was actually 2,500 years old, not 3,000.
It was, in short, amazing.
But we’ll get to that.
I have yet to actually get some description going on Sevestopal, which I think it deserves a bit of. In many ways, Sevestopal is a average Ukrainian city: the exposed pipes, crumbling asphalt, rusting balconies and plaster on the exteriors cracking and looking like the buildings have varicose veins.
But it feels different. There’s the tang of salt from the black sea in the air, the people are friendlier (as confirmed and repeatedly mentioned by all the volunteers in for the camp) and there’s an intriguing hint of history built into every nook and cranny. Stairs that are out of place, too old and the wrong style, lead up to Soviet apartment buildings. Columns and carved promenades, their edificases worn down to just a bare hint of themselves, peek at the end of alleys. Behind Patty’s apartment, past a basketball court surrounded in rusting chainlink fencing, the backboards splintered and the hoops gone, is an old stone arch, imploaded steps leading down to it, tiny black kittens playing at the grass at its base. Who built it? How old is it? Who knows? It just sits unrecognized in the courtyard between a cluster of aging apartments. I like Sevestopal. I really do. But I was reminded again that it is Ukraine when, twenty minutes into the first writing of this blog, the power to the building the internet café was in went out, and I lost everything I had just written.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of this great history is Hirsonce, the Greek sea-side settlement. In the pictures I’ve seen, it’s a couple of columns, and a famous arch that’s on the back of the one hrivna bill. Except I was shocked to find its more than that, so much more than that, the foundations of a whole city, stone squares marking houses, the spaces in between hem streets, spreading for acres and acres along the sea shore. That’s only twenty percent of the spectacle, though, because the majority of the foundations are underwater, in the shallow basin folled with the waters of the Black Sea after an Earthquake. After the students left, the tour completed, we spread out towels on the rock beach and swam out into the water, my swimming goggles (picked up in Zhytomyr in order to add swimming to my fitness regime) making the rounds to see the ruins we were standing on as the surge of the water buffeted us back and forth. The ruins were almost unregonizble, just smoothed stone covered in lichen and seaweed. Still, we were standing on underwater Greek ruins. Back on dry land, Carrie and some others tossed a Frisbee back and forth among Corinthian columns while Patty and I baked in the sun, lobbing seminar ideas back and forth for her upcoming training. They were playing Frisbee in Greek ruins. Sean and I hiked up to a small cliff overlooking the water. On the way were dozens of pottery shards amongst the rocks, so common that they were left. I picked up a few. The cliff was about ten to twelve feet high, but the water below was less than five. Still, I had never gone cliff diving before. We both jumped, my hands spread and my legs tucked to not slam into the sea floor. Survival assured, we climbed back up the rocks of the cliff and did it again.
Sean above, me slighly below, cliff diving into the Black Sea Carrie took pictures of us doing it, one of the hundreds now rapidly filling up my 512MB card in my camera, which is nearly maxed out. I have so many awesome picures: vistas and castles and rstudents and ruins and friends and dolphins and moments and I feel slightly frustrated at my inability to share them. To even get one online is currently a process, a problem when traveling in a non-first world country and trying to share those travels with others in the world.
Still, they will be shared, although it will probably be weeks until I am in a position to do so. In the meantime, life is absolutely fantastic and every frustration I ever felt over the long winter has been evaporated by the summer sea-side sun.
Me, Carrie and Sean at the ruins of teh castle at Balaclava. There are no stairs to the upper window. I had to climb to it! If this were America, we probably wouldn't even be allowed to touch it!
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Ukraine: Balaclava (and Moby pics)
Balaclava: the oldest standing structure in Ukraine, thought to be built by the Greeks over 3,000 years ago. It's a ruined castle on a hill overlooking the Black Sea now, just a few turrets and walls still standing.
We took the summer camp students up there in the afternoon, after teaching in the morning. Together we all got to run around and play on the castle for a while (Sean, Carrie and I climbed up to the highest window in the standing turret). Below the hill, in the blue waters of the Black Sea, a pod of dolphins jumped in and out of the water. I have photos to prove all of this, once I manage to get a few online.
From up there we could see the cove that once held Soviet submarines, and the concrete entrance they used to enter a bunker buried in the hill across from us.
After the students left, we paid this skipper of a tiny boat to put us around the hill the castle stood on, to a cove called Silver Beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon tanning, swimming (the water was freezing), skipping rocks, rock hopping and looking at the hundreds of jellyfish in the water. They had no tenticals and didn't sting. In fact, the Ukranians would pick them up and throw them at one another. I think jellyfish are some of the most beautiful things in the world, as close to angels as we will ever get on Earth, so ethereal I'm hard pressed to understand them as animal, or even alive. They just seem mystical.
A relaxing afternoon, to soon be followed by a night of clubbing (and then back to teaching in the morning). This is the life.
*Addendum* After a lot of bad Russian on my part and figuring out how to get them to move photos from my camera to the main computer in this internet cafe to my terminal (they wouldn't let me plug it into my machine directly), I got a grand total of two photos moved before the whole process became to slow to bother with.
But here is Moby. There's no zoom. I was that close. He's the bald guy on the right. It was dark, so I couldn't really take good photos, hence the first dark one with a flash and the other, movement-blur without. Still, proof that I was there, right?
We took the summer camp students up there in the afternoon, after teaching in the morning. Together we all got to run around and play on the castle for a while (Sean, Carrie and I climbed up to the highest window in the standing turret). Below the hill, in the blue waters of the Black Sea, a pod of dolphins jumped in and out of the water. I have photos to prove all of this, once I manage to get a few online.
From up there we could see the cove that once held Soviet submarines, and the concrete entrance they used to enter a bunker buried in the hill across from us.
After the students left, we paid this skipper of a tiny boat to put us around the hill the castle stood on, to a cove called Silver Beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon tanning, swimming (the water was freezing), skipping rocks, rock hopping and looking at the hundreds of jellyfish in the water. They had no tenticals and didn't sting. In fact, the Ukranians would pick them up and throw them at one another. I think jellyfish are some of the most beautiful things in the world, as close to angels as we will ever get on Earth, so ethereal I'm hard pressed to understand them as animal, or even alive. They just seem mystical.
A relaxing afternoon, to soon be followed by a night of clubbing (and then back to teaching in the morning). This is the life.
*Addendum* After a lot of bad Russian on my part and figuring out how to get them to move photos from my camera to the main computer in this internet cafe to my terminal (they wouldn't let me plug it into my machine directly), I got a grand total of two photos moved before the whole process became to slow to bother with.
But here is Moby. There's no zoom. I was that close. He's the bald guy on the right. It was dark, so I couldn't really take good photos, hence the first dark one with a flash and the other, movement-blur without. Still, proof that I was there, right?
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Ukraine: Naked Kniting
A quick three day update:
(By the way, I'm typing this on a computer with a cracked screen, the glass looking like a microscopic bullet piercied it, sending out a light-ray pattern of glass. Beneath that, though, brown patterns, the textures of a spider's legs, spread along the cracks hemselves, damage to the LCD screen. From afar, it looks like someone splatted a bug. In any case, I can bareley see the programs beneath the cracks, and am simply typing this without being able see mmost of the letters. Hence, it will no doubt have a hundred speling mistakes. Still, I am a compulsive writer, and something like a cracked screen is not going to stop me!)
I went to the Moby concert. I was supposed to be sitting in the balcony bit, but ended up jumping the gate and working my way to the front. By the time Moby came on, I was fifteen feet from him. Awesome concert, including a lot of classics that first introduced me to Moby in my rave days: "go:, "feels so real" and "next is the e". Also, I met a girl in the crowd named Tanya and got her number. We're supposed to meet for lubch on my way back through Kyiv in two weeks.
Spent 16 hours on a train, my longest to date, and it was an experience in itself. Nothing exciting, just a good opportunity for observation and reflection on Ukraine and its culture that will come out in a later blog.
Now I'm in Sevestopal, in the southernmost part of Ukraine, on the black sea. Just south of here, across that sea, is Turkey. The city I'm in holds some of the flavor of the once-Turkish control of the city is here, as well as the Greek and especially the Soviet control. Actually, until 1996, foreigners were not even allowed in the city because it's the home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which now sits rusting in the harbors, still leased by Russia until 2017.
Carrie and I got off the train at 6:00 AM this morning and went to Patty's apartment. Paty set up the camp, and is hosting all the teachers: 10 of us, in a one-bedroom apartment. Bags are everywhere, the hanging towels making the air humid an stuffy and Paty has asked for a toilet paper fund because, as she said "10 asses are a lot to wipe." Still, all of us but Carrie are from the same training group, and the dynamics are great, clusters in the apartment talking, eating, watching television, reading.
After a morning of teaching, we spent the afternoon on the beach, joined by some of Paty's Ukrainian friends. The beach was pebbles, not sand (unfortunately) but the water was blue and beautiful. A number of us swam out to a bouy, which, in Ukrainian fashion, was actually a large plastic beer bottle, anchored to the sea floor by a rope.
Back on the shore, reading New Yorker stories printed up by Samrong, surrounded by my friends and their subdued conversations, murmor really, as we baked in the sun. I couldn't believe that this was Peace Corps, supposedly the toughest job I'd ever love.
Samrong, by the way, is leaving Peace Corps, yet another from my group, although this time with good reason: he's been offered the job as principal for a New York City charter school, with a starting salary just over $100,000. Withoug me even asking, he mentioned me getting a job teaching at the school. At this point, I don't know what my post-Peace Corps life holds, but it's another friend made, and apparently a contact as well.
Paty pointed out that a nude beach was a few hundred meters away, behinnd a stand of rocks. No one else wanted to go, so she and I walked over there. Paty only took off her top, but I went the full nude. There was in fact a nude beach there, but it, like the beach we were on this Tuesday afternoon, was lightly populatted. A couple in their twenties (the woman quite hot), a full family with husband, wife, grandmother and daughter, all nude (the grandmother kept her bottom on) and a man in his fifties who, as Paty pointed out, was obscenley well endowed. We laid out on the beach for a time, soaking in the sun before heading back towards the rocks and the group. It was then that I saw that the woman in her twenties, beautiful body, bronzed skin, was knitting! It was something red and taking the whole of her concentration, and I have to wonder if she wasn't knitting herself some clothes to leave the beach with.
(By the way, I'm typing this on a computer with a cracked screen, the glass looking like a microscopic bullet piercied it, sending out a light-ray pattern of glass. Beneath that, though, brown patterns, the textures of a spider's legs, spread along the cracks hemselves, damage to the LCD screen. From afar, it looks like someone splatted a bug. In any case, I can bareley see the programs beneath the cracks, and am simply typing this without being able see mmost of the letters. Hence, it will no doubt have a hundred speling mistakes. Still, I am a compulsive writer, and something like a cracked screen is not going to stop me!)
I went to the Moby concert. I was supposed to be sitting in the balcony bit, but ended up jumping the gate and working my way to the front. By the time Moby came on, I was fifteen feet from him. Awesome concert, including a lot of classics that first introduced me to Moby in my rave days: "go:, "feels so real" and "next is the e". Also, I met a girl in the crowd named Tanya and got her number. We're supposed to meet for lubch on my way back through Kyiv in two weeks.
Spent 16 hours on a train, my longest to date, and it was an experience in itself. Nothing exciting, just a good opportunity for observation and reflection on Ukraine and its culture that will come out in a later blog.
Now I'm in Sevestopal, in the southernmost part of Ukraine, on the black sea. Just south of here, across that sea, is Turkey. The city I'm in holds some of the flavor of the once-Turkish control of the city is here, as well as the Greek and especially the Soviet control. Actually, until 1996, foreigners were not even allowed in the city because it's the home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which now sits rusting in the harbors, still leased by Russia until 2017.
Carrie and I got off the train at 6:00 AM this morning and went to Patty's apartment. Paty set up the camp, and is hosting all the teachers: 10 of us, in a one-bedroom apartment. Bags are everywhere, the hanging towels making the air humid an stuffy and Paty has asked for a toilet paper fund because, as she said "10 asses are a lot to wipe." Still, all of us but Carrie are from the same training group, and the dynamics are great, clusters in the apartment talking, eating, watching television, reading.
After a morning of teaching, we spent the afternoon on the beach, joined by some of Paty's Ukrainian friends. The beach was pebbles, not sand (unfortunately) but the water was blue and beautiful. A number of us swam out to a bouy, which, in Ukrainian fashion, was actually a large plastic beer bottle, anchored to the sea floor by a rope.
Back on the shore, reading New Yorker stories printed up by Samrong, surrounded by my friends and their subdued conversations, murmor really, as we baked in the sun. I couldn't believe that this was Peace Corps, supposedly the toughest job I'd ever love.
Samrong, by the way, is leaving Peace Corps, yet another from my group, although this time with good reason: he's been offered the job as principal for a New York City charter school, with a starting salary just over $100,000. Withoug me even asking, he mentioned me getting a job teaching at the school. At this point, I don't know what my post-Peace Corps life holds, but it's another friend made, and apparently a contact as well.
Paty pointed out that a nude beach was a few hundred meters away, behinnd a stand of rocks. No one else wanted to go, so she and I walked over there. Paty only took off her top, but I went the full nude. There was in fact a nude beach there, but it, like the beach we were on this Tuesday afternoon, was lightly populatted. A couple in their twenties (the woman quite hot), a full family with husband, wife, grandmother and daughter, all nude (the grandmother kept her bottom on) and a man in his fifties who, as Paty pointed out, was obscenley well endowed. We laid out on the beach for a time, soaking in the sun before heading back towards the rocks and the group. It was then that I saw that the woman in her twenties, beautiful body, bronzed skin, was knitting! It was something red and taking the whole of her concentration, and I have to wonder if she wasn't knitting herself some clothes to leave the beach with.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Ukraine: The Tale of the Race (With Pics)
So Carrie and I are finished with the race, although we actually didn’t finish the race. We completed only 25 of the needed 60 kilometers, for reasons to be herein explained. Still, the race was a lot of fun, even if we did have a few problems. So on with the story. Or , as they say in Ukraine: devai…
My socks were wet. The race wouldn’t start for four and a half hours, and I was already dealing with wet socks. I had washed them the previous night, but they still hadn’t dried. I only had one dry pair, and they were on my feet. I strapped the wet ones to the outside of my pack.
I started the race while on my mobile phone, people moving past me and asking in Russian: “Are you calling America?” Actually, I was trying to text message Diana. We had been waiting for the race to start, being entertained by a trio of jailbait singers and guys doing bike tricks. I had been told the start time of the race had been moved from 12:00 to 12:30 and figured Diana might come down to hang out and see us off. My socks were on a stone bench, slowly drying in the sun. About ten minutes later, and with Diana on her way, they announced that we would go ahead and start. We barely had our packs on when they clanged the start bell, and we were off, me trying to simultaneously jog and punch letters into my mobile at the same time, telling Diana not to come.
We ran down a hill (I thought the running was quite silly. We had 60 km of trekking ahead of us, and running with packs was going to do nothing but wear us out. But since everyone else was running…). At the bottom was a checkpoint. We turned left and ran some more. There was another checkpoint. Then we turned left and ran up the hill we had just came down, although this time on a steep dirt track instead of stairs, passing another checkpoint. Another left and we were back where we started. This was, in fact, part of the race, and no doubt the organizers thought it was funny as hell. Breathing hard, we then ran down the hill again, the checkpoint this time pointing us right, where, around a corner, ropes were set on a stone wall.
We were originally told that ascenders would be supplied for this portion of the race, making scaling the wall easy. At the last minute, at the registration and orientation we had gotten up at 7:30 AM to attend, we were told there weren’t enough ascenders, so no one would get any. As my group was already lagging behind the crowd of 40 competitors, I just jumped at the rope and started pulling myself up, hand over hand. At any moment I felt that my hands were going to slip and I’d be back at the bottom, but I surprised myself by getting to the top. While I was climbing, Carrie was tying our bags into my rope. Then, while I hauled our packs up one rope, Carrie climbed up the one beside it. She got about five feet from the top before she couldn’t go any father, but with a mighty heave I got her up. Teamwork at its finest.
Carrie free climbing the wall
Together, we then jogged for a kilometer down the river that flows along Zhytomyr, where we then had to swim across the river to continue the race. Here is where problems started. All the competitors had become spread out along that kilometer. Carrie and I, our “Crazy Hedgehog” team, was sticking with four other teams that we personally knew from Polissya, the sporting organization I’m building a climbing wall with. The ten of us decided to stick together to complete the race, rather than worrying about winning it.
The Polissya crew. Clockwise: Arteom, Ina, Ira, Dima, Vannya, Nikolya, Carrie, Pasha, Alla
Carrie and I also needed them because all the instructions for getting to the checkpoints were in Russian, and we simply didn’t know most of the words on the paper (they never taught us “chestnut tree in a meadow” in training). We had been told that English instructions would be provided, but that must have gone the same route as the ascenders.
We arrived at the river crossing with the leading teams already stripping their clothes off. A number of the men, wisely as I would discover, decided to swim the 100 meters across the river wearing nothing at all. I stripped down to my boxers, Carrie to a bikini she had on. We inflated the children’s inner tubes we had been instructed to bring along and put our packs on them.
Crossing the river
We had been unable to find plastic bags big enough to fit our packs. It seems that few other people had this problem and had thrown their packs into thick plastic bags, lashed them to tubes and hit the water. Without the bags, we had opted to put everything inside our packs in Zip-lock bags that I had brought from America. The problem was that as I was stuffing clothing into the Zip-lock already holding my fleece, it tore. I could have moved stuff into other bags, but my group was already getting into the river. I figured I’d just do my damndest to keep it out of the water and waded into the water. Pushing my bag along ahead of me as I swam across, I realized all was not going according to plan.
Water was getting into my pack, and the heavier it got, the lower it sank into the water. On the other side, I discovered that all my clothes, including my fleece, were completely soaked. This included the pair of socks I had spent all morning trying to dry out.
So was my spare pair of boxer shorts, like the other Ukrainians, I went commando for the rest of the race. The nice thing on the other side of the river, trying to wring out my clothes as fast as possible, was the eye candy. Not wanting to continue trekking in their wet bathing suits, several of the women were stripping them off in front of us and pulling on dry clothes. Ukrainians, like many Europeans, don’t think much about being nude. I didn’t mind this attitude at all.
I strapped my rain jacket to the outside to dry it and put on the fleece, figuring it would dry faster on me. Carrie offered to strap stuff to her pack, so I gave her my boxers and my once-again-wet socks.
Uphill we went from there, across a wide meadow covered in yellow flowers, past fields where people were planting their summer crops, tilling the earth with horse-drawn plows.
Horse-drawn plow
Group problems started then. There was some guy tagging along with our group, a man in his late thirties, his partner a girl in her early twenties. The girl was wearing only a sports bra and some short spandex shorts, a mistake she readily discovered when we started moving through thick underbrush. From her attitude, it was apparent she had gotten dragged onto this trip.
I never learned this guy’s name, so we’ll call him Mr. Moron. In booming Russian he started barking orders, and my whole group started doing what he was saying. Since I was beholden to the group, so did I. I hate group dynamics.
Into the woods...
This might not have been so bad had Mr. Moron known what he was doing. Instead, he turned out he really couldn’t read maps. He had us trail breaking through forest that turned into a bog, hiking through watery mud that quickly soaked my dry socks. He kept thinking something was wrong with his compass and kept asking to borrow mine. I could see on my map that there was a road not fifty meters south of us, one that led straight to the next checkpoint.
Trailbreaking
I pointed this out to Carrie, that we needed to head south until we hit the road, but neither of us wanted to leave the group, so we just pushed through the thick foliage, ducking branches and walking through stinging nettles and thorny berry bushes before the guy realized his mistake and we went down to the road we could have taken the entire time.
The guy with the beard is Mr. Moron. The butt belongs to his partner.
We were now at the orienteering section of the race, and were given maps so detailed we didn’t even need compasses, able to navigate by trails, roads and rivers instead. Ukrainian mentality came in then. Peace Corps volunteers have a hard time stopping their students from cheating, because Ukrainians don’t consider it “cheating”, they consider it helping each other and why shouldn’t they do that?
We had to find six spots and both write down a code spray painted to a tree, or punch cards with hole punchers at each spot. Rather then have each team go to all six spots, the Ukrainians decided that we should split into two groups, one team member in each group, with each group finding three spots. Since the team members would have collectively found six, this was determined to be okay.
Carrie and I just went along with it, as we found ourselves doing the entire race so as not to get split from people we needed to complete the race. Although Carrie’s group had less ground to cover, my group beat them back by 20 minutes. How? Well, of my group of three guys and two girls, one of the girls was the sports-bra and short spandex shorts girl. She was unable to keep up, so the guys decided she should just hide out of site, the other girl—Ira, a trooper whose shins were sliced up from going through the thorns and who was still pushing us to go faster—waited with her. We took their cards to punch them for them. Then, we ran.
I don’t know why we were running, but these two other guys—Vannya and Arteom—were big, strong, fit guys and felt we should make up lost time by running to the checkpoints. Not wanting to lag behind, I had to run full out to keep up with them, wondering how I was going to have any energy left after this.
We were slowed up at one point by a group of racers staring at a tree. It was the correct tree, as it had a marker on it, but no one could find the hole puncher. Three people were searching the muddy water under the tree. It became a bottle neck as more and more people reached the point, people searching for the hole puncher.
Trying to find the lost hole puncher
Finally, I took a digital picture of the tree to prove we had been there and we were off. Poor map skills came into play again, and Vannya and Arteom actually let me help them find the second marker, then let me take over as leader and lead them to the third. I was starting to feel better, that I was contributing and wasn’t simply following the Ukrainians around.
One of the orienteering markers
Once we picked up the girls and came back to the site and Carrie’s group finally returned, Mr. Moron took charge again and we all followed him.
Our next destination had us following a large river, the next checkpoint beyond a big bend in it. About a hundred meters from the bend, Mr. Moron stops and thinks we should turn around, that we missed the checkpoint. I try explaining in Russian that we haven’t reached it yet. Here is the bend on the map (not knowing the word for “bend”, I was reduced to motions), there is the bend in the river. It’s past that.
Lost at the river
Possibly because I sound like a five year-old in Russian, that’s how much respect I was given and they headed back. Carrie said she’d follow me rather then the group, so we went off towards the bend. Some of the group, still confused about where we were, followed us. Soon the whole group ended up following us and, lo and behold, beyond the river bend was the checkpoint. The hole puncher was at the top of a thirty foot tree. Rather then let each person do the challenge (and, dammit, I wanted to climb the tree), they decided to send one person up with all our cards.
Climbing the tree. Our guy is at the top, with six team cards around his neck
Admittedly it saved time, but it was cheating. Once again, I acquiesced to the will of the group. Despite being right, they still didn’t give me any respect. We were the Americans. For some reason, we needed to be taken care of.
This is not a new experience. In fact, it’s a mentality I’ve been dealing with since I’ve gotten here. We have it easier in America, they figure, we can’t possibly know how to survive in Ukraine. They're not patronizing about it; it's a genuine desire to help. But still, when you value independence and self-sufficiency, it grates on your nerves.
Anyway, things became uneventful from there, the group chewing up kilometers as we hiked on roads, through forests, through towns and through fields, passing kids playing soccer next to sleeping goats, past a guy carrying a scythe while riding a bicycle, past an old army base, rusting hulks of tanks on the other side of a barbed wire fence.
I call this one: Man on bike with scythe
We ended up on train tracks, feet killers, and Carrie’s knees started to hurt. A few kilometers later, she was limping.
On the train tracks
We hiked a few kilometers on blacktop, cars rushing by and kicking up dirt, clothes getting stripped off in the hot sun. I began rotating the clothes in my pack to the outside, letting them dry before moving the next item. It would have been nice to have a dry pair of socks at this point, but somewhere in the forest my boxers and one of my socks had fallen off of Carrie’s pack, lost forever.
It would have been better to just leave them hanging to dry in my bathroom.
Arteom asked us to sing an English song he learned in school: Old McDonald. Carrie and I obliged for a few verses, Arteom joining in for the only part he remembered: "E-I-E-I-O". We then launched into the other song most Ukrainians know: "Yesterday" by The Beatles.
We pushed on. Once again, we had map issues. The map showed the checkpoint being where the road (running on a ridge) met a stream. Mr. Moron decided that we should get off the road down the embankment, to be closer to where the stream would eventually be. But why not wait, I wondered, until we see the checkpoint so that we know what side of the road to go down on? The group followed him, so we followed the group. He picked the wrong side, of course, and after half-sliding on the muddy embankment through stingy nettles, we later found ourselves having to climb back up it, cross the road and slide down the other side.
There, we came upon our next challenge, and my final challenge before I gave up on the group. We had to cross back through the embankment by way of a concrete pipe, water up to our calves. We left our gear outside it, so no pictures of this debacle. After going through the muddy water, we found a message spray painted on the other side for us.
We were moving too fast for me to read the Ukrainian, but I did see “150 meters” and “30” degrees. Simple: take a bearing and go 30 degrees for 150 meters. I had left my compass in my pack, but it didn’t matter because the group was now trudging upstream through a small river, straight from the end of the pipe we had just came through. Trying not to loose them, I followed. This made no sense, as we were moving 90 degrees from the mouth of the pipe, and we needed to be going 30. I figured that they had read something on the wall and knew what they were doing.
I was wrong.
We waded up the river for about ten minutes before they decided to go to dry land. Carrie, who had come barefoot to keep her shoes dry, opted to go back to the bags and wait for us. She would wait for an hour.
These people, who had made me jog from orienteering spot to orienteering spot, were now slowly meandering in the woods, no one with a compass out, trying to spot a point I was sure we were nowhere near. I wanted to go back and take a bearing with a compass, but they kept walking, spreading out and stopping every minute to pick one of the hundreds of tiny, wild strawberries that were growing at our feet. Periodically, they’d ask one of the women picking these strawberries and putting them into glass jars if they knew where the checkpoint was. Each lady would send us in a different direction. Finally, we were out of the forest and at some train tracks, far more than 150 meters from the pipe, and they were still walking, looking around for the checkpoint. I stopped walking. We had been hiking, jogging, swimming and wading for seven hours. My feet had been wet the whole time. My legs were scratched up from where I had pulled up to wade, and then crossed onto dry land—following everyone else—through thorns and stinging nettles.
Arteom picking wild strawberries
My desire to keep going with this whole race was minimal. I was dependent on the group, but the group—much as I like and respect each of the members—didn’t know what it was doing. Finally, the sun slowly sinking and most of the race to go, they returned from their fruitless walk along the railroad tracks and I pulled aside Alla, one of the group members that I know better than the others. In Russian I told her: we need to go back and use a compass to go 30 degrees from the pipe. That’s what the instructions said. She agreed, called everyone together and we started walking back.
Along the way, we came across a man in a much-repaired gray suit watching his grazing goats. They asked him where to go and he pointed us in another direction. They went where he pointed. I wanted to kill them. We had been wandering around for nearly an hour on a challenge that shouldn’t have taken five minutes. My impotence to convince them of what we needed to do frustrated me. I told Alla I was going back to the pipe, and she said to just come with them, that they now knew the way.
They didn’t. We ended up along the embankment, several hundred meters north of the pipe. I don’t think they even knew what compass headings are because I tried explaining, with my arms, that we were at two or three degrees in relation to the pipe, and that 30 degrees was a wider diagonal from it. Instead the guys in the group kept running around, looking into old pipes and aqueducts for the checkpoint, figuring it had to be close, me wanting to yell “it’s nowhere near here!”
Then, ironically, they did find a checkpoint. It just happened to be the wrong one. Whichever checkpoint was 150 meters at a 30 degree angle into the forest must have pointed to this one. It was a tiny pipe that lead through the embankment. Once again, rather then all of us crawling through, they sent two guys with all our cards. We walked to the other side, and there found another challenge: a deep well, about twenty feet deep, that led to fast moving water. You had to climb down a rope, bracing yourself against the well walls, and then use the hole puncher that hung just over the water.
That’s what I love about Ukraine: whether it was climbing that twenty-five foot high tree with no protection or doing a challenge that would kill you if you slipped and fell into the water, personal safety gave way to cool challenges. You would simply never see this challenge in America without being in a harness and belayed from above. As is, it was an adrenaline rush.
They tried to take my card down for me, but I told them I wanted to do it. That’s the point of an adventure race: to actually do the challenges. I was sick of being babysat.
Going down the well
After I came back up, someone had gotten the code we were supposed to get from the missed checkpoint from another racer. Handing my card over, Alla wrote it on there. Cheating, cheating, cheating.
With all current checkpoints completed, we were given a new map. I thought we had been making decent time, but the new map showed otherwise. We had nearly two-thirds of the way to go and the sun was two hours from the horizon. Looking at the map, it was obvious that the cool parts: the rafting and rope challenges, were going to be near the end, to be done in the morning after the sun came back up. Between now and then were a lot of miles to be done in the dark. That was the part I had been dreading. I hate hiking on trails at night, even for an hour or two. I had never done it for an entire night, and wasn’t looking forward to it. Along with the new map came more instructions, all in Russian. Once again, we would have to be dependent on the group to get through the race.
Carrie and I took stock. She had rested for an hour and felt better energy wise, but her knees had stiffened up. I had spent an hour slogging around in wet tennis shoes with no socks, following people who wouldn’t listen to reason.
Could we keep going? Yes. Could we finish the race? Doubtful. Extrapolating our current progress, we’d finish the race a few hours past the 23.5 hour deadline. Also, Carrie said her knees couldn’t handle going all night. My feet, the skin soaked and shifting, were getting near to blister-formation. The next time we crossed a major road would be in the middle of the night. We were as close to Zhytomyr as we’d be for the rest of the race. If we were going to quit, now would be the time.
And you know, I felt no regret in quitting. The race had been fun, a lot of fun save for the periodic frustrations. I’d never done anything like that. Hiking and backpacking are usually relaxing. This had been balls-out for seven hours, going as fast as possible, the only break when we waited 20 minutes for Carrie’s group, and the odd three-minute breather now and then as we took bearings on maps. The pace, the challenges and the push-yourself mentality made for a really exciting day. Frankly, I’d like to do more multi-sport races, and I’m sad we missed on the ropes course and rafting portions of this one. What I’m not sad about is missing the all-night hiking, the feeling of absolute exhaustion that I knew would come over me about 3 AM, having been awake for more than 20 hours and needing to push on, that mindless slog that meant I would return home absolutely exhausted and physically torn up, which is not how I wanted to experience the Moby concert I was going to the next day.
Carrie and I calling it quits
Instead, Carrie and I had a fun day and then got to walk back to Zhytomyr, another five kilometers along the banks of a river, before we caught a marshrutka to a local pizzeria to order carryout to take back to my apartment.
The river we followed to Zhytomyr
We finished the night drinking the cold Pepsi, eating pizza and munching on popcorn, watching Family Guy on my laptop and periodically saying, “you know, it’s 10:00 PM and guess what we’re not doing? Hiking in the dark!”
And now, as I type this, it’s 1:30 in the morning and out there, right now, are a lot of people hiking in the dark. Oddly, that makes just sitting here quite an experience, a nice little pleasure that puts a smile on my face.
My socks were wet. The race wouldn’t start for four and a half hours, and I was already dealing with wet socks. I had washed them the previous night, but they still hadn’t dried. I only had one dry pair, and they were on my feet. I strapped the wet ones to the outside of my pack.
I started the race while on my mobile phone, people moving past me and asking in Russian: “Are you calling America?” Actually, I was trying to text message Diana. We had been waiting for the race to start, being entertained by a trio of jailbait singers and guys doing bike tricks. I had been told the start time of the race had been moved from 12:00 to 12:30 and figured Diana might come down to hang out and see us off. My socks were on a stone bench, slowly drying in the sun. About ten minutes later, and with Diana on her way, they announced that we would go ahead and start. We barely had our packs on when they clanged the start bell, and we were off, me trying to simultaneously jog and punch letters into my mobile at the same time, telling Diana not to come.
We ran down a hill (I thought the running was quite silly. We had 60 km of trekking ahead of us, and running with packs was going to do nothing but wear us out. But since everyone else was running…). At the bottom was a checkpoint. We turned left and ran some more. There was another checkpoint. Then we turned left and ran up the hill we had just came down, although this time on a steep dirt track instead of stairs, passing another checkpoint. Another left and we were back where we started. This was, in fact, part of the race, and no doubt the organizers thought it was funny as hell. Breathing hard, we then ran down the hill again, the checkpoint this time pointing us right, where, around a corner, ropes were set on a stone wall.
We were originally told that ascenders would be supplied for this portion of the race, making scaling the wall easy. At the last minute, at the registration and orientation we had gotten up at 7:30 AM to attend, we were told there weren’t enough ascenders, so no one would get any. As my group was already lagging behind the crowd of 40 competitors, I just jumped at the rope and started pulling myself up, hand over hand. At any moment I felt that my hands were going to slip and I’d be back at the bottom, but I surprised myself by getting to the top. While I was climbing, Carrie was tying our bags into my rope. Then, while I hauled our packs up one rope, Carrie climbed up the one beside it. She got about five feet from the top before she couldn’t go any father, but with a mighty heave I got her up. Teamwork at its finest.
Carrie free climbing the wall
Together, we then jogged for a kilometer down the river that flows along Zhytomyr, where we then had to swim across the river to continue the race. Here is where problems started. All the competitors had become spread out along that kilometer. Carrie and I, our “Crazy Hedgehog” team, was sticking with four other teams that we personally knew from Polissya, the sporting organization I’m building a climbing wall with. The ten of us decided to stick together to complete the race, rather than worrying about winning it.
The Polissya crew. Clockwise: Arteom, Ina, Ira, Dima, Vannya, Nikolya, Carrie, Pasha, Alla
Carrie and I also needed them because all the instructions for getting to the checkpoints were in Russian, and we simply didn’t know most of the words on the paper (they never taught us “chestnut tree in a meadow” in training). We had been told that English instructions would be provided, but that must have gone the same route as the ascenders.
We arrived at the river crossing with the leading teams already stripping their clothes off. A number of the men, wisely as I would discover, decided to swim the 100 meters across the river wearing nothing at all. I stripped down to my boxers, Carrie to a bikini she had on. We inflated the children’s inner tubes we had been instructed to bring along and put our packs on them.
Crossing the river
We had been unable to find plastic bags big enough to fit our packs. It seems that few other people had this problem and had thrown their packs into thick plastic bags, lashed them to tubes and hit the water. Without the bags, we had opted to put everything inside our packs in Zip-lock bags that I had brought from America. The problem was that as I was stuffing clothing into the Zip-lock already holding my fleece, it tore. I could have moved stuff into other bags, but my group was already getting into the river. I figured I’d just do my damndest to keep it out of the water and waded into the water. Pushing my bag along ahead of me as I swam across, I realized all was not going according to plan.
Water was getting into my pack, and the heavier it got, the lower it sank into the water. On the other side, I discovered that all my clothes, including my fleece, were completely soaked. This included the pair of socks I had spent all morning trying to dry out.
So was my spare pair of boxer shorts, like the other Ukrainians, I went commando for the rest of the race. The nice thing on the other side of the river, trying to wring out my clothes as fast as possible, was the eye candy. Not wanting to continue trekking in their wet bathing suits, several of the women were stripping them off in front of us and pulling on dry clothes. Ukrainians, like many Europeans, don’t think much about being nude. I didn’t mind this attitude at all.
I strapped my rain jacket to the outside to dry it and put on the fleece, figuring it would dry faster on me. Carrie offered to strap stuff to her pack, so I gave her my boxers and my once-again-wet socks.
Uphill we went from there, across a wide meadow covered in yellow flowers, past fields where people were planting their summer crops, tilling the earth with horse-drawn plows.
Horse-drawn plow
Group problems started then. There was some guy tagging along with our group, a man in his late thirties, his partner a girl in her early twenties. The girl was wearing only a sports bra and some short spandex shorts, a mistake she readily discovered when we started moving through thick underbrush. From her attitude, it was apparent she had gotten dragged onto this trip.
I never learned this guy’s name, so we’ll call him Mr. Moron. In booming Russian he started barking orders, and my whole group started doing what he was saying. Since I was beholden to the group, so did I. I hate group dynamics.
Into the woods...
This might not have been so bad had Mr. Moron known what he was doing. Instead, he turned out he really couldn’t read maps. He had us trail breaking through forest that turned into a bog, hiking through watery mud that quickly soaked my dry socks. He kept thinking something was wrong with his compass and kept asking to borrow mine. I could see on my map that there was a road not fifty meters south of us, one that led straight to the next checkpoint.
Trailbreaking
I pointed this out to Carrie, that we needed to head south until we hit the road, but neither of us wanted to leave the group, so we just pushed through the thick foliage, ducking branches and walking through stinging nettles and thorny berry bushes before the guy realized his mistake and we went down to the road we could have taken the entire time.
The guy with the beard is Mr. Moron. The butt belongs to his partner.
We were now at the orienteering section of the race, and were given maps so detailed we didn’t even need compasses, able to navigate by trails, roads and rivers instead. Ukrainian mentality came in then. Peace Corps volunteers have a hard time stopping their students from cheating, because Ukrainians don’t consider it “cheating”, they consider it helping each other and why shouldn’t they do that?
We had to find six spots and both write down a code spray painted to a tree, or punch cards with hole punchers at each spot. Rather then have each team go to all six spots, the Ukrainians decided that we should split into two groups, one team member in each group, with each group finding three spots. Since the team members would have collectively found six, this was determined to be okay.
Carrie and I just went along with it, as we found ourselves doing the entire race so as not to get split from people we needed to complete the race. Although Carrie’s group had less ground to cover, my group beat them back by 20 minutes. How? Well, of my group of three guys and two girls, one of the girls was the sports-bra and short spandex shorts girl. She was unable to keep up, so the guys decided she should just hide out of site, the other girl—Ira, a trooper whose shins were sliced up from going through the thorns and who was still pushing us to go faster—waited with her. We took their cards to punch them for them. Then, we ran.
I don’t know why we were running, but these two other guys—Vannya and Arteom—were big, strong, fit guys and felt we should make up lost time by running to the checkpoints. Not wanting to lag behind, I had to run full out to keep up with them, wondering how I was going to have any energy left after this.
We were slowed up at one point by a group of racers staring at a tree. It was the correct tree, as it had a marker on it, but no one could find the hole puncher. Three people were searching the muddy water under the tree. It became a bottle neck as more and more people reached the point, people searching for the hole puncher.
Trying to find the lost hole puncher
Finally, I took a digital picture of the tree to prove we had been there and we were off. Poor map skills came into play again, and Vannya and Arteom actually let me help them find the second marker, then let me take over as leader and lead them to the third. I was starting to feel better, that I was contributing and wasn’t simply following the Ukrainians around.
One of the orienteering markers
Once we picked up the girls and came back to the site and Carrie’s group finally returned, Mr. Moron took charge again and we all followed him.
Our next destination had us following a large river, the next checkpoint beyond a big bend in it. About a hundred meters from the bend, Mr. Moron stops and thinks we should turn around, that we missed the checkpoint. I try explaining in Russian that we haven’t reached it yet. Here is the bend on the map (not knowing the word for “bend”, I was reduced to motions), there is the bend in the river. It’s past that.
Lost at the river
Possibly because I sound like a five year-old in Russian, that’s how much respect I was given and they headed back. Carrie said she’d follow me rather then the group, so we went off towards the bend. Some of the group, still confused about where we were, followed us. Soon the whole group ended up following us and, lo and behold, beyond the river bend was the checkpoint. The hole puncher was at the top of a thirty foot tree. Rather then let each person do the challenge (and, dammit, I wanted to climb the tree), they decided to send one person up with all our cards.
Climbing the tree. Our guy is at the top, with six team cards around his neck
Admittedly it saved time, but it was cheating. Once again, I acquiesced to the will of the group. Despite being right, they still didn’t give me any respect. We were the Americans. For some reason, we needed to be taken care of.
This is not a new experience. In fact, it’s a mentality I’ve been dealing with since I’ve gotten here. We have it easier in America, they figure, we can’t possibly know how to survive in Ukraine. They're not patronizing about it; it's a genuine desire to help. But still, when you value independence and self-sufficiency, it grates on your nerves.
Anyway, things became uneventful from there, the group chewing up kilometers as we hiked on roads, through forests, through towns and through fields, passing kids playing soccer next to sleeping goats, past a guy carrying a scythe while riding a bicycle, past an old army base, rusting hulks of tanks on the other side of a barbed wire fence.
I call this one: Man on bike with scythe
We ended up on train tracks, feet killers, and Carrie’s knees started to hurt. A few kilometers later, she was limping.
On the train tracks
We hiked a few kilometers on blacktop, cars rushing by and kicking up dirt, clothes getting stripped off in the hot sun. I began rotating the clothes in my pack to the outside, letting them dry before moving the next item. It would have been nice to have a dry pair of socks at this point, but somewhere in the forest my boxers and one of my socks had fallen off of Carrie’s pack, lost forever.
It would have been better to just leave them hanging to dry in my bathroom.
Arteom asked us to sing an English song he learned in school: Old McDonald. Carrie and I obliged for a few verses, Arteom joining in for the only part he remembered: "E-I-E-I-O". We then launched into the other song most Ukrainians know: "Yesterday" by The Beatles.
We pushed on. Once again, we had map issues. The map showed the checkpoint being where the road (running on a ridge) met a stream. Mr. Moron decided that we should get off the road down the embankment, to be closer to where the stream would eventually be. But why not wait, I wondered, until we see the checkpoint so that we know what side of the road to go down on? The group followed him, so we followed the group. He picked the wrong side, of course, and after half-sliding on the muddy embankment through stingy nettles, we later found ourselves having to climb back up it, cross the road and slide down the other side.
There, we came upon our next challenge, and my final challenge before I gave up on the group. We had to cross back through the embankment by way of a concrete pipe, water up to our calves. We left our gear outside it, so no pictures of this debacle. After going through the muddy water, we found a message spray painted on the other side for us.
We were moving too fast for me to read the Ukrainian, but I did see “150 meters” and “30” degrees. Simple: take a bearing and go 30 degrees for 150 meters. I had left my compass in my pack, but it didn’t matter because the group was now trudging upstream through a small river, straight from the end of the pipe we had just came through. Trying not to loose them, I followed. This made no sense, as we were moving 90 degrees from the mouth of the pipe, and we needed to be going 30. I figured that they had read something on the wall and knew what they were doing.
I was wrong.
We waded up the river for about ten minutes before they decided to go to dry land. Carrie, who had come barefoot to keep her shoes dry, opted to go back to the bags and wait for us. She would wait for an hour.
These people, who had made me jog from orienteering spot to orienteering spot, were now slowly meandering in the woods, no one with a compass out, trying to spot a point I was sure we were nowhere near. I wanted to go back and take a bearing with a compass, but they kept walking, spreading out and stopping every minute to pick one of the hundreds of tiny, wild strawberries that were growing at our feet. Periodically, they’d ask one of the women picking these strawberries and putting them into glass jars if they knew where the checkpoint was. Each lady would send us in a different direction. Finally, we were out of the forest and at some train tracks, far more than 150 meters from the pipe, and they were still walking, looking around for the checkpoint. I stopped walking. We had been hiking, jogging, swimming and wading for seven hours. My feet had been wet the whole time. My legs were scratched up from where I had pulled up to wade, and then crossed onto dry land—following everyone else—through thorns and stinging nettles.
Arteom picking wild strawberries
My desire to keep going with this whole race was minimal. I was dependent on the group, but the group—much as I like and respect each of the members—didn’t know what it was doing. Finally, the sun slowly sinking and most of the race to go, they returned from their fruitless walk along the railroad tracks and I pulled aside Alla, one of the group members that I know better than the others. In Russian I told her: we need to go back and use a compass to go 30 degrees from the pipe. That’s what the instructions said. She agreed, called everyone together and we started walking back.
Along the way, we came across a man in a much-repaired gray suit watching his grazing goats. They asked him where to go and he pointed us in another direction. They went where he pointed. I wanted to kill them. We had been wandering around for nearly an hour on a challenge that shouldn’t have taken five minutes. My impotence to convince them of what we needed to do frustrated me. I told Alla I was going back to the pipe, and she said to just come with them, that they now knew the way.
They didn’t. We ended up along the embankment, several hundred meters north of the pipe. I don’t think they even knew what compass headings are because I tried explaining, with my arms, that we were at two or three degrees in relation to the pipe, and that 30 degrees was a wider diagonal from it. Instead the guys in the group kept running around, looking into old pipes and aqueducts for the checkpoint, figuring it had to be close, me wanting to yell “it’s nowhere near here!”
Then, ironically, they did find a checkpoint. It just happened to be the wrong one. Whichever checkpoint was 150 meters at a 30 degree angle into the forest must have pointed to this one. It was a tiny pipe that lead through the embankment. Once again, rather then all of us crawling through, they sent two guys with all our cards. We walked to the other side, and there found another challenge: a deep well, about twenty feet deep, that led to fast moving water. You had to climb down a rope, bracing yourself against the well walls, and then use the hole puncher that hung just over the water.
That’s what I love about Ukraine: whether it was climbing that twenty-five foot high tree with no protection or doing a challenge that would kill you if you slipped and fell into the water, personal safety gave way to cool challenges. You would simply never see this challenge in America without being in a harness and belayed from above. As is, it was an adrenaline rush.
They tried to take my card down for me, but I told them I wanted to do it. That’s the point of an adventure race: to actually do the challenges. I was sick of being babysat.
Going down the well
After I came back up, someone had gotten the code we were supposed to get from the missed checkpoint from another racer. Handing my card over, Alla wrote it on there. Cheating, cheating, cheating.
With all current checkpoints completed, we were given a new map. I thought we had been making decent time, but the new map showed otherwise. We had nearly two-thirds of the way to go and the sun was two hours from the horizon. Looking at the map, it was obvious that the cool parts: the rafting and rope challenges, were going to be near the end, to be done in the morning after the sun came back up. Between now and then were a lot of miles to be done in the dark. That was the part I had been dreading. I hate hiking on trails at night, even for an hour or two. I had never done it for an entire night, and wasn’t looking forward to it. Along with the new map came more instructions, all in Russian. Once again, we would have to be dependent on the group to get through the race.
Carrie and I took stock. She had rested for an hour and felt better energy wise, but her knees had stiffened up. I had spent an hour slogging around in wet tennis shoes with no socks, following people who wouldn’t listen to reason.
Could we keep going? Yes. Could we finish the race? Doubtful. Extrapolating our current progress, we’d finish the race a few hours past the 23.5 hour deadline. Also, Carrie said her knees couldn’t handle going all night. My feet, the skin soaked and shifting, were getting near to blister-formation. The next time we crossed a major road would be in the middle of the night. We were as close to Zhytomyr as we’d be for the rest of the race. If we were going to quit, now would be the time.
And you know, I felt no regret in quitting. The race had been fun, a lot of fun save for the periodic frustrations. I’d never done anything like that. Hiking and backpacking are usually relaxing. This had been balls-out for seven hours, going as fast as possible, the only break when we waited 20 minutes for Carrie’s group, and the odd three-minute breather now and then as we took bearings on maps. The pace, the challenges and the push-yourself mentality made for a really exciting day. Frankly, I’d like to do more multi-sport races, and I’m sad we missed on the ropes course and rafting portions of this one. What I’m not sad about is missing the all-night hiking, the feeling of absolute exhaustion that I knew would come over me about 3 AM, having been awake for more than 20 hours and needing to push on, that mindless slog that meant I would return home absolutely exhausted and physically torn up, which is not how I wanted to experience the Moby concert I was going to the next day.
Carrie and I calling it quits
Instead, Carrie and I had a fun day and then got to walk back to Zhytomyr, another five kilometers along the banks of a river, before we caught a marshrutka to a local pizzeria to order carryout to take back to my apartment.
The river we followed to Zhytomyr
We finished the night drinking the cold Pepsi, eating pizza and munching on popcorn, watching Family Guy on my laptop and periodically saying, “you know, it’s 10:00 PM and guess what we’re not doing? Hiking in the dark!”
And now, as I type this, it’s 1:30 in the morning and out there, right now, are a lot of people hiking in the dark. Oddly, that makes just sitting here quite an experience, a nice little pleasure that puts a smile on my face.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Ukraine: Extreme Marathon
Well, I've been alluding to this marathon I'm doing and meant to talk about it but, you know, haven't. Since it starts tomorrow, I figured I'd better.
So, yeah, Carrie and I are a team in an Extreme Marathon. We're the "Boshvillne Yodjiki", which is syrgic ("Boshevillne" being Ukrainian and "Yodjiki" being Russian) for "Crazy Hedgehogs".
Polissya, the group I'm building the climbing wall with, runs it. There are three classes. The hardest is a four day journey in excess of 400 kilometers and involves biking, hiking, boating, orienteering and rock climbing.
The wimpiest (i.e. our) class, is 60 kilometers (a little over 37 miles). Fifty-five are hiking and orienteering, with ropes course type obstacles (climbing, crossing a river on a rope, rapelling, etc.) along the way. An unknown length is swimming (something like 300 meters) and 5 kilometers is rafting on a river. The rafting, by the way, is done on a raft you build on the spot, with provided materials (branches and car tires and such). We have to complete the whole race in 23.5 hours, straight through the night.
This is the required gear list: Climbing harness, carabiners, belay device, ascenders, 8mm rope for prusics and building the raft, 10mm rope to make slings for ropes course activities (zip lines and such), first aid kit, headlamps, a inflatable kid's tube (so your gear can float behind you when you're swimming), and a compass. Obviously, you also have to bring food and water.
I was going to take pictures of all our want more.
my problems just didn't fit anymore. I am healthier and I want more.
So, yeah, Carrie and I are a team in an Extreme Marathon. We're the "Boshvillne Yodjiki", which is syrgic ("Boshevillne" being Ukrainian and "Yodjiki" being Russian) for "Crazy Hedgehogs".
Polissya, the group I'm building the climbing wall with, runs it. There are three classes. The hardest is a four day journey in excess of 400 kilometers and involves biking, hiking, boating, orienteering and rock climbing.
The wimpiest (i.e. our) class, is 60 kilometers (a little over 37 miles). Fifty-five are hiking and orienteering, with ropes course type obstacles (climbing, crossing a river on a rope, rapelling, etc.) along the way. An unknown length is swimming (something like 300 meters) and 5 kilometers is rafting on a river. The rafting, by the way, is done on a raft you build on the spot, with provided materials (branches and car tires and such). We have to complete the whole race in 23.5 hours, straight through the night.
This is the required gear list: Climbing harness, carabiners, belay device, ascenders, 8mm rope for prusics and building the raft, 10mm rope to make slings for ropes course activities (zip lines and such), first aid kit, headlamps, a inflatable kid's tube (so your gear can float behind you when you're swimming), and a compass. Obviously, you also have to bring food and water.
I was going to take pictures of all our want more.
my problems just didn't fit anymore. I am healthier and I want more.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Ukraine: Bombed Like Baghdad
Katie: the piano is going well! As this story shows, love life is otherwise.
So I was hanging with my neighbors (the girls teaching me piano) a few nights ago when they pulled out their Institute's yearbook and asked which girls I thought were attractive.
Honestly, most of the girls (from a a class of about 30) were decently attractive, but I only found one girl hot, and I pointed to her.
"That's Oxana," I was told in Ukranian. "We know her. She'll be here tomorrow." Well, I had to be in Kyiv the next day, but it so happened that yesterday as Steve and I were going downstairs to go jogging, we ran into Alla (one of the neighbor girls) and Oxana. And they both looked stunning, having just come from one of their piano exams, which are done as recitals, and having dressed up for them. Oxana looked even better in person. Just think very-fit Ukranian blonde with sparkling blue eyes in a skin-tight black shirt and white skirt and that would be her.
They asked what we were doing, and I told them we were going jogging, but whether they would be at my neighbor's apartment later. Oxana said that she was tired, that she was going to go home soon. Poor timing I figured, and Steve and I departed. We got about two blocks before I said "let's go back. We'll jog later."
So we went back. The apartment had a number of guests, including Oxana, and we all talked together for about an hour, some syrgic mess of Ukranian and Russian with the Ukrainians throwing in the occasional English they learned in school, which is was along the lines of "Yes! Super!"
I got Oxana to play piano for me, and she did a great version of "My Heart Will Go On". The piano was great, the singing atonal, but I wasn't going to complain. My Ukranian has been doing a lot better since I started hanging out with my neighbors and Oxana and I ad a pretty good conversation. By the smiles, I figured we were hitting it off.
She asked what Ukranian foods I liked, and then offered to cook me borcht. I was all over it. Ukanians have a saying: "Harne borcht, harne divchina." It pretty much translates: "a good woman cooks good borcht." In other words, she was throwing her goods onto the table. I was very happy with the way this was progressing.
We arranged to eat it today, her coming over to my neighbor's apartment to cook it. We hadn't nailed down a time, but I got off work at 6 and figured she'd be in the process of cooking or about to get started. I made sure my clothes looked good so I could go straight from work to the apartment, and I even printed up the lyrics to a couple Ukranian songs I know. I'd played the songs for my neighbors before, upon request, but they only knew the choruses, and i can't sing in English, let alone Ukranian. I figured post dinner, with the lyrics they could sing and I could play and the night would go well.
I show up about 6:15, and am told the borcht is there, but Oxana was not. I don't know what got lost in translation, but apparently she thought we had set a time for 4:00 PM. I wouldn't have said that because I was working. I was also confused, because I know times in Ukranian. It's one of those things I've had to use almost every day for nine months. Anyway, she had come over, made borcht and waited and waited and finally left.
They gave me her number, but only her roommate was home. My neighbors insisted I still eat the borcht, which I felt was wrong, but they told me she'd be more offended if I didn't. So I sat and ate it with them, commenting frequently on how good it was while all the time feeling like a total ass.
So, yeah, bombed that one.
So I was hanging with my neighbors (the girls teaching me piano) a few nights ago when they pulled out their Institute's yearbook and asked which girls I thought were attractive.
Honestly, most of the girls (from a a class of about 30) were decently attractive, but I only found one girl hot, and I pointed to her.
"That's Oxana," I was told in Ukranian. "We know her. She'll be here tomorrow." Well, I had to be in Kyiv the next day, but it so happened that yesterday as Steve and I were going downstairs to go jogging, we ran into Alla (one of the neighbor girls) and Oxana. And they both looked stunning, having just come from one of their piano exams, which are done as recitals, and having dressed up for them. Oxana looked even better in person. Just think very-fit Ukranian blonde with sparkling blue eyes in a skin-tight black shirt and white skirt and that would be her.
They asked what we were doing, and I told them we were going jogging, but whether they would be at my neighbor's apartment later. Oxana said that she was tired, that she was going to go home soon. Poor timing I figured, and Steve and I departed. We got about two blocks before I said "let's go back. We'll jog later."
So we went back. The apartment had a number of guests, including Oxana, and we all talked together for about an hour, some syrgic mess of Ukranian and Russian with the Ukrainians throwing in the occasional English they learned in school, which is was along the lines of "Yes! Super!"
I got Oxana to play piano for me, and she did a great version of "My Heart Will Go On". The piano was great, the singing atonal, but I wasn't going to complain. My Ukranian has been doing a lot better since I started hanging out with my neighbors and Oxana and I ad a pretty good conversation. By the smiles, I figured we were hitting it off.
She asked what Ukranian foods I liked, and then offered to cook me borcht. I was all over it. Ukanians have a saying: "Harne borcht, harne divchina." It pretty much translates: "a good woman cooks good borcht." In other words, she was throwing her goods onto the table. I was very happy with the way this was progressing.
We arranged to eat it today, her coming over to my neighbor's apartment to cook it. We hadn't nailed down a time, but I got off work at 6 and figured she'd be in the process of cooking or about to get started. I made sure my clothes looked good so I could go straight from work to the apartment, and I even printed up the lyrics to a couple Ukranian songs I know. I'd played the songs for my neighbors before, upon request, but they only knew the choruses, and i can't sing in English, let alone Ukranian. I figured post dinner, with the lyrics they could sing and I could play and the night would go well.
I show up about 6:15, and am told the borcht is there, but Oxana was not. I don't know what got lost in translation, but apparently she thought we had set a time for 4:00 PM. I wouldn't have said that because I was working. I was also confused, because I know times in Ukranian. It's one of those things I've had to use almost every day for nine months. Anyway, she had come over, made borcht and waited and waited and finally left.
They gave me her number, but only her roommate was home. My neighbors insisted I still eat the borcht, which I felt was wrong, but they told me she'd be more offended if I didn't. So I sat and ate it with them, commenting frequently on how good it was while all the time feeling like a total ass.
So, yeah, bombed that one.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Misc: The End of Peace Corps Uzbekistan
In the wake of the violence two weeks ago, Peace Corps Uzbekistan is shutting down. An Uzbekistan PCV that I correspond is now back in the USA, which is good, but also bad. Good to be home, good to be safe, bad to loose a place you've learned to love and work in. She's understandably upset about it.
Peace Corps Russia shut down two years ago, Russia accusing PCVs of spying for the United States.
Places like Belarus, who need it the most, won't even accept Peace Corps.
Eastern Europe is like some struggling giant, body parts made of different materials but somehow held together by the glue of history and politics. It's struggling to rise but as some of it reaches for the sun, other parts shatter and collapse.
It's both a heartening and tragic thing.
In another news, Carrie got back into her apartment, and the camera sale got resolved, so good news there.
Annie, I hope things work out for the best.
Peace Corps Russia shut down two years ago, Russia accusing PCVs of spying for the United States.
Places like Belarus, who need it the most, won't even accept Peace Corps.
Eastern Europe is like some struggling giant, body parts made of different materials but somehow held together by the glue of history and politics. It's struggling to rise but as some of it reaches for the sun, other parts shatter and collapse.
It's both a heartening and tragic thing.
In another news, Carrie got back into her apartment, and the camera sale got resolved, so good news there.
Annie, I hope things work out for the best.
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Ukraine: Pics and a Video
Media!
The video is the edited footage of my 7,000 mile journey around America before I went into Peace Corps. I couldn't get it uploaded until I was back in Florida and never got around to mentioning it until now. A word: it opens with a freeze frame of Sarah and then a brief intro in titles about the trip. Everytime I have shown it, I have gotten this question: "is this all it is?" No, this is not all it is. Wait five seconds, and you'll see. And then five seconds later they start laughing. Patience, people! Patience!
Enjoy.
Pics: Shashlik, a Ukranian summer tradition
Pics: Last Bell, the end of the school year ceremony
Pics: Rock Climbing in Zhytomyr
Video: The Dirty Windshield Diaries
The video is the edited footage of my 7,000 mile journey around America before I went into Peace Corps. I couldn't get it uploaded until I was back in Florida and never got around to mentioning it until now. A word: it opens with a freeze frame of Sarah and then a brief intro in titles about the trip. Everytime I have shown it, I have gotten this question: "is this all it is?" No, this is not all it is. Wait five seconds, and you'll see. And then five seconds later they start laughing. Patience, people! Patience!
Enjoy.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Ukraine: Job Problems, a Robbery and Jumping off a Bridge
I had problems getting pics online yesterday. Maybe within the next week I’ll get up climbing and shashlik pics. Life moves faster than my access to the internet, so this update will require me to pack a few events into one quick burst:
1) I’m getting very annoyed with my work. I understand that the Ukrainian concept of scheduling is much more flexible than the American one, and I roll with it when they wake me at 8:30 AM to tell me that my noon class has been moved to 9:00 AM, or that someone is sick and they need me to teach, well, now. But last week I got a call that went like this:
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Why didn’t you teach this morning?”
“I didn’t have a class this morning.”
“You didn’t know you had a class this morning?”
“No.”
“Oh, I must have forgotten to tell you.”
Yesterday, I get a call like this:
“When are you coming into the institute today?”
”I’m not,” I said. “I’m in Kyiv doing paperwork.”
“What about the kids?”
“What kids?”
“Nevermind.”
This was after I theatrically pulled out my calendar after last week’s incident and said, “Okay, tell me all the classes I’m teaching next week.” Wednesday was wide open, which why I went to Kyiv to finish up the grant paperwork. My coordinator wasn’t around when I was at the institute today, so I left a rather stern note on her desk that me missing a class makes Peace Corps look bad, and that we needed to work on our communication.
2) Carrie was robbed two days ago. She went swimming at a quarry-cum-swimming hole, with her backpack on the shore. Someone took it, and inside was her watch, mobile phone, wallet with 200 hrivna, her keys to her apartment and her clothes. She showed up at my apartment wearing a bikini, sandals and a sarong. Two days later, we still haven’t gotten keys to her apartment, so she’s been going back and forth between my apartment and Amy’s. We’ve both loaned her clothes and money and, in a karmic coincidence, she got a mobile from me and a call package from Amy. The mobile was originally Carrie’s old one, the one she had given me after mine was stolen when I was mugged. I had just bought a new one, and so was able to give her old one back to her. Someone had given the call package to Amy for free, but she had already had one and was able to give it to Carrie. Carrie’s taken the whole thing with her usual stoicism, although she’s understandably pretty frustrated that she can’t get back into her place.
3) Carrie and I jumped off a bridge yesterday evening, a nice release to both our frustrations. This would be want I didn’t want to mention ahead of time: rappelling 125 feet straight down off of a condemned bridge in a second world country. Forgive me, mom! It wasn’t even my idea, suggested instead by the Ukrainians we climb with. Apparently they do this all the time. Two police sat on one end of the bridge, not even paying attention to us, so if it was illegal, that law wasn’t exactly being enforced.
1) I’m getting very annoyed with my work. I understand that the Ukrainian concept of scheduling is much more flexible than the American one, and I roll with it when they wake me at 8:30 AM to tell me that my noon class has been moved to 9:00 AM, or that someone is sick and they need me to teach, well, now. But last week I got a call that went like this:
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Why didn’t you teach this morning?”
“I didn’t have a class this morning.”
“You didn’t know you had a class this morning?”
“No.”
“Oh, I must have forgotten to tell you.”
Yesterday, I get a call like this:
“When are you coming into the institute today?”
”I’m not,” I said. “I’m in Kyiv doing paperwork.”
“What about the kids?”
“What kids?”
“Nevermind.”
This was after I theatrically pulled out my calendar after last week’s incident and said, “Okay, tell me all the classes I’m teaching next week.” Wednesday was wide open, which why I went to Kyiv to finish up the grant paperwork. My coordinator wasn’t around when I was at the institute today, so I left a rather stern note on her desk that me missing a class makes Peace Corps look bad, and that we needed to work on our communication.
2) Carrie was robbed two days ago. She went swimming at a quarry-cum-swimming hole, with her backpack on the shore. Someone took it, and inside was her watch, mobile phone, wallet with 200 hrivna, her keys to her apartment and her clothes. She showed up at my apartment wearing a bikini, sandals and a sarong. Two days later, we still haven’t gotten keys to her apartment, so she’s been going back and forth between my apartment and Amy’s. We’ve both loaned her clothes and money and, in a karmic coincidence, she got a mobile from me and a call package from Amy. The mobile was originally Carrie’s old one, the one she had given me after mine was stolen when I was mugged. I had just bought a new one, and so was able to give her old one back to her. Someone had given the call package to Amy for free, but she had already had one and was able to give it to Carrie. Carrie’s taken the whole thing with her usual stoicism, although she’s understandably pretty frustrated that she can’t get back into her place.
3) Carrie and I jumped off a bridge yesterday evening, a nice release to both our frustrations. This would be want I didn’t want to mention ahead of time: rappelling 125 feet straight down off of a condemned bridge in a second world country. Forgive me, mom! It wasn’t even my idea, suggested instead by the Ukrainians we climb with. Apparently they do this all the time. Two police sat on one end of the bridge, not even paying attention to us, so if it was illegal, that law wasn’t exactly being enforced.
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