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.