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.