Tuesday, December 27, 2005

America: Christmas Chillin'

Nothing of note, lately. My last America visit was non-stop travelling and seeing people and this one, purposefully, is a lot of relaxing.

The first few hours of Christmas Day were spent watching my nine month-old niece, Isabell, figuring out how to open her presents. She was slightly confused as to why, every time she opened up some new squeezable-lights-up-and-makes-noise-while-teaching-shapes/letters/numbers/animals-Baby-Einstein gift, we'd take it away and put a new wrapped present in front of her. She continued this while her uncle spent twenty minutes putting together her new lights-up-and-makes-noise-playhouse-thingy and then spent another twenty minutes playing with it himself.

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Me and Isabell. In the back is the playhouse thingy

Isabell tired of opening gifts only halfway through (and was finding the wrapping paper more entertaining anyway), so it was time for the grown-ups to open their gifts. This would be the first year I got socks and underwear and was really happy about it (they just don't make them the same in Ukraine). Just goes to show perspective is everything.

Happy to be full of tasty food. Happy to climb without five layers and a ski cap. Happy just to be with my family. Much as I enjoy Ukraine, I've missed America and it's going to be hard to go back...

Working a lot on a Ukraine video. It's turned out to be a bigger project than I realized, now pushing the 45 minute mark and that's shaving things down to the bare minumum. I'll have it up on the net in a few days.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

America: Bathroom Bungalows and Brownie Points with God

In Orlando, warm, safe and sound!

The trip home was exhausting, but actually seemed to go by pretty quickly, with a few incidents of note:

Ghetto. I use the term not in its original definition as an area where people are forced to live by law or by economics, but by its more common, modern defnition: something that makes sense but violates societal mores. It's ghetto when you eat your cereal out of a frying pan. It's ghetto when you forgo repairing your car window and instead use a piece of cardboard and duct tape. And it's pretty ghetto when you spend the night sleeping on the floor of an airport bathroom, but it does make sense:

Not finding it financially viable to get a hotel room for my 7:00 AM flight, I had decided to sleep in the airport after arriving from Zhytomyr via Kyiv at 11:30 PM. All the benches were covered in Ukranians doing the same. After sleeping sitting up for an hour or so, I noticed the two girls I had been squeezed between were no longer there, possibly chased off by body odor or snoring. I could finally recline, which I did until I was awoken by a couple with two young children who obviously needed the benches more so than my whole body. Back to sitting up and finding myself awake, I decided to answer nature's call.

In my several hours of sleeping/sitting in a stupor, I had noticed the following problems with sleeping on the benches:

1) It was f-ing cold. The benches were right inside the airport doors and freezing air came in with every opening. The smartest and longest-staying of the sleepers were those on the benches farthest back. Not posessing either quality, my bench was sub-zero.

2) It was loud. Televisions played a loud, non-stop loop that included two techno videos, commercials, Ukraine promotional videos, a short segment on foot wrestling (I'm not kidding) and an "inspirational" short about Lance Armstrong. This does not help when one is trying to sleep sitting up.

3) It wasn't secure. I hadn't been overly worried about people stealing anything while I slept: after all, this was an airport and those there had to buy tickets, right? But, of course, right before I left, Diana was warning me about people who prowled the airports at night. I had hoped to get through customs and sleep on the other side where you HAD to have a ticket, but we weren't allowed to go through until two hours before flight time. Right by the door, I did realize I was very exposed to anyone who felt like walking in.

So I was half-awake in the bathroom, realizing how nice a bathroom it was. Most Ukranian bathrooms have turkish toilets: a piece of flat porceline or wood surrounding a hole in the ground. But this was a completely modern bathroom and immaculate and, most intestingly, had stalls that were pretty much completely enclosed: there was maybe three inches of space between the floor and the stall walls, making each a veritable cubical. And it was in there that I realized that it was warm, quiet and secure.

So, ghetto. But yes, I put my head on my bag, put my jacket over me, curled up on the floor and went to sleep. And stop what you're thinking, because I've crashed on the floors of many an apartment and that floor was far, far, far cleaner than all of them. It was my little bathroom bungalow.

Fast forward to my layover in Amsterdam. Those of us coming from non-first world countries, i.e. Ukraine, were in a little line having our passports throughly examined and waiting to get on the trans-Atlantic flight to Detroit. I talked a little to the burly Ukranian with a large beard next to me.

On the flight, it turns out he is in the row ahead of me and I find out he a priest is with the Orthodox church and is going to Detroit to preach to its rather large Ukranian diaspora population before returning to his home town of Lutzk, Ukraine.

A little before landing, he asks me to help him with his customs form. I fill in most the information from his passport, translate the rest for him and go back to my seat.

We land. As I'm pulling my bag from the overhead compartment, I nearly hit an extremely attractive girl in the face. We make introductions and it's with a bit of a kick-myself that I realize that this girl sat catty-corner to me the whole flight and in my trans-Atlantic stupor never noticed. In the wait to get off the plane and walking towards customs, we chat for a while: she's from Norway and on her way to Ohio to see her American mother for the holidays. She has dual nationality, meaning she can go through the American line. Just as we're about continue on our way, though, the Ukranian priest asks if I can translate for him at customs. Priest. Hot Norwegian girl. Priest. Hot Norwegian girl.

Dammit. Maybe I'll get some brownie points with God out of this.

The girl walks on an I stand with the priest in the forever-long foreigner line.

We got to talking a bit more, the priest and I, and it turned out he wasn't a priest: I had simply assumed that because he said he was with the church and would be preaching. He was a bishop and the leader of the central Orthodox church in Lutzk, which is why the Ukranians of Detroit paid for him to travel to speak to them.

I notice the girl isn't far from us in the other line. Well, never miss opportunities, right. This holy man, this bishop, this monk (he was a monk, too), approved with an encouraging nod for me to leave him for a few minutes and smiled when I came back with her email address. Man of God or not, he knows a hot girl when he sees one. And it wasn't futile getting the address: one day I may well be in Norway (it can happen: I met a Czech girl on Michicgan Ave in Chicago, got her email and two years later--last summer--visted her in Czech Republic); so it can happen.

I translated for the bishop at the border, with customs and with exit security, each time these people asking if he had brought any food from Ukraine and each time I translated the question I think he was beginning to wonder if I was translating it correctly. By the end he was like "No, I am not carrying food!" (but in Russian, of course).

I am glad I am not a custom's agent. The bishop was speaking directly to her in fast Russian and she's looking at me in desperation with an expression of "what the fuck is this guy saying?" and you have to figure they deal with this in fifty languges every day.

Through customs and before parting, the Bishop opened his luggage and handed me a CD. A present, he said, for helping. It was a recording of the choir at his church, and the church on the front was beautiful. He said if I was in Lutzk to ask for Mikail at the church and he would welcome me. "I thought your name was Timofey," I said, having copied it serveral times from his passport. "Timofey is my name," he said. "When you become a monk, you take a religious name, and it's Mikail."

Of course.

So I bid good-bye to Mikail and went to find my plane to Orlando.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Ukraine: Birthday Bash

I didn't have so much as a birthday as a weekend, and thanks to everyone who made it possible...

And this is bragging, but forgive me...

My actual birthday was low-key, as I was teaching that day--both my teachers and my kids--, but both groups gave me gifts and did the Ukranian tradition of giving me many congradulations and wishes (long life, success in love, etc.).

My Regional Manager from Peace Corps was in town and took me out to a lunch I could never afford and after going to four restaurants that evening (two were closed, one was rented out and one had no tables), the Zhytomyr volunteers, Diana and I finally found a restaurant we could eat at, and they bought me dinner as well. After about a month of potatoes, borcht and peanut butter and jam sandwhiches, I finally felt well fed.

My mother called me that night to wish me happy birthday, and I got to hear my little niece gurgle me a happy birthday as well.

Saturday kicked off the party off in earnest. The way I figure it, since I was born at 9:00 PM in California, with the ten hour time difference it was actually the 17th in Ukraine when I entered the world, and so that entitled me to another day of partying.

My climbing buddy Jon came into town and with the Polissya crew and a few of the girls from my movie club at the library (possibly I am now too old to be hanging out with hot 19 year-olds but, um, I have no willpower) we spent the day climbing at the climbing wall. Hardcore climbing, too: I had some chalk and Jon and I were marking routes that even the best Polissya climbers had a tough time doing.

Two more volunteers came into town for my birthday and Steve and Amy came over that night and all six of us headed out to a club. The girls from my movie club met us there--decked to the nines--and we all danced until 3 AM. Somehow Peace Corps is not as difficult as I thought it would be.

Sunday found Jon and I back on the wall and Sunday afternoon I was at a traditional birthday lunch thrown for both Yarik--Diana's brother--and me (Yarik's birthday is the day after mine). I actually met an English-speaking Italian there. Yarik's girlfriend's mother met him through a dating service and is learning English from Diana so she can actually talk to her new boyfriend. He teaches archeology in Venice and has an exchange program with a university in Odessa, and so comes to Ukraine every few months to see her and plans on taking her back to Italy when she learns enough English. Strange world.

I was so sore from the climbing-->five hours of dancing-->climbing that I was sure someone had gone to work on me with a sledgehammer. Diana offered a massage, which I accepted and just when I thought all the gifts and food were done, my neighbor Valentina (the old lady trying to convert me) came over with a plate. She had made me dinner! Diana left at 10:00 PM and I was so exhausted from the weekend that I went straight to sleep.

Happy birthday to me!

Today I start the 35 hour journey to get home, when I leave at 5:00 PM to go to Kyiv. My flight leaves at 7:00 AM, and since it's a waste to get a hotel room only to check out at 3:30 AM (thirty minutes to the train station, an hour to the airport and two hours to check-in for international flights), I'm just going to go to the airport tonight and sleep there. From there it's a flight to Amsterdam and from there to Detroit with a seven hour layover (why couldn't I have a seven hour layover in Amsterdam!?!) and finally I'll get into Orlando Teusday night.

But you know what? From the time I get to the airport and for the next three weeks, I'm going to be warm...

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Ukraine: Speaking of...

Speaking of...

The wall opening went really well. There was a reporter there and both my picture and a picture of the wall is in the local paper. In the article, I am refered to by a rather archaic Russian word that means "great giver of things". I suppose the less-literal translation would be "philanthrapist", but who's checking?

Speaking of giving things, I've been given a lot more responsibility. My coordinator has been in and out of the hospital for blood pressure problems and I've had to take all her seminars--which meant a lot of candles burnt at both ends trying to keep up. I now teach 16 out of the 20 seminars we teach in a cycle. It used to be I was kind of a "guest lecturer" teaching a seminar maybe once a week. Now I pretty much live at the institute and teach every major class. I'm proud but exhausted.

Then I was hit with the news that my coordinator may die. I came in and found the women in my department upset, tearfully asking about my coordinator and telling me she has "kor". I didn't know what "kor" was, but I genuinely worried and moped around all day. The next day, they were still going on about my coordinator's kor. "Tell me the symptoms," I said in Russian. And when they did, it sounded suspiciously like chicken pox. "Chicken pox is not serious," I told them in Russian. "Not for children," one replied "but for adults. So dangerous! Poor Irina." I told Diana about it, and, after laughing a lot, she said: "It is chicken pox. This is the usual Ukranian old woman response." Apparently you can sneeze in Ukraine and old women will crow that you are on your death bed.

Speaking of death, Avian flu has crossed into Ukraine. They're culling birds in the south and volunteers have been moved out of the affected regions. We all recieved flu shots, even thought it doesn't protect against Avian flu.

Speaking of shots, I've been giving Diana them in her ass. Diana needed antibiotics for an infection and, while I'm sure they have oral antibiotics in Ukraine, apparently they're not common. What is common is a process that reminded me of medivel alchemists. Pulling out a vial of powder and a vial of liquid, Diana mixed the two, drew the concoction into a syringe and handed it to me. I looked at it a moment and said, "Okay, how do I do this?" which caused Diana to look at me in a wide-eyed mix of horror and shock.

"You said you knew how to do it."

"No, you asked if I WOULD do it and I said yes. I never said I had."

"How could you not have learned how to do it?"

"We don't do this in America. We take pills. You're telling me every Ukranian knows how to do this?"

"We learned to do it in grade school."

"What did you practice on?"

"Pillows."

So after showing me how to do it, I did it and she walked around with a sore ass. That's how archaic Ukranian medicine can be.

Speaking of archaic medicine in Ukraine, I had to have an EKG. This prompted my first visit to a Ukranian hosptial, which, if you're used to shiny, new, disinfected places, can be a bit of a shock. A nurse rubbed a slimy gel on my torso and used suction cups to attach electrodes made in the 1950s running to a machine made in the 1970s. Two electrodes were clipped to my wrists and two to my ankles. They then had me lie, stand and do squats.

It confirmed what I had thought: I have an irregular heartbeat. But apparently, and the Peace Corps doctors confirmed it, it's not a dangerous type of irregular beat. So nobody worry. Especially you, mom.

And speaking of moms, mine popped me out (in 17 hours of agony, as is oft-reported) almost 27 years ago, my birthday being this Friday. I'm on the fast track to 30 years-old, but that's a really surreal thought because I'm mentally stuck at 22--if that. The anticipation of my birthday, though, is eclipsed by the anticipation that I'll be going home to see my mom on Teusday. Yes, I will be home in America Dec 20-Jan 10th.

America, watch out.