Thursday, September 29, 2005

Ukraine: One Year Anniversary

Katie is back in Britain, leaving from the airport where, one year ago today I first stepped onto Ukranian soil.

I HAVE BEEN IN UKRAINE FOR A WHOLE YEAR!

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. It has gone so quickly. And yet, when I look back at certain times, they seemed interminably slow, and I didn’t think I’d make it another month, let alone my whole service.

I figured that I should make a tally of what I’ve done and learned in the past year, so here it is:

In the past year I have been mugged, attacked by a dog, had food poisoning three times, and witnessed an assault that I did not stop. I have been colder and more isolated that I have ever been in my entire life, and there were times when I have never felt more alone. But, in the past year, I have gained an intermediate level in two new languages, been to six new countries and nine of Ukraine’s oblasts. I’m probably halfway to a Slavic studies degree.

I learned how to lead climb and got a grant to build a climbing wall. I’ve learned more than 30 new songs on guitar. I’ve learned which vegetables and fruits are harvested with each season and how to prepare for the winter. I learned how to cut and grind meat, can vegetables, dry herbs and make tortillas and salsa from scratch (because if you want Mexican in Ukraine, you do it yourself).

I’ve bantered with babushkas, survived marshrutkas and have been beaten with birch branches in banyas. I’ve watched amateur boxing in an abandoned building, spectators packed in and bundled against the cold, watching sweating combatants wearing tennis shoes. I’ve been packed into every form of public transportation, and broiled, froze and stood for hours on them, yet kind of relish the discomfort.

I’ve helped smuggle cigarettes.

I have more attention than I ever should from hotter women than I should ever have.

I've taught a lot of seminars, clubs and classes, created a web page, wrote a lot of Olympiad and teaching materials and talked a lot about my country.

I’ve climbed on castles three times as old as my country. I’ve basked on nude beaches, sweated in packed discos and drunk vodka with Ukrainians. I’ve climbed mountains in Slovakia, caved in Hungary, and biked in Poland.

I’ve explored abandoned catacombs in Odessa, dove off cliffs into waters filled with Greek ruins in Sevastopol, been to a massive concert in Kharkiv, played poker for the first time in Poltava, heard the most breathtaking music of my life in a cathedral in Lviv, and danced traditional Ukrainian dances under the streets of Kyiv.

I’ve worn a speedo in public.

I’ve had both cops and train attendants try to get bribes from me. I’ve gawked at the flesh parade that is Krechatic Avenue. I’ve taught them a little about how to salsa and they’ve taught me a little about how to play the piano. I’ve seen a BMW idling beside a horse-drawn cart. I’ve seen a woman herding goats near a store that sells flat screen televisions. I’ve eaten so much pig fat I could never drown.
I’ve learned to love Ukraine in every season but winter, and have learned a little more about how to understand its people.

I’ve had my hair trimmed with a straight razor, have eaten homemade cheese and ate liver from a cow I saw alive only hours before.

Hot water, running water, electricity and a land line are all options now.

I danced ten feet from the stage at a packed Moby concert, sang “Razom Nas Bahato” in a crowd being broadcast to millions during Eurovison and quietly heard Yuchenko speak on Maidan during the Orange Revolution, realizing I was now part of history.

I have learned a lot about being an American in the world.

I have learned a LOT about teaching English as a second language, a lot of professional skills, including how to manage people, coordinate their schedules, and work in a bureaucracy, and am slowly learning how to teach adults.

I’ve made out with a beautiful Ukrainian while standing in the snow on a condemned
bridge, overlooking a gorge carved by a frozen river.

I rappelled off that bridge a few months later.

I’ve had the best jam, apple juice and watermelons of my entire life.

I’ve written more than 170 blog entries and finished a novel.

I have learned to appreciate beets and cabbage

I have really learned to appreciate McDonalds.

But mostly, even though its cliché, I’m learning about myself. The Peace Corps experience is so intensely social and so intensely political that it’s made me learn a lot about how to act in groups, how to learn from others and how to be humble, hard as that still is. More importantly, I’ve learned more about the person that I want to be.

Actually, I’ve learned and done so much, this list doesn’t begin to make a dent, so I’ll stop.

But I will say this: it’s been a hell of a year.

Thanks to all those who have helped me get through it, particularly my family (and all the emails from mom!), Bean, Sarah, the Zhytomyr crew, Carrie, Sean, Seth, Liz, Susannah and Diana. Thanks to all my friends who have been emailing me from the homefront and letting me know how they and America are doing, and offering words of support. I wouldn't have lasted without all of you.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Ukraine: Odessa

Getting pics online in Ukraine is a lot harder than in the rest of Eastern Europe, so it will probably be a week on these pics, but I'm seeing some cool stuff.

Despite some half-hearted protestations on my part, Katie is paying a lot of the cost of the trip (which is peanuts to her since she makes the British pound, currently 1:8.6 hrivnas). She bought me dinner in a posh restaurant overlooking the Black Sea here (hey, I paid the tip) and it cost 14 pounds for both of us. Katie points out that she can't buy dinner for herself in Britain for that price, so it makes me feel a little better.

Since all the volunteers I knew in Odessa have left Peace Corps, she ended up springing for a hotel as well. A 27 pound hotel room, in Odessa, it turns out, gets you a two room suite with a huge bathroom. We each got our own beds, which is just as well because I developed some sort of chest infection and have been hacking my lungs out. Still, that didn't stop me from seeing things.

Odessa is really cool, a sort of run-down Budapest architecture-wise, with great views of the Black Sea. We saw the Potemkin Steps, made famous by a movie that I haven't seen, and wandered around Arcadia Beach. Arcadia Beach reminded me of Mexico: the sand and water were beautiful, but it was surrounded by run down buildings, crumbling docks and detrius. Of course, we didn't go in it because it's polluted. Still, you could tell that at one point that this was prime vacation real estate in the USSR, but has since crumbled into ruin. It's probably pretty pumping in the summer, though, because a couple areas, now deserted, were obviously open air clubs now closed for the fall.

Me being sick prevented us from checking out any of Odessa's famed clubs, but today we're going to try to find and explore the catacombs used by partisans during WWII. They're outside of town, and the guide book says nothing more than to get a tour to go to them. Well, the off-season tour costs $85, so we're going to try to get out there on our own and see what happens.

***

Addendum: We have an hour before the train leaves back to Kyiv, so I thought I'd hop on the net. We found a marshrutka going to the town with the catacombs and found the museum that the catacombs exit into. The museum was open but had no one in it, including any attendents. We found the stairway going into the catacombs, but it was pitch black. There were a couple of flashlights around, but I figured they'd get upset if we took them without permission. We went to a nearby store and bought some matches, but they didn't have any candles. I was about to use some dead branches for a torch when a bus pulled up full of kids, and a woman that was with them started taking them into the catacombs. We negotiated a tour for 6 hrivna each and down we went.

The catacombs were really cool: full of old matress frames, rifles and machine guns, cooking pots, radios, typewriters, you name it, all used by partisans to fight the Nazis when they occupied Ukraine during WWII, and all just left around these tunnels carved into the sandstone underneath the village. There was graffiti on the wall in Russian that said things like "Blood for Blood" and "Death to the German Occupiers!" as well as pictures of Stalin and the Russian flag. The tour guide spent most of the time yelling at the kids who kept trying to run off down various tunnels, so mostly we hung back and wandered around the tunnels, trying to not let their voices get too far off because we heard that people had been lost in the catacombs, never to return. It was pretty damn cool, and well worth the price. The entire catacombs trip, including marshrutka and tour, came to $3.60. Compare that to the $85 the tour company had wanted.

We wandered around Odessa for the rest of the day, watching old men play chess in the park and wandering to another beach. This one had the remains of a concrete sea wall, so we sat on that for a while, amongst people fishing. The beach was lightly populated, but there were two really attractive girls in their 20s sunbathing naked, a man in his 60s lying between them in a pair of speedos. Not sure how he got that gig. And nearby them was another older man, who was just hitting a ball on a paddle up in the air over and over--but suspiciously close to the naked girls.

Possibly the old man was a sex-pat, one of the Westerners that come to Ukraine for dates and/or wives. At the posh restaurant, a German man at the next table was speaking in broken English to a translator, who was translating it into Russian for the extremely hot Ukranian girl sitting across from him. How you pick up a girl through two langauge barriers, I don't know. Although taking her to a posh restaurant probably helps.

Katie and I met one more sex-pat on the way into Kyiv from the airport. He was from Austria and absolutely lost coming out of the airport. He heard us speaking English and asked for help. He got on the marshrtuka with us to Kyiv, and told us he was meeting his girlfriend--whom he had met on the internet. She was arriving in Kyiv from Moldova (the next country over) to meet him and get a visa for her to Austria.

Katie and I got to talking about Ukranian women on that hour-long trip to Kyiv and I told her about the sex-pats, and the Austrian was visibly upset and told me he didn't want me to think badly of him. I told him the truth of the matter: every Ukranian woman I have ever talked to about the subject, including Diana, thinks that it's a good thing. If a Ukranian girl can have a better life in another country, so be it. And the Moldovan girl was from Transnistria: the breakaway region in east Moldovan that's run by warlords. She lives in a war-torn hell hole and if an Austrain guy is going to get her out of there, good for her. If they love each other, even better.

In any case, when we got off at the train station in Kyiv, I was going to help him find her train when he realized he had left something important on the marshrutka. He started patting his pockets with a look of fright on his face and then took off running after it.

We never saw him again.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Ukraine: Daniel the Tour Guide

Katie, a friend of mine from Britain, flew in on Thursday to take an extended weekend trip in Ukraine. When you live in the UK and make the pound, you can do that sort of thing.

I took her around Kyiv on Thursday, back to Zhytomyr on Friday, and then gave her the cultural experience: we bought food at the bazaar, went back to my place and canned pickles and applesauce. Then I took her out to the fields where, unfortunately all the summer crops have been harvested so that was not a lot to see. I forced her to speak to one of my English classes and tell them about Britain and show pictures before she, Diana and I went out to a club. It's difficult having to dance in a club with two attractive girls, but someone has to do it.

Today is was back to Kyiv to see some places that were even new to me: the Caves Monastery, where you we toured the catacombs by candlelight and saw the mumified remains of monks. Katie was required to wear a head scarf and had to buy one on the street. Ironically, there were many women in see-thru shirts that barely obscured their breasts, but they had on the head shawls and so were fine. Then we went to see Rodina Mat, otherwise known as "The Big Metal Mama", the huge statue of a woman holding a sword in the air that you can see from much of Kyiv. Surrounding her is a bunch of Soviet military weaponry, including tanks, helicopters and an intercontinental ballistic missle. Seriously.

Tonight, believe it or not, we're going to a Brian Adams concert. He's playing for free in the middle of Kyiv (how low he has fallen) so we'll give him an hour before grabbing dinner and getting on an overnight train to Odessa...

It's a tough life.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Ukraine: Walls, Pickles, Hamsters (With Pics)

Life updates:

Been extremely busy, but did get to spend a weekend at home finally. Saturday night I simply locked the door to my apartment, turned off my mobile and did nothing but write and watch a movie with my hamster. What? Hamster? We'll get to that.

Half the plywood is on the climbing wall. It's looking great. It's on a lot that the Polissya crew decided to beautify, so Saturday was spent breaking up and moving asphalt and shovelling dirt so that they can plant flowers around the perimeter. It was also spent gripping the frame of the wall with my ankles and thighs, ten feet in the air, while holding big sheets of plywood to it at akward angles. My new Russian word learned that day was "Derjai!", which roughly translates as "hold the goddamn plywood flush so I can get this goddamn bolt into the hole!" Actually, my dictionary doesn't translate it that way, but it's a small dictionary.

I have hot water again! I never got around to posting it, but the way they fixed my pipes meant that only a small trickle came out of the hot water tap, not enough to kick in my kolunka to heat the water. For about a week and a half I took bucket baths. Then, suddenly, the water was off for two days (but all my water jugs were full this time, so it wasn't badly missed) and then when it was turned back on, the water pressure was back. My kolunka is still idiosyncratic, so hot water is still intermittent, going on and off while in the shower, but this I am used to and can just step out until it kicks back in and then step right back in. I love hot water!

The other thing going on in my life, other than all the teaching and lesson planning and Russian tutoring is preparing for winter. The thermometer has begun its downward slide and the days are getting noticeably shorter (all the more so because my kitchen light still doesn't work and I'm still cooking via headlamp) so it's time to start canning. All the canning implements appeared in the bazaar and, with Diana's help, I canned my first batch of vegetables: 9 liters of tomatoes and 6 liters of pickles. Since then, I've canned a couple of liters of salsa and tonight I am going to make applesauce (once again, via headlamp). I need to hurry up, though, because tomatoes are dissapearing out of the bazaar and going up in price. When I made the salsa two weeks ago, I bought 7 pounds of tomatoes for 80 cents. Yesterday, it took forty minutes to find someone with tomatoes, and they were tiny. Everyone was selling apples yesterday, which is why I bought a few pounds to make the applesauce.

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Sterilizing the jars

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Boiling water on all four burners

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Spices

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Diana doing math. She's anal about the level of spices being right and apparently how much salt, sugar and vinegar should go into X liters of water requires a level of math that would make Einstein babble.

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Loading up the jars


Finished products

Oh, yeah. The hamster. When I was in the bazaar, I passed the part where they sell pets. They sell everything in my bazaar, and when I say everything, I mean everything. You can buy an AK-47 in the bazaar for $250. I'm not kidding. One day, I'll work up the courage to go take a picture of the weapons shop. But passing the pets, I noticed something unsual: in a cage full of hamsters, one was hanging upside down from the roof. I watched this hamster climb around for a few minutes and, knowing she was a hamster after my own heart, bought her.

Her name is "Scalalazitzka". It literally translates as "female who crawls on cliffs", which is the closest Russian comes to "climber". I call her Scala for short. She's my backup protein source if I run out of food this winter.

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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Ukraine: Bootlegs No More?

And in news that effects me: The Ukranian parliment just passed a bill to make stop all the DVD, CD and program pirating in Ukraine. Ukraine is number 2 in pirating in the world, behind China. If I want a DVD of a movie--even one still in the theatres--I walk down to the bazaar and buy it for $4. If I don't mind it being dubbed in Russian, then I can buy one of the 6-in-1 DVDs. I recently bought a DVD with Madagascar, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Star Wars III and a Russian film for $4. I also bought the first season of "Lost" for the same price.

DVDs are a little more pricey than MP3 CDs, on which I can buy, say, every album ever made by by Prodigy for $2.50. MP3 DVDs cost $4 and have about 3,000 songs from a genre, say techno. Having both little respect for intellectual property laws and a laptop, this has always been one of the great perks of living in Ukraine. Apparently, no more. I mean, the street side vendors will no doubt carry them, but the huge markets at the bazaars and, more particularly, Patrivka (the dozens of blocks long black market of media in Kyiv where you can buy ANYTHING that can be burned onto optical media) will be shut down. Why is Ukraine caring about this business that brings entertainment to its people when they could never afford a full-priced DVD or CD?

Because thanks to pushing the bill through, the United States has just lifted the 100% import tarriffs they slapped on 75 billion dollars worth of goods from Ukraine to punish the country for not respecting intellectual property laws.

Now, I can see being ethical and all, but do you think that it was the principal of that matter that caused the US to punish Ukraine to the tune of 75 billion dollars? Or do you think it was film and music industry lobbies pressuring the government? Because, let's think about this for a second: what does the loss of legitimate sales of overpriced media in second world countries do to America's GDP? And what does the loss of being able to export 75 billion dollars worth of goods mean to Ukraine's GDP? Which is why Parliment made the bill. But do you think the American people were so feeling the burn of Ukraine's burning that they were clamouring for these tarrifs to be put in place?

I just think the U.S. surely has better things to worry about. Right? Right? That, and it's now harder to find my $4 DVDs.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Ukraine: Yushenko Fires his Government

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Sunday, September 11, 2005

Ukraine: Iron Babucias, Abusing Orphans and Dancing in a Speedo (With Pics)

This was 24 hours in Poltava:

1) Iron Babucias. The group was walking down the street when the sound of squealing tires caught our attention. I looked up just in time to see a car hit an old woman. I ran towards her, not knowing what I could possibly do. The car was now stopped, the woman lying beside it. Two men from a wedding party across the street ran over as well. When I reached her, the old woman looked at me and her expression was one of utter pain. The two men were talking to her and another woman ran over, telling them not to move her. Unable to help there, I ran across the street to a grocery store and burst in yelling in Russian "We need an ambulance, call an ambulance," to the people inside. They looked at me with expressions normally reserved for cows. "We need an ambulance!" I said again in Russian. Trying to explaing, I said: "A babucia was [hit] by a car." Not knowing the word for hit, I smacked my hands together. Finally, a man started walking to the back of the store. He was wearing a white dress shirt, and I assume he was a manager. The people went back to their shopping. Finally, the man came out and said an ambulance had been called.

I went back outside, five minutes having elapsed, and the old woman was sitting up. A man with the wedding party, who said he was a doctor, was examining her back. A few minutes after that, the old woman--who I swore was going to die in the street ten minutes before--stood up. She and the man who hit her began to talk. Possibly, she was trying to sell him berries for causing her the inconvience.

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The babucia and guy that hit her

I walked around to the other side of the car. The side view mirror was hanging off from where it had hit her. I looked over to the old woman and the man. They were walking slowly, talking. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. Dali on LSD. That kind of surreal.

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The damage to the car

A bit later, the ambulance pulled up, and the woman walked unassisted to it and got in. I swear they make babucias out of iron.

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Getting into the ambulance

2) Abusing Orphans. So a poker night was ensuing. What you need for a poker night: Cigars? Check. Money. Check. Chips? Um. Cards. Um. Carrie had forgotten the poker chips in Kyiv. What could we possibly use? Well, Jared's mother had brought a few bags of little toys for the orphans in Poltava when she had come to visit Ukraine. One of those bags was felt rings with smiley faces on them. Those could be used as chips. And Jared couldn't find his cards. Well, there was also a pack of tiny Mickey Mouse cards that was also for the orphans. All these toys were given to the orphans later, of course. They were just, um, tested first.

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Chips and cards

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Me and Sean playing poker

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Sean, Erin, Mike, Jared and Carrie playing poker

3) Dancing in a Speedo. As I was packing, Sean noticed the bit of fabric that was the pair of speedos I bought in Budapest. Not knowing if swimming would be involved on the trip, I had brought them. They pack well and, hey, it's Ukraine. You stand out if you're on a beach and NOT in speedos. Possibly joking, Erin asked to see me in them. Jared put on some booty-shaking music and craziness ensued. As did lap dances. Carrie and Mike were not there when I started dancing around because they had been on a beer run, but they did come in for the, um, tail end of it.

Pair of speedos: $3
Digital camera:$200
Mike's reaction when he walked into the room: Priceless

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Dancing in a speedo

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Mike's reaction

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Ukraine: Four Eaten Tickets

I bought three train tickets in Zhytomyr for my trip: Zhytomyr to Kharkiv, Kharkiv to Poltava and Poltava to Kyiv. By the end of the trip, not one would be used and a fourth would be eaten as well. It's a comedy of (Daniel's) errors.

THE FIRST TICKET:

The first ticket I ate right away. I hadn't realized it at the time, but the train between Zhytomyr and Kyiv is more than four hours, and from there it overnights and arrives in Kharkiv at 9:00 in the morning, a 16 hour trip. The marshrutka to Kyiv takes only 1.5 hours. Figuring I'd cut two and a half hours out of the trip and cash in on a dinner Carrie owed me, I hopped the marshrutka to Kyiv intending to catch my train on its way through.

Because I was slow in getting to the marshrutka, I arrived and met Carrie with only an hour to get to a resturant and eat dinner. In a Ukranian restaurant, it can take an hour just to get your order taken and the food brought to you. I'm not kidding.

Carrie, guru of train times, told me of an express train leaving the next morning for Kharkiv at 6:00 AM. Because it only stopped in Poltava, it arrived in Kharkiv at 11:00 AM, two hours after mine and eleven hours shorter a trip. They wouldn't let me exchange my ticket, so I ate it and bought a new one.

Carrie took me out to Tequila House, an expensive ex-pat Mexican restaurant in Kyiv, where I had fajitas for the first time since leaving America. It was so good that I ate every scrap of food on my enormous plate, even ordering more tortillas to finish it off. It was, quite simply, a culinary orgasm. I crashed at Carrie's place and, the next morning, went to Kharkiv.

THE SECOND TICKET:

I was supposed to leave from Kharkiv for Poltava early in the morning the day after Independence Day (the night it was three guys, seven girls and not a single kiss amongst us). When Sean had suggested going back to his town of Chguiev, I had traded in my ticket for a train leaving in the afternoon. Chuguiev being 20 minutes from Kharkiv, I alloted an hour to get to the train station. The next morning, exhausted from all the running and dancing and, well, I admit, drinking, I dragged myself out of bed with a little over an hour to go. Getting up to leave, Sean finally woke up, looked at the clock and said: "there's no way you can make it." "I have an hour," I said. "It will take you an hour and a half."

The metro from the marshrutka stop to the train station, it turned out, would take nearly an hour in itself. As I couldn't concieve of an hour-long metro ride, I thought I had more than given myself enough time to get to the train station. Wrong. Sean was trying to explain this to me as we were half-running to the Chguiev station, me convinced I could still make it. Sean did not want to be hauling ass. In fact, Sean did not want to be anywhere but back in bed. One block from the marshrutka station, he had me convinced there was no way to catch the train, so I stopped, turned back around and walked back to his place. "Thank God," he said.

I ate that ticket, had breakfast with Sean and Mike, and then left for Kharkiv to catch the next available train to Poltava. Well, no trains were leaving for Poltava for four more hours, so I paid 30 hriven to catch a marshrutka (the train was 9 hriven) to get there. Believe it or not, the marshrutka beat my train there.

THE THIRD TICKET

After a great night of clubbing in Poltava with the entire group that had converged there, the PR campaign to get Daniel to eat his third ticket began. Everyone was leaving Poltava on Sunday, save me, who had a ticket for Saturday night. Carrie, Erin and Sean mounted an offensive to get me to stay, but I was not to be swayed. I had eaten two tickets, I said, I was not about to eat a third.

They were cunning, they were. A poker night was planned, one with cigars and beer and betting until dawn. This still did not sway me. Then Sean got very cunning. He challenged me to a game of chess. Sean is a ranked player who kicks my ass with regularity. But I soon found myself not loosing, a rare thing against Sean. The time to leave to catch my train was creeping closer, but I was in a position to win the game. Finally, still deep into the chess match, the time to catch the train went by. I had just eaten my third ticket. But I did win the game. Damn him.

THE FOURTH TICKET

The next morning, Carrie and I rose bright and early after playing poker all night to catch an express train to Kyiv. Once again, the fast train would beat my slow, overnight one, but at twice the cost. Carrie, who had won enormously at poker, offered to buy me my ticket. My ticket cost 53 hrivna, her exact winnings.

Right before the train was about to leave, though, Carrie began to frantically look for her ticket. She couldn't find it. "Did you give it to me?" I asked, because a mental itch was telling me that she had. I searched my pockets, but found only my ticket. "No, I had it," she said.

She rushed back in to buy another ticket before the train left. I pushed money at her, as she had bought mine, but she pushed it back, annoyed at herself for loosing the ticket. Another ticket in her hand, she began going towards the train when I picked up the magazine I had been reading. Inside was her ticket.

She would later say that she would have sworn on a stack of bibles that she had not given it to me. But, thirty minutes earlier, she had. It took some bit to recall because, remember, this was after a long night involving a lot of beer, but she had handed it to me without thinking while she went to the bathroom. As I was in the middle of reading and the world does not cognizantly exist when I read, I simply placed the ticket in the magazine without paying attention.

When I discovered it, with five minutes until the train left, Carrie raced back inside to get a refund on her newly bought ticket, but it was too late.

She ate the fourth one.

THE MORAL: Don't buy your tickets ahead of time. Or perhaps you should, because readers of this blog will remember me buying a 200 hrivna ticket in Lviv because all but the highest class on the train was sold out. So perhaps the moral is to have so much money that it doesn't matter either way. Yes, that's it. Make lots of money. That's my new goal. Hence the addition of marrying a supermodel who will leave me her millions now being on the five year plan.

All interested, please submit a recent photo and last year's 1040 (or 1040EZ, as applicable) to my email address. You could be my next sugah momma!

Next blog: What happened between the third and fourth tickets, AKA the poker night. It involves iron babucias, abusing orphans and me dancing in a pair of speedos. With pics. Scary, scary pics.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Ukraine: Poltava (With Pics)

On the way back from Kharkiv I stopped off in Poltava, reputed to be the most beautiful city in Ukraine. I came to visit two friends: Jared, a vounteer in Poltava, and Sasha, my teaching partner from PDO.

It turns out I was not the only one coming into Poltava, though. Carrie came in from Kyiv, several Poltavaska oblast volunteers came in to Poltava and Sean and Mike came from Kharkiv. Why? Well, no one's sure, least of all Jared, whose apartment we all crashed at. I think that everyone heard that other people might be coming in and suddenly critical mass was achieved.

One of the Poltava volunteers works with tourism NGOs and is training Ukrainians to give walking tours in English and Ukrainian. She took us all on a walking tour of Poltava, and it doesn't get any better than to have someone who specializes in tourism give you a tour.

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The tour group in front of a recreated Ukranian home

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One of Poltava's parks

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Poltava's opera house

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Suits for sale at Poltava's bazaar

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Spire commemorating Ukraine's victory against the Swedes. You didn't know that Sweden once invaded the Baltics and made it as far south as Poltava, did you? Well, neither did I

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Carrie on a cannon beneath the spire. Jared is beside her. Those cannons are real

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One of Poltava's churches, undergoing renovation. What I thought was interesting is that the church still has an earthen floor, covered in grass

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This is slightly morbid: Many of the cobblestones on this street were made from Jewish gravestones. The synagogue (not pictured) has been converted to apartments, but you can still see some of the Jewish symbols in the fascade

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This is Sasha, my PDO teaching partner. Behind her is a friendship monument between Ukraine and Russia. And it's not what you're thinking: she has a boyfriend

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Sasha cooked me up a Ukrainan lunch of dumplings filled with homemade cheese. Yes, homemade cheese. It involves letting milk curdle for a very long time and then boiling it. I'm actually going to try it. Here is homemade wine that Sasha's family is fermenting. She also explained to me how to make it. You see all the great things I'm learning in Peace Corps?

Monday, September 05, 2005

Ukraine: Chgooyev and Independence Day (With Pics)

Although Kharkiv promised to have yet another blowout concert to celebrate the Ukrainian Independence Day (the day after City Day and giving Khargive plenty of excuse to party), Sean wanted Mike and I to see the town where he lives. A marshrutka later, we were in a tiny town north of Kharkiv: Chgooyev.

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Sean, wondering why he brought us here

What is there to do in Chgooyev? Well, um, go jogging apparently. Sean is an avid jogger and Mike used to do cross country, so that's why I found myself trailing behind them as we ran four miles through the streets of Chguyev and then out into the woods surrounding it.

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Whenever you are in a new town in Ukraine, you have to go find the Lenin statue. I love that in front of this Lenin was a train with an American flag painted on it.

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The three of us in front of Lenin. Doesn't this picture look photoshopped?

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Fisherman we jogged past. Notice that he is manning three poles

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Sean and Mike, posing on their jogs

After you run, what is there to do but eat? Sean's host-grandmother packed us full of fantastic food.

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Sean with his host grandmother

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I don't know what this is called, but it was delicious

And then what do you do when your legs are sore from jogging and your stomach full from eating? Go to a club, of course! Which is how we celebrated Independence Day, dancing at a club. I even drank a little, discovering a tasty, orange alcoholic drink called Lonher. Then I discovered that it's supposed to be for girls. Still, I did get buzzed off it.

A strange thing happened at the club. We went with two of Sean's Ukranian friends, who happen to be female and taken. But then five more girls sat with us, making it seven girls and three guys. Anyone looking at us would have though we were lucky bastards, but the gods laughed and decided that none of the girls would actually want to dance with us.

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Sean with his friends

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Our table full of strange women

I still had a lot of fun dancing on the floor, but was slightly bummed that I could strike out with such favor-stacked odds. That was until a petite little blonde came up who could move. We raver style tore up the floor for a couple songs, people around stopping to watch and it perked my mood up drastically. She thanked me and left, and I saw her talking to a guy outside later on. I don't know what her story was, but I was happy just to have danced with someone who really knew what they were doing.

And what do you do when it's 2:00 AM and you've just been jogging and eating and dancing and still have a buzz on? You call home, of course! Sean wanted to call a friend back in America to wish him happy birthday, so we went to a 24 hour call center (Ukrainians without phones or without long distance use them). Sean paid to call America and I plopped down some cash, too, having not spoken to anyone in America since I came back in May. It was 8:00 PM in Florida, but my mom wasn't home. I left her a message on the machine and got a hold of my grandparents, speaking to them for a few minutes before I ran out of money.

What is there to do in the tiny town of Chgooyev? Quite a lot, apparently.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Ukraine: Kharkiv and Susannah's birthday (With Pics)

Welcome to Kharkiv, place that is big! Okay, it's actually the second biggest city in Ukraine, after Kyiv, but don't tell it that. It's statues and buildings strive to be far bigger. It's nearly on the border of Russia, and I've pretty much heard that cities in east Ukraine are smog-filled hell holes, so I was surprised by how nice Kharkiv was. Seriously, it was.

I was there at Sean's invitation for City Day, the day the Kharkiv celebrates both its emancipation from the Nazis and its birthday: 351 years this year. In Ukraine, that is considered to be young (Kyiv and Zhytomyr are both over 1,000 years old)!

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Sean and I in front of a statue in Kharkiv

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Here's statues depicting the bondage of Ukranians around a statue of Ukraine's most celebrated poet, Taras Shevchenko

City Day also happened to be Susannah's birthday, Susannah being one of the girls that trained in my link. Thinking I was on the other side of the country, Susannah hadn't told me she was having a party in Kharkiv. I got off the train thinking Sean and I would be hanging out, but instead it turned into this big party with volunteers all over the oblast coming in to help Susannah celebrate. The citizens of Kharkiv also decided to help celebrate Susannah's birthday by putting on a big concert with Ani Lorak, one of Ukraine's more popular pop stars. If Anny Lorak doesn't sound that Ukrainian to you, it's actually because her stage name is simply her real name spelled backwards: Karolina.

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Susannah getting video of the concert

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Me, Sean, Mike and Adam at the Ani Lorak concert. Because everyone else was holding a beer, I grabbed Susannah's.

It was a pretty fun concert, and Kharkiv decided to keep on celebrating Susannah's birthday by putting on one of the best fireworks shows I've ever seen. And you're talking to an Orlando boy who was raised on Disney fireworks shows. One of the cooler visual images was all these fireworks exploding behind and sillouetting a huge statue of Lenin, his arm outstretched.

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Lenin gives you...fireworks!

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More fireworks

Later that night found us in an outdoor club shaking some booty and later we ended up playing guitar back at Adam's apartment. I was crashed out by 4:00 AM, but from what I understand, the music kept going until long after the sunrise.

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At the club

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At Adam's apartment

Kharkiv and Susannah welomed their birthdays in style.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Ukraine: Cooking by Candlelight in the Indoor Rain

I come home from almost a month of travelling looking forward to some sleep. I walk in and am surprised to find it raining in my kitchen. Apparently, the pipes above the ceiling were leaking and over time the water had cracked the ceiling, ran along the cracks and was now steadily falling, not in one spot, but many. I don't use the metaphor of raining lightly: that's exactly what it looked like.

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Apparently my landlady was aware, because my pots were strategically placed all over the floor to catch the dripping water. My landlady came over the next day and we spoke. She doesn't understand Ukrainian--certainly doesn't understand my Ukranian--, so we have to converse in Russian. I'm struggling to keep up with her, but while I want to know when the water issue is going to be fixed, she's getting on my case about not telling her that I was going to be gone for so long. I tried to explain I didn't know I was supposed to tell her, but by then she had moved to tell me my apartment was a mess (a Ukranian landlady can demand you keep a clean apartment).

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On most other days she would be correct: my apartment is usually a mess. Ironically, I had cleaned it before leaving. What I had not cleaned was my dining room, where I do lesson planning, which looked as if a hurricane had hit into a newstand, papers spread everywhere. Not wanting to upset my ingenious organizational system, it was the one room in the apartment that had been left as is. She also took issue with the level of dust. As I hadn't spent more than a few days in the apartment since June, I thought the reason was obvious: I simply hadn't been home long enough to do it. The water question unanswered, she took the month's rent and left.

I called my Ukrainian coordinator and asked her to place a call to my landlady to make sure the rain situation corrected. My coordinator called back: the leak will be fixed in a day, but why is your apartment dirty? Clean it.

It was life as usual for a few days, although no one came over to fix the leak. The light fixture in the kitchen had understanably stopped working under the onslaught of the water pooling above my ceiling, and so I have an image for you: me cooking dinner by candlelight in an indoor rainstorm.

Rainstorm became a better metaphor. The leak was just getting worse and the rain coming down harder. A large crack had opened the length of the ceiling, one wall to the other, a row of buckets, tubs and pots following it, the splashes caught by potato sacks given to me by a kind neighbor (who immedietly started beseeching God upon seeing my kitchen and then demanded that I call my landlady again).

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I recieved an email from my Peace Corps Regional Manager: he had called my coordinator to touch base for the upcoming school year. She gave him the news of the past few days. Two lines of the email were about the water, and two paragraphs were about the cleanliness of my apartment: "understand that not keeping the apartment in a decent condition is not only a health hazard," he wrote "but also it may damage both your relationships with the landlady (and the site) and your image of a PC volunteer." By this time, the dining room had been cleaned (took, oh, ten minutes to put all the papers in a stack) and the apartment had been dusted. I emailed him back to reassure him I was not living in squalor.

I took my neighbor's advice and called my landlady. Later that day, her husband came over. I like him. For some reason, my landlady is completely unable to understand my accent and this leads to many frustrating conversations. Her husband, though, never fails to understand what I am saying and speaks in such a measured, slow pace that we're able to easily converse. I pointed out the worsening situation in the kitchen. The water, steadily dripping down the cabinets, had begun taking the old paint with it and the floor was covered in pots, water splatters and white paint chips. He looked at it for a few minutes, then made a few phone calls.

Twenty minutes later, as I was walking downstairs, a man came upstairs. In one hand was a wrench, in the other a flashlight, I felt I knew where this was going. When I returned later, my landlord and the man were gone, and so was the water. They had simply shut my water off.

There are 3 liter bottles all over my apartment for water, in addition to a huge 20 gallon drum. Because my water is shut off every night, I had kept these full. But as I became better at understanding how much water I used each evening (and because mosquitos had been breeding in the drum, leaving their larve), only two 3 liter bottles were now full. I was without water for God knows how long.

I stretched the 6 liters for three full days. I had never realized how much I used running water until it is gone: how much is used for cooking, grooming, washing the dishes, bathing, flushing the toilet, even just quickly washing off your hands because they're dirty. Once again, I thought about the Peace Corps Africa Volunteers.

In any case, the last of my water gone, I cleaned the apartment again and locked it behind me. I was going to East Ukraine for a week to visit friends and discuss upcoming projects. I hoped I'd have water when I got back.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Ukraine: The Final Tally

The Final Talley For the Trip:

Days traveled: 25

Countries visited: 6

Cost of trip: $852.64

Bank of America ATM fees: $45 at $5 each

NOTE: After finding out about the Bank of America fees, I started pulling large amounts of money and exchanging cash as I went. When in Poland, I was able to put things on my check card and Seth and Sean would pay me back in cash, meaning I didn't have to withdraw money from ATMs

Acquired knowledge of Slavic Languages, Eastern European History, World War II and the Holocaust, as expressed in college credit hours: 16

American franchises eaten at: 5, McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, KFC

UNESCO Sites visited: 8

Girls made out with: 6

Castles visited: 5

Caves visited: 3

Mountains climbed: 1

Hours spent waiting for/travelling on trains, buses, elektrichkas, marshrutkas, trolley buses, and metros: The amount of hydrogen atoms in the universe plus the number of grains of sand in the Sahara multiplied by the cummulative heartbeats of the human race, squared.

Highlights: Climbing the highest mountain in Poland, caving in Budapest, seeing an English Language movie in Bratislava, visiting thermal baths in Budapest, clubbing with a Rugby team in Budapest, seeing Beethoven's grave in Vienna, drinking absinthe in Prague, visiting Spisky Hrad (big ass castle) in Slovakia, drinking gatorade in Slovakia, watching the astronomical clock ring in Prague, making a lot of new aquaintences, bike tour in Krakow, Beatles night in Krakow, sleeping in my own bed when I got back.