Ukraine: Happy Halloween! (Pics)

Happy Halloween! Just because most people in Ukraine don't celebrate Halloween doesn't mean somewhere there's not a costume party until dawn in my city. Diana, Steve and I went to "Halloween Drum and Bass", which is pretty much as the name describes, an all-night rave in a tiny club.

Steve and Diana didn't dress up, but I went as a... As a... Well, I'm not sure what I was. I didn't have much to work with, so we went with the post-apacolyptic raver look, Diana drawing tribal tattoos on my body and adding accents in duct tape.

Steve decided the concept of dancing to drum and bass was a little beyond him, and so instead played with my video camera for the night. Cool footage, and here are stills from the evening:


I think my expression says: "I have a really tough life".


A close-up of the "tats".


My back, and the added duct tape.


At the rave. Only maybe ten percent were in costume, and nothing extravagent: kitty ears, devil horns, a guy in a scream mask, a girl in a witch mask, that sort of thing.


Me and Diana on the dance floor (I'm shirtless, she's in the light blue shirt).


I think this is a really cool shot of me whirling my arms.


Diana on the dance floor


Diana again.

It was a really cool night, but I did find myself leaning over to Steve at one point and saying: "I'm 26. I have a Masters. I am a teacher". He immedietly got the irony and started laughing. The subtext was: "why the hell am I shirtless, covered in drawn-on tatoos and duct tape and dancing at an all night rave?"

I'm still not sure, but it was a lot of fun.

Ukraine: Chess

TRITE BUT TRUE:

I went to Diana’s apartment for the first time two nights ago. She’s asked a couple times for me to come over, especially since her family would like to meet the American she’s been spending all this time with. I’ve avoided it just because, even though we’re not dating, it is one of those “meet the family” things. I could already see it in my head: awkwardly sitting around, everyone looking at me, various cookies and tea being pressed upon me as I struggled to keep up any kind of conversation in Russian. Besides, I had already met her brother a couple of times and her mom once, at various functions. But when she told her grandfather I played chess, apparently he got excited and Diana finally found the way to bait the hook.

So I went over, chess set in hand. Diana’s mom wasn’t there, but I was introduced to her grandfather and grandmother. Her grandfather had fought in World War II and later served in Zhytomyr’s administration before becoming a pensioner. A balding, short man who was solidly built despite his age, he immediately guided me to a table and pulled out the chess set, so eager was he to play a game. Her grandmother, a squat babucia with eyes that never really seemed to focus, disappeared into the kitchen with Dianna. Her grandfather donned a pair of old glasses with square frames each five times the size of his eyes, warned me that he wasn’t any good and then began to play.

Diana served us the customary tea and cookies during the opening moves, being lightly berated by her grandfather for putting them too far away. Her response was to smile indulgingly and move them closer: which I found amusing because if I ever said that to her, she’d hit me upside the head and tell me to move myself.
Yarik, a local radio personality who lives in a different apartment with Diana’s mom, came over to await his match. The game with Diana’s grandfather was not going well: within fifteen minutes I had lost my queen and was down two pawns. Her grandfather, quite simply, was very good. I had pretty much relegated myself to loosing, and told this to Diana, who was now watching MTV with Yarik. Her grandmother, still in the kitchen, was not seen again until I left.

Diana looked disappointed. She had wanted me to win, she told me. I had thought me winning would be a bad thing: I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s pride. My winning would actually make me look good to her family, she said.

I looked back at the board. Jesus Christ this was going to be difficult. But I dug in. The game lasted two more hours and required more thinking than I had done in the past month. I had simultaneously to keep up the defense and whittle him down piece by piece until the end game itself became bloody tradeoffs. By the time it was said and done, both Diana and Yarik now watching, I had a king and a pawn and he had a king. Three moves later, it was certain that I was going to get my pawn across the board and he conceded the game.

I had never seen Diana so proud, beaming while trying not to show that she was beaming. I looked around the tiny apartment then, grandfather trading places with Yarik, Diana going to her room to listen to music, hearing her grandmother in the kitchen and felt a kind of homey feeling. I’ve lived on my own since I was 17, but the only times I felt really comfortable about it where when I had a number of people living with me. I just like the background noise and spatial sensation of half a dozen people going about their business around you, probably because there were 9 people living with me in my grandfather’s house growing up. It wasn’t something I realized I missed until, playing that game with Yarik, I felt quite comfortable, with none of the awkwardness I had dreaded. And, rather than being the object of attention, it seemed playing the game with the grandfather brought on immediate acceptance.

Yarik wasn’t as good as his grandfather and quickly lost, and in the next game the grandfather came back to beat me, although not by much. Our third game—both of us still even—was stopped midway through by Diana, who made it known she hadn’t invited me over to have me ignore her the whole evening for chess. She then invited me to leave the apartment with her. Ironic for the time she spent getting me to come over.

At first I was in shock. You’re asking two competitive guys to abandon their match game when it could go either way? Why don’t you just turn off the Superbowl during overtime? Switch off the Playstation during the last level? Stop other generic chest-thumping cockfights? I didn’t actually say any of that, but I was still in shock.

But she pointed out that she had to go out and buy groceries for her mom before the stores closed and, since she would be taking them over to her mom’s apartment, she wouldn’t be coming back to her grandparent’s apartment. She thought it rude to them and to me to leave a stranger in the house. So her grandfather and I left the chess board as it was, and I went for a walk with Diana to the store. She couldn’t really see my side: why would I want to be left in a house full of strangers? Would I do that to her? I pointed out that if she and my sister were watching a movie and I had to go to the store, even if I wasn’t coming back, I would not make them stop watching the movie. So she finally understood where I was coming from and apologized, and we had a nice walk, wrapped warm in the cold evening.

It’ll be good to go back, though, and finish the match, hear a couple more of her grandfather’s war stories (which he loves to tell) and to be, in some small way, part of a family here. Cliché as it is to say it, I feel like I’ve found something I hadn’t even been looking for.

Ukraine: Odessa Catacombs (Pics)

Just had a great "Man vs. Rock" weekend: seven of us climbing, drinking, clubbing and watching "Family Guy" all weekend, celebrating one of the last weekends warm enough to be on the rock. And now it's back to work.

But here are some pics from the Odessa Catacombs that I finally got online:


The catacombs under Odessa


"Blood for blood. Death for death."


Beds in the catacombs.


Other stuff in the catacombs


Chillin' with Stalin

Ukraine: Comment Responses

I don't usually respond to comments on the page because it usually takes too f-ing long for pages to load while sitting in an internet cafe watching bought minutes quickly tick out, but something radical has happened in my life: internet at home!

Yes, that's right. My oh-so-hard Peace Corps life now includes internet access in my apartment. Through my pulse dial up connection where I can actually hear other people's conversations via crossed wires while my modem handshakes with Ukertelecom's I can now connect to the rest of the world. My highest connect speed so far is 34.6 kilobytes per second and the lowest is 16.4 kilobites per second. It's nostalga, really, remembering those days of college when 16 MB of RAM was extravagent, as was that 36.6 modem I stole from Best Buy by stuffing it into my wide leg Raver pants. Do you remember those days? Do you? When a single picture took minutes to load? Well I'm reliving their joyous splendor, basking in a technology that does TCP/IP, I believe, via carrier pigeon. Still, I can't complain: like college it's nearly 2 AM, I have work in the morning and I'm still on the web. I have time to actually wait for pages to load to respond to some comments, so here we go:

Happysam: I haven't heard about Yuchenko calling for or wanting more "Orange Revolutions", although considering the dissapointment currently felt about the last one, I think its a bad PR move to bring it up (and he is in serious need of some good PR). Probably he wants a "revolution" in the parlimentary elections, seeing many of his opponents in the Rada--the ones who blocked his new prime minister choice the first go around--replaced by friendlier faces. Other than that, I don't know!

Katie: Are "star jumps" what you weird British people call jumping jacks? Because otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about. If they're not, I'm going to assume you're being lewd.

So a lot of me not knowing, apparently. Perhaps I should have stuck with not responding. A fool and a wise man are the same person until they open their mouth, you know, and I think I've made it very clear which of the two I am.

I wonder how long it will take to download bisexual crossdressing midget fisting porn? I wonder how many people are going to end up seeing my site because those words are now here? Perverts. You and your strap-ons and your MMF and your star jumps.

And I think that's my cue to go to sleep.

ZZZZZZ...

Ukraine: The Siege

I am under siege from the cold. Through sheer denial, I had forgotten how cold it gets in Ukraine until, three rainy nights ago, I was firmly reminded when the temperature plunged. What happened to my summer? Now it’s dark at 6:00 PM and the sun sets earlier every day. Grr.
That, and Zhytomyr has no heat. Thanks to communist planning, a central station heats all the water that runs through the radiators in most of the apartments in Zhytomyr. The government controls that central station. The heat was supposed to be turned on October 17th, but the Zhytomyr government didn’t allot enough money, so now it will be the 28th.

I’m told my apartment doesn’t heat well anyway, because the pipes are corroded on the inside, so I’ve fortified for a siege. George and Gail, the volunteer couple that previously lived here, spent the winter in the same way, I’m told, closing off all other rooms except the living room and bedroom, and keeping an electric space heater running in there.

Which is what I’m doing, except I’m not using the living room because there’s only one of me and only one Peace Corps-supplied space heater. I’m moving a table and chair into my bedroom, along with a reading chair and some books. My laptop and Scala are coming in as well and the space heater is currently running full blast. I have to put on a jacket to go out into the living room, because it really is the temperature of the outside world.

My kitchen gets nicely heated because of a trick I learned from my first host mother, Anna: she just left one of the gas burners on the stove going 24/7. Because gas is still supplied as the communists would like: everyone paying the same price regardless of amount used, this kind of waste goes on (the smart thing to do would be to install meters to monitor usage, but they can’t afford to). In the interest of conservation, I shut mine off when I leave the kitchen, but a few minutes of two burners going can get the kitchen warm enough to remove my jacket and cook.

The bathroom has a similar strategy. From Carrie I learned that the water purifier left to my by George and Gail puts off a lot of heat when it’s working. As it takes roughly four hours to purify a gallon of water, turning it on in the evening guarantees I’m not literally freezing my ass off when I make a bathroom run at night.

Speaking of Carrie, her block is one of the only ones in Kyiv with heat right now. She lives in the neighborhood where all the embassies are, paying a lot of money for the location of her a tiny one-bedroom apartment. Because it’s in an area shared by so many diplomats, their heat magically gets turned on before everyone else’s. Which just goes to show that even though everyone is equal in a communist world, some are more equal than others.

Ukraine: Political Parties Punches

I had once heard of Indian politicians doing this, and am proud that Ukrainian politicians are doing it as well. The impetus was a group of soldiers during World War II that fought not against the Germans, but not for the Soviets, and instead killed Soviets for the freedom of Ukraine. This group has received veteran status in Ukraine and is vying for more rights, but at a demonstration that they held in Kyiv a few days ago, they were attacked by members of the socialist and communist parties (the communist party is alive and well in Ukraine, and regularly holds rallies that I can hear from my window).

In any case, a bill was being debated about granting them more rights in parliament, and the argument amongst the politicians became so heated that a fist fight broke out. Apparently, this happens quite often in the Ukrainian parliament. I think all politics should be conducted that way: if you’re voting for or against a bill, you should feel pretty passionate about it. I don’t think anyone should block a campaign finance reform bill unless they’re willing to loose a few teeth over it. And vice versa.

Oh, and one more thing about Ukrainian parties: they’ve been holding demonstrations all around Zhytomyr trying to drum up support for the upcoming parliamentary elections. The communist party, with their red flags emblazed with a golden hammer and sickle, like to hold their rallies at 8:00 AM, in support of their right to yell loudly and wake up Americans. Pora (“It’s Time”), the party that attracts a lot of college students and was instrumental in the Orange Revolution last year, has a big bee in the middle of their flags. But what I found funniest of all was the Green party, which holds their demonstrations by the bazaar. The symbol in the middle of their white flag is a smiling sunflower. So picture if you will one of their supporters, a very Mafioso, scowling, well-muscled man of about twenty, wearing a green cloth vest and holding a white flag with a smiling sunflower on it. His look said: “Go on, make fun of my sunflower and see what happens to you.” It was the highlight of my day.

Ukraine: It Comes When it Comes

"It comes when it comes, it goes when it goes and it gets there when it gets there."

This is why I mentally say to myself when dealing with Ukranian public transportation. Actually, I'm really impressed with Ukranian public transportation: I can get anywhere in my city, oblast or country rather easily and cheaply (although not necessarily quickly) and I really wish America had a system quite as good.

But there are times, like this weekend, that I have to chant the mantra. I went to Kirovograd this weekend for a meeting, a seven hour trip. Unfortunately it's only five hours from Kyiv, which mean no overnight trains, only overpriced buses. After getting into Kyiv from Zhytomyr (having just found out they raised the marshrutka prices 4 hrivna; high fuel prices are really hurting Ukraine right now), I was told they wouldn't have any buses to Kirovograd until the evening, putting me into Kirovgrad at 1:00 AM and way too late.

A bus was due to leave in 5 minutes though, and I incessently bugged the ticket taker about an open seat until it turned out there was a cancellation. This put me in the last seat in the back right corner of the bus, where someone had curteously piled boxes. The bus was crammed full, being one of the older buses, designed for midgets with no arms. The windshield was also cracked (a requirement here, apparently) and the drapes and overhead rack covers were made of the same upholstry-patterened faded cloth you see on every other bus, albeit this time it was green. After putting the boxes in the aisle (and getting yelled at by the people who the boxes were now beside as if this truly inconvienced them) I discovered that a reinforcement pole had been welded directly beside the seat, precicely where a quarter of my body was supposed to be. This left me in a subtle control war with the guy in the next seat as whenever one of us stretched, the other would get their shoulder against the back of the seat instead of having to lean forward. When he had his shoulder against the seat, I literally could not have my arms against my body because it would mean one elbow in his stomach, the other against the pole, so I just gripped the overhead rack with both hands, waiting for him to stretch and then I would regain control. And what I told myself continously was: "you're in Peace Corps. It could get a lot worse. Toughen up and stop being annoyed."

After about two hours and a few stops later, some people got off the bus and I grabbed their seats, the normally cramped confines suddenly feeling extremely spacious.

Coming back from Kirovograd the next day, I thought I was in heaven. I was shocked at the 53 hrinva price back when I bought my ticket in Kirovograd, because it had cost only 35 hrivna coming down. The price difference, I found, was because my bus was brand new. It was also quite late, which is why I found myself repeating the mantra: "it comes when it comes."

It did come, and it was the nicest bus I'd ever been on in Ukraine. New seats, new everything including a TV showing the newest movie from Russia that everyone's been talking about: "9 Rota" (9th Company) about a group of Soviet soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. The movie was really good and I was getting into it when the TV suddenly shut off and the bus lost power.

How ironic: the ghetto bus makes it and the brand new one breaks down. We sat on the side of the road for about 20 minutes, the driver turning the engine on and off, trying to get the bus to move. Every once in a while it would slowly rock forward and then the engine would go off.

It is testement to the equanamity of the Ukranian people that no one said a single word or asked a single question. We all sat quietly and looked out the windows. The driver offered no explanation and called no one on the radio (if he even had one). I repeated the mantra "it gets there when it gets there".

I stared out the window. It was 5:30 PM and already getting dark, the days shrinking as we get closer to the solstice. Most of the leaves have turned and are really rather pretty. I've never lived in a place with real seasons, have never seen the leaves turn red and orange and yellow. Everything in Florida is evergreen. The trees in Oklahoma seemingly go from verdent to bare to back again instantaneously. Every other place I lived I was too young to remember, every other place I visited was visited in summer. Some of the reds I was lookign at were truly spectacular, too, the leaves were ablaze. Beside the road, four cows, attended to by two babucias, munched on grass. I've come to believe that anywhere at any time, if you are on a bus and look out of the window in Ukraine, you will see grazing cows being guided by old women holding sticks.

As the bus kept not moving and no explanation was forthcoming, I kept telling myself to not get annoyed, that this is a part of life, that expectations kill, that I would get there when I got there. And eventually it worked. I stopped paying attention to the shutting on and off of the engine, stopped being annoyed and zoned out. Eventually, I realized that, with much grinding, a gear had been achieved and finally the bus started moving. It stopped again about five minutes later but, with more engine going off and on and more loud grinding, we got on the road and didn't stop until Kyiv.

Kyiv was more mantra: the marshrutkas don't leave until they are full. Depending on the day and time and luck, this could mean every ten minutes or once an hour. I was the first on my marshrutka and took its time filling up. Tired and wanting to be home, I told myself: "it will leave when it will leave."

I have yet to achieve that traveller's inner peace. I still have the tick-tock of American punctuality in my blood. That is to say, official things should be punctual. I, of course, never am. Forty minutes later, though, the engine started and, two hours after that, I was finally home.

"It comes when it comes, it goes when it goes and it gets there when it gets there" and that's how you live in Ukraine.

Ukraine: Odessa (Pics)

Life is going well: work hard, play hard.

Pics from Odessa:


Odessa's Potemkin Steps


Odessa's Black Sea port


A babucia on Arcadia beach


I like this picture because it's a number of Ukranian stereotypes in one picture


This canon was taken from the British during the Crimean War. Katie is trying to take it back.


Another Odessa beach

Ukraine: Okean Elzy Concert (Pics)

Diana and I went to the Okean Elzy concert in Kyiv on my Ukrainian one-year anniversary and it was amazing. My digital camera is gone, sadly, but I had my video camera at the concert, so was able to take some photos from that.

I’ve been a huge fan of the five-member Okean Elzy (their name means “Elzy’s Ocean”) since I first got to Ukraine. They are one of the few groups that sing in Ukrainian and not Russian, and listening to their music helped me out greatly during training. Nowadays they are a welcome respite on the airwaves, muscling in as they do between Euro-techno and Russian pop.


Where we were on the floor, with no zoom

Okean Elzy falls into no particular genre. The only musical tradition Ukraine has is folk music, played on pipes and accordions. This seems to have freed up Okean Elzy to try every type of song they wanted: one may be bluesy, another hard rock, one is straight funk with a Red Hot Chili Peppers-style rap, and another draws too much from the 80s. Where they really come to the fore, though, is on the power ballad. Lyrics to two of them are at the end of this blog.

Their lyrics are amazing. Ukraine has a love affair with poetry. There are statues in my town not to generals or politicians but to poets: Taras Shevchenko and Alexander Pushkin (well, there is a Lenin statue. A Ukrainian city without one is like an American city without a Wal-Mart). Okean Elzy’s lyrics reflect this poetic tradition and are full of interesting imagery.


Singer Svyatoslav Vakarchook. The zoom on my video camera rocks!

Unfortunately, the lyrics end up sounding stilted in English despite being so powerful in Ukrainian. Ukrainian is a musical language. The complexities of its grammar, it took me a long time to realize, are because it’s so concerned with how things sound. Every word changes to sound good with every other word. Had early Slavs taken a crack at modern English, they might have decided that “Youra beautifula girla” sounded more musical (or, at least, more like a retarded Italian) than “Your beautiful girl”, hence “Tvoya kracnaya divchina” is the translation, with both “your” and “beautiful” changing to fit with “girl”. “Your beautiful boy” would be “Tovoyee kracnee holopsee”.

It used to frustrate me that there were 24 forms of “you(r)” and that I had to memorize when each was used. What I finally understood, though, was that if I just started lining up sounds, I usually found that I was grammatically correct. Possibly it should have been taught to us that way, rather than presenting us with what linguists found when they decided to make an organized picture of the language.


Guitarist Pavlo Goodimov

In any case, the musicality of the language, the imagery of the words and the freedom of the music has made Okean Elzy one of my favorite bands. It was a great way to celebrate one year in Ukraine by paying $12 to get in, sneaking past the guards being mobbed by ticket-waving fans so that we could get onto the floor and then muscling our way to the front. Although Okean Elzy would be playing in Zhytomyr in only four days, it was worth the trip to Kyiv because you have to sit in Zhytomyr's theatre. To be on the floor, amongst the dancing singing, crowd, was definitely worth it. The zoom on my camera took care of the rest.

If you want to hear Okean Elzy’s music, an English website provides samples and sells albums.

http://www.umka.com.ua

And here are a couple of lyric translations (by me, so they may not be completely accurate):

[I don’t know the name of this song. It was song at the concert and I got it on video and have been listening to it repeatedly because it’s f’ing fantastic]

Prosto meni tak hochetsya boodo tam de ee ti
It’s just that I so want to be where you are

tak hochetsya shivite tebe polonee
So want to live for you, a prisoner

Ee bachete yak ytakyoot vid mene snih v tovoyee dolonee
And to see how my dreams escape from me into your hands

[Bez boyu (Without a Fight)]

Ya nalyyu sobi, ya nalyyu tobi vyna. A hochesh iz medom?
I pour to myself, I pour to you wine. Or do you want [me] with honey?

Hto ty ye? - Ty vzyala moye zhyttya i ne viddala
Who are you? You took my life and didn’t return it.

Hto ty ye? - Ty vypyla moyu krov i p'yanoyu vpala
Who are you? You drank my blood and fell drunk to the floor

Tvoyi ochi, klychut', hochut' mene vedut' za soboyu
Your eyes, they call, they want me. They see into myself.

Hto ty ye? Y kym by ne bula ty
Who are you at whom there was not you?

[Screamed] Ya ne zdamsya bez boyu!
I will not give up without a fight

Ukraine: Around Kyiv (Pics)

Slightly annoyed at the moment. Sometime between last night and this morning I lost my digital camera. Don't know if I set it down in Peace Corps office and it got picked up, if it got left in the hotel room and the maid ran off with it, or it was jacked in the metro. Either way, I managed to travel literally thousands of miles with the thing and never loose it and then I somehow misplace it while attending a meeting in Kyiv. That's how it goes... I try not to place too much attachment on property and it was on its last legs anyway, but still...

So there may not be pics on the site for some time, but I do have some from my last trip with Katie to Kyiv and Odessa, so here we go:


Katie in her headscarf that she had to wear to go into the Kyiv catacombs. I couldn't take pics inside the catacombs, so no mumified monks. Sorry.


A cathedral was under reconstruction. These are the tops.


Me in front of some Soviet weaponry. Behind me on the left is the Rodina Mat, on the right is an ICBM


Me, posing in front of the Rodina Mat