Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Peace Corps Service Completed

Wow.

Like everything in my life, it was at the last second: a series of events meant I got to Kyiv with only 90 minutes before the Peace Corps office closed, and I needed to get a medical checkout, close my grant (which normally takes a couple hours) and get a half a dozen signatures from people who turned out not to be in their offices.

With quite a bit of help and goodwill, at very annoyed financial manager, and a new record for running up and down flights of stairs, it's done.  I'm done.

I am no longer a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I thought it would be more sad, but the elation of getting the paperwork in under the buzzer put me on an adrenaline high.

Wow.

Done.  After everything.

I fly home in five days.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Why I Almost Quit Peace Corps

Yep.  I almost quit Peace Corps 12 days before finishing it:

My day started off well enough, with me taking my language proficiency test and getting a score of "Advanced-Mid".  The language exam is one of many tests, exams, surveys and interviews that comprise the two page checklist that must be completed before a volunteer can close his or her service.

 It’s as hard to get out of Peace Corps as into it.

Although "Advanced-Mid" is only one below the best rating you can get of "Advanced-High" (provided you don't count the "Native Speaker" rating), I don't feel I deserved it.  You see, the exam is really just a conversation with the examiner, during which they suss out how good our skills are.  The thing is, we stuck mostly to talking about my projects in Peace Corps, which are topics I've had to discuss hundreds of times in the course of making them happen.  I've got canned responses and the grammar nailed down for those, so I came off sounding much more proficient then I actually am.  Still, considering I didn't speak Russian at all 18 months ago and received an "Intermediate-Mid" rating on my test 11 months ago, I was pretty damn proud.

My day took a turn for the worse in the afternoon.  The Ukrainian administrator handling my file was confused: why was I telling her that my flight was on December 4th when my records showed that my Close of Service date was December 14th?


Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Ukraine: Description of Service

Had my last day of teaching today. Felt good, actually. Also went and bought my first suit 'cause I know I need one and it's cheaper here. Everything's like that now: finishing this, getting that, all preparing to leave. And that includes writing my Description of Service.

What is it? It's the official record of everything we've done. Like a few other volunteers in my group, I've decided to post mine online. Why? To brag of course!

It's just the way such things are. A lot of it is boiler plate: they gave us the exact wording on most of the beginning and end and gave us examples of how the middle should go. Workin' for the government and all.

Thought I'd share.

***


Description of Peace Corps Volunteer Service
Name: Daniel Reynolds
Country of Service: Ukraine
Dates of Service: (December 2004 – December 2006)

Monday, November 13, 2006

Ukraine: Extreme Marathon 2006 (Pics)

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Waiting for the race to start.
A guy rode past me on his bike, popped up his front wheel while peddling, hit the brakes and then stopped like that, perfectly balanced on his back tire. Then he started jumping up and down, using his bike like a pogo stick, the back tire thumping as it repeatedly hit the ground.

Okay.  Mission Accomplished.  I am impressed.

It was 9:00 AM, and I was waiting, along with 19 other people, to compete in Zhytomyr’s Extreme Marathon, a multi-sport adventure race. This was actually only a mini-Extreme Marathon. The real one, in which I had competed the year before, was a 24 hour endurance race of running, swimming, climbing, ropes course challenges, orienteering, biking and rafting. Another volunteer named Carrie had been my partner, and we had lasted about 12 hours before Carrie's hurt knee caused us to drop out.  Still, of the 32 teams from 6 countries in the race, four others dropped out before us, which meant we weren’t complete losers.


Friday, November 10, 2006

Ukraine: Uman (Pics)

"Do you think black cats know they cause bad luck?" asked Diana as we sat down on the bus to Uman. Apparently a black cat had looked at her on the way to the bus station and, just as she neared it, purposely walked across her path.

The bus left at 7:00 AM. Diana said it would take three and a half hours to get to Uman. This is what they had told her when she bought our tickets. They had lied.

"Nature takes her clothes off with dignity," said Diana several hours later, apparently in a poetic mood as she looked out the window. The bus was rocking down a road paved through the middle of a forest. On either side, trees blazed red and orange and yellow. Soon those leaves would fall and leave nature naked, but before then she'd have one last burst of glory.

At 11:00 AM, when we should already have been in Uman, Diana asked the driver if we'd soon be there and laughed at her. The bus kept on its slow way, stopping, it seemed, every fifteen seconds to pick someone up or drop them off on the side of the road. Diana and I were going to Uman on a whim. Uman is famous in Ukraine for it's park, reputed to be the Versailles of Ukraine (which, admittedly, doesn't say a lot). Neither Diana nor I had been there, but we thought it would be great with the fall foiliage. We were discussing this on Friday. Not having a lot of time, we decided to do it as a day trip on Sunday.

Finally the bus pulled in, six hours after we left Zhytomyr. It being near winter, it was already starting to get dark. It was raining. In the bus station we found there were no more buses headed back to Zhytomyr that day. Still, we knew we could still get back to Kyiv that night (all roads lead to Kyiv) and if we could get to Kyiv, we could get to Zhytomyr. We headed over to the park, which was in walking distance of the bus station and, when we got to the entrance, Diana found that she had lost her wallet, either on the bus or in the bus station. We went back to the station, but it was not to be found. I was going to find that black cat and kill it. Deciding to make the best of it, we headed back to the park.

The park was built in honor of a woman named Sophia. A little over a century ago, a nobel had fallen in love with a Polish concubine and built the park over several years as a gift to her. As with everything in Ukraine, much of the park was destroyed during World War II, but it was famous enough to have been rebuilt under the Soviet Union. And guess what? Even with the overcast skies and dim light, it was still beautiful.

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A map of the park

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The following photos show nature in her dignity (and show Diana and I being not quite as dignified)

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This was kind of cool: there's a long tunnel that goes under the park. For 2 UAH you get in a boat and a guy pushes the boat along the tunnel using a stick. For most of it there's absolutely no light (except from idiots who can't turn off their mobiles and people like me who insist on taking pictures)

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The trip back was shorter than the trip there: a marshrutka to Kyiv and then a marshrutka to Zhytomyr. Unlike buses, marshrutkas haul ass. Of course, the bus station and the train station in Kyiv (which is where one marshrutka arrived and the other left from) are on opposite sides of the city. Also, for all their really efficient Soviet planning, the bus station is inexplicably far away from any metro stops. Which, with it raining again and raining hard, meant we got pretty wet. I blame the cat.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Ukraine: Orphans in Costumes (Pics)

So, on Halloween I was at the orphanage's costume party (but sans costume myself) and had a lot of fun. Here's the pics:

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Tanya and I talking to the orphans about the history of Halloween and how it's celebrated in America. We were kind of put on the spot about this and I found myself lacking a lot of the necessary vocabulary

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Playing limbo

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I think she's supposed to be a cat

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Tanya getting mobbed

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Monsters everywhere!

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Break dancing

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A traditional Ukrainian game of passing a handkerchief in a circle

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The break dancing boys. They asked me to show them some of my moves

So, yeah, fun all around.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Ukraine: What's Been Going On (Pics)

Happy Halloween! I’m not celebrating it in any real sense, but I have been invited to the orphanage tonight to see their “Scariest Costume” contest. Should be fun.

Yesterday was the first snow in Zhytomyr. This might be more welcome if we had heat in my apartment building. Some parts of Zhytomyr have heat, some don’t and no one seems to know when the rest of the city will get theirs (this is the favorite topic of conversation at the institute, though). I have a space heater that keeps my bedroom warm and otherwise I just stay in my three layers of clothes. Yesterday I even managed my first multi-layer quick change. Since I had pulled off my “casual” layers (long-sleeve shirt, fleece, Harley-Davidson hoodie) all at once, they were still intact on the chair when I stripped off my “nice” layers (long sleeve shirt, dress shirt and tie, nice sweater) all at once and pulled on my casual layers as if it were one item of clothing.

***

Sarah left just ahead of the real cold, and now she’s back in the states. Soon she’ll be going to India where she has a seasonal job as a kitchen manager at a yoga retreat. In India, I don’t think they have a word for cold.

Since I was teaching we really couldn’t leave Zhytomyr, but here’s some of what we did:

Sarah was missing yoga while she was here, so we went with my friend Tatyana to her yoga class one evening. The instructor had not shown up (for the second class in a row) and an 18 year-old girl who said she knew a lot of yoga volunteered to teach it. What she was showing us was more of a warm-up for a dance class, though, including kicks. We’d be in a dance stretch and someone would ask what the pose was called and she say “I don’t really know, but it’s good for your legs.” The most yoga it got was mid-way through when she asked us to sit in a lotus position and chant “Om”. The problem was that one of the older guys in the class (who was one of several that spent the entire class telling her that she was doing this or that wrong) was trying to convince her that she was doing her “Om”s too quickly. Of course we’re following her, but then while we’re all going “Oooom” he’s doing “Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom”. He was literally trying to out om her. Finally the class broke down entirely due to their tug of war and Tatyana suggested that Sarah show us some things since she was very into yoga and had been doing it for a while. This is how Sarah, who speaks only English, ended up teaching a half-hour yoga class to Ukrainians…and doing a good job, too.

***

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All the decked-out Ukrainian women convinced Sarah to attempt to beautify. Since they're so cheap, she got a facial, a pedicure and a manicure while here. My friend Irina took her to all these things and then taught her about the joys of make-up.

***

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On my one day off we took a day-trip to Kyiv to see the Percheska Lavra (Caves Monastary)

***

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I took both Sarah and Amy to visit both an old USSR collective farm and to the mass graves from the Holocaust. Above and the next three below are the remains of the farm, where villagers still graze their horses. During Soviet times, farmers were required to keep all their livestock and mill all their grain here. It was unproductive, but let the Soviets be able to take their cut.

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Above and below are pictures of the mass graves

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***

I got interviewed on television. The local news station had a camera set up by a statue of Sergei Korolov that’s near my apartment. Korolov, if you’ve never heard of him, designed Mir, the first manmade object in space, and also designed the ship that let Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space (yes, we did loose that part of the space race). Having been raised in Zhytomyr, Korolov is my city’s favorite son. They stopped Sarah and I as we walked past and asked me if I knew who the statue was of. It was Korolov’s birthday, and they were doing a piece on him, seeing what Zhytomyr residents did and did not know about him. I said I did and said who he was and they could tell from my accent that I wasn’t Ukrainian. They asked where I was from and I told them and they seemed excited to interview an American. They then asked if I knew why Korolov was famous. Here, my Russian ran into trouble. I didn’t know the word for “design” or “spaceship”, so what the citizens of Zhytomyr heard last night was an American telling them that their local hero had “prepared the first car to go into space.”

***

Sarah and I took two of the bikes we got with the grant and did a circuit across the condemned bridge, down to a path by the river, along the river to the man-made waterfall/dam (where sewage is also dumped) and then we carried the bikes across the river to ride up to the WWII momument (with the eternal flame that wasn't burning) and then back to my apartment. Done at sunset, the whole route was gorgeous.

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Here you can see the WWII memorial in the distance as we bike along the Teatriv River

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Me, carrying my bike in front of the waterfall

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***

Sarah was kind enough to talk to a English-education group at the local library. She brought photos and told them about her work as a wilderness ranger in Alaska

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***

This is what I have been doing since Sarah left:
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It is the entire British Councils Recertification Curriculum (what we teach at the Institute), re-written. Since almost every teacher attending courses at the institute has already done the curriculm (they have to get recertified every five years), we needed a new one, which is essentially the results of me developing my lesson plans over the past two years. It took a week to get everything typed up and organized, but there you go: one copy for me, one for Peace Corps, one for the institute and three for the new Teacher Trainers that just arrived in Ukraine last month (and whom I worked with and gave feedback to when they came to give practice lessons at the institute two days ago)

Here's some pics from my lastest group of teachers:

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Doing a reading/creative thinking exercise

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Rewriting a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip

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Working with flashcards

***
And that's about it! I'll leave with one final photo:

My friend Amy wanted to visit Zhytomyr to hang out and climb and asked to bring a friend. "Is she cute?" I asked, jokingly. Turned out she was. She was a New Zealander (Kiwi) named Livvy who was living in Prague and met Amy, who lives in Ukraine, when Amy was in New Zealand. Confused yet? Anyway, it turns out she actually was cute and I got to make out with my first Kiwi. Between her and "Lord of The Rings", I'd really like to visit New Zealand now.

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Me, Livvy and Amy before going to a club

Monday, October 23, 2006

Ukraine: Letter From the Director

I feel horrible at the moment. For reasons I'm not even sure of, I got another bout of gastroentiritis and was up all night while my body tried to get rid of every last bit of fluid inside me. Not fun, but as this is my fourth in two years, they get a little easier to deal with each time.

I've had a crazy couple weeks with Sarah (who left Saturday morning) and when I wasn't working, she and I were tearing up Zhytomyr. Haven't gotten any of that up on the blog, though, 'cause I've been a bit busy. I only have three weeks of work left. It's odd. I realize I need to start packing up and stuff, but I haven't even begun thinking about it. Mostly I'm trying to get this last cycle of teaching done and get my lesson plans in order to turn over to the next batch of teacher trainers.

Anyway, one cool thing that has gone on is that the Deputy Director of Peace Corps (as in, the whole world-wide program) was visiting Ukraine and came to see the wall. I was told I should have a training session going at 3:00 PM on a Thursday. This is the time when everyone is at work or at school and it's a little hard to get a group of kids there. Panicked is not the right word, but stressed is.

Luckily, one of the teachers I have trained agreed to bring her class. I called in a few favors to Polissya, ACET and my climbing friends and everyone was good enough to take the afternoon off from work or skip their university classes and the whole thing went off without a hitch. The Director of Peace Corps Ukraine was with her, along with two guys from the Peace Corps communication department who were taking photos, one of which also took a stab at climbing the wall.

Here's the email I just recieved from the Deputy Director:

***

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for welcoming me and my staff to the Zhytomar Climbing Wall. I was so impressed to see how you managed to combine elements of fun with HIV/AIDS education. It was very clear that under your guidance, kids who visited the wall received important life lessons, as well as a boost in self confidence (this became abundantly clear when our own Chris Harnisch made it to the top of the wall and was smiling for the rest of the day!). I applaud you for your can-do attitude and the determination that you have instilled in much of the youth of Zhytomyr. You represent the highest ideals of a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I wish you the best of luck for your final month in Ukraine.

Sincerely,

Jody Olsen
Deputy Director of the Peace Corps

***

Kinda cool, huh?

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Turkey: Mt. Dan-Rah (Pics)

It was an island uninhabitable by design: a small oblong of razor sharp rock covered in thorny brambles. Weary of the interior, I opted to sit on a short stone spire sticking out of the ocean, my feet protesting as I tried to find smooth places to place them, my backside no happier when I finally sat down, legs just over the sea, the water gently lapping up against them.

Sarah swam up from a sandbar she had been exploring, pulling off her mask and snorkel and tossing them beside mine on a nearby protrusion. A few hundred yards away floated our yacht, the blobs of color around it were our fellow passengers, who always seemed reluctant to swim more than ten feet away from it. My pockets were full of interesting shells, some of which would later prove to be owned by other creatures of the world. Having snorkeled nearly every inch of shoreline of the bay where our yacht was anchored and around the island itself, I was taking an enjoyable break to get warm in the sun, saltwater drying on my skin.

“Think we could climb that?” I asked Sarah.

Mountains—albeit small ones—rose up from the shoreline of the mainland. Their surfaces seemed like piles of pebbles left by some god child, stacked steep up to three separate peaks, the middle one noticeably higher than the others. Goats made noises at each other as they picked their way along the rocks, chewing on the scrub brush growing from the crevices. There was nothing remotely approaching a path to those peaks; there was nothing remotely approaching flatness, actually, but if you thought in terms of climbing rather than hiking, it was just a grade four scramble that couldn’t take more than an hour.

“Probably,” said Sarah, leaving it at that. I took her lack of enthusiasm as an idea rejection.

***

Several hours, the rest of a book and a number of backgammon games later, Sarah proffered a suggestion. Most of the shells had been cleaned and were drying in the bathroom of the small cabin Sarah and I shared with Doyon. The fact of other ownership became known when a couple of the shells magically moved themselves several feet away from where I had put them. The owners and their homes soon found themselves on an unasked-for adrenaline joyride through the air before splashing back into the brink.

“Let’s climb the mountain,” Sarah said to me.

She said this, of course, with only an hour before we were scheduled to leave the bay. I wasn’t sure we could get up and down in time. Sarah had spent the past two hours tanning herself and writing in her notebook a few feet from me. Why we hadn’t started earlier, save perhaps to make the experience intense instead of leisurely (I do not deny that Sarah’s subconscious as well as mine decides things in this way), I don’t know.

I thought for a moment.

“Cool.”

***

“Don’t let the devil goats get you!” Brenna yelled from the ship as Sarah and I kicked our way to shore, shoes held over our heads. The goats had been so named because, yes, they did have a certain malevolent look about them. They stayed out of our way, though, as we put on our socks and shoes and started scrambling up the steep rocks, showing up their prowess and hurting their collective pride. They “nahhed” at us in scorn.

Sarah took the lead because we both have our areas of expertise, and trailfinding is certainly one of Sarah’s. Trailfinding here entailed locating climbable rocks while avoiding the sharp branches of the shrubs. The rock was a hard, porous limestone, which made climbing up them easy, a plethora of holds available for hands and feet. We practically ran up the thing, and within half an hour were on the top, looking down at our ship and the others in the bay.

It was amazingly beautiful, but I’ll let the pictures tell the thousand words. We had enough time to pose for them, take a couple more of ourselves bouldering with that beautiful backdrop, then rock hop back down to the shoreline to swim to the boat, our little adventure taking less than 45 sweat-soaked minutes.

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On top of the mountain

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On board, I looked at the maps of the area. Although the mountain range behind the one we had been on had its peaks named, ours must have been too small to merit labels, or the map wasn’t detailed enough, being more concerned with the topography of the ocean floor. The point is, as far as we knew, our peak was unnamed.

So we named it, smashing our own together.

We had just climbed Mount Dan-Rah.

***

After seeing a sunken city, the foundations of its houses visible through the clear water, after seeing a fishing village on an island reachable only by ship, a castle clinging to its one peak, we sailed into a cove and dropped anchor.

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As the day gave way to night, we started secretly drinking the vodka and raki (a Turkish liquorish-flavored liquor not unlike ouzo) that we had smuggled on board after our stop in Kash. We were not supposed to bring any drinks on board, which meant the ship had a monopoly of the market and allowed them to mark everything up 100%. Because we didn’t have the World Bank on our side, we were forced to turn into raki runners and Pepsi pirates (my treasure trove of cans now buried at the bottom of the ship’s cooler). Tipsy and happy, we scarfed down dinner and got dressed. Here, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were going dancing.

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At 11:00 PM, a speedboat pulled up beside the yacht and everyone under the age of 30 got on board, the older people begging off, perhaps thinking it wasn’t their scene. The speedboat stopped at the other boats anchored in the cove and soon a party was making its way to a sandy beach, to a dance club reachable only by boat.

“Pirate’s Cove” was a three sided wooden building on stilts, its open side facing out towards the water. Between it and the docks were a number of wooden platforms with pillows and chairs, and they’d already lit a small bonfire before we arrived. The selection of music, spun by one of the bartenders in between getting drinks, was the most eclectic I’ve ever heard, from Counting Crows to Jay Z to Madonna, the only seeming criteria being that the next song had to be an absolutely different genre from the last. This made for better dancing because I can get bored of the same stuff after a while and loved moving to a beat never stopped changing.

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Brenna, Me, Sarah, Stella, Ryan and Doyon

We danced for hours before taking a break on one of the wooden platforms, cooling off in the night air. A movie moment happened shortly thereafter: all the Americans on the boat were on that platform, as well as Stella and Doyon, who simply watched us with raised eyebrows. A fair amount of America bashing had been going on during the four days on the yacht, about its foreign policies and attitudes in general, about Bush in particular. The most virulent bashing came from the Americans, Brenna spearheading it, and the lone defensive voice was me. I was quite an America basher until I lived in Ukraine, and now I feel that even though we screw up a lot and deserve most of our stereotypes, we’re still a damn good country trying to do damn good things. I even think one of our better qualities is our self-criticism, but all of that floated away for a few minutes on the opening chords of Don Mclean’s “American Pie.”

“A long, long time ago/I remember how that music used to make me smile…”

It came to us on the night breeze from the over-amped stereo system, and no matter what we thought about our country, at that moment we felt. The thirty or so other people sitting outside—all from other countries—quietly listened, as the four of us began singing together. We four sat and looked off at the sky, the water, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly singing for ourselves, our voices in near whispers during the verses but rising up joyously together on the choruses. The four of us: Sarah, Ryan, Brenna and me, are all travelers; we pride ourselves on having visited and lived in many places, on speaking other languages and being comfortable in other cultures, but that moment something was very clear, at least to me: we were inescapably American. No one else on that beach, in that club, knew those words, at they were one of thousands of strings that bound us together as a people, a culture, a nation. And while it looked like a cool Almost Famous/”Tiny Dancer” movie moment, it was more than that because we all felt very close just then, something we remarked upon later, drawn together by childhoods staring out car windows while this song played on car radios, now adults out in the middle of nowhere in an area of the world that mostly hates us and being together being very, very American. And normally to be “very American” is a negative label, but just then it was a very positive, very beautiful concept.

***

Leave it to the Australians to ratchet up the party. At some point in the evening two of the Australian girls had gotten behind the bar and were helping to serve drinks, getting in a shot or two (or seven) for themselves. At one point I was getting hit in the back with ice cubes and, when I turned around, Jess, one of the Australian girls, was tugging the front of her tank top down and offering me a target. I underhand tossed one cube of ice at her and she maneuvered to catch it between her breasts. Another ice cube, another perfect catch and soon our Turkish bartenders, Vinnie and Hussein (yes, that was their names), happy about all that close-by cleavage, started giving out free bottles of water and soon lined up glasses and gave us all a free shot of vodka.

The dance floor was a loud group of moving bodies. Ryan was glued onto Stella at that point and possibly I should have been going for Jess but I was having too much fun dancing with Brenna, even though I knew it would probably cost me any action that night. Sarah was dancing with Ahmed, the first mate of our boat, who had started the evening by saying to her: “I want be with you tonight.”

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Groovin' at Pirate's Cove. Ahmed is on the right

The lack of English meant that the insinuation could have gone either way but it was pretty apparent when, a few dances later, he was pushing his tongue in her mouth. Being attractive, Turkish and made of muscle, Sarah wasn’t minding.

***

I stripped naked and dove into the water, narrowing missing Sarah, who was dog-paddling in all her pinkness. Skinny dipping had not been our idea: it had been suggested by Brenna and seconded by Stella. Stella was now under a pile of blankets with Ryan on the top deck, though, and Brenna had become morose and lonely during the evening (there had been a distinct lack of lesbians at the club) and had gone straight back to her cabin. Most of the boat was still back at the club, our group calling it a night at 3:00 AM while they were still going strong. The music carried across the water towards us, seemingly as loud at the boat as it had been on the beach.

Never ones to let a good idea die, Sarah and I decided to still go skinny dipping, even though no one else would. Besides, who wouldn’t want to say they had gone skinny dipping in a cove in Turkey in blue-black water under a moon one day from full?

Inexplicably, the water four inches under the surface was warm while the top layer was cold. Although it was fun, the novelty wore off the colder I got and I told Sarah I was going in. Showered off and carrying my blankets up on the deck, I noticed Ahmed spreading out a blanket over two of the deck cushions and putting more on top, creating a double bed. He was ambitious. I knew he had told Sarah things like: “Look my eyes” and “I think I loving you,”, but from what I understood, she had declined his offers. Still, I made my bed up as far as possible from his.

A few minutes later, I couldn’t find Sarah. She wasn’t in the water, she wasn’t on the deck and she wasn’t in the cabin. I didn’t think she was drunk enough to have had a problem swimming, but it was too small a boat for her to have disappeared. Finally, though, she swam into view from the front of the boat and I handed her clothes to her when she got on board.

In a life moment Sarah declared to be one of her cooler ones, Ahmed had descended the chain that stretched taut from the bow of the boat down just above the water and sat on it, his feet dangling in the water. Sarah had pulled herself up out of the water, one hand on the chain, the other on the back of his head, breasts exposed and dripping in the moonlight, to make out with him.

I think her next decision to sleep on that bed with Ahmed fell into the category of teasing. She had no intention of having sex with him: with a stranger on a deck filled with half a dozen other people (most of them from the boat’s 50-and-over contingent) was not her style, but the topless making out probably gave Ahmed the idea that he was on his way to scoredom.

I awoke a few hours later, almost at daybreak, to hear her telling him to stop and that she wanted to sleep, her hushed whispers carrying over the deck. Sarah can take care of herself, but when I still heard her sharp protestations a few minutes later, I thought I might have to get up and say something (and that would have been an interesting fight to film: two guys sliding around on a dew-slicked deck, ropes and booms and elderly tour patrons all caught up in the fray). Apparently he laid off his groping, though, because soon it was quiet and I fell back to sleep.

In the debrief the next day, Sarah told me the climax of the evening had been the making out at the bow of the ship, and that it had been falling action from there. Although happy to cuddle and make-out with Ahmed, she had discovered that his idea of kissing was of the “shock and awe” variety, and she showed me where his tongue, in its forceful incursions, had actually torn a bit of that flap of skin between her tongue and the bottom of her mouth. It was swollen and bleeding a little.

Apparently for her, it had not been a Turkish delight…

***

And that was the end of our adventure. We got off the boat the next day, made our way to Antalya and spent the evening walking around the winding cobblestone streets of its walled old city. The next morning, while merchants were carrying their goods out of their stores to display in the streets, we caught a cab up to the airport and flew back to Ukraine, our ten days in Turkey at an end. Still, it had been an amazing time, and our memories were carried with us in our heads, our notebooks, our cameras, and, especially, in Sarah’s slowly healing tongue.