NOTE: Pics of the debauchery are coming.
It was both the week of National Olympiads and Spring Break. This meant a lot of volunteers in town and I had the week off. The possibility of partying was positive.
Excited as I was, though, the week got off to a horrible start. Within 24 hours I had four bad things happen that I won’t go into, but each was progressively worse. About thing three I was still emotionally staying on top of things and proud of that, but had a crash at thing four. Suddenly I wanted to be anti-social and the week was looking like a bust.
Still, there’s nothing like exercise and alcohol to make you feel better (although not necessarily combined), which is all this week was. Jon was in town, as well as Brian, another climber, and we climbed every day save one and partied every night.
Monday was the day of bad news, although a serious workout on the climbing wall helped alleviate that. The next day found us at the cliff, where a warm, sunny day in the middle of a week of gray, rainy ones found me leading hard routes on warm rock with no shirt on. That day was unpredicted, here and gone, and was so precious and so appreciated because of that. It was the herald of spring and we embraced it.
Then it snowed the next morning.
Wednesday was probably the best of the rainy ones, with a downpour forcing us to climb out on wet, mud-slicked rock. Standing at the top, hoods pulled up and belaying Brian, Jon and I were met with the site of him dragging himself over the edge, face and hands caked with mud (some had fallen on him), gray rain framing him, gear hanging off him. He looked like goddamn Rambo.
We walked in the rain, carrying rope and gear, still wearing our harnesses, into town and went straight to an upscale restaurant to meet some other volunteers, who were wearing shirts and ties and skirts from having just come from Olympiad jury duty.
People stared.
Thursday was the day we didn't climb, the rain forcing us to spend the day playing chess and watching American television shows that Jon’s brother had downloaded, burned and mailed him. I had dropped 220 hrivna early in the week on groceries and we ate like kings, Brian and I taking turns in the kitchen whipping up steaks, hamburgers, pasta, you name it. Jon fears the kitchen and normally refuses to cook, but round about Wednesday he helped cut a potato. He then spent quite a bit of time bragging about this.
Despite the rain, we didn’t let a day go by without exercising (doctors recommend 30 minutes a day; you are exercising 30 minutes a day, aren’t you?). About 4:00 PM Jon sat up and said: “I’m going running.” We looked out the window. Watery cats and dogs were plummeting from the clouds. This meant nothing to Jon, who was watched by shocked Ukrainian eyes when he jogged around his village in –30 C temperatures. I’m not sure how, but ten minutes later we were all outside, jogging in the rain. I did two miles and felt that if I didn’t go back then, I’d end up walking home in the cold rain in shorts. Jon and Brian, marathon runners both, kept going, doing a circuit of Zhytomyr’s monuments and running nearly 10 miles.
Friday was a little more crazy. We were at the climbing wall with the movie club girls and Roman, a quiet guy who was climbing with us for the first time. This was his introduction to us:
Marina was busy cleaning mud off climbing shoes with a toothbrush used for just that purpose. Jon picked it up afterwards and mimed cleaning his teeth with it. I said “I’ll buy you a coke and chechel (smoked string cheese) if you brush for 10 seconds”. Coke and chechel happens to be Jon’s climbing snack of choice. He hesitated for a moment and then plunged the toothbrush in, scrubbing the grit onto his white teeth. He earned his food.
Ira had not brought climbing clothes and stood there watching in a skirt. She jokingly asked to borrow my jeans and I told her she could if I could wear her skirt. A little bit later, when I had returned with Jon's food, Marina was done climbing and had changed back into her clothes, allowing Ira to borrow her pants. Tanya pointed at Ira’s skirt, now neatly folded on top of my backpack. “Didn’t you say you wanted to wear that?”
So captured on my video camera is me taking off my jeans, putting on this skirt and catwalk walking in front of the climbing wall. What’s not on camera is Jon grabbing my jeans and taking off with them, and me putting on my boots and running after Jon, into and down the street in a skirt (which is not easy to run in), watched by shocked Ukrainian eyes.
We asked Roman the next day if we had scared him. In his over-formal English he said “I am not accustomed to such behaviors.”
And that wasn’t even the best story. Capstone of the week was Saturday night. Tonight, in fact, as I am typing this at 3:50 AM. Almost every American in town, 12 of us, went to a dance club. Although this was after a day of climbing (and our first and highly successful AIDS/Climbing seminar that morning), I running on high octane energy. Needless to say, the bad news at the beginning of the week, although still bad, was not emotionally dragging me down.
I danced for nearly six hours straight, one of the only guys in a sea of girls. I ended up sandwiched between one of the American girls and a Ukrainian girl, the Ukranian girl under the influence of more than just alcohol. The Ukrainian started pulling up my shirt while I was leaning back on the American, which was fun and fairly ego boosting, but then her hands went down to my pants. Before I could straighten back up, my belt was undone, my button unbuttoned, my fly unzipped and her hand was shooting towards my crotch. I’m not particularly gun shy with crowds (RE: running down the street in a skirt), but thought it prudent to stop this attempt at indecent exposure and possible genital mangling. I tried to back away, but the girl caught hold of the waistband of my jeans and would not let go. Amy tried to help, grabbing my arm and pulling me in one direction while the girl was pulling at my pants in the opposite direction. It was an oddly-erotic tug of war. It took two of the American girls prying at her fingers while the Ukrainian girl’s friend yelled at her (“Stop it! You’re embarrassing yourself!”), before she finally let go, and I could pull them back up.
People applauded.
I later saw the molester on the dance, eyes unfocused and dancing in her own world. Thing was, she wasn’t wearing a bra and one strap on her shirt had dropped down, exposing her breast. She didn’t seem to notice, but after a few minutes, her friend helped her yet again. Last I saw of her was when she was leaving, pulled by the friend, after she had accidently overturned a table and a stool, breaking some glasses and knocking a champagne bottle onto the next table.
All of this was maybe 5% of the stories that came out of this week, most of which are already moving through the Peace Corps grapevine but which I won’t put on the internet.
It was a great Spring Break.