I have decided that braids are the way to go during the summer, though.
My hair in braids from the front. This is my "white trash" photo
The braids from the back
Another weekend, another wall training, but this time it included Dasha and Nika, two friends of mine from Kyiv:
Nika's butt and Igor's everything at the wall
Yes, I am that strong. No, really. Seriously. Date me?
Igor, Dasha, Volva on the wall
Completely worn out from their first time climbing, they went to the club with me that night despite their exhaustion. We were supposed to meet up with other friends at the club, but a phone call later revealed they were too drunk from the pre-partying to even get out of their apartment. This left just the three of us and Dasha and Nika sharing me on the dance floor. Tough life. Actually, Nika is married and Dasha has been with her boyfriend for a year, but I think that made them more comfortable dancing with me rather than less, and post-alcohol we were getting pretty raunchy.
Dasha at the club
Dasha and Nika on the dance floor
Because they were tired and because I wasn’t leaving the dance floor, they were literally taking turns at the end of each song, one getting up to dance with me while the other sat back down at our table. The punchline of this story is that while Nika was dancing with me that Dasha, sitting with her back to a table but still able to overhear them, heard a girl remark about me: “well, he must have a lot of money if he can afford two prostitutes.”
I’d worry about giving Americans a bad name except, like I’ve said before on this blog, no one thinks I’m an American. They know I’m a foreigner, but when they ask where I’m from and I ask them to guess, they generally say France or Spain or, occasionally, Poland. This is such the general assumption that, while riding on a bus and talking to Dasha, a Ukrainian came up to me and started speaking to me in French. I told him in Russian that I don’t speak French and he kept on going anyway, finally ending with what sounded like a question, so I just said “Da.” He got off at that stop and Dasha asked: “what did he ask you?” “I have no idea,” I responded.
The next day rained out our hopes of climbing on the cliff, so we went back to the wall for a little bit before the girls said they were too tired to climb any more. So I took them to Zhytomyr’s space museum. I’d actually never been there, even though it’s Zhytomyr’s main bragging point. Sergei Karolov, who designed Mir, the first satellite in space, and Soyuz, the ship that took Gagarin, the first man in space, into space, was born in Zhytomyr. Hence, we have a cool museum with the original Soyuz ship, the return capsules, cosmonaut suits and a whole lot more. Possibly the coolest thing (and the most random) were a dozen chairs suspended from the ceiling that had headphones playing new age music. So I actually spent a good ten minutes resting my sore body on one of those, blissed out, wondering how to get one home to my apartment for use as a reading chair. Oh, and the entrance fee of this museum? One hrivna. Or, in American money, slightly less than 20 cents.
Anya in the space museum
The actual Soyuz spaceship. It was smaller than I had imagined.
A crawler used to get samples from the moon.
Blissed out in a space chair