Thursday, August 31, 2006

Ukraine: Back from the Carpathians (Vid)

I am sitting in Peace Corps office, just having got of a 7:15 AM arriving train from the Western part of Ukraine, where my entire group just had their Close of Service conference.

We were up in the Carpathian Mountains, which were beautiful, but we realized why you don't go to the mountains in August: it rained, hard, every day. We were inside mostly, realizing that getting out of Peace Corps may be harder than getting in, what with the insanely long checklist of paperwork, clearences and tasks that have to be done in order to go. We also did a lot of feedback sessions in order to improve the program in Ukraine and filmed a welcome message to the next group (who will arrive at the end of September).

But mostly we had fun: This was the first time our group had been together in a year and a half. We had a talent show during which Sean recited Pushkin from memory in yogic poses while I did an interpretive dance behind him. We had Ukrainian Disco night with everyone decked out in the extreme end of Ukr fashions (me in a billowy cossack-esque shirt, speedos, black socks and sneakers, which I've seen more than one Ukrainian in during the summer--well, they wear sandals, but I can't dance in sandals). We socialized. We drank. We realized we wouldn't see each other again for years, if ever (there were some that I hadn't seen since swearing-in, which meant we hadn't seen each other for years).

There were a couple of rain-soaked excursions: I bouldered in caves that once hid partisans. We rode a very-ghetto chair lift up a mountain in the pouring rain and then rode it right back down without geting off. I and three others made an attempt to climb the highest mountain in Ukraine and accidently climbed the wrong one (which will definitely be a future story on this blog).

I also had the best train rides out thus far in Ukraine. We practically took over whole wagons. I was feeling particularly social last night and jammed on guitar with a couple Ukrainians, spent hours talking with the eight Americans in our wagon, played with a seven year-old kid named Igor (whose mother half liked it/half didn't like that he was now bursting with energy when she wanted him to soon go to sleep), and met and got the digits of of a cutie named Lilia who goes to school in Kyiv.

It's been a good week.

I leave you with this:

I haven't seen television in eight months (watched some in America when I was there for New Years), but I happened to be at a friend's apartment a week ago and she happens to have a lot of money (both from a good job and her mom, who cleans houses in Italy, who sends money back) and has satellite television. It was on a music station and the Shakira "La Tortura" video came on. I'd heard the song before: it's a rage in the clubs here. But I hadn't realized the video was better than porn.

Due to said lack of television and internet bandwith problems I've never seen the video again, but while surfing here in the office I did find the code so all of you can watch it for me and send the resulting vibes my way. Shakira is the only woman I know who could have sex and draw a picture and have both come out perfectly. That is to say that her body moves completely independently of itself. Need to get back to the states and Latinas.

Que buena.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Ukraine: Uh, Cause I Live Here...

Was at a bar/club in Kyiv last night with a group of Volunteers for a bachelor party, as one of our number was soon going home to marry the American girl he's been faithful to all of service. It was fun at first and I was dancing with some girls, but then found that my group had met a huge group of English speakers: people from Britain, America and Canada whose parents or grandparents had come from Ukraine. They all had been raised speaking Ukrainian and now were on a three week tour of the county, most of which were visiting their ancestral homeland for the first time.

There was a lot of cuties and I was ready to start macking when I got sucked into a conversation that took down the next two hours and left me fumming. We had tee-shirts for the bachelor party and the writing on the back was in Russian. "Why Russian?" we were asked. Because most of the people in our group spoke Russian. "But you're in Ukraine." Yeah, but we live in Russian speaking towns. "But you should speak Ukrainian in Ukraine." This is not the first time I've had this conversation with newcomers, who knee jerk think that everyone in Ukraine must have spoken Ukrainian until the USSR tried to stamp it out and now it is a matter of cultural rebirth to speak it again. To be Ukrainian you have to speak Ukrainian, goes the too-simple argument.

I got into education mode (let's point out I'd had four shots of vodka in the past two hours) and started explaining how historically much of what is now Ukraine was not part of what was originally "Ukraine". Other than a sliver of land controlled by the cossacks (and even that wasn't for long), most of Ukraine was a colony of other countries after the collapse of Kyivian Rus 800 years ago (where they didn't speak Ukrainian, but Old Slavonic). In those 8 centuries, the land known now as Ukraine was in bits and pieces, at various times under the control of the Scandinavians, the Lithuanians, the Polish, the Mongols, the Turks, the Russians, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Swedes and the Germans. To give you an idea of this, here are some famous authors: Joseph Conrad, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose writings gave us the term "masochim") and Mikhail Bulgalkov. If asked, they would tell you their nationalities are Polish, Austrian and Russian, respectively, but they were all born on what is now Ukrainian soil; it just didn't happen to be Ukraine at the time.

The "Ukrainian" identity is rather recent, coming about only during the surge of nationalism that gripped Europe at the turn of the 19th century, when intellectuals started piecing together a culture out of traditions found in villages. In fact, until the end of the 19th century, Ukrainians as an ethnicity were called "Ruthenian" and were in the same ethnic group as Belarussians. "Ruthenian" was the only distinct name they had for themselves if they thought of themselves as different from Poles or Russians or whomever, which they often didn't. That doesn't mean the Ukrainian culture invalid; in fact I am proud of Ukraine and its quest to find an identity. But while Ukrainian as a language was spread around the country, to say Ukrainians speak Ukrainian doesn't take into account that never in its history did a majority of the people living in what is now in the boundaries of Ukraine speak Ukrainian. The new edict from the government that Ukrainian is the national language and its efforts to train every Ukrainian in the language is part of a manufactured attempt to create national cohesion in a country that has never had it. Most of the political problems in the country today are because so much of Ukraine identifies itself differently and why regions like Crimea or the Donbass (which has most of the country's population and industrial capacity) keep threatening to break away. Both are predominantly Russian-speaking and constantly feel like THIER identity as Ukrainians are hijacked becaues THEY are told they are not Ukrainian if they don't get on board with an identity that mostly originated in a different part of the country.

Imagine, if in America, you were told that Texas has all the original American attributes and that to not adopt Texas traditions and the Texan dialect, you aren't American.

Is this wrong to try to create this identity? Well, that's up for debate. When I got here I thought it was a good idea. I shared every opinion voiced to me by those people in that bar. But when my Ukrainina friends or students complain that nationalists make them feel bad for speaking a language (Russian) that their families have spoken for as long as they can remember, a language that the nationlists themselves speak but refuse to in an attempt to have a seperate identity from Russia (a country that they, for better or worse, are culturally, ethnically and economically intwined with), I realized the issue was much more complex and gray than books or articles on Ukraine paint it as.

And that's what these visitors knew of Ukraine: what was taught to them at the "Ukrainian schools" they told me they attended to learn about their ancesteral history and culture, and of course what their parents and grandparents taught them. But anyone who was in the diaspora would have been fleeing the crimes of the Soviet Union and of course this would make them nationalistic, rendering their opinons valid but biased, especially of what it's like on the ground in Ukraine today.

In my opinion you CAN'T go around trying to shovel under the Russian langauge and culture because that's as bad as what the Soviets were trying to do to Ukrainian language and culture (let me make the point, though, that I live in a predominantly Russian speaking city and speak Russian, so am unduly influenced by their views). My point is: let people speak what they want to speak, identify as they want to identify. It's just so ironic because Ukrainian culture IS Russian culture and vice versa. As slavs they share common cultural and linguistic anscestors and are much, much, much more alike than they are different. Most of what is Ukrainian "culture" is what is not shared by Russia, Belarus and Moldova (and even then they argue; some say bortch is Russian, others Ukrainian; the same for matroishka (nesting) dolls).

I was shouted down by several members of the group for all these opinions and angrily so. To a Ukrainian-American or Ukrainian-Canadian, Russia is the enemy and West is best. I was told I didn't know anything about Ukraine, that they'd been studying it their lives. They WERE Ukrainian, they said ("I'm a Ukrainian who just happens to live in Canada" said one guy who later admitted this was his first time in Ukraine). One guy in particular and and I argued for a long time because he refused to belive that perhaps, having lived here for two years and with the resulting intensive study of Ukrainian history, politics, culture and language, I might know a few things that someone who was visiting Ukraine for the first time might not. I've heard a lot about Cuba from my family and read a lot of books on it, but I'd like to think I'd let my assumptions be challenged if I visited Cuba and met an Australian who lived there for two years. This dude actually started getting in my face. I was calm, but he started yelling, calling me a retard and an idiot. He thought that everyone in Ukraine should speak Ukrainian, period. "They can speak what they want in their homes, but in the streets, in schools, they should speak Ukrainian because this is Ukraine," he said. I'm from America, but I don't speak American, I said. I speak English. The name of a country does not determine what it's people speak. The people do. Anything else is manufactured. I was reminded of the Spanish/English arguement in America, which he tried to pull in, but the two are dissimilar: students learning in a Spanish school in America are likely not to learn English, which may hold them back in a predominantly English speaking country. Ukraine is neither predominantly Ukrainian nor Russian speaking. Areas are predominantly one or the other, but you can hear both in every city in the country, it just depends what percentage or even how much the two intermixed. This guy didn't even realize that most places simply spoke dialect mixes of the two: because that's the nature of language. What it is in a book is never what it is on the street. He had never even heard of that or the word "surgic", the Ukrainian word for the mixed dialects, but then again, he doesn't live here.

He was also pissing me off because some things he "knew" were flat out wrong. He traced his ancestry to the Harkov oblast and I know that to be a Russian speaking oblast (I visited it last summer and Elizaveta, one of the Ukrainian girls I've dated lives there; Russian is the language she speaks at home), so I thought it was strange he was so gung-ho Ukrainian. When that was pointed that out, he said everyone in Harkov spoke Ukrainian and if they did speak Russian, it's becaues they felt forced to. I brought in Sean, who lives there, and he calmly explained that as a teacher trainer living in that oblast, he travelled around it regularly, was on a first name basis with hundreds of its teachers and only two of those he knew could speak Ukrainian. "90 percent of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian. I read that on Wikipedia!" the guy yelled. "That may be," said Sean calmly, "I'm just telling you what I know from living there." I realized the conversation was going nowhere and had to devolved into issue entrenchment and excused myself, letting Sean take over. Then I realized that my more combative nature had kept me in it for that long, and by then it was 3:30 AM and the group was packing up to leave. No cuties to hit on and I was annoyed beside.

Grrr.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Ukraine: No KaZantip :-(

Okay, so I never made it to KaZantip.

I talked to Peace Corps about how likely my trip was to go FUBAR with all the train problems due to exploding ordinance on the tracks (RE: last blog). My manager told me that the fire was out and trains were back to normal, but that people were protesting the incident by standing ON THE TRACKS, slowing down and halting traffic in and out of Crimea. He was harried because he was covering for three other managers, had to contact volunteers in the area to give them updates and was dealing with a few volunteers stranded in Crimea.

People were protesting because a number of trains simply sat in fields for 8-10 hours, with no food brought to the passangers and no information given to them. Somehow the protestors thought delaying traffic FURTHER and causing more delays for the people on the trains would somehow make their lives better.

I actually talked to one volunteer in the office who had been trying to go to Crimea, had found her train was routed to Hirsone (a town on the south coast) and no one had told her that (for hours she thought she was in Crimea), and it sat in Hirsone for about 8 hours. Finally, frustrated and running out of time she got on a bus back to Kyiv. About 35 hours to make a useless circle. And she was travelling with a friend who was visiting from America. Welcome to Ukraine.

My manager said that the Travel Ministry had told them everything was back to okay and running on time and, that while he himself wouldn't risk it, if KaZantip was worth it to me, then go.

That afternoon I was in the train station with ten minutes until my train. No line number by the train. No line number by any of the trains heading into Simferopal. It appears that while the Travel Ministry says everything is okay, they've gone ahead and cancelled every train running into Crimea.

There was a predictable mob at the window to get new tickets. Most of the discussion was about how to get on buses into Crimea and a couple of smart scalpers were haggling with people in the group, offering to get them onto buses or marshrutkas. There are no lines in Ukraine, so I wedged, body blocked and elbowed my way for an hour until I got to the counter. An ingenious lady behind me, holding a two-year old girl asked me, since her arms were tired, if she could put the girl on the counter. The ploy was obvious, but how could I say no? This put her ahead and a couple opportunists squeezed in behind her, shoving my ribs into the counter and now this little girl was blocking my access to the window. Still, I was Zen about it: I was on a couple hours of fitful sleep and really didn't care. I finally got my ticket in the window and they wordlessly rebooked me, as they were doing everyone, onto the 23:00 train into Simferopal.

I took stock: if nothing else went wrong and there was no guaruntee of that, I'd have about 12 hours at KaZantip. This was enough because 12 hours of drinking and dancing and oggling women does tend to wear one out enough to just get back on a train. But that was if nothing went wrong. I could well spend that 12 hours sitting on a train because someone decided to take a nap on the tracks in protest. And for some reason, I've been risk-averse lately, with my gut sliding to the safe side. Must be getting old.

Plus, I didn't feel like spending six more hours waiting on yet another train that may well get cancelled, stranding me in Kyiv another night. Burn me once, burn me twice, I ain't sticking around for a third.

Let's recap the past two years of delayed/cancelled travel:

Hurricane Jeanne: Florida
Widespread Flooding: Romania
Train wreck: Hungary
Exploding armory: Ukraine

I went and got a couple drinks with some Peace Corps volunteers, got back to Zhytomyr and got my tickets refunded (I was NOT going to wade into another line at the Kyiv train station. And yes, you have to go to one window to get rebooked, then to another window to get a refund) and then went and slept like the dead.

Dissapointed about KaZantip, but there's always next year...

Trains: I think by now they may be back to normal. My first train (coming down from Moscow) never arrived. I got put on one the next day. The next day, my train was cancelled again, this time because most train traffic between Kyiv and Crimea was disrupted due to a fire in an armory that had ordinance exploding everywhere. 4,000 people got evacuated and a lot of trains just sat on the tracks for 8-10 hours. In protest, people started blocking the train lines, causing more problems. One volutneer I ran into in Kyiv had gotten as far as Hirsone, waited for 8 hours and finally caught a bus back to Kyiv. 35 hours to make a circle and do nothing. Worse, she had a friend visiting from America, and that's what the friend got to see of Ukraine. They put us all on an 23:00 PM train, but I'd only have maybe 12 hours at KaZantip, IF nothing else went wrong. The Ministry said everything was back to normal, but they said that BEFORE they cancelled all the afternoon trains to Simferopol (by the way, that created a mob at the window that I had to elbow and fight my way through for an hour before getting the 23:00 train ticket). I just had a couple drinks with some other volunteers, went back to Zhytomyr, got my ticket refunded at the Zhytomyr train station (because I was not going to try standing in another line in Kyiv) and went straight to Tatyana's apartment.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Ukraine: A Series of Unfortunate Events

Thus far my trip was gong really smoothly: I had cleaned my apartment, packed up, hung out with some friends and caught the marshrutka to Kyiv. I had called Tony, the guy I was staying with, and found out that "the horde", the group of Peace Corps males in my group who were spending the last of their vacation days marauding around Crimea, was staying with him for the next two nights, so I was walking into a party before I was even going to the festival. I was so pumped I was pumping my fist, excited to be back on the road after almost two weeks of sitting in Zhytomyr

I was in Peace Corps office, writing a blog as to where I was going: a whirlwind two night trip to Crimea to party at the alcohol-fueled nudist beach with a techno beat that is the month-long KaZantip Music Festial, when the series of unfortunate events started. After spending about forty minutes writing about the festival and my plans, I clicked the post button. Nothing happened. I had forgotten: the internet in Peace Corps gets turned off at 10:00 PM, and that had happened three minutes before.

Oh well, not a huge loss.

I leave Peace Corps to go the metro and arrive at the train station with exactly ten minutes until my train left, right on time. I look at the board, notice that the Kyiv-Simferopol train was ten minutes later than the time on my ticket, but thought maybe they had changed it.

I go to the train and the lady looks at my ticket: it's the wrong train.

I begin to run, something I'm familiar with at train stations, and get into the main station to look at the main board listing. There's my train, but there's no line assigned. That's bad. I look at the information board. My train has been delayed by four hours, to leave at 3:00 AM. That's very bad.

I go to the information window. An older guy ahead of me, in his fifties, asks about the same train I'm supposed to be on. The lady tells him 3:00 AM and offers no more information. Enraged, he spits on the glass seperating him from her. Since he summed it up for me, I just walk away.

I notice on the board there are two other trains leaving to the exact same destination, each leaving in ten minutes. Of course, there's a train full of people thinking the exact same thing. There's a mob at the sales window, and a lot of yelling. I figure it's not even worth it, and leave. It's strange, though: I've had problems with many trains in many countries, but in nearly two years I've never had a train in Ukraine be late.

I catch the metro back to Peace Corps office and read for three and a half hours, then call a cab because it's 2:30 AM, the metro is closed, and the last time I walked that late at night in a Ukrainian city alone, I got mugged. Because it was so late it cost 20 hriven, for a ride that should have cost six.

At the train station, the information board now says the train will leave at 4:30 AM. People are sprawled, sleeping on their bags, and the station is calm, quiet, a relief from the chaos just a few hours before. The situation is familiar, though: the last time I was on a train that was continually bumped back (in Budapest), it never arrived. I figure it's better just to catch a different train the next day.

I go to the information window and asked where to change my ticket. I was told at the sales windows on the other side of the train station, and this is a long, long train station.

I walk and walk and get to a window and ask about my train. The woman is honest: the train is coming out of Moscow and there are problems, but she's not specific as to what. No one actually knows when it will arrive, she tells me. The honesty is nice: In Budapest they kept us waiting at the station for more than ten hours before someone finally confessed there had been a train wreck and it wasn't coming at all.

I asked about trading in my ticket for a new one. Can't do it, I was told. I'd have to turn in my ticket and lose ten percent and then buy a new one.

I walked towards the sales window, but then passed a tiny window, manned by a guy wearing a tie. That looked promising. I told him the situation and he wordlessly stamped and signed the ticket so that I could get a full refund.

Another window later I had my refund. Another window later I had bought my new ticket. The ticket was exactly 20 hriven less than the one I turned in. So, a lot of time had been wasted but financially I had broke even.

I was deteremined to keep it even: the walk back to Peace Corps office was about 20 minutes, mostly uphill and with that risk of mugging, but I didn't want to bother with getting ripped off by another cab.

I walked outside into heavy rain. It was fucking raining. And all the cabs were full. After trying to find one for about ten minutes, I finally flagged one down. I told him my stop and even though it was five minutes by car, he said he didn't want to go there and didn't bother giving a reason. He was driving off as I was shutting the door.

Oh well, the rain meant no one's was going to mug me.

I walked, soaked, but luckily it was a warm night. I reflected on my situation and the possibility of getting mugged. The fact was that I looked Ukranian. I was travelling as light as possible to Crimea since I knew I'd be taking my stuff in with me to the festival. All I had was a bathing suit, a towel, a toothbrush, a contact case and a book in a canvas satchel. In my hand was a baba bag with some train food, which just made me look even more Ukranian. Add in the crew cut, the shaved face and the fact that every item of clothing I was wearing save my underwear, right down to my shoes, was made in Ukraine. On the street I passed a guy in the rain who was trying to flag down a car, a huge backpack on his back and NOT looking Ukranian. I thought, "hmm, maybe I should just mug him. Come out financially up for the night."

I kept walking.

Back at Peace Corps office I told the guard my story and he said I could sleep on a couch in the lounge. Only I knew they had two beds in the medical office for people who were sick. Are they being used? No. Can I sleep in one? No. Why not? We need permission from the medical staff. Can you ask? He glanced at the clock. It was nearly 4:00 AM. Too late to call. Whatever. I went upstairs, used my towel as a pillow and slept on the couch, clothes still wet.

A few hours later, volunteers started coming in, getting off early arriving trains. Their conversations woke me up, kept me up, so I went back downstairs to ask the guard to call medical. It was almost 8:00 AM, but after two calls to two numbers he couldn't get medical on the line. This is a business day, and medical is supposed to be reached 24 hours a day. Whatever. I went back upstairs and tried to get a few more hours of sleep.

I think I was happiest with my reaction to the situation: a combination of stoicism and determination. Peace Corps does that to you. I was never even annoyed during the whole thing, just went with the flow. I kept remembering Budapest and what a nightmare that was: ten hours in a fugue-Zombie state of half sleep at the train station before using the last of my cash to get a cab back to the hostel and then using my passport as collateral just to get a bed to get to sleep. That had cost me a lot of time and money. This cost me some discomfort and my trip getting pushed back a day (and now it really would just be a one night blitz at the festival), and I'd miss partying with the horde, but things were still on track.

I woke up on the couch a few hours later to hear volunteers complaining to each other that out that train traffic into Crimea was being severely delayed. I got online and found out that an arms depot right on the tracks leading into Crimea had caught fire and that ordinance was going off every two or three minutes, launching shells 900 feet into the air.

My train from last night was going right past that depot. Possibly that was the reason the train never came into Kyiv, although unlikely. The terminus was in Crimea but plenty of people would be on it from the Moscow-Kiev route, so it should have come in before turning back. So maybe that was my saving grace. I figured my trip would be scrapped, but then I checked my train routes. The depot was on the Eastern line. The train I had gotten for today, even though it was three hours longer (I had only picked it the night before because the departure and arrival times were more convienient), took the Western line. If I had picked the next train, leaving later and arriving earlier (and saving time), I would have been going past that depot.

So that was my series of unfortunate events, but things seem to be looking up (if not being on a train scheduled to go past an exploding arms depot is up). I'm more determined to go and have a great time at this festival, and, at the least, it's a story.

I leave in six hours.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Ukraine: Yep, it's Gone (Pics)

My mom doesn't like me with long hair, but she also doesn't like it when I buzz it short. So she's probably still not happy, but Locks of Love will be (hopefully). My hair was finally long enough to donate, so away it went. Soon it will be made into a wig for children in need of one. Last time I donated my hair (right before Peace Corps), I never got back any kind of notification from Locks of Love, making me wonder if they recieved and/or accepted the hair. Hopefully I'll get some kind of response this time. If you don't like the way I look with short hair don't tell me 'cause it's not like I can make it come back!

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The last picture taken of me with my hair down.

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Saturday, August 12, 2006

Ukraine: Crimea Trip, Part 2 (Pics)

Katie and I spent the next four days mostly on marshrutkas, criss-crossing the country and me on my mobile tracking people down. I knew a lot of people in the area, but they were all traveling themselves. In the end, although our route looked like a web made by a spider on LSD, we saw all the sights we came to see without ever paying for accommodation.

We saw a huge fortress, packed beaches and a music festival in Sudak. The music festival was partly sponsored by ACET, and they loaned us a tent for the night, one among hundreds strung along the coastline. The day was spent lounging on a pebble beach by the Black Sea, waiting for the evening’s musical entertainment. The show was cancelled, though, because the whole area lost electricity. One group decided to play anyway, going acoustic on a stage lit by the headlights of a single car.

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A view of Sudak

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Me and the fortress

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Cute baby

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Packed beaches in Sudak

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A nice view

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Me working the speedo

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Tents at the music festival

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Concert by headlights

We saw the Swallow’s Nest, a concrete “castle” built in 1912 by a German for his mistress. It’s now a restaurant. From the base of the cliffs the “castle” is perched on, we took a relaxing boat ride down the coast to Alupka, home to a gorgeous Russian palace that is a clash of styles, Arabic and English being the most obvious. It sits nestled between a mountain range at its back and the sea at its front. It was amazing.

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The Swallow's Nest

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The coast from the boat

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The mountains behind the Alupkan palace. The following photos are all from the palace

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We also saw a nipple. It was on the breast of the rather attractive girl sitting behind us on the marshrutka to the Swallow’s Nest. The girl had fallen asleep and one breast had popped out of her bikini top. When I first saw the nipple, during a head turn to look out the window, I was, of course, horrified. It was an obscene display. Unfortunately, I couldn’t look away. I was so disgusted that I felt I had to document it to report it to the authorities. Which is why I took a couple pictures. There was a man sitting beside her, a man I assumed to be her boyfriend. He had sunglasses on, but hopefully was asleep. Luckily, he didn't punch me in the face.

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The nipple

We saw a Lenin statue by a McDonalds in Yalta. Yalta is a major tourist destination for rich Russians, made obvious by the trendy clothes stores that line the boardwalk on the coast of the Black Sea. Also lining the boardwalk were a number of “give us your vacation money” stalls. My favorites were those that had racks and racks of costumes and display settings where you could pay to have your picture taken on a throne in a Renaissance dress or on a Harley Davidson in leather and studs.

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The Lenin statue is in the lower right. He's cursed to forever look at a McDonalds

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Want to take a picture on a Harley Davidson?

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Yalta

We ended where we began: back at the limestone cliffs of Bakhchysaray, where Mike and I spent the morning climbing before Katie and I got on a train to Kiev. This time I brought plenty of water and didn’t have to run.

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Mike belaying me as I climb

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Ukraine: Crimea Trip, Part 1 (Pics)

Just got back from a pretty cool trip from Crimea. Stories and Pics:

Had to run for the train yet again. This time it was in the middle of nowhere and completely dehydrated because the sauna-like train I was on to Crimea sold only beer (seriously). Normally trains stop at bazaar-like stations, people selling fruit and bottled water to you through the windows. You’d think a 16-hour long train would have a few more provisions but, um, no. I asked the train attendant and she said the next stop would have water.

At the next stop, I got off and went to the station, stood in line at the cafe, and kept eye on the train. The line shrank slowly and I began to worry about get stranded. I was somewhere in the middle of Ukraine, but that’s all I could knew. I was in a tee-shirt, cotton shorts and sandals and that’s all I had. It was finally my turn but they had no water without gas. It’s a failing of mine in Ukraine, where gas water is the norm, but I can barely drink it. I turned to see the train moving. Good thing I didn’t buy water, because I now had to run.

I ran, in these foam sandals, leaping down onto one set of tracks (they are about five feet lower than the concrete), leaping up onto the concrete divide, back down onto another set of tracks, back up onto the next divide and finally down onto my tracks, running alongside the train, which was picking up speed. The door to my wagon was shut and the train was beginning to go faster. I was about to be stranded with nothing in the middle of nowhere (sort of: all my money and my passport was with me; I’m not that stupid). God dammit!

But someone must have seen me through a window because the door swung back open and I jumped on. The train attendant caught my arm and helped me. She shook her head with a wry smile. “American,” she said in Russian. The whole wagon knew who I was: I was traveling with Katie, and of course everyone heard our English. But when a girl came by who needed help with her bags, I started speaking to her in Russian. That caught people’s attention and since Ukrainians rarely hide their curiosity, I was mobbed by people most of the evening, six sitting around me at one point, asking questions about me and America and trying out the few English phrases they knew. The nice thing about answering the same questions for two years is that you get really good at giving thoughtful, grammatically perfect answers and everyone thinks your language is better than it is.

But I was out of breath when the attendant bemusedly said “American”, so all I could do was grin and say “Da.”

***

The first stop after spending an evening relaxing with my friend Mike in Simferopol was Bakhchysaray. Bakhchysaray is the main home of the Crimean Tartars, an ethnicity that had mostly fled the Soviet Union and its persecution but was now slowly returning to its homeland, starting with this city. My first encounter with this group was being cursed in the train station. I don’t know what I did (maybe I cut her off coming out the door) but suddenly an old woman was yelling at me, waving her hand in the air at me and repeatedly pointing at her palm. The tartars have their own language and I assumed it was this until I caught the words: “shestnatsit prostitutki”. Those words were Russian (or common to both languages), and I was surprised to hear them. It had occurred to me that she might simply have been forcefully blessing me, but as I turned and kept on walking, I could figure out how a curse or a bless could involve sixteen prostitutes.

Bakhchysaray, controlled for a long time by the Turks, was a treasure trove of sites. There were six of us there: five volunteers and Katie. Katie, myself and a volunteer named Patrick decided to brave the steep, mile-long path to see some of these sights. Chandani, Mona and Lauren decided to wait for us at a cafй. We trudged up first to see the Upsenky Monastery, a tiny church over 1,000 years old that had been carved into the limestone cliffs above Bakcherserai. In addition to a tiny worship area and some beautiful views, it also had a “healing fountain”. Unfortunately it wasn’t turned on.

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Upsenky Monastary

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Another forty minutes of hiking brought us to Chufut-Kale, a cave city that constantly made me think of the Flintstones. Protecting Ukrainians, Turks, Tartars, Jews and their predecessors for more than 1,400 years, it is what it is: a lot of cool caves with windows and doors carved into them.

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Living like the Flinstones

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Yours truly on top of Chufut-Kale

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Interesting old guy

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Tartar eating area

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Climbing around in the caves

Meeting back up with the rest of the group, we headed down to the Khan’s palace. Although this and much of the rest of Crimea had been under Turkish control, most of that evidence had been wiped out under the rule of Catherine the Great of Russia. She spared the Khan’s palace, though, because of a poem. Pushkin had written about the “Fountain of Tears” which had been created to “contain the grief” of the last Crimean Khan. He had been so distraught over the death of one of his harem girls, a Polish beauty who never requited his love, that he was neglecting his country. The poem and the fountain were so famous in Russia that Catherine let the palace continue to exist.

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Minarets of the Khan's Palace

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Chandani, Lauren, Mona, Katie and Patrick, relaxing at the Khan's Palace

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The Ambassador's gate at the palace

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The Khan's swinging bachelor pad

After walking for an hour around through the beautiful rooms of the Palace, seeing the mosque, marveling at the minarets and really wishing I had a harem (the carpet-appointed room was only one of what used to be four harems in the palace), we still hadn’t found the fountain. Trying to demystify a map on one wall and unable to get my bearings (nor seeing a name for the Fountain of Tears), I stopped a tour guide, pointed at the biggest looking fountain on a map and asked how to get there. In a tone that said “you fucking idiot” was what lay beneath the words, the guide told me that the map was of how the palace had looked 300 years before and was no longer accurate. Oh. We finally found the fountain, had walked by it before because it was so tiny. But it did have the traditional roses laid atop it: one red for love, the other yellow for chagrin.

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The Fountain of Tears


Getting back to the train station provided a political discourse: we had flagged down a car and the six of us piled in, me across the laps of the three girls in the back, Patrick sitting on Chandani’s lap in the passenger seat. This less than intelligent arrangement occurred because the driver had been yelling at us to get in as fast as possible. His name was Misha and he looked in his seventies. He charged us one hrivna each, much cheaper than the four we had been charged coming from the station. He asked in Russian where we were from. When told America he said, “horrible country.” I asked him why he thought that and he said how much better it had been under the Soviet Union and that the USA was responsible for its downfall. He stopped the conversation just long enough to ask Patrick, Patrick’s face pressed against the glass, if he saw a car coming. Patrick responded in a negative and Misha gunned onto the next street before picking up where he left of, saying how everything was cheap when he was growing up and everything was great until America had ruined it. But he seemed to have no problem giving a group of Americans a ride in his car and charging us much left than our last cab. He shook my hand when we got out and we caught the train back to Simferopal.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Ukraine: Full Circle

Remember the Orange Revolution? When much of the country banned together in peaceful protest against a falsified election one by Victor Yannakovich?

Those paying attention and those of us living here have watched that promise of democracy slowly slide, but I for one didn't realize it was on a curve, and always had been. After all the petty political infighting and lack of progress that led to Yuchenko loosing his support and after dragging out negotiations for four months on achieving a coalition in parliment, something happened.

It came full circle.

You see, the presidency no longer matters. After changes enacted after the Orange Revolution, power now rests in the hands of the Prime Minister. Because of personality conflicts--mostly from Yuchenko refusing to have his Orange Party join forces with Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc because he did not want her becoming prime minister after having fired her from that post--nothing got done with the Western-leaning political parties, even though they all stood for the same thing. So after months of being with them, the Socialist party, a rather small one, switched sides. But it was enough for the Socialist party, now aligned with the Communist party and the Party of Regions--Yannokovich's party, to give the other side a majority.

This morning, Yannokovich was named Prime Minister.

Less than two years after the Orange Revolution, when Ukraine was heralded as a shining beacon of democracy in a region crawling out of the shadow of the former USSR, the Socialists and the Communists control the parliment and the power of the country will rest in the hands of the man the country banded together to oust.

One friend, who was a staunch supporter of the revolution, was asked if he'd march again on Maidan. "I was on Maidan last year," he said. "Look what happened."

I was here for the Orange Revolution. People felt like they could make a difference, had control. It was all people could talk about. Now, the biggest indicator of the national mood is that no one is talking about it. Everyone is apathetic. They can't change what's going on, best to just get on with their lives.

Full circle.

Ukraine: Climbing Camp Pics

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Because few people could work every single day during the week, I had a staff of 12 for the camp: three climbing instructors, four team games instructors, a yoga instructor, and four healthy lifestyles instructors. Pictured here are the Americans: Mike, Mike (called Manly to prevent confusion), me, Sean and Jon

DAY 1: The Climbing Wall

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Every morning, Sean and Diana taught yoga to the kids.

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Students learning from Mike how to belay

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Manly holding down a kid

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The kids doing trust falls

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In the foreground, a team guides a team member blindfolded through an obstacle course. In the back, the other teams play another game

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Playing more team games

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Five people in my apartment meant we went and got Steve's old bed from his apartment since he's done with Peace Corps and will be moving soon. We carried this thing more than a mile back to my place, people staring at us the whole way.

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Communal meals, cooked every night by Sean

DAY 2: THE CLIFFS

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Going to the site

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Diana teaching yoga

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The kids attempting yoga

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Equipment, waiting to be put up. It was a morning race to get all the routes up in the 30 minutes Sean and Diana were teaching yoga. On the last day, Mike and I got eight ropes up in 20 minutes.

The trio of activities:

Climbing
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Healthy Lifestyles
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Team Games (I am a dragon and they have to get my "treasure"--a figure 8 belay device--without me touching them)
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Group photo from the end of Day 2

DAYS 3 & 4

Kids climbing:
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Sean interviewed by the local news

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Web activity: the kids have to get their entire team through without using a hole twice.

DAY 5
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Jon and I put up a rope that stretched across the river that the kids (hooked in with a harness) had to pull themselves across hand over hand, Mission Impossible style. It was difficult getting it tight enough without a jumar or a grigri, which is why, on the first test, it sagged under my weight and I ended up in the water. I forgot my camera was in my pocket, which is why there are no more pictures until it dried out at the end of the day.

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End of the day, end of the camp group photo: all the kids and most of the instructors with their tee-shirts and certificates.

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The last communal meal before we hit the club. There were about fifteen of us at the club that night and we didn't come back until the sun was well up. Great camp.