Peace Corps: Ukraine

America: Back

2006-12-08T10:16:00.005-05:00

I am back in America. For three days I have seen family and friends, surfed way too much internet and mulled my future. It's good to be back, but I already miss Ukraine. I had a purpose there and don't have one here. There I was somebody, and now I am anybody. I know this will change and within a few months I'll have a laundry list of projects but for now I feel adrift. This is partly pleasant and partly sad.

Things I immediately noticed upon arrival in America:

1) Minorities
2) English
3) Fatties
4) Space: I ate in a restaurant in the airport with plenty of space between the tables and plenty of empty tables. In a public transit area in Ukraine I'd be sharing a table with someone I didn't know.
5) Service

I keep feeling like America is nicer and meaner than I remember. For example: I went to a restaurant with a friend. The waiter was uber-friendly (annoyingly so) and was refilling our drinks when they were still more than half-full. A) There are no free-refills in Ukraine and B) You'd have to hunt down a server to get one even if you wanted to pay for it. So take this amped-friendly service (which I had missed) and contrast it with this: I was driving yesterday and discovered I was in the wrong lane to turn at the light. I rolled down my window, smiled and motioned to the SUV beside me, inquiring the older woman driver if I could pull ahead of her when the light went green. Her expression turned to one of anger and she squinted her eyes and forcefully mouthed the word "NO!" It shocked the hell out of me. There isn't a Ukrainian in the world world who wouldn't have allowed me to switch lanes. Ukrainians are really rude in some senses, but they'll get off a packed bus so you can get out, give you detailed directions (if they don't take you there themselves) and generally try to help you out (Communism did breed communalism). So while they'll generally always work as little as they have to (hence the service), they wouldn't make someone have to drive off and make a later U-turn (as I did) just because they didn't want you pulling in front of them.

I tried to figure out why she reacted that way and the best I could come up with is that it affronted her that I would make her wait for my own gain, or that she had earned that spot and I was trying to selfishly take it (like line-jumping). And then I remembered that a few years ago I wouldn't have asked: I would have put my car nose in front of her's (telling myself that she owned an SUV and deserved it) and muscle my way into the spot.

I guess Peace Corps does change you.

But here I sign off and bring this blog to a close. Peace Corps was a very difficult, eye-opening and (above all) amazing experience. I go on to do different and (hopefully) interesting things. Thanks for taking the ride with me.

Ukraine: Done

2006-11-29T11:24:00.001-05:00

Wow.

Like everything in my life it was at the last second: I was supposed to check-out today but a series of events meant I got to Kyiv with only 90 minutes before the office closed and I was in need of a medical checkout, needed to close my grant (which normally takes a couple hours) and still needed half a dozen signatures from people who weren't in their offices.

And with quite a bit of help and good-will and at least one very annoyed financial manager (along with running up and down three flights of steps about nine times)...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 and finally finishing everything put me on an adrenaline high.

Wow.

Done.

I fly home in five days.

Ukraine: Why I Almost Quit Peace Corps

2006-11-23T16:53:00.002-05:00

Why I almost quit Peace Corps 12 days before finishing it:

Well, before we get to that I want to talk about my language proficiency test, which was one of many tests, exams, surveys and interviews that comprise the two page typed checklist that must be completed before I can close my service. It’s almost as hard to get out of Peace Corps as into it.

I thought my language test would be in the afternoon and toyed with the idea of drinking a “longehr” (a pre-mixed vodka and juice drink sold on any street corner in Kyiv) in order to grease the grammar. I have had it independently confirmed that my Russian is quite a bit better under the influence of alcohol, if only because I stop worrying about making mistakes, something which no doubt causes me to make more of them. Unfortunately, my test was scheduled for 10:00 AM and despite the Ukrainian belief that 100 grams of alcohol every morning is healthy for you, even after two-plus years of living here I still can’t stomach the idea of vodka for breakfast. So I went and did it sober.

I was hoping--only hoping mind you--for a score of Advanced-Low. In reality, though, I thought I would receive an Intermediate-High. I had thought I was at this level during the last test I took in January, but only received an Intermediate-Mid. Now, while I have grown more comfortable with the language over the past ten months or so, I haven’t felt like it went up drastically. In fact, I thought the high point was around August when I was dating a girl who didn’t speak English and most of my Ukrainian friends found it was easier to speak with me Russian than mash their way through English.

But after Sarah came to Ukraine, I found myself speaking English for pretty much a month because I spent most of my time with her and even when we did hang out with Ukrainians, we kept it to English so she didn’t feel excluded. Sarah’s month long visit put my work into a backlog and I was swamped with catching up, leaving little time for socialization. The result? I felt like my Russian died and was having dirt thrown onto it. So I was hoping for Advanced-Low but would be satisfied with Intermediate-High, secretly worrying that I was still at Intermediate-Mid.

The test was simply sitting down with a Ukrainian staff member and having a conversation. Thirty minutes of describing my projects and my vision of the future of Peace Corps in Ukraine later, I was given a score Advanced-Mid, higher than I had ever hoped for. Hammer out the grammar problems, I was told, and it would have been Advanced-High.

Made my day.

And I didn’t even need the vodka.

***

My day took a slight turn for the worse in the afternoon. Admin was confused because I kept telling them I was flying out on December 4th but the computers showed me COSing (Closing of Service) on December 14th. Why? Well that’s the official COS date. I knew we were allowed to leave up to 30 days before that, though, so had bought a ticket for the 4th. Apparently, though, there was a form for that.

“Can I fill out this form now?”

“No, it was due in October. You can’t leave until the 14th.”

“But I bought a non-refundable plane ticket for the 4th.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll talk to Diana about it.”

NOTE: Diana Schmidt was the Director of Peace Corps Ukraine.

“The person to talk about that is [Bob]. But he won’t approve it.”

NOTE: Bob was a Ukrainian working for Peace Corps, but I will keep his identity secret.

I go up to Bob’s office and ask his secretary if he is in.

“No, he’s out to lunch. What do you need?”

I show her the form and say I need it approved.

“He won’t approve that. It was due in October.”

“But I need to leave on the 4th.”

“You can’t.”

On the way out of the office, another admin worker that I'm friends with expressed shock and dismay that I hadn't filled out the form. According to her, there was no way to get it approved.

Dammit.

I went to the Diana's office and talked to her secretary. The secretary said that Diana was busy, but that she could squeeze me in for five minutes in an hour's time. Also, the secretary said not to even ask Bob about the form. He'd be angry I hadn't filled it out in the first place.

I went down to the volunteer lounge and fumed for a bit. It was my fault. I vaguely remembered being told about the form when I had been being handed the inch-thick stack of paperwork required to leave Peace Corps. And yes, I had never filled it out.

Three Peace Corps employees told me there was no hope of getting it approved and that Bob will have an aneurism if I even bring it up. But they were Ukrainian and Ukrainians ultimately think differently. Bribery may be part of their culture, but getting approved past a due date is not. Americans, on the other hand, bend rules if the rules need bending.

But if Bob said no, what was my option. Quitting. The consequences? None, really. After a year in Peace Corps, you get all the benefits you'd get if you finish your service, save one: non-competitive eligibility for government jobs. But that benefit only lasts a year from your close of service, and I didn't see myself trying to get a government job any time soon, if ever. So if I quit, on my paperwork it would say “Early Termination” rather than “Close of Service” and that was it. So quitting was definitely an option, but I hated the idea of having an asterisk on any statement I made about serving in Peace Corps.

At the time of my appointment I explained the problem to Diana, admitted it was my fault and said I needed this favor. She winked at me and said, “let’s do it.” As she signed the form, she said “Bob’s going to kill me.”

I took it down to my manager. He looked surprised that the director had signed it, but signs on his line anyway. “Bob’s going to be pissed,” he said.

I took it up to Bob. I handed him the paper. He nodded and signed it.

“You’re not upset?” I asked.

“Why would I be?” he asked in return. “The director signed it, so I don’t care.”

I left the office and went back to the admin person handling my paperwork and told her my COS date has been officially moved up. She didn't believe me, and actually called Bob for confirmation. She hung up the phone, looking surprised.

“Bob didn’t yell at you?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said. “He didn’t care.”

She got a a far-away look in her eyes. “Well I guess you never know,” she said.

My official COS date is now November 29.

In six days, I will no longer be in Peace Corps.

Ukraine: Description of Service

2006-11-14T06:43:00.001-05:00

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)

After a competitive application process emphasizing professional skills, cultural sensitivity, adaptability and medical fitness, Daniel Reynolds was invited into Peace Corps service as a Teacher Trainer.

On September 29th, 2004, Daniel Reynolds joined the twenty-seventh group of Peace Corps Volunteers to serve in Ukraine. He entered an intensive 12-week Peace Corps Ukraine community-based training program. The training program included 150 hours of technical instruction in TEFL methodologies and teaching practice, 200 hours of Ukrainian language training, and 100 hours of cross-cultural studies (history, economy, cultural norms, etc.). To reinforce language and cross-cultural learning, Daniel Reynolds lived with a Ukrainian family in the town of Obhiev, Kyiv Region throughout training.

In preparation for his Peace Corps service, Daniel Reynolds, while a trainee, taught at Public School #11. While at Public School #11, Daniel Reynolds taught English and Country Studies. As a teacher trainer, he also helped the four other trainees in his cluster plan their and observed their teaching to provide feedback.

U.S. Ambassador John Herbst swore in Daniel Reynolds as a Peace Corps Volunteer on December 23rd, 2004 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Daniel Reynolds was assigned to Zhytomyr, a city of 300,000 in west-central Ukraine. He worked as a full-time instructor at the Zhytomyrska Oblast Recertification Institute which trains and recertifies 200 teachers a year. He was one of two TEFL Pedagogy teachers and reported directly to the institute’s director Ivan Ivanovich Yakuno, while working closely with his counterpart Irina Borislavina Gumenyuk, the Head of the Foreign Languages Department.

Teacher were recertified at the institute every five years in groups of 25-30, each attending month-long courses. Daniel Reynolds taught more than 300 teachers over his two year service, personally training 40% of the English teachers in the Zhytomyrska Oblast. He taught the following 90-minute seminars:

•Introduction and Terminology of the Recertification Course
•Approaches to Language Teaching
•The Communicative Method
•Teaching Speaking Skills
•Teaching Listening Skills
•Teaching Reading Skills
•Teaching Writing Skills
•Teaching Integrated Skills
•Teaching Vocabulary
•Teaching Grammar
•Teaching Mixed-Ability Classrooms
•Lesson Planning
•Classroom Instruction/Management
•Teaching Young Learners (five different seminars)
•Language Improvement (four different seminars)
•Country Studies (four different seminars)

Daniel Reynolds also developed and taught an advanced English language program for secondary students. His lessons fostered critical, creative thinking through interactive learning. This program prepared students for Ukraine’s highly competitive English competitions (Olympiads). All his students qualified in their regional Olympiads and went on to compete at the oblast level. At the oblast level, one of his students took first place and two took second place in their respective divisions and all three went on to compete nationally.

Daniel Reynolds developed, with Irina Borislavina Gumenyuk, all the tasks used in the Zhytomyrska Oblast English Olympiads for 2005 and 2006. This involved writing numerous writing and speaking prompts, as well as creating multiple-choice and true/false reading and listening tasks for three different grade levels. He also judged at the Zhytomyrska Oblast Spanish Olympiad in 2005 and at the Zhytomyrska Oblast English Olympiads in 2005 and 2006 (in order to prevent a conflict of interest, he did not judge the grade level of the students he was coaching). When the Ukrainian National English Olympiads took place in Zhytomyr in 2006, Daniel Reynolds helped coordinate the ten Peace Corps volunteers who came to Zhytomyr to judge at them.

Daniel Reynolds developed a large body of original teaching materials during his service. These included: a twelve lesson integrated skills English Competition training course that included audiovisual materials and used authentic materials; a five lesson Country Studies course on America, each lesson including authentic materials, digital photographs, texts with questions, listening exercises using audio from native speakers and short videos (many filmed and edited by Daniel Reynolds himself); a 40-page booklet, written in conjunction with Irina Borislavina Gumenyuk, on Olympiad training, which was sold by the institute to teachers in the oblast; and a twelve lesson update of the British Councils Recertification Curriculum. All these materials were distributed by the institute, by Peace Corps and by Daniel Reynolds to Ukrainian teachers and Peace Corps Volunteers for use in their classrooms. The update of the British Councils Recertification Curriculum was distributed to all the teacher trainers in Ukraine Group 31.

To increase awareness of the communicative method and show its applicability in the classroom, Daniel Reynolds taught a number of “master lessons” at various schools in the Zhytomyrska oblast. He would visit a classroom (often in a town or village) and teach a TEFL lesson to a classroom of students. These lessons would be observed by the school’s English teachers so that they could learn how communicative teaching techniques could be used in a real-life classroom setting.

These were Daniel Reynolds primary assignments.

In addition to his primary responsibilities, Daniel Reynolds worked to increase the level of English in his community by hosting a 90 minute English Club at School #12 once a week (average attendance of 20 students); teaching “guest classes” at the Zhytomyr Pedagogical University; substituting on numerous occasions for sick teachers at School #12; and hosting a weekly English movie club at the Zhytomyr library. The movie club proved to be especially popular and was sometimes standing room only. The participants came from all walks of life, including retirees, teachers, and university students, and the club became so well-known in the community that it was covered twice by a local newspaper.

Daniel Reynolds served as the oblast manager of the Peace Corps “Practical Project”, a project aimed at increasing the English and pedagogy levels of English teachers in select oblasts in Ukraine. Daniel Reynolds was responsible for the coordination and oversight of ten TEFL Peace Corps Volunteers in his oblast, who in turn conducted monthly or bi-monthly workshops with teachers in their communities. He conducted monthly meetings with the volunteers, distributed teaching materials to them and observed them teaching in their classrooms once a semester to provide feedback on their teaching. Through this project, dozens of young teachers in the oblast saw dramatic improvements in their ability to speak English, improvements which would no doubt carry over into their classrooms.

Interested in both youth sporting and wanting to combat the alarming increase in HIV infection in Ukraine (during Daniel Reynolds’ service, Ukraine had the fastest growing HIV infection rate in the world), Daniel Reynolds, working with a sporting-NGO called Polissya, applied for and was awarded two Small Project Assistance Grants for a total amount of $8,262.

The first SPA grant, for $3,342, was to complete and purchase equipment for a 25-foot high climbing wall. After completion, 93 students were trained in basic climbing techniques on this wall. To be able to climb, the students had to attend a one hour seminar on HIV/AIDS provided by the Ukrainian branch of ACET (AIDS Care Education Training), an international HIV-awareness organization. These students were then allowed to climb for free on the wall on nights and weekends. The wall became fairly well-known. Its opening was covered in two newspapers and it was later visited by Country Director Karl Beck, Country Director Diana Schmidt, two regional managers, SPA project coordinator Anne Silver and Peace Corps Deputy Director Jodi Mitchell.

The second grant SPA grant, also with Polissya and for $4,920, purchased ten bikes and materials to mark bike trails in the Zhytomyr region. A 25-kilometer bike trail was marked with signs in the wooded area south of Zhytomyr and Polissya began conducting biking excursions in the oblast. Orphans were the target group of this project because they were statistically more at risk of being involved in crime and the sex industry. In order to ride the bikes, the 74 orphans who participated in the project had to also attend an HIV/AIDS seminar provided by ACET. Both projects are continuing and Polissya plans to offer bike excursions to local students beginning in spring 2007.

Daniel Reynolds continued to work with Polissya, helping to promote their projects. He brought them business from a Zhytomyr-based Dutch computer company, got them listed in Brandt’s Rough Guide, got them featured on a television show focused on successful Ukrainian organizations, and got donations for them of new climbing ropes from New England Ropes, space heaters from COSing volunteers, and a two year subscription from Rock + Ice.

During the summers, Daniel Reynolds continued his work in increasing student interest in sporting, American culture and the English language. In 2005, with 11 other Peace Corps Volunteers, he participated in a summer camp organized by the Sevastopol Recertification Institute, which helped more than 30 students practice their English skills and learn about American culture and civil rights. Also in 2005, Daniel Reynolds was invited to be a master teacher for the staff of YouthCAN, which ran an extremely popular civic education youth camp called Rah-Rah. He conducted a marathon four-hour pedagogy session for YouthCAN’s trainers so that they could better teach the participants of their camp. Later in 2005, Daniel Reynolds was trained by American Councils to teach at their Pre-Departure Orientations (PDO) for Ukrainian students who would be going to America for nine months on the FLEX exchange program. During two four-day sessions he trained 30 students using a Department of State-approved 12-lesson curriculum. In 2006, Daniel Reynolds was invited back by American Councils to be the Master Teacher at their Training of Trainers. He taught teaching skills to 40 trainers from six countries and then observed and gave feedback for their mock-trainings during the four-day session. That summer, Daniel Reynolds taught another 15 FLEX students during a four-day PDO. Later in the summer, he taught 100 teachers about American schools at a week-long “teacher camp” hosted by the Zhytomyr pedagogical university.

In 2006, as the result of five months of planning, 20 students participated in Camp Edelweiss, a climbing/teamwork/healthy lifestyles summer camp that pulled together resources from Polissya, ACET, Peace Corps, American Councils, The Center for Youth Initiatives and donations from both businesses in Zhytomyr and international ones such as Mammut, Black Diamond and Metolius. Daniel Reynolds managed a staff of twelve during the five-day camp, including four Peace Corps Volunteers. At the camp, teams of students climbed Zhytomyr’s cliffs, competed and cooperated while completing team challenges like crossing a river with a rope or navigating obstacle courses, and participated in seminars that covered HIV/AIDS, narcotics, alcohol abuse, civic responsibility and more. Due to the sponsorship, every participant at the free summer camp received tee-shirts, completion certificates, posters and stickers. In order to not limit participants, the camp was conducted entirely in Russian and Ukrainian. Daniel Reynolds worked closely with the local media and the camp was covered by three newspapers, a radio station and a television station. The Ukrainian staff participants also reported that they gained a great deal of project management and public relations knowledge from working at the camp. One staff member said putting the camp on her resume and talking about the experience during her interview was likely what awarded her a placement in the UGRAD exchange program. Now in the program, she is currently studying at St. Lawrence in Canton, New York.

Continuing his interest in sporting and HIV education, Daniel Reynolds was one of two project managers on Run Across Ukraine, a relay race from the Eastern border of Ukraine to the western one to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. Along with PCV Jon Kendrick, Daniel Reynolds helped organize and grow the run; brought on board other PCVs and organizations (including ACET, American Councils, the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living With HIV/AIDS, Democrats Abroad and the U.S. Embassy); secured the donation of advertising, tents, bikes, a PA system and thousands of HIV information pamphlets; designed a webpage and got the web address http://www.runacrossukraine.org and webmaster services donated; and contracted for a bus that would support the runners on their journey. Although scheduled for September 2006, issues with securing permission for the run from the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sport (who were in turn plagued by constant political upheaval and uncertainty) delayed the run past the Close of Service date of both Jon Kendrick and Daniel Reynolds. Both volunteers transferred their responsibilities to two new, enthusiastic volunteers, introduced them to the leaders of the organizations supporting the run and helped prepare the new team of PCVs who would organize it. Daniel Reynolds hopes to return to Ukraine to help manage the run when it will begin in May 2007.

Near the end of his service, Daniel Reynolds became increasingly interested in working with civic education groups. He helped The Center for Youth Initiatives write their Democracy Grant for “Active Community, Transparent Authorities”, which sought to empower Zhytomyr NGOs by providing them with resources and workshops and to open the avenues of communication between Zhytomyr NGOs and the Zhytomyr Government (which was also going through upheavals, including the recall of the mayor due to election fraud). Daniel Reynolds also advised and did translation work for several grants pursued by the Ukrainian branch of the International Organization for Human Rights, an NGO that conducts human rights monitoring in Ukraine (particularly in prisons) and conducts civic education, leadership and conflict resolution seminars with Zhytomyr’s students. Daniel Reynolds advised on and translated a Democracy Grant for Commercial and Information Center, an NGO which wants to air regular three-minute spots on local television to inform the citizenry of their legal rights. Ukrainians would be able to SMS, call or email the center to ask legal questions which would be answered in the next television spot. These spots would also provide information to help citizens protect themselves against police extortion and human trafficking, both serious problems in Ukraine.

As Daniel Reynolds’ Russian abilities improved, he was able to offer volunteer translation services, including helping one teacher with her master’s thesis; translating a press release for Soldiers for Peace, an NGO of retired soldiers that do community work; and translating the menu for the Corsair restaurant so that they could attract more foreign business.

Daniel Reynolds continued to initiate projects even as he was leaving. With less than three weeks before his COS date, Daniel Reynolds took a group of Ukrainian university students to the orphanage with which he had worked on the Bike Project. Seeing that the orphans needed more attention and interaction from adults (a staff of 8 took full-time care of more than 100 orphans), the group, with Daniel Reynolds advising and organizing, decided to create a social club that would visit the orphanage weekly to interact with the orphans, bringing them movies, music and conversation.

Daniel Reynolds was extremely mindful of his short stay in Ukraine and actively worked to make sure his projects were sustainable after he left. For each major project he groomed a Ukrainian or American replacement and made sure he/she had an active part in the planning process. Due to this, the Climbing Wall; the Bike Project; Camp Edelweiss; the Movie Club; Run Across Ukraine; Active Community, Transparent Authorities; the Orphanage Project and the Legal Rights project will all continue after he goes back to America.

Besides his work with host country nationals, Daniel Reynolds was an active volunteer in different Peace Corps projects. In addition to teaching at several in-service trainings, Daniel Reynolds was a member of the Multicultural Awareness Group. With the group, Daniel Reynolds helped to put together a series of lesson plans that taught cultural sensitivity and helped to create a multicultural awareness video. Channeling his former career as a journalist, Daniel Reynolds was also an active contributor to Peace Corps Ukraine’s newsletter, Nu Scho?!, with an article in all but one of the monthly newsletters printed during his service. Daniel Reynolds’ writing also led him to work with Peace Corps Ukraine’s public relations department, writing several articles for them on projects he and other volunteers had done.

Although he was taught Ukrainian during training, Daniel Reynolds was assigned to a Russian-speaking site and so began studying Russian in his spare time. At the end of training, Daniel Reynolds tested in Ukrainian and received a score of Intermediate-Mid on the Language Proficiency Inventory. At the end of his service, Daniel Reynolds tested in Russian and received a score of Advanced-Low on the Language Proficiency Inventory.

Following 750 years as a colony of other Eastern and Central European states, Ukraine decided in 1990 by plebiscite to be an independent country oriented towards Western Europe. Ukraine welcomes change and encourages its people to open their minds to new concepts. Daniel Reynolds’ work as a teacher of English language, as well as his role as a transmitter of western culture and its approaches to problem solving, were part of a nation-wide effort in Ukraine to reorient itself towards the West.

Additionally, Daniel Reynolds fulfilled the goals of Peace Corps service by giving of himself, both professionally and personally, to his site and the local community. His contribution, whether to the teachers of his institute, to the pupils of the local schools or to the members of the local community, provided opportunities for Ukrainians and Americans to create common bonds and to gain understanding and appreciation for one another.

Pursuant to Section 5(f) of the Peace Corps Act, 22 USC 2504(f), as amended, any former Volunteer employed by the United States Government following her/his Peace Corps Volunteer Service is entitled to have any period of satisfactory Peace Corps service credited for purposes of retirement, seniority, reduction in force, leave, and other privileges based on length of Government service. That service shall not be credited toward completion of the probationary or trial period of any service requirement for career appointment.

This is to certify in accordance with Executive Order 11103 of April 10, 1963, that Daniel Reynolds served successfully as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Her/his service ended on November 18, 2006. He is therefore eligible to be appointed as a career-conditional employee in the competitive civil service on a non-competitive basis. This benefit under the Executive Order extends for a period of one year after termination of Volunteer service, except that the employing agency may extend the period for up to three years for a former Volunteer who enters military service, pursues studies at a recognized institution of higher learning, or engages in other activities that, in the view of the appointing agency, warrant extension of the period.

Ukraine: Extreme Marathon 2006 (Pics)

2006-11-13T14:00:00.001-05:00

A guy rode past me on his bike, popped up his front wheel, hit the brakes and stopped like that, 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.

I thought: Q: Who the hell are these guys? A: People who think mountain-biking, rocking climbing, orienteering, paint ball, and carrying said mountain bike over countless streams, footbridges, embankments and outcroppings, all in sub-zero weather, is fun.

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. Carrie (another volunteer) and I had lasted about 12 hours before dropping out. That had been the plan all along, because I had to be in Kyiv the following day and couldn’t afford to do the all-night trekking through the woods (which hadn’t sounded like a lot of fun anyway). Still, of the 32 teams from 6 countries, four others dropped out before us, which meant we weren’t complete losers.

Although Extreme Marathon was born in Zhytomyr, its increasing popularity and the addition of real corporate sponsorship (from Marmot, among others), meant a much larger Extreme Marathon took place this summer in the Chernitskava Oblast. Jon and I briefly considered entering, took one look at the gear list and the hassle involved of getting it all to another oblast and, with Run Across Ukraine taking up most of our energy, decided it wasn’t worth it.

So I was excited when I heard there would be a smaller version in Zhytomyr this year. Of course, I only heard about it 36 hours before the race itself. Jon couldn’t leave his town because it was his last weekend in Ukraine, so I asked my neighbor and 15 year-old climbing protégé, Igor, to be my partner. He accepted, and then told me he’d only ridden a bike once in his life and that, because of him, we’d probably loose.

“I’m not doing it to win,” I said to him. “I just want to finish.” I considered that for a moment, and remembered the last race and the pride of not being the first team to drop out. “And not come in last place,” I said.

It turns out, largely through my own mistakes, that while we did (sort of) finish, we also came in absolutely, dead-last place.

Here is a record of those mistakes.

***

Igor has an earnest can-do attitude, which is what makes him such a great student whether he’s in class or on cliffs (and I’ve had the pleasure of teaching him both places). As soon as he accepted my invitation to compete, he asked to borrow a bike to learn how to ride it. Giving him one, off he went, practicing for the next four hours, not wanting me to help him. When he returned it that evening, he asked to borrow it at 7:00 AM the next morning to practice some more. I woke up just long enough to give it to him before going back to sleep, trying to get in another hour before having to leave for the race. Unlike his lazy American partner, Igor was up with the sun, trying to teach himself to ride.

The race started near Zhytomyr’s only extreme sports store, a tiny, ten square-foot space crammed with skis, sleeping bags and backpacks. There wasn’t even room for a register or sales desk, and the salesperson sat in a chair between two aisles. If you want things like climbing gear, they pull out the catalogue and ask what you want ordered.

Teams arriving at the start point

In the parking lot, the ten teams were registering at the organizer’s table, which was actually the hood of a car. Once signed in and having paid 10 hrivna ($2) per team, we were given cards to go around our necks. These cards would be hole-punched and scrawled on at 18 checkpoints in and around Zhytomyr. On our card was written the team name Carrie and I had chosen last year: Bolshevilne Yeedjike, or “Crazy Hedgehogs”.

The registration table

Me, with our "Crazy Hedgehogs" card

I was already loosing the feeling in my fingers and toes from standing around in the cold when, finally, we were told to line up our bikes. Igor’s and mine were from the ten that were purchased by the forward-thinking tax payers of America for Zhytomyr’s youth. As part of keeping the project sustainable, Polissya was allowed to rent these bikes out in order to earn funds to keep the bikes maintained. Another four of the ten bikes were being ridden by race participants. I hoped they’d paid to use them.

Igor and I, before the race

The race participants were hard core, the best of Zhytomyr’s extreme community. Almost all were Polissya members, who climbed in the winter long after I had deemed it too cold to do so, who had started adventure racing in Ukraine and who now traveled all over the country and the CIS region to compete in them. Even the bike-renters were adventure racers who normally took part in races that substituted long-distance hiking for biking. Still, I didn’t think of myself as particularly outmatched. True, I’d ridden a bike about ten times in the past ten years, but I was one of the best climbers in the group. It didn’t really occur to me that climbing would be about 0.02% of the race and the rest would mean using muscles I never really used before, that I would be competing in an endurance race when I spent most of my time sitting inside.

It didn’t really occur to me how spectacularly I was going to get my ass kicked.

All the teams lined up

We were handed a typed set of clues in Russian (“the hole puncher is inside an old well”, for example) and a map, which had the 18 checkpoints marked on them and the order they were to be done in.

On your mark, get set …

And we were off.

***

As a mob of 20 bikers, we made our way to the first checkpoint, which, once off Zhytomyr’s streets, meant navigating down a steep, hill-hugging, winding, muddy path. In the spirit of racing, I did not walk my bike down (two teams choose to do so), but blithely followed the psychopathic people ahead of me, waiting to fly off the path and die at any moment.

After braking to a dirt-spewing halt, we hopped off our bikes to gather around an old stone well, reaching down to punch our cards with a hole puncher tied to the inside. A code (B7) was spray painted on the side of the well, and this was then written by us on our cards next to the punched holes (each puncher left a different configuration).

And then it was off to the next checkpoint.

Except Igor’s bike chain had come off. And not just come off, but had inexplicably come over the gear wheel and was now around the pedal, jammed in against the gear shift. I hurriedly worked it back into place as seven teams disappeared off into the woods.

The chain now on, Igor and I crossed a wooden footbridge and furiously biked off after the other teams. On top of a hill, we couldn’t see them, so I reached for the map.

My hand felt cloth.

There was no map.

After the first checkpoint, I had shoved it in my left jacket pocket.

It was not there.

My pumping legs must have knocked it out.

Fuck.

Leaving Igor at the top of the hill, I went back the way we came, looking for the map. The other two teams, the ones that had walked their bikes down the hill, passed me. I went twice along the distance between the hill and the first checkpoint and could not find the map. Possibly someone had picked it up; there were Ukrainians walking along the paths we were riding on. Possibly one of the two trailing teams had grabbed it, but that was unlikely. Ukrainians are remarkably sportsmanly. It had occurred to me to stop one of the trailing teams and ask them to share one of their maps, but I knew that they would say yes and that it would be unfair to impose ourselves on someone for the entire race.

In the end, Igor and I went back to the starting point and got another map.

That was Daniel mistake #1.

***

New map in hand (firmly clutched in hand), it occurred to me to skip the next checkpoint and catch up with everyone (there’s a 30 minute penalty for each missed point), but I wanted to do the whole race. If I was going to loose, I was going to at least complete it.

Half an hour later we were lost in the woods. There was a circle on the map on a green bit and there was a clue for a “half ruined tree”, but after a lot of circling, we couldn’t find that tree. Found a lot of live ones and a few dead ones, but no “half-ruined" ones that would have a hole puncher and a code. The forest was a maze of crisscrossing paths and while I could always get us back to civilization, I didn’t always know where we were in relation to that circle.

My mobile rang.

“How’s the race?” asked Jon.

“Igor’s bike chain came off, I couldn’t find our map and now we’re lost in the woods.”

“Huh,” said Jon, helpfully.

“And we haven’t even reached the second checkpoint.”

“Yeah, sounds like you’re doing well,” said Jon. “Good luck, then.”

After more of not finding that tree, I decided that we’d have more fun doing the climbing challenges that would come later, and didn’t feel like spending any more time wandering around frozen in the woods. We were going to loose anyway, why worry about a tree?

“Let’s go, Igor,” I said.

***

At the next checkpoint, we found lots of bikes leaning against trees. It was the orienteering section, which was meant to be done on foot.

The check-in for the orienteering section

Two race volunteers were checking teams in and out, writing their times on a clipboard. I looked at it. A team was actually still behind us. Apparently they’d had a bike problem. Five other teams were out in the woods. I looked at the three teams that had finished this section. They’d all taken around 45 minutes to find four points which were out in the woods, and they’d been the fastest. According to the times, some teams had been out there for more than an hour. It had been snowing for a week in Zhytomyr, and had all that snow had melted in two days of above-freezing temperatures. Although it had been below-zero in the morning, it was back up now and the whole forest was mud. Still, I’d been sweating under my sweaters (they finally lived up to their names) and now felt like I was freezing with their wetness against me.

“Want to do this?” I asked Igor.

He shrugged. “Whatever you want to do,” he said.

Walking around cold in the mud for an hour?

“Yeah, we’re not going to do this part,” I said, handing the map back.

The race volunteers balked.

“We know we’re going to loose, so we’re going to keep it fun,” I said.

They laughed and waved us good luck.

Igor and I went to the next point.

***

The next checkpoint actually was fun: we found ourselves under a large bridge over a small river. Two more race volunteers were there and the challenge, as they pointed out, was to climb up the inside of the bridge, walk across the scaffolding under the bridge (clipped into a rope they’d strung the length of it), hole punch your card with the puncher dangling from underneath the bridge and then rappel down.

Finally, something worth doing! I strapped on my harness and began climbing, got to the scaffolding, clipped in and began dodging around steel beams, pulling myself through holes made by their “X”s, clipping in on one side of the hole and unclipping from the other. As I navigated under the bridge (the Red Hot Chili Peppers song starting in my head and not leaving for a long time), Igor snapped pictures of me.

Climbing under the bridge

In the pics above and below I am rapelling down

Rappelling down, I was now halfway down a steep, concrete embankment leading to the river. Rather than go up the embankment and bike across the bridge, though, the volunteers were telling us we had to cross the river.

Looking down, I saw one of the teams ahead of us doing so. Looking back up, I saw Igor lifting a bike over the barricade.

“Wait!” I yelled, but he had already let go, the bike sliding on its side and smacking into my outstretched hands a few seconds later, but not before the front reflector had broken off.

“Was the bike injured?” Igor asked me in his not-always-perfect English.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, the bike was injured.”

“Oh no!” he said earnestly (if there was a Ukrainian version of “Leave it to Beaver”, Igor would be its star).

I climbed up the embankment, shouldered the other bike and began carrying it down, which really meant I was sliding on my ass, trying to keep my hands away from the broken glass, the remains of decades of idiots tossing beer bottles from above.

Carrying the bike down the glass strewn embankment

This wasn’t just extreme, this was Ukraine extreme. If my feet slipped, I’d go tumbling down to the river, tangled up in ten pounds of bike. This is always what scares and excites me about Extreme Marathons: real danger. In America we have a lot of fake danger: jumping out of a plane with a parachute is scary, but you’re only going to get killed if two sets of equipment fail, which part of you realizes isn’t likely. It’s adrenaline without real fear. Real fear was last year, where getting to one hole puncher meant climbing down a well, feet braced on one side and back on the other, a rushing underground river at the bottom, no protection if I fell. There is no culture of litigation in Ukraine. If you get hurt from doing something stupid of your own free will, a Ukrainian judge will laugh if you tried to sue. So dangerous challenges that would give an American organizer pause are nothing to Ukrainians; in fact the participants seem to have a certain relish for them(we are talking about a country that birthed Leopold Von Masoch, whose writings gave us the word Masochism). And even though I’m an American, even though there’s no way in hell I’d, say, climb down that well for the fun of it, in the middle of a race and hopped up on competition, I hadn’t thought twice about going down it. And now, part of me was wondering why I was sliding a bike down this embankment, but it was only a small part, one quickly shoved away by the concentration of survival.

Igor getting his bike down to the river

We got the bikes down, adrenaline making my muscles vibrate, and began carrying them across the rocks poking out of the river. I had thought to wear my waterproof boots for the race, but they’re heavy and thought my cheap-but-light sneakers would fare better on a race that was mostly biking. This is what I get for thinking.

Bam, my foot slips and is plunged into the freezing water. Igor fared worse, getting both feet wet. On the other side, frost formed on our shoes. I wrung out my wet shoe (the pair was $10 at the bazaar; the soles are so thin that I can literally wring them out) and my sock before Igor and I manhandled our bikes up the grass on the other side.

Some of the teams behind us, bringing their bikes down the embankment and beginning to cross the river

I was slightly frustrated at the experience. We could have gone across the bridge, but it seemed like the race was being extreme for the sake of being extreme, making us go down the embankment, across the river and up the other side. Later, I realized why that was.

At the top, we began biking some more. According to the map, the next street would take us directly to the next checkpoint: a graveyard. But there were no side streets for quite a while. According to the scale of the map, we should have hit it already, but we hadn’t seen one. Looking behind us, I saw another team of bikers, so we must be going the right way.

Turned out, they were following us.

The street, I realized, was the dirt road that was on the other side of the river. I thought the street we were supposed to get on was paved: we had biked on it earlier in the day and that section had been blacktop. On the map there was nothing to indicate that it turned from paved into dirt, but it did. That was why they sent us across the river: the road was right there.

By the time I realized the mistake, it was better just to cut south and try to reconnect to the road later, the other team following us the whole way. Despite skipping two checkpoints and getting back in the pack of teams (and being spatially, if not technically, ahead of six other teams), the roundabout way of getting to the graveyard meant that we and the other team were now in last place. Except the other team had done all the checkpoints, and Igor and I were about as far behind as we could possibly be.

That was Daniel mistake #2.

***

We stuck with this other team, more or less, for the remainder of the race. Its members were Dima and Irka, a boyfriend/girlfriend team that Carrie and I had spent most of the last Extreme Marathon trading places with. It seemed fitting.

In the cemetery, our next checkpoint was to write down the day that Karol Something-Or-Other died. If “Karol” doesn’t sound very Ukrainian, it’s because he and most of the other occupants of the cemetery were Polish, having been buried at a time when Poland controlled Ukraine. We found his grave, a huge one, behind the cemetery’s tiny church.

Igor, biking ahead of me in the graveyard

We wound our way out of the city and back into the country, crossing another footbridge and temporarily interrupting the four adolescents that had been smoking cigarettes and fishing there (even after two years of living in Ukraine, it still surprises me to see a 12 year-old puffing). We found our next checkpoint code spray painted on a pipe dumping strange contents into the river, found the next one spray painted on some small cliffs a half-mile past it.

Above, Irka crossing the footbridge with the smoking/fishing kids. Below, two more of the kids, one still holding his cigarette

We possibly found some criminals as well. Two guys were using a cross-cut saw to cut firewood, watched by two other men (there’s a Ukrainian proverb that goes: there are three things a man can always watch: fire burning, water flowing and other people working). One of the guys cutting had lost an eye and had a slash across it that looked like it came from a knife. The whole tableau looked interesting and I asked to photograph them. I’ve never had a Ukrainian refuse to have their photograph taken, but they did and began looking around, slightly worried that I had asked. I decided it was best to keep moving.

Irka biking past hills covered in frost

Dima, Irka and Igor carrying their bikes over some rocks

I did like that about the race: it put us into contact with a lot of people going about their daily lives on a Saturday, showed me a lot of areas of Zhytomyr I had never seen before. I probably saw more new things in Zhytomyr in the six hours of the race than I’d seen in the past six months.

In the pics above and below, some of the scenery around Zhytomyr

***

Despite the newness, I was extremely familiar with the next checkpoint: it was the cliffs I had been climbing on for over a year. Getting there meant lugging the bikes up to an overpass, crossing to the other side of the river and then lugging them back down.

Carrying the bikes up to yet another overpass

At the cliffs, we were required to climb a route to get our cards signed by one of the volunteers there. The route I had to climb was one I’ve climbed at least 50 times before: a sweet, easy little crack that shoots up for 70 feet. Except I had never climbed it in wet, muddy, $10 tennis shoes after spending four hours biking. My feet kept slipping and I ended up climbing the thing hand over hand, absolutely exhausted when I got to the top. Igor, who had been belaying me, gently lowered me down.

“Good work!” he said, trying to encourage me.

I nodded, too out of breath to speak.

Irka was climbing the route beside mine, with Dima belaying her. She was only halfway up and, not wanting to get any farther behind, Igor and I set off.

Igor goofing off

Our next point was down a well again, me holding Igor’s legs so he could lean in and punch the card. Igor had begged off the climbing challenges because he was tired from the biking. I honestly thought Igor wouldn’t have much of a problem during the race, because he has a lot of endurance. He often goes jogging with Jon (who regularly runs marathons) and, unlike me, is always able to keep up with him. Still, even though he didn’t seem to be uncomfortable on the bike, he was constantly trailing behind me. So, because he seemed more tired than I was, we had reached an unspoken agreement: I climbed things, he crawled into things, which is how he ended up half inside a well.

Igor in the well

Irka and Dima biked past us a little later, while I was Daniel mistake #3, which was to ask an old woman how to get to another street. Ukraine doesn’t have street signs. The street names are stenciled onto buildings when someone decides to mark them, which isn’t often.

I was asking her how to get to a lake that was on the map, which was the next checkpoint. She kept trying to get me to go to the river. "The river is a much nicer place to go," she said. She didn’t really get that this was a race and I needed to get to the lake. “Go straight and then take a left”, she said. I knew a left would get me to the river. Irka and Dima took a way I had suspected would get there, but also suspected would leave us lost in a bunch of unmarked cross-streets. The problem with not growing up in Zhytomyr is that I don’t really know the place. I wanted to get out to a main road and take it up towards the lake.

Of course, I was now trying to get away from the old woman, who didn’t want to let go of my map and didn’t want to stop telling me how to get to the river. Two other old women came up and they all began arguing over which way I should go.

I gave up on directions to the lake. “See this road?” I asked pointing to a main one. “How do I get there?”

One of the old ladies pointed at a building. The main road was on the other side, she said.

“Thanks.”

Igor and I biked past some old playground equipment, crossed in front of the building and headed up the main road.

***

We found Dima and Irka at the lake. The clue said the hole puncher was attached to the small dock there, but they hadn’t found it yet. Igor did his job and, legs on the dock and torso wrapped under it, managed to see where the puncher was hanging. We passed him our cards to punch, and then moved onto the next challenge, in a wooded area of Zhytomyr.

Dima, Irka and Igor at the dock

Dima and Irka were leading the way, so they got to do the challenge first: paintball.

I had been excited about this bit, and it was partly why I had skipped out on the orienteering. I thought paintball would have all the teams pitted against one another, and I thought that if Igor and I got too far behind, we’d miss out.

Actually, each team of two was pitted against snipers. This was the way it worked: five wooden targets had been nailed to trees. You and your partner shot the first two targets to learn how to use the guns, then lit and threw a smoke grenade into the woods. You were then supposed to use the smoke as cover as you went deeper into the woods to shoot the other three targets. The snipers (two of the guys working for the paintball company) tried to kill you and you tried to kill them, or at least survive long enough to shoot the targets. You got your card punched whether you won or not.

Dima and Irka playing paintball

Dima and Irka were soon killed and Igor and I began pulling on the gear: pullover plastic camo pants and a jacket, kneepads, a bandanna, and a vest that held the CO2 canister for the paintball gun, which looked like an M-16.

In the pics above and below, Igor and I getting suited up. I'm on the left.

I was handed a smoke grenade and one of the snipers explained how to use it. There’s still a lot of words I don’t know in Russian and to me it sounded like this: “You see this hurgle? You pull it to pull the cap off one end and then you pull this hurgle on the other. Inside is a blibity and you light that with this lighter and then you throw it. Understand?”

And I said yes because the hurgles were obviously the cloth strips on both ends and a blibity had to be a fuse.

The snipers disappeared into the woods and, shortly thereafter, Igor and I ran in after them. We shot the first two targets, then hid behind a tree while paint balls exploded around us. I pulled one end off the smoke grenade, then the other. Inside one end there was nothing and in the other there was a metal ball. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never lit a Russian-made smoke grenade before and was a little stumped. I’ve never so much as lit a firework while in Ukraine and so didn’t realize that there was a different way to do it. I held the lighter to the metal ball for a few seconds and then stopped, deciding I didn’t want to blow my hand off.

“Just go!” I said to Igor, dropping the grenade and shooting at the snipers, making them get their heads down. They ducked behind trees, and Igor ran out and shot one target, then the next. He started shooting at the third, then realized he had no bullets. I found that I was out of bullets, too. They’d only given us ten or so each and we’d used them all.

Igor dropped to the ground, lying on his belly in the leaves.

“Go on!” yelled one of the snipers.

“I’m out of bullets!” yelled Igor.

“Me too!” I yelled. I thought this mean we were finished, done, game over. But apparently the snipers didn’t think so.

“Then get back to the start!”

“But we don’t have bullets!” I yelled.

“Go back!” they yelled again.

They wanted us to run with them shooting at us?

Igor started to get up.

“Go! Go!” I yelled, shooting my gun. Yeah, there were no bullets, but it still made a popping sound when I squeezed the trigger and that made the snipers get behind the trees, thinking that I had lied to them. Igor ran past me and I began to run as well, zigzagging as a small firestorm of paint balls hit the trees around us.

We finally got back alive, and, soon thereafter, the snipers came out of the woods, asking what had happened with the smoke grenade. I told them it didn’t work. We went back to where I had left it by the tree.

“Hold the lighter to it,” one of the guys said.

I did, and after a few seconds nothing happened.

“Keep holding it,” he said.

Finally, the metal ball must have heated up enough to ignite an internal fuse because sparks began to come out.

“Throw!” the guy ordered.

I did, and out came the smoke, quite uselessly at this point.

Still, it was pretty cool.

Me, coming back from having lit the smoke grenade, which is going off in the background

Stripping off the gear, I had wondered how paintball could possibly be included in a $1 per person entrance fee for the race, but as the owners were asking us if we liked it, told us about prices and handed us business cards, I realized how smart the organizers were: each team gets a little ten minute experience with just couple dozen paint balls and a smoke grenade and no doubt wants, like I did, to do it again and this time with a full magazine of bullets. Paintball hadn’t been part of the entrance fee; the paintball guys had donated it to generate business. Pretty smart.

***

We caught up with Dima and Irka at the next checkpoint. Although they had left fifteen minutes before us, they must have gotten lost. Igor and I had almost gotten lost as well, our dirt path through the woods disappearing and us breaking trail on our bikes, mowing down grass and brush as we raced past abandoned houses in the woods. The reason we didn’t try to relocate the path was that wild dogs were chasing us.

We’d been chased by dogs all day. It’s part of what makes an extreme Ukrainian race so extreme. But in the city, the dogs, which generally make up the totality of any given Ukrainian home security system, never chase you past the territory of the house they guard. But these dogs didn’t seem to have a territory and chased us all the way down to the river. For the tenth time that day, as they were nipping at our pedaling heels I thought: “We are going to die.”

As is, the river was our goal and we followed it to the next check point: an abandoned house that stood on a bluff overlooking the water (the property alone would be worth tens of thousands in America). Dima was climbing the tree in front of it, trying to reach hole puncher at the top. He wasn’t tied into anything; that wouldn’t be extreme. Rather than risk death yet again, I handed Dima our card and he punched both while I watched the sun start to set.

Dima up in the tree

As we got back on our bikes, it became obvious that we wouldn’t finish the race. No matter how many checkpoints you finished, all teams had to be at the finish line at 4:10 PM, six hours after the race started. We’d be lucky to get two more checkpoints in.

We biked, pushed said bikes and carried said bikes along the river, crossing intersecting streams and moving over and under fallen trees and along the edges of cliffs.

At one point, I was charged by a goat. A woman was sitting in a wooden rowboat beached beside the river, watching her three gazing goats. I stopped and took a picture of her and one of her goats must have thought this was threatening because it began running at me, head lowered. I was quickly starting to pedal when she yelled at it and it stopped mid-charge. I didn’t even know you could train a goat like that.

The lady and her goats. The one in front is the one that charged me

Charging goats? They forgot to put that in the race description.

Two checkpoints later we were at another favorite Zhytomyr point of mine: the riverside cliffs that Marina and I had climbed on all summer.

The challenge there, the last for us, was to rappel down to some rocks sticking out of the river, punch the card and then jumar up the rappel rope to the top. If you don’t know what a jumar is, imagine a metal handle with a wheel on it that only spins in one direction. If you clamp it on a rope, it slides up, but not back down. Jumaring up a rope uses two of these: one with webbing attached to your harness, one with a piece of webbing you put your foot in. You stand up on the webbing, lifting your body up, then slide up the jumar attached to your harness. This lets you sit into the harness to take weight off our foot and slide that jumar up in order to stand up on it again. This is done on straight ropes where there’s no way to climb up the rock, as was the case now because they’d hung the rope off an overhang, which meant it went 70 feet straight down to the river and those rocks.
Rappelling down over the river, the sun setting and turning it red and orange, was amazing. Jumaring back up after all the other exertions of the day? Stand up, slide up one jumar, sit down, breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Slide up other jumar, stand up, slide up first jumar, sit down, breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

One of the race volunteers

When I got to the overhang, I didn’t so much pull myself over the top as crawl and then roll and then lie there. Dima took the jumars and rappelled down.

Dima jumaring back up

Here you can see the mechanics of jummaring: the top jumar goes the the harness, your foot is in webbing attached to the bottom one

I wasn’t in a hurry to get up because we didn’t have enough time to do the last three checkpoints. I was happy about that, though. The next checkpoint required finding another tree. I don’t like finding trees because if there’s a problem with forests, it’s that it’s full of them.

I photographed Dima coming over the edge, felt a bit of satisfaction that he, taller and more muscular than I, a veteran of a number of adventure races, was just as exhausted as I was when he got to the top.

The four of us biked to the final stop, on the other side of Zhytomyr. Perhaps knowing it was the end, Igor, who had been trailing all day, was now right behind Dima and both of them sped ahead of me. Irka ended up falling way behind. Igor and Dima didn’t seem like they wanted to slow down, though, nor were they looking back, so I was in a strange tug of war trying to keep up with them ahead and trying keep Irka in sight behind. Finally I got stopped at a traffic light and Dima and Igor disappeared completely.

I pulled out a map and Irka caught up, saying she knew the way: it was to a factory that made climbing harnesses and sleeping bags. I had no idea that Ukraine had a company that made climbing harnesses, let alone one with a factory in Zhytomyr.

I let Irka lead, which is how I was the absolutely last person to reach the finish line.

***

Inside was a thing of beauty: a table laden with food. Igor, who hadn’t brought any food for the race, had eaten most of mine, and we had run out hours ago. Since Dima and Irka kept us racing hard, we never gave ourselves time to so much as stop to grab a candy bar. I had also been freezing all day, and the wisps of steam from the hot tea on the table called to me.

The most beautiful sight in the world after a race

Our card, after all the codes and hole punches

After everyone was inside the factory and they’d collected our cards to determine placement in the race, we were invited to eat. And as soon as we got up to move, though, the race coordinator asked us to go outside. Apparently the others were as hungry as I was and there were a number of protests. Still, we shuffled back out into the cold to line up in the dark for the awards ceremony, the food untouched.

Above and below are pics of the awards ceremony

Igor and I, as we suspected, placed tenth out of ten, but we got the prize everyone else did: free tee-shirts (again why I love Ukraine: I paid $1 for an adventure race and along with everything else, it included food and a tee-shirt). Third and second place got lanterns and I’m not sure what first place got because by then it was too dark to see.

The tee-shirt I got

We shuffled back in and pigged out.

***

“Seriously, let’s take a bus,” I said to Igor after about an hour of eating, talking and watching the video from last year’s Extreme Marathon.

Outside, it was back to below-zero and all my clothes were still soaked with sweat. My legs ached, and I was very, very tired.

The factory was located on a main road that ran straight (but for several miles) back to our apartment building. Any bus running along it would take us and our bikes home for the bargain price of 12 cents each.

“We should bike home!” said Igor. “We should finish on our bikes!” Despite his being tired all day, he must have processed that food pretty fast. Kids.

“Igor, it’s dark and we’re likely to get hit by a car,” I said. It wasn’t just an excuse: Ukraine is lacking in the street-light department, as well as in the sane-drivers department.

“So you’ll take a bus home and I’ll bike, okay?” he said.

He was determined to ride home, and I wasn’t going to let him go alone.

Fine. I got on my bike and listened to my legs cry.

And then another thing happened. During the day, Igor (when he wasn’t way behind) had had the not-so-endearing habit of following right behind me. This meant whenever I had to stop, his front tire would hit my back one. This time, biking along on pitch-black black top, when my front tire went into a water-filled hole I had not been able to see and my bike flipped forward, depositing me over the handlebars (but luckily on my feet), Igor crashed into the back of it, ramming my own bike into me.

I wish I had taken that bus.

Igor apologized about 700 times.

I picked up my bike and kept going.

After a while, the slight uphill grade we’d been moving on for 20 minutes turned into a downhill one. We coasted the last mile back to our apartment and completed the final challenge of the adventure race: carrying the bikes up the four flights of steps to my apartment.

***

I had come in last and I hadn’t even technically finished the race, having missed five checkpoints. I was cold, sore and extremely tired. Still, looking at the pictures that night and remembering the day, it was a great experience. My adventure race record may be pitiful (I’ve done two and completely finished neither), but it’s something I’d like to get better at, and America is definitely the place for it.

Maybe I’ll start one in Orlando.

Ukraine: Uman (Pics)

2006-11-10T09:38:00.001-05:00

"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.

A map of the park

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

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)

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.

Ukraine: Orphans in Costumes (Pics)

2006-11-08T04:40:00.000-05:00

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:

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

Playing limbo

I think she's supposed to be a cat

Tanya getting mobbed

Monsters everywhere!

Break dancing

A traditional Ukrainian game of passing a handkerchief in a circle

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

So, yeah, fun all around.

Ukraine: What's Been Going On (Pics)

2006-11-01T10:33:00.000-05:00

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.

***

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.

***

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

***

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.

Above and below are pictures of the mass graves

***

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.

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

Me, carrying my bike in front of the waterfall

***

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

***

This is what I have been doing since Sarah left:

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:

Doing a reading/creative thinking exercise

Rewriting a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip

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.

Me, Livvy and Amy before going to a club

Ukraine: Letter From the Director

2006-10-23T05:57:00.000-04:00

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?

Turkey: Mt. Dan-Rah (Pics)

2006-10-17T13:06:00.000-04:00

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.

On top of the mountain

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Turkey: This Was One Day... (Pics)

2006-10-13T04:23:00.000-04:00

This was one day…

Sarah and I awoke with the rising of the sun, stirring out from underneath the blankets we had laid over the blue foam mattresses strapped to the deck of the yacht. We were anchored near St. Nicholas Island, once home to a Byzantine trading town, now home to sprawling ruins, the peeking sun painting yellow and orange the white stone shapes poking through brush and marching up the spine of the island to its rounded top.

There was no boat to the island, but no matter. Without saying anything to anyone, we climbed down the ladder into the water, held our sneakers over our heads (my camera wrapped in a trash bag and stuffed into one shoe), and swam the few hundred miles to shore.

On the island, we tied on our shoes (Sarah looking sexy in her bikini, me in my Speedo looking more like the cover boy of the Gay Times’ special Twinks edition) and set off to explore. We had maybe an hour before we needed to get back to the ship, so we followed ancient paths past roofless houses, churches with collapsed domes, mausoleums that no longer held bodies, mosaics barely visible beneath overgrown grass. We were alone on the island save for insects, working to the crest of the island and finally greeted with gorgeous views all around: the mainland, the yachts anchored in the cove below, the water surrounding everything, so blue…

Sarah in the ruins

The view from the top

Sarah

Me, at a long corridor that once connected two churches, its roof now collapsed

We made our way down through the rubble, picking our way past thorny bushes that scrapped at our copious amounts of exposed skin, exploring nooks and crannies, rambling past hundreds of buildings that represented thousands of years before we finally found our way back to the shore. We put our shoes up over our heads and swam back to the ship to eat breakfast.

***

I got to drive the boat through an inlet between the shore and an island. Yes, the captain and the crew entrusted their lives to me, though I've never driven a yacht before, allowed me to steer the ship even though this was dangerous, technically exact stuff.

Okay, so the inlet was like a mile wide and the captain was always two feet away, but I still got to drive the damn boat…

Me, with everyone's lives in my hands...

***

If you come at the right time, apparently Butterfly Valley is home to millions of butterflies who come their to mate. We missed the right time by about a month. We also had no time in general because due to an anchor issue and some other scheduling problems, the captain had been trying to pack two days of itinerary into one. Rather than cut some things out, he simply shortened everything, often drastically. When the yacht anchored, 200 yards from shore, we were told we had 30 minutes.

Butterfly Valley

Most of the other passangers choose to just swim around the boat, but our motley tribe decided to swim to shore. There we found many people on tours, basking on the beach, sitting in a wooden bar listening reggae music, paying to go parasailing. We wanted to see the valley.

They guy at the gate in front of the path into the valley wanted 4 lira each. This was like $2.50, but, as we tried to explain, we had swam to the shore and had not thought to bring money. No matter, said the guy. No lira, no valley.

This thwarted all but Brenna and I. Possibly not to either’s benefit, we found that our personalities formed a closed loop of headstrongness that soon had us pushing through a worker’s access gate about 100 yards from the pay gate that had a nice big “No Entrance!” sign on it in English and Turkish. Everyone else refused to follow, so Brenna and I Navy SEALed the fucker, communicating by hand signals as we snuck along an irrigation ditch past the guy at the pay gate and finally crossed some fields, flanking the guy and finding our way to the path into the valley.

Brenna was keeping an eye on time and we had none. By the time we got to the valley, we had only five minutes to get back to the boat. Satisfied that we’d at least got there, we turned and sprinted.

We were a good mile from the gate at that point, and running in wet bathing suits and sneakers is never comfortable, but we had a boat to catch (not that they’d leave without us, but pretending otherwise did make it exciting). We stopped as we reach the fields and once again silently snuck along the irrigation ditch and back through the worker’s gate, running for the beach, kicking off our shoes and swimming like mad for the boat.

I saw exactly one butterfly.

***

I met Yahya outside his carpet shop in Kash, overlooking a harbor packed with yachts, one of which was ours, anchored for the night. Although it was evening and the streets were mostly empty, his store was still open and would be until midnight, a managerial decision I never had explained to me.

Sitting outside in the warm late summer air, lit by the open doors and unshuttered windows behind him, he was finishing his day’s work: repairing a long tear in a large kilim that was someone’s family heirloom. Walking up, I would have told you he was fixing a carpet, but the the difference between a carpet and a kilim, as well as a dozen other carpet-related things, would be my educational experience for the night.

Yahya repairing the kilim

I asked to take his picture and he consented, then invited me to sit with him, pulling a pillow at me . I did, watching his hands quickly work a crochet hook over and under the weave, pulling through a piece of yarn that then bound the tear together, perfectly matching and making the rent disappear.

Yahya spoke fairly decent English and immediately corrected me when I asked him how long it took to repair the carpet. “Kilim,” he said. “No carpet. Kilim flat weave.” He demonstrated what he meant, showing me that that horizontal wool was woven over and under vertical wool, creating a flat piece of material. In carpets, he later showed me, thousands and thousands of strands of wool was individually tied onto vertical pieces of wool, causing them to stick up and creating a plush softness.

He asked where I was from, pleasantly surprised, as I have found many Turks to be, that I am American. Yahya later explained why this was. “Many Americans came to Turkey, but after 9/11, none of them come.” His opinion was reinforced by some other Turks a day later. The Turks we met seemed happily seemed to think Sarah and I represented the beginning of a resurgence in American tourism. We were baffled, because neither of us had ever regarded Turkey as unsafe. It is predominantly Muslim, yes, but is also a liberal, secular state with a fully-functioning democracy that is only a few hurdles away from EU membership. I regard Greece and Italy, with their rampant corruption and criminality, not to mention a strengthening mafia, to be far more dangerous. I was surprised to hear that Americans had stayed away.

As if to disprove the Americans comment, Brenna, Sarah and Ryan came up from their shopping to find me sitting with Yahya and reminded me that it was time for dinner before walking off to the boat. Sarah stayed behind and Yahya invited us inside. “I know you will no buy carpets,” he said. That was obvious, from Sarah’s $2 sunglasses to the duct tape holding one of my sandals together. “Come, I give you little gift.”

We went inside, to a store with its walls and floor covered in carpets, and hundreds stacked around the perimeter of the room. Yahya pointed out the four different types of carpets: wool, silk, cotton, and carpets that are amalgams of these materials. After explaining, carpets obviously being the obsession of his life, he pulled out a stack of woven pillow covers and told Sarah and I to each choose one as a gift. They were old and obviously had been used, not to be resold, but that he was giving us such a unique gift was still awesome. I chose one with two red squares, two blue ones and bordered in green. Now covering a pillow and sitting in a chair in my apartment, it clashes with absolutely everything, which is just the way it should be.

Yahya invited us back for tea after dinner.

***

While the rest of the boat went out in search of a bar, Brenna joined Sarah and I back at Yahya’s shop. Yahya, sitting on the floor with a glass of apple tea beside him, came under a barrage of questions.

Yahya was originally from Capodocia, a poorer region in the center of the country with a landscape better suited for the moon. He learned carpet weaving at his mother’s knee and was so good at it by the age of 13 that a carpet seller, making his rounds of the villages to buy carpets for resale in Istanbul, invited Yahya along. Only just a teenager, he left his family and everyone he knew to go weave carpets in Turkey’s largest city.

“I had to cook for myself, clean my dishes,” he said. “It was very hard.” I had to smile. I was thinking of this huge, bustling city, adults who may or may not take advantage of him and his skills, loneliness, exposure to bars, clubs, brothels, and yet Yahya’s memories were of a boy whose mother was no longer doing the domestic duties. After a few years, Yahya moved down to Kash, on the southern coast, where tourists came in on their yachts looking to spend their foreign currency on woven wool. He know owned half the shop, manning it until the wee hours of the night.

“Demi Moore, she come here,” he said. “And Madonna,” listing the famous people who had passed his carpet store. “She have two boats.”

When I told him I lived in Ukraine, he smiled knowingly. “You should visit,” I said at his smile. “Why?” he asked, the thought disdainful to him. “Beautiful things in Ukraine,” I said. He winked. “I know. They have come here.” His tongue darted up and touched the gap in his two front teeth, something he did whenever he made a joke.

“You like Ukrainian women?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to die!” he said. “And I don’t spend money.” It took a few minutes to get clarification on this, but Yahya was of the opinion that Ukrainian women, all Ukrainian women were prostitutes and he neither wanted to A) pay for their services or B) get any lethal diseases. It was easy to see how he arrived at this generalization: most Ukrainian women who lived in Turkey were prostitutes. I wanted to point out that many were victims of human trafficking, lured to Turkey (and Germany, and Britain, and…) by promises of jobs as waitresses and hotel staff but then put to work as prostitutes, their passports taken from them and objections met with beatings, but Yahya was so adamant that Ukrainians the world over sold their bodies for money that it didn’t seem worth the effort and I didn’t want to upset him with an argument.

He put in the last word on it any way: “And they no buy carpets.”

***

“Flying carpet!” said Yahya, and one spun through the air towards me. He stuck his tongue to his teeth again, proud at his pun. I looked at the carpet now lying on the floor in front of me. It was beautiful, and this from a guy who didn’t get why people think carpets are beautiful. On a white background, a tree emerged from the bottom, multicolored birds on its branches. It wasn’t large, perhaps the size of a poster, but it was made of silk, said Yahya, then he flipped it over to show me how tightly packed all the knots were. It had come out of a wooden dowry chest that he stored his most valuable carpets in. He would sell it for around $3,000. In American it might fetch $15,000.

He went into the back room to make more tea and I overcame the urge to roll it up and run. $15,000 could be mine if I could just get out of the country. Instead it was right where Yahya had left it when he came back with more tea.

Yahya said that in a year he would probably sell about 600 carpets. Although of different values, he was still pulling down probably half a million dollars, much of which went back into inventory. Still, he wasn’t hurting: during the course of the evening he pulled out both a very expensive digital camera and an even more expensive mobile phone.

The carpet business was apparently a good one.

After our second glass of apple tea, Brenna asked about the differences in carpet quality. Yahya didn’t quite have the English for it, but he took us to a loom in the corner. He showed us the knot used in most carpets, especially those done by machines. It looped under itself only once. Giving a hard tug on the yarn, it came out of the vertical lines of wool. He then showed us the knot used in Turkey, which doubled back on itself twice, something only dexterous human fingers, not machines, could do (well, not cheaply anyway). No mater how you tugged on it, the yarn wouldn’t come out. Pulling a book off a shelf, Yahya showed us a picture of a 1,200 year old Turkish carpet currently in a museum in St. Petersburg. It looked dull and worn, but was completely intact.

Now that’s quality.

I had Yahya show me the knot again and sat down to do it while he pulled out a carpet he had woven himself to show Brenna and Sarah. The knot was hard to do, my fingers fumbling, but I slowly got it down while Yahya explained the symbolism woven into the carpet, and how each shape demonstrated what was on his mind when he made it: the yearning for love. Eventually I had knotted ten or so pieces of yarn, finishing another line over the one Yahya had done. After cutting them to length with a pair of special scissors that must have been 50 years old, my line perfectly matched. I had just helped make a Turkish carpet! Make that a Cuban-American-Turkish carpet!

Yahya showing me the Turkish double knot

Trimming the yarn down after knotting a line

My one line of carpet

Yahya explaining the symbolism in a carpet he had made

The tea had forced me to leave and go to the bathroom shortly thereafter, and when I got back, Brenna had pulled me aside. Apparently, while Sarah had been looking at carpets on a wall, she and Yahya had a conversation that had gone like this:

“You like girls? You lesbian?”

“Yes,” Brenna had said.

“You dated guy before?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you date one again?” he had asked hopefully.

Later, he convinced her, to mild protestations, to give him a back massage. Since he had been kind and had given her a pillow cover as well, she obliged while Sarah flipped threw a carpet book, and I laid down on a stack of carpets, realizing how tired I was.

Everyone relaxing in the carpet shop

The carpet on top was old, almost a hundred years old, and huge, about fifteen feet by six feet. Expressing my happiness at its softness, Yahya offered it to me for $600. Everyone’s mouths dropped open.

Yahya offered me the top carpet for $600

“Take it,” said Brenna. It would easily fetch $3000 in America.

Of course I didn’t have that much money. Nor that much room in my backpack.

***

The end of the evening, after Yahya closed shop, found us in “The Secret Garden”, a bar with a hookah (“Nargehleh” in Turkish). Brenna had made sure she was sandwiched between Sarah and myself and I felt almost bad for Yahya has the conversation, aided by much apple flavored tobacco (which, since we don’t smoke, definitely gave Brenna and I a buzz), sped out of control and mostly centered on male and female roles.

Sarah on the hookah

The rest of the boat crew inadvertently found us when they independently came into the bar. “Bar” tends to connote a smoky interior, but we were outside, sitting on cushions, smoking out of a pipe so long it looked like a musical instrument, hooked up to a four foot tall hookah with a metal horse impaled on the pipe leading up to the coals. I will say one thing: Turks have relaxation down to an art form. Although the rest of the party took over another table, Stella came over to ours and nestled in beside me. The ambiguity of whether her wrist, hand hanging limp, was on my knee out of necessity or flirtation was pleasantly distracting, and as smoke curled out of my mouth I reflected on waking up on the deck of a boat, swimming to an island covered in ruins, steering a yacht for the first time, sneaking into a valley, weaving a carpet and ending the evening smoking flavored tobacco on a warm, moonlit summer night with the warmth of a beautiful Greek girl beside me.

Stella and I

And Americans were afraid to come here?

Good. More for me.

Turkey: Scenes from a Boat (Pics)

2006-10-13T04:10:00.000-04:00

What does one do on a guliet (a traditional wooden yacht) for four days? Swim. Read. Tan. Talk. Eat. Repeat.

For a go-go-go traveler like me, taking a “Blue Cruise” along the Turkey’s southern coast seemed an egregious waste of time. But when Sarah was too sick to go north, it seemed a good idea, especially when we read that the itinerary would things like sunken ruins, fishing villages, and a dance club reachable only by boat. The price, $180 each, seemed a little steep, but we haggled down to $140, a price that we were sworn to secrecy over.

The boat we spent four days on

I was glad Sarah was along: no matter who the other dozen or so passengers were, I knew we’d have a good time. But as it turned out the other passengers made it worth it. For social reasons explicable only to an anthropologist, our group rapidly split into three tribes who would little interact during the entire voyage. There was the older group, the retirees in their 50s and 60s who dissected every aspect of everything: the food, the color of the water, the comfort of the cabins. There were the Australians, who numbered five, came separately and immediately congregated together (I’m sad to say that they’d still win in any survivor situation) and the rest of us: four Americans, one Greek and one South Korean.

A motley crew we were: Brenna was a lesbian (she would make sure you knew this fact within minutes of meeting her, so it’s kind of a defining characteristic) who had worked as a masseuse in Greece, which is how she met Stella, a distracting beauty who routinely kicked my ass at backgammon (I blame the bikini). Stella was pursued by Ryan, a graphic designer from Colorado on an extended world tour, (who would quasi-succeed with her by the end of the trip). This left Doyon, on an eight month trip and who had stopped to teach math for a month in a hut in Nepal “because I thought it would be fun.”

Me, Stella, Ryan, Brenna and Sarah. Doyon is taking the picture

I’ve met a number of people while traveling, exchanged a lot of email addresses but a couple hours at a hostel or a club does not let you now a lot about a person. Four days on a boat is a really good way to actually get to know people. With Ryan and Doyon I talked of travel and women. With Stella I flirted, but mostly kept that chill so as not to get in Ryan’s way. With Brenna I also talked about travel and women (she was ready to jump on the first ferry across the Black Sea to Ukraine when she heard of the women there), but she and I connected in a way I rarely do with people and we spent many hours talking and laughing and debating about absolutely nothing.

Me conning Brenna into giving me a back massage. Baring the needed tools, it was done on the dining room table with suntan lotion serving as massage oil

Our patterns on the boat were quickly established. While the boat was on the move we’d read (between buses and the boat trip I went through three books in nine days), tan, talk, and play backgammon and chess, all to a constant soundtrack from the music blasting from the galley, everything from Cat Stevens to Moby to Turkish pop.

Chilling on the boat. This is also where most of us slept since the nights were warm

As you can see, life was very difficult

The boat would stop, usually in some unidentified cove, and everyone would jump overboard and swim in water that was blissfully warm (with strange cold eddies that would hit you).

Sometimes we snorkeled with leaky gear. Sometimes we fished with nothing but fishing lines and hooks. Sometimes we would go cliff diving (the first time it took me an hour to work up the courage to actually dive, that is head first, from the top of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water. Before then I would jump, scream like a girl and curl into a cannonball).

The clarity of the deep, fish-filled water

An octopus caught with nothing but line, bait and a hook

Me, jumping off a cliff

After a while our captain, Mustafa, would tell us we were leaving and we pull ourselves out of the water, arrange ourselves on the deck, and ply the blue waters some more, to swim, tan, talk, eat, read, repeat.

Getting my ass kicked at backgammon

Could you concentrate on the game?

Often, Turks would come out to the boat to sell us ice cream or stuffed pancakes

Me, hanging off the bow

Delicious Turkish food, three times a day

Stella, Ryan, Me and Sarah jumping off the boat. Stella didn't quite get the idea.

Turkey: Fetiye (Pics)

2006-10-05T14:13:00.000-04:00

Every morning started with a traditional Turkish breakfast

The harbor at Fetiye, packed with yachts that travel along Turkey's southern coast.

Women canning olives. Turkish life is lived outside.

Spices at the market

Before the Romans ruled this area, it was controlled by the Lycasions, who left little behind but these graves carved into the cliffs

The grave of some Lycasion king

Now with a Daniel on it

Lycasion sarchophogi are all over the city. Rather than move them, people simply built the streets around them

A family enjoying the warm late evening air

We were in Fetiye to catch a boat. And after this relaxing day, that's just what we did...

Turkey: I am Oily (Pics)

2006-09-30T15:16:00.000-04:00

I am covered in a layer of oil as I type this. It's not that I'm too lazy to take a shower (which is usually the case) but that I was told it was healthy to leave it on for an hour so my skin can absorb it.

I have oil on me because it was put there for half an hour by a man wearing only a towel. This was in a Turkish bath, so Jerry Falwell (I know you read this), you can reast easy. The visit to the Turkish bath (Hammam) was the third to last thing on a long itinerary. It was pretty cool: sauna, then soap massage and getting rubbed down with a coarse glove followed by rinsing and then that oil massage (Sarah opted for a pedicure instead of the massage). I found it pays to be an attractive female: there were three girls in the marble tiled soap massage room when we entered, two lying on the marble pentagon altar-thingy in the middle and being soaped/scrubbed.

The one being soaped, the looker of the three, was soaped for the better part of fifteen minutes, the man vigorously soaping everying inch of her, paying particular attention to the breasts and insides of her thighs (which she didn't seem to mind, saying in a British accent: "Oh, I lah-ike thaat"). He even massaged her face. I thought perhaps I needn't have paid for the massage after, if the soap massage was that involved. It turns out my soaping was less than two minutes, as it was for the girls after her as well.

Apparently being Ukrainian might help: we were talking with the female manager before this and she said she did get a lot of Ukrainian customers during the tourist season (we are in Bodrum, on the mediteranian coast, and it's a a package-tour destination). The massuesses, according to her, slaver like dogs over the ladies. The manager wasn't impressed with them, though, saying they're stuck up and don't know English, making her communicate through gestures. She also said some of them knew Turkish but hid it, so that they could listen to her conversations with the workers. Now, the stuck up thing I could agree with: Ukrainians, like most of those who lived under the USSR, are exceptionally proud and lean heavily on racial bias: they tend to think of Turks (or anyone south of them) as dirty, despite the fact that everything, from restaurants to buses to hotels, is palatial compared to Ukraine. I cannot see, well, any Ukrainian knowing Turkish though. Obviously some might but Turksih is not taught in any schools, there is not a significant amount of commerces between the two countries, and the females she was complaining about were probably not likely to know it. I think it's part of the Ukrainian/Turkish distrust that's been going on since Kyivian Rus bumped up against Crimean Tartars a millenia ago. Anyway, despite the historical antagonism, be a Ukrainian hottie and you'll get a fifteen minute soap massage.

The oil massage was pretty good: I've had two bad experiences paying for professional massages in the past and so I guess the third time is a charm.

The reason I was getting a massage in Bodrum and not in Istanbul was that Sarah didn't get better and couldn't stomach (literally) a ten-hour overnight bus trip. We stayed an extra night in Selchuk and headed south to Bodrum in the morning: three hours, which to her was manageable. Originally our itinerary called for three overnight buses. Now we won't do any and will put along the Mediteranian coast until we get back to where we started and catch our plane home.

Today started at 6:30 AM so we could catch our bus.

Since then we have:

Visited THE Mausolium, where they buried Mausolus, whose name the structures came from. Except his was fourteen stories tall and only had one small room that held his small urn. It was one of the seven wonders of the world before it was torn down for building materials, leaving only the foundations. Yes, on this trip I have now been to TWO wonders of the world. Might make it a goal to get to all seven. Sarah's got a pic of me lying on the floor of the exposed burial chamber.

What's left of the Mausoleum

What the Mausoleum used to look like

In the burial chamber

Messing around in a connecting tunnel at the Mausoleum

Visited St. Peter's castle, which is where all that building material went. In addition to being a cool castle with views from the turrets of the yacht-laden waters on one side and the thousands of sugar-cube houses stretching up the hills on the other, it had the world's largest underwater archeology museum. Although it had way too many pots (taken from hundreds of shipwrecks in the thousands of years that ships have been plying thiese waters), it was one of the best museums I've been to, well laid out and really informative. Don't ask me about it any time soon because you'll get an earful of shiplife for the past four millenia. Yes, four millenia: they had artefacts from a bronze age ship that sunk before Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. I was touching stuff (in the case of some stone tablets) older than the Bible.

St. Peter's Castle

The view of Bodrum from the turrets

Me, looking over my kingdom

Bronze age pots that are older than the Bible

The castle dungeon. The inscription says "God is not here"

Shopped with Sarah because she needed a bathing suit and clubbing clothes, having brought neither on her trip. This was actually more fun than it sounds like, mostly because I finally convinced her to buy a tight red top with "Playboy" written across the chest. If you know Sarah, you will know why this is funny.

Turkish bath was the third to last thing.

Getting dinner, even though it's almost 11 PM is the second to last thing because the restaurants here are open to 5 AM and are especially busy because it's Ramadan and observing Muslims can only eat at night.

The last thing is to hit an open-air club on the beach called Hekeropolis. It's so well-known it gets a paragraph in Lonely Planet and one poster we saw while walking around the city said: "You haven't been to Bodrum if you haven't been to Helekarnos." Tonight is "Crazy Foam Night". I have no idea what it means.

Should be fun.

But first I'm going to take a shower...

Turkey: Ruins and Cures (Pics)

2006-09-29T10:26:00.000-04:00

After I wrote my blog yesterday I had to go searchıng for Sarah. She had come up lookıng for the key to the room, I dıdn't know where ıt was and she left to go lookıng for ıt. And lookıng for ıt... And lookıng for ıt...

She had got ıt ın her head that ıt had gotten lost whıle we were out followıng the drummers and was scourıng the neıghborhood wıth a Spanısh gırl also stayıng at the hostel named Lyra.

I found the key on the couch where I had set ıt down and went downstaırs to be ınformed that Sarah was off and about. I went out ınto the neıghborhood, pushıng my Turkısh ınto the longest sentence I've managed thus far: 'ıkı bayan nerede?' Where are two gırl? Now,thıs statement could have a number of meanıngs but most people knew what I was askıng about and poınted me the rıght way, especıally a small group of old ladıes sıttıng on plastıc chaırs on the sıdewalk, who poınted me wıth great glee. I knew the words for 'two' and 'where' because I've been orderıng two of everythıng (tıckets, water) for two days now for Sarah and me and also frequently askıng 'where ıs the toılet?' The word for gırl I learned because whıle the toılets wıll be marked 'bay' and 'bayan' respectıvely, they generally don't have the helpful pıctures to tell you whıch ıs whıch. The fırst tıme I got yelled at for walkıng ınto the wrong one, I learned pretty quıckly.

Sarah and Lyra passed the old ladıes before I found them and the old ladıes motıoned for them to waıt and then a lady sent a kıd to come fınd me. All together, we were taught a handful of Turkısh words by the old women (who were really entertaıned by us) and we fought through a language barrıer to say who we were and where we were from and to establısh the famılıal relatıonshıps of everyone hangıng around. Sarah lıked the whatever that one of the ladıes was crochetıng and so the lady went ınsıde and came out wıth some beautıful embrodery and lace that she had done. Sarah ended up buyıng one of the embroıdered headscarves the lady had made.

Mack-ing the old ladies

Sarah with her new headscarf

Sarah and I ended the evenıng watchıng a lıghtıng storm from the roof of the pensıon.

***

The next day Sarah was feelıng sıck. She'd been sıck for a couple days but was really naseous today. We went to the ruıns of Ephesus, the best preserved ruıns on the Medıteranıan, but after twenty mınutes she was throwıng up on saıd ruıns (and goıng one better than the spıttıng Dıana had asked me to do) and decıded to catch a marshrutka back.

Sarah adding ambiance--and breakfast--to Ephesus

I spent a couple hours wanderıng around. Not only the sprawlıng remaıns of a cıty that probably held 30,000, but some of the houses were so well preserved you could see the paınt stıll on the walls and ıntact mosaıcs on the floors. For the fırst tıme I got a real sense of what a Roman cıty was lıke because unlıke a monument here or a buıldıng there as I had expereıence before, I was walkıng the streets, seeıng the areas for the market, the remaıns of the lıbrary and the stadıum and even pokıng around the rooms of the brothel (yes, I have vısıted a brothel ın Turkey now). It really put thıngs ınto perspectıve and made me realıze that, wıth central heatıng and ındoor plumbıng, the Romans weren,t doıng much worse than we were even a century and a half ago, and ıt really was a fall from grace when thıs part of the world fell ınto the Dark Ages.

The ancient city of Ephesus

The library of Ephesus

Close up of the library

A mosaic of Mary

Inside some Roman homes that had been buried by an earthquake and preserved. Notice the painted walls and floor mosaics.

A Roman toilet. The pipe on the floor carried waste away

Me with the massive theatre at Ephesus

Waıtıng on the marshrutka back, I was talkıng to a cab drıver named Mufasta and he convınced me (only after much hagglıng and gettıng my fırst 50% dıscount on a haggle) to go to Mary's house. It was a ways away and there wasn't much to see, but I have vısıted what ıs belıeved to be (by the Catholıc Church and they tend to be an authorıty on these thıgns) the last place Mary lıved--as ın vırgın Mary, mother of Jesus. Apparently she came here wıth St. John and lıved out the rest of her lıfe. Her grave has never been found, but the restored remaıns of her house have been turned ınto a small chapel. I found prayıng slıghtly dıffıcult; I don't have a dıalogue wıth Mary nor readıly ınclude her ın my relıgıous contemplatıons so dıdn't really know what to say or pray. Other than a 'Haıl Mary', mostly I wondered what ıt would be lıke for her, havıng just watched her son be brutally murdered, to then have to leave her homeland, come north and lıve the rest of her days almost alone (although close, St. John contınued preachıng and wrıtıng half a day's journey away). So ıt was less prayıng than thınkıng.

The restored house where the Catholic church said Mary lived out the rest of her life

In addıtıon to the small church ın her restored house, there ıs an old stone drınkıng fountaın buılt on a sprıng that the church also holds that Mary would have gotten her water from and drank from. The water ıs now consıdered to work mıracles. After drınkıng some, I fılled up a bottle to brıng back and hopefully cure Sarah. Eıther way I'm brıngıng a half lıter back wıth me, so that my Mary mıracle water can sıt on the shelf wıth my blessed Pepsı.

The water from this fountain is said to work miracles

Sarah wasn't around when I got back and no one had seen her. I was a lıttle worrıed and walked around to see ıf maybe, havıng felt better, she went out to eat or maybe went back to the carpet store. I fınally found her back at the pensıon, ın a room at the back of the pensıon. A pensıon worker had saıd she could sleep ın an unoccupıed room (we had checked out thıs mornıng) and saıd worker was hımself asleep, whıch ıs why no one had known she was back.

Trıed to go to a Turkısh Bath, but ıt turned out to be women's day. Sexısts!

Goıng to go get dınner and get on that overnıght bus to Istanbul...

Gettıng lots of great photos but no vıable way to get them up (they are too bıg and ınternet ıs too slow) untıl I get back.

Peace!

Turkey: Saınts and Wonders (Pics)

2006-09-28T13:33:00.000-04:00

It took comıng to Turkey to realıze how lıttle I knew about Turkey. Although completly wrapped up ın Greek, Roman and Bıblıcal hıstory, I only thınk of Turkısh culture as Ottoman.

But yesterday I vısıted the place where St. Stephen was martyred and burıed. Today, ın a cıty called Selchuk on the western coast, I vısıted the church over the tomb of St. John. As ın St. John who wrote the Gospel of John and Revalatıons ın the bıble. I dıdn't know thıs, but ıt ıs accepted church belıef that St. John and Mary (as ın, vırgın, mother of God) came to what ıs now Turkey and lıved out theır lıves. A sıgn near the church has a dıfferent ınterpretatıon: 'these thıngs beıng done, John took Mary ınto hıs hose.' I don't know ıf they meant the kınd you wear on your legs or the kınd water comes out of, but ıt ıs an ınterestıng theory and one Rome may not have taken ınto consıderatıon. A huge church was buılt over John's tomb and were ıt stıll standıng ıt would be the 7th largest ın the world. Instead ıt ıs a sprawl of columns and stone that Sarah and I explored for an hour.

The ruins of the church to St. John

St. John's grave

After that we walked to the 700 year-old Isa Bey mosque. It ıs Ramadan, but the mosque was strangely empty. When the call to prayer rang out from the mınuret, only the two men sellıng Korans and scrawlıng people's name ın Arabıc for a fee went to pray, dwarfed ınsıde the sprawlıng ınterıor (mosques ıs mostly one large empty space covered ın carpets so that many people can pray together).

A mosque in Selchuk

After that we walked to the Temple of Artımes, one of the seven ancıent wonders of the world. Robbed for buıldıng materıals, only parts of the foundatıon and one lone column stand. It's not much of a wonder, but I can say that I vısıted ıt.

The temple was Greek, the church Byzantıne and the Mosque Ottoman, all were wıthın ten mınutes walkıng dıstance of each other.

This is the lone column left of the Temple of Artimes, one of the seven wonders of the world. In the upper right is the Church of St. John. In the upper left is the Isa Bey Mosque. Behind it is a Citadel built in the 11th century

Hagglıng has been the norm. Other vısıtors don't seem to realıze thıs. Hearıng other people ın our pensıon talk, they are payıng askıng prıce and are not aware they can pay any other. Our bus tıckets to Istanbul tomorrow started at 80 lıra (1 dollar=1.5 lıra) and we talked them down to 60. Our room started at 30 and we got them down to 20 wıth breakfast thrown ın. The older Australıan couple we talked to apparently paıd 40 (maybe because we're younger they proprıetor thought we couldn't afford as much). And the hagglıng really came ın at a carpet store. I don't want to gıve away what I bought (ıt wasn't carpets) because some of the recıpıents read thıs blog, but I emerged wıth 1/3 off what was already a steal by Amerıcan prıces and thıs ıs the key word here: cashmıre.

Had a good dınner back at the pensıon, whıch was surprısıngly sub-par to what we've been eatıng. Huge portıons and amazıngly delıcıous. The Cossacks stole many thıngs from the Ottoman Turks durıng raıds: money, slaves, jewlery. Why couldn't they steal some recıpes? But ın return for raıds the Turks had agaınst the Ukraınıans, Dıana asked me to spıt on Turkısh ground. Apparently thıs ıs a tradıtıon when Ukraınıans come to Turkey (a lot do--ıt's cheap and they don't need a vısa, so package tours go to the coast; yesterday I heard more Russıan than Turkısh, but we are now north of the tour locatıons).

Some of the delicious Turkish food

Rıght now, I am ın a room on the top floor of the pensıon. Through hangıng curtaıns ıs the roof from whıch I can see the cıty and a 6th castle on a hıll (whıch we can't go see because ıt's unstable). Behınd me are two Turkısh men sıttıng on the pıllows that lıne the wall of thıs carpeted room, gruntıng as they watch at football match on televısıon. The televısıon ıs to my rıght but through the door on my left ıs the waılıng of the call to prayer. Earlıer, men sıngıng and beatıng a drum walked up the street. Thıs ıs Ramadan tradıtıon, ındıcatıng that ıt's now late enough to eat (Muslıms fast through the day durıng Ramadan). I went out and photographed them and they were happy to pose. Shortly after we were mobbed by kıds wantıng theır pıctures taken and they posed wıth Sarah and I ın turn agaınst a yellow paınted wall, the kınd of photo you normally see ın guıdebooks. Everyone has been extremely frıendly and accomodatıng and the servıce everywhere has been outstandıng. People are warm to you here, the stark opposıte of Slavıc coldness. The weather ıs warm, too, and dry.

A Ramadan drummer

Getting mobbed by Turkish kids

It's amazıng.

Tommorrow mornıng ıt's the ruıns of Epheseus, the best preserved classıcal ruıns ın the Medıteranıan. After that ıt's a massage and soakıng at a Turkısh bath before gettıng on an overnıght bus to Istanbul.

I am so content rıght now.

Turkey: Day One (Pics)

2006-09-27T13:34:00.000-04:00

The ırony of a blog: when I've got actual storıes to tell, I am too busy to wrıte them.

Sarah came to Ukraıne on Frıday. Sınce then ıt's been non-stop. Normally I'd talk about all the clımbıng and clubbıng we've been doıng, but that's overshadowed by better events.

Prodıgy came to Kyıv and I got to see them ın concert, not fıfteen feet from the stage. The ıntensıty of that experıence was overshadowed about fours later when Sarah and I got up ın the mıddle of the nıght to start our journey that would end fıve hours later wıth us ın southern Turkey. Another sıx hours of buses and marshrutkas (here called Dolomuses), and we were explorıng snow-whıte travertıne pools, Roman ruıns and swımmıng ın the warm mıneral waters of a pool that had collapsed Greek columns ın ıt. We ended the evenıng on the patıo of our hotel (whıch we managed to haggle a thırd of the prıce off of), eatıng spıced chıcken and rıce and lıstenıng to the waılıng prayers broadcast from the mınuret of a nearby mosque.

And that was only the fırst of nıne more days.

Grapes and pommegranates hanging heavy from tressle at our hotel

Travertine pools created by left-behind calcium

The mineral water of the pools is considered to be healthy so people come to bathe in them

To preserve the calcium deposits, you're not allowed to wear shoes on them, which meant we had to walk barefoot for half a mile to the top...

...where we found the ruins of Heiropolis, a Roman city built near the pools as a sort of ancient health spa. Here is the well-preserved theatre

Heiropolis is also the place where St. Stephen was stoned to death. Later, when Rome went Christian, this martyrdom was built over the site of his killing.

Ruins are meant for climbing

Or yoga

Swimming in warm thermal waters amongst collapsed columns.

Ukraine: Bikes and Work (Pics)

2006-09-21T04:45:00.000-04:00

Below are some photos from the second bike, um, "thing" with Zhytomyr's orphans. Originally, they agreed to let us take the orphans on excursions into the countryside, where we have waterfalls, cliffs, the ruins of a palace, mass graves from the holocaust, etc. But the last two scheduled times they had us bring the bikes to the orphanage (which requires rounding up ten people to bike an hour to get them there) and they're only allowed to ride them on orphanage property due to legal restrictions. Hopefully they're warming up to us and I can find an orphanage employee willing to come on the excursions. Haven't had a lot of time to do so: the last time we were there, there was also an impromptu visit from the mayor (who has been under fire for allegations of voter fraud from the last election) with a camera crew in tow. We were told the kids could ride for 20 minutes and then we had to leave. We've scheduled an excursion for non-orphans on Sunday, so hopefully we'll have our first one that actually leaves the city. I wanted to have both orphans and non-orphans on excursions so they could make friends (the orphans are isolated at the orphange), but the beaurocratic headaches might make that not happen. Still, even if they're not getting to bike out of the city, they still are getting the ACET information sessions and they have a great time just biking around (at the highest possible speeds with homicidal intentions after having surreptiously removing their required helmets).

Two of the Polissya girls who rode the bikes 30KM to the orphanage

At the orphanage

I swear I yelled at them for having their helmets off right after I took this picture

In other work news, I had my last session with this group of teachers yesterday. It was on teaching grammar and at the end I gave them a list of about twenty phrases or words that Ukrainian students consistently use incorrectly because they're incorrect in the textbooks. "I jealous you" and "I go in for sport" are common ones. They're not huge problems, just consistent ones. The problem is that the teachers tend to resist that these are wrong. "This is how we teach them!" I know. "This is how they are in the books!" Yes, I know. But they're wrong.

I can understand: how would you feel if you were told you had been teaching something wrong for years? This is the general defense, brought up even later when a teacher used a phrase I hadn't even put on the list: "Have you a mother, father, sister, brother?" Slavic languages don't have articles and don't put a conjunction at the end of a list, so this is an easy mistake, it being a direct translation. But, yes, it's also the phrase written in the books. When I tried to explain that it's "Have you A mother, A father, A sister OR A brother?", the offending teacher said: "That is American English. We teach British English."

At which point I have to explain, nicely, that I've been to Britain, I have British friends, I watch British sit-coms, I dated a girl for three years who was raised in the British Commonwealth, I have a good grasp of the differences between British and American English, and this isn't one. Don't feel bad, it's not your fault, you learned it incorrectly. That's why native speakers are here to help.

But they still don't want to admit that.

Ukraine: Ow (Pic)

2006-09-18T07:19:00.000-04:00

Most of this week has been cleaning my apartment and organizing my lessons. The former is for Sarah, who will be here on Friday and will stay in Ukraine for a month. We are going to tear this country (and at least one other) up!

My apartment has two rooms and since the other will be hers while she's crashing with me, this required cleaning it. Thing is, it had became the repositry of every lesson, handout, and resource I've made/found/been given for the past two years. We're talking stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of papers with no discernible order covering every flat space in the room and most of the floor. It generally looked like a hurricane fought a printing press and won. As often as not I'd end up needing this or that handout for a different version of the same lesson and not having time to go through the room, would make new ones and those would get tossed in there too.

I spent a week organizing everything into five huge 3-ring binders to pass on to the next volunteer. Several big-ass bags also made their way down to the trash receptical for someone to burn later. Whoever comes after me will either thank me or their head will explode just trying to look through them. But out of a rather boring week, the following story did happen:

***

So I decided that I needed a new challenge in climbing, and that challenge would be to do a circuit of the ten routes on the main cliff that weren’t 5.12s. I started the challenge by knocking through the first five. Then I came to the two hardest. Here’s where the mistakes began.

I started the sixth, a 5.11a called “Path of War” from the ledge at its base. To the right, the ledge drops off five feet to a lower ledge. I had been leading all the previous routes, but “Path of War” shares the same anchor with the route I had just done so I had left the rope up to save time.

Igor, my 15 year-old belayer, well, I don’t know if he had gotten bored or distracted or what, but he seemed to think I was leading the route, even though there was very obviously a rope going from my harness up to an anchor and back down to him.

Anyway, I was about ten feet up at the hardest move and Igor hadn’t been taking up the slack, thinking it was a lead climb and waiting for me to put in the first clip. The problem might also have been that Nadia was beside him, and Nadia is just damn pretty.

I fell doing that move and kept falling, straight past the ledge Igor was standing on and hitting the one below it, twenty feet in all, landing on my right foot-- which immediately gave out from under me--and then landing on my right side, smacking my ribs on the rock. I lay there for a few minutes, waiting for the pain to go away. Luckily the rope had started sucking up momentum a few feet from the rock or it would have hurt a lot worse.

I got up, shook myself out and decided to start climb some more, if only to assure a guilt-ridden Igor that I really was okay. I climbed the route perfectly after that, possibly due to the adrenaline-amp, took down the rope and prepared to lead the route beside it, another 5.11a called “Hakuna Matata”.

The hardest move on this route is the last one: a fun but awkward move that’s also ten feet above the last clip. If you fall, you fall twenty feet and get whipped into a ledge of rock. At least two of the network of lines crisscrossing my right shin are from falls on this move.

It’s a funky sequence: above you is a solid foot-wide ledge. If you do a pull up on that and get your feet under you and spread wide, looking like a hanging frog, you’ll find a nice foot hold on your right, out of sight around a flake of rock, and the tiniest nub for your toe on the left. You then shift your grip and push down on the ledge, raising your body up to where your waist is at ledge height. The goal is to now get a foot on this ledge.

Because the rock flakes up and left, you reach up with your left, grab a vertical edge of rock, lean back against it so your body is now diagonal, shift your weight onto your left toe to free up your right foot, and then push and pull at once, a trippy dynamic move to swing your right foot up to that ledge.

One of two things will happen: you’ll get the foot onto the ledge, stand up and be at the anchor, or you’ll aim too high or too low, your momentum will take your toe off the nub and down you fall.

The later happened, but due to a subconscious fear about the last time I fell with Igor holding me, I reached out and grab the opposite end of the rope to stop my fall. Hand clenched around that rope and body weight dragging the rope through my hand, I felt a sharp burning sensation before I let go and continued my fall. I needn’t have worried: Igor braked the rope like he should have and I found myself hanging twenty feet lower and cradling my hand. The whole thing had happened in two seconds, without any conscious thought, and now, as I slowly uncurled my right hand, I found I had rope burned it.

I always yell at my students to never hold the opposite rope and here I was with a rope burn. A straight line of skin on my palm looked like it had been glazed and the skin on the undersides of my fingers was raised and red. A couple of tiny blisters were under the knuckles of some fingers, at there were two fat ones on the underside of my middle finger.

While I waited for the pain to clear away, I realized I might have to leave gear on the wall to get down. The last move was difficult enough without doing it with a burned hand. Thing is, I have yet to leave “treasure” on the wall and I wasn’t about to start. Luckily, the parts of my hand that were damaged (palm and insides of the knuckles) were the parts you don’t use on a 5.11 climb. As long as the tips of my fingers were okay, and they were, I could keep going.

I was out of quickdraws, so I had Igor lower me a little, pulled two off the wall and traversed left to another route which I knew had an easier ending. I finished that route, put the rope into the anchor and felt like my hand was feeling better. Using the edge of the cliff, I traversed right to the anchor of “Hakuna Matata”, put the rope in and had Igor lower me (Igor being very confused about this latest set of events) to the last move I had completed on the route. On top rope and with falling not threatening to be painful, I climbed up and pulled the last move, touched the anchor, and had Igor lower me so I could, for ego reasons alone, do it again.

I finished the route again and, since my hand barely hurt during this, I thought that I could complete the last three routes on the circuit. I traversed over and set the anchor on the next route. When Igor brought my down, though, pain in my hand flared up and wouldn’t subside. My hand glowed an angry red and throbbed and the pain didn't go away for the next 20 minutes, despite being wedged between my left bicep and my ribs. I was done for the day.

Because there were only tiny open wounds, there was nothing really to do when I got home: took some IB Profin and cleaned the dirt off. This morning, the only real damage seemed to be the blisters on the middle finger. The rest had gone down and my hand as a whole didn’t hurt. If anything, it was like instant calluses at every place the rope touched. Bonus.

My poor hand

I felt good enough this morning that I’m going to make another attempt at the circuit, possibly tomorrow or Tuesday. And this time I won’t grab the rope.

Ukraine: Climbing the Wrong Mountain (Pics)

2006-09-10T06:14:00.000-04:00

“Have you climbed Goverla before?” the Ranger asked Brian in Ukrainian.

“No,” he replied in the same language.

“Have any of you been here before?” the Ranger asked.

“No. We’ve never been here before,” Brian said, leaning out of the passenger side of the taxi, the door open. I sat half awake in the back, Liz and Gino wedged in beside me. The taxi idled at the mouth of Carpathian National Park, which held Goverla, Ukraine’s highest mountain.

“Well, what will you do if you get lost?” the Ranger asked.

“We’ll take care of it,” said Brian.

“How will you take care it?” the Ranger asked incredulously.

“We won’t get lost,” said Brian with assurance. “I promise.”

The Ranger raised the horizontal bar serving as a gate and our taxi continued onward.

***

“Lost” can be a relative term, I suppose.

Did we know where we came from? Yes.

Did we know where we were going? No.

It should have been easy. I heard that over and over from people who had done Goverla: it’s easy.

We piled out of the cab, cold. At the end of August in the mountains, it was colder than we expected. Brian and Gino were in a tee-shirts and Liz was in a long sleeved cotton shirt. Although Brian is the Eagle Scout, I seemed to be the only one prepared. I had on a fleece and a windbreaker, but I soon loaned the windbreaker to Gino. I was the only one who had eaten that morning, as well, having saved some yogurt and hard-boiled eggs from the previous day’s breakfast. It had been an early wake-up call: 5:15 AM for me, after a few hours of sleep from the good-bye party the night before. To tell the truth, I think I was still a little drunk.

A taxi had brought us, to the tune of 150 hrivna, from our hotel in Yaremcha to the base of Goverla, 37 KM away. It was the only way to get to the roof of Ukraine before we all had to catch a 6:00 PM train back to Kyiv.
We found a sign for Goverla with an arrow pointing at a wide, rock-strewn path.

It was 7:30 AM. Between the four of us we had one liter of water and the two hard-boiled eggs in my pocket. We began walking.

***

We started up the path, moving fast to stay warm, and enjoyed the sights: mountain rivers with planks of wood for bridges, yellow and purple flowers in bloom. Within half an hour we were above the tree line and walking into a Tolkien-esque fantasy: misty mountains, their rounded green tops draped in undulating fog. It was beautiful.

Gino, Liz and Brian crossing a bridge

We approached an old house of sorts, with a tin roof and wooden slats. Higher and behind it we reached a weather station, old and made of concrete blocks, things spinning on weather vanes and wires running everywhere.

We had also lost the trail.

Brian spotted a man in boots and a huge purple parka attending to some of the instruments. He looked surprised to see us.

“Where is the path to Goverla?” asked Brian, who has the best Ukrainian among us. The rest of us lived in Russian or Surgic speaking towns and although we all had a descent understanding of the pure Ukrainian spoken in the west, we were embarrassed by our mangled attempts at speaking it.

Brian and the purple-parked man

The man waved a hand vaguely to the right. “Goverla is over there,” he said. “You’re on the wrong mountain.”

The path that had led us here had been pretty well marked and whenever it branched, obvious red arrows spray-painted on the rocks and put us in the right direction. There was no way we could have gotten lost.

“Well, how do we get there?” asked Brian.

The man waved vaguely again. “Take the path up and then go across the ridge and you’ll get there,” said the man.

“What path?” asked Brian.

The man regarded Brian for a second. “Don’t go,” he said. “You’ll get lost and one of you will fall off a cliff and we’ll have to call an ambulance.”

Brian said nothing.

“And who seriously climbs a mountain in a tee-shirt?” he asked.

Brian turned and walked towards us.

We found the path he referred to, a thin dirt trail used so rarely that the short, shrubby bushes that grew at this altitude had spread their branches nearly completely across it. The rain of the past few days and the morning dew meant the path was muddy and the water on the branches transferred to our pants. The going was steep, all of us falling and sliding at some point, using the branches to pull ourselves up and keep our balance.

Up the path

Forty minutes of this later, finally hitting a plateau, we were soaked and caked in mud. The misty fog that looked so pretty from below now enveloped us, a wet, cold cloud. The mountains and trees no longer blocking the wind, it roared around us and the temperature dropped below freezing.

Brian had his arms inside his tee-shirt. The water in Liz’s hair froze into delicate icicles. I couldn’t feel my hands. But the going was now easier and the path snaked off in the right direction, so we followed it.

We couldn’t see where we were going: the fog was too thick, visibility only a few feet. We often lost sight of each other as we spread out along the path and called to each other to stay in contact. We would periodically regroup, but then our different gaits would spread us out again.

We had no idea where we were. We were on top of a mountain, that was for sure, but we could see nothing around us, could barely see each other, could only see the dirt path under our feet. Although the wind blew constantly, sometimes a gale of it would hit us at once, causing us to brace and see, as the gust blew some of the fog clear, that on our left the ridge of the mountain went up no more than thirty feet before ending at a bush-filled peak and that below us the land dropped away into a steep valley. I now knew what the man said about falling off a cliff.

We kept walking, not knowing where we were going, picking forks in path by intuition more than anything. Then the path all but disappeared. We were following a line of slightly trampled grass, moving in a straight line when even that vanished, hoping to find something more substantial.

The water had been drunk. I had long ago eaten the eggs.

Were we lost? It’s a relative question. Besides, Brian had a promise to keep.

We kept walking.

We could have been half an hour from Goverla, ten minutes away, maybe we were on it. Maybe we were on the wrong path completely. I knew a path wended its way on these mountain tops for more than 40 km, all the way to an old observatory built by the Poles. Maybe we were on that path. Who knew?

If it had been a clear day it would have been easy. That high up we could have spotted the cross I knew to be on top of Goverla, or at least sighted which crest was the highest. We could see absolutely nothing and were shivering and stumbling around on top of a wind-blown ridgeline.

We knew how to get back: turn around. We just didn’t know where we were going. Had Brian broken his promise? It’s academic.

Since I had rounded up the crew for this hike, it fell to me to call it, like a patient dead on the table. There is a point where it becomes to stupid too keep doing what you are doing. And lost on top of a unknown mountain in the Carpathians, shrouded in fog, freezing in tee-shirts, without food and water and no idea how to get where we were going had definitely crossed the stupidity threshold.

We found our way back, retracing our steps along the ridgeline. We were about to start heading downhill again when I found another path leading higher. The three stayed while I explored it and found a path that had seen some use: packed dirt and bits of trash. I came back down and found that the others had spotted a wooden sign in the fog, up near the path I had taken.

Finally! A sign.

Up we went, along that path and found that sign, which had so many boards nailed to its wooden post that it looked like those that point the ways to different, distant cities.

There was no writing whatsoever on it. It was a blank marker up in the mountains, marking absolutely nothing.

The sign with nothing on it

We huddled like penguins, facing each other in a circle while we tried to send text messages, slowly typing out in frozen fingers. I texted my friend Heron, who had done the trail before: “did you see a sign with many boards and no writing?”

Her response: “no, are you above the trees yet?”

We’d been above the trees for more than an hour, but it was obvious we weren’t where we needed to be.

And if anyone is wondering, a penguin huddle really does work. Sharing our body heat like that, we stopped shivering for a few minutes.

Curiously, no one was unhappy. Slipping and sliding around on the mud and being lost had a “so ridiculous it’s funny” quality, and we had never stopped cracking jokes to each other. “This is better,” we said. “Climbing Goverla is easy, at least we had an experience to show for it.”

We headed back down.

I wondered at that going down. Although certainly difficult, Everest is such a popular destination that an infrastructure of fixed ropes and ladders is in place, an entire economy of porters and portable oxygen at its base. At this point, it’s probably harder to climb any of the peaks around Everest, a thousand feet or more shorter but carving the way by yourself.

I now forget the name of the mountain we climbed. I found out the name later, but only remember that it starts with a “B”. I suppose that’s beside the point. The point was we got to the top of a mountain and while 300 feet shorter than Goverla, it was a hell of a lot harder, which made it a hell of a lot cooler.

The lower we went, the less miserable it became. Once out of the clouds we finally had visibility, the temperature got warmer, trees blocked the wind. Brian’s arms sprouted out of his tee-shirt. An hour later we were at the bottom and still could not figure out how we had gotten “lost” in the first place.

The sign to Goverla still pointed to our path and there had been no diverting paths that we had missed. Brian finally saw it: around a building that was part of the nearly-abandoned hotel at the bottom of the mountain was another path, a big one, with a big sign in both English and Ukrainian and red/white/red blazes spray painted on the trees.

Now that was a path and it was obviously the path to Goverla.

On the right is the tiny orange sign pointing to the Goverla path. Notice that it is point to the right. It should be pointing at me, because I was standing on the real Goverla path when I took this picture

I looked back up at the sign pointing to our path. I reached up and lightly pushed on it. It effortlessly swung and now pointed the right way.

Ukraine: The Carpathians (Pics)

2006-09-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

Came back and was swallowed by work. Just got TWO grants done, will know soon whether we got either. Teaching has started, with a group of teachers "of the highest specialization". These are the teachers who get paid the most and have been around the longest. Predominantly in their 50s and 60s, they are also the least likely to want to do any work. In two days I have gotten the excuses: "My head hurts", "I have forgotten my glasses" and "I did not put in my teeth today." Teachers are usually bad students, but if you smile a lot and not take no for an answer (a bit like getting women, actually), they slide into the flow. Three days later, no problems.

(Did he really mean that comment about women? Hmmmmm.)

Anyway, here are pics from COS:

Group 27. We came with 109 and are leaving with 75. I am on the bottom left.

How we spent the majority of each day: listening to many long, long presentations about how to get out of Peace Corps, get jobs, get insurance and get a life.

The Group 27 Gentlemen's Club welcomes you!

One of the excursions was to some nearby caves that hid partisans fighting against the Polish, led by a man named Doverbush. This rock was carved in memory of him and his troops.

A view in the Carpathians Mountains

What? Partisans hid here? I will climb it!

The hotel we stayed was the nicest I've seen in Ukraine and most of the amenities were outside our price range (originally they wanted 40 hrivna per person per hour to swim), but Peace Corps negotiated and paid for one hour for us to all swim. Here is the cluster I trained with, together for the first time in almost two years. We are one of only two intact clusters left.

We had a "Ukranian Disco" night. Everything you wore had to be bought in country. Here is me in a Ukrainian shirt and speedo with Diana Schmidt, the new director of Peace Corps Ukraine.

Sean in his outfit.

Shand in his. Shand is the one getting married upon return to America, so sorry ladies, this hunk of burning love is taken.

Another excursion was to take a ski lift to the top of a mountain. It rained, but we were herded onto the lift anyway. At the top, the attendent wouldn't let us off. Yes, we rode in one big circle in the cold, cold rain. Here is Mike and Sean behind me.

The Group 27 Gentlemen's Club invites you to dry us off.

Caitlin, post high-altitude whirl in the rain.

A wooden something or other

Peace Corps went all out and paid for a really nice farewell dinner. We ate for three hours straight.

The Obhiev crew

The Zhytomyr crew (and our infamous "Z")

Dancing to a Hutzul band

Ukraine: Back from the Carpathians (Vid)

2006-08-31T02:01:00.000-04:00

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.

LA TORTURA (Shakira)

Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

Ukraine: Uh, Cause I Live Here...

2006-08-25T05:46:00.000-04:00

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.

Ukraine: No KaZantip :-(

2006-08-23T05:38:00.000-04:00

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.

Ukraine: A Series of Unfortunate Events

2006-08-21T03:11:00.000-04:00

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.

Ukraine: Yep, it's Gone (Pics)

2006-08-16T08:16:00.000-04:00

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!

The last picture taken of me with my hair down.

Ukraine: Crimea Trip, Part 2 (Pics)

2006-08-12T07:41:00.000-04:00

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.

A view of Sudak

Me and the fortress

Cute baby

Packed beaches in Sudak

A nice view

Me working the speedo

Tents at the music festival

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.

The Swallow's Nest

The coast from the boat

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

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.

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.

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

Want to take a picture on a Harley Davidson?

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.

Mike belaying me as I climb

Ukraine: Crimea Trip, Part 1 (Pics)

2006-08-12T07:24:00.000-04:00

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.

Upsenky Monastary

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.

Living like the Flinstones

Yours truly on top of Chufut-Kale

Interesting old guy

Tartar eating area

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.

Minarets of the Khan's Palace

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

The Ambassador's gate at the palace

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.

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.

Ukraine: Full Circle

2006-08-03T14:05:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-03T04:10:00.000-04:00

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

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

Students learning from Mike how to belay

Manly holding down a kid

The kids doing trust falls

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

Playing more team games

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.

Communal meals, cooked every night by Sean

DAY 2: THE CLIFFS

Going to the site

Diana teaching yoga

The kids attempting yoga

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

Healthy Lifestyles

Team Games (I am a dragon and they have to get my "treasure"--a figure 8 belay device--without me touching them)

Group photo from the end of Day 2

DAYS 3 & 4

Kids climbing:

Sean interviewed by the local news

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

DAY 5

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.

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

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.

Ukraine: Climbing Camp Fin

2006-07-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

What an awesome week. I am completely exhausted and completely happy right now.

Attendence at the camp swung up to 15 and back down to 13 by the end of the week, but this turned out to be just the right amount of kids to have everyone climbing and belaying simultaneously.

The whole week was nothing but competitions and games and lectures and climbing and all the kids were loving it and begging to do it again next year. We played ultimate Frisbie, we built a web out of junk rope that the kids had to work as a team to get through, Jon and I strung up a rope across a 40 foot wide river and the kids had to clip in and pull themselves across hand over hand. In a flash of "why didn't I think of that sooner" insight I figured out how to make our four ropes into eight routes, each 25 feet high. We had a ton of stickers and on the last day we said that every route finished meant you got a sticker and these kids attacked the routes. One kid, Misha, finished five routes in 45 minutes! It was great. Got pretty good news coverage, too: one local television station and two newspapers sent reporters and cameras.

The package from Rock + Ice arrived and I decided it was time to take care of the troops, presenting my instructors with magazines, posters, patches and stickers in a small ceremony on Thursday (it kinda made sense since the magazines are in English). The tee-shirts arrived on the last day and the company that had made them had botched the order (the symbol on the front was smaller than ordered and the symbol on the back for the company sponsoring us was on its side; luckily its abstract and you'd have to know that), so I talked them into a 60% discount, which meant I saved some money because the original price had been misquoted and we didn't get enough from the sponsor. I decided to cover the difference ($23), but because of the discount actually gave money BACK to our sponsor. Also, the cost of printing the completion certificates was cheaper than expected, so we gave even more money back to our sponsor (the Center for Youth Initiatives, a Ukrainian NGO). Yesterday the kids got their tee-shirts and their certificates and I have a great photo of the whole group together wearing/holding them.

It was just a great time. The week as a whole was the most exersise I've had in a while. Possibly Tuesday-Wednesday was the best example: climbing during the day (someone has to lead up those eight routes), going to the club that night (yes, on a Tuesday) and dancing for three hours, climbing the next day, carrying a bed a mile from Steve's apartment to my apartment (the matress balanced on top of Mike's head and mine), and then going for a four mile jog that night. This was pretty normal. Jon and Sean, made a point of running every day. All of this was fueled by Sean's cooking, which was nothing but huge pots of spicy carbs and protein (nothing had a name; Sean's dream job, he told us repeatedly this week, would be to be the cook for an army living off the land, throwing together huge portions of spicy carbs and protien that have no names). It was good exercise, food and companionship.

Last night was the best of them. The entire staff went out to a club, along with a few more friends. Here were all my American guy friends and all my Ukrainian female friends all dancing together and having a great time and after I wore myself out on the floor I just sat (somewhat drunk) at our table on the second floor overlooking the throbbing mob and smiling contentedly.

I thought: "I did this. I put this together and now there's all these happy kids and happy friends and that's 'cause I followed through on this idea and didn't give up." It wasn't an ego thing, I just felt happily surprised that it all worked out and I found that I was really proud of myself.

Hopefully pics will be up tomorrow.

Ukraine: The Climbing Camp

2006-07-25T10:13:00.000-04:00

Well, the camp has gotten off to a kick ass start. It was an experience before it even began, with four other American PCV climber guys crashing at my place: Sean, Jon, Mike and Mike. First, five guys in one apartment would be messy enough but my apartment had gone on the offensive against us, making it worse. There was no water for the first day, and not enough water pressure for hot water on the second and third, meaning no one was taking showers and the dishes were piling up. Also, the water shuts off at 11:00 PM every night anyway, meaning no toilet flushing. Add the hot weather and us sleeping two to the bed, two to the couch and one (this position is rotated) on the floor and all sweating like crazy and and all these smells combined into one huge funk.

On top of that we lost power for a while yesterday, two breakers blew again today and my laptop crashed (I'm taking it to someone who has recovery software in twenty minutes) so the first night's entertainment: watching DVDs, was out thereafter.

But it's still been a fantastic time. No one has noticed the problems and we all roll with them 'cause it's Ukraine and we're PCVs and generally someone always has it worse. Instead we've been whipping up big batches of pasta in the evening, eating communally out of the pot and going head to head in rotating chess matches that go extremely late, with the converstation richocheting from politics to sex to sports.

I have MISSED male companions. I never see Steve and Jon anymore, and while I have a number of female friends that I enjoy spending time with, it's almost impossible to hit the same level of comraderie, bare knuckle debate and, of course, raunchiness, with female friends. So I've really enjoyed the past few days.

Not to mention they've been spent climbing.

We had 18 kids show up on the first day of the camp, less than I wanted but more than I expected. I was shooting for 24 and thought they would come from the 50+ kids we'd had at the climbing wall who said they wanted to do the camp, but a lot couldn't participate because travel, studies, work (it's harvest season), etc. From that 50, we had 2. And the roster had been the last thing on my mind because I assumed it would be popular: of course, it might be, but no one knew about it. There was a blitz to get the word out, but by the time the articles hit newspapers and radios and everyone had called who they could call, we still had only 15 kids commited. So it was cool when 18 showed up.

Amongst the instructors the camp was a little shaky the first day because most Instructors were coming in last minute and we were short on prep. All the climbing time was spent on basic skills, too, and many didn't even get on a route because it took so long to teach them the knots and belaying (that was my fault; I've taught it a dozen times in Russian and can explain it pretty easily, but I left it in the hands of Mike, who has more experience teaching climbing than me, but not through a language barrier; I wasn't teaching climbing because I was floating among the three concurrent sessions and being gopher). And while the first day went okay, I felt the energy amongst the kids wasn't huge. They were participating, but they didn't seem really, really into it.

I wasn't surprised when only 12 showed up this morning, but those 12 had come to climb and have fun and today was a blast. They each finished two routes (and only one had climbed on real rock before), we played a ton of games, they listened to two healthy lifestyles lectures from ACET and we had a competition with posters from Black Diamond as prizes. The energy fed back and forth between the kids and the instructors and though we all dragged ourself to the camp in the morning by the afternoon we were all having a blast.

And it's only day 2.

So, there's some things I'd do differently if I did it again (but I'm a perfectionist) and I learned a lot from the whole process of planning and executing, but I can't say it's anything but successful so far and it looks to get better: a film crew from a local TV station is filming tomorrow, some of the cooler "ropes course" challenges will be done tomorrow and, hopefully, the tee-shirts will arrive. We ended up with so much swag that we abandoned the idea of a point system and the kids get swag for every milestone: New England Ropes posters when they could properly show how to belay, stickers for correctly tying knots, and tomorrow we'll do a healthy lifestyles quiz for them to earn their tee-shirts, and then they can wear their tee-shirts for the rest of camp.

Due to lower attendance and swag still coming (stuff from Mammut, Metolius and Rock and Ice are, theoretically, still in the mail), we'll have extra tee-shirts and stuff for next year when, hopefully the girls will do it again.

I'm pumped from today, so life is good.

Pictures up when I get some time!

Ukraine: PDO (Pics)

2006-07-22T07:20:00.000-04:00

So this is a heck of a lot of pictures from the Pre Departure Orientation for the FLEX students going to study in America next year: four days of learning about the FLEX program, American Culture and pitfalls they might encounter.

I uploaded like a hundred pics from the PDO because a lot of my kids wanted them, and they can all be found here:

http://s34.photobucket.com/albums/d137/blogmaster99/PDO

But here's some highlights:

The kids learned all about the most important part of American culture: Ultimate Frisbee

Eating borsht for lunch

My kids working on a presentation

We had to go over a number of case studies of problems previous FLEX students had in America, so we did them as a talk show. Here, my teaching partner Tea is getting a reaction from the audience.

A perfect class: no, this isn't posed. These kids have their hands up at every question, so I asked one, whipped my camera out and took the photo.

Taking the test about everything they learned at the PDO. Yes, if they fail the test they don't get to go to America.

On the last evening there was a variety show from the students. Here is the audience.

No, I'm not sure why he's wearing a flag as a skirt.

After the variety show, the staff did "American Dream", a play we do every PDO poking fun at what FLEX students think they will find in America. During the "nightmare" part of the dream, I get to harrass the poor FlEX student on her flight to America.

And here I'm channeling my time in Oklahoma to be a hick

Giving each other autographs

The infamous Group 2, with their stalwart leader, me.

Ukraine: Khotin (pics)

2006-07-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

Oy. Just got back from a great four days of teaching students who will be going to America in the fall. Even though I was fighting a throat infection all week (including loosing my voice on the third day of teaching and teaching anyway), the kids had so much positive energy that it was a fantastic experience. It was more like a summer camp with classes than a orientation. Hope to get up some photos and vids soon (including all the kids singing an acoustic version of Britany Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time". No, I'm not kidding.)

But here's more pics from last weekend that I'm only getting around to:

So this is the castle at Khotin. Khotin is a village on the bend of a river that was of strategic importance at one point, but now it's just a village on the bend of a river with a really big castle. It's about forty minutes from Kominets Podilsky, so we made a day trip there, explored a bit, lazed around at the river and then finally went back to Kominets to catch our overnight train back to Kyiv.

Although a lot bigger and a lot cooler on the outside, the castle wasn't nearly as much fun inside as the castle at Kominets Podilsky, mostly because a lot of the interior was inaccessible (and free climbing would have been too dangerous) or gutted. Still, we had just as much fun wandering around the area outside the castle, which was this sort of mythical land of wildflowers and 500 year-old walls and aqueducts.

Above and below are two more shots of the castle.

Some of the interior of the castle, shot through a window of the tiny church in the castle. Every room of every building inside the walls was completely bare, which was a little uninteresting, but it was still pretty cool.

Me jammed up in a window.

Above and below are from exploring the area around the castle.

A church in Khotin

A horse drawn carriage in Khotin

Awesome weekend all around!

Ukraine: Climbing Castles in Kominets Podilsky (Pics)

2006-07-10T05:14:00.000-04:00

First: Amazing 1.5 hour meeting with the director of Peace Corps. She loves the Run Across Ukraine project and we're now working closely with the assistant director on bringing in the U.S. Embassy, and advertising company and some other major HIV/AIDS organizations.

Second: Just got back from an amazing weekend in the Western part of Ukraine, checking out a couple castles there but, most importantly, chilling out. Life, for a variety of reasons, hit a stress high point that ebbed away as the train left the station and I had nothing to do for two days but eat and explore. What follows today and in a blog tomorrow is an insane number of photos, and those were culled from the more than 200 I took:

Above and below are exterior shots of the fortress at Kominetz Podilsky. This area was battled over by the Poles, the Russians, the Cossacks and the Turks and this massive, five hundred year-old fortress helped secure the area.

Wooden church

Me and my Cossack brother

This wheel is used to draw up water, but now it lets me get in my hamster exercise.

What I love about Ukraine is that they let you climb on everything

Marina, whom I went with, is crazier than I am with free climbing. Since a lot of the wood had rotted away, we climbed up the inside of some turrets to get to higher floors.

Since this shot required climbing to get to, it's a view few have seen!

Marina being all cute and such. Since we're good friends and travel together, people assume we are together. The opposite was proven when we killed a bottle of vodka together Saturday night and slept in the same bed and nothing happened.

On the way into Kominets Podilsky itself. In this pic you can see a waterfall on the left and a climber on the right. I just found out they have bolted routes here, called up Jon and we'll probably come back in August, pitch a tent by that waterfall and climb all weekend.

Clash of cultures: It's a Catholic church that had an Islamic Minaret built onto it. After the Turks lost the city, a statue of Mary was placed on top.

A view

I love that the saint statues look like they are hitting on the Mary statue at a club

The city has a real "fallen from grace" feel to it. Many statues can be found in the surrounding parks, covered over in plants. Much of the town has a real wistful, romantic feel.

One last shot of the fortress

Ukraine: And a Coalition Forms

2006-07-07T10:29:00.000-04:00

Remember three months ago when I said how important the parlimentary elections would be because it would determine the new government? Okay, you don't but I did and it took until NOW for the for a coalition to form to have a government.

After much squabbling that pushed the time limitations that nearly resulted in a new set of elections, a coalition formed around the three major parties that supported the Orange Revolution. Eventually they'll get around to voting for the Prime Minister, which due to her strong support during the elections, will probably go to Yulia Tymoshenko, which is a huge slap in the face to Victor Yuchenko because I'd say 80 percent of the fighting was about her NOT getting the position because Yuchenko, well, fired her from the very post she's probably about to get.

It's still only probably because she has to be nominated and they have to vote, but they haven't been able to do that because the Regions Party (the one headed by Yanokovich, the one who "won" the falsified election that sparked the Orange Revolution) surrounded the parlimentary podium and blocked access to it, so there was no nomination. It's politics as usual and in the meantime the government hasn't really done anything, including confirming Supreme Court justices (there aren't enough on the bench to rule on anything) who may or may not overturn the constitutional ammendments pushed through at the end of the Orange Revolution which, among other things, grant amnesty for all polititians.

I have a meeting with the director of Peace Corps Ukraine in a minute, to discuss the Across Ukraine Run. Three hours after that I'll be on a train to Kominetz Podilsky, a town that is actually a fortress. Should be cool.

Ukraine: The End of World Cup (Pic)

2006-07-05T05:30:00.000-04:00

On Friday I watched Ukraine play in the quarterfinals for World Cup. The whole country was slightly manic, as this was the first time Ukraine had made it into the finals. I was asked fifteen times by fifteen different people where I’d be watching the game. I was also consoled by about another twenty on America not making it, them not realizing that neither I nor other Americans care. What I held back from saying was that if we did care, we’d win every year. I don’t tell anyone that because it would just reinforce the well-deserved stereotype of American arrogance, but it’s the truth: find a baseball or basketball team somewhere in the world that can beat one of ours. Go on. I’ll wait.

American arrogance at its finest.

Anyway, I ended up watching it at a friend’s apartment, one full of Ukrainians. I decided that it would be best to watch this game with some true fans instead of the Dutch guys, and true fans they were. Let’s just say I had a real life lesson in every Russian curse word ever invented.

You would have thought they’d play well: the Ukrainian coach had told his players that they could have sex with their wives and girlfriends if they made it to the semifinals. I hadn’t realized Ukraine had a “women-weaken-legs” no-sex policy, and to this day I still can’t comprehend why kicking a ball around on a field is better than having sex. I always assumed “love of the sport” really meant “as soon as I get famous, I’m getting some,” but apparently people willingly give up getting laid because of something once started when a kid on a dirt field was doing “look ma, no hands” and a game was born.

But even the promise of sex didn’t save the Ukrainians from getting stomped. It was a travesty, made all the more so by my new emotional investment in the sport. I really, really wanted Ukraine to win World Cup. Several times during the game I realized that I was standing and yelling because someone had gotten the ball within a few meters of the opposing goal, without any conscious input from my brain. It was beginning to dawn on me why people had been keeping me up till dawn with the partying in the streets that took place every time Ukraine had won a match.

Ukraine was scored on within the first few minutes, something I was told was okay. “It’s a Cossack thing. You have to loose at first to win,” I was told by the girl squeezed in beside me on the 50 year-old couch. But then another goal was scored. And then a third, this time off the foot of one of our own guys. Luckily it was the star player. I read that the same thing happened on the Columbian team one year, and the hapless mistake-maker was murdered upon returning to his country. See, that’s the kind of motivation you need: don’t offer them sex, offer not killing them.

Ukrainians are gracious losers, though. Every time the other team scored on us or one of our own kicks was blocked, they’d praise the kicker or the goalie. And they also had an elegantly simple post-game plan: if we win, we celebrate and get drunk. If we loose, we just get drunk. They broke out the vodka halfway through the second half, when it became apparent that Ukraine had no chance of winning. We lost, so we got drunk.

And for Ukraine and for me, that was the end of World Cup 2006.

Ukraine: Prizes! (Pic)

2006-06-29T04:41:00.000-04:00

So I didn't even need my keys (although I eventually did find them; they had fallen through a crack in the wire-frame hall table-thingy down inside a house shoe that's been there since 1956) to get my mail because this morning a knock on my door woke me up and much information was demanded from me, me sleepily scrawling on a piece of paper while an old woman pointed (not quite sure if I was getting mail or signing a confession)and next thing I knew I was following her downstairs to get a package.

Inside were two brand new ropes, about thirty posters, sixty or so stickers and a handful patches. I wasn't expecting that much: we have so much that every kid can get at least one poster and two stickers and that kind of defeats the idea of "winning" a prize, especially since more is supposed to be on the way. We'll probably have to make "prize packs" of different goodies and no matter what, everyone gets a sticker. But still, nothing else could make it to Ukraine at this point and we'd be set. I also go pick up the tee-shirts today, so it's a pretty good day as far as the climbing camp goes.

So a huge thank you to New England Ropes (http://www.neropes.com) and to Chris, who I've been corresponding with there!

Just goes to show you that you never know: I originally wasn't going to email New England Ropes because I just figured it was a small, specialized company and what were they going to be able to give us? Rope? Black Diamond sending a carabiner or two and some posters, that would make sense. A company I hadn't previously heard of sending us the most expensive part of climbing, that was unbelievable. But not only did they respond, they pledged both the biggest and the most prizes and their package got here first. They have won a convert for life. If you buy rope, buy New England Rope!

Peace.

Ukraine: World Cup Coding

2006-06-28T11:09:00.000-04:00

So it's 11:00 PM and after listening for almost an hour to chanting and cheers out my window at and me wondering how they hell they could possibly be yelling that often for considering goals are a bit of a rarity, I went down to watch a World Cup game with Ukranians.

It was like I described before: a crowd standing just beyond the waist-high fence surrounding an outdoor beer garden, watching the latest World Cup game (Ukraine vs. Switzerland) on the beer garden's television. In addition to being very drunk and waving Ukrainian flags (Ukrainians are obsessed with flag waving), they were also chanting this, call-and-response style, in Ukranian:

"Treba? Hol! Treba? Hol! Treba? Treba? Treba? Hol! Hol! Hol! Scho takoye? Hol! Scho takoye? Hol! Scho takoye -koye -koye? Hol! Hol! Hol!"

I knew "treba" and "scho takoye" in Ukranian: "Need" and "What's this about?", respectively, but I didn't know what "hol" was. In fact, I first heard "Ho" because enounciation and vodka don't go together, and thought they were yelling "[What do we} need?" "[A] ho!" Then I realized they were doing the transliteration of "g" to "h" that always happens in Ukrainian and that they were actually screaming for a goal, not a whore.

After half an hour of carefully listening to the noise in reaction to various events on the television and presicely coding it, I felt confident to be able to gauge the game by their cheers and went home.

My findings:

*Crowd cheering of 3-8 seconds, entirely male, starting low and building to high decibles: this means that the ball is within a few meters of the opposing team's goal.

*Crowd yelling of 3-8 seconds, entirely male and with a touch of franticness: the ball is within a few meters of Ukraine's goal.

NOTE: by the above I could, sitting in my apartment without a television or radio, tell you where the ball was on the field at any given time. If I heard nothing, it's because it was somewhere in the middle of the field, or a ref was making a call.

*Crowd cheering of 1-3 minutes, with some female voices, wild and ecstatic, possibly accompanied by burts of an air horn: the other team just received a penalty.

*Crowd cheering of 5-10 minutes, both males and females, to the point of ear-drum bursting even through glass and brick: Ukraine just scored.

*Continous screaming, car horn blasts, chanting of "U-kra-ina!", the national anthem repeatedly being sung, cheap fireworks fired into the sky and people (I'm not making this up) shooting guns in the air until almost four in the morning and possibly later because that's when, despite the noise, I finally got to sleep: Ukraine wins.

Ukraine: Who Are These People? (Pics)

2006-06-25T05:53:00.000-04:00

Who are these people?

They are Ukrainians watching the latest Ukrainian match in World Cup. Ukraine won, which meant that cars were blasting horns and people were cheering and chanting the National Anthem until well past 3 AM.

Who are these people?

This is Jung and Irun, two guys from Holland who now live and run a business in Zhytomyr. Their business outsources computer programming from Dutch companies to Ukrainian programmers. I only met them two weeks ago, but the friendship has proved worthwhile in many respects. Other than the interesting conversation and more guy friends (Jon has been too busy to come to Zhytomyr lately and Steve is permanently occupied by his girlfriend; I love Kirstin, but it’s a bit like Israel and Palestine with sex instead of bulldozers), they make a European salary and I make a Ukrainian one. I insist on making them rock climb. They insist on feeding me and giving me drinks.

Who are these people?

This is what the inside of a trolleybus looks like. I normally can walk anywhere I want to, but since the Dutch guys live on the edge of town and I’ve been watching World Cup with them, I’ve been seeing the inside of a trolleybus more and more often.

Who are these people?

This is Sasha (one of my co-workers), Marius from Norway and a guy from Austria who I just met yesterday and whose name I can’t remember. It turns out that all the ex-pat business people in Zhytomyr know one another and Jung and Irun invited some of them along to do some climbing. Marius runs a business that makes ironing boards for sale in Europe. From him I learned that, due to tariffs and taxes, it’s cheaper to buy Ukrainian steel from Italy than it is to buy Ukrainian steel in Ukraine, which is what his company does. They make their ironing boards with Ukrainian steel, it is just well traveled steel, having crossed the Black sea and the Adriatic…twice.

Who are these people?

This is everyone that came climbing yesterday. Holland, Ukraine, Norway, Austria and America are all represented in this picture and the lingua franca was…English. People (including volunteers) seem to think teaching English in Ukraine is some sinister function of American imperialism. It’s nothing of the sort. When Marius and Jung sit down to do business, they do it in English. If Ukraine wants to do a joint ad-campaign with China to say “Fuck the Americans” in Swahili, they’d still hash out the business plan in English. Teaching English in Ukraine gives Ukrainians economic tools and options. The perfect example is Jung’s company: it’s a Dutch company, but you can only get hired as a programmer if you know English. You could be a kick-ass Ukrainian programmer, but no one is bringing you on board with a translator. You need to have learned English in school (quite possibly with the help of an American Peace Corps volunteer, or from one of the teachers trained by yours truly) well enough to work for this company that pays about a third more than a Ukrainian company pays. Now, the morality of outsourcing Dutch work is another thing, and I’m sure the Dutch are arguing about it as I type this…

Who are these people?

The world brought together by climbing. But let’s notice that it’s the sole American trying to hog all the attention. It’s world politics in a picture.

Who are these people?

Um, it’s me, climbing my favorite route on a hot summer day, belayed by Igor, my protege in both language and climbing.

Who are these people?

This is a football team, projected onto a wall on the first floor of the four story office/living space of the Dutch guys. I do feel slightly guilty about this: I’m supposed to live at the level of the Ukrainians around me, but while they’re standing around a television watching World Cup, I’m watching it with the Dutch guys, sitting in office chairs and munching on food from Holland that I can’t pronounce. Still, I never say no when invited.

Who are these people?

This is Maxim, a Ukrainian who works with Marius, and the desiccated head of a crawfish at a post-World Cup outdoor barbeque.

Who are these people?

Everyone chowing down after the World Cup game. I told you, these guys like to feed us.

Who are these people?

This is Nadia and Olya, my escorts to Student Republic. Student Republic is a huge two-day party that celebrates the end of the school year for University students. It’s not only for University students, as anyone under the age of thirty shows up, and it’s a lot of fun. Nadia and Olya are in my climbing class and they invited me along.

Who are these people?

A bunch of people enjoying the free concert at Student Republic

Who are these people?

More people enjoying the concert and relaxing on the beach on the Teatriv River.

Every one of these pictures was taken in 24 hours. It was fun.

Ukraine: How do you know it's World Cup

2006-06-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

How do you know it's World Cup?

When you look out your window at the tiny sea of umbrellas: Ukranians huddles in the rain to watch a game on the flat screen (but covered) television of an outdoor beer garden. Seriously, tiny sea: people standing on the concrete banks of a fountain, on park benches, on tip toes trying to catch a glimps of the game.

How do you know when Ukraine scores a goal?

You could be in a closet, earphones on and music blaring, head wrapped in three blankets and you'd still hear the cheering.

NOTE: closet/earphones/blankets thing not actually tested.

***

Camp news:

Black Diamond is sending posters and stickers and Mammut is sending stickers. Lots of stickers (email from Mammut: "would 200 be enough?").

The girls finally named the camp. It is now called Edelweiss. My fault; I gave them final call. Luckily they didn't use some earlier things they came up with, like "Cliff of Friendship". I can live with Edelweiss, even though it's a German word for a camp run by Ukranians and conceived of and supported by Americans. Still, I understand the intent: I mean, it's a flower that grows in the mountains and you have to climb to go get it (even though I think of Sound of Music every time they say it). But getting to the flower represents goal setting, teamwork, and, of course, climbing. In true Ukranian tradition, the slogan they came up with is: "Together to the top". And Edelweiss does originally mean "nobel" (it also means "white", but we have enough skinheads around without worrying about that), so I can live with it.

Both the name and the slogan will now be on 50 tee-shirts. I'm about to leave the internet center now to go approve the final design. We'll see what the tee-shirt people came up with. My sketch of the Superman "S" symbol with a climber doing a roof move on the underside of top of the "S", reaching for a flower, being belayed by a person standing on the bottom part of the "S" was deemed to complex by the tee-shirt people. They said come back today and they'd have some options.

So we'll see.

Ukraine: The Art of Backscratching

2006-06-19T09:07:00.000-04:00

I have been on an emotional high for days now. The tumblers on my climbing camp, once jammed and rusted and bending my mental key, are now all sliding into place one after the other. Not only is it fully staffed with all needed equipment and not only are the prizes promised, but other, smaller things are coming in, too.

We had debated cost items like tee-shirts and certificates of completion, but without a fundraiser and not a lot of obvious donor backing in Zhytomyr I was skeptical that we could get them.

Enter backscratching.

Seeing a long stretch of nothing to do but teaching after the craziness of summer (October-December), I figured I had at least one more project in me before I left and should start exploring my options now. I asked around and was put in contact with the Center for Youth Initiatives, an organization that mostly works on information campaigns on both youth rights and get-out-the-vote. Turns out they were extremely well-funded, but they were happy to meet me and we batted around ideas about what to do if I got a Partnership Grant. They had wanted to do an information campaign against domestic violence and I also though that was a good idea. We decided to think about things some more and come back a week later to make a decision.

The next week (last Friday) I came to them with something better than a Partnership Grant: a Democracy Grant. The Partnership Grant would probably bring in only about $2,000, but a Democracy Grant (an information campaign about women's rights perfectly fits the grant) could bring in around $15,000. They also brought Ivan, who runs an advertising company here in Zhytomyr. They had told him about me and he came, interested in doing a project with me, too. He wants to create a series of short programs (5-10 minutes) done by youth that would run in place of a commercial set on local television. These programs would each focus on a different informational aspect for youth: drugs, alcohol abuse, youth rights, domestic violence, STDs, etc. They had most of what they needed: camera and editing equipment, a studio and an agreement with the television channel to run the programs, but they needed money to build set decorations and to purchase a video montage program so that they could put in professional graphics.

[A note on language: all these meetings have been entirely in Russian. Both Ivan and Andre (who runs the Center for Youth Initiatives) are really good at keeping their language clear and non-idiomatic and I usually come out of a meeting feeling like I am a language god. This usually happens right before I run into someone who starts speaking and then I don't have a damn idea what they are saying.]

So I agreed to do the Democracy grant for the Center for Youth Initiatives and the Partnership Grant for the Youth Program.

Then I asked, not really expecting anything, if they knew of a place to cheaply print tee-shirts and any company that might be willing to sponsor them in exchange for their logos on the shirts. Ivan said he knew where to get the tee-shirts done and Andre said that they had gotten a grant to give out seed money for small business initiatives. Someone had to attend a business education course and then apply for the grant, which could be up to $100. I sent Marina to the course (I figured she needed the contacts and the info and she was happy to learn about it because she's really into managing the camp and wants to learn more about project management; plus, it was in Ukranian and my Ukranian sucks). It turned out the money (which Andre said was assured) would not come in time to make the tee-shirts: it would come literally a day before the camp started, but in time for us to print up certificates (nice ones on heavy card stock with good printing).

So certificates, check, but still needing tee-shirts.

I met this morning with Ivan and his partners at their office and they showed me some videos of the previous work they had done (they have been sponsoring a youth singing contest for four years now) and gave me a budget for the project and then we just talked for about an hour about random stuff, getting to know each other (most of business in Ukraine is getting to know each other). Finally, I asked if he got the price on the tee-shirts and he had. Then I told him that the money from CYI would not come in time for the camp. Ivan looked at his partners, shrugged and said: "well, we can sponsor the tee-shirts, why not?" and his partners nodded.

Boo-yeah!

So in exchange for working on getting a $2,000 and $15,000 grant, respectively, I'm getting certificates and tee-shirts for my climbing camp. It's not really that insidious, we're all just helping each other out and it's all in an effort to do good in Ukraine, but I've found that 99 percent of project management is meeting the right people and getting them on your side.

It's the art of backscratching.

Ukraine: The Art of Begging, Pt II

2006-06-17T12:19:00.000-04:00

First I'd just like to say that life is absolutely wonderful at the moment. I'm wrapping up my teaching duties and soon summer, freedom and travel will be upon me (especially with the news today that Peace Corps is reverting back to its relaxed travel rules after all the volunteer protest over the more stringent ones).

More to the point, we had our first real warm day today and the Ukranians ladies proved it in style. Fashions are a little more...um...risque...here, but that doesn't become apparent until after the winter coats come off. So today it was all midriffs, short skirts, see-thru pants with thongs underneath, see-thru shirts with (sigh) bras underneath, and not a flat shoe in sight. Looking at it all, I felt like one of those bobble headed dolls.

I was walking around with some female friends today, enjoying the weather, when my head swivled to follow the results of nothing more than a few well-placed bits of cloth. Suddenly, I was punched on the arm.

(In Russian) "You are such a bobnik," said Marina, the one who had assaulted me.

(Linguistic note: Bobnik translates as "male slut".)

This was the best defense I could muster: "She was a redhead!"

Luckily, for reasons beyond my understanding, my female friends find my bobnik-ness endearing.

But that and a dozen other nice little things that happened recently still didn't make me feel nearly as good as getting this email from New England Ropes:

"We have a couple of short ropes coming to you (~ 153', but shorter than what we consider sale-able) as well as stickers, posters, and a few patches. Hope the kids enjoy them. We'd love to see pictures of them!"

Boo-yeah! A 153' rope is plenty of rope. And more than one? This is a godsend because we've already almost worn out the ropes we bought with the SPA grant last year. I am so freakin' happy at the moment.

And immdietly following that was a slight surge of worry: big packages tend not to arrive in Ukraine, especially if they've been insured (it just tells the "authorities" that there's something valuable inside and that it'll get replaced, so they take it home). Plus I can't actually find my keys to get into my mailbox should it get here. My keys were lost somewhere in my apartment, which is ironic because I don't have a big apartment and there's not much in it and I've been through every inch of the place. I'm currently using a spare set from my landlord (imagine the embarassment of telling your landlord that the keys were lost IN your apartment). This problem may not happen for a few weeks and hopefully I'll have found them by then (the current plan is to leave out candy for the goblins that took them and drop a cage on their unsuspecting, thieving asses), but the ONLY key to my mailbox (where they'll drop the slip that I'll need to pick the package ) is on that key ring.

Still, got to keep one's chin up. Especially if I'm going to go out and look at more ladies.

NOTE: Some of you, dear readers, may be slightly offended at my objectification of women. I'd like to inform all of you that I not only support gender equality, but chivalry as well. I think women should get equal pay, doors held open for them and multiple orgasms. But I in return I reserve the right to look at them. Especially if they happen to be wearing a see-thru shirt.

Ukraine: Activity Report 4

2006-06-15T06:36:00.000-04:00

Just to prove I do work here in Ukraine, the following is the activity report we are required to submit to Peace Corps three times a year. It is for Jan 1-June 1 2006.

***

Volunteer Activity Report
TEFL Volunteer Form

Part One: Primary Assignment

1. My schedule and responsibilities widely vary at the institute, changing from week to week.

In the past six months I have:

-Taught approximately 40 seminars, each 90 minutes long, on the following topics: Intro to the Course and Terminology, Methods of TEFL, Communicative Method, Vocabulary, Lesson Planning, Integrated Skills, Country Studies; Mixed Ability Classrooms; Young Learners; Reading Skills; Writing Skills; Speaking Skills; Listening Skills; Speaking for Young Learners; Reading for Young Learners; Writing for Young Learners; Listening for Young Learners; and English Language Improvement
-Created all the listening and speaking tasks for the Regional Olympiad; proofed and typed all the tasks for the Regional Olympiad
-Taught a biweekly Olympiad coaching class
-Judged at the Regional Olympiads (but disqualified myself from judging any student I had coached).
-Coached the winners of the Regional Olympiad for the National Olympiad
-Continued work on a book of Olympiad Coaching exercises
-Liaised with volunteers coming to judge at National Olympiads; created map of the city with places of interest for them; guided them from their hotel to their sites
-Continued work on set of Country Studies multimedia materials, including taped interviews with volunteers about their hometowns, which have been steadily distributed to my Practical Project volunteers and my teachers.

2. Describe your major accomplishments for this period:

-Last year, writing the Olympiad tasks was difficult, possibly because I had never done it before and was never sure exactly what was expected. This year I felt I created a number of very original (so that they students could not provide memorized answers) and very challenging tasks.

-I feel that, after having taught them a number of times, that my lesson plans are really polished and I am really enjoying my rapport with my teacher groups. Based on conversations and observations, I am confident a number of the techniques and materials I have presented are making their way back to Ukrainian classrooms.

-Probably the accomplishment I am most proud of is that all the students in my coaching class placed in the Regional Olympiad, including one taking first place in the 11th form and one taking first place in the 10th form. Both went on to win 2nd at the National Olympiads in their respective forms.

3. List factors that helped or hindered your work during the reporting period

-A good relationship between me and my coordinator; trading teaching materials with other teacher trainers. I don’t feel my work has been hindered.

4. What are your plans for the next reporting period?

-I will continue to teach seminars until the end of June.

Part Two: Community Projects

English Club

A club taught once a week at a School 12 that focused on English grammar and country studies.

-I taught this club in conjunction with PCV Steve Senteny and PCV Kirstin Johansson. At the beginning of the year we had almost fifty students, prompting us to weekly split the class among us. Outcomes have included better English skills and better awareness of social issues and America amongst the attendees. Attendance dropped in the middle of the semester and I stopped teaching at the club in March to work on other projects. Steve and Kirstin continue to teach it.

The Climbing Wall

The climbing wall was built using SPA funds last fall in conjunction with Polissya, a Zhytomyr non-profit focused on promoting extreme sports.

-During April and May I visited an average of 6 classes a week at local schools to promote the wall, showing a video and handing out flyers. During those two months we conducted 8 weekly training sessions on the wall. The sessions were two hours long, with half the class listening to an HIV seminar conducted by ACET and the other half climbing, then the two groups switched. We trained 82 people, 61 of which were under 18. Those asked said the seminars were very informative and useful. At least 27 of those 82 have come back to use the wall during the week.

The Climbing Club

A weekly two-hour club for teaching advanced climbing skills

-I taught a group of 8 (four boys and four girls) both at the wall on Zhytomyr’s cliffs. Classes focused on climbing technique, lead climbing, proper belaying, setting anchors and safety.

Practical Project for ESL teachers

A PC pilot project to increase the level of knowledge amongst Ukrainian ESL teachers

-I managed ten volunteers: setting up classes for the new volunteers, checking attendance and providing materials for older volunteers, holding monthly meetings in Zhytomyr to discuss progress and teaching techniques, and observing each PCV once during the semester, giving them feedback.

Windows on America

A USA-sponsored section of the Zhytomyr Library that holds American Studies classes

-I did two things for Windows on America:

1. I held a weekly club for watching English-language movies and discussing them. The club has been very popular, often becoming standing room only. We have watched a wide range of movies from the Windows on America collection and have had great discussions. The librarians constantly receive good feedback that they pass on to me.

2. One Saturday, as part of their weekly American Studies class, I conducted a two-hour seminar on Florida, using video, photographs and activities. The seminar was covered by a reporter and the article appeared in a Zhytomyr newspaper.

Climb for Life

A one-week summer camp that will be held in July and which will focus on three areas: Healthy Lifestyles, Climbing Skills and Team Challenges

-I am the Camp Director. During this period I planned the camp, creating a camp handbook that I then translated into Russian (which was thankfully checked by a Ukrainian!). I brought on board Healthy Lifestyles teachers from ACET and climbing instructors from Polissya, secured in-kind donations of climbing and camping equipment from Polissya, secured in-kind donations of flipchart paper, markers and a flipchart easel from American Councils, registered 60 interested students (final number will be 24), secured the services of a Yoga instructor, approached the Zhytomyr City Council about a fundraiser, and assembled a management team of three university students who will manage the camp this year and continue it next year.

Run Across Ukraine

A relay race across Ukraine that will raise awareness and money for HIV/AIDS

-I am one of two high-level managers for the race (PCV Jon Kendrick is the other). I brought to the project ACET, Polissya, a major fundraiser and a webmaster to the project. Together, Kendrick and I jointly planned and organized the run, presented the project to the HIV/AIDS working group, created informational packets, liaised with volunteers in other oblasts and basically have done whatever possible to get the project working. I also designed and wrote most of the HTML for the website, which was then turned over to the webmaster for translation and upkeep. We hope it will be successful when it starts in September.

Bike Zhytomyrska

A project to help Zhytomyr’s youth, particularly Internat pupils, by providing a recreational alternative for them, educate them about their oblast and teach them about HIV/AIDS and healthy lifestyles by conducting weekly biking trips around the oblast.

-Coordinated with Polissya, ACET and one of Zhytomyr’s Internat’s to plan the project, then wrote and was approved for a SPA grant to buy the bikes and equipment. Received the money on 28.05.06 and dispersed it to Polissya.

American Councils

American Councils runs FLEX in Ukraine, which sends Ukrainian students to the USA for one year to study.

-I was the Master Teacher at the FLEX Training of Trainers this year. My responsibilities included teaching two basic pedagogy classes and observing and giving feedback for the practice presentations of all the participants. I will also teach at their Pre-Departure Orientations in July.

2. What are your intended projects for the next reporting period?

-I plan on expanding the climbing class to two classes (one for over 18 years of age, the other for under 18), finish preparations and conduct the Climb for Life camp, manage the Bike Zhytomyrska and Run Across Ukraine projects, teach a Pre-departure Orientation for FLEX in July, continue my film club during the summer, and conduct any climbing wall trainings for interested groups (already three volunteers have expressed interest in bringing students from other oblasts for a wall training). I am also discussing with a group called Youth Initiatives about getting a Partnership Grant for them to work on a project to combat domestic violence.

Part Three: Social/Cultural Adjustment, Language Learning

1. Describe difficulties and successes you have experienced in adjusting to your community.

I feel very well adjusted to my community.

2. What are your plans for continuing your personal development to overcome problems and sustain successes?

I plan to continue bettering my language and maintaining my friendships in order to continue integrating with my community. I hope to continue to remain open to new change and flexible in the face of new challenges.

3. Describe your current language study program and your plans for continuing your language learning.

Currently, I study 30 minutes a day during lunch, Monday-Thursday, watch and listen to movies and music in Russian and regularly speak in Russian with my Ukrainian friends and colleagues. My rather modest goal is to acquire 100 new words a month until I leave the country.

Part Four: Volunteer Support Needs

1. Describe your experiences with support provided by Peace Corps during the reporting period and make suggestion.

I am very impressed with the level of support that I receive from Peace Corps.

2. Provide your feedback on communications with the office for the reporting period.

My e-mails and phone calls have always been promptly returned and my questions have always been satisfactorily answered. My regional manager, Bohdan Yarema, has always been extremely honest and supportive with all my questions and inquiries. I have been and continue to be very impressed with him.

Part Five: Lessons Learned

Stay flexible. Work hard. Enjoy life.

Part Six: Safety/Security Issues

I feel safe.

Ukraine: The Art of Begging

2006-06-14T11:03:00.000-04:00

The plans for the climbing camp are in full stride now. We have dates, gear and materials commitment, instructor commitment (including a yoga instructor!) and the girls are currently making the calls to get all the participants signed on. As of now, if the participants just show up we'll have a kick ass camp.

The only holes we have at the moment are non-necessary ones: i.e., tee-shirts, participant certificates, prizes, etc. Plans are in the works to get these, but we can't pay for them via fundraiser like I originally envisioned. Why? The city of Zhytomyr wouldn't give us permission to do a car wash, and most other ideas for fundraisers weren't really viable.

We were looking at local sponsorship on the certificates and tee-shirts, but still didn't have a lot of leads on prizes. And we want quite a few: the participants will be in teams and the teams will earn points for winning climbing skills competitions, winning team games (ropes course-style challenges) and getting high scores on healthy lifestyle quizes. At mimimum we'd want to award the overall team, but it'd be cool to give out smaller prizes for each competition.

Then a very simply idea came to me last week and I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier: email climbing companies for their promotional items to give out as prizes. I went through an issue of Rock and Ice and wrote down the name of every advertiser in the magazine and yesterday sent out about 25 emails, less than half the list (with a slow internet connection, finding their websites and then finding their contact info was a time consuming process).

But less than 24 hours later, I got four responses:

*Trango said they had already spent their promotional budget for the year, but to keep them in mind next year (we will).

*Metolius is sending us stickers!

*Rock and Ice is sending, get this: a 2 year-subscription to the magazine, back issues, several copies of "How to Climb" and stickers! Boo yeah!

*And Rock Empire (I own a set of Rock Empire cams) sent me the email of their Europe branch and said that if they weren't interested, to email them back and then gave me a personal email address. Boo yeah again!

Possibly I'll keep getting "no"s, but already we're going to have a decent amount of swag to give out as prizes and I get the feeling we'll get more!

It's all about knowing how to beg.

Ukraine: Wet Climbing (Pics)

2006-06-08T08:01:00.000-04:00

It has been raining steadily for a week now. Between the heavy rains and swamp-like setting of the waterlogged streets, I almost feel like I am at home. But the rains have produced a funny story.

It's hard to tell in this pic, but the water goes all the way back to that building.

So on the first day of the deluge, but before it had started, we were out on the cliffs. Not the old cliffs, but new ones we found at a place called Golova Chatskaya. That translates at “Chatsy’s Head”. This is because at this site is a pile of rocks sticking out over the Teatriv River that looks like a face. I don’t know who Chatsky is nor why he had the misfortune of owning a face that looked like a pile of rocks, but it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve every climbed. The cliffs are on the edge of the river, making the approach rather dangerous as you’re constantly at risk of slipping on an angled, moss-covered rock and falling headlong into the river. More interesting is the fact that the first bolt of three of the routes is out over the water, meaning you climb out over the river before you can even clip in. Fun stuff.

No real pictures from in the rain (camera was safely away from water in a bag), but these were taken off a video of me climbing just before the rain started.

Going for a 'draw

This looks like a job for...

We climbed all morning until rain forced us off, but not before we notice that one overhanging route was staying relatively dry. We came back in the late afternoon when the rain had stopped again, but I won a 5 hrivna bet that it would start raining as soon as we got there because it did.

Grrr! Grrr!

Just kinda like this shot

Last move before the anchor

Boo yeah!

I nearly plunged into the river, a boot slipping on wet rock, back heavy with climbing gear, but managed to throw myself backwards and catch myself. This was followed by my very first “deck” during a climb, that innocuous term which actually means hitting the ground. I was leading up on that dry face, almost the length of the rope over my first bolt when I slipped and fell. The dynamic rope stretched, my belayer, Marina, got pulled into the air and I ended up falling into Jon’s lap. But the fact that I had fallen all the way to the ground meant that after two brushes with damage, I wasn’t trying for a third.

“We’re setting a top rope,” I said.

The cliffs allowed for it: since the terrain sloped down to the river’s edge, it was a matter of hiking back up and over the top of the cliffs. Marina and hiked up there in the light but steady rain, while Tanya and Jon were huddled under the overhang. With the dirt now slippery mud, I sent Marina to tie into a tree because decking with a rope is one thing, decking without it is another. We talked over the order: she would lower me over the cliff edge. I’d clip the rope into the anchor. She’d lower me down, then she’d throw the rope over the edge. With the rope clipped into the anchor, we’d now have a top rope.

Simple.

Except from where Marina was tied into the tree, she couldn’t actually see me.
And with the rain and all, she was having trouble hearing me. And, as it turns out, she was really worried about accidentally killing me.

So I climbed over the edge, boots on the tip of some slippery rock, hand grabbing another slippery rock, in the pouring rain (and, like an idiot, having left my jacket at the bottom), looking over the edge at the anchor. It was a newer one: a chain welded into two bolts bored into the rock. I clipped a quickdraw into one of the bolts. Now at this point I couldn’t actually put weight onto the rope tied into my harness because I needed enough slack to be able to clip it to the anchor. When I tugged on the rope, I found it was less than six inches from going into the quickdraw. “Slack!” I yelled into the gray rain.

Now, Marina knows this word. In fact, most of the Ukrainians have adopted it because it seems so much better suited to the task then the Russian word “svobodney”, which just means “freely”. That, and they keep hearing the Americans yell it when they climb, so maybe they think it’s cool. Anyways, it’s now not uncommon to hear one Ukrainian we climb with shout to another Ukrainian: “Die mene slack!” (give me some slack). So I’m not sure why Marina decided to pull the rope tight.

I yelled slack again and every time I yelled it, Marina kept pulling on the rope, pulling me backwards and off balance, slipping in the mud. Finally I yelled “Svbodney!” and the rope went loose, dropping me over the edge, my fingers entangled with the anchor, the rest of my body hanging on the rope, dangling in the rain. Pain tends to make me angry, so with gritted teeth and still clinging to the anchor, I got the rope into the quickdraw and then slammed in two more into the other bolt, clipping those into the ropes with the carabineers in opposite directions. Hanging in the rain, having nearly hurt myself twice that day, I was not tempting fate anymore.

“Let me down!” I yelled, first in English, then in Russian. Either Marina couldn’t hear me or understand me or was now just too worried about killing me. The rope didn’t budge.

This is how I ended up hanging in the cold rain in a tee-shirt, just over the edge of a cliff, for the better part of fifteen minutes.

After yelling myself hoarse for Marina to lower me down, I finally yelled down to Jon to go tell her, and he then hiked up to the top of the cliff, me hanging there cold and soaked and twiddling my thumbs before I miraculously started to be slowly lowered.

The rest of the operation went quickly and soon the rope was tossed over the edge, allowing us to climb safely on a top rope. All save Tanya climbed the overhanging route, and while Marina was doing it, she called for slack I got to yell at her in Russian: “oh, now you know that word!”

On Jon’s climb, the last climb, he got to spend about twenty minutes hanging in the rain. Once clearing the overhang to the anchor, he discovered my three quickdraws and for some reason had a lot of trouble getting them back out. He hung in his shirt, yelling and tugging at them while I stood in the rain belaying him (although now infinitely happier under the hood of my rain jacket), a slightly sadistic smile on my face that I wasn’t the only one who had to go through that.

One last note: getting ready to go to the club that night (yes, we did all go to the club that night), I peeled off my sock and noticed blood. What I thought had been an itch had actually been a nice little bloody abrasion the size of a quarter on my shin just above the ankle. I’m not sure at what point in the day I received this wound, but what sets it apart from every other cut on my hands, elbows and shins is that it’s directly on top of a scar I have from when I broke my leg nine years ago.

A cut on a scar

Scar tissue is supposed to be tough. How in the hell can you get a wound on scar tissue? And then not notice it?

Fun day, climbing in the rain.

Ukraine: $4,920

2006-06-03T06:09:00.000-04:00

Four thousand, nine hundred and twenty dollars is the grant money that that was transferred to my bank account to pay for the bikes and equipment for the bike tours. I went to withdraw it and my bank didn't even have that much money in the vault (the vault, by the way, is a very, very, very old safe sitting on a table on the other side of the counter). One of the bankers actually had to leave the bank to go to another bank to get more money.

I withdrew it in dollars because, as I mentioned in a blog a long, long time ago, the dollar is the hard currency most Ukranians keep their savings in (not trusting the hrivna, which is just a revaluation of their last currency, the koupon, which was so destroyed by inflation that people were literally using koupons for toilet paper). One thing that is never hard to find in Ukraine, even in the smallest villages, is a money exchange between dollars and hrivnas (although, it must be noted, Euros are starting to become popular here, too).

They handed me the $4,920 and I took a second to look at it. In my hands was more than I make in two years here in Ukraine, in one lump sum. It was as much as some people (i.e., teachers) make in five years. It was more than I'd ever had in cash in my hands at any one time. And how does one transport this massive amount of money? Armored car? Body guard? No, I figured low-key was the best strategy and just folded it in half and stuffed it into the front right pocket of my jeans.

I safely got it home (it was the afternoon and I kept my hands in my pockets) and waited for Kolia to come over and pick it up. I felt it was like a drug deal or something, especially when I put the money in an envelope. We met at my apartment instead of the usual cafe we meet at because handing someone an envelope full of cash in a public place could not possibly look good.

He picked it up, got it safely got it to his home and within a few weeks we'll start doing bike tours!

Ukraine: Work News

2006-05-30T05:35:00.000-04:00

Got another one of those: "gee, you seem to be spending your Peace Corps service at Ukranian bars" emails. It was actually a supportive email other than that, but I would like to make a correction: I actually don't spend spend a lot of my Peace Corps service at Ukranian bars. I spend it at Ukranian discos, and my time there is important for language acquisition, cultural integration, and oggling beautiful women. Most of these are in the Peace Corps Handbook as being essential to success at site, but I leave it up to you to figure out which ones.

It came right before an intended blog on work anyway, which I swear I try to keep balanced with "Daniel having fun" and "Ukranian Culture" blogs.

Anyway, the lead off in the work news is that we just had our last training at the wall. We went out with a bang: 16 participants were trained! It concluded eight weeks of me promoting the wall during the week (every week I visited an average of six classes at local schools and distributed about 100 flyers) and eight Saturday trainings. Final numbers: 82 people trained in eight weeks, 61 of whom were under 18. That's in addition to the 93 trained since the wall's opening in November (during which it wasn't promoted; we were waiting for warmer weather). Each of the 82 people trained in the past eight weeks also recieved a one-hour course in HIV/AIDS prevention.

The HIV/AIDS courses, I feel, are what really mark the success of the wall. Initially it was to provide a recreational option in a city where there are few save playing soccer on dirt fields. But because Polissya has been having problems (some motivational, some staffing) with keeping the wall open regular hours and because HIV/AIDS awareness is so low in Ukraine (a recent poll showed that only 14% of 16-25 year-olds could correctly name the ways HIV is transmitted) that pairing the draw of the wall with an HIV/AIDS awareness class really make the money invested (AKA your tax dollars) worth it.

Of course, I thought that would be our last training for a bit, but I got a call last night to go visit the village of Ivanivka this morning to do a presentation. Irina, one of my trainers is from there, and she wanted to bring students from her old school to the wall(I told my trainers that they could start promoting the wall and I would open it for any training they wanted to do). So I got up early and caught a marshrutka out there and we'll be having training this weekend. This is added two at least two planned by volunteers: Jon is bringing a group from the Rivniska oblast and another volunteer is bringing a group from the Kyivska oblast. Thinking we should expand that, I put out an all-call on the volunteer bulletin that we would schedule trainings for any volunteer bringing a group of students in over the summer, so maybe even more Ukranians will get to experience climbing and become more informed about HIV/AIDS!

On a side note, after today's trip I am starting to realize that Ivanivka might merit a documentary of sorts. I've mentioned Ivanivka before: it's the town with the mass graves from the Holocaust. But, as I learned today (as it was behind the school I gave the presentation at), it has an old collective farm from the Soviet era. It was creepy: high concrete walls, a guard tower and a sliding metal gate normally reserved for military bases surrounded the farm. The gate was ajar and inside were a dozen buildings: the remains of a huge concrete barn, paddocks where milking cows were kept, the collapsed wooden coops where chickens were kept. It wasn't so much as a farm (although fields still used by the village sat just behind the walls) as a food factory. I hadn't brought my camera with me (always a mistake in Ukraine), but Irina told me her father used to be a bookkeeper at the collective, so maybe I can have him come out with me and have him point things out on camera, describe a bit of what life was like there. Along with the graves, footage of village life (this is where people hand-plant and hoe produce and then bring it to market by horse-drawn cart) and interviews with village residents about life now (one house had a satelite dish attached to the roof), it might make for an interesting encapsulation of Ukranian life, then and now. Or maybe it'll get buried under every other idea that I have...

*Just got the money in my bank account for the bike project. I'll be giving it to Polissya tomorrow and we will get that project rolling (pun intended). The first tours should start in July.

*The Across Ukraine Run is now getting moved to September, for a variety of reasons, the most major of which is that we should be getting a grant to cover most of the costs, but won't get the money until August. Other than that, a lot is finally starting to coalece. More and more people keep coming on board and taking up the slack in different areas, so I finally feel like we're almost to the apex and soon it will have enough momentum to succeed no matter what! And believe it or not, despite how big it's getting, I might have problems taking the 18 days needed to manage the trip as official leave. It was a bit of hoop-jumping to get four days approved to go teach for American Councils in July, because Peace Corps Ukraine is changing its policy that any work not directly related to your site does not count as official travel. Run Across Ukraine is not directly related to my site, but my manager understands that we'd been working on it for months prior to the travel-policy change. The problem is that he's about to be out of the country for a month. We had a phone conversation about the best time to submit the request (i.e., after he gets back, but before the new Country Director is installed) to get it approved. The interim director also strongly supports the project, so hopefully this won't be an obstacle, but it is entirely possible that they'll say I can't take official travel to do it, and I'm almost out of vacation days.

*My climbing camp is giving me fits. Finding dates that work for everyone is problematic. My Healthy Lifestyles teachers can't do it in the first half of July and my climbing instructors can't do the last half. I think I'll have to just set them and those that can't do it can't do it and we'll find replacements as needed.

We're also running into a funding snag. Polissya should be donating most of the equipment for climbing and camping, and American Councils should be donating use of teaching materials, so we're going to be able to fund it dirt cheap (I don't want to run my camp on grants, as that cuts back on sustainability), but I wanted to raise some extra funds via a car wash to buy the kids tee-shirts, etc. This is the answer Irina got back from the City Council: "Minors are not allowed to work, the government is in a mess right now (the elected mayor had her election overturned by the court due to falsification and there will be a re-election in July), and no one does car washes in Ukraine. Forget about it." Bear in mind all we need from them is PERMISSION to have the car wash, not any kind of support. And the excuse that minors can't WASH A CAR TO RAISE MONEY is ridiculous. I told Irina to get me a meeting with the head of youth services on the council next week, so hopefully we'll get it sorted out. That's the fourth Ukranian to say that "no one does car washes in Ukraine" as if that's a reason not to TRY to do something. Ultimately, I'm not that worried about funds: with the in-kind contributions, the camp is designed to run as cheaply as possible (it will run 9 AM to 3 PM specifically so that we don't have to feed them) and I'm willing to fund the rest out-of-pocket, but I'd like to set it up so that it can continue itself without me. I'm already hopefull of that: Marina, Irina and Tanya are taking on a lot of management responsibilities of the camp, and I hope to leave it to them after I'm gone. They're making me really proud, actually!

*Just finished another cycle of courses at the insitute. I LOVE my job there (which is good, because it's my main job). I teach the same set of classes to a different group of teachers every month, which means that my lesson plans just keep getting refined instead of the stress of making new ones for every single class. Also, since the cycle only lasts a month, at the end of every month my teachers give me candy or (if I have a good rapport with the group, like this last one) little gifts. If I'm lucky, I get both, and yesterday I was lucky. Yesterday I got my candy and my gift (a little figurine of a cossack and his wife) and said good-bye to another great group of teachers. I estimate that 1/10 of the English-teaching teachers in the oblast have been my students, something proved when I travelled around the oblast doing observations this month: at every single school I visited, even including the school I saw today in Ivanivka, at least one of the teachers knew me. The new volunteers will begin to introduce me to one of the teachers they work with and either I or the teacher will stop them because we already know each other. "How?" the new volunteer will ask. "She used to be my student," I will say. It's fun.

But enough about work. I finished another 5.11a on top-rope on Sunday and I want to make an attempt on lead today. I'm meeting Marina in an hour to attack it. It's time to go climbing.

Ukraine: St. Sophia, A Heartbreaking Story, A White Whale

2006-05-22T07:32:00.000-04:00

Tuesday was the day of Saint Sophia. Despite almost two years in Ukraine, I’m not clear on why she’s a saint or what she did, but the colossal blue cathedral in Kyiv that’s on the UNESCO treasures list was built to her, so obviously she’s pretty important to Ukrainians.

My friend Tanya is in a Christian band that was playing at a concert held on Saint Sophia’s day, so we went over to check it out. It was held in front of Zhytomyr’s Catholic Church. There’s only one Catholic Church in Zhytomyr because Catholicism doesn’t have nearly the hold hear that Orthodoxy does. In fact, plans to build another Catholic church in Kharkov were halted do to an outcry from the Orthodox churches that Catholicism was starting to take over. Yeah, there’s that kind of intolerance. With that kind of outrage over a Christian church, I asked my friend Lisa, who is from Kharkov, what the Ukrainians would do if someone tried to build a mosque there.

“Oh, they wouldn’t care,” she said. “Because it’s not a threat.”

The church was new by Ukrainian standards, only 300 years old, but pretty: a gothic facade in peach and white. An empty stage was set up in front of the church and we waited beside it until the Sophia Day service was over and the congregation piled out of the church to watch the performance.

The music was upbeat gospel, with touches of jazz and rock thrown in. During it, the coolest priest I’ve ever seen, a perpetually-smiling man of about 30, was leading a sort of conga line through the crowd. Instead of hands on hips they had just all held hands to form one big chain, and moved past us in a sort of half-run, half skip.

Then the whole crowd began to do circle dances. They did one traditional Ukrainian one: where everyone holds hands, does this sort of cross-back, cross-forwards step to run in a circle before the whole circle runs towards each other to meet in the center, then runs backwards again to spread the circle back out. Then an MC on stage began coaching the people through many more circle dances that (my friend later told me) they said they had learned from a Polish Catholic congregation. One was vaguely Indian with its twisting hands and hop-step, one was vaguely Celtic/Irish in its moves and so on and so forth, but all were pretty cool. I filmed for a bit but then just got in one of the circles, doing the dances with them. Towards the end they were fast and almost out of control, with people forming smaller circles within the bigger ones and having a hell of a lot of fun.

I still don’t know what Saint Sophia did, but apparently she knew how to party.

***

I was leaving the library on Thursday when I heard English, and I heard it in a sing-song, lilting accent. I was leaving the library with Kirstin, another volunteer and we both stopped, looked at each other, and Kirstin said what I was thinking: “she’s not from Ukraine.”

The English was being spoken by a woman in her early thirties pushing a stroller, and her name was Anna, and, it turned out, she really was Ukrainian. Her child, Marina, though, was American and her husband, Marina’s father, was from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When we got it sorted out, her rather heartbreaking story was this: Anna grew up in Ukraine and learned English here. While in Poland visiting a friend, she met her future husband. Although her husband only spoke Swahili and French and Anna spoke neither, they fell in love and her husband began to learn English for her. It was amongst her husband’s African relatives that she picked up the sing-song English accent.

Her husband moved to America, illegally, to find work and Anna followed him there on a tourist visa, even though she had only one year left in her University schooling. She became pregnant and Marina was born in America. Marina currently has both passports.

Anna came back to Ukraine to finish school, but afterwards when she tried to return to America with Marina, she was not allowed to. The American embassy was worried (correctly) that she would skip on her visa and stay in America with her child. So Anna hasn’t seen her husband and Marina hasn’t seen her father since. Her husband still supports her and the baby, sending money from America, but he can’t leave America because he would not be able to return, and even if he came to Ukraine, as Anna pointed out “who would give a black man a job in Ukraine?”

So to support his family he stays there work and she lives here and waits.
Marina is a beautiful little girl, almost three years-old with mocha skin and extremely curly hair. The hair gives Anna fits, she was saying, because she doesn’t know how to control it. She’s waiting for her mother-in-law, who lives in Congo, to bring some hair product when they both meet in Turkey this summer, one of the few countries where neither woman needs a visa. The mother-in-law, who could get a tourist visa to America, wants to take Marina with her to see her father. Anna doesn’t want her to, because she’s worried her Mother-in-law and her daughter won’t come back.

Marina loves attention and kept making faces at Kirstin and I to get it. When her mother finally let her out of her stroller, she was darting around on the sidewalk, running farther away than most kids are willing to be from their mothers and often causing Anna to chase off because she was reaching into a trash can or about to get into a fountain.

I don’t know why, but watching Anna scold Marina in Russian, my saddest thought was that if this family could be together, Marina would grow up speaking five languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English, Swahili and French.

Anna, tired of chasing her, finally strapped Marina back into the stroller, where she once again began making faces at Kirsten and I, smiling what few teeth she had at us. Anna took both our mobile numbers, saying she was glad to have people to practice English with, and then, pushing the stroller ahead of her, said good-bye and walked away.

***

I climbed my first 5.11b on Sunday. It was only Jon and I, which meant we could just seriously work on skills. We skipped out on going out Saturday night and got up at 5:30 AM, when the only people up were some fishermen on the river and us.
It was on top rope and yet still a sloppy climb, resting after almost every move. One move, the hardest, required a two fingered left-hand pull-up. I’m not kidding. This is why I’m still not a 5.11 climber. Instead of pulling the move clean, I worked my body up so that the rope would take some of my weight and I could half-swing up to the next hold (which, as it turns out, is only the tips of all four fingers, but on my right hand).

We were able to set a top rope because Jon was able to lean over the top of the cliff, me sitting on his legs, and put the rope through the anchor. After I finished it on top rope I tried to lead climb it (a climb doesn’t count unless it’s on lead), but I hit that two-finger pull-up move, fell, gashed open my shin and called it a day.

So I’m not a 5.11 climber yet, but I can feel it coming. That route (which is named after a three-headed dragon in a Ukrainian legend) is my new white whale.

Ukraine: Ded Kolia and Gouliating

2006-05-22T07:29:00.000-04:00

So I finally got some time at the computer and here are the first two of five interesting stories from the past week:

-My friend Olya, who lives in Kyiv but is from Zhytomyr, was in town for the weekend. We met to hang out, and I was told that we had to go see her grandmother, because Olya had promised to see her, and this killed two birds with one stone. It was already 9:30 PM, but with long summer days to match the short winter nights, meant there was still some light out. Still, it wasn’t until I got on the marshrutka with Olya that I was told her grandmother didn’t live in the city, but in a village outside of it.

It was full dark by the time we got there, which is how I found myself feeling my way across a creaking bridge of cobbled together metal plates to cross the Teatriv and get to this tiny village. Her grandmother, who lived in a two-room tiny house that was more than a century old, was really cool: youthful for her age and full of energy. While Olya’s eight year-old cousin attacked her in a hug and began jabbering about the birthday party she had had the previous weekend, the grandmother stuffed me full of dyruni (fried potato pancakes) topped with sour cream and told me in breakneck Russian about this guy she knew named Ded Kolia.

“Ded” means grandfather, but Kolia wasn’t so named because of his age but because of his actions during World War II. I don’t know why she thought a story from the war would be one to tell me unbidden. Maybe it’s because World War II was one of those few times that Americans and Soviets were on the same side. In any case, she was right, because I like to hear any kind of interesting story and those from World War II almost always seem to be interesting.

Only one generation out of Germany and able to speak German, Ded Kolia was named the administrator of her village by the Nazis after their war machine rolled through. Rather than being loyal to his German roots though, Ded Kolia used this new clout to forge papers for people who were being sent to the death camps. Instead of going to the camps, these Ukrainians lives were saved by being sent to Korestichiv, a town just north of Zhytomyr where, her grandmother told me, they would then join the large partisan resistance that was brewing there.

Then the story gets sadly ironic. Although he retreated with the Germans, Ded Kolia and his two sons were allowed to come back to Ukraine after the war ended. Despite saving so many people during the war, Kolia, possibly do to voicing anti-Soviet opinions, was sent to a gulag in Siberia, where he died.

Ded Kolia’s house was pointed out to me in the dark, on the way back to the bus stop to get me back to Zhytomyr. Olya and her grandmother tried to get me to stay the night, but I had to teach in the morning (yes, on a Saturday morning!). Olya wanted to walk me back to the bus stop (and I probably would have gotten lost if she hadn’t), but her grandmother didn’t want her returning alone, so all three girls: Olya, her grandmother and the young cousin, walked me to the stop.

Because it was so dark, Olya took one of my hands and her grandmother took my other and Olya’ cousin held her grandmother’s hand. So in this way these three Ukrainian girls walked the poor, lost American down the dirt road to the bus stop. It was a sweet moment.

Her grandmother invited me back to see the village in the daytime, because she says it’s beautiful and she wants to show me the apple orchids. I promised to return.

***

The next evening I was again walked by girls, this time Marina and Anya. It was after a long day of climbing with my class of boys, browbeating them up a route none of them thought they could do but two of them managed to complete. Anya called and asked if I wanted to get ice cream with her and Marina. This is what Ukrainians do.

When it’s warm, the most popular thing to do in Ukraine is to buy alcohol, ice cream or both and walk. The Russian and Ukrainian languages even have a verb for this: “Gouliat” and “Houliate”, respectively. There are other verbs for walking, but this verb particularly means leisurely strolling around the town, almost always with a beer in one hand and ice cream in the other, talking with your friends.

I’m an American. I’m not used to all this walking. Still, the weather was gorgeous, the chestnut trees were blooming and we gouliat-ed down Old Boulevard, the park and fountain lined avenue that stretches from a statue of Pushkin to a massive (but condemned) bridge that crosses the Teatriv River. Gouliat-ing on Old Boulevard is the equivalent of going to a club in America. Everyone is decked to the nines, girls baring stomachs, cleavage and thighs and guys in shined shoes and button down shirts (the two buttons generally undone and exposing gold chains), almost everyone sipping on beers and eyeing each other from their same-sex clusters. Both the girls had dressed up, hair done and wearing makeup (which I’m not used to seeing them in) and I stood out considerably because I was still in my climbing clothes, hair under a bandanna.

There actually was a club near Old Boulevard, in an old Soviet concrete amphitheatre, its walls topped with barbed wire. Inside, Russian pop boomed from speakers, DJed by a guy sitting in front of a computer under a large Coke-a-Cola umbrella. The price for this open-air impromptu club was 4 hrivna (80 cents for those playing the home game), a fifth less than any other club and for obvious reasons: they didn’t serve alcohol and they closed at 11 PM (when, invariably, everyone would be going to places that DID serve alcohol). For that price and with pumping music, I was down for a little daytime dancing. The weather was warm, the sun was setting and it seemed perfect, but the girls were too embarrassed to dance any place that didn’t have bad lighting.

So then I suggested we just sit in the grass and listen to the music. We don’t have any alcohol, they said. If you’re going to sit on the grass, they said, you have to eat and drink vodka or beer.

This is a rule?

No, it’s a tradition.

So we can’t just sit and listen to the music?

No.

I didn’t understand why they didn’t want to sit, relax, enjoy the sunset and listen to the music. They didn’t understand why I didn’t want to walk.

Because this is what Ukrainians do. They gouliat.

Ukraine: My Day

2006-05-15T15:12:00.000-04:00

Actually, the last three days have been very cool and I've got some feel-good Ukraine culture stories to put up, but no internet time (and I'm hungry).

So here was today: As a teacher trainer, I "manage" the ten Zhytomyrska Oblast volunteers in Practical Project and that includes observing their teaching once a semester. When I envision a manager, I envision this guy in a suit and tie, suitcase on his lap. And then I envision him in Ukraine, cramped on an archaic bus lurching in the rain down a road of broken asphalt, dodging around horse-drawn carts to get to a small village on the outer edge of the oblast to watch one 45 minute class.

It's not that bad: I planned lessons and studied Russian on the way there and back, but all told I was gone from Zhytomyr for seven hours and only saw my volunteer for a total of 75 minutes. The rest was on buses, waiting on buses, finding her school in the rain and standing in a hallway for 45 minutes waiting to speak with her after her lesson.

Yeah. That was my day.

Ukraine: The Past Two Weekends, Pt II (Pics)

2006-05-12T21:39:00.000-04:00

Before going back to Kharkiv, Lisa braided my hair. It was nice to have it out of the way, but I ended up taking it out just a few days later for a formal meeting with the director of the orphanage that will be working with us on the bike project. Since the orphanage is on the outskirts of the city (completely isolated from the rest of Zhytomyr), we had to work out the logistics of getting them to the Polissya clubhouse and also found out what kind of paperwork would be needed to take “formal responsibility” of the orphans. I was hoping at least one worker from the orphanage could come on the trips with us simply for liability and discipline issues, but that may not happen. I'm slightly worried about having “formal responsibility” for wards of the state, considering I don’t let a single kid climb with us without their parents signing a waiver, but if it’s what we have to do, it’s what we have to do.

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

Ukraine: The Past Two Weekends, Pt 1 (Pics)

2006-05-08T06:29:00.000-04:00

Life has been moving faster than I’ve had time to post about, but here are the highlights of the past two weekends:

First, the weather has been absolutely beautiful lately, which is why I’ve been climbing whenever I have a free moment. Sheep also think the weather is beautiful, and have been grazing near the cliffs we climb.

Me and sheep

I'm not 100% sure how this match with Anya even started, but apparently I lost

Marina washing her hands in the river after a day of climbing

Like every week for the past month, I’ve been visiting schools to show a video and pass out flyers for the climbing wall. I’ve discovered that there’s about a 1:10 ratio on flyers to show ups. I keep thinking that we’ll get overwhelmed on any given Saturday at the new trainings, but even if 40 kids say they’ll come, only 10 will show up. We average 8-10 new students each Saturday training, which is a good number considering the wall is fairly small. After a rotating roster of instructors, both friends, other Volunters and people from Polissya, my instructors have settled to three: Marina, Anya and Tanya. They are now veterans and at the last training I let them handle it from start to finish. I am becoming obsolete!

Marina teaching students

Anya teaching students

Students climbing

Why all girls? Um, because I'm working towards gender equality in the sport. And it's empowering to women. And, well, let's be honest, there can never be too many hot female climbers in the world. Eight months ago, none of these girls had ever climbed before and now they teach others to climb every week. Cool, huh?

If it makes anyone feel any better, I also have a special class after the Saturday trainings with five boys, they're just not as photogenic, as was proved when we all went to a club after climbing last Saturday:

***

Found a new cliff in Zhytomyr last week. I’ve heard that there are five, but no one seems to know where they are. Lisa—-who was visiting for the weekend from Kharkiv--, Anya, Igor and I followed rumors that there was one along the Teatriv River and found it. It’s small, the flat remnants of granite quarrying, but in a beautiful location, back in the woods and just above the dam built across the Teatriv river, where water overflows it into a waterfall. The bolted routes are hard: between 5.10c and 5.11a, but we were able to anchor a rope to a tree so that Lisa and Igor could do some of the easier routes.

Igor on top of cliff, overlooking the waterfall

Lisa climbing

Getting back was an adventure. Rather than walk the mile back to the bridge we had used to cross the river, Igor suggested we cross on the rocks in front of the waterfall. He said he had done this before, but apparently that was in late summer when the water was lower. It was only when we were a quarter of the way out that we realized that too many rocks were underwater to make the crossing without getting our feet wet. Igor and I just plunged on, soaking tennis shoes and boots, respectively, but Anya and Lisa decided to take their shoes off.

Lisa and Anya taking off their shoes

I'd like to point out that Igor is helping the girls while I'm off taking pictures. Quite the gentleman I am, huh?

Lisa and Anya, halfway across

At one point Lisa dropped a shoe and I had to jump into the river, up to mid-calf, to retrieve it. I gave it back to her, tossed the backpack full of gear to Igor, several rocks away with fast moving water between us, and rather than wait, he put the pack on and started walking. I heard a yelp and turned around to see that Lisa had dropped her shoe into the water again and it was now beyond my reach, floating off down the river. I heard another yelp and turned back to see that Igor had fallen into the water halfway up his chest, completely soaking the backpack full of climbing gear.

This is the last picture of Lisa with both shoes

Igor, pulling himself and all the wet gear out of the water

People fishing on the banks were watching us like we were complete idiots, which, of course, we were. Lisa had the worst of it. By the end, she had also banged her shin and it was freely bleeding and had to walk back to my apartment in a pair of climbing shoes, getting blisters in the process. Still, she had brought two pairs of shoes with her from Kharkiv and thankfully didn’t have to buy a new pair to go home.

For her, it was an interesting introduction to Zhytomyr.

Almost to the other side.

People fishing and watching us

Ukraine: Climbing in Crimea

2006-05-03T03:58:00.000-04:00

I had missed the clip. How had I missed the clip?

I was hanging at the top of a route, six feet above my last quick draw, left arm jammed past my elbow into a crack, left toe on a tiny nub of rock and nothing else stopping me from falling, falling, swinging, crashing.

Coming upon the cliffs

I had been climbing for seven hours straight and had completed six routes, five of them on lead, all of them 5.10b's and 5.10c's. A 5.10 route, once considered the hardest climbs, are now only the bottom end of advanced climbing, but they're above the level of people who aren’t serious about the sport. Most of my early climbing was done in at a climbing gym in Oklahoma city, one built inside a huge grain silo. They didn’t use the numbering system for difficulty. Instead, easy was marked green, medium was marked blue and difficult was marked black.

I’d been on black all day.

My friend, Dasha, working up to the top of a route called "Nuff-nuff"

A 5.10 route are the routes where you will be hanging by fingers, balanced on tiny toe holds or doing pull-ups and swinging a foot up to get past an overhang. They’re not 5.11s or 5.12s, where you do everything just mentioned but for the entire route, often at an acute backwards angle, but they’re still very difficult.

And, of course, there’s 5.13, which only the world’s best climbers can do, of which there was only one such route present at the cliffs in Crimea, a razor’s edge of featureless rock that required you to hang upside down by your fingers for most of it.

No one at the cliff went near it.

None of the people climbing around Jon and I were that good, but they were all damn good. Jon and I were puppies amongst the big dogs there, learning just how much we had to learn. We were, in two facing bluffs that stretched high before the Black Sea, in Ukraine’s rock climbing heaven.

The cliffs

Jon still doesn’t trust his leading skills, which meant I had to lead almost all of the routes we did, wearing myself out in the process. Lead climbing is a giant evolutionary step from the top roping. When you top rope, the rope goes up from your harness to an anchor above you. Most people who have tried climbing have done top roping. If you fall on a top rope, you only fall a few inches. When you lead climb, though, the rope comes up from below and you clip it into bolts set into the rock as you go. Why lead climb? You have to: out on cliffs, no one is going to set a top rope for you. You have to lead up and set it yourself.

Sitting on top of a route called "Chimera". Jon is below

Lead climbing is more dangerous, though. If you are four feet above your clip, you will fall eight feet before you stop, swinging and slamming into the rock. The worst possible time to fall is right before you clip into your next bolt.
It can be a nerve wracking process: you reach a bolt and reach back and grab a quick draw-two carabineers attached by a short length of webbing--off your harness. You clip one carbineer into the anchor, then reach down to pull the rope to the other one. You are now at the worst part. You are holding on with one hand, feet precariously perched on whatever nub you can find, pulling up a rope which is being fed as fast as possible from below. Invariably you end up with slack, which means that if you miss clipping in and fall, you will fall that much farther.

Here, you can see the basics of lead climbing: quick draws clipped into bolts and the rope. And you can also see my best side

The situation I was in was even worse: we were climbing on poorly formed limestone. Unlike the granite I’m used to, the rock had a surface like soap and my shoes could barely grip it. My hands were so tired from climbing all day that my fingers couldn’t stay clenched, which is why I shoved my arm into that crack. Now, if I fell, I’d be leaving a lot of skin behind.

I had thought I’d had strength left for one more route, a route called “Sim-Sim” as in “Sim, sim, Salabim!” what Aladdin yells to open the cavern. I jokingly said it before I started the route. The saying hadn’t helped: the route had started with a roof move, me hanging upside down and having to swing myself over an edge, grabbing a flake of rock with enough grip that I could pull myself over. That move took the last of my energy, but I was past the point of no return. The thing about lead climbing is that, if you don’t complete the route, you have to leave one of your quick draws on the wall so your partner can lower you down. Quick draws are only $18, but pride alone won’t let me leave gear on the wall. Besides, I only get paid $200 a month.

So I had to finish.

I kept working to the top of the route. If ever I found a crack big enough for my hand, I’d jam it in and rest for a bit. It wasn’t good for my hands, as my right one was already coated in chalk and blood.

My poor hand,

Normally, climbing is just fun: feeling your body move in the warm sun up a rock face. Some days, like today, you just get in a push-yourself mood. Then it becomes the sport of masochists.

I did get up to the top, finally, to the top anchor which, luckily, was a drop-in: a big carabineer attached to the wall. Sometimes it’s just a ring, meaning you have to tie in with a piece of webbing, untie your rope, thread the rope through the ring, retie into the rope and then get lowered down. I didn’t really have the energy for that.

Lead climbing is taxing. It’s slower and you take more time between each move because you don’t want to fall. This means you spend a lot more time just gripping and looking at the wall for the best holds, time that tears up your muscles. And it’s mentally taxing. You’re focused every moment, planning, looking, feeling things through. Sometimes a minute can seem like an hour and an hour a minute.

The top anchor had a serious spring on it, which is why it didn’t move when I weakly pushed the rope at it and missed the clip, the rope falling out of my hand and down.

You learn a lot about yourself while climbing. One lesson is that you can always go farther than you think you can. My left side had started shaking. When you stand too long on a toe, your leg will start vibrating up and down. “Sewing machine leg”, they call it. Except now, my whole left side, arm jammed into the rock, toe on a nub, was trembling.

I only sort of dimly regarded it, though, because I simply knew one thing: falling would hurt a lot worse than the pain I was in now. At this point, it’d be a fall of fifteen feet, only slightly less than the height I fell from when I broke my leg. The rope would absorb some of the energy, but would swing me directly into the rock, a “face whipper” as climbers like to call it.

My hand came back up with the rope, smeared white and red. You learn things about yourself. Everyone has preprogrammed ideas of endurance that don’t give a real picture of how far your body can go, how much it can actually handle. Because as far as my conscious mind knew, I was out of energy, but my body, despite all the vibration, kept hanging on. Fuck it. I was not going to fall.

I shoved the rope through the clip and the gate swung back with a snap.

“Take!” I yelled, and Jon pulled all the slack out of the rope as I let go, forearm sliding out of the crack, feet leaving the rock and body dropping a few feet before just hanging.

I looked out. Fog had obscured the views the day before, but today, from the top of any given route, you could see over the trees, past the road, past the ramshackle houses and tiny farm plots on the hill side, and see the Black Sea.

Oh yeah, that’s why I do this.

The Black Sea from the top of a route

My arms would hurt so bad the following night that the pain would keep me awake, but that was okay. I was a puppy running amongst the big dogs, and this is how I was going to get bigger.

Me, climbing a route called "Kong"

At the top

As I hung there, I thought about dinner and how good hot food would be. And we could watch Chappelle’s Show on Chandani’s laptop, and I could rest.

That’s what I thought about, along with a warm sense of accomplishment, as the adrenaline drained out and Jon lowered me to the ground.

Ukraine: Sex. Birth. Life. Death. (Pics)

2006-04-28T07:59:00.000-04:00

NOTE: Although we went to Crimea to climb, this blog is about everything but. The next one, with pictures, will be about the climbing.

The trip started and ended with mad dashes for the train. Looking for my lost hat had made us late and pedestrians yelled at us as Jon and I dashed around them, running full-out along the length of the train to our carriage. The brakes unlocked, that sudden, loud and nails-on-chalkboard squeaking metal shift of the entire train settling forward half an inch, and we kept running, trying to stay balanced against the shifting of backpacks heavy with climbing gear. Our carriage attendant lowered the steps and we leapt on, slicked with sweat. After showing our tickets, made our way to our cabin as the train began to roll forward.

Also on the train, but four carriages ahead of us, were Yura and Kiril, two climbers from Kyiv that I had met a week before on a cliff in Zhytomyr. They had invited us to Crimea for three days of climbing over the extended Easter weekend. Crimea is the southern peninsula of Ukraine that juts out into the Black Sea, a subtropical region in a country of steppe, a rugged and beautiful sea coast where Russian Tsars once had their winter homes. We found Yura and Kiril’s cabin and found they had brought their girlfriends, Valya and Irina, also climbers.

“This is great,” I remember remarking to Jon half an hour later after we had all exploded in laughter at some joke. Talking about climbing with Ukrainians on a train rolling through the darkening day into night, being stuffed with sausage and lavash, that was great. Although I had ended up skipping dinner while looking for my hat, it’s impossible to starve on a Ukrainian train. Tradition dictates that you share your food with fellow passengers and many temporary friendships are made over the tiny table in each cabin. We all split a paska, a traditional Easter cake. It wasn’t supposed to be eaten until Sunday, but we figured that we’d be on the rock and now was as good a time as any. Paska, like every other kind of Ukrainian cake, looks fantastic and tastes horrible. But Jon and I ate it with smiles anyway.

Yura serving up paska

I was making my way back to our cabin a few hours later, tired, when someone called to me from an open door. The man calling to me said that there was nothing past his cabin and that I must be lost. He was right: I had accidentally passed mine. I thanked him and turned around, but then he asked me inside, where he and two other Ukrainian men were gathered around a small feast on their small table, drinking beers, while an older woman slept on one of the top bunks.

I was asked where I was from: my accent is always a giveaway, but rather than have them guess, which always provides interesting but ultimately incorrect answers (“France? Lebanon? Spain?), I told them I was American. I’ve only once had a bad reaction to the news that I was American, from a skinhead at a rock concert in Zhytomyr. He got in my face in slurred Russian before finally spitting out what was apparently the only English phrase he knew: “Yankee go home!” Then his friends pulled him away.

The three men, like most Ukrainians, greeted me happily at the news of my nationality and offered me vodka. They were car salesmen, they said. The carriage behind ours, they told me, had eight cars they were taking from Kyiv to sell in Crimea, which is why they were in the last cabin: to keep an eye on the merchandise. They began pushing food at me, including homemade salo (spiced pig fat) smeared with beet and garlic sauce on black bread. It doesn’t sound appetizing but is actually fantastic and goes perfectly with vodka.

The conversation swung to politics and rather than having to dodge questions about my views on Ukrainian politics, they actually pressed me about American ones. Did I think America was going to go to war with Iran? I hesitated a second, then said that, since the war in Iraq was so unpopular, I didn’t think we’d start one with Iran anytime soon. They cheered that thought (possibly since Ukraine had troops in Iraq, they worried troops might end up in Iran) and raised their glasses.

“To war!” shouted one of the men, the one who had spent most of the evening telling me how his hometown of Sevastopol had been declared a hero city after World War II and that the greatest experience I could have in Ukraine would be to be there on Victory Day.

“No!” said the guy who originally called me into the cabin. “To peace!”

How fitting, considering I am in Peace Corps.

“Za mira!” I yelled, and we drank to that.

***

Sex. Birth. Life. Death.

The complete cycle, all in 24 hours.

Sex was not me having it—unfortunately—but was embodied in the raunchiest strip show I’ve seen in my life. I was in a nightclub in Alushta, a small city set in the mountains about 20 miles from where Jon and I had spent the morning climbing. The cliffs, on the coast of the Black Sea, had been completely covered in fog, ironic since Crimea is known for sunshine. Apparently I had brought sun block and a bathing suit in vain. The fog was actually so thick that Jon and I were nearly killed crossing one of the roads that chicane along the mountainous coast. We couldn’t see two feet ahead of us and heard no cars, but in our mad race to the other side nearly got winged by one racing out of the white.

A babushka in Alushta

In Alushta's bazaar

Alushta is where Chandani, another Peace Corps volunteer, lives, and we crashed with her over the weekend. Also crashing was Mona, another volunteer, and with these two ladies I went out to the club while Jon, not a club fan, caught up on his sleep.
Most clubs in Ukraine have a midnight show which will generally have a selection of four things: choreographed dancing, singing, break dancing and strip shows. I prefer the latter two, as the former are almost always poorly done by local (un)talent.

I was not disappointed. After a round of break dancing, a stripper came out and began her show. She must have been trained as a gymnast at one point because, in only a g-string and knee high leather boots, she was doing insane pole stunts, including what amounted to a handstand on the pole, arms spread wide and gripping it while her inverted body bent into the shape of an arrow and suspended there. The gymnastics alone made the show worth it, but she was just getting warmed up.
She pulled a guy out of the crowd, took him to the pole and had him hold it. She took of his shirt and then pushed down his pants to his ankles, revealing his boxers. The club clientele, 80 percent female, went nuts, women standing up and cheering, getting closer to the stage. The stripper laid the man down on his back and began to gyrate on him, twisting herself to rub her crotch in his face and simulate going down on him.

“No she did not,” said Chandani.

“I did not want to see that,” said Mona.

The stripper had the man stand back up, put her back to him, and then slid down him, pulling his boxers with her. He was standing naked at this point, her body blocking his bollocks, when she began to writhe against him. He looked like he was going to explode.

She slid back up, expertly bringing his boxers up with her so that he never actually exposed anything, pulled his pants back up and then led him offstage. Believe it or not, the show wasn’t done.

After another round of break dancers, the stripper came back out, danced for a little bit and then walked back out into the audience. She picked a bottle of vodka off another guy’s table, poured it onto her breasts and then had one of the guys lick it off.

She then pulled a girl out of the audience and took her to the bar. They both got on the bar and I was sure the girl was a plant until I saw her face. The entire time it was one of “should I be doing this? Should I be doing this? Should I be doing this?” But she did it anyway. The bartenders handed the stripper a can of whip cream and the stripper sprayed it on herself, which the girl licked up. Then the stripper started taking off the girl’s shirt, which, after some hesitation, she let her do. Her bra went next.

These two women made out on the bar while half the club cheered and the other half, including Mona and Chandani, acted offended but kept watching anyway. As a finale, the stripper tugged down her G-string to just above crotch, sprayed whip cream on her pelvis, laid the girl down on the bar and then straddled her face. When she stood back up, the whip cream was gone.

I have seen sex shows in Amsterdam (where both the performers and the audience are bored) and strip shows in Mexico (reputed to be the most hardcore) and I have never seen anything that intensely erotic ever.

So there you go: sex.

Birth in this case would be the celebration of Jesus’ on Easter. Okay, his birth celebration is Christmas, but maybe we can say this is celebrating his rebirth?Church is probably not the place most people go after a club (at least not for eight more hours), but we did. In Ukraine, Easter is celebrated with an all night service starting at midnight. Halfway through the service, people will line up in a circle around the church, baskets full of food and holding lit candles. The bishop or priest of the church will then go around the circle, splashing holy water onto the people and the food. The food will then be eaten the next day.

Paska for sale

Food awaiting the blessing

I had missed Easter service last year because I had been in America, and this once would be my last one before leaving Ukraine. As I assumed I would never be back in Ukraine in April, it was imperative that I go to see the ceremony that night, which, in Alushta, started at 3 AM. I dragged Chandani and Mona along with me, the food that I was going to have blessed in my pocket. I had found it buried underneath some other bottles in a tiny store in a tiny town near the cliffs we had climbed that morning: a half liter bottle of Pepsi.

Our timing was excellent. We arrived as the circle formed around the church and could hear the last of the mass being chanted inside, the bells ringing every few minutes. I placed my Pepsi down in between two baskets, each holding food and a paska, a lit candle pressed into each one. It was a beautiful site, all the people holding candles and quietly waiting. Although I was not there for religious reasons, I found it moving all the same. I thought about how plasticized our Easter is in America. This is where the tradition of Easter is at its most original: eggs are symbolic of birth and fertility and are eaten on Easter. But they must first be blessed and so are taken to the church in, of course, baskets. But this holy ritual somehow morphed into seeking out plastic eggs in plastic baskets and is more of a children’s game in America than a rite.

People lined up around the church

Candles burning in the Easter night

The blessing was not as gentle as I thought it would be. Two priests, each holding a traditional wicker broom, walked beside altar boys carrying buckets of holy water. The priests dipped the broom into the bucket and then whipped the water at us and the food. And it was a lot of water. Old women were getting hit full in the face, yelping and then saying “Christ has risen”, their tone almost apologetically for not being more appreciative of the water whipping. Water hit my Pepsi, which is now a blessed Pepsi (I brought it back to Zhytomyr; not sure if or under what circumstances I’ll drink it) and quite a lot hit me. When I thought about it later, I realized I had been wearing my travel clothes: khakis, boots, fleece sweater, pack jacket, and so they were all blessed, too. Maybe they’ll keep me safe on my journeys.

The priest, blessing with a water-soaked broom

My blessed Pepsi

Technically I was also blessed, which is why I got to go to Chandani and Mona, who were sitting against a building and waiting for me, and say: “I am now a blessed man. You are standing next to a blessed man.”

“Look who’s here,” they said.

I turned around and, sure enough, off to the side and watching the ceremony, long blonde braids hanging down and wearing a wrap-around red coat that stopped at those knee-high leather boots, was the stripper from the club.

Life. Life is climbing, which is what Jon and I did all the next day, but that’s in the next blog.

Death. On the marshrutka back to Alushta, we came upon a car wreck, the car halfway up an embankment and its front smashed in. I took a picture of it because my camera was already out, but then realized that the next car, a black one and with its front end smashed in, was still smoking. I put the camera down as we next passed a woman sitting on the side of the road, holding her head with one hand, blood running down her face, and then we passed two men, obviously dead, lying where they had been dragged to the side of the road. Two other men were standing, waiting for some ambulance that had hopefully been called, and our marshrutka didn’t even slow down.
They say in Peace Corps Ukraine that you’ll see at least one dead person before you leave. I’ve now seen three.

Death is always a sobering end.

But it is only the end, and this story, my story is not there yet. It made me slightly sad to see it, but in truth I forced myself not to think about it. Instead told myself to be thankful for life and everything that affirms it: strip shows and church services and days spent rock climbing.

So, like life does, we continued down the road, driving along the rocky coast for miles and miles.

***

Jon and I sat playing a game of chess in the train station in Simferopal, a two-hour bus ride from the cliffs. A chess board was lying on a the seat between us while we waited for our train. The announcement came and we began to pack up when Jon said something worrying: “I can’t find my ticket.”

He looked. And looked. And looked.

And couldn’t find it. This took fifteen minutes.

I glanced at the clock. We had three minutes to get on the train and didn’t even know where it was.

“We have to go,” I said, not even sure if we had time to catch the train, ticket or not. “Now.”

So started another mad dash for the train, gripping backpacks.

We found our train and ran down the length of it. In my head, I knew we were fucked. They check tickets at the door, will not let you on the train without a ticket. I saw our carriage, saw our carriage looking worriedly at us as we ran towards the train.

“Do not stop!” I yelled at Jon.

The train began to move. The attendant didn’t even try to lower the steps and luckily the platform was high enough that I could jump into the open door. He backed away as I came flying at him, backpack swinging wildly from one shoulder and blocking his view of Jon. I shoved my ticket at him and he was taking still more steps back as I pushed myself towards him, trying to give room for Jon to get past me.

Jon leapt on after me and immediately moved into the hallway and down the carriage as fast as he could, ignoring the attendant. The attendant saw him, but was to busy with me to stop him.

When I found Jon a few minutes later, he was really upset. He had upended his backpack but could not find the return ticket. Two cabins down from us was Seth, another volunteer who had been to another part of Crimea, but who had arranged to be on the same train back as us.

Seth came up to us and was quickly informed about the situation. At the other end of the hall was the attendant, coming towards us. Seth and I had both been in need-to-bribe situations before and weren’t nearly as worried as Jon. It also helped that we both had our tickets.

“I don’t have any money,” Jon said. He'd given most of what he'd had to me earlier in the day to buy gear.

I shoved a 50 hrivna bill at him.

The attendant was about forty feet away.

“Maybe we can get away with 20,” I said. “Seth, do you have a 20?”

Seth folded one up and slid it into my palm and I slid it towards Jon.

The attendant arrived and demanded Jon’s ticket. For whatever reason, Jon went with the I-don’t-understand-you ploy and through bad Ukrainian and mimes said he couldn’t find it, motioning at the spread-out contents of his backpack.

“Then you’ll get off at the next station,” said the attendant in Russian.

Seth and I immediately assaulted him in a barrage Russian and Ukrainian: this was our friend, he paid for the ticket, this was his bunk, we bought the tickets together, don’t you have a passenger list, why don’t you have a passenger list, he had reserved the bunk, it was his and he wasn’t going anywhere…

People started poking their heads out of their cabins, curious at the loud, accented languages.

“He’s getting off,” said the attendant and turned to leave when Seth said the magic words: “Maybe there’s a fine?”

“Yes,” I said. “What is the fine?”

The attendant hesitated, then said: “the cost of the ticket.” That was 86 goddamn hrivnas. Seth and I both paused. Do we haggle? But by naming the ticket cost and not an arbitrary number, the only way to lower it was to admit it was a bribe.

Jon handed over my 50, Seth’s 20 and 16 of his own.

He later found the ticket, in a plastic bag that he had put his band-aids in.

He was pissed for the rest of the trip. But at least he got home.

Going home

Ukraine: News (and TOT pics)

2006-04-25T05:47:00.000-04:00

Just got back from an Easter weekend spent climbing in Crimea (the southern part of Ukraine that extends into the Black Sea; from the top of any given route I could see the ocean). It was awesome and some interesting stories came of it, but that's in future posts after I go get some sleep.

Two things happened just before I left, though, bad and good, that I have time to mention:

Bad: Lost my Star Wars baseball cap. I've had it since I was 12 and it's been to every country I've been to. And how do I loose it? My pants didn't have belt loops, so I stuffed it into the back waistband while I was walking around Kyiv. It must have fallen out somewhere. I completely retraced my steps and looked for over an hour and a half (stopped only because I had a train to catch). I guess I can reassure myself that I left a part of myself here in Ukraine, but damn that sucked. I try not to attach myself to things, but I did love that hat.

Good: Got the grant for the bikes! That was a long, frustrating process. I actually didn't get the first grant it was written for because it didn't fit the requirements (it should never have been written for that grant in the first place, but that is what Peace Corps had recommended; writing it the first time was like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole). The idea was liked, though, and when it failed to get the first grant, an exception was made to submit it late to another one. That required cutting out $2,000 and changing huge sections to get it to fit this new one. Let's say I've learned a lot about how, when it comes to grants, it's not in the idea itself but how it's written that matters. In any case, I got it and $5,000 will be coming in Mid-June. By July we should be taking kids out on bike trips. That, I feel very good about.

Here's some pics from TOT:

Jon (from Georgia), myself and Mike jamming on "Last Dance" by Tom Petty. To be forever known by the TOTers as "The Indiana Song"

At the TOT social. Mike, myself, my 'fro, and Lana

Me and seven girls. It's a rough life. Georgia, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine and America are all represented in this picture.

Also, here is a link to a video of us playing "The Indiana Song". It's funny the way train wrecks are funny.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=674138096&n=2

Ukraine: 250th Post

2006-04-16T15:22:00.000-04:00

This is the 250th post since I started writing this blog a little under two years ago. That's a lot of writing. Since this is a blog and not, say, a newspaper column, I can only assume that narcissism is to blame.

Still, thanks to all of you that keep reading!

Ukraine:TOT

2006-04-14T10:06:00.000-04:00

Just got done with the American Councils "Training of Teachers" for their upcoming pre-departure orientations for students going to American on the FLEX program. My role this year was of "Master Teacher", a really lofty title which meant I taught a couple classes on teaching techniques and then spent the rest observing everyone else practice teach and giving them feedback.

Ukraine is the hub for all the surrounding countries participating in the program, so we had people from Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Georgia (the country, not the state) and Moldova there. This group had to learn an insane amount of material (in excess of 150 pages) in four days, and the pressure was relieve by three nights of much, much partying, which mostly consisted of drinking, dancing and guitars, with one walk through the surrounding woods at sunset and then getting lost in the dark on the way back.

There were also twin hookers at the hotel's bar. I'm not joking. No, I didn't ask them how much.

Only one minor was on hand for the debauchary, the four year-old son of the head of Serbia's program. For some reason this kid took to me (possibly because I played guitar for him on the first night) and would often run after me down the hall, grab my hand and follow me to wherever I was going. I think his mother was relieved at this because he had boundless energy and she needed the break. No matter how much I ran, played or tossed him around, he never got tired. He was a little spoiled though: he had a tendency to take whatever he wanted and neither of his parents tried to stop him. One night this meant he was trying to take my cell phone and, when I wouldn't let him, he bit my hand (not angrily, just using his teeth as another tool along with his two little hands prying at mine). I thought it was funny that he bit me and was walking towards his parents to let them know when he ran after me and the phone, collided with my legs and hitting the ground, smacking his head on the floor. Then he started to cry. I picked him up and carried him to his mother and then it was pointed out to me that blood was running down my arm. Turns out his teeth had caught a scab earned while climbing and tore it. I went to wash out the cut and when I got back, he was in the sniffling stage and his parents were encouraging him to apologize to me. I felt so sorry that he had hit his head that I didn't even want the apology, but the parents were slightly adamant. He couldn't quite get it out through the sniffs, though, so then he just reached out and hugged me. It was a very "Aww" moment.

Ukraine: Spring Break

2006-04-02T11:23:00.000-04:00

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.