Oseledets - Оселедець
On the train to Poland (two months ago):
I cut my hair into something of a Mohawk and grew a big mustache. It is a traditional style here in Ukraine. The Cossacks shaved their heads and the remaining top knot looks kind of like a fish lying there on their head, so it is called “a herring”. I wear a baseball cap when I am not at camp but on my way to Poland, I imagined the conversation when I remove my cap on the plane. I decided that if I asked, my response would be, “I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ukraine and my job is to develop youth. One of the biggest parts of this, I have learned, is to convince Ukrainian youth to be proud of themselves. Their history, they respect, but they often don’t believe in themselves, and this haircut helps me to teach that lesson.”
PS. The weather here is phenomenal! The air is crisp in the morning and warm in the afternoon. The skies are sunny there is little rain. Except for about three (very) cold days, it has been that way for weeks, but only this week really have the trees come into full color in town. They are stunning! I must have been too overwhelmed last year to appreciate it. I barely even remember it, but I am drinking it all in now.
What would you want to witness being invented?
Of all the things that I wish I could have been there to see invented, I think the one I want the most would be a very simple thing. I wish …that I had been on Coney Island…on that hot and fateful day… that I could have been watching the bored waffle vender strike upon his revolutionary idea that would spread one day all the way to Ukraine…that I could have seen the incredulous ice cream man being sweet talked into using a waffle as a container…that I could have seen the surprise and disbelief of the first client. Was it a child? An adult? I wish I could have bought one that day.
What would you want to witness?
PS. Did I submit this PS already?
PPS. Landon, where are you? What is your current email? Mine is the same as old. What do you think about a hike and camping in the Smokey’s June of next year? Anyone else interested? Or it is really nice here in the spring, if you are serious about the plane. We could do the hike here, or a cross country skiing trip?
The Travels of the Toothpick
This is no ordinary toothpick, this is a Finnish toothpick, and indeed it looks like it was crafted from the rib of a great ocean schooner… which would be fitting because this toothpick has come home to live the rest of its days with me after a long journey. It will never serve the purpose that it was created for, but in my eyes has transcended to a much greater ideal.
You see, my sister [and perhaps she can elaborate a bit more in a comment] had some conversation with my parents in Helsinki, a land of culturally and linguistically distinctive people with no remotely close relatives or neighbors (they are NOT Scandinavian, I found out). The outcome of this conversation, I believe at breakfast on the first day of their journey, was that Catherine would not be capable of delivering this toothpick to me intact. Well from there they departed for the Russian border by bus. Successfully across, and with many stories to tell, they spent several days seeing the sites of St. Petersburg, and then several days in Moscow. At this point, they were to pick up tickets at the airport and fly to Lviv where I would meet them, and this is where the story gets really interesting.
My Ukrainian coordinator’s daughter lives in Moscow, and they had managed to meet my parents for dinner the night before. The dinner was lovely, they said, except for when Mom found out that the delicious salad she was enjoying was made of bull’s heart. When my coordinator, Natalia, and her daughter, Vika, learned that my family was going to the airport the next day, they insisted on driving them. Driving in private automobiles, although more common in Moscow from what I understand, is quite a luxury for us here. Well the trip was about an hour, and upon arriving at the airport, in typical Ukrainian fashion, the hosts insisted on seeing them off to the last possible step. I will be eternally grateful that they did, because my greatest fear, unbeknownst to me who was waiting in the Lviv airport, was about to come true. The ticket guy insisted that my parents needed visas to enter Ukraine, which has not been necessary for American tourists for a year, and this was a Ukrainian air carrier, not a Russian one. In Russia visas are still a must, and not easy to come by. This event also elicited the typical Ukrainian response from my parents’ hosts - a bartering/yelling match meant to intimidate the other side. After an hour of my dad, my coordinator’s daughter, and this man in a back office discussing - in alternatively heated and then silent exchanges - he eventually gave over the tickets, without any money exchanging hands (this was the part that surprised me the most). If my parents had not made it to Ukraine for this reason, I would never have stopped kicking myself. Thank you, Natalia and Vika, from the bottom of my heart.
The flight was another interesting comedy of errors, but 4 hours after I expected them, and an hour after I had given up hope, they came walking into the airport lobby. There isn’t much more to the Lviv airport than the lobby. I almost cried I was so happy, …as did they.
From there we spent several days in Lviv and my nearby town. We toured many churches, town halls, towers, museums, and mineral waters. We made Varenyky with my host family (a dish my father fondly remembers from his highschool girlfriends’ mothers’ kitchen), and had cake with some of my colleagues and neighbors. We even got to listen to the 2 am screaming after Ukraine won another of the World Cup games. Have you forgotten the toothpick? Somewhere in this period, my sister remembered it, and it was passed to my pocket, completely intact.
The irony is, that I then promptly forgot about it, and I happened to carry it off on the next stage of our adventures. From my town we went on to visit my first host family, and my very pregnant host sister-in-law near Kyiv, and then a few days of sight seeing in Kyiv. We had a wonderful time together, and saw many interesting sights and met many interesting people, but their vacation was coming to an end. I regretfully saw them off at the airport in Kyiv. I however wasn’t returning home, and neither, I re-discovered, was the toothpick.
I went on to 2 conferences, a 7 day camp, a Ukrainian/American wedding, a couple of days with the host family and friends again, and then home. Three weeks later, as I was unpacking, I found the toothpick again. It was still intact, but its little plastic wrapper had worn right off, and it was a bit dirtied. However, its being from such a strong explorer culture, and having so many journeys already under its belt, will certainly guarantee my loyalty to it. As a symbol of friends and family, far and near, the little toothpick has a special place of respect in my heart and will certainly make the great journey over the pond on my final return home.
First impressions
This is a collection of thoughts and events with or by my visitors; I hope this is the first in a series…
When (Jason) Sando was here we went to Poltava, a very pretty city like a state capital. We went to 6 banks before we could cash a traveller's checks. I forgot to tell Mom and Dad about this, but luckily I had made the same mistake in my town, and we only had to go to 2 banks and wait about 30 minutes. I was impressed with the speed and ease of the process; needless to say, my dad thought I had lost my marbles. Oh, and I forgot to mention make sure you bring your passport to exchange traveller's cheques and have your service fee ready!
Sando went with some friends of mine to lunch in Poltave. We had the whole traditional lunch starting with borsch, then vodka shots and varenyky (dumplings with potatoes; perogies for you Poles out there). Sando got the real experience because after lunch we went to a social with two very eccentric and lively older women, one Ukrainian and one American. There we had champagne and chocolates, and then went on to a puppet show at the local college with the lively American where, at the end, we shared holiday stories and traditions…and more drinks.
When we did this traditional dinner with Mom, Dad, and Catherine (my sister), I took them to what I thought was one of the nicest restaurants in town. I had been waiting for them to go there. It is right in the center and I have often seen the tables full through the windows; I have seen different people I know of reputation standing in the doorway, but while we ate, we were the ONLY ones in the restaurant. The food was good and the service (understandably) nice, but now I seem to remember that whenever I saw people standing there, it was under their big, convenient awning, out of the rain falling, hmm…
They all had Ukrainian pizza which is good, but different yet again from Italian or American.
They had it in a café where the strangest toppings are tuna or hard boiled eggs, but if you get the special chance of having it at home, then you can expect pickles, sausage, cabbage, corn, mushrooms and other things, and never forget to lather it with mayonnaise and then add ketchup also if you desire. I remember the first time I had pizza in Ukraine. I order it by sight, and then asked what it was called. The word in Ukrainian is still pizza, but I had to ask the woman to repeat.
Ukrainians have a very tasty fried bread with fillings inside. They can be liver (the one food I found my father doesn’t like, though I do), sausage, potato, cabbage, and then there are rarer flavours like pea, one of mine and now Sando’s favorite, though my host mom says I really shouldn’t eat them from the fair like stalls that cook them at the bazaar.
One day in Poltava, we went to a really nice show that the local orphanage did. Then we gave out gifts that volunteers had collected through an angel tree. It was really nice. Then we went on a tour of the city. It was winter then, with lots of snow. As we were passing a public toilet, which are often attendant-guarded vaults sunken in the ground. Sometimes they are just holes in wood boards, sometimes you get lucky and they are porcelain squatters. Luckily the vaults are usually the porcelain variety as this one was, and as it was very clean Sando tried to tap the snow off his boots as he stood in the open doorway before going in. The woman immediately started yelling at him, and as he turned to look at me waiting above, I said to go in quick, she says your letting the heat out. So he went in, paid, and said thank you. While he was in the toilet, the woman comes to the door, sees me and our active older American conversing in English. She then props the door open to ask us where we are from and what we are doing here. As always I am amazed by the sudden change of mood. I asked how she knew we were foreigners (it isn’t so easy to tell in coats and hats and she couldn’t have heard our English in her vault before she opened the door). She said that my friend had said “thank you” before using the bathroom and that was VERY unusual; we must be foreigners. It was an interesting conversation, but I unsuccessfully tried to finish it before Sando came out. I knew that seeing her standing there pleasantly with the door half open would elicit in Sando a mood shift of the same speed but in the opposite direction.
That night we had pulled barbecue chicken, Korean carrots, and pumpkin pie thanks to Erin. They were fabulous. And if you don’t know what Korean carrots, then you have to come visit (though I will probably continue to make them after I return).But now the part I promised in the title, first observations of visitors that I had forgotten I once also had:”The toilet paper has no inner tube!” (they still hang it)”what's a kolonka?” (makes your water hot, beats bucket bathing with water heated on the stove)”the ice IS slippery!” (and Sando had a newspaper route in North Dakota!)”The escalators ARE fast and it still takes 5 minutes. (the Kyiv metro is one of the deepest in the world, I believe I read; my father echoed all these thoughts when he visited) ”Pedestrian underpasses with shops, ingenius!” (they are like mini-malls; warm in winter, cooler in the summer)
“They eat their bananas upside down.” (though technically they grow that way)
My dad has already posted some comments under another post, but I will wait to share more stories of their stay until I have given my mother and sister the chance to post too. You can do it collectively if you want, and if you send me it in email, I will post it as an entry instead of a comment.
