Perpetual Change

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.

posted by jjs @ 11:58 AM