Perpetual Change

An odd day

This title refers to a very special phenomenon. It was penned by Edwin and myself, shortly before a manhole cover ate his left leg. It comes from the concept of trains that only run every other day, but more precisely, they run on odd or even days, as stated on the schedule. This blog post has become a collection of the less than believable.


It all started one week when I went to buy tickets for some students and myself who were going on a school trip. I was taking them on a 29 hour train ride across the country to meet their pen pals and I had checked train times and price previously. Through my experience in Ukraine, particularly with travelling, I was pretty sure that although this was not my first time out to the train station to deal with these tickets, and even though I had money, dates, IDs and all, it probably wouldn't be my last time out to the train station. This is what the odd day term refers too.


So when I arrive and try to book my tickets for the first of the month, the ticket agent has problems. Usually they are grumpy because you haven't understood some detailed intricacy of the system. This time she was grumpy because she didn't. Turned out, after much trial and error, that because the previous month had 31 days, they were not going to run the train on the 1st, seeing as that would be two odd days in a row. Heaven forbid. So I went home to call my students parents and see if we could leave one day sooner.


Shortly after this event, I went for the weekend to Odessa, where Edwin and PJay had their own odd day stories:


In Edwin's town, a rather big city, one public, free Internet provider (in a library of sorts) only offers it every 3rd day. That's right. Who knows 3rd from what; we couldn't figure out how they count any better than they could, but they always had an excuse not to be open.


PJay went to buy a plane ticket and found that although the Odessa ticket office was open, they were not selling tickets till Monday. They could quote her the price and availability though.


I once almost bought a plane ticket for the right day in the wrong month. When I caught it, the travel agent assured me that he had stated the right date to the airline. After a call it turned out that I couldn't buy a ticket more than ONE month ahead of time. So they had issued me the ticket for that day, the next month.


That same time, because of many nightmares (which I would rather forget), I had to pay in cash. I took out the money, and changed it at my usual place, except this odd day, all they had were 20's. I was shocked. I literally ran down the street with a WAD of money that was bulging out of my pocket.


Edwin, PJay and my stay in Odessa got even weirder. I went to a famous nautical museum to find it had burned down (ironic?)... on Easter! Who had been in the museum that day.

So instead I went to the museum across the street; it had been started in the 1830’s! They had a large Egyptian collection that had been given to them by Egypt...over a 100 years ago!

W took a harbor tour. The terminal looked abandoned, but in another of my classic Louvre experiences, some woman in an out of the way desk told us that there was something leaving right now. We ran down to the dock, to a boat that looked like it was pulling away, only to sit on it for 40 minutes waiting. The trip was a great view of the harbor cranes.


But my favorite was one morning when we couldn't find breakfast. Everything was closed, so we decided to go to a very famous hotel in town and have their brunch. I thought I had seen it the other day, so we walked that way. When we got close, I asked a newspaper kiosk and they gave me wrong directions, but I still found the hotel, only to find out that the brunch was 100 UAH (roughly the equivalent buying power of $100). Later I found out that the kiosk had given me good directions to the right hotel. The one we had been at was an impostor.


So instead, we walked around and found another kiosk with danishes, and then bought coffee from a machine. Well Edwin tried, then PJay tried to help, then I came over, and they said that coins were stuck in the bill slot. So I got out my pocket knife to try to fish them out. At this point, we have been at this machine for several minutes, in the middle of a book market that is just beginning to open up for the morning. A man who had been standing across the way with some others comes over, yelling about me breaking his machine. If I haven't ever told you before, I don't like to be yelled at, and in Ukrainian, I find that I will often yell back. My whole character changes a bit when I speak in Ukrainian; I am more gregarious and volatile. I started yelling back that I didn't break it and he should keep coins out of the bill slot (I was incensed that the owner had been watching this whole thing and doing nothing until he thought we were breaking it). He snarled back that there weren't any coins, but then as he opened the machine, everyone could hear them falling to the ground. He was indignant; I smirked; Edwin got his coffee.


That night at a restaurant, the waiter asked me if my parents had left Ukraine in 1962.


And finally, as we were walking the city one evening, discussing how to keep people from stealing manhole covers so that autistic children wouldn't fall into them (which was a real question posed to PJay earlier that day by a parents group), Edwin stepped on the the side of a COVERED manhole. The loose cover pivoted like a trap door, and Edwin went down to his waist. Trying not to crack up laughing (it was something out of the 3 stooges), we helped him up and thanked the heavens that he hadn't broken anything, or perhaps worse, lost his shoe...down there.


What an odd day.

posted by jjs @ 4:29 PM