21 mar 03
Today is the Academy Awards, or at least will be when it’s nighttime in CA. We’ll see them tomorrow and I’m excited for that…

Today was full of small excitements and excursions. First of all, I finally felt good enough to go to the gym. I went by myself and it was a good realization that I know so little Russian. There were of course nice Ukrainians who spoke decent English who showed me around and I got a good workout. The gym is in a brick building and the interior is quite nice, exposed brick and lots of windows. There was a serious aerobics class going on that I got the schedule for, so that will be fun to try. I think if I go regularly and try to talk to people, I’ll meet some of them and practice Russian.

I laugh to think about how excited I was to go to the gym and also for my next outing, shopping w/ Ira. After the gym, I showered, dressed and put on the makeup I’m accustoming myself to putting on before leaving the house. It’s not a lot, but certainly more than I would wear on a regular basis in Boulder…

We first went to Spar, the large, new supermarket that has Brovary abuzz. Spar even is putting out a weekly circular, a new idea here. Spar is a large store, with wide aisles and lots of selection. There’s another supermarket named Forum about 200 metres from Spar, and I actually prefer it. The prices are almost the same and both stores have second floors devoted to small shops w/ cosmetics, clothing, toy guns and interesting chatchkas, such as figurines of naked ladies and fish.

Which leads me to my first digression today, the prevalence of nekkid ladies. The gym had a poster of a sweaty, topless girl, titled, “Absolute Fitness.” Some of the tabloid newspapers have topless babes and Ukrainian Cosmo this month had a pictorial of men’s and women’s heads and unclothed bodies, with a quiz to see if one could match the head w/ the body. Torsos and tushes only, not full frontal.

I don’t really have anything to say besides that observation. I am unused to so much nudity, but it doesn’t particularly bother me. The violence in the Russian soap operas and the reality TV shows does upset me, but not the skin.

Back to the outings of the day – I was really sort of scarily excited to go shopping with Ira, in particular to the bazaar (open air market that sells fruit, vegetables, clothes, live fish, chickens of questionable origin, flowers fresh and in colors not found in nature, basically everything). I realized that I sort of made sure I looked nice to go shopping. I guess I find it scary as I write this for an American audience because I see how different my life is at the moment and how basic it is. How excited I get when I speak correctly in Russian or how accomplished I feel when I do something small like ask how much something costs and understand. Scale is different here.

The bazaar was fine, normalna in local parlance, and only one thing was weird for me, the woman selling fish swimming around in bloody water. I realize I am such a wimpy meat eater. I also think that it’s ok to chose how one buys meat or fish and that one doesn’t have to support merchants that sell fish in such a way.

Ira hates the bazaar, she tells me that she finds it dirty and she’s short spoken to some of the sellers. In general, I think that she wants very much to be part of a more modern Ukraine and that things that seem old fashioned or not 1st world aren’t to her liking. This judgment, of course, 10 days after having met her.

Final digression: I realized the other day that I’ve been saying the word for “five” instead of the casual greeting word, “hi.” They slightly similar in Russian, verrrrryyyyy slightly and this realization explains so many things to me, the least of which is the lack of response I’ve been getting.