Blog for the dates of 4-6 March 2003

We flew via Lufthansa uneventfully to Frankfurt. Lufthansa is nice. Frankfurt was a great layover, as it was German and therefore nice and clean, but very European, so a little foreign, which was good to adjust to.

We then took a smaller plane that was all Business Class (read, “bigger, leather chairs, nicer food and especially friendly flight attendants”). When we began to descend, I was riveted as we emerged below the clouds and saw a frozen vista, white and gray and black and more gray. I think I imbued it with a sense of difference, but if I’d been told we were descending into Kansas, I would have believed it.

The Peace Corps Ukraine staff was waiting for us after Immigration with warm greetings and luggage carts. We loaded up, then gathered outside the airport to toss bags into one truck, bodies into another.

By this time, we’d been traveling for 18 hours or so, counting the Frankfurt layover, and my body was tired. I’d slept pieces of time during the journey, but really very little. I found myself getting annoyed with a particularly loudmouthed fellow trainee that had sat behind me on both planes and now the bus – 18 hours of loud comments that were only funny the first 5 hours. When he said this particularly insensitive comment, I almost throttled him: “I guess if I roll around in the dirt for a while, I’ll look just like the people here.” Luckily, our training director, Andrey, was talking with this person and had a patient retort for him.

We arrived at our home for the next week, the Post Graduate Institute, or the Piggy, on the outskirts of Kyiv. I was thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to find nice rooms, nice bathrooms and HOT WATER!! I realized how much I’d prepared myself for hardship in this experience and how each time something was nice, how happy I was.

I needed to stay awake and desperately needed to be outside, despite the cold and gray or perhaps because of it. I found some co-conspirators and we pretended we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to leave the grounds. For god’s sake, we’re not in Iran, we’re just in Kyiv and the suburbs for that matter! Even though it will take away from the rebel factor, one of my co-conspirators, Carrie, is a fluent Russian speaker, so we knew we’d be ok. Safe rebellion isn’t as sexy.

We walked up a broad avenue and saw a golden spire of some type in the distance and decided to walk to it. What we found was an immense grounds of an exposition center, full of nearly 20 enormous Soviet style buildings, each with wonderful tributes to the agricultural might of Ukraine. We ventured up to one and found it open and heated, somewhat of a surprise. We’d find out eventually that this was built in the 1960’s and was a former National Fair grounds, now used for conventions. That was a find.

We had dinner in the cafeteria and enjoyed our first pounded, egg battered fried meat and mashed potatoes meal and then soon retired for sleep. I slept a normal night and felt quite unscathed from jet lag, a first for me.