Where to begin today? I recently read a book written by a fellow PCV from Group 24, Christina O’Keefe’s Finding Francis. (Order it online at www.amazon.com - it’s a worthwhile read) It’s a sort of memoir and it made me think a lot about writing, about what I’ve been doing in this space. It felt uncomfortable to acknowledge that this blog, hell this whole experience, is a lot more about me than anything else.

But, I also realize that this is a common human condition – we are inherently selfish and I’m comfortable fessing up to it. I also take a more Ayn Rand-esque view of the word “selfish” in relation to people. Being selfish has a bad rap, but I believe it’s hardwired in us and serves survival purposes.

Further, I decided when I chose to come here to that I would do the kind of work I wanted to, because I know I’ll be most effective doing what I want. That means that I don’t do development work that I don’t like. At the same time, I also need to be challenged and need to actively cultivate that in my life and not seek the easier, more comfortable paths.

Finally, this is MY blog, MY life and everyone is welcome to write their blog as they see fit and live their life as they wish. I’m not sure who or what I’m being defensive against, but it’s been on my mind and now it’s out.

Back to the reports. I’m walking up the steps from the passage under a major street, buy flowers from a babushka, bargaining her down from 3 to 2 hryven, then enter the metro. There’s a crumpled, gray babushka sitting and begging right before the escalator down to the train. I realize that I move the flowers to the hand away from her, as if to hide them, and feel shame for my health, my youth, that I can buy trifles like flowers.

There’s the young girl on the other metro stairs, trained to repeat, “Thank you, please help me,” for hours to the passersby. On the next underpass stairs, a mother slumped over, cradling her child, not even bothering to say anything, a plastic cup in front of her.

Then on the street, all of the fashion, the Russian and Ukrainian floating past me, me catching mainly connector words as opposed to full sentences. The young women wearing tight, satiny pants, the supremely pointed shoes that are the rage this summer carrying their light bodies. The men wearing black and gray, toting their murses. (man purse)

On the marshrutka, I try to give my money to the driver, who has turned off the engine and is reading a paper. He ignores me, so I try humor to get his attention to take my one hryven. When he does notice, he says shortly that the conductor will take my money and I take a seat, thinking unmentionable thoughts about culture, manners, generalizing 55 million people in my moment of bad humor.

Last week, I took my first vacation! Christopher, my boyfriend, has arrived from Colorado and after a couple of weeks here in Kyiv, we set off to western Ukraine.

We went to Lviv, Ivano Frankivsk and a village in the Carpathians, Yaremche. We stayed with fellow PCV, Chris, in Lviv and got to enjoy the party she threw for Tina O’Keefe’s book release. Tina read from Finding Francis and we all enjoyed Chris’ gazpacho and great mix of people. It was really cool to have not just PCV’s and Americans there, but also Ukrainian coworkers and new friends.

Lviv is a supremely beautiful city, the center all cobblestones, old buildings, churches, neo-classical architecture, coffee houses, breweries. Christopher and I counted 3 dogs that were trained to carry baskets through the streets. One was a beggar’s dog and had a sign asking for donations, but the other two seemed to be civilians. Curious.

After Lviv, we took a 4 hour marshrutka through rolling countryside to Ivano Frankivsk. Why are the haystacks cylindrically shaped, supported by poles, ranging in shape from “soft serve ice cream” to “Christmas tree” shapes? We saw horse drawn carts carrying people, livestock, produce. At one town, little beggar boys boarded the marshrutka to sing a song, then beg for alms. One had what looked like a congenital birth defect and had flipper-like hands with one or two digits on each misshapen hand. He stood in front of a row of people, clapping his arms together and repeating, “Please help me, please help me,” until someone gave him some kopecks and he joined his cohorts on the street.

We were supposed to meet up with a PCV friend in Ivano Frankivsk (IF), but I hadn’t written down the name of the hostel where we were supposed to stay and meet. IF turned out to be a larger town than I’d expected and the taxi drivers didn’t know the hostel. They kept trying to send us to an expensive hotel, but I finally convinced them we wanted cheap. They told me one to go to and gave walking directions.

I’m not great with directions in my native language and am much worse in Russian/Ukrainian. We walked for some time, Christopher silent and brooding, me hungry and worried. I asked a woman on the street and she indicated that she’d walk us there.

We backtracked about a kilometer (oops) and then I noticed the HUGE billboard advertising the hotel. The women kept walking us to the hotel despite the signs, past train tracks, past garbage heaps, past a big soviet-style apartment building, past burning garbage heaps, to the hotel. It was really nice of her to go out of her way to walk us and we thanked her as she quickly walked away in the dusk.

The hotel had a utilitarian feel, but seemed clean and I tried to sort out the pricing structure. It was the first time I’d been confronted by the old tiered pricing. A room for non-Ukrainians cost just over 3 times as much as for Ukrainians! We asked to see a room and while it was very clean, but the toilet was on another floor and the whole hotel had no hot water.

I’m glad that Christopher intervened and vetoed that place, because we ended up staying at a really nice, Western style hotel that cost $1 more than that place, and had a lovely private bath and hot showers. Even the obnoxious Canadian gymnast convention that had shrieking girls drinking too much downstairs couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm for the place.

The next day we tried all day to phone Scott without success. I even phoned PC HQ in Kyiv to get his office address, but when we went to find it, the building that should have been that number was being demolished. Disheartened, I perked up when Christopher bought me an ice cream on the street and we decided to cut our losses and head to Yaremche that evening.

We went to a kiosk I’d seen advertising tourist info. I asked there for said info and she gave me a piece of paper and told me to phone the number on it. I did so from a pay phone, asking the info center what they knew about accommodations in Yaremche. The woman on the other end asked me where I was, which seemed a strange way to answer my questions. She offered to come down and give me the information in person and sure enough, five minutes later, she showed up by the kiosk with information in hand.

The language question is even more interesting in Western Ukraine to me, where they really speak Ukrainian. Here in Kyiv I think I hear so little pure Ukrainian, or perhaps when I do I’m catching the parts that sound enough like Russian that I don’t notice. But in Lviv and IF and later Yaremche, there were many times when the accent and vocabulary were distinctly different. I felt happy for these people to have a separate language from Russian. Nonetheless, when I was dealing with people, they easily switched from Ukrainian to Russian when we spoke. Or sometimes I would speak Russian and they Ukrainian and we’d make do that way. I think of this tangent because after this tourist info woman spoke Ukrainian to my Russian, she made sure to say “Dasvidanya” which is distinctly Russian.

After getting tourist info, we went to the train station to purchase our tickets. It was only my second time buying train tickets and the whole process is still very intimidating to me. I had my Ukrainian phrasebook ready and steeled myself for the waiting, the curious looks at our backpacks, the outright staring sure to occur the moment I open my mouth.

Christopher was having a bit of culture shock. The pushing, staring, whispering and pointing and such were getting to him, and he was reacting angrily. Granted, maybe no one understood what he was saying, but I felt a little uncomfortable, despite also understanding how uncomfortable it can be to be singled out.

By contrast with his newness and adjustments, it was interesting to note how much I have grown accustomed to such things. While I probably will never enjoy being jostled and I’m definitely never going to enjoy being cut in front of in line anywhere, I’m somewhat accustomed to crowded public transport and being a “star.” In fact, there’s even a syndrome for expats or PCV’s when they return to the US and are no longer “stars.” Even if they didn’t enjoy the attention that being different brought them, suddenly they are very ordinary and there’s a vacuum where all the attention to their every move used to be.

The train station still makes me nervous because one waits for a long time, then has a short amount of time with a generally taciturn railway employee and there’s always people trying to push in and ask questions, especially when they hear the slowness of my speech. Plus I have to be really careful to make sure I understand what they’re saying because changing a rail ticket would suck.

In any case, the railway employee was actually sort of friendly, but told me that I couldn’t buy tickets that day for the coming Saturday. I tried to ask several ways, but each time she told me I couldn’t. She said I would have to buy them the next day.

I got out of line, then decided to verify that I understood correctly. The second time around, she explained using large hand gestures and creative dance interpretation that one can only buy tickets 3 days before the train leaves. Despite having a database on her computer, she was unable to tell me whether there were actually tickets available for the train we wanted.

This turn of events meant that we needed to stay in IF one more night, then buy tickets the following morning. Christopher also reacted rather strongly to this ridiculous rule, which also contrasted nicely to me how passive I’m getting when people tell me things such as this. We realized later that we could have tried bribing her, but I really don’t want to contribute too much to that culture. A chocolate bar of thanks here and there, sure, but outright bribes are icky.

We trooped back to the expensive expat palace, braving the Canadian gymnasts one more night.

More to follow…