It has been a very long time since I posted here. Some of you have complained and is gratifying to me to anyone reads my words with interest. Much has happened, so I’ll give a brief update before a longer treatise about recent travels, soon to be accompanied by photos.

• Orange Revolution. I work and live in downtown Kyiv, so walked through Maidan Nezholeshnosti (Independence Square that you likely saw on TV if you saw any news coverage of the revolution) nearly every day in Nov. & Dec. ‘04. You can read tons about the revolution online, so I’ll just focus on my experiences. The spirit of people on the street was so beautiful and hopeful during this time. I was so grateful to be here to see what Ukrainians are capable of, to see a people stand up and quietly and firmly say “No more” to that level of corruption. Some highlights that I observed while walking around, which I did many days and nights:
• Being asked by upteen Ukrainians if I was here to support the revolution, after they’d heard me speaking English on the street. I would always reply, “yes” because in a roundabout way, I am here for that sort of support, just that I came a year and a half early.
• Inadvertently ending up in a line that turned out to be for the “tea and cookies” tent on Maidan and receiving said treats. (the organization was such that there were food stations, medical tents, prayer tents among other basic services provided to the thousands of protestors all along Khreshiatik Boulevard – after having spent a year and a half thinking that Ukraine wasn’t a culture very used to planning, the fast and efficient organization to support protestors was awesome)
• Watching and listening to Ukrainians shouting, “Police are with the people!” to hundreds riot police as they filed out of more than 25 buses to protect the Presidential Administration building. Later, a snow truck was stopped by protestors that had documents being smuggled out under a blanket of snow from this building.
• Seeing all the people from all over Ukraine walk around and sightsee in Kyiv while they were here to camp out on Khreshiatik. Many Ukrainians can’t afford to travel and for them to come to Kyiv was a big trip.
• Getting chills listening to everyone around me sing the national anthem almost every day on Maidan.
• Watching all the impromptu groups of citizens form to talk about the days events on the street. There was such a strong sense of community and camaraderie during this time even among strangers.
• Peace Corps service ended on 27 April 2005.
• I continue to work at the International Organization for Migration (IOM - www.iom.org.ua). I’ve been working there since Feb. 04 as the Public Information Officer and will continue to do this job, just no longer as a PCV. I love my work and still can’t believe some one actually pays me to do this job. I also am particularly grateful not be facing the “now what?” question so many PCV’s face after service ends.
• We just got a dog! Sydney is a 2 year old chocolate lab that our missionary friends, the Buckaways, needed to rehome for a year while they return to the U.S. She’s so sweet and is my first dog who is somewhat easy and calm. :-) No offense to my dear, dear Hawk-star, who is living the good life in Southern California with Christopher’s parents, Gerry and Donna.
• Apropos of nothing, I learned that one is only supposed to have one space between sentences. Because I learned to type on a typewriter, I didn’t learn until now that when typing on a computer, there’s only one space.

Now on to recent travels…

Odesa

Christopher and I went to Odesa for the long Orthodox Easter weekend. We took the train down and as usual the inexplicable “Train Hunger” hit me shortly after boarding our kupe (2^nd class cabin for 4 people).

Let me explain. I have found that as soon as the train starts rollin’ down the tracks, I get a powerful hunger. Sweets, salty snacks, whole picnics are required to sate my appetite. Luckily, I had planned for this eventuality and had a bag chock full of chips, fruit, chocolate and my obsession, sour skittles.

Perhaps some of you readers don’t know about Ukrainian trains. In general, they are great, comfortable, efficient in that one travels at night, waking at destination.

We always travel “kupay” (2^nd class compartments) but buy all 4 seats so not to risk companionship with those drinking, smelly, farting or snoring, all of which I experienced before. You first find your train car, then show your tickets to the conductor. Then you haul up the little ladder, enter the narrow hallway of the car and find your compartment.

If traveling w/ strangers, you identify your bunk, upper or lower, right or left, then stash your stuff. After the train gets going, the conductor will come around to collect tickets and ask if you want to purchase sheets. Sometime later, she/he returns with the sheets and asks if you’d like to buy some beer, tea, coffee, cappuccino (horrible instant stuff from a packet, lest you dream of some fancy barrista brewing frothy coffee beverages).

There is a coal-burning stove at one end of each car, which smells delicious if you like the smell of coal burning and I do. Each car has its own conductor and I’ve found them to be friendly and efficient.

The only real downside to traveling by Ukrainian train is the bathrooms, which seem to get rather wet as the trip goes on and sometimes it’s not water. The toilets flush directly onto the tracks. Ick.

We arrived early in lovely Odesa and got to the hotel recommended by our friend, Lani. I’d called ahead to reserve a room and upon checking in, found that they still employ an old Soviet “business” practice of charging 50% more for the privilege of doing so.

When the hotel clerk was explaining this to me, I had a moment I have sometimes when I hear something inexplicable and don’t think I understand the Russian. But in reality, I just don’t understand the concept of what is being said. After checking some essential vocab in the dictionary, I confirmed that indeed the Hotel Passage does charge 50% of the room’s price for reserving ahead of time.

Still, the Passage is a lovely grand dame, right downtown and a huge old building with a grand, marble staircase and ceilings to heaven. The room was large, the bathroom basic and “un-remonted” (remont is Russian for “remodel”) and we had to push together two twin beds. There were lovely windows that I sat in to read and watch the busy street below.

The hotel is right across from an Orthodox church that has recently been rebuilt after being destroyed by Stalin. When we went in the Saturday before Easter, there were workmen still sanding and drilling to finish the elaborate main alter.

We spent three days walking around Odesa, eating lavishly and enjoying the luxuriously decaying city. A southern port city, it reminds me of another decadent and slightly decaying French city, New Orleans.

One day, while photographing the old Governer’s mansion, also not yet remonted since independence, a woman approached me and asked why I was taking pictures of that building. I sort of expected her to launch into the history of the building, because this has happened to me in other places in Ukraine. People are often very knowledgeable about and proud of their history, deservedly so.

This woman, however, really wanted to know why I wasn’t taking pictures of things that were, in her words, “Truly beautiful.” I told her that I believed that this building, which while closed was really not under such bad repair, was “truly beautiful.” I had been trying to capture the symmetry and beauty of a long set of columns in a portico. She said in a rather aggressive tone that I was another one of those foreigners who took pictures as keepsakes to show people back home how ugly Ukraine was.

I was surprised by her tone and accusations and wish in retrospect I’d broken out the oldy but goody that I use when people bewilderedly ask why I’m here when America so much better? I always say that each place is different and that in America we also have problems with poverty and freedom and basically that the U.S. isn’t a perfect place. Here I would have added that some of our historic buildings aren't in good repair.

Western Ukraine

After Odesa, we returned back to Kyiv and I met with my friends, Lani and Brian, also Peace Corps Volunteers, who served in Chernihiv, a town a two hours drive north of Kyiv.

Brian was sick, so he backed out on our trip, but Lani and I boarded a train bound for Uzhgorod the same day Christopher and I returned from Odesa.

We had prepared for the train hunger, including a bottle of not entirely dry local white wine. Lani and I sat and talked until sleep overcame us.

We woke in the morning to beautiful green scenery rolling by. The Ukrainian Carpathians are round, old mountains, and somewhat remind me of the North Carolina Smokey Mountains.

Our first destination was Uzhgorod, very near the borders with Slovakia and Hungary. It’s a beautiful old city that was until World War II part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. People there speak Ukrainian, Hungarian, and a dialect of Ukrainian specific to the region that is very melodic.

We went to a sanotorium that I’ve stayed at before, Svitok, which is on a road that is locally known as “Millionaire’s Row” for the big houses that line the winding uphill. There’s a little café across the street that serves good coffee for less than a dollar and it’s an easy walk to downtown and the castle in town.

I remembered from my last trip to Uzhgorod that there was a local crafts store and Lani and I went there. I bought a beautiful piece of hand made pottery from a local “master.”

There’s a great central market that sells amazing bread, veggies, fruit and cheese. On the outskirts of the market sellers were lined up selling plants for gardens and dachas and it was fun to walk along and identify veggies, herbs and various bushes.

We later went to the castle which also has a museum in it with several interesting exhibitions. The castle houses an Orthodox monastery and has several rooms with furniture from the bishop who lived there. In each room in Ukrainian museums there is usually an old lady who guards the room. They often sit on chairs at the corner of their room and read, knit and watch museum goers.

In this room, the guard lady was friendly and began to tell Lani and me about the room and general history of the castle. She started in Ukrainian but switched to accent-less Russian once we spoke Russian to her. After the history part, she asked us where we are from and then we asked her about her family and life in Uzhgorod. Her husband in Soviet times worked at a factory (I can’t remember what kind now) and her son still lives in town. They have a dacha outside of town she said, pointing to nearby hills visible from the window in the room where we stood. She told us about a better time during Soviet rule, a time of affordable kolbasa and milk, of health care and yearly vacations.

We then went upstairs to a room with Carpathian musical instruments. There is a form of bagpipe and lots of string instruments, as well as long horns that remind me of something from the Alps.

My favorite room has clothes from different parts of the area – beautiful embroidered shirts, belts, pants and skirts. There are bulky jackets made from shorn sheep skins. I was struck by how similar indigenous embroidery is in disparate parts of the world. Think of Andes, Central American, Thai, Southwestern American tribal handiwork. Side by side with this art, there are so many similarities.

After the castle, we went down to a little café called, “Under the Castle” mentioned in Lonely Planet. There we had a form of goulash that was super yummy. The toilet for the café was in a little room just off the narrow, cobbled stone street.

We wandered around town for a few more hours, Lani buying some kids books for her nieces that teach the Russian alphabet. We arranged to meet a Peace Corps volunteer working in Uzhgorod at a river-side café that I remembered serving cold beer on tap and good “shashlik” (meat shish kabobs marinated and grilled). While waiting for Tom to arrive, two young university students began to talk to us. Speaking Ukrainian, they asked us if we liked the “holupsti” in Ukraine.

I heard the word for “dove” that also refers to the cabbage rolls dish, but Lani told me it was another Ukrainian word, slang for “guys.” I sort of realized these kids were picking us up and after two years of little male attention in that way, I was kind of shocked. They asked us if we wanted to walk around town with them and then they’d show us the best disco in town, much better than anything in Kyiv, they assured us.

We declined the offer, but chatted with them for a while. I just have no practice flirting in Russian, unlike Spanish, as I got a lot of practice in Costa Rica, where the men were much more attentive, to a fault really.

Mukachevo

From Uzhgorod, we took a marshrutka to Mukachevo. This western city has a really nicely maintained castle and is larger than Uzhgorod. It wasn’t as friendly and we’d heard that it has a sizable mafia presence, due to the close by border and all the power running a border crossing brings.

We dropped our bags off at the temporary storage place by the railway station, bought tickets for the afternoon electrishka (electric train) to Lviv and moved on to explore Mukachevo for a few hours.

We found a friendly café to try another kind of goulash and some homemade kolbasa. We made our way to the castle by another marshrutka and climbed up the hill to it, overlooking a valley with small churches shining gold in the sunshine and cozy homes overrun with green around them.

The castle was one of the few historic, tourist-oriented places I’ve been to in Ukraine that had more than a smidgen of information written in English. In fact, not only English, but also Hungarian and Slovakian. I was impressed.

Back to the train station after escaping a sudden downpour into a “produktiy” (food store) for train supplies (food, wine, water). There on the walls of the train station were posters for pesticides to eradicate the dreaded “Colorado potato beetle.”

Often when I tell people here I lived in Colorado, people would launch into the scourge of the beetle from Colorado. In Soviet times, urban myth had it that this pest was intentionally introduced into the Soviet Union by America to ruin the agriculture might of the people. People still scold me sometimes, usually jokingly.

On the electrishka, we were told that the tickets we had bought for 1^st class seats for the 6 hour ride were actually for 2^nd class. The train cars were packed and the conductor assured us that when a 1^st class seat was available, we could move up and pay the difference.

We found our seats and began to put bags above our heads. Two women, appearing to be mother and daughter sat in the two seats opposite ours. As we arranged bags, the older lady began to fret that there was no man to put our bags up and how could two women manage. The daughter very adroitly tried to distract her mom with jokes. After hearing us speak English, the mother began to question why we weren’t in first class.

I was also beginning to feel grumbly and pouty, but tried to not fall into that spoiled foreigner way of thinking, of wanting to be in the nicest place and have as little to do with the locals as possible. The 2^nd class seats were quite comfortable and in the end we started talking to the older lady. She had the normal questions about us, and then began to tell us about her family. She told us about her two daughters, one of whom she was traveling with. The one they had just visited is an “invalid,” or disabled in Russian. The woman told us about a protestant church that had a minister who’d healed her daughter to the point where she could walk.

Apparently, the other daughter was also slightly disabled, but the lady said that despite this, “She was a quick learner” and was a teacher.

Soon after, the conductress came to move us to 1^st class seats and the mother shot a look at her daughter and said, “I told you so!” Sometimes it’s funny to hear something so familiar in another language and cultural context.

The 1^st class seats were in the dining car, which had big windows and tables. The afternoon light began to grow long and we were passing through the mountains. We had a train feast – cheese, bread, “bear’s blood” wine, tomatoes and cucumbers. As we began to cut and assemble our feast, a parade of people started through the car, gypsies looking for money or food. There also were Roma families traveling that weren’t begging.

I decided to give a trio of kids some bread and cheese early on, not yet having caught on that there would be a steady stream of hungry kids. As I was getting the offering together, a big guy speaking Russian on the other side of the car began yelling at the kids to leave. When I handed them the food he bellowed loudly at me, “Don’t do that!”

I told him that I would do what I wanted. He asked me if he came to my country, would I feed him, too? We exchanged a few more words then stopped. I think he was angry because he’d been telling the kids to leave, then I undermined him by giving them food. Whatever.

Later, when Lani was photographing the scenery and us on the train, the same loud, drunk guy came over and wanted us to take a photo. He ended up sitting with us the rest of the way, sharing his homemade wine and alternately squeezing in beside me or Lani on the one person benches.

He was gregarious in a way that reminded me of Latinos more than Slavs and while he wouldn’t tell us directly what his job was, he would say he worked for the military. He was dressed in western-style clothes and had a Scottish business school Tshirt on.

I think his name was Sergiy, but honestly, I don’t remember. He was very suspicious about the whole “Peace Corps Volunteer” gig and I don’t think we adequately convinced him we weren’t making big bank in Ukraine. He kept asking, what do you get out of it?

As the trip wore on, and the bottle emptied, Mr. Personality began to get a little touchy feely. I know, big shock. He also kept giving me noogies, so when he got up to say goodbye to a friend, I scooted over so Lani could share in the joy if he returned.

He of course did return and began anew to noogie and even to attempt kisses. Ugh.

Lviv

When the elektrishka arrived in Lviv, he grabbed Lani’s bag and we all began to walk towards the city. At some point, he began to get really aggressive, demanding we come with him. I distracted him, laughing and jumping around until I was able to get Lani’s bag away from him.

I then grabbed Lani and we ran to a taxi, while Mr. Secret Drunk Guy ranted and stalked off. I didn’t know the address where we were going, and had dropped my phone earlier and it wasn’t working properly so couldn’t call our friend Nancy to get directions., I had to sms her, much slower.

While I had hoped to jump in a taxi and speed away, we instead sat in the taxi while I tried to get across that we needed to go towards the center and that the guy over there was threatening us.

It was really funny, b/c we didn’t go anywhere for a while and by the time we did, Dorkface had disappeared anyway.

Once we did get started, the taxi broke down about two minutes from the train station. The taxi driver got on his CB radio and said, “My taxi has broken down and my clients don’t know. Please send another car quickly.”

Yeah, stupid foreigners think it is normal for the taxi engine to sputter, then to stop in the middle of a dark road while the taxi driver tries to restart his car. I guess he thought we were unaware because we were so calm and laughing.

To his credit, very quickly a working car pulled up and took us to our destination.

We arrived at our friend, Nancy’s corner and she was waiting for us. Nancy is the consummate host, so despite the hour (nearly midnight), she was ready to chat about our travels and get us properly accommodated.

Lviv has running water 4 hours per day – 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the early evening. Nancy has a system of buckets and pails full of water for the rest of the day, for washing faces and hands, for flushing the toilet, etc.

Lutsk

After Lviv, we took a marshrutka to Lutsk with our friend, Devon. On the marshrutka was a seriously drunk guy whose village Ukrainian I couldn’t even begin to decipher. He was very interested in Devon and his nose was bloody and the stench on him was deep, old and lifted by the under note of digested vodka. As he got off the marshrutka along the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere, I saw he was clutching a large bag of beet seeds, or all they called something else besides seeds?

Anyway, we had but a few hours in Lutsk before our train left to return to Kyiv. We spent it exploring the really charming city, supposedly very much like a Polish town, and the lovely castle there. Sort of by mistake we took a tour of the catacombs of a local Catholic cathedral. The tour was given by a darling young girl who kept switching into Ukrainian from Russian, despite trying to speak Russian with Lani and me.

In the evening, we boarded the last of our trains to come east, to home, to Kyiv.