The Borderland Chronicles

Oleg, center, with a stuffed bear on his head. He made it his personal mission to get me plastered. And he succeeded. He also invited me to butcher a pig with him at his dacha.

I’ve been hiding in my bedroom for about five minutes, standing over my bed with my head out the open window, and I’m inhaling and exhaling deeply, doing everything I can not to get sick from all the vodka I’ve drank during the past hour.

Then, from the other room, a heavily accented voice beckons. “Kree-ees,” it says, drawing it out in the middle.

I take one last deep breath, give myself a light slap to the face and then walk to the other room.

It’s Ira’s 23rd birthday, and her entire family has come over to the apartment I share with her and her boyfriend, my very good friend Igor, to celebrate.

Birthdays in Ukrainian culture are a very big deal. It’s typical to host a large dinner for family and close friends on the day of your birthday. And it’s important not to have empty space on the table during those dinners.

So for the past three days Ira and her friends, Ira, Ira and Tanya, have been baking, cooking, preparing elaborate mayonnaise salads and decorating the living room. They’ve also accumulated a table’s worth of booze. Every sort, from champagne to cognac, is represented.

The birthday dinner itself follows a strict formula. First, the dinner must be held on the actual day, or after, but never before. Once at the dinner, no one dishes up before everything is laid out, and no one drinks until everyone is present and ready to begin. A toast to the person whose birthday it is sets everything in motion.

On Monday night it’s Ira’s uncle Oleg who starts.

“Let’s drink,” he says, standing and raising his shot glass. The rest of us follow accordingly. “To Ira, my beautiful and wonderful niece on her birthday! May you have a long and prosperous life.”

Everyone throws back their glass of vodka, and we’re off to the races.

Plates are passed around, with the women scooping enormous helpings of everything onto them for the men. Discussions begin, with topics running the gamut from gossip to politics. The latter is one that I try to tread lightly on, because it has the power to ignite a firestorm amongst Ukrainians. And over the course of the next hour there are more than a dozen toasts, to the honored guest and just about everything else.

“I would like to make a toast to love!” Ira’s aunt cries out. So we all stand, clink our glasses and toss one back.

A few minutes later Ira’s father announces, “To the lovely couple – Ira and Igor!” Another shot down the hatch.

Not long after someone else shouts, “To women!” And everyone drinks again.

There’s a toast for men, another for Ukraine, one for friendship between Ukraine and America. There’s even one for me, for making it through the past two years. “It must have been difficult for you living with all of us,” someone jokes. All the while Oleg is watching my glass to be sure I’m drinking the shots in full. When I try to get away with just drinking half he calls me out.

“It’s bad luck to drink only half after a toast,” he explains. “Finish that now and let’s get you another.”

It’s after that next one that I escape to the toilet and then to my room. I need some air, and I need to stand up. I need to focus myself, because this thing’s not close to over.

But what I really need is to purge all this booze, drink some water and sleep. It’s a Monday night, and I have English lessons at 8 a.m. the next morning. Oleg, though, won’t let that happen. He’s made it his personal mission to fuck me up.

Somehow, sometime during my five minutes away, he’s acquired a new bottle of vodka. How the wretched thing materialized is beyond me

“Chris, you see?” he says, flicking his finger against the raised bottle of Nemiroff, his wedding ring clinking the glass. “This is just for you and me. For new friends!”

“Oleg,” I say, slowly shaking my head. “I don’t know. I just– ”

“No excuses. Only drinking,” he tells me, with a flick to his neck. “C’mon!”

Now I have no choice but to continue. His father, Ira’s grandfather, has sat me down on the sofa and is now holding my shot glass in front of my face, waiting for me to take it from him.

“You’re young and strong,” he tells me. “Everything will be OK.”

But after more than a dozen shots, I’m not sure if I believe him.

I finally get Oleg to let me take a break, but only after Ira’s aunt goes to bat for me, explaining to her husband in a rather patronizing manner that I’m American and I shouldn’t be held to Ukrainian standards.

“They can’t drink like us in America,” she says.

For the next several minutes I consume as much mashed potatoes, salad and bread as I can, in order to soak up some of the alcohol, careful not to overindulge for fear of becoming ill.

Living here for more than two years, you’d think I’d have learned all the tricks to surviving the Ukrainian birthday dinner. During Peace Corps training we’re even warned about it and taught ways to say no to alcohol. They tell us we’ll need to say “no” forcefully and at least three times for people to comprehend that we really don’t want or need anymore, or that we should think of a medical excuse.

But that’s just stupid. And the latter only works if you’ve not been drinking from the start. The former, well, sometimes you do want to partake, have fun and be lively. It’s not that I can’t take more than three shots, it’s that I don’t fare so well taking more than that in a span of just 10 or 15 minutes.

Three shots into the new bottle, I cut myself off, informing Oleg that it is now impossible for me to drink anymore without paying dearly for doing so. When he asks me what that means exactly, I make a vomiting gesture.

Tossing his head back in laughter while simultaneously patting me on the back, he finally gets it.

Thirty minutes and two pieces of cake later, Oleg and everyone else are gone. Igor and Ira do their best to convince me that going to a nightclub called Fresh is a great idea, but I make it no further than the courtyard in front of our building before I feel nauseous. Forget dancing, the simple act of watching someone dance might incite vomiting.

So I make my way back inside, stumble on my pants as I take them off to climb in bed, and hit the sack.

The next morning Igor and I bump into each other in the hallway. We leave for work at the same time.

“How are you feeling?” He asks.

“Terrible,” I say. “How about you?”

“Like a Brontosaurus Rex,” he tells me. “I think we drank a lot of vodka.”

Posted in Artemovsk, Culture, Encounters, Food, Holidays, Life, Peace Corps, Russian, Travel, Ukraine |

Being a foreigner gets me a lot of shouts and hollers from people on the street, from people I know or who recognize me as well as from passers-by who might hear me speaking English to a friend or on the phone.

Students of the school I work at, other kids and even grown men like to shout out the few English words they know when they see me. “Shit! Muzzer Focker!” they often say. A long, drug out “Heeelllooo” is another common one. I’ve even heard someone yell just “pizza!”

Every once in a while I receive rather unwelcoming calls, such as the one a friend of mine and I were on the receiving end of in Kiev last week. “Fuck you, Yankee! Go to America!” The guy shouting it actually had fairly good pronunciation as well as a strong delivery. I thanked him and continued on down the street.

I get a whole hell of a lot of “I love you” calls, too. It’s usually young women throwing those out, and only after they’ve walked far enough past me that they can’t be recognized.

This is all part of living in a foreign land. I accept that. And, actually, I might even miss those shouts someday, being recognized. With my Close of Service conference beginning tomorrow, the clock is running out on my Peace Corps days. But I won’t be heading home afterward; I’ll be joining my girlfriend in Shanghai, China. There, I imagine the cat calls will continue. I wonder what they’ll sound like.

Posted in Artemovsk, Culture, Encounters, Kiev, Life, Travel, Ukraine |

Last October, as a fall 2011 Glimpse Correspondent for Glimpse.Org, I spent a weekend with six coal miners in the eastern Ukrainian mining town of Torez. The plan was to get an idea of their lives and then to write a piece that would provide the outside world with a glimpse into their lives. While in Torez that weekend we discussed everything from work and moonshine to family and the future. The result, published earlier this month, was a 4,000-or-so-word story illustrating the mining culture that’s existed in the area for decades and highlighting the future of the illegal mines, called “kopanki,” and what their disappearance would mean for the Torez community.

You can read the story over at Matador Abroad or Glimpse. You can also view my photos of the mine and the miners on Flickr.

Posted in Culture, Encounters, History, Journalism, Life, Media, Politics, Soviet Union, Travel, Ukraine |

Heavy-eyed and over-tired from just three hours of poor sleep, we spent the 30 minute taxi ride reassuring each other everything would be fine, that despite my girlfriend’s multiple entries into Ukraine and living here for five months now customs officers would simply look the other way and let us pass through security to the gate where our plane to Poland would be waiting.

The law in Ukraine states travelers are allowed in the country for 90 days total during a 180-day period, but must spend 90 days out of the country before allowed another 90 days in it. The law is fairly new and until recently has rarely been enforced. But with Euro 2012 approaching, Ukraine’s trying to clamp down and show the west it’s moving away from Soviet-era lawlessness and toward European conduct.

It’s well known that corruption and bribery has played a prominent role in Ukrainian culture. In the country’s defense, with a bureaucracy as thick as the ice that forms on the Dnieper in winter, paying someone off is often times the only way to ensure something gets done here.

Approaching the airport customs booth, I went over every possible scenario in my head. Everything from nothing happening to detention and deportation. A check of my passport proceeded as usual. With a working visa and government approval, I rarely get asked many questions at customs. Then came the check of my girlfriend’s passport. Multiple entry stamps showed more than five months residing in country. The guard’s eyes widened as he studied this. And then he spoke – in Russian.

“Do you not have a visa or registration to be in Ukraine?” he asked my girlfriend.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “She doesn’t speak Russian. And no, she doesn’t have a visa.”

He went on to explain the law – 90 days in, 90 days out. Did we not know about this? No, of course we didn’t know, I explained. Our bad. We apologize. What do we need to do now?

He didn’t ponder this question long.

“You must pay a fine. Today. You can pay 850 hryvnia, and I can let you pass.”

I turned to my girlfriend to explain the situation. She had 800 hryvnia on her, not a kopek more. When I explained this to the guard he said it would be enough, and then he motioned me around to the side door of the booth.

“Put the money in here,” he said, holding open my girlfriend’s passport.

A minute later, after some pecking at the keyboard, we got the stamp we needed to get through. Thirty minutes later we boarded the plane to Poland.

Returning would be another challenge, of course. Would we run into the same customs officer? Would my girlfriend be allowed back in the country? Again, thoughts of questioning, detention and deportation entered my mind. Always prepare for the worst, but expect the best.

Turned out it was easier getting in than going out. The female customs officer said hello and smiled. She didn’t ask a single question, but stamped the passports and handed them back to us. “Have a nice stay” was all she said.

Outside the terminal we embraced for a moment, relieved that we’d been allowed back in without any trouble. But we were interrupted a moment later by a taxi driver asking if we needed a lift.

“Yes, please,” I said.

We didn’t haggle over the price – 150 hryvnia – which my girlfriend agreed was probably twice as much as it should have been. At that point, though, we just wanted to be home.

Posted in Culture, Encounters, Flying, Holidays, Kiev, Krakow, Teaching, Travel, Ukraine |

The mood was tense outside the Kiev courthouse this morning, while supporters of ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko awaited the verdict in the trial that most considered to be politically motivated.

Thousands descended on the city center today, including scores of police in riot gear. And they were all packed in tight, shoulder to shoulder.

Behind barricades supporters waved flags, sang songs, chanted, rang bells and said prayers for the Orange Revolution leader. From my position just 20 feet from the courthouse entrance, I listened to a group of women discuss corruption, a couple consider the country’s political future, and when a photographer was shoved back from the barricade a chant of “Free press!”

Once I was struck in the head by an unknown object that had been thrown by someone in the crowd, and twice I was on the receiving end of a police forearm, though it was merely meant to keep me from being shoved over the barricade by the crowd behind me.

The guilty verdict was expected by everyone. People would have been silly to believe otherwise. Still, great disappointment could be seen on the faces of the supporters when the verdict was read. Whatever bit of hope they’d held on to had been vanquished.

After the verdict the sentence came down. Tymoshenko should spend seven years in prison, pay restitution to the state in the amount of $188 million and not participate in elections for three years, the judge said. In all, a huge blow.

Today’s outcome will no doubt impede whatever progress Ukraine has made with Europe. And that has many Ukrainians worried. A woman standing next to me speaking to a police officer on the other side of the barricade told him “Ukraine is moving backward.”

Tymoshenko herself would probably agree. “This is an authoritarian regime that is distancing Ukraine from Europe, while using European rhetoric,” she said in the courtroom. Yanukovich, she said, “is bringing Ukraine back to 1937,” the height of the Stalinist purges.

You can view more photos from today’s event at my Flickr page.

Posted in Culture, Encounters, History, Journalism, Kiev, Media, Politics, Ukraine |

Matador recently published another piece of mine. Notes on eating and drinking with Ukrainians is a collection of experiences in brief that I’ve had here in Ukraine. What’s included: Stories about drinking homemade vodka, eating rodents and having icicle sword fights. Sounds like fun, right?

Here’s a teaser:

Mystery meat and moonshine

It’s a two-hour bus ride from my home in Artemovsk and then a 40-minute walk to Alla’s father’s village. I’d met Alla months earlier while living in a suburb of Kiev. Her six-year-old daughter Liza shows me around. We walk past rabbit huts, a chicken coop, a large garden with tall green corn stalks and sunflowers, and then she leads me to a steel drum where a large rodent – an all-white nutria with an orange overbite – is frantically trying to escape.

Alla didn’t mention we’d be swimming in a nearby lake, so I wear my blue Hanes boxer briefs into the water. We drink Ukrainian beer and eat smetana-flavored sukhariki (crouton-like snacks) on the grass below a sweltering sun. Alla’s pregnant sister smokes half a pack of Chesterfield lights.

Back at the house that evening I help Alla’s father, Viktor, skin and butcher a rabbit by hanging its feet from the clothesline. At dinner Viktor tells me he has a couple of surprises.

“First,” he says, “my samigon!” Samigon is like Ukrainian moonshine. Unless infused with something – I once had a bottle infused with walnuts – the smell and taste resembles rubbing alcohol. He pours a shot for each of us, and we drink a toast to new acquaintances.

“And now, something else,” Viktor says, reaching across the table. He plucks a piece of meat from a plate with his fork and drops it onto mine. Alla is furrowing her brows and shaking her head at him, and I’m not sure why. Viktor ignores her.

With all eyes on me, I cut a piece of the barbecued meat and put it in my mouth. It’s stringy, and tastes a bit gamey.

“Tasty rat, huh?” Viktor says.

“Rat?” I recognize the word because it’s said just like my name, but with an “a” at the end.

“Yes,” he says, using the middle and index finger of his right hand to simulate two large teeth, making a lapping sound like Hannibal Lecter. “Nutria.”

Posted in Artemovsk, Culture, Encounters, Food, It's Cold!, Life, Media, Peace Corps, Russian, Travel, Ukraine |

The elektrichka bumps along the tracks, passing endless fields of sunflowers and small villages, and my girlfriend asks, “Do you know where we get off?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t know where we get off.” I ask the wagon attendants, but they’re too busy looking at passengers’ faces, trying to recall if they’d already checked them for tickets. When one does respond to me, I don’t understand his mumbled Russian, but I feign understanding so as not to make myself out to be some sort of idiot.

“What did he say?” My girlfriend asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. So I ask a woman sitting near us if we’re on the right elektrichka. In Russian I ask, does she know if this elektrichka is going to Yasinovata?

“It will go to Donetsk,” She says.

This is good, I think. Yasinovata is just north of Donetsk, where we’re heading. And supposedly it’s a large station, which is odd, because Yasinovata is nothing, barely a town. I heard it was turned into a large station so as to keep some of the traffic out of Donetsk. Good idea, I suppose. But because I’ve never been there, and because it seems no one on our elektrichka is getting off there, I don’t know when we’ll be stopped there. So every time the train begins to slow, the metal on metal screeching us slowly to a stop, I get up from my seat and walk to an open window to peak out. I don’t know what I’m looking for, just a station that’s larger than the previous stops, I guess.

And then the wagon attendants come by again. I lean from my seat toward the aisle, and before I can finish what I’m saying one of the men says to me, “Two more, then the third.” And that’s all. I think he’s just told me when our stop in Yasinovata is. I’m surprised he remembered me. I suppose I was just annoying enough not to forget. A few minutes later the lights of Yasinovata shine through the elektrichka windows.

***

We’re aboard our train now, the No. 224 to Simferopol, leaving from Yasinovata at 2:18 a.m., arriving nearly 10 hours later at 11:35 a.m. The wait at Yasinovata was five hours long. With not much else to do, we played cards at a small table in a waiting area outside of a much nicer and pricey waiting area called The Hall Of Expectations Of The Raised Comfort. I love direct translations. A peak inside the doors showed oversized leather sofas, a bar, television sets, paintings hung on the walls and large candlesticks sitting atop antique-looking desks and side tables. There’s no doubt in my mind we could have caught a bit of shut-eye in there. But where we were, the wooden chairs with the arms on either side of the seats, making it impossible to lie down, people stirring all around, feral cats strolling up and down the aisles, meowing for food scraps, sleep was out of the question.

But we’re tucked in our top-bunk beds now, aboard the No. 224. And it’s not so bad. We’ll drift off to sleep soon, waking up every so often throughout the night when the train lurches to a stop. But that won’t be so bad. And in the morning we’ll awake in Crimea, on our way to Simferopol and then Sevastopol and the Black Sea.

***

The taxi leaves us in front of a Soviet-bloc style apartment building. The number on it says 48, but we’re at the wrong entrance. I know this because we’re looking for apartment No. 26, and in front of me are mailboxes that range from 1 to 10. So I call Anna, the young woman my girlfriend and I have asked to stay with for the next five days. We found her on CouchSurfing.org. Her current mission, it says on her profile, is to ”Swim in all four oceans, visit every continent and find the meaning of life”. Her profile also said we’d have our own room. So Anna answers her phone and says she’ll meet us downstairs in a minute, that the front door is locked, anyway.

Anna’s apartment is quaint, cute. In typical Ukrainian fashion, rugs are found not only on the floors but overtop the sofas, too. Photographs cut out of fashion magazines and others she’s taken of friends are displayed on shelves. In the corner of our room is a small aquarium with small bluish fish. The fish are also transparent, and with the sun shining in from the open balcony door I can see their diminutive insides. My girlfriend and I are settling in, unpacking some things from our bags – changes of clothes and whatnot – when Anna speaks up from the other room.

“Would you like to eat lunch?” she says. “I can make lunch and we can eat here, and then I can show you where the market is.”

What she prepares is fried potatoes, thinly cut, a salad of heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and basil. Everything, she says, came from her parents’ garden.

I offer to wash dishes, tell her I’d be happy to clean up, but she insists, “No, it’s OK.”

A few minutes later we’re at the market. Kiosks of produce and other products all around us. My girlfriend and I pick up some things to snack on later and then make for the beach. Anna said it would be just a ten minute walk, and it is.

At Omega beach, it turns out, my good friend Igor and his girlfriend Ira are relaxing. They’ve also come down to the sea from Artemovsk. Together we make for the westward-facing cliffs. It’s sometime in the early evening. The waves of the Black Sea are crashing on the rocks in front of us. There’s a cool wind blowing, but that doesn’t stop me from getting in the water. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.

This first evening in Sevastopol, we drink beer and watch the sun sink below the horizon. Then we go back to Anna’s apartment and turn in early, exhausted from the journey down here. Tomorrow we’ll do some exploring.

***

There’s no need to rush, but we wake up before 8 a.m., anyway. After a breakfast of coffee, fruit and yogurt we make our way to the bus stop around the corner. Our mission this morning is to take the local No. 109 bus to a stop called “Tsum” and ask around until someone can point us in the direction of Khersones. This is the gist on Khersones, it’s a nearly 2,500-year-old Greek settlement on the shore of the Black Sea, it was once a democracy, the architecture is mixed with Greek, Roman and Byzantine influences, and Volodymyr the Great was baptized into Christianity there, paving the way for what later would become the Russian Orthodox Church. Today it’s all fascinating stone ruins. With limestone columns perched just meters from the shoreline, it’s an opportune place to snap a few photographs. So we do just that, and then we spend an hour or so relaxing on its rocky beach and jumping into the breaking waves.

I think it’s also the No. 109 bus that takes us to the Sevastopol city center, where we eat lunch before finding our way to the bay and the ferry boat. The boat takes us to the north side of the city, where we spend some time soaking up the sun and napping on the sandy beach, away from the hordes of Russian tourists. But we don’t stay too long, we want to stroll about the city. It’s our one full day to do it. So we see the main drag, Bolshaya Morskaya Blvd., and we take that up to the park and the Painted Panarama, we spend some time around Lazareva Square, too, and then we make our way back to the beach, where I drink a beer and the girlfriend drinks a gin and tonic and we watch the sun paint the sky all sorts of pastel hues as it sinks below the horizon.

We grab a bite at a seaside cafe. Ukrainian shashlik and Georgian-style plov. We wash that down with another drink each, and then walk the 10 or 15 minutes back to Anna’s. We’re in bed before midnight. I wonder if this is a sign we’re getting older.

***

I’m always up first. So I start the coffee, prepare the breakfast. We don’t fiddle around the apartment too long before we’re out the door and on our way to Balaklava.

I suppose now’s a good time to tell you this, that Sevastopol and Balaklava, before the fall of the Soviet Union, were closed off to the general public. The reasons being that the Sevastopol bays were home to the the country’s Black Sea Fleet, while Balaklava housed and repaired its nuclear submarines in hidden mountainside tunnels. Only military personnel and immediate family members were allowed access. Nowadays, however, the cities are two of Crimea’s major attractions, and it’s easy to see why.

The Black Sea isn’t really black; it’s a beautiful shade of blue. And it’s clear. Surrounding the bay of Balaklava are the Crimean Mountains, and perched atop them sits the ruins of an ancient Genoese fortress. Docks jut out from the shore, mooring wealthy Russians’ yachts and locals’ charming wooden motor boats. The water in the bay is calm and the morning sun is a warm 80 degrees, or so.

I’ve always had a thing for boats. So my curiosity gets the best of me and I set off down the dock. Inside one boat is an old man with his hat over his face and his feet kicked up on a seat. Two young men sit in another, Russian hip-hop playing loudly on the radio. A man leans toward me out of a boat on my right and asks if I’d like to buy any sea products. And at the last boat is a smiling man who asks if we’d like to go for a ride.

We agree on a price before we set off. The man will take us around the bay and out to sea for a little longer than a half hour and it’ll cost us just $15. Cruising through the bay, he points to a row of large houses with large yachts parked out in front. He tells us they’re Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich’s. We wind our way through the bay and then out to sea, where the landscape is even more striking. Jagged cliffsides as far left and right as I can see. The skipper turns the boat off and pulls out a fishing rod.

“You like to fish?” he says. “Watch this. You don’t even need bait. Drop the line in and pull it up. A fish every time.”

He drops the line in. On it is a single weight and a barbed hook. He gives the rod a few jigs to let the line out.

“Now you watch,” he says.

And I watch.

A few minutes go by, the boat rocking with the swells, before he reels in the line to reveal a small fish. “They’re not always big,” he says. “But you get one every time.”

My girlfriend is enjoying just being out at sea. She’s taking photographs and shooting video. She watches as the skipper pulls me behind the wheel and hands me his binoculars, encouraging me to act out a scene in which I’m driving the boat, using the binoculars to discern what’s up ahead. Then he hands me the radio, and in a nasally voice I say into the thing that the Footloose is on the run, being chased by pirates or something, not sure if we can outrun ‘em, it’s gonna be close.

I’m stepping away from wheel when the skipper points and shouts, “Opa! Dolphins!” And sure enough, about 20 meters starboard, two dolphins are swimming in sync, fins breaking the surface, backs glistening in the sunlight. We watch them for a minute, and then my girlfriend tells me she could almost cry.

Reentering the bay I can see that more people have begun to show up in Balaklava. It turns out today is the birthday of the local winery, which means tasting booths will pop up all around the bayside streets and Ukraine’s most popular band, Okean Elzy, will play a free show in the evening. But before all that, we want to stroll about town, hike up to the ruins of the Genoese fortress, find a place to eat some seafood.

With our bellies full – we ordered a large, assorted plate of fish, all served with the heads and tails still attached – we set off for the wine kiosks. For less than a $1 we’re poured a glass of sparkling wine. First we try the white brut, later we’ll try the red brut. And then we spend some time people watching. Also, there’s the final of the Miss Crimea Pageant happening on stage. We turn our attention there, where a young blond girl in a white dress is singing a rendition of Marilyn Monroe’s “I Wanna Be Loved By You” at the end of the stage. I can tell she doesn’t know all the words. Luckily, for her sake, the volume is turned up enough to drowned her voice out. But I don’t know if the Russian-speaking crowd would have noticed, anyway.

Tired from a long day in the sun, and with a belly full of wine, we make our way back by marshrutka to Anna’s apartment in Sevastopol. Again we turn in a bit early. Tomorrow will be another long day.

***

After Sevastopol, my pal Igor had moved on to stay with some friends in the nearby town of Alupka. On the phone the night before he’d told me Alupka was a beautiful place, that we should see it. So, eager to see more of the Crimean coast, my girlfriend and I set out to meet him.

The bus ride along Crimea’s southern coast is perhaps the most beautiful in the country. The beauty of the mountains, cliffs and shoreline visible from our seats on the bus are only matched in exuberance by the precariousness that is riding public transportation in Ukraine. An hour into our ride we passed two smashed-up cars that had collided head-on. On the ground laid a bleeding man covered in bandages, past him was another being tended to under the shade of some trees, and inside one of the cars was a deceased woman sitting alone, eyes open and mouth agape, a stern reminder of the fragility of life.

Sure enough, Alupka is gorgeous. My girlfriend described it as a giant treehouse, and in a way it is. A myriad of trees abound, enveloping the town. We stroll around for a while, down cobbled alleyways, past hidden cafes and quaint homes, eventually arriving at the Vorontsov Palace. The palace sits in the middle of a large garden of plants, fountains and lion statues. It was built between 1830 and 1848 for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov. Some years later, during the 1945 Yalta Conference, it was the short term residence of Winston Churchill.

After visiting the palace grounds we meet Igor and his friend Dima for lunch. We drank some beer, eat some shashlik and chat for a while. Afterward, worried we wouldn’t be able to get a ticket back to Sevastopol in the evening, we go to the bus station. As it turns out, buses from Alupka to Sevastopol are few and far between, but a number of buses from Yalta leave for Sevastopol every hour. And so we decide to move on to Yalta.

There must be 50 people on this marshrutka. We’re crammed in like canned sardines. A sign above the driving says the maximum number of passengers is not to exceed 26. If we crash, we’re all dead, I think. I’m pressed up against the front door, peering out at a 500-foot drop to the sea as the marshrutka lurches up the hillside and onward to Yalta.

Turns out we don’t have much time to spend in Yalta. The only tickets we can get to Sevastopol are for a bus an hour and 15 minutes later. Our visit to Yalta will be a whirlwind tour. We take a trolley to the center, where we walk past a theater, a square and a monument of Lenin, eventually finding our way to the seaside. We have only a few minutes to take in the view. The sea this evening is a calm, dark blue. Behind us are the Crimean Mountains, looking like edges of a serrated blade. We have just enough time to consume an ice cream before we make our way back to the station and board the return bus to Sevastopol.

***

We take it easy our last day in Sevastopol. We were going to try and visit Bakhchisaray before leaving Crimea, but we’re exhausted. So we spend the late morning and early afternoon on the beach, relaxing, eating some plov and shwarma purchased from a beachside vendor.

In the evening a bus takes us two hours north to Simferopol, where we wait seven hours for our 1 a.m. train to Donetsk. We pass the time by eating, drinking, playing cards and people watching. Where are they all going, I wonder.

Inside the station, people waiting for trains contort their bodies in the wooden seats, trying to catch a few winks. I’m watching four men to my left, all in different, awkward positions, sleep when over the loudspeaker the arrival of our train is announced.

My girlfriend and I board the No. 278 from Simferopol to Donetsk, make up our beds and turn in. In the morning we’ll be back in the small, eastern Ukrainian city of Artemovsk, where the closest bodies of water are ponds created out of old mining pits and reservoirs used for irrigating crops.

Posted in Artemovsk, Balaklava, Bazaar, Crimea, Culture, Donetsk, Encounters, Food, History, Public Transportation, Russian, Sevastopol, Soviet Union, Travel, Ukraine, Uncategorized |

A few months back, while on a tour of Konstantinovka’s dilapidated factory areas and trash heaps (“The Wonders and Horrors of Donbass”, April 13), I met a young journalist from Donetsk named Alex. Alex is the editor of the online news outfit НОВОСТИ, based in Donetsk. We chatted for a while about journalism and I promised him I’d give him an interview about what I’m doing here in Ukraine

We just wrapped up the interview this week. The interview is in Russian, but you can run it through Google translate and get the jist. Here’s the interview.

Posted in Donetsk, Encounters, Journalism, Konstantinovka, Media, Peace Corps, Russian, Teaching, Ukraine |

We barely made it back to Kiev from Chernobyl that evening to catch our train to Donetsk, running all the way to the platform. When we boarded, sweaty and panting, wanting only to throw our bags down and sprawl out on our bunks, we found a family of three – two of which would occupy the upper bunks – eating dinner at our table, sausages, bread, cheese and salad laid out, their possessions strewn about the kupe (cabin area). They were polite, however, and made room for us to sit.

As we began settling in, talking about our day touring the Chernobyl exclusion zone and our weekend in Kiev, passengers around us noticed our English. One set of eyes were those of an adorable six-year-old named Dasha. It took a few winks on my end and some friendly Russian words, but she eventually opened up. She was very curious what we – Americans – were doing in Ukraine. When I told her I lived here and taught English she told me that, well, she spoke English. She counted off numbers one through 10, told me all the English words for family members and pets, then sang a cute rendition of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”.

As it turned out, her father spoke some English, too. We chatted with him some about life in Ukraine. He told us about the difficulties finding good work here, and how they’d had to move around quite a bit. Then he paid me a nice compliment about how much he appreciated the work volunteers do in Ukraine.

We arrived in Donetsk early the next morning, where my favorite cab driver was waiting for us. Arnold drove us – for a very reasonable price – an hour north to Artemovsk, where my uncle and I would spend the next three days. But we didn’t have much time to rest. After a quick shower and change of clothes, we made our way across town to the Artyomovsk Winery for a tour of the underground factory, followed by a tasting.

The tour took us through the underground passageways of the winery, showing us the bottling process and rooms where bottles are left to ferment and age. Something interesting about the winery: The Royal Family serves the winery’s Krimart Red Brut to guests during official gatherings. We picked up two bottles after the tour. Very tasty.

In Artemovsk I took my uncle around to my usual places, introducing him to many of my friends along the way. A Peace Corps volunteer himself a bit over a decade ago in Ecuador, he was curious to see how I lived here, which turned out to be in strict contrast to how he lived then and there. Instead of a jungle, I’m surrounded by Soviet bloc buildings. In place of a small river, I have plumbing, or – at worst – a well where I get my water. And there are more differences, such as a few restaurant and discotheque options.

Hungry for traditional Ukrainian cuisine, we headed to my favorite place here in Artemovsk called Britchka. Famished from a long day of traveling and drinking sparkling wine, we ordered nearly half the menu. Varenyky, shashlik, bread, salad, salo and more, washing it all down with beer and vodka.

Over the next couple of days I showed him the rest of what the town had to offer. We bought produce at the market, strolled through the park and even spent a late night at Bananas, the town’s premier disco. We had a great time. I only wish we would have had a bit more of it.

But all good things must come to an end. We arrived back in Kiev at week’s end, spending one day there before my uncle flew back to his home in Panama. It was a great time, and I was thankful to have him come all this way to visit me.

My holiday, though, still wasn’t over. Six hours after I dropped my uncle off at the airport my girlfriend and friend would fly in. We’d spend six days in Kiev, eating, drinking and photographing our way through the city. But before that I took a brief nap.

Posted in Artemovsk, Culture, Encounters, Food, History, Kiev, Public Transportation, Travel, Ukraine |

Leaving my apartment yesterday evening, I bumped into my downstairs neighbor on the stairwell landing. We spoke briefly as she opened her front door. But I don’t think either of us expected to see what was behind it.

There, clad only in American-flag styled bikini briefs and a smirk, nonchalantly leaning against the entry-way wall, was her husband.

The man looked at his wife and then at me. His eyes went wide, his brows rose and his mouth narrowed. ”O!” he exclaimed. “Amerikanyets!”

“Da!” his wife said. “Shto eta takoye?” What’s that? She gestured at his pelvic area with both hands, palms up.

Just before the man pulled his wife inside she turned her head to me and apologized, “Izvinitye, Chris!”

Then the door shut.

Posted in Artemovsk, Encounters, Ukraine |