Amanda Kyle Gibson in Ukraine, the saga continues

April 14, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

Tuesday Mar 10 continued:

So we schnuggled for a while, until Natasha informed us that it was time to come eat (we had chatted earlier about supper as we were eating first dinners, cheese, bread, praline butter, and Natasha had informed us that we would not be eating burritos but the pot of potatos that Alla had made). We ate with just her, not Alla, a soupy potato dish with some meat in it, deliciousness. The typical pickles, pickled tomatoes, cookies, breads, and halvah (a much darker sort that I’ve eaten in Paris but equally luscious and fatty) made their daily appearance. Natasha insisted that we break out the pate to try it even though she admitted to thinking it was weird. Alla was decidedly disturbed. I shoveled some in in a show of French solidarity.
The evening ended with Claire being boring and “reviewing grants” while we both huddled in her bed. I was somewhat appeased by watching a few minutes of Ghost Town.

Dinner involved a conversation in which Natasha insisted that we try the pate that Mandy had given them and her telling us that though she had tried it, she wasn’t going to tell us what she thought, but that we simply had to try it for ourselves. Alla point blank refused to have anything to do with the pate. I was then forced to match Mandy’s aggressive pate sampling. I remain unimpressed.

Wednesday Mar 11

A very big day. Of lots of firsts. Beginning with breakfast. We incorrectly thought that we’d be making eggs, but we went to school at the same time as Alla today so we ate together and thus ate their food. Sort of a potato hash brown thing. Again delicious, since Alla is a potato master. We comforted ourselves by saying we’d have eggs for lunch but Alla pointed out the pot of borscht for us on the stove…so no…but borscht! Halvah, bread, cookies, pickled goods, nice cabbage, the usual…And then Alla rushed to the fridge saying she’d forgotten something. A murky bowl of translucent something with chunks appeared on the table. Holodets? Claire declined to elucidate further, but I vaguely remembered hers and Mary’s description of it. Bones of hooves or something soaked to make gelatin plus chicken pieces, then chilled. It does not slide right down…despite being slippery. An upsetting moment, but no harm done. Natasha was on a kasha only diet. But revealed that she had added the pate to it…nice.

Mandy had previously asked if there was any food that I had not been able to adapt to in Ukraine. Holodets was my first and only answer. While the taste itself is perfectly palatable and would in fact be delicious if it were simply the chicken, I have still not be able to handle the cold, slippery nature of the dish. And at 7:30 in the morning, it is especially a doozey. I could not help but chuckle to myself as I told Mandy that it was Holodets and she simply looked at me quizzically and scooted some of the slippery mass onto her plate.

The sun was out! Another first! The walk to school was drier and more solid. Claire only had two classes today, one of two 12 year old boys learning about appliances and the other her 9th form that we’d had yesterday. The girls again had many, many questions. Like if I had a boyfriend. They clearly had not prepared these ahead of time as Claire had suggested, but that didn’t stop them.

Then we left school. A short day. After meeting Claire’s counterpart and hugging some pipes to return feeling to my hands, we headed home. At home, we read, worked, etc while the hot water boiled. Yes, shower time. Claire bustled me into the bathroom, gave some hurried instructions, and bustled out, advising me to move fast before the water cooled. Amazingly it was much better than expected. Because expectations had been so low?? In fact pouring the boiling water mixed with cold water over my head with a ladle was downright delightful. But I tried to move as quickly as possible.

I would like Mandy to be faced with this decidedly freezing bathroom, bucket, and ladle, every time she wants to bathe and then reconsider if she would in fact call this experience delightful.

We made cheesy eggs for lunch, plus borscht and praline bread. I got to clean up in their special style. Food in compost, boiling water in a small bowl plus detergent for cleansing and cold tap for rinsing.

Finally we were off to Rivne, 45 min on the Marshrutka to the center. We met the Klevin 1 English teacher on the bus.

The English teacher from the other part of Klevan entertained us for a bit with pictures of his cat on his cell phone.

Rivne was neat, but rainy. Really bright gaudy shop signs, casino signs, and weird vsbus-like trollies in neon colors. A bazaar all around the center, shoe polish, veggies, hugehugehuge carrots, fruit, underwear, neon sports good, honey, cookies. So many cookies. We indulged in sandwich cookies with burnt sugar filling dipped in chocolate and some chocolate wafers. I now understand Claire’s once problematic cookie habit.

I never knew there could be so many types of cookies.

Then we moved on to business. 2nd hand shopping. An expensive day. 53 hryven for 1 kg. We bought 1.5 kg of stuff, a tink shirt, a skirt, a hoodie, and some dresses, a skirt, and a shirt for Claire. All for under 10 dollars.

Thank you, western Europe, for your donations.

We walked a bit more, saw the church, then met up with 2 of Claire’s students from Klevin 2 to walk to English club in the library. A nice place with computers, books, big tables. Maybe 15 students of various levels. We chatted, wrote haikus, ate snickerdoodles, a pretty informal process.

I attend and help run an English club every Wednesday in Rivne, my oblast center, with a few other volunteers in my region. Students from our schools and students who study in Rivne at institutes and universities attend the club.

Thursday Mar 12

A up and down day today. Claire was worn out from staying up late reviewing grants, while I battled hypoglycemia in relation to my recurring cold. We had an 8:30 class, so woke at 7, ate some kasha and apples with Natasha, plus some delicious sweet cheese blinis and the ever-present halvah.

Mandy has done a number on the house halvah stores since her arrival.

First class was the 9A we had on Tuesday, with the 2 girls that had come to English club. They presented on favorite musicians and attempted/failed to interpret the Beatles’ “Revolution.” I spent the rest of the day teaching myself the alphabet and Ukrainian words. Actually, it was cute, the girls spent 10 minutes at the end of class pronouncing words for me. Then we had a break in which the adorable Maxim stopped in to talk to Claire.

We headed off during break to buy train tickets in Klevin center, a monstrous open warehouse with benches. A funny place. Big and empty but with a train station feel to it. But the computers were down. So we trudged back after buying my hypoglycemic self a roll from the bazaar.

I feared that Mandy was going to pass out in the streets of Klevan and that I was going to have to leave her to the mangy packs of dogs that roam the streets to make it back in time for my next class.

11h10 tea time! Cookies, buns, chocolate, coffee, plus the old science lady shoving food at me saying take take take. So sweet.

Next we had claire’s nightmare class. Mostly boys, and 2 very sweet mature girls. Claire actually had to send one boy back to their original class, leaving me at the mercy of the little devils for several minutes. Terrifying. I tried to ignore the one pretending to hang himself. The the 10a class. They made some quite nice dialogues.

More break, scary toilet visits, and a final class of sweet girls that mostly got to goof around and ask me questions. They were a bit lost but well-intentioned. I was asked “how do you live” at one point. Perhaps a bit existential for their vocab level.

Poor vocabularies and sentence structures often lead the children to create far deeper sentences than they intended. I both enjoy the irony of these moments and am saddened by them.

After school we made our way back to the center to buy our tickets successfully (kupe again, high class) and groceries for tonight. And some cheese for immediate sustenance. We then hung out in the library, really cute, but apparently the books are old, while Claire worked. Until one of Claire’s fellow English teachers called. The old cross-eyed math teacher wanted to know if I (as in me) had stolen his hat “by accident.” No I had not. Suspicion of outsiders?

When the English teacher asked me if Mandy had taken his hat, I told her that unless he had taken to wearing a kind of dark blue velvet cap, then I didn’t think so. I am now unable to see this teacher at school without thinking about his accusations that Mandy stole his hat and alternating between feeling like I want to laugh at him or still kind of want to tell him off.

We then headed to Claire’s tutor’s house for some serious ping-pong business. But we couldn’t stay too long because we had Mexican food to cook. And did we ever. Homemade tortillas (2 c flour, 1tsp salt, 2/4 cup water, 1 Tb oil), refried beans with ancho, cumin rice, and tomato-corn-pea relish. Plus cheese and sour cream. Great. A major clean-up project given the small bowl of boiling water technique plus all the flour all over the table but all worth it. Natasha continues to seem horrified by it, as she eats her kasha plus bagged sauce.

THE BEST BURRITOS I HAVE EVER TASTED. Ok, maybe not in fact that best, but they were good and combined with my extreme cravings for spiced foods made them unbelievable.

Hopefully we’ll watch ghost town soon?

Thursday March 12 continued:

Yes, we did watch Ghost Town. Then we passed out.

Blinchiki: combine 2 eggs, 1/3 c milk and 1 tsp sunflower oil, whisk; whisk in 1/2c flour, pinch salt; butter skillet and cook like crepes, 60 s per sides

Vareniki
3 c flour and 1 egg and 1 ¾ c warm water, ½ tsp salt, 1 Tb oil, mix, knead in rest of flour 2.5 c, knead, let stand 10 minutes, roll flat, 1/8 inch, cut circles, add filling, seal, freeze if you want, add to boiling salted water and cook 4-5 minutes.

Mandy has included recipes for two traditional Ukrainian dishes above. If you can’t wait another 21 months until I get home to make Ukrainian food for you myself, have at it.

Friday March 13:

Last day in Klevin 2….poo. And it was snowing of course. Until it started raining that is. Claire starts lateish on Fridays, 10:30 or so, so we woke up to make biscuits. We used the Babushka cookbook recipe, so they were a bit different and perhaps slightly undercooked, but absolutely delicious with Claire’s new honey.

Classes went as normal. One of her 10b students, Olia, beaded a flower for me so I’d have something of Ukraine to take home with me, which was really sweet. A class of all girls, wearing mini-skirts for the most part, that I hadn’t met before decided to be hyper-friendly to the visiting American and insisted that I visit their classroom, see their American football, and take pictures with them. They asked me if my brother was good-looking and if I had a picture. Sadly, no.

The day ended with an assembly in honor of the Ukrainian poet Tscevschenko who was born and died this week. They, being mostly girls in the advanced classes, read poems and sang musical renditions of them. A large percentage were wearing extremely short skirts and/or very tight tops despite it being fricking cold out. I don’t know how they do it.

Back at home, we prepped for leaving on the overnight train. This entailed my second bucket shower. Yes! I sadly have not mastered the water temperature thing since I ended up somewhat scalding myself, but I did okay. Alla pulled Claire aside around mid-afternoon and informed her that she was going to make dinner and would I like vereniki or deruni. Tough choice, but I went with the vereniki after Claire’s feedback on their excellence.

I think I chose well, since they were delicious. Alla is so adorable. She made potato vereniki and served them with smetana, salad vinaigrette, pickles, and mushrooms with onions. Then she broke out this small pitcher of a sweet wine that her mother had made. It was amazing, particularly since Alla had us toast to something like peace, friendship, and small savory buns. Then there were dessert vereniki that had cherries in them. These were the most fantabulous vereniki I have had thus far and I may have eaten most of them.

On our way out, I insisted that we all take pictures which caused something of a hullabaloo. Natasha flat out refused at first, but after spending about 30 seconds in front of the mirror, she apparently felt presentable. And she beaded me a necklace!! I have no idea how she finished this in a week; it’s pretty extensive. They’re both super sweet, even if I was simply a source of amusement for them.

The kindness that these people continue to demonstrate astounds me. I will never know how to properly thank them.

So we finally had to truck off to the train station in the dark with all of our bags. We made it eventually, only to be accosted by two very drunk older Ukrainian men. I guess they were having a Friday night “out on the town,” by which I mean drinking alone on the quai of the train station. Claire had some nice love songs sung to her; thankfully my being “french” spared me most of their attention. We ultimately ended up lurking behind a building of the train station to avoid them, emerging only when our train appeared.

Did I mention that we ended up in kupe again? Sadly, it was not the moving palace of the Kiev-Lviv train. No blue velvet, but red leather isn’t so bad. The real problem in fact arose when we realized that we were shut, perhaps permanently, in our train car. The door wouldn’t budge and no one seemed to be inclined to respond to our poundings. So we ate some cookies and assessed the situation. Our neighbor tried to help, but couldn’t open it and I guess decided not to inform the woman in charge of our car. Finally we started causing a serious ruckus, until a tubby Ukrainian man came over and simply lifted the door off its track in about 2 seconds.

Mandy lost her grip on reality pretty soon after we discovered we were unable to open our cabin door. She went through a series of emotions in which she calmly pondered the outcome of an entire night unable to open the door, banging, kicking, pulling, and other wise beating on the door, laying on her bunk, rolling to and fro, and mumbling about the disaster that would be our fatal end in the Kupe. We briefly discussed our possible exit options if the door was never opened for us. We both agreed we would be able to break open the window and then brainstormed the various metal parts of the cabin that we could rip from their places to use as a tool to break the window. Luckily, we did not have to realize any these hypotheses.

Saturday March 14th 2009
Sadly, liberation did not translate into a solid night of sleep. We “woke up” groggy, dirty, and hot. Or at least I did. And it appeared to be wintry mixing in Kiev. We killed some time drinking coffee in the McDonald’s until the Peace Corps office opened and we could drop our stuff. Then we moved on to our now traditional breakfast place Double Coffee on Kreschatyk where we discovered that cooked semolina is delicious and somewhat resembles cream of wheat.

Our waitress brought us each a small bowl of dried fruit with our tea. Mandy proceeded to dump her fruit into her tea. I was unsure as to the fruits purpose but then finally dumped part of my fruit into my tea too. I mean, why would she have brought it with the tea if it wasn’t for the tea right? Our essentially cream of wheat arrived and we realized the fruit was likely intended for the food. Mandy and I scooped our now nicely plumped fruit back out of the tea and added it to our cream of wheat. Delicious.

But onto more serious stuff. Like extreme tourism. We walked northwestish I believe towards the Saint Sophia church, or religious complex, which I think was first built around the 1000s. Or something early like that. The visit began rockily, as the establishment foolishly implemented electronic ticket readers that don’t work and then equipped them with surly male security guards that apparently like to watch young women struggle. But we made it in, and it was awesome. My first orthodox church in fact, and it was really different from other churches I’ve seen. The grounds consisted of the church, with its gold domes and the giant bell tower. Inside, lots of gold. The frescos and mosaics were just beautiful. Some tombs weirdly dotted the side corridors, including that of Yaroslav the Wise. There were upstairs galleries as well and three small museum wings with paintings and reconstruction work.

Directly facing this church, down the boulevard, is St. Michael’s Church, which was rebuilt after destruction in the 40’s by the Nazis or the Soviets (not sure). It was bright bright blue and also with big gold domes, of course. Outside was a somewhat political seeming monument to the Great Famine in the 30’s. The church inside resembled in structure other churches that we’d seen, with the large gold wall, but was obviously more modern than St. Sophia and a functioning church (or at least it gives baptisms).

We braved the freezing ice winds of death again to make our way northward to the Andrew’s Rise area. This is supposedly the most touristy area of Kiev, with lots of tourist stalls lining its cobblestones streets. We were largely spared this thanks to the absence of tourists during this season and this kind of weather. There was lots of bad artwork out and about though. From St. Andrew’s church we had our first view of the eastern part of Kiev and the Dnieper River. The church was more memorable as a location for rewarming ourselves, but it was nice. Several visitors were kissing the icons all around the church. And then politely wiping them clean.

At this point we were of course hungry again and praise be we found another Ukrainian fast food joint, the same one we’d been to in L’viv. Some sort of mushroom soup, bread, potatoes, and, I have no idea what this is officially called, ground chicken wrapped in cabbage and boiled with a tomato-based sauce.

Then we sadly had to head out again, and the weather seemed to have worsened. Happily we got to take the metro towards the south east to visit the Lavra, a huge religious complex in a park that overlooks the Dnieper. Before entering the Larva, we walked around the park, saw some monuments, saw some “views” or as much as we could in the fog. In the Lavra…things were a bit weird. The entry gate was this adorable little church that we couldn’t see the inside of, but the outside was bright blue with lots of paintings of saints. The grounds hold monks’ dormitories, huge long complexes, and a variety of churches. The first building we entered was a semi-freaky exhibit on higher religious personnels’ clothing, like hats and robes. Way too ornate, but pretty sexy stuff. We stopped in one church, of about a million; I mainly remember that it was full of old ladies.

Down the hill was the area of the Lower Lavra, the real pilgrimage site. There were some monks with black robes and very long, very frizzy beards ambling about. It took some effort, but we eventually figured out how to enter the caves of mummified monks. Sadly this was not as creepy as we’d anticipated. No actual visible bodies, just bodies wrapped in intricate embroidered cloths. Pretty old stuff though. What was creepy was all the kissing of the coffins and praying and crossing that went on with these monks. We visited two sets of caves, the Near Caves and the Far Caves, but the dead monks pretty much looked the same. Cool nonetheless; everyone loves a dead, well-preserved monk.

I heart well-preserved monks.

This signaled the official end of our extreme tourism. We metroed back, spent maybe an hour on the escalators out of the depths of the metro (this is so not an exaggeration), collected our belongings, and trekked to the hostel in the Circus area of Kiev. A delightful place, temporary home to a fat, semi-stupid Texan who had made a plane reservation to Poland while drunk and was thus compelled to come to Eastern Europe in winter. And a gaggle of Dutch boys who seemed to be in Kiev only to visit Chernobyl. And an Australian who had sold all but his truck and his kayak to drive around the arctic circle. We laid claim to the common room, where we had not a fold-out sofa, but personal fold-out armchairs….awesome. Most importantly, there was a great cookie/pechivo stand near the hostel where I bought several kilograms of amazing cookies for under 2 euro.

We celebrated my last night appropriately, by making ourselves somewhat sick on delicious food. Claire took me to Drum, an expat? bar/restaurant just off Kreschatyk in a dark alley. We got huge tankards of beer from the oblast where Claire’s training site of Mryn is located, a starter of fried mushrooms, and veggie burgers made of rice and walnuts. Not to be deterred by this enormous quantity of food and our slightly overwhelmed stomachs, we shot even higher, for kit-kat chocolate sauce McFlurry’s. Definitely worth the pain. We huffed all the way back to our hostel only to find the enormous troop of dutch boys in our personal space. Thankfully they went out drinking, so we could watch little miss sunshine and go to sleep.

I had been taken to the Drum once before when I was in Kiev for a working group with some other volunteers. I remembered that it was in a kind of obscure alley off Kreshatyk after a corner with some steps on it. My alley choice was a bit of a shot in the dark, but I was very pleased with myself when it turned out to be correct, and even more pleased once there was a pint in my hand.

Sunday March 15, 2009

My last day….nnnrrrr. And to make it worse, double coffee wasn’t open! This was a heart-breaking development. Thankfully, or maybe not so, we found the Coffee House. They kindly reheated a “toasted” cheese, mayonnaise, and pickle sandwich for us, plus lattes, apple struedels, and ice cream. My attempt to take it easy after last night’s extravaganza thus failed somewhat.

This was the first real ice cream that I have eaten since being in Ukraine. I miss ice cream.

Then began the long process of Mandy exiting Ukraine. We ultimately took a taxi after the apparent absence of a marshrutka and some serious bargaining. At the airport, I felt like I’d been transported back to those days when I was a kid and flying with my family was this terrifying, disaster-prone misadventure. Check-in always took forever, there was inevitably some problem like weight or bag number (I hid my second carry-on and snuck on with it) or technological failures (they couldn’t print my second boarding pass). Then, after boarding the plane, always a good first step, the 2nd half of the plane couldn’t board because of something related to the food services. Or lack thereof. All I knew is that some man kept running up and down the aisles with water bottles and we left a half-hour late, only to be served chips, “croissants,” and candy bars. Upon landing in Prague, I was somewhat surprised to have made it out of Ukraine at all. But I did, none the worst for wear.

It was a lonely ride back to the center of Kiev and an even sadder realization upon my arrival back in my room in Klevan that Mandy’s massive pile of junk was no longer in the corner, and neither was she.

And back in Paris I was happily very pleased to have returned. The sun was shining and I saw some bunnies hopping along the runway. Sort of a different feel than Ukraine. But who knew the third world could be such a partaayy?? I’d like to acknowledge Claire in particular for her major contributions to this manuscript, and all those who provided us with solid material with which to write about.