Enjoying a fall weekend

We've had kind fall weather here the past few days, save for Sunday afternoon.


Everyone seemed to be out for a stroll. Perhaps it's the weather, perhaps it's the proximity from Western Ukraine, but people here seem in much less of a panic than in Kyiv about the swine flu. If in Kyiv one in 10 were donning a mask, here it is more of an occasional sighting.




And my favorite weekend sighting:

What no map can tell

The great pleasure in such journeys is in seeing and feeling what no map can tell, no matter for how long poured over in the quiet of a room at home or in the basement of the Royal Geographical Society. Of course, the romance of maps lies in their mystery, in the names of far-off places in strange tongues, such a powerful seduction: Ilisu, Shatili, Ushguli, Batumi, Tbilisi, Baku. I have sometimes imagined a turbanned man of my age sitting cross-legged on the floor of his dwelling in Samarkand wit a map of Britain open in front of him, mouthing gently to himself, while a small shiver of pleasure descends his spine, 'Saffron Walden, Gateshead, Chipping Sodbury, Clacton-on-Sea.

- Tony Anderson, Bread and Ashes: A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia

I've reread this passage a number of times since my trip to Georgia this summer and better felt its sentiment each time; perhaps alone for the number of times I have poured over maps of far away places, planning extensive overland journeys for which I have not the time nor the resources, purely for flirtation with rising wanderlust. But this passage also reminds me of the feeling you get when finally arriving someplace you've long thought about, and how naturally you can fall into the pace of things, feeling that the far away place is not so far away at all. And perhaps most of all the reminder of what a privilege it is to choose a spot on a map and decide to see it for yourself.

-Trinity Church in Gergeti (Kazbegi) - perhaps one of the most famous sites in Georgia. Photograph once again courtesy of David, Clicking Again's favourite photographer

This summer in Kazbegi, one of the most famous tourist destinations in Georgia and a beautiful mountain region, I met two American brothers (from Michigan, no less) and an Australian around-the-worlder at my homestay. I mentioned to them the small box in my Georgia Lonely Planet describing a hike over the Juta Pass, into another mountain region that is not accessible without going back through Tbilisi. The brothers had already caught wind of it and were in. A Czech couple overheard and joined the conversation, producing a topographic map they had found and printed up of the pass. We stayed up late pouring over it, improvising water-proof gators and organizing transportation to the foot of the pass.

The next day the sky was gray, and reports of a washed out road on the way to Juta squashed our hastily made plans. The Americans had to move on, the Czechs as well. Alex (the Australian) and I had a bit more time and made plans for the next day.

The next morning our homestay drove us to where the road had washed out, and we were picked up on the other side by someone who would show us the path to the Pass.


Even after spending the last week hiking in Mestia, I was not in the kind of shape I should have been to go over the pass. Yes, I got over it in the end, but if anyone had been keeping score, Juta would have certainly won regardless. Although it was June the pass was still covered with snow, and the trail was often washed out or nonexistent. The fact that I took few pictures of the breathtaking view is good indication of how scared (near to death) I was. There I am bundled up next to the cairn, and there's Alex eating a well deserved Snickers. Behind him is the side we had just climbed up.




The descent was gorgeous, but not much easier. When we reached the cow line, we knew the end was near.


And of course the village of Roschka was the most welcome sight I had ever seen.




A few days later, I reached the chapter on the Juta pass in Tony Anderson's Bread and Ashes. I carried that book up and down the pass without realizing that the cover of his book is a picture of the very same place.


Writing this post now, and reading again at these far away names on the map - Ilisu, Shatili, Ushguli, Batumi, Tbilisi, Baku - I look forward to hiking through these mountains again soon. With that in mind, perhaps I should go for a run.

gorilla tape, and other finds

I believe nearly everyone in expatia has their own “must-have” - something that seems illogical to bring from home or abroad to which you nevertheless dedicate precious luggage weight. For Maggie this is cooking ware and pet supplies. For me (or rather my friends and family visiting me) it is mostly peanut butter and Cracklin’ Oat Bran. Jen, a friend of mine from Istanbul, wrote quite an entertaining post about this in her blog here, which is a good argument not to move to Turkey if you find pork, palatable wine or European cheese necessary ingredients to your happiness.

Settling into my new flat has me thinking quite a bit about this, because I keep finding items brought from abroad by the six years of Americans who have lived in this same flat before me. It started in the kitchen cupboard, but there is evidence stashed away in the bathroom, wardrobe and dresser drawers. I have moved to a little slice of expatia!

Among my finds:






Duct tape (actually Gorilla Tape, of which I had previously never heard), three bags of Ricola cough drops (various fruit flavors), a 680g container of McCormick Taco Seasoning Mix Premium (expired May of this year), Energizer batteries, a ten bottle collection of Encore Herbs and Spices (made in Canada), a L’Occitane Travel Candle (lemon scented), a Sony Discman with a copied Nickleback album (!), a pocket New Testament, The Very Best of Elvis Costello (book for Piano/Vocal/Guitar), a three-pack of Trader Joe’s scouring pads, tiny Christmas lights (red) and Cooking Basics of Dummies. Two Washington D.C. postcards near the bookshelf.


And the biggest prize of all - non-metric measuring cups, lined up lovingly along the wall. One cup! ½ cup! ¼ cup! 1/8 cup!

Then there are the items I am almost sure were purchased locally by my fellow countrymen. The French press - yes of course Ukrainians drink coffee as well, but call it a feeling. The giant coffee mugs. The smaller, more expensive salt with iodine that you can poor right out of the container. Non-sugar sweetener.

Finding these things gives me such a nice feeling, something nostalgic, or romantic…I’m not sure how to describe it, but I’d bet the Germans have a cute compound word for it. Not just finding little pieces of America, but finding the little pieces that others have put together. Something like: The Best of American Consumerism [Abridged Pocket Version].

Austin, if you are reading this and any of these things are yours, please do not think I am mocking you. On the contrary, let me share my list of ridiculous “must-have” items to which I devoted precious space in my luggage: 10 pound yoga mat. Carbon monoxide detector. A collection of McCormick spices (albeit not Taco Seasoning Premium). Memory foam pillow. Calcium supplements. Peanut butter.



So here’s to carrying on the American legacy on Turgeneva Street, with enough spices for a few curries, and then some.

And now to Crimea

After two months in the capital, I’ve finally moved down to Simferopol, Crimea to begin working on my project. That's me there in the middle:

Thanks to Lyuba for the picture, on which she tagged me on Facebook :)

I arrived yesterday morning on the train from Kyiv and my landlord Sergei met me at the train station. I originally got in touch with Sergei through Austin, who just finished his Fulbright year in Simferopol a few months ago and lived in this same apartment. Interesting side note - Austin taught English a few years ago at the London School in Bishkek, where I studied Russian last spring. Yes, he also gave me a list of his friends on the peninsula so I totally take over his life completely here.

So I come off the train with my 10 months of clothes and books and other necessities and make a little mountain with my baggage on the platform. Dad- imagine what I looked like when you drove me to TVC plus winter clothes and an overnight train ride. I waited not one minute before seeing a friendly looking man in a “Birch Street Elementary School” gray hooded sweatshirt holding up a sign reading “E L I Z A B E T”, looking at me but trying to pretend he hadn’t already pegged me as the American student with a year’s worth of baggage looking around clueless.

As we drove to the flat he told me about his previous tenants over the past 6 years - they’ve all been Americans. The first found him through a real estate agency, and worked for two years at a local museum before returning to Baltimore. Since then the apartment has been handed down by word of mouth, good for us in the line who didn’t have to go through a real estate agency to find accommodation, and good for Sergei, who prefers to rent to Americans because they’re аккуратные. And of course we don’t mind paying in Dollars. But I am quite lucky to have Sergei as a landlord, who seems like a really nice guy. I am comparing this to my Kyiv landlord, who called all our mutual acquaintances, told them I stole antiques, left blood in the refrigerator and wrote all over her walls, and tried to get them to pay her for the "damages." I suppose I've been busy lately and didn't have time to blog about that...

The place is more or less how Austin described it. The building itself is typically post-war, and the entry way and courtyard formed by the surrounding apartments look exactly like the area I lived in Bishkek, except in the middle there is a common laundry line instead of a playground. A kid about 14 years old sat on the stairway to the building and played Russian rap from the tiny speakers of his cell phone.

Inside the kitchen has plenty of space, getting bonus points for the oven and microwave. The bathroom has a nice large bathtub. The living room is large and has all the necessary furniture. There is a television, but when pointing it out Sergei sighed and said that it only gets Ukrainian programming. “Watch it and you can teach yourself Ukrainian!” he laughed. The bedroom is actually a storage unit mostly full of boxes belonging to Sergei’s mother who now lives in New York. But there is a large comfortable bed in the corner and what’s left of the space is still considerably larger than my Kutlu Sokak flat where I had to get dressed either in the kitchen or standing on my bed.

In about a hour and a half I have my first lesson with my new Russian tutor, Laryssa. We're meeting at my house because all the schools and universities and Ukraine are closed in preventative quarantine due to the swine flu. I don't have internet at my place yet, so I'm blogging and catching up on email at the Hotel Imperial near my house, in their cafe decorated only in pink.

A trip to Chernobyl and Pripyat

Ask a Ukrainian when he stopped believing in communism, and the answers vary. A few quote the invasion of Czechoslovakia, some the Afghan war, others the discovery of Stalin's mass graves at Bykivnya. Many, like Lyashenko, look blank, because they have not really stopped believing in communism at all. But by far the likeliest reply is 'Chernobyl'. ...Imperilling everyone impartially and in the most basic and dramatic fashion, no other single piece of communist bungling did more to turn public opinion against the regime.

- Anna Reid, Borderland

So many have photographed and written about Chernobyl I almost hesitate to even take a stab at it - what more can be said about this tragic, lonely post-Soviet space? Over Photoshopped pictures of abandoned buildings with orange skies, the ferris wheel, the empty classrooms. But a few weeks after my visit I'm still thinking of this place.



A trip to Chernobyl comprises not only the nuclear plant and exploded reactor, but the city of Pripyat and surrounding villages, locked in an open-air 1986 time capsule. The Fulbright office organized the trip for us with a local tour agency. We got on the bus at 7 in the morning and set off for the exclusion zone. Technically, tourism is still not allowed in the "zone." Visitors are allowed under the guise of "educational excursions." For this reason, independent visits to Chernobyl are difficult, and most visitors chose to go with a tour agency.


When I first told Anna, my Russian teacher, about my upcoming trip to Chernobyl she seemed a bit disappointed. She knew that some of the Fulbright students were just arriving, and she didn't think it right that the first thing they see be Chernobyl, when Ukraine has so many other beautiful destinations. "Why is everyone so interested in Chernobyl?" She asked me. Melissa, another Fulbrighter, told a woman on her Odesa-Kyiv train that she was going on an excursion to Chernobyl. The woman gave her a similar look. "Why Chernobyl?"




As you walk around the city of Pripyat and the other abandoned villages in the area, you see a lot of what a Frenchman on our trip constantly referred to as "hyper-reality." Almost 25 years after the disaster, thousands have visited the site, and some have rearranged the left items. In one small house in a surrounding village, a day calendar was still hanging on the wall, with the date "April 26, 1986" never removed. Family photos were carefully placed around the room. Many toys have been rearranged so the visitor encounters them in doorways, on tabletops, on sidewalks. Yet regardless of what was arranged here and there since the disaster, all of these things were once part of the lives of the citizens of Pripyat.


Throughout the city of Pripyat, it is obvious that scavengers have removed materials of value, such as metal hand railings and fences. Our guide pointed this out to us, and one of the others on the tour asked him what the metal had been used for. He shrugged and said there was no way to know. A joke from the crowd about silverware and utensils got a few chuckles as we walked on.

In the prison, some found discipline slips scattered on the floor, issued to individual prisoners and listing their infractions and punishments. The doors to the individual cells were all open and the rooms were dark. In the maternity ward of the hospital and the back of the kindergarten, white metal cribs and beds were scattered and rusting. The floorboards of the sport center's court were warped and peeling.

In one of the schools, there is a room where several boxes of child-size gas masks have been dumped out onto the floor. They were delivered to the school in the confusion following the disaster but never used. This is a famous stop on the tour.


The day after our trip to Chernobyl, I happened to meet one of the first photographers to photograph the city. It was quite an opportunity to talk to her about her first trips there, and the ways in which the zone has changed over the years. She talked a bit about tourism to the area, and visitors changing the space when they visit it. She commented that it was much more striking years ago, when the disaster was fresh and tourism had not yet begun.




I asked her opinion on the graffiti that can be found throughout Pripat. She just shook her head and said that it was something new. That it wasn't there before. Although I found much of it quite striking - and even beautiful - I can understand her negative feelings about it. To visit the zone again and again after so many years, and see it change from a deserted Soviet city with everything locked in time to an international space evolving in its own way.


Since visiting Chernobyl, I've looked at a number of blog posts and photo collections of Chernobyl visits and impressions. Many of them include at least one photograph of these Banksy-like haunting images. One thing that struck me when viewing other's photographs from a few years before my visit is that even this art is fading away as the forest takes back the city. The color in the dress of the little girl by the elevator is fading and the wall is showing through. The dancer in the city square are turning from black to gray.




I'd like to think I'm not prone to excessively dramatic thoughts, but in the few weeks since the excursion, I've found myself thinking quite a few times about some of the specific apartments and buildings that we visited - sitting the same way, slowly wearing away as my own inhabited spaces are dirtied and tidied, swept up and reorganized.


Towards the end of the tour we climbed to the top of one of the tallest apartment buildings in Pripyat. By this time it almost seemed normal to be walking around an abandoned zone, looking in other people's bedrooms and classrooms and offices. On the top of the apartment we looked across the forest and town, squeezed past the giant neon sign on the top of the building to get to the other side of roof. Then we suddenly heard a noise from across the city and we all turned to look - it was a tour bus starting its engine in the silence.


Despite its current state, it is not difficult to imagine Prypyat as the beautiful city it no doubt was. And although it is difficult to detach our emotions from our post-Chernobyl, post-Five Mile Island skepticism of nuclear power, imagine how great it must have been to stand in this city built on nuclear power. How proud this city must have been, before that sign of radiation took on the terrifying connotation it has today.


On our way home, we all turned in our radiation measurement devices and received a "certificate" indicating how much radiation received during the day and a 5% off coupon for any further excursions organized through Chernobyl Tours.

A month in

A month in, and a bit more settled. Visits from David and Maggie, who both came bearing presents of olive oil and lokum! And of course catching up and good times. David and I spent a weekend in Lviv and also explored Kyiv. Maggie came for the bayram and we stayed in Kyiv, but saw quite a bit. Also managed to fill up a suitcase of decent wine and European cheese for her to bring back to Istanbul. I think this was a trip second only to the wonderful Indian (at Himalaya) we had our first night.

For those of you who are fans of David's photography, and I know there are quite a few of you out there, you can find his photos from the trip here. The Chernobyl album is here. I wanted to share one of my favorite of his pictures, taken on Andriyivskyi Uzviz in Kyiv:


There are so many things I like about this photograph. Most of all how it reminds me of seeing this couple at the time and thinking, "How ridiculously sweet..."

----

This past week I attended an interesting conference titled "World War II and the (Re)Creation of Historical Memory in Contemporary Ukraine." Not in any way an area of expertise for me, so it was quite interesting to passively participate in. Also: Mariah Carey interference on my simultaneous translation device, reception at Polish Embassy, meeting academics at all levels of investment warning me about the dangers of graduate school, and all-night documentary film festival on Saturday. Unfortunately regarding the last item, I was not in attendance. Great idea, but I do think you'd need to be quite dedicated to not fall asleep just thinking about the following collection of words, all in one place: overnight. world war two. documentary. Shall I add: academics. Really, great idea though! I instead spent my Saturday night eating sushi, getting dragged to a place that some of us call the "underground military bar" (because it is actually underground, not because it is actually cool) to eat borsch and drink half a beer only to retire by 10.

Settling in

I'm sitting on the balcony of my new Kyiv apartment, and although at times this weekend was quite sunny and a bit stifling, at the moment it feels more like autumn as the center winds down from the weekend.

I haven't written in awhile...there are still posts from both Kyrgyzstan and Georgia that never materialized. In theory I was going to finish these posts (half-written in my mind for months) before starting on my time in Kyiv, but if I do that it may be quite some time before I get out another post.

I'm studying Russian here for two months, then moving down to Simferopol to begin my research. Since arriving last week, I've managed to locate almost all my basic needs - SIM card, trusty neighbourhood cafes, flat, market. On the list of basic needs to be soon fulfilled: internet, French press, lamp to replace the one I've already broken (whoops).

Before I left for Kyiv, I found out that a friend of mine from Bishkek, a fellow Russian student named Michael, is also living here in Kyiv, working at a German NGO. He offered to let me stay with him until I found a place. I am so thankful for his hospitality. Waiting 90 minutes at passport control only to find out my baggage was lost and my prearranged driver had already left the airport, it was wonderful to know that I had a friendly face waiting for me somewhere out there is this new city.

So then I was left with the question of a more permanent residence. The language school I'm attending provides quite costly accommodation. I lucked out considerably when Brian, another student here, was approached on the marshrutka by a woman wanting to rent out her apartment. Unfortunately (for him), he had already found an apartment, so he passed it on to me. Bypassing both the school and real estate agents, I was thus able to find a cozy, affordable one-bedroom flat in the center.

For affordable groceries, however, I have to leave downtown, with its expensive loaves of bread and lack of fresh vegetables, and venture to less central markets and grocery stores. This is most certainly more than worth the effort, as now is a great time of year for fruits and veggies. Frequenting produce markets is my favorite way to slowly acquaint myself with both the food and the people of places I visit.

Aside from settling in and orienting myself, I've yet to see much of the city. Unfortunately I missed the Independence Day events waiting in Michael's apartment for delivery of my missing luggage. A friend (David, whom you may remember from a Kyrgyzstan post or two) will be visiting next week, and I hope to be able to show him around with a minimum of navigational blunders. I have yet to schedule the weekend's entertainment (aside from a day-trip to Chernobyl) - this weekend is the opening of the opera season, so opera tickets are naturally sold out. As a backup, I tried to get tickets to the Ukrainian theatre, but the woman in the kacca was not too keen on selling me tickets to Saturday's show..."But it is in Ukrainian!! You won't understand it!!!" I got scared and ran away.

Please send me an email if you would like my local address and/or telephone numbers, and add your address if you'd like to engage in low-tech correspondence.