So life has been pretty interesting in the month or more since I last posted. I've visited a number of other cities, from really antisemtic Lviv in the west (covered in swastika grafitti and some 80 percent of people interviewed on the street had something bad to say about Jews) to pretty-inclusive Poltava, where people stopped on the street railed about what little antisemitic graffiti there was up (of course it was up; you can't escape it in Ukraine, save, perhaps, in Odessa). But ironically it was there that I talked to not one, but two rabid antisemites. Both pulled out books to show me. One was by Vasiliy Yaremenko. The other was by David Duke. Small world. I had contacted David Duke by email to get his permission to use excerpts from his radio broadcasts in the documentary. He wrote back and agreed. Former Klu Klux Klan member, former Representative from Louisiana, he's authored some bestselling (in Eastern Europe anyway) books about a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. He's also recieved a doctoral degree from MAUP, a university in Ukraine infamous for publishing literature of similar themes. He is ardently anti-zionist, some would say antisemetic, although that kind of talk gets you sued. The week before I had interviewed Yaremenko on camera, who is also a director at MAUP and he spoke for a long time about how Jews are in complete control of Ukrainain politics and finances and responsible for the millions of Ukrainian deaths in a famine manufactured under Stalin in the '20s. He told me, at interview's end and when the camera was off, that if I said he was antisemtic in the film or misrepresented his words, he would sue me. It's not an empty threat: MAUP has sued pretty much anyone who has said it or Yaremenko is antisemitic for slander. I'm not worried: I have no intention of saying he is antisemtic or misrepresenting him. I'm just going to put what he said in the film and let people make their own decisions. I did get thrown of MAUP's campus later, though. I was interviewing students, all of whom (of course) said positive things about the university and all (but one) admitted they didn't read the publications that MAUP is so infamous for. Then security escorted me off. I was on the sidewalk getting interviews from students and had every right to be there, but security kept bugging me to leave and was intercepting me from talking to students. So I got some shots of a kiosk of theirs selling books about the "Jewish question" with them continually asking/telling me to leave but hamstrung by the fact that they could not actually make me do so on the sidewalk. Part of it is on tape, although when they told me to turn the camera off I did because, I don't know, I'm not a complete jerk and I sympathize: they don't want me interviewing their students without permission and its the response most universities would have. It's made me think a lot lately. I could so easily put forth all this stuff about MAUP making it look bad and then toss in, without commentary, these three guards, pointing me off campus and people would go: "look, they're scared becaues they know they're antisemetic" and, really, that's too easy and facile. These issues are so touchy, especially here, that I'm really commited to making as serious and balanced a work as I can without resorting to Michael Moore type tactics (which I say with all respect considering his films started my interest in documentaries, but if you ever deconstruct "Bowling for Columbine" you realize how easy you can lie or mislead via editing).

Still, those books that the antisemites (and they proudly labeled themselves antisemites, so no worries about libel there) had seemed to have left an impression. Both, one on camera and the other off, vehemently went on about Jewish control in Ukraine. The off camera one's suggestion was to "do something" but was unsure what. The on camera one had less ambiguity: "kill them all." I brought up a Jewish woman I had interviewed several weeks before: she had just been attacked with her husband in Zhytomyr, and she was left in the hospital for two weeks. She has 8 kids. Did he really agree with that kind of violence. "Yes," he said. "She hasn't done anything to you," I said. "She's raising 8 more Jews who will likely become Zionists." Even he agreed, though, that his views were in the extreme minority in Ukraine, but only because Ukrainians hadn't yet "woken up" about it.

With his interview, I finally felt I had enough sides: official and street, Jewish and anti-Jewish, to give a depiction of the status of Ukraine today. I still have some stuff I'm shooting here and there and couple more interviews lined up, but I've even been closing off the tap of interest in talking to me because I'm at risk of overflowing and my main job now is get rid of everything I don't need.

Both sides have threatened to sue me, though, including the head of the Union for the Council of Soviet Jewry for Ukraine. He's a great guy, actually, but he's just as worried about being represented as everyone else. It's nice to know I've got everybody worried, though. I once heard that a perfectly balanced journalism piece on a controversial topic is one that pisses off both sides. If one is happy, it's because you leaned too much their way.

Possibly I should have just made a film only about antisemitism in Ukraine. It wasn't where I originally started and I don't know that many people would find it interesting divorced from the story of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Especially, as everyone points out, if you want to do a story on antisemtisim in Europe, go to Russia. But the holocaust story in Ukraine has been the most frustrating because historical footage and photographs have been extremely hard to get a hold of, at least in the quality I need for showing in a film. The archives in Ukraine are a beaurcratic nightmare and the one in America is obscenely expensive ($15 per photo, and don't get me started on film). Someone explain to me why I decided my first film should be an historical one in a foreign country and requires the use of four languages?

I've been milking the networking. The path of the holocaust is well-trodden, at least by museum exhibitors. It's a matter of getting their permission and materials. I thought I had a good thing going at the Lviv museum. Three days spent having coffee with the curator and together we got permission from the director. But all those photos are on a hard drive she didn't have access to because the person was on vacation. And now they don't want to mail them to me and I think said currator is avoiding my phone calls. I think I'm going to have to make another trip there to try and get those materials. That's okay, there's also a crazy rabbi there to interview. They tried to set his door on fire, among other things, but he also talks nonstop in a stream of conciousness way (he once went on for half an hour on the phone with me, me not saying a word, about the numerical importance of the sabbath. The question I had asked him was "when did this happen?" refering to the door-on-fire incident. He actually never answered that question.

I also have a contact through a contact with the Kyiv archive and another contact through a contact for the Zhytomyr one (although that one tried to milk me by trying to sell me "archival" footage, which turned out to be bootlegged DVDs of BBC documentaries on the war dubbed in Russian. I did pick up some of them off him both for goodwill and to use the footage as temp footage during editing until I get access to higher quality. I'm hoping he'll come through on photographs). All of this stuff is public forum, even by Ukrainian law, but it's a matter of getting good quality scans.

It all should be wrapping up soon, though. Editing is coming along well, but slowly, and my intention to completly edit in Ukraine has been changed by changing visa laws. I was all set to get on a train to Poland last night to stay for as long as it took me to walk back over to Ukraine. Why? Because Americans get a 90 day stay for free. People had been leaving and coming back every 90 days to work in Ukraine (as had been my intention) when not one, but two people tipped me off at dinner AN HOUR before I was to get on the train that they had just changed the visa rules that if you came in under the 90 day thing, you had to leave for 6 months before you could do it again. So I might have gotten off in Poland with only a change of clothes and a tooth brush and had not been able to get back in again, with all my stuff still in zhytomyr. As is, I talked to the American embassy and the best bet is to do what other people have done: overstay the 90 days and pay a fine on the way out (between $18 and $140 depending on the border guard, but legally it can not be more than $140). I ate the ticket to Poland and went out with friends to a latin-themed dance club.

But I also don't like staying in the country illegally, so I'm going wrap things up and be out by the end of September. My ticket between Budapest and New York is moveable to when I want, but the New York to Orlando ticket is October 4th, moveable at $30 a time, so I might as well make that the target date.

Right now I'm babysitting a scanner in Kyiv, scanning orginal documents left by the Nazis. It's about 50 large leaflets dealing with Jews in '41-'42. Announcements to go the the ghetto and how much they could bring, announcements that aiding Jews would bring a death penalty, announcements proclaiming to Ukrainian that the horrors of the Soviet Unions were due to Jews, and announcements for "relocation" and for Jews to gather for it, which is when they would take them outside the city and shoot them. Little of it is of use in the film, it's all in Russian or Ukrainian and has nothing visual, but since I came upon this small cache of documents at a small institute in Kyiv (friend of a friend thing again) I've decided I want to preserve it. A lot of what I've found and will get is going on the web, so others can have less trouble finding and using these materials. I hope to create a small, free online archive of sorts of scanned original materials so that people can use them in research or documentaries.

Anyway, in all liklihood I'll be back in Orlando October 4th, laden with hard drives laden with stuff. Wish me luck!

Left Odessa last night after four days of filming and four nights of partying.

Odessa started off badly. My main reason for going was to film the new mass grave they found last month. More than 11,000 Jews had been executed and buried there, only discovered when workers were digging to lay wires. My contact with the Jewish center here said I could get in with a team that was going daily to the grave to examine it. He said that last week when I bought the ticket, but the day before, when I called to see if we were going the day I got off the train (I was arriving at 6 AM), he said just to come down, meet him at 10: 30 and we would talk about it.

I met him. He said work had already finished, but gave me information about how to get there. It was outside a village. There was only one bus there per day, 4.5 hours. Once there, I would need to find someone to take me in for the night. I called the contact there he gave me. She told me there wasn't much to see, but that I was welcome to come. The bones had been reburied, leaving only a dirt and sand patch. Was that worth spending two days going out to?

I talked to my contact. Aren't there photos, videos? Sure. Who has them? He's not sure.

***

Another frustration was a lack of a place to stay. I was crashing the first night with a Peace Corps Volunteer, but he was leaving the next day. I knew three other Ukrainians in Odessa (had dated two of them) and they knew I was coming down. Surely someone would have a place for me to sleep. I called. Two were leaving town that day, one rented a room from a woman and was not allowed to have guests. Hmm. Should have planned this all better. But then said Peace Corps volunteer introduced me to four other volunteers in Odessa on vacation. Together, we rented an apartment. Craziness ensued.

***

The next day I had a follow-up interview with a holocaust surivor that I had interviewed the previous day. He took me out to the spot where his family had been murdered, along with 10,000 other Jews. He, a boy at the time, had escaped in the melee. He was one of three holocaust survivors I interviewed in Odessa, all of their stories heartbreaking. One had a friend whose mother had saved her daughter by putting her back to the firing squad and holding her daughter in front of her. She fell into the pit dead, but the daughter was unharmed. When the daughter--whose name was Sofika--crawled out of the pit, she came face to face with a German soldier left to guard the pit. He pointed his gun at her, then lowered it, letting her leave. She came to a house and the woman there took her in, told her to forget she was a Jew and then raised her. Sofika--who did not look Jewish--changed her name to Dasha, grew up, married a Ukrainian and had two children, who never learned their Jewish heritage. When the woman I interviewed ran into her long after the war, Sofika/Dasha begged her to keep her heritage secret. It was only until after the fall of the Soviet Union and Sofika/Dasha felt it was okay to talk about.

***

With getting to the grave a bust, I decided to explore the other incident I thought would be worth filming:

Odessa had about 700 graves at the Jewish cemetary defaced withswastikas in May. I was told that they'd been cleaned and it wasn'tworth going out there, but I decided to see if I could at least speakto someone. I introduced myself to the caretaker and he said hedidn't want to talk about it, on camera or at all, and, no, there wasno one else I could talk to. He was being a bit of a dick, actually.So we stand there for a few minutes, me debating my options (none) andhe asks if I smoke. I say I do, thinking he's asking to have acigarette with me and maybe I'll massage this into him talking. Heasks if I have matches. Oh. I don't.

He complains he's askedeveryone coming into the cemetary for two hours and no one has, hencehim not smoking. I leave. It's on the outside of the city, but afterabout ten minutes of walking I find a kiosk, buy a pack of Malborosand two lighters and head back.I hand him a lighter and we both sit down on a bench. I smoke one I just bought, taking the smoke into my mouth without inhaling yet (BillClinton was right, it can be done) until we're both down to thefilter. We do this without speaking, and then he says "What do youwant to know?"

By now I have learned to not ask a single question or, in fact, letanyone speak until the camera is out. People have the tendency tojust start talking, camera or no, and when they start it's usually themost important stuff. So I take out the camera. He doesn't want tobe on camera. So I point it to the distance figuring I'll get shotsof his hands or whatever. He says it can record his voice, but thecamera has to be in the bag. So I hook up a shotgun mic, it's cordnow trailing into the bag, which he confirms is closed. Then hestarts talking. It's not top secret shit, either, just what he foundand how long it took them to clean it off and he's kind of annoyed athaving to do the work, and there's also a tinge that he doesn't likethe Jews either. Not that they deserved it, but that he's got toclean up graves because of something going on between them and theskinheads.So we wrap it up and I'm wondering what I'm going to do with just avoice. Overlay images of the defaced graves? Who do I get thosefrom?

I had already asked about them, but no one seemed to know who would have them. The caretaker--Sergei--seemed to think it was a waste of time to filmthe graves at this point, but I needed some kind of imagery. After mehassling him, he pointed to which area they were in. And I wasfucking jaw-dropped when I got there. Grave after fucking grave stillhad the swastikas on them. Some had been scrubbed to where there was only a ghost of them, some just had the red paint in between carvedletters, where scrubbing was too much effort, but a number seemed tohave not been cleaned at all. Within fifteen minutes I had shot atleast 40 graves with recognizable swastikas on them, all the worsebecause many of the graves had pictures of the deceased carved intothem, so there's a swastika right over their faces. One--of aswastika right over the face of this 8 year-old boy, was heartbreaking. Most of the graves had fencing around them, a traditionhere, so it meant the people who did it climbed over 700 differentfences to paint that many graves. Fucking A.

And the fact that anattempt had been made to clean them meant that they'll remain that wayuntil the paint is finally weathered off. You could probably come inten years and still see them.

Despite that, Odessa is quite anti-antisemitic. What few antisemiticgraffiti I saw was crossed out with ANTIFA painted below (which standsfor anitfasism) and I saw far more ANIFA graffiti, including stenciledspray paints of a silloutte tossing a swastika in a trash can andwriting like "death to fasisim" and "die Nazi scum". I also saw farmore anti-NATO graffiti and hammer and sickles, meaning Odessa'sconcerns are quite different from say, Zhytomyr and Lviv, which iswhere hard-core Nationalism is on the rise.In the end, I lucked out with Sergei. Another guy, Pavel, was therewhen I returned from the graves, carving a headstone set up on two sawhorses. That was visually interesting, so I asked to film it, and heagreed, provided I didn't show his face. He had helped clean thegraffiti on the graves as well, telling me about it with the camerapointed at the headstone. Sergei came over after a while and jokedwith Pavel, me making sure to keep the camera pointed down and not really seeing where it was pointed but hoping to catch anything goodthey might say on the mic. I looked at the footage later, though, andit's about three minutes of Sergei's hands on the shiny granite, halfhis body reflected but not is face. It was the perfect "anonymous"image to go with his voice and I didn't even mean for it to happen.

***

I spent three days hassling everyone I could meet about getting photos or videos of the mass graves or the cemetary defacement. The secretary at the Jewish Cultural Center took to glaring at me the second I walked in. I hated to be a problem to anyone, but at the same time if you don't push in this country, it doesn't happen.

Finally I got a hold of the press guy for the Synagogue. I met him at his office. He had deleted those photos, he told me. What? Well, maybe this other guy had them on his computer, but he was in Israel. Maybe my frustration leaked through, because he asked me to wait and went to make some calls. I really felt low. All the way down here, burning money that's not coming back anytime soon, to not get any useable evidence of this grave. The Holocaust testimonials and the footage from the cemetary was great, but I had pinned a lot of hope on this mass grave. I hoped to bookend the film with the grave's discovery. It made the film timely, that more than 60 years later, we were still finding graves from this relatively unknown part of the Holocaust.

The press guy comes back with a piece of paper with a code on it. Had he seriously just called this guy in Israel? He punches the code into this other guy's computer and is soon rooting through photos. He finds them and transfers them to my ipod. Then he says "maybe you could use this," and holds up a DVD. He pops it into the computer and it's RAW FOOTAGE of the graves the day they were found, including INTERVIEWS WITH THE PEOPLE WHO FOUND THEM. "You can take this and copy it if you want," he said, my eyes bugging out of my head. "Who shot this?" I asked. "Who do I need to ask for permission to use it?" "Oh, it's ours," he said, "we bought it off of a television station." "Can I get written permission from you to use this in my film?" "Yeah, I'll just get the rabbi to do it when he gets back."

I practically ran down the street to find an internet cafe and had them copy the disk. I had them check it twice before I gave it back and still occassionally find myself patting it in my backpack.

The next day, the press guy, who I still want to kiss as I type this (in a very hetero-masculine way), said he found where to get photos of the defaced headstones. He couldn't get them before I left, but he promised he'd put them on disk and give them to the volunteer in Odessa, who can mail them to me. And when the rabbi gets back he'll see about getting permission.

It was like a three day knot unwound from my body. I spent my last five hours in Odessa on a beach with another volunteer, playing beach volleyball, swimming in the Black Sea, listening to music pumped out from a PA system (interrupted repeatedly by offers of a free SIM card from the mobile company sponsoring the music) and oggling the many beautiful sights (Ukrainians don't have much problem with sunbathing topless).

Life is good.

The film finally has a working title:

Black Earth: the Holocaust and Antisemitism in Ukraine

"Black Earth", of course, refers to Ukraine's famed black earth, but possibly people won't know that. I like the associations with the sins and the mass graves, but I can also see someone thinking it's about African-Americans.

Interviewed the director of the Zhytomyr branch of MAUP, theuniversity that puts out the antisemitic lietrature. It was a he, now it's a she. I don't know why he was suddenly replaced, but at least she was willing to talk. We talked aboutMAUP having its accredidation pulled, but when I moved onto theliterature, she said she never actually read the stuff THAT THEYDISTRIBUTE AT THEIR SCHOOL.

Interviewed the cop who is responsible for the rabbi attack case. Hedidn't want to talk on camera, but the camera was on my shoulder andpointing off at an angle, so I switched it on anyway. He doesn'tthink they'll catch the guys who did it, but said they were steppingup patrols near the synagogue.I interviewed the rabbi who had been attacked the next morning. Allthe Jews have been cautious about saying anything bad about theauthorities on camera, but he was so livid that he was tearing intotheir lack of effort and their constant denial that any attacks areantisemitic vs. acts of hooliganism. The problem: Daniel didn't havethe camera switched on. I had turned it on during set-up because hewas working on his computer and I figured I could use it for cutshots, but when I had the mic ready and was starting the interview, Imust have instinctively hit the record but (no memory of doing this,but it's what must have happened) because next thing I know the camerais powering down from being left idling too long and when I switch itback on I notice only a minute of tape has rolled (the minute from set

that, but I missed his initial outburst about the cops. Grr.

He andI are still supposed to have a lengthy sit down interview about a broad number of topics, so maybe I can get him to say it again. Went to Kyiv yesterday and was taken on a personal 3 hour tour of Babyn Yar by the head of the Judaica institute. She talked so much it took up 2.5 hours of tape and ran my battery into the ground. I thought it would be much briefer and left my back-up battery in Zhytomyr (I had forgotten to charge it the night before anyway) and as I watched the battery tick down I started to go to manual on everything, including the focus, to save power. Thing is, she standing still. We're walking all over Babyn Yar and I'm shooting handheld, monitoring sound, keeping focus, trying to understand her Russian and trying not to fall on all the rocks and branches (it's a big ravine). I was mentally exhausted by the end, but got a lot of good information. More to the point, she gave me permission to dig throughtheir archives. She says they have a number of photos from the war, which I should be able to scan myself. This is good, because the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC wants $15 for EACH PHOTO that they give me on disk. Fuck that.

I'm also getting slightly raped by the archives here in Zhytomyr. FINALLY, after a whole lot of wrangling, I got access to the archives and it's a treasure trove. Page after hand-written page of tesitmonies and findings that the Soviets compiled on any bit of paper they could find (some of it is on the back of German maps), documenting what had happened in Zhytomyr and Berdichev during the war and then locking it all away. It even looks visually good: this thick folder of aging paper, and the writing is in various colors: blue, purple, red, black, with notes in the margins.

Problem is, I have yet to get permission tophotograph it (technically I should not be allowed to at all, but I'mholding out hope), and I couldn't even photocopy it because--had thephotocopier not been broken anyway--I need permission from thedirector for each PAGE copied, and when I do get that permission, eachone will cost me 7 UAH ($1.40) (so much for me planning on copyingeverything to have a small archive of my own). Marina and I jokingly concoted a plan for taking turns in the bathroomphotographing them with a digital camera, but we're not so stupid as to actually try it.

Still, that moment was a long time coming. I'd seen parts of thetexts already: there are microfiche copies of some of it in Yad Vashemand the Garrards (the authors who wrote the Bones of Berdichev)reference them in their book, but even they haven't seen the actualcopies, and there I was, with them in my hands, sitting at a desk andflipping through them. I didn't even want to give them back becausesome paranoid part of me worried that the next time I came back I'dhave lost permission to see them or that they'd have dissapeared.It's hard to explain how important these pieces of paper are to me.They aren't even typed Soviet reports or anything. It's thehandwriting from 60 years ago of a handful of NKVD officers goingaround saying "what happened here? what happened here?", andscrawling it down. It's as raw a first-hand account as we're going toget, completely untainted by the passage of time (as survivor'smemories are), although, of course, taininted by the politics of theday...

Two things happened that made me decide to stay until September: One, the rabbi of Zhytomyr was attacked. Again. Secondly, a company I worked with last summer on my climbing camp has greatly expanded themselves and now own a television channel and set themselves up a production studio. They have a documentary. They need someone to do the English translation and hock it in America. I need post-production work. They're not going to do it for free, but at a discount of what is already obscenely cheap compared to America.

This is a massive risk because when I go back, the teaching year will have started and there may be no slots. I might find a job, I might be waiting tables until next fall. But I now have enough faith in what I've filmed so far to think that this movie will sell. I never thought that before: it was a personal project. But I've gotten enough great footage--not just good, but great--that I feel I can make a powerful film with what I have, let alone some of the interviews I have been promised, which migh kick it up another notch (sorry to be vague, but unless I have something, I don't like talking about it).

On other news, A woman in Chicago who works for a company that doesDNA testing for Jews looking to find which graves hold their relativesheard about my project (from an attendee of a presentation I gave inTucson in March on the Holocaust in Ukraine; how random is that?). Ifilled her in on the status of the documentary and, finding that I wasself-funding it, she offered to find my some funding from hercontacts. She asked for a dollar figure and I have no idea how muchto ask for. I could finish the film for $2,000; I could finish it for$50,000 or more, depending. I have been afraid to crunch numbers because I didn't really want to think of how difficult it might actually be to finish the film when it comes to post. But I've now started doing all the research to put the final budget together.

Somone finally came through with finding me some skinheads. Twogroups, one in Kyiv and one in Zhytomyr have been informed I want to talk to themand they are willing. The Zhytomyr group had already heard of me:apparently word has already gotten around that the American constantlyseen with a tripod strapped to his back is doing a film onantisemitism. I've also got a lead on an antisemtic group in Poltavathat holds regular meetings and wouldn't that be a hell of a thing tofilm...

Also, I found a perfect song for the film, by a Ukrainian group calledBoombox. It's called Kviti v Volocia ("Flowers in the hair " inUkrainian), but it's not so much the lyrics (about a couple who promise to be together forever, but the boy is called away to work overseas) as themood of the whole song. It's this slow, haunting melody on accousticguitar, punctuated occasionally with brief turntable scratching. Somesoft singing by the (male) lead singer in Ukrainian, then it kicks inwith a slow break drum beat, the guitar continuing and soon the guy iswailing over all it it. As soon as I heard it I was seeing the imageslaid over it of graffiti, broken gravestones, broken windows andsnippets of Ukrainians bashing on Jews (which, I've found have beenprogressively easier to get; Mariana I have been "bombing" inZhytomyr, Kiev and surrounding villages. She walks up, microphone inhand, me with and already turned on camera and starts asking aboutJews. Caught off guard they start talking and it's all unvarnished.Asking permission, we have found, gets us nowhere, and since it'sobvious the microphone is connected to a camera pointing straight atthem, it's not like they don't know what's going on). I had beenwanting to get a more modern, sad, but still obviously Ukrainian song. i think I've found it.At first, I thought I'd put together a "music video" for the film tothe song and toss it on YouTube, which the fundraiser in Chicago hassuggested I do to help her show people what I have so far. I figuredI'd never get the rights to the song for use in a distributed film asBoombox is a nationally known group here. But I mentioned wanting touse that song to a friend of mine last night. She reminded me of aguy who works at a Zhytomyr radio station that is friends with herbrother, who also works there (I met all of them about a year ago atan event put on by the station). He's friends with the members ofBoombox, who happen to live in Rivne, near where Jon used to live.Apparently they'd be cool with something like that and would probablywelcome the American exposure, she said. She's going to try to get mea meeting with them. And I have also become aquainted with a coupleof PR people working in Kyiv who are now bothering their mediacontacts about getting me footage that the news has shot for variousstories (finding the graves, the Torah scrolls being confiscated, MAUPloosing their accredidation, etc.).So, a lot of potential, but I'm not holding my breath. Still, I havefound telling every person I meet about the film means that usefulstuff gets back to me. Now we just have to see what comes through.Extending to September, though, was a good idea. Otherwise I'd be inan insane time crunch and if I've relearned anything, it's that stuffcan happen, it just takes a lot of time. Especially in Ukraine.

Life has picked up considerably. Spent two days interviewing warsurvivors and some of the stories are really heartbreaking, althoughfew are related to the Holocaust (even though the survivors areJewish, they survived because they fled as the Germans advanced; theirmemories are of living in Tajikistan or Kazakstan or Siberia until theend of the war).

One woman I met with today, though, was Ukrainianand hid Jews during the war. I know of a Fulbright Scholar in Lvivwho is also going to tell me about her main subject of research: apriest who hid dozens of Jewish children during the war. So at leastI am going to balance some positive with the negative of theHolocaust.

And in other positive news, the more I interview various people, themore interesting commanalities come to light. For example, I havethree different Ukrainian girls on camera saying that Jews make thebest husbands and they'd love to marry one. I also have six or morepeople, including the antisemites, saying that Jews are extremelysmart and three people saying that's why there's distrust and dislikeof them. Jews being an educated group is not an amazingly newstereotype, but how much it's mentioned here, I realized that togenerations of non-educated Ukrainian farmers, that would stand outparticularly. Also, I have a few Jews (possibly too proudly for theirown good) also saying how smart and talented Jews are compared to therest of the world. I honestly would have thought of "jealousy ofeducation" as being a laughable excuse for antisemitism at best but ithas come up so frequently that Ihave to consider it as a possiblemotivation.

I'm about a week and a half into shooting and I have about 8 hours offootage, about a 1/3 of it useable and some of it very beautiful. I'malso learning that I have a lot more to learn about how to do thiswell, especially with limited equipment and only myself or on occasionmy friend Marina as crew. Take today, which turned out well but wasfrustrating at the time. The lesson: how difficult it can be to getgood sound out of someone you're interviewing on the fly because youcan't interrupt them to get a mic onto them. I had a camera that hadthat handled: it could handle a camera-mounted shotgun mic and awireless lavalier mic on two channels. I accidently broke that camerathe day I was supposed to fly to New York. Insurance should becovering it (keep fingers crossed), but I'm using the back-up camerawhich doesn't have the mounts or inputs, so either I have a handheldmic, the on camera mic (which sucks) or a lavalier mic.

Today: I'minterviewing the caretaker of the Jewish Cemetary in Zhytomyr, whichhas a lot of broken gravestones from skinheads defacing the place, buthe's not keen on doing an interview at first (I have learned inUkraine that asking for an interview will get you a "no". Turning thecamera on and starting to ask questions seems to be the best way togo) so getting the lavalier on him is not going to work. Marina isholding the shotgun mic near enough to him and we're getting greataudio but then he gets excited about showing us (everyone seems torelax after the first few minutes and then they get into it) and takesoff and starts pointing things out and is now out of mic range. Soshe's running after him to clip the lavalier on him but doesn't get itswitched on and he doesn't seem to get that the transmitter should beon his belt, so he's waving it around while he talks. She finallygets it on, but meanwhile I'm switching the inputs between the twomics and loose a good good chunk of everything he has just said.

Oy.Still, got enough to get the gist: skinheads breaking tombstones, copsdoing nothing, cut to still shots of broken tombstones. Done.

Another point of pride: the director of the Zhytomyr branch of MAUP,the private Ukrainian university that is infamous for printing anddistributing antisemetic literature in Kyiv, didn't want to talk to usabout it and said to talk to the main people in Kyiv. But on Friday,and you should enjoy this, the Ministry of Education pulled MAUP'saccredidation. Their reasons were for technical violations, not dueto the hate material, but everyone knows that is why (the authorotieshave been trying to get them to stop printing the antisemiticliterature for months now; see, there is hope!). So I cornered himin his office today and he said that it was all for PR and that theschool would continue as normal. I asked for an interview on this newdevelopment and he declined. Then I refused to leave his office andhe was late for a meeting so, flustered, he promised me one next week. Possibly he didn't mean it, but I then went and talked to hissecretary and I'll get her to schedule it. He did promise, afterall...

Going to another city tomorrow that was the site of the first plannedmassacre of Jews during the Holocaust (23,000) and then will be goingto Odessa tomorrow night or the next day to shoot some footage of thenew mass graves they discovered there.

I declined the New York job because I wouldn't be back in time,but then they said I could still have it provided I got to New Yorkbefore August 20th. Since that is very doable, I accepted. I'm notsure why: it will mean a flustered move and housing search, shittywinter weather and longer working hours and that will all cut intoediting the film.

The film is coming along in interesting ways. The Jewish school wanted one of their students to present about the holocaust in the little museum they have, buthe kept nervously moving around and I had to keep moving the camera tokeep in in frame (in retrospect, I should have just said "fuck it" andgone wide) and then his teacher kept interrupting and trying to showthis and that, but she's behind the camera. Thing is, a lapel mic ison him running into the camera, so I can only pick up what she'ssaying by pulling the plug and switching on the onboard mic, thenputting it back in when he starts talking again. So the result is thecamera swinging back and forth between the two of them and the soundconstantly cutting in and out as the mic is switching. It's prettyfunny to watch, but there's enough usable stuff in there to make itworth it.

I don't mind how bad some of the footage initially looksbecause I will be editing it, but then they asked for a copy of theraw footage and now I'm embarassed to give it.Went to the archives and spent four hours getting official permissionto access the historical documents related to the holocaut (as aforeigner, I had to get permission from the head director). Told himI wanted to interview him about the archive repossessing the Torahscrolls and he got really angry and refused. I asked who the officialspokeperson was that I could talk to and he realized it was him andthen grudgingly agreed to do it next week. I got him calmed down andsaid I just wanted to know the official side of things since Americansthought it was Ukraine being antisemitic (actually, most Americansdon't know about it, so I lied a little). He started talking, though,saying they took them back because the Jews had lost 90 meters of thescrolls (the Jews say those 90 meters never existed and it had beenmiscategorized; I should point out that these are a number of scrollsand scroll fragments). But the director, getting more comfortable,explained that now anyone could come see them whenever they wanted toand that they were much safer now. And then (God, I hope he says thison camera) he went on to say that the Jews should be thankful to thearchives for preserving the scrolls and keeping them safe after thewar. Actually, he has a point to this, but it still came off reallyhigh and mighty.

Getting people to say things on camera has been a problem. Myantisemtic friends that agreed to an interview started complimentingthe Jews as soon as the camera went on. Me: "But that's not what youtold me before." One of them: "I have changed my mind. That was along time ago." Me: "That was last week". "But I have thought aboutit and realized the Jews have done nothing bad to me" Me: "That'sgreat! Would you be willing to talk about how you used to feel andwhy you changed your mind?" Her: "No"Other open antisemites that my friends know have also refused to talkon camera. Understandable, but... Grrr.

Jews have also been unwilling to say anything bad on camera, fearfulof later retribution. Said one: "don't forget, we have to live here".I was getting a little frustrated, but hit a gold mine last night.The rabbi's assistant finally got back to me and was really honest.He's been compliling antisemetic incidents in Zhitiomir and apparentlyattacks have been happening about every three months. He gave me thenumbers of not just Jews who have been attacked, but those who havebeen attacked AND speak English. He's also going to take me to theJewish cemetery to show me the vandalism and smashed graves. He alsosays a lot of skinheads hang out there, so hopefully I can startmaking contacts with them and get interviews that way. He also calledover to a Jewish organization that provides fellowship parties forolder Jews, and when I talked to them today they said that there weremany who attend who were alive during the holocaust and that theyloved when young people were interested in their stories. They alsosaid recording them wouldn't be a problem and that it was important toget the stories captured.The rabbi's son's bar mitzvah is tonight and I was invited so that Icould meet other members of the community. Thing is, I don't haveformal clothes. The family I'm staying with, the father and son areboth taller than me, but one loaned me a shirt and tie and the otherloaned me pants. So I am going in these old, baggy clothes and tennisshoes. But I'm excited that I will be allowed to film there, so I canget some good b-roll footage of Jewish life here, and will put it ontoa disk so that the son can have some Hi-def footage of his barmitzvah.

So things are coming along. I am realizing that there is enough herethat I could be working way past when I would need to go back toaccept the New York job, or even teaching in Florida (which I stillhaven't secured a job for; no one wants to do phone interviews).Ironically, I was offered a job here in Ukraine that would havestarted in September and was only a four month contract. If I hadtaken it I could have finished filming, worked four months tore-infuse the bank account, travel a bit and been flown home for free. I passed on it, though, and now it's been filled.

Grr. I feel likeI have been very out of the flow lately, unsure of what I should bedoing and it's frustrating. I am used to things lining up andtrusting to getting where I'm going, but now I find myself unsure.

I am in Odessa right now, about to finish an interview with a Holocaust survivor. I have decided to start updating the blog again in regards to the documentary. Filming has been going really well despite some hiccups, and I finally feel like I will have an end product worth watching, and so feel like I should acually start writing about it. I have been documenting the experience in emails and in my journal, but not on this blog. That will change, but it will take a while to catch everything up. So this comes from an email dated June 22, and as I get more time, more will get posted until the story up untill now has been posted.

***

I feel like filming on the documentary has finally started. I had shot some stuff in Ukraine earlier and an interview with an expert in the states, but the main course has begun. I interviewed a friendbeside some mass graves today. She told of how, when she was fifteen,she and classmates had to rebury the bones churned up by gravediggerslooking for jewlery they had heard the Jews had swallowed prior tobeing led away from their homes, not knowing (or refusing toaknowledge) that they were going to be killed. This had only been sixyears ago: with no money after the collapse of the Soviet Union, thisis what people had been driven to.And horrific as all that is (and, sadly, the more horrific the thingsI find, the more compelling the documentary becomes), it onlyreinforces a whole new angle I'm finding on this. Those casualantisemites [I wrote earlier of some friends I had dinner with who, when I mentioned the topic of the film, started ripping into Jews, but not in an angry manner] I had dinner with? Well, let's put it this way: we had totake turns at their little table. It's four people and a dog livingin a two room (not two bedroom, two room) apartment: the parents of myfriends' sister, the sister (very pregnant and due in two weeks) andthe sister's husband (who has invited me hunting with him). Soon itwill be five with the arrival of the baby. With my friend, me, andher daughter there, there simply weren't enough chairs and we tookturns eating dinner in the kitchen. This is their life. Much of theconversation centered on the impossibility of finding an apartment.The husband is in the army, the wife will finish university next year. They will continue living this way, with the addition of a baby, forthe forseeable future, disgruntled by every moment of it. So is itany wonder when they casually blame Jews for this and that? I askedthem, would any of them attack a Jew given the opportunity? No. Butthat doesn't mean they like or trust them. They don't even lump allJews together. There's Jews and then there's "Zhidi", which I took tomean Hassidic Jews from their description of the ear curls (by theway, one of the founders of Hassidism was born in Ukraine; smallworld) [NOTE: I later learned that Zhidi is the slang for "kike", so they were telling me the differences between Jews and kikes the way someone might tell you "there's differences between blacks and niggers". Those Jews, they said, they stay seperate, go to seperateschools, are told they are special. And of course they found thatthreatening. With as fucked up as the government is here, as corruptare the cops and judicial system, can't they wonder, believe, thatthere is something behind all this, profiting from all this? I can'tblame these people for how they feel. As they spoke, it seemed liketheir views were completely reasonable, save for the fact that, youknow, I knew that they were completely, morally WRONG. But as Ilistened, their story seemed as important as that of those sufferingfrom the violent results of this undercurrent of dislike.Being Jewish, you might not see it that way, but what it comes down tois that this hate doesn't spring fully-formed, that the cycles ofpoverty, oppression and hate have spun together for the entire historyof this country and it comes back again now, viciously as every hopethey had with the Orange Revolution has collapsed (to me at least, theskyrocketing of antisemetic incidents seems to coincide exactly withthe revolution's collapse)I can't speak for antisemitism in the world in general, but here Ifeel that there might be a chance to, I don't know, EXPLAIN it alittle, or a least peel back some of the layers over the motives.It just feels as if it all weaves together: strands of Judaism bornhere, being murdered here, casual poverty, casual hate. I have aninterview with the Zhytomyr rabbi tomorrow, who was, along with hisfamily, was beaten in broad daylight by skinheads. His assistant'sassesment of antisemitism in Zhytomyr when we talked yesterday? "Ne ochen ploha" (not too bad) People telling me there is no problem, people tellingme they have a problem, people just not caring either way. I feellike there's something here, compelling, worth documenting, even ifonly for me, even if only to teach myself HOW to to document suchthings on film (or HD digital, whatever). I've felt a trepidation fora while about all this, that it was going to overwhelm me, that I wasdiving into a project I didn't have the skills for (making adocumentary) and now I don't care if the end result turns out to beshit because I feel like I am in the middle of something right now, anexus of so many different ideas and images and opinions and factsand--despite all the horror--I feel glad to be here.

For the past week I have been travelling around the Balkans (for the most part). This is what I have done:

I was taught traditional Hungarian folk dances by two girls from a troupe at a party overlooking the Danube, swum beneath waterfalls in Krka, free climbed cliffs to enter an inaccesible watchtower in Split, sea kayaked around old city walls in Dubrovnik, ran uphill to a fortress overlooking the largest fjord in Europe in Montenegro, met the perfect girl for me (who, unfortunately, had a boyfriend), stood atop a a mineret above a war-torn city in Bosnia, and got drunk on grape brandy on a beach today... Tonight to Poland, tomorrow to Ukraine, where hopefully I will have enough time to post the pictures and stories that I have collected on this amazing trip.

People keep asking me when I'm going to update my blog. This is strange to me: I assume no one reads it. Originally I was really into it, updating it daily, because it was what I had meant it to be: a chronicle of my Peace Corps experience. But now that I'm back in America and teaching and not really travelling, there's not much to write about.

I mean, I could write about it. The things I could say about the school system would blow people's minds. But I also feel I can't say them because anything I say about a kid or a teacher or an administrator would probably bite me in the ass.

In two weeks I fly back to Eastern Europe. I will be heading an education project on the Holocaust and antisemitism. I will be directing a documentary on the same. I will be travelling. I will be rock climbing and seeing old friends. It will be amazing.

Will I have things to write about? I don't know. I find the desire not there. I still have to post that promised story from Vegas from TWO MONTHS ago and have not. And I realize it's because I got over the whole idea of blogging and the narcissim that goes with it. I told myself I was doing it to document Peace Corps for myself, so that in a decade's time i could look back at a journal I had created.

I did that, but now I have this blog and unsure what to do with it.

I keep wanting to make a final post that says: this blog is over. But I haven't brought myself to that point yet. But that's why I haven't been updating.

For those of you that do read it, though, I'm soon off on another adventure. Wish me luck!

In general, I don't believe in debt. To finance a house, yes, but when it comes to cars, furniture and everything else, I say if you don't got the money, don't buy it.

I didn't go into debt for my undergrad or my Masters, and half of my Masters was paid out of (my) pocket. I had a Mastercard for a little while, but never used it and so cancelled it. Apparently that was a mistake. That card sat in my wallet (and, in my opinion provided a liability should said wallet ever get stolen) and in that time I was deluged with mailers for credit cards that I duitfully shredded.

Going into Peace Corps, though, I just cancelled the thing. But when I saw an offer for a Paypal credit card to finance something I wanted on ebay, I figured "what the hell?" But I was denied. And was flabbergasted. All I knew was that I had really good credit. Had there been fradulent activity? I ran a credit report.

No, no fradulent activity. It just turns out that having no credit card, no loans, nothing for more than two years actually increases your credit risk. So apparently healthy spending habits work against you.

Now I know.

I just applied for another Mastercard.

Okay, that really cool Vegas story will wait... Some 600 Wal-Marts all across the country today had a promotion for the Spiderman 3 movie using 600 guys in Spiderman costumes. I was one of them...

Took a lot of pictures, signed a lot of autographs, gave a lot of high fives. Other than the fact that my knees ache from squatting for four hours, it was pretty damn cool. And I'm $150 richer. Sadly, I have to return the costume. Sorry to ruin that fantasy, ladies.

The pics are courtesy of my mom, who came to see it. Yes, that really is me in there.

Spiderman unmasked! Tobey Maguire, eat your heart out!

So this is a story of Spring Break unlike any I've ever taken. I once took a Spring Break road trip out this way, also with a guy and a girl (Nick and Sarah). We visited six states and, in addition to visiting Las Vegas, went snow skiing, rented a wave runner, and visited Bryce Canyon, Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks. The difference between that event-packed one and this one was alcohol. You don't do much during the day when you've been drinking all night and so this is the first trip I've ever taken where the bulk of it was spent lying around a hotel. Still, despite how chill the trip was, it did have one very, very notable story, which will be in the next blog. Normally what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but not this time. But until then, here's the rest:

I flew into Tucson, where my cousin Miguel lives. He was working, so I was picked up from the airport by Amanda, who served in Peace Corps with me and now works on a horse ranch there. She picked me up in a pick-up truck while wearing a cowboy hat. I borrowed said hat. And when we went hiking in the Tucson foothills that day, she took this picture that I call "Cacti and the Cuban Cowboy"

Obligatory silloutte shot. Someone hurry up and put me in a cigarette ad!

Amanda contemplating the cacti of the world. Do they know that they so hurt?

The next day I presented at an OASIS conference and talked about the Holocaust and antisemitism in Ukraine. I was introduced by Carol Garrard, co-author of the Bones of Berdichev, whom I later interviewed on camera for my in-progress (amateur) documentary on this topic. This was the piece of paper outside the room.

Presenting. Apparently I talk with my hands a lot.

Miguel and Amanda getting their respective grooves on at a Tucson salsa club that night.

The next day we hopped into Miguel's car to drive 8 hours through the desert to Las Vegas. Somehow Amanda got out of driving. We're still not sure how that happened.

A little bit of mid-trip craziness. Yes, I did put a quarter in that thing.

Crossing the Hoover Dam into Nevada

Vegas, baby! The MGM Grand Hotel

The New York New York hotel. Yes, that is a hotel.

The Ballys and Paris hotels seen through the famous fountains of the Bellagio

The Coyote Ugly bar. We didn't realize how upscale the clubs on the Las Vegas strip were, and it was was the only one that would let us in wearing sneakers. But it had women dancing on the bar, so we didn't mind.

Miguel and I the next night, having dropped $100 each at a Ross to meet Vegas standards. Estillo Cubano!

We so lucked out: next door to our hotel was a Cuban restaurant with great food and better mojitos. We ate there literally every day.

The greatest painting in existance. Picasso, eat your heart out.

We took a break from the partying to head out to Red Rocks with two British guys we met at the Las Vegas Hostel. This is Amanda on the rocks.

Miguel trying a route. He has vowed never to climb rocks again.

Me setting a route. This is not fun to do with a hangover.

We are men. Men is what we are.

The Pussycat Dolls section of Ceasar's Palace. Yes, I did stare. I didn't gamble much: I was $40 up at one point and $20 down at another but, like always, I broke even.

Amanda, me and Miguel with a group we met at the Las Vegas Hostel, going out on our last night in Vegas

Amanda getting a whole lot of man loving...

This is Deonna. She is a prostitute. How do I know? Because after two dances she invited me to her room. Then she explained that this would be paid for. I declined and we kept dancing.

On the way back to Tucson, a tanker overturned, spilling caustic chemicals on I-10. We sat in this traffic jam for three hours. In addition to Amanda reading us excerpts from a romance novel and giving us quizes from a Cosmo, Miguel and I watched Dane Cook on my iPod. It was still a very long three hours.

The next day and my last of the trip. Before my flight, Amanda and I took a afternoon hike up Mt. Lemmon.

I need to walk around with a lighting kit giving me these exact shadows. For once in my life, my skinny self looks buff! Or maybe I'm just getting fat. Must be all the fast food I ate...

Fun trip

So this is my Friday and Tuesday evenings. The pay is low but damn it's fun!

A lot of the experiments revolve around air pressure...like who can blow up the bag more.

My "vortex generator": a trash can with a hole in the bottom, a bungie cord and a piece of plastic. It launches out a column of air that you can feel fifteen feet away, made visible by filling it up with smoke from a smoke machine

Tap it the right way and you get smoke rings!

The kids have just blown out some candles using the vortex generator. The kid in the red shirt was slamming his whole arm against the plastic to get enough force to knock them out!

Using our magical, mystical science powers to get the water to change color... Actually, the water has a base in it and a base indicator that turns pink. When poured into vinegar (that looks like water), it neutralizes and turns clear.

More of my magical, mystical science powers making the ball levitate. Oh, wait, is that leaf blower between my legs?

This is just a fun trick... Basically, if you push the skewer through the darker spots of a balloon (where there is still some elasticity) and you do it fast enough, the latex will hold a seal around the wood and you can push it clean through without popping it.

The Mad Science dance. Her shaking it up (with the acetone I just poured inside it) will break down the plastic of the foam peanuts, releasing the air inside them and making them shrivel up into a piece of plastic the size of a quarter. Poof!

One of my favorites: Evaporated methanol + water cooler jug = Jet engine

Yes, they pay me to do this!

Why have I not put up a post in two weeks?

So I got a job working for MadScience, doing science presenations for students. They took too long finding gaps in their own schedule to get me trained, so I applied to P.F. Changs as a waiter to get some money coming in.

P.F. Changs also took forever as I had to go through THREE interviews (this is their standard) and then they said they didn't think I was qualified enough to be a waiter ("we don't usually hire the type of people who have worked at TGI Fridays" said one manager). So despite three years of server experience, three years of teaching, two years of Peace Corps, two bachelors degrees and a Masters, they said "maybe we'll start you as a back waiter and and in a month or two we may move you up to server."

I took their training manual home and memorized every item on the menu, including their ingredients and flavor profile. After four days of working as a back waiter (which essentially requires running trays of food, ice, rice and dishes for eight hour straight) they said they wanted to train me as a server.

But by now I've finally gotten my letter of eligibility from the Florida Department of Education that says I can teach here. This letter allows me access to the job database and I call all eight schools with an opening. Seven have already hired someone, and one is doing their interviews THAT DAY (and I'm already driving to a MadScience training when I'm making the call). The secretary says if I fax my resume over, they might get me in. I call my mom at work, have her pull my resume from my email account (it had been attached to an email that I had sent), print it and fax it.

Three days later, I'm finally starting MadScience presenations and I get a call from the school: none of the applicants had impressed and they wanted to interview me, but it can only be THE NEXT DAY. Of course, I'm working a morning shift at P.F. Changs. I stay up until 4 AM putting together a video resume, work my shift, change in the car, drive across town, do the interview and they say they'll let me know.

In my experience, that is never good.

They called the next day: I got the job!

So I'm the newest 8th grade langauge arts teacher at this middle school, but I still have to jump through the hoops to get it, which includes a background check, drug testing and an 8 hour orientation for the county.

In the meantime, I have now been made the regular Friday night presenter for MadScience at a hotel, and P.F. Changs isn't able to get me trained as a server because they've packed my schedule with backwaiting shifts. They had jsut scheduled me to do my first training shifts this week, so weren't happy when I told them I got the teaching job and need to only work weekends.

So for the record: Mon-Fri: teaching; Friday evening and occasional weekday late-afternoons: MadScience; Saturday and Sunday: P.F. Changs.

Three jobs. Technically, this is not the busiest I've ever been in my life (in the Spring of 2004 I was teaching, working on my Masters, in a dance company, writing for two newspapers and directing a training video for Gear UP), and I'm sick of being poor.

Work! Work!

Peace Corps feels like such a long time ago.

I just got my W-2 from Peace Corps. Last year I made exactly $2,532.82, Doesn't seem like a lot, but I wasn't hurting in Ukraine: I had a roof over my head, food, a bit of travel and some spending money, all on less than $3,000 a year.

Makes a huge arguement for not living in America after retirement.

Everything we did after Disney probably merited all their own posts but, I don't know. I've been unmotivated to keep up with the blog. I started it because I was going into Peace Corps and wanted a record of that, and now that I'm back I've been unenthused. Still, peeps in Ukraine are asking for America pics, so here's a lot:

Marina and I rented a canoe and took it out on the Weikiva River. The thing about rivers in Florida: they got alligators!

Daniel at his wisest: eating a chicken lunch on a gator-infested river

Turtle. Possibly between the ages of 13-19. Possibly been in contact with radioactive substances. Possibly adept in the martial arts.

Marina trying to figure out how to go in a straight line.

Drunken idiots who overturned their canoe

***

This is how sparse this blog is: One whole crazy day at Universal Studios, but me only posting one pic

***

Since Marina came in the winter, she got to have a Floridian tradition: picking oranges. And by tradition, I mean tricking foreigners into slave labor because it's only fun for about ten minutes and there's thorns involved.

Marina with her basketful

We hit the road and went down to Boyton Beach (a little north of Miami) and hung out with my sister. My niece was obsessed with Marina. Seriously. If Marina tried to give Isabell back to my sister, she'd start crying.

Boyton Beach. Marina became addicted to beaches. So much so, I thought I was going to put her into rehab. "What do you want to do today?" "Go to the beach!" Repeat every morning. In addition to Boyton Beach we went to South Beach, Daytona Beach, a beach in Key Largo and snorkling in Weikiva springs. Since the water temp was too cold for me, I just read while Marina swam, often the only one in the water because no one else could stand the cold but her.

***

Sunrise in Key Largo. For those unaware, the Florida Keys are a string of islands south of Florida. We camped out in Key Largo (Marina unhappy because I didn't adequately explain that I don't have a tent and perfer to sleep under the stars. She opted to sleep in the car.) and got up the next morning because she wanted to see the sunrise over the ocean.

***

We got on a boat and went snorkling in John Pennecamp State Park in Key Largo, which protects a section of the only natural coral reef in North America. It was actually some of the best snorkling I've done in Florida. I had been unimpressed with Key Biscayne's park (which protects another section of the reef) when I snorkled it last year, so didn't buy a disposable underwater camera. Big mistake: crystal clear water, an abundance of coral and fish, a Spanish cannon from the 1700s, broken lobster traps blown in by Hurricane Wilma, Florida lobsters, barricuda, hundreds of live conchs and a nine foot nurse shark. It was later explained that all the polluted run-off from Miami kills the coral and wildlife in Biscayne, but Key Largo is far enough south to escape it.

The lines left by the mask kinda look like wrinkles, so this may be what I look like in ten years!

***

That's it for now! We spent her last day here at Islands of Adventure, but I'll go ahead and do one whole blog for that next time. Peace!

Firstly, Marina have been doing too much for me to have time to really post anything, but we got lots of cool photos coming which should make you want to go to Florida. Tomorrow, we're heading down to Miami and then the Florida Keys.

Secondly, A couple weeks ago I sent out the first wave of letters to book agents hoping to get one interested in a book I want to write about Ukraine. That wave only wanted a one page letter about the book. Others wanted a full proposal, so I was leaving those until after Marina left and I could work on it. Well, the "6-8 weeks" response time advertised by most agents turned out to be much faster than that. Of the 17 letters I sent out, I had 7 say they were not interested and 3 say that they were. Two of the three wanted a proposal that I currently didn't have. One wanted just the first three chapters, which I did. I spent the past two nights rewriting and rewriting those chapters late at night while Marina and my family slept and sent those chapters to the agent today. I have dozens and dozens more agents to sent proposals to and more letters to hear back on, but I'm still nervous/excited about my first sending out of an actual part of the book. We'll see.

And thirdly, photos of Disney:

My aunt got us free tickets good for one day and we had a lot to see: Disney has four major parks and a number of smaller ones and put together is bigger than Manhattan. We started at "Animal Kingdom", Disney's massive zoo. Above is the area made up to look like Africa

Some of the residents

One of my distant relatives

The next stop was "MGM", which has a number of rides based on television and movies. Here, Marina is standing in front of the Tower of Terror, based on the Twilight Zone. The main part is being in an elevator that shoots you up and down four times, once dropping you so fast you actually become weightless

At "Star Tours", a ride based on Star Wars. I'm sad to say that the walker shot the man and his kid

Marina taking a speeder bike ride

Me, lost in New York. Oh, wait, that's just a painting behind me

The famous ball of "EPCOT Center", a theme park about technology.

Its coolest attraction was "Mission to Mars" in which you sit in a moving centrifuge and "control" a ship that takes off from Earth and later lands on Mars, but not before serious G-forces, navigating an asteroid belt and having a crash landing. The worst attraction was "Honey I Shrunk the Audience", a decently-cool 3D movie preceeded by a pre-show that was, in fact, a 12 minute commercial for Kodak. And a bad one at that.

Lastly, the Magic Kingdom, where Disney World Started.

What Disney would be complete without a ride on "Pirates of the Carribean?"

The coolest part was being there with Marina. I grew up with this stuff and was introduced to the technology one step at a time. Marina, on the other hand, had never been on a roller coaster or a simulator, to a 3D movie or a ride with animatronics. It was all new and cool to her and made me remember how each thing was when I first encountered it as a kid.

My good friend Marina, who helped run the climbing camp and trained at the climbing wall, has been living and studying in upstate New York for the past six months on a university exchange program. Since she had two weeks left on her winter vacation, she decided to spend them with me. Possibly because she hasn't seen me for a while, possibly because she knew it wouldn't be boring, but probably because she she knew she'd be warm.

She had no sooner gotten off the plane than we plied her full of hamburgers and mac and cheese (you know, a good ol' fashioned American cookout) and then took her to a Latin club, along with my friend Brett.

Brett and Marina dancing

Neither Brett nor Marina had been to a Latin club, but I showed them the basic steps and they got them pretty fast. The club was called "Club Mambo", where everything is in Spanish and half the staff doesn't speak English anyway. I like that, though, because I need the practice. Since Jan 1, my mom and I have only speaking Spanish to each other and it's slow in coming back. Marina and I are mostly speaking in Russian because I don't want to loose it and I have to speak English with my mom's fiance, so the first dinner with Marina here was, um, interesting. And gave me a headache. But at least I can brag about having a dinner in three languages. Actually, my friend Diana had a rather brilliant idea to not loose my Russian at the expense of my Spanish (the opposite is what happened to me in Ukraine) and sent me a book for studying Spanish that's in Russian. This is why I love her.

Anyway, Club Mambo has two dance floors, both filled with people whirling and turning to Salsa, Meringue, Barchata and Mambo. It was heaven.

Mostly I left Brett and Marina to dance with each other since they were similar levels. The nice thing about a Latin club is that you always have ladies lining the floor waiting for someone to ask them to dance. And they've been doing it all their lives, which makes for a lot of fast, sweaty, hip-swivling, swirling fun.

The 1 AM booty-shaking contest

***

Marina's second day in town was spent rock climbing (of course) and we got yelled at because we were climbing in the lead climbing section and neither of us had been certified by the gym. This was slightly annoying: we've lead climbed a lot harder in tougher situations: wet rock, crumbling rock, extreme cold and they didn't want us to lead climb until we'd passed their course, which cost $25, which wasn't being offered that day anyway. Grr.

***

Today we went for more natural beauty and went up to Rock Springs, a state park just north of Orlando. It's got a spring that pumps up freshwater so fast it creates a strong current you can tube down. It was $1 to get in, $5 to rent the inner tubes and there we were: the only people getting jetted down this crystal clear river in this beautiful sub-tropical jungle.

No, this is not a postcard. That's Marina on the river

From start to finish, it takes about 20 minutes to float down the river and then there's a wooden boardwalk to walk back to the start. We did it twice, once lesiurely and once while in a sort-of-race that mostly involved trying to overturn the other person's tube. Marina did it a third time while I went to get dried off and warm again. I was fine the first time, but mid-way into the second, as the sun was beginning to set, the temperature dipped into the low 70s and with the water, my teeth were chattering. It took no time at all for my body to go right back to hating the cold.

Anyway, pictures are better than words, so here you go:

So I've always wanted to be an extra on a movie set (well, actually, an extra on many movie sets), so when I saw on Craig's List (http://www.craigslist.com) that an independent movie needed extras in Orlando, I contacted them. They called me back, gave me directions and this afternoon I was standing on the set for "Two Jerks", a comedy about two guys working in a porn store.

The set of "Two Jerks"

On the left, director Will Cobble monitoring the, um, monitor

The script was fairly derivative of "Clerks", but that's admitted to by the writer/director, Will Cobble, who's even met and talked about the movie with Kevin Smith. Despite that, I was laughing while reading it, so maybe it'll be a success (Will said that Warner Bros and Roadshow Pictures had expressed interest in distributing).

Shooting the movie

When I told my mom that I would be working as an extra today, her first question was "are they paying you?" Actually, no, but I did get fed and was given an unlimited amount of Pepsi. Seriously, they just kept refilling the cooler. I also got a free DVD, but not porn. It was of Cobble's last movie.

The day got more interesting when I was in conversation with two other guys who were also extras and one of the crew asked if we were okay being in the same frame as a topless woman. None of us objected.

While on the set I had a conversation with a cast member named Tiffany, who was into paintball, rock climbing and motorcycles. This meant we had a lot to talk about, but we had to have a conversation in 30 takes. We'd get in about five sentences before we had to shut up for the next take, often getting cut off mid-sentence and picking it up later. It's an interesting way to talk, if only because you get time to think up witty responses. She also mentioned that she had really wanted to go bowling lately, but no one would go with her.

In any case, it turns out she was the girl who was going to be topless.

My role: browse porn. Now, this is not easy and requires years worth of experience. I was able to channel all those late nights surfing the web, though, into a Shakepearean performance of angst and glory that would have drawn tears had anyone been paying attention to what I was doing. I browsed porn that well.

While giving me direction about browsing porn, Cobble said "and you've already picked one" and handed me the porn masterpiece, "Black Velvet", which I then had to carry around for the next half hour

I was in the background of a couple scenes but have no idea what the framing was or if I was anything other than a blur in a blue shirt. Guess we'll find out when the movie comes out.

Will Cobble giving direction to Tiffany (who was having trouble with the whole "no bra" thing: she couldn't wear one since it would leave skin marks that would show in the topless scene.) and another extra named John

Preparing a shot. Note the Pepsi and the Penthouses.

"Britany", the film's mascot

I was also taking a lot of pictures of the set and Tiffany asked if I could take some of her in action. Including your topless scene? Yes, including the topless scene.

The photos of Tiffany didn't come out to well because I (obviously) couldn't use a flash and had to stand way back, but there you go

Unlimited Pepsi and photographing a topless girl? I'm sorry, did I need to get paid?

Tiffany and I are going bowling on Friday.

Since I mostly write for an American audience, it was easy to blog while in Ukraine: anything that was unique or interesting for me was likely to be unique or interesting for them.

Since I've gotten home, though, I've become the quintesential American and feel I have nothing much to write about. The job hunt has not been going too well. I've got some apps out and may have landed a writing gig, but things are taking their sweet time in that department. I've got some ideas on the burner but I'll talk about them only if they start to boil. Mostly, though, I sit around and watch DVDs and read. Seriously, I barely leave the house. It's is a complete 180 from the life I was living in Ukraine and in Ukraine I used to think how sad it was that most of America sits around mindlessly entertaining themselves. Ah, sweet irony.

In the meantime, though, I'll condense the past two weeks down into the most interesting tidbits:

1) Drama between my sister and her baby daddy meant she came back to live at home. This meant that, for the first time in a decade, my immediete family is now all living under one roof. It's been chaotic, but also really nice. On several occasions all of us have ended up lying on my mom's bed in the evening, forming a sort of circle with our bodies with Isabell running around in the middle and trying to surprise us with flying tackles. We sing children's songs to her and she does the movements to "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and falls down on cue to "Ring Around the Rosie" and it's just the way things should be.

2) Christmas. Christmas has been very noisy this year because Isabell is an 18 month-old, and she's an 18 month-old that's not happy unless an Elmo DVD is playing all day every day (and will begin yelling "Elmo! Elmo!" as soon as the credits roll, which is her uncle's cue to restart it). In addition to the constant singing of said furry red muppet, she loves, loves, LOVES these little Christmas dolls that, like many of her dolls, will play a song whenever you squeeze its right hand. Her favorite game is to overlay the Elmo singing with the singing of three to four of these dolls at the same time. Other than my inability to concentrate on anything when this is going on and my occasional desire to bury these dolls in the backyard, it led to one funny incident: Isabell opened one of her Christmas gifts from me, which was a handmade doll from Ukraine. Not handmade as in really valuable, handmade as in this nice, soft little doll meant for babies to play with. The problem was as soon as she opened it, she started squeezing its right hand. When she realized it wasn't going to play any music, she immedietely lost interest. My present from my mother was a remote controlled car. I didn't realize how perfect a gift this was for me until I got it. I now chase Isabell around the house with it and get yelled at a lot.

3) I have no plans for New Years because after attending only one meeting of the group of Russian speakers I was supposed to spend New Year's Eve with, I was kicked out. Specifically, I was kicked out because I said some things I shouldn't have in a blog about the meeting. On the whole the blog was positive, but I gave some negative observations of some of the members (actually, it was just a blow-by-blow account about two of the older guys who were not-so-subtly trying to chat up the women, including a married woman and a 17 year-old). The group organizer read it and emailed me to tell me I had no right to judge people I just met (this is true) and was no longer in the group. This bummed me out because I really liked the people I met, just didn't like the two older guys. And now I have nothing to do on New Year's.

So this was most of my birthday: a Cuban pig roast. Ironically, there weren't many Cubans at it. It was hosted by Bret, a friend of my mother's who learned the art from her and my grandfather. They had planned the roast thinking I would be in Ukraine on my birthday, which had been the original intention. But here I was back, and it's not like the roast could have been cancelled because about 30 of Bret's friends had been invited. My sister and Isabell couldn't come because of problems between her and Bret and there it was: it was my birthday and I was going to a party where I knew almost no one and my sister and Isabell couldn't even be there.

As things go it wasn't bad, I was just in a funk about everything, this in-between transition state where I am back home and miss Ukraine and my friends and certainly the fun I'd be having if I was there, but I didn't really want to go back and if I was able to teleport there I still probably wouldn't want to be there, I wanted to be here, with my family. It was just, well, strange.

In the end, I asked myself what I'd rather be doing and the answer quite quickly came back: climbing. So Jerry and I left, got my gear and went to the gym. I got to break in my birthday present to myself, my new rope, and led four new routes. After that, I was still in a mood, so I just climbed one route over and over until I got an adrenaline high and felt a whole lot better in the world. In Ukraine, at least, it would be to cold to climb...

Pig, Cuban style, roasted on a barbeque built of cinder blocks. When I was a kid, I'd help my Uncle Rene hang up the freshly slaughtered pig on the side of the house and spray it out with a hose before it was marinated and put over the coals.

Jerry, my grandfather and my mom

My grandparents, cutting apart the pig

Roast pork, black beans and rice and fried plantains...you can't get this in Ukraine

Splitting open the pig's head to get to the brain.

At pig roasts in Miami, my second-cousin Lazaro and his brothers would fight over who got to eat the brains. Since they weren't around, Bret got the honors

I typed "Russian" and "Orlando" into Google and up came www.orlandorussians.com. Whuda thunk? It's a group of Russian speakers that meet once a month to, well, speak Russian. And their next meeting happened to be a week away.

I RSVPed the meeting and met the group (about 25 showed up to the meeting but there's more) spread out over three tables in a Chinese restaurant. I had been worried about my Russian having already rusted off: I hadn't spoken a word of it in near two weeks. But as I sat down at an offered seat and started chatting, I found it hadn't really left.

Talking with those around me confirmed what I had guessed from the member pictures: a lot of Slavic women and their American husbands. Surpringly, many of the women were from Ukraine although, ironically, few spoke Ukrainian. The two near me were from Crimea and Odessa, respectively, where Ukrainian is rarer. So when I broke out a few phrases of Ukrainian, the Kazakstanian to my left and the Russian from near Vladivostok across from her encouraged a conversation because they wanted to hear it. Before I had a chance to confess I wasn't very good at it, the Ukrainians begged off first, giving the same excuse. So on we went in Russian, with everyone thinking I was some sort of polyglot.

Other than the bevy of Slavic brides, there was one couple nearby that were both American and had gotten as far as learning the alphabet. They had joined an Eastern Orthodox church had had been encouraged to do mission work in Russia by their Russian priest, hence their joining the group. But while they were to learn, two guys there in their 40s were there for a bit more (I'm keeping out names to protect everyone's privacy).

The Ukrainian from Odessa and her Vladivostokian friend came to the restaurant late and sat across from me. Both were older, late 30s to early 40s, and both, particularly the Odessan, had low levels of English. I asked them in Russian how they had come to America and got the usual answer that I got from every woman I met that night save the Orthodox one: got married. The Odessan met her husband literally on the street and while he didn't speak Russian nor her English, the courtship moved on through his interpreter and here she was. The husband was in Chicago on business, she said, but one of those two guys must not have understood it because he got up to go to the bathroom and then hung back upon return, saying making everyone get up to get back to his seat on the other side of the table wasn't worth it. "You know what, it might be easier if I just sat there," he said, pointing beside the Odessan, which meant just as many people had to get up for him to get seated, but now he was seated beside her. This put him square across from me and we talked a bit. He had visted both Ukraine and Russia, he said, but he didn't speak Russian. He was looking to learn, but he seemed to me his was more just learning to look because not one word of Russian came out of his lips the entire dinner.

The Russian from Vladistovok and I talked quite a bit before she said her daughter should come to the dinner. She called her daughter on her cell phone and it seemed the daughter didn't want to come, but mom put forth and order and that was that. "She'll sit there," said mom, waving at the empty seat beside mine. Huh. This could go any number of ways.

The daughter arrived a little later, in a bit of a huff, but she was pretty. And pretty young. This did not stop the guy across from me to calling the name of his American friend down the table, pointing two fingers at his own eyes and then pointing at the daughter, who was now making her way between the tables. The other guy flashed him a thumb's up.

The daughter sat down beside me, purse in her lap, not looking at anyone. She ordered iced tea in English, but then only spoke in Russian, which froze out the guy across from her. The mom started admonishing her to be social and started singing my praises from what little she knew of me and I just wanted to put my head in my hands. The daughter and I did get to talking, but mostly it was her complaining about America. I asked her if there was anything she did like. "The money," she said. "And the stores." Yeah, this wasn't going to work, further cemented a few minutes later when I asked her where she studied and found out she was still in high school. And 17. I went back to talking to mom.

All in all, though, it was a lot of fun. I hardly ate any food I was talking so much, and I ended up being something of a celebrity as I was the only American at my table who could speak Russian (or, at least, the only one who was speaking in Russian) and because I had a lot of common ground with the Slavs because I was familiar with their culture and politics. Many of the women hadn't been back to their home countries in years and I had just gotten back from the region less than two weeks before.

Because we were all spread out on tables, I only got to meet the half-dozen people around me, but there's a New Year's party the group is throwing that I'm excited about. I'm glad the group is mostly older, as well, because I am more into making contacts, making friends and practicing Russian, and meeting a bunch of hot 20-something wives would just spell trouble.

And so do their 17 year-old daughters.

Some of the Russian Meetup Group

The 17 year-old

Mucho props to my boy Sean for coming up to this blog topic.

So on numerous occasions, I heard from Ukrainians (or read in their texts) that America is "a law-abiding nation". I laughed at first, thinking that we're a "law-bending nation", always trying to scam a deal, cheat on our taxes, etc. Aren't we a nature born of rebellion and have been breaking the rules ever since?

What I didn't realize until after a while of living in Ukraine is that yes, we have a lot of laws and tend to obey them whether we want to or not.

I got the hint that Ukrainians weren't such a law-abiding people (or didn't have the laws in the first place) when recreation included rapelling off condmended bridges in full view of police or climbing up the scaffolding of the largest bridge in Kyiv to see the view from the top. I always thought "won't we get in trouble?" when, actually, no, we wouldn't. I got the hint when we were allowed to climb all over centuries old castles or when Polissya thought it was ridiculous that I wanted to get parental permission forms for the climbing wall and the climbing camp. In Ukraine, your personal saftey is your own and in that way, they have more freedom than the land of the free. Actually, the length America goes to protect its own citizens (or, more accurately, protect itself from litigation) makes Ukrainians laugh. Mostly they don't know about it, because there's no plastering of warning signs and detailed instructions (a Ukrainian warning sign for an open manhole cover is to put some tree branches sticking up out of it so that you see it), but a minor example that drew chuckles was the big "WARNING" label on my American-made climbing harness that shows if you don't double back the strap. "Only in America," said one of my Ukrainian climbing parnters.

The most I ever saw the cops get involved in the lives of the citizens (other than trying to extract bribes) was during Eurovision. I saw a drunk guy hanging off of a bridge over the water eighty feet below him, a sure death if he fell. The cops went out after him, pulled him back, yelled at him and let him go.

But I didn't realize (or rather, had forgotten) how involved the law was in life in America. I got my car back from my sister and the first time I parked it in front of the house (on the grass, off the street), my mom told me I had to repark it so it faced in the direction of traffic. Why? No one knows. Maybe it makes things look prettier. But it's a regulation my sister got a ticket once for not doing, so I went and reparked the car. In Ukraine I could have parked the thing on a sidewalk (which is only slightly more frequent than driving on the sidewalk, which I've seen happen dozens of times) and no one would have cared.

I am currently helping my step-father tear down a small garage that he built on the side of the side of the house at the expense of serveral thousand dollars. Than the county told him that it was against regulations and needed to come down. It wasn't breaking any saftey rules, it was just against housing regulations about the way the houses should look. If he had put a tarp over the top of it instead of a roof (white trash all the way!) it would have been within regs because it wouldn't have been "permanant." But because he put some time and effort into doing it right, it needs to come down. And then to rub salt in the wound, he had to go pay for a demolition permit in order to have the time to take it down, or else they would have started fining him thousands of dollars a day. As soon as I was told this I thought "this would never happen in Ukraine." You could build a banya extention out on your balcony supported by flattened soda cans and stale string cheese and at most the cops would ask to use it.

In Zhytomyr, you could walk down the street with an open beer bottle, hike down your pants and begin pissing against a building while throwing said beer bottle into the street in full view of everyone and while you might get some dirty looks for not pissing in an alley like everyone else, no one, not even the cops, would bother you. Trust me: I've seen it more than once. And maybe that's why Ukraine doesn't look um, as "nice" as America, but believe it or not it's the natural extension of copious amounts of personal freedom.

I was driving yesterday and wanted to make a phone call on my new cell phone but couldn't remember if that was against the law or not. I remember there being a ruckus in the media about it, but didn't know if I'd get pulled over for doing it. It's all put me in a slight state of paranoia every time I leave the house, trying to remember the minutae of the legal realm because I have a hazy memory that there are a lot of laws but I don't remember what they all are. Living in a permanent state of paranoia about getting in trouble with the government? Gee, that reminds me of something...don't they have a word for that...wasn't there another government that was like that...well, I better not think about it because the thought police might give me a fine...

For the past decade or so, I have not watched television. I watched a lot all through high school, but at college lived in a dorm without cable and found I didn't miss it all that much. Although a huge fan of movies and any television show created by HBO, these were viewed in a series of Blockbuster rentals that spoiled me and lead me to loathe any commercial break whenever I sat down to watch television at other people's houses. Although those DVDs and videos were watched on a television set, I didn't even have that in Ukraine, instead watching bootlegs on my laptop.

One of my favorite moments in my entire life occured while I was teaching one of my eighth grade classes in Oklahoma City. My kids knew I'd traveled a lot and done many things: they got stories and slide shows and videos, all part of my not-so-hidden effort to make them want to experience as much of the world as possible. I usually got the question: "Mr. Reynolds, where do you get time to do all this?" and my answer was: "I make the time because it's important to me" but that was never completely honest: I never conciously made time; it just always seemed to be there. If I was ever short a few hours, I just slept less.

But here was the moment: I mentioned (in response to a question about a show) that I don't watch TV. Silence descended. Then one of my kids, a screwed up expression on his face, slowly said "imagine all the time you must have." That's when I made the connection that, yeah, I probably have a lot more hours in the day simply because I don't regularly watch TV and that leads me to do a lot of other things. But that moment of precious realization on his part has stuck with me since. So since then my answer to "where do you get the time?" has been "I don't watch TV."

But I do have more free time now, so when I got back to America and my mother's monstrous television set, I turned it on. The first thing that came on was Dr. Phil. I have heard of him the way I have heard of many cultural icons: reading about them. I have read quite a bit about Survivor and American Idol and dozens of other shows even though I have never seen them. Other shows, like Lost and Entourage, I read about and then zealously watched on pirated or purchased media. I like that I don't get sold to when I am entertained.

So I knew who Dr. Phil was, but I was not prepared for what I saw. He was interviewing three people: a man, his wife and the wife's mother. At interest was a lie detector test that the man had just taken about whether he had molested his own daughter. Dr. Phil slowly read each question: "have you at any time put your penis into ...'s vagina?" To every question the man answered "no" and to every question Dr. Phil said "the test says you are deceptive." At which point I wanted to throw up. The mother was just shaking her head and saying vile things to the father, but was not attempting to claw his eyes out, which was the appropriate response, although the far more appropriate response would have been this questioning occuring in a police department because WHO THE FUCK GOES ON NATIONAL TELEVISION IF THEY SUSPECT THEIR DAUGHTER HAS BEEN MOLESTED?

So I was caught on all ends: the revolting disgust at the father, the revolting disgust at the mother for coming on the show, the revolting disgust at Dr. Phil for having the show (furthered by the fact that he probably thought he was doing a civil service) and more and more disgust at the audience, the advertisers and anyone who kept watching for reasons that they probably didn't understand but were all subconciously purient.

I turned it off in mid-sentence and have not turned it on since, nor plan to. There is nothing on television that I want to see. If it is worth seeing, it will be vetted by the public in general, I will hear about it and then I will watch it on DVD or will download it and rationalize that at some point I'll buy the whole season on DVD. There isn't a single piece of information or show that I can't get online and at least I will never have to be sickened in 17 different ways and worry about the dowfall of society all in the space of a second ever again.

You don't need the purient. It's healthier to just watch porn.

I no longer worry about why I came back. My sister and my niece came up from South Florida today. My niece, who I had been warned tends to hide from strangers (and sometimes throws things at them) ran right up to me coming in the door and gave me a hug. She hasn't seen me in a year. In fact, she was only eight months old when I last saw her. But she remembered me.

This afternoon we sat around, hanging out. My mom, my step-father, my sister, my niece and me. We haven't been together for a year, and even last year it didn't feel like this.

When I've come home before, I didn't spend time with my family, I spent hyper-time, time lived intensely because all involved knew it was brief (save for my niece, whose mental cognition didn't go past eating, pooping and configuring her face into an infinite aray of endearingly cute expressions). Even sitting around and watching a movie was a cost/benefit analysis of two hours spent out of a few hundred available before I left yet again.

But sitting around today was different, relaxed, all together and as it should be. I can't remember when it last felt that way and in some ways it never had: my niece and step-father are recent additions to the configuration. So this is what I came back for: a warm afternoon of all of us watching my niece run around and just being with each other without us feeling like "time's-short-we-need-to-be-with-each-other!"

Family. It's why this is home and why I am here. Screw the "somebody/anybody" comment of my last blog. I am home.

P.S. I have the cutest niece in the world.

Me and my niece

My step father and my niece playing with my guitar

I am back in America. For three days I have seen family and friends, surfed way too much on the internet and mulled my future. It's good to be back, but I miss Ukraine. I had a purpose there and don't have one here. There I was somebody, now I am anybody. I know this will change and within a few months I'll have a laundry list of projects but for now I feel adrift. This is partly pleasant and partly sad.

On the flight over I met a couple of interesting people, one of whom worked on a yacht that Rod Stewart had been a passenger on. She says he's an asshole, if any one is wondering, but apparently is kid is adorable.

Things I immedietly noticed upon arrival in America:

1) Minorities

2) Lots of English being spoken

3) Overweight people

4) Space: I ate in a restaurant in the airport with plenty of space between the tables and plenty of empty tables. In a public transit area in Ukraine I'd be sharing a table with someone I didn't know.

5) Actual help from airport employees

I'm trying to figure out what to do with this blog. I likely won't be teaching or travelling for some time. Maybe I'll do a "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" thing: America through the eyes of someone coming back to it.

It's funny, because I really had forgotten. I haven't been in the country in a year, and I did a huge adjust this year. Last year I came back twice: for the birth of my niece and Christmas, but was back for short times and mostly spent whirlwind time with family and friends before getting back on the plane. And in those times I still felt very seperate from Ukraine. In the past year I adjusted wholesale. The majority of my time was spent with Ukrainian friends and the majority of my interactions were in Russian. I never adjusted in the clothing department (although it must be said that, even as I type this, I am wearing a pair of tapuchki: Ukrainian house slippers) but a lot of Ukrainian cultural beliefs became my own, even if they didn't make sense (looking in the mirror to ward of bad luck if you forget something in your apartment and have to return). I don't think you can live somewhere for more than two years and not adjust: if I have learned anything, it is that the human psyche is designed to adapt, and subconciously so.

So this might be a lesson in American values as I adjust to them and maybe I'll just ramble my observations here, all the strange dichotimies of life. For example: I went to a restaurant with a friend. The waiter was uber-friendly (annoyingly so) and was refilling our drinks when they were still more than half-full. A) There are no free-refills in Ukraine and B) You'd have to hunt down a server to get one even if you wanted to pay for it. So take this amped-friendly service (which I had missed) and contrast it with this: I was driving yesterday and discovered I was in the wrong lane to turn at the light. I rolled down my window, smiled and motioned to the SUV beside me, inquiring the older woman driver if I could pull ahead of her when the light went green. Her expression turned to one of anger and she squinted her eyes and forcefully mouthed the word "NO!" It shocked the hell out of me. There isn't a Ukrainian in the world world who wouldn't have let me get there. Ukrainians are really rude in some senses, but they'll get off a packed bus so you can get out, give you detailed directions (if they don't take you there themselves) and generally try to help each other out (Communism did breed communalism). So while they'll generally always work as little as they have to (hence the service), they wouldn't make someone have to drive off and make a later U-turn (as I did) just because they didn't want you pulling in front of them.

I tried to figure out why she reacted that way and the best I could come up with is that it affronted her that I would make her wait for my own gain, or that she had earned that spot and I was trying to selfishly take it (like line-jumping). And then I remembered that a few years ago I wouldn't have asked: I would have put my car nose in front of her's (telling myself that she owned an SUV and deserved it) and muscle my way into the spot.

I guess Peace Corps does change you.

Wow.

Like everything in my life it was at the last second: I was supposed to check-out today but a series of events meant I got to Kyiv with only 90 minutes before the office closed and I was in need of a medical checkout, needed to close my grant (which normally takes a couple hours) and still needed half a dozen signatures from people who weren't in their offices.

And with quite a bit of help and good-will and at least one very annoyed financial manager (along with running up and down three flights of steps about nine times)...it's done. I'm done.

I am no longer a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I thought it would be more sad but the elation of getting the paperwork in under the buzzer and finally finishing everything put me on an adrenaline high.

Wow.

Done.

I fly home in five days.

Why I almost quit Peace Corps 12 days before finishing it:

Well, before we get to that I want to talk about my language proficiency test, which was one of many tests (medical being the rest), exams, surveys and interviews that comprise the two page typed checklist that must be completed before I can close my service. It’s almost as hard to get out of Peace Corps as into it.

I thought my language test would be in the afternoon and toyed with the idea of drinking a “longehr” (a pre-mixed vodka and juice drink sold on any street corner in Kyiv) in order to grease the grammar. I have had it independently confirmed that my Russian is quite a bit better under the influence of alcohol, if only because I stop worrying about making mistakes, something which no doubt causes me to make more of them. Unfortunately, my test was scheduled for 10:00 AM and despite the Ukrainian belief that 100 grams of alcohol every morning is healthy for you, even after two-plus years of living here I still can’t stomach the idea of vodka for breakfast. So I went and did it sober.

I was hoping—only hoping mind you--for a score of Advanced-Low. In reality, though, I thought I would receive an Intermediate-High. I had thought I was at this level during the last test I took in January, but only received an Intermediate-Mid. Now, while I have grown more comfortable with the language over the past ten months or so, I haven’t felt like it went up drastically. In fact, I thought the high point was around August when I was dating a girl who didn’t speak English and most of my Ukrainian friends found it was easier to speak with me Russian than mash their way through English. But after Sarah came to Ukraine I found myself speaking English for pretty much a month because I spent most of my time with her and even when we did hang out with Ukrainians, we kept it to English so she didn’t feel excluded. Sarah’s month long visit put my work into a backlog and I was swamped with catching up, leaving little time for socialization. The result? I felt like my Russian died and was having dirt thrown onto it. So I was hoping for Advanced-Low but would be satisfied with Intermediate-High, secretly worrying that I was still at Intermediate-Mid.

The test was simply sitting down with a Ukrainian staff member and having a conversation. Thirty minutes of describing my projects and saying where I thought Peace Corps should go in Ukraine later, I was given a score Advanced-Mid, higher than I had ever hoped for. Hammer out the grammar problems, I was told, and it would have been Advanced-High.

Made my day.

And I didn’t even need the vodka.

***

My day took a slight turn for the worse in the afternoon. Admin was confused because I kept telling them I was flying out on December 4th but the computers showed me COSing (Closing of Service) on December 14th. Why? Well that’s the official COS date. And while we’re allowed to leave up to 30 days early, apparently there was a form to fill out for that.

“Can I fill out this form now?”

“No, it was due in October. You can’t leave until the 14th.”

“But I bought a non-refundable plane ticket for the 4th.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll talk to Diana (Peace Corps Ukraine Director) about that.”

“The person to talk about that is [Bob]. But he won’t approve it.”

NOTE: Bob is a Ukrainian guy, but I’m keeping his identity secret.

I go up to Bob’s office and ask his secretary if he is in.

“No, he’s out to lunch. What do you need?”

I show her the form and say I need it approved.

“He won’t approve that. It was due in October.”

“But I need to leave on the 4th.”

“You can’t.”

On the way out of the office, another admin worker that I'm friends with expresses shock and dismay when hearing about not filling out the form. According to her, there is no way to get it approved now.

Dammit.

I go up to the office of the director and talk to her secretary, but the director is busy. She says she can squeeze me in for five minutes in an hour.

I go down to the volunteer lounge and fume a bit. It is my fault. I vaguely remember being told about the form when being handed the inch-thick stack of forms that needed to be completed before I could leave Peace Corps, but, yeah, I never filled it out.

Three Peace Corps employees have told me there is no hope of getting it approved and seem to think Bob will scream at me for even asking. But they’re Ukrainian and Ukrainians ultimately think differently. Bribery may be part of their culture, but getting approved past a due date is not. Americans, on the other hand, bend rules if the rules need bending. I hold out hope for the director.

Still… If she can’t help me, my only option is to quit. The consequences? None, really. After a year in Peace Corps you get all the benefits you get if you stay the full service, save one: non-competitive eligibility for government jobs. Except that benefit only lasts a year from service and I don’t see myself trying to get a government job any time soon, if ever. So if I quit, on my paperwork it says “Early Termination” rather than “Close of Service” and that’s it…but it does mean I quit 12 days before I was supposed to finish.

At the time of my appointment I explain the problem to the director, admit it’s my fault and say I need a favor. She winks at me and says “let’s do it.” As she’s signing the form, she says “Bob’s going to kill me.”

I take it down to my manager. He looks surprised the director signed it but signs on his line. “Bob’s going to be pissed.”

I take it up to Bob. I hand him the paper. He nods and signs it.

“You’re not upset?” I ask.

“Why would I be?” he asks. “The director signed it, so I don’t care.”

I leave the office and go back to the admin person handling my paperwork and tell her my COS date has been officially moved up. She doesn’t believe me, and actually calls Bob for confirmation. She hangs up the phone looking surprised.

Later I see my manager. “Bob didn’t yell at you?” he asks.

“Nope,” I said. “He didn’t care.”

My manager gets a far-away look in his eyes. “Well I guess you never know,” he says.

My official COS date is now November 29.

In six days I will no longer be in Peace Corps.

Had my last day of teaching today. Felt good, actually. Also went and bought my first suit 'cause I know I need one and it's cheaper here. Everything's like that now: finishing this, getting that, all preparing to leave. And that includes writing my Description of Service.

What is it? It's the official record of everything we've done. Like a few other volunteers in my group, I've decided to post mine online. Why? To brag of course!

It's just the way such things are. A lot of it is boiler plate: they gave us the exact wording on most of the beginning and end and gave us examples of how the middle should go. Workin' for the government and all.

Thought I'd share.

***

Description of Peace Corps Volunteer Service

Name: Daniel Reynolds

Country of Service: Ukraine

Dates of Service: (December 2004 – December 2006)

After a competitive application process emphasizing professional skills, cultural sensitivity, adaptability and medical fitness, Daniel Reynolds was invited into Peace Corps service as a Teacher Trainer.

On September 29th, 2004, Daniel Reynolds joined the twenty-seventh group of Peace Corps Volunteers to serve in Ukraine. He entered an intensive 12-week Peace Corps Ukraine community-based training program. The training program included 150 hours of technical instruction in TEFL methodologies and teaching practice, 200 hours of Ukrainian language training, and 100 hours of cross-cultural studies (history, economy, cultural norms, etc.). To reinforce language and cross-cultural learning, Daniel Reynolds lived with a Ukrainian family in the town of Obhiev, Kyiv Region throughout training.

In preparation for his Peace Corps service, Daniel Reynolds, while a trainee, taught at Public School #11. While at Public School #11, Daniel Reynolds taught English and Country Studies. As a teacher trainer, he also helped the four other trainees in his cluster plan their and observed their teaching to provide feedback.

U.S. Ambassador John Herbst swore in Daniel Reynolds as a Peace Corps Volunteer on December 23rd, 2004 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Daniel Reynolds was assigned to Zhytomyr, a city of 300,000 in west-central Ukraine. He worked as a full-time instructor at the Zhytomyrska Oblast Recertification Institute which trains and recertifies 200 teachers a year. He was one of two TEFL Pedagogy teachers and reported directly to the institute’s director Ivan Ivanovich Yakuno, while working closely with his counterpart Irina Borislavina Gumenyuk, the Head of the Foreign Languages Department.

Teacher were recertified at the institute every five years in groups of 25-30, each attending month-long courses. Daniel Reynolds taught more than 300 teachers over his two year service, personally training 40% of the English teachers in the Zhytomyrska Oblast. He taught the following 90-minute seminars:

•Introduction and Terminology of the Recertification Course

•Approaches to Language Teaching

•The Communicative Method

•Teaching Speaking Skills

•Teaching Listening Skills

•Teaching Reading Skills

•Teaching Writing Skills

•Teaching Integrated Skills

•Teaching Vocabulary

•Teaching Grammar

•Teaching Mixed-Ability Classrooms

•Lesson Planning

•Classroom Instruction/Management

•Teaching Young Learners (five different seminars)

•Language Improvement (four different seminars)

•Country Studies (four different seminars)

Daniel Reynolds also developed and taught an advanced English language program for secondary students. His lessons fostered critical, creative thinking through interactive learning. This program prepared students for Ukraine’s highly competitive English competitions (Olympiads). All his students qualified in their regional Olympiads and went on to compete at the oblast level. At the oblast level, one of his students took first place and two took second place in their respective divisions and all three went on to compete nationally.

Daniel Reynolds developed, with Irina Borislavina Gumenyuk, all the tasks used in the Zhytomyrska Oblast English Olympiads for 2005 and 2006. This involved writing numerous writing and speaking prompts, as well as creating multiple-choice and true/false reading and listening tasks for three different grade levels. He also judged at the Zhytomyrska Oblast Spanish Olympiad in 2005 and at the Zhytomyrska Oblast English Olympiads in 2005 and 2006 (in order to prevent a conflict of interest, he did not judge the grade level of the students he was coaching). When the Ukrainian National English Olympiads took place in Zhytomyr in 2006, Daniel Reynolds helped coordinate the ten Peace Corps volunteers who came to Zhytomyr to judge at them.

Daniel Reynolds developed a large body of original teaching materials during his service. These included: a twelve lesson integrated skills English Competition training course that included audiovisual materials and used authentic materials; a five lesson Country Studies course on America, each lesson including authentic materials, digital photographs, texts with questions, listening exercises using audio from native speakers and short videos (many filmed and edited by Daniel Reynolds himself); a 40-page booklet, written in conjunction with Irina Borislavina Gumenyuk, on Olympiad training, which was sold by the institute to teachers in the oblast; and a twelve lesson update of the British Councils Recertification Curriculum. All these materials were distributed by the institute, by Peace Corps and by Daniel Reynolds to Ukrainian teachers and Peace Corps Volunteers for use in their classrooms. The update of the British Councils Recertification Curriculum was distributed to all the teacher trainers in Ukraine Group 31.

To increase awareness of the communicative method and show its applicability in the classroom, Daniel Reynolds taught a number of “master lessons” at various schools in the Zhytomyrska oblast. He would visit a classroom (often in a town or village) and teach a TEFL lesson to a classroom of students. These lessons would be observed by the school’s English teachers so that they could learn how communicative teaching techniques could be used in a real-life classroom setting.

These were Daniel Reynolds primary assignments.

In addition to his primary responsibilities, Daniel Reynolds worked to increase the level of English in his community by hosting a 90 minute English Club at School #12 once a week (average attendance of 20 students); teaching “guest classes” at the Zhytomyr Pedagogical University; substituting on numerous occasions for sick teachers at School #12; and hosting a weekly English movie club at the Zhytomyr library. The movie club proved to be especially popular and was sometimes standing room only. The participants came from all walks of life, including retirees, teachers, and university students, and the club became so well-known in the community that it was covered twice by a local newspaper.

Daniel Reynolds served as the oblast manager of the Peace Corps “Practical Project”, a project aimed at increasing the English and pedagogy levels of English teachers in select oblasts in Ukraine. Daniel Reynolds was responsible for the coordination and oversight of ten TEFL Peace Corps Volunteers in his oblast, who in turn conducted monthly or bi-monthly workshops with teachers in their communities. He conducted monthly meetings with the volunteers, distributed teaching materials to them and observed them teaching in their classrooms once a semester to provide feedback on their teaching. Through this project, dozens of young teachers in the oblast saw dramatic improvements in their ability to speak English, improvements which would no doubt carry over into their classrooms.

Interested in both youth sporting and wanting to combat the alarming increase in HIV infection in Ukraine (during Daniel Reynolds’ service, Ukraine had the fastest growing HIV infection rate in the world), Daniel Reynolds, working with a sporting-NGO called Polissya, applied for and was awarded two Small Project Assistance Grants for a total amount of $8,262.

The first SPA grant, for $3,342, was to complete and purchase equipment for a 25-foot high climbing wall. After completion, 93 students were trained in basic climbing techniques on this wall. To be able to climb, the students had to attend a one hour seminar on HIV/AIDS provided by the Ukrainian branch of ACET (AIDS Care Education Training), an international HIV-awareness organization. These students were then allowed to climb for free on the wall on nights and weekends. The wall became fairly well-known. Its opening was covered in two newspapers and it was later visited by Country Director Karl Beck, Country Director Diana Schmidt, two regional managers, SPA project coordinator Anne Silver and Peace Corps Deputy Director Jodi Mitchell.

The second grant SPA grant, also with Polissya and for $4,920, purchased ten bikes and materials to mark bike trails in the Zhytomyr region. A 25-kilometer bike trail was marked with signs in the wooded area south of Zhytomyr and Polissya began conducting biking excursions in the oblast. Orphans were the target group of this project because they were statistically more at risk of being involved in crime and the sex industry. In order to ride the bikes, the 74 orphans who participated in the project had to also attend an HIV/AIDS seminar provided by ACET. Both projects are continuing and Polissya plans to offer bike excursions to local students beginning in spring 2007.

Daniel Reynolds continued to work with Polissya, helping to promote their projects. He brought them business from a Zhytomyr-based Dutch computer company, got them listed in Brandt’s Rough Guide, got them featured on a television show focused on successful Ukrainian organizations, and got donations for them of new climbing ropes from New England Ropes, space heaters from COSing volunteers, and a two year subscription from Rock + Ice.

During the summers, Daniel Reynolds continued his work in increasing student interest in sporting, American culture and the English language. In 2005, with 11 other Peace Corps Volunteers, he participated in a summer camp organized by the Sevastopol Recertification Institute, which helped more than 30 students practice their English skills and learn about American culture and civil rights. Also in 2005, Daniel Reynolds was invited to be a master teacher for the staff of YouthCAN, which ran an extremely popular civic education youth camp called Rah-Rah. He conducted a marathon four-hour pedagogy session for YouthCAN’s trainers so that they could better teach the participants of their camp. Later in 2005, Daniel Reynolds was trained by American Councils to teach at their Pre-Departure Orientations (PDO) for Ukrainian students who would be going to America for nine months on the FLEX exchange program. During two four-day sessions he trained 30 students using a Department of State-approved 12-lesson curriculum. In 2006, Daniel Reynolds was invited back by American Councils to be the Master Teacher at their Training of Trainers. He taught teaching skills to 40 trainers from six countries and then observed and gave feedback for their mock-trainings during the four-day session. That summer, Daniel Reynolds taught another 15 FLEX students during a four-day PDO. Later in the summer, he taught 100 teachers about American schools at a week-long “teacher camp” hosted by the Zhytomyr pedagogical university.

In 2006, as the result of five months of planning, 20 students participated in Camp Edelweiss, a climbing/teamwork/healthy lifestyles summer camp that pulled together resources from Polissya, ACET, Peace Corps, American Councils, The Center for Youth Initiatives and donations from both businesses in Zhytomyr and international ones such as Mammut, Black Diamond and Metolius. Daniel Reynolds managed a staff of twelve during the five-day camp, including four Peace Corps Volunteers. At the camp, teams of students climbed Zhytomyr’s cliffs, competed and cooperated while completing team challenges like crossing a river with a rope or navigating obstacle courses, and participated in seminars that covered HIV/AIDS, narcotics, alcohol abuse, civic responsibility and more. Due to the sponsorship, every participant at the free summer camp received tee-shirts, completion certificates, posters and stickers. In order to not limit participants, the camp was conducted entirely in Russian and Ukrainian. Daniel Reynolds worked closely with the local media and the camp was covered by three newspapers, a radio station and a television station. The Ukrainian staff participants also reported that they gained a great deal of project management and public relations knowledge from working at the camp. One staff member said putting the camp on her resume and talking about the experience during her interview was likely what awarded her a placement in the UGRAD exchange program. Now in the program, she is currently studying at St. Lawrence in Canton, New York.

Continuing his interest in sporting and HIV education, Daniel Reynolds was one of two project managers on Run Across Ukraine, a relay race from the Eastern border of Ukraine to the western one to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. Along with PCV Jon Kendrick, Daniel Reynolds helped organize and grow the run; brought on board other PCVs and organizations (including ACET, American Councils, the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living With HIV/AIDS, Democrats Abroad and the U.S. Embassy); secured the donation of advertising, tents, bikes, a PA system and thousands of HIV information pamphlets; designed a webpage and got the web address http://www.runacrossukraine.org and webmaster services donated; and contracted for a bus that would support the runners on their journey. Although scheduled for September 2006, issues with securing permission for the run from the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sport (who were in turn plagued by constant political upheaval and uncertainty) delayed the run past the Close of Service date of both Jon Kendrick and Daniel Reynolds. Both volunteers transferred their responsibilities to two new, enthusiastic volunteers, introduced them to the leaders of the organizations supporting the run and helped prepare the new team of PCVs who would organize it. Daniel Reynolds hopes to return to Ukraine to help manage the run when it will begin in May 2007.

Near the end of his service, Daniel Reynolds became increasingly interested in working with civic education groups. He helped The Center for Youth Initiatives write their Democracy Grant for “Active Community, Transparent Authorities”, which sought to empower Zhytomyr NGOs by providing them with resources and workshops and to open the avenues of communication between Zhytomyr NGOs and the Zhytomyr Government (which was also going through upheavals, including the recall of the mayor due to election fraud). Daniel Reynolds also advised and did translation work for several grants pursued by the Ukrainian branch of the International Organization for Human Rights, an NGO that conducts human rights monitoring in Ukraine (particularly in prisons) and conducts civic education, leadership and conflict resolution seminars with Zhytomyr’s students. Daniel Reynolds advised on and translated a Democracy Grant for Commercial and Information Center, an NGO which wants to air regular three-minute spots on local television to inform the citizenry of their legal rights. Ukrainians would be able to SMS, call or email the center to ask legal questions which would be answered in the next television spot. These spots would also provide information to help citizens protect themselves against police extortion and human trafficking, both serious problems in Ukraine.

As Daniel Reynolds’ Russian abilities improved, he was able to offer volunteer translation services, including helping one teacher with her master’s thesis; translating a press release for Soldiers for Peace, an NGO of retired soldiers that do community work; and translating the menu for the Corsair restaurant so that they could attract more foreign business.

Daniel Reynolds continued to initiate projects even as he was leaving. With less than three weeks before his COS date, Daniel Reynolds took a group of Ukrainian university students to the orphanage with which he had worked on the Bike Project. Seeing that the orphans needed more attention and interaction from adults (a staff of 8 took full-time care of more than 100 orphans), the group, with Daniel Reynolds advising and organizing, decided to create a social club that would visit the orphanage weekly to interact with the orphans, bringing them movies, music and conversation.

Daniel Reynolds was extremely mindful of his short stay in Ukraine and actively worked to make sure his projects were sustainable after he left. For each major project he groomed a Ukrainian or American replacement and made sure he/she had an active part in the planning process. Due to this, the Climbing Wall; the Bike Project; Camp Edelweiss; the Movie Club; Run Across Ukraine; Active Community, Transparent Authorities; the Orphanage Project and the Legal Rights project will all continue after he goes back to America.

Besides his work with host country nationals, Daniel Reynolds was an active volunteer in different Peace Corps projects. In addition to teaching at several in-service trainings, Daniel Reynolds was a member of the Multicultural Awareness Group. With the group, Daniel Reynolds helped to put together a series of lesson plans that taught cultural sensitivity and helped to create a multicultural awareness video. Channeling his former career as a journalist, Daniel Reynolds was also an active contributor to Peace Corps Ukraine’s newsletter, Nu Scho?!, with an article in all but one of the monthly newsletters printed during his service. Daniel Reynolds’ writing also led him to work with Peace Corps Ukraine’s public relations department, writing several articles for them on projects he and other volunteers had done.

Although he was taught Ukrainian during training, Daniel Reynolds was assigned to a Russian-speaking site and so began studying Russian in his spare time. At the end of training, Daniel Reynolds tested in Ukrainian and received a score of Intermediate-Mid on the Language Proficiency Inventory. At the end of his service, Daniel Reynolds tested in Russian and received a score of Advanced-Low on the Language Proficiency Inventory.

Following 750 years as a colony of other Eastern and Central European states, Ukraine decided in 1990 by plebiscite to be an independent country oriented towards Western Europe. Ukraine welcomes change and encourages its people to open their minds to new concepts. Daniel Reynolds’ work as a teacher of English language, as well as his role as a transmitter of western culture and its approaches to problem solving, were part of a nation-wide effort in Ukraine to reorient itself towards the West.

Additionally, Daniel Reynolds fulfilled the goals of Peace Corps service by giving of himself, both professionally and personally, to his site and the local community. His contribution, whether to the teachers of his institute, to the pupils of the local schools or to the members of the local community, provided opportunities for Ukrainians and Americans to create common bonds and to gain understanding and appreciation for one another.

Pursuant to Section 5(f) of the Peace Corps Act, 22 USC 2504(f), as amended, any former Volunteer employed by the United States Government following her/his Peace Corps Volunteer Service is entitled to have any period of satisfactory Peace Corps service credited for purposes of retirement, seniority, reduction in force, leave, and other privileges based on length of Government service. That service shall not be credited toward completion of the probationary or trial period of any service requirement for career appointment.

This is to certify in accordance with Executive Order 11103 of April 10, 1963, that Daniel Reynolds served successfully as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Her/his service ended on November 18, 2006. He is therefore eligible to be appointed as a career-conditional employee in the competitive civil service on a non-competitive basis. This benefit under the Executive Order extends for a period of one year after termination of Volunteer service, except that the employing agency may extend the period for up to three years for a former Volunteer who enters military service, pursues studies at a recognized institution of higher learning, or engages in other activities that, in the view of the appointing agency, warrant extension of the period.

A guy rode past me on his bike, popped up his front wheel, hit the brakes and stopped like that, balanced on his back tire. Then he started jumping up and down, using his bike like a pogo stick, the back tire thumping as it repeatedly hit the ground.

I thought: Q: Who the hell are these guys? A: People who think mountain-biking, rocking climbing, orienteering, paint ball, and carrying said mountain bike over countless streams, footbridges, embankments and outcroppings, all in sub-zero weather, is fun.

It was 9:00 AM and I was waiting, along with 19 other people, to compete in Zhytomyr’s Extreme Marathon, a multi-sport adventure race. This was actually only a mini-Extreme Marathon. The real one, in which I had competed the year before, was a 24 hour endurance race of running, swimming, climbing, ropes course challenges, orienteering, biking and rafting. Carrie (another volunteer) and I had lasted about 12 hours before dropping out. That had been the plan all along, because I had to be in Kyiv the following day and couldn’t afford to do the all-night trekking through the woods (which hadn’t sounded like a lot of fun anyway). Still, of the 32 teams from 6 countries, four others dropped out before us, which meant we weren’t complete losers.

Although Extreme Marathon was born in Zhytomyr, its increasing popularity and the addition of real corporate sponsorship (from Marmot, among others), meant a much larger Extreme Marathon took place this summer in the Chernitskava Oblast. Jon and I briefly considered entering, took one look at the gear list and the hassle involved of getting it all to another oblast and, with Run Across Ukraine taking up most of our energy, decided it wasn’t worth it.

So I was excited when I heard there would be a smaller version in Zhytomyr this year. Of course, I only heard about it 36 hours before the race itself. Jon couldn’t leave his town because it was his last weekend in Ukraine, so I asked my neighbor and 15 year-old climbing protégé, Igor, to be my partner. He accepted, and then told me he’d only ridden a bike once in his life and that, because of him, we’d probably loose.

“I’m not doing it to win,” I said to him. “I just want to finish.” I considered that for a moment, and remembered the last race and the pride of not being the first team to drop out. “And not come in last place,” I said.

It turns out, largely through my own mistakes, that while we did (sort of) finish, we also came in absolutely, dead-last place.

Here is a record of those mistakes.

***

Igor has an earnest can-do attitude, which is what makes him such a great student whether he’s in class or on cliffs (and I’ve had the pleasure of teaching him both places). As soon as he accepted my invitation to compete, he asked to borrow a bike to learn how to ride it. Giving him one, off he went, practicing for the next four hours, not wanting me to help him. When he returned it that evening, he asked to borrow it at 7:00 AM the next morning to practice some more. I woke up just long enough to give it to him before going back to sleep, trying to get in another hour before having to leave for the race. Unlike his lazy American partner, Igor was up with the sun, trying to teach himself to ride.

The race started near Zhytomyr’s only extreme sports store, a tiny, ten square-foot space crammed with skis, sleeping bags and backpacks. There wasn’t even room for a register or sales desk, and the salesperson sat in a chair between two aisles. If you want things like climbing gear, they pull out the catalogue and ask what you want ordered.

Teams arriving at the start point

In the parking lot, the ten teams were registering at the organizer’s table, which was actually the hood of a car. Once signed in and having paid 10 hrivna ($2) per team, we were given cards to go around our necks. These cards would be hole-punched and scrawled on at 18 checkpoints in and around Zhytomyr. On our card was written the team name Carrie and I had chosen last year: Bolshevilne Yeedjike, or “Crazy Hedgehogs”.

The registration table

Me, with our "Crazy Hedgehogs" card

I was already loosing the feeling in my fingers and toes from standing around in the cold when, finally, we were told to line up our bikes. Igor’s and mine were from the ten that were purchased by the forward-thinking tax payers of America for Zhytomyr’s youth. As part of keeping the project sustainable, Polissya was allowed to rent these bikes out in order to earn funds to keep the bikes maintained. Another four of the ten bikes were being ridden by race participants. I hoped they’d paid to use them.

Igor and I, before the race

The race participants were hard core, the best of Zhytomyr’s extreme community. Almost all were Polissya members, who climbed in the winter long after I had deemed it too cold to do so, who had started adventure racing in Ukraine and who now traveled all over the country and the CIS region to compete in them. Even the bike-renters were adventure racers who normally took part in races that substituted long-distance hiking for biking. Still, I didn’t think of myself as particularly outmatched. True, I’d ridden a bike about ten times in the past ten years, but I was one of the best climbers in the group. It didn’t really occur to me that climbing would be about 0.02% of the race and the rest would mean using muscles I never really used before, that I would be competing in an endurance race when I spent most of my time sitting inside.

It didn’t really occur to me how spectacularly I was going to get my ass kicked.

All the teams lined up

We were handed a typed set of clues in Russian (“the hole puncher is inside an old well”, for example) and a map, which had the 18 checkpoints marked on them and the order they were to be done in.

On your mark, get set …

And we were off.

***

As a mob of 20 bikers, we made our way to the first checkpoint, which, once off Zhytomyr’s streets, meant navigating down a steep, hill-hugging, winding, muddy path. In the spirit of racing, I did not walk my bike down (two teams choose to do so), but blithely followed the psychopathic people ahead of me, waiting to fly off the path and die at any moment.

After braking to a dirt-spewing halt, we hopped off our bikes to gather around an old stone well, reaching down to punch our cards with a hole puncher tied to the inside. A code (B7) was spray painted on the side of the well, and this was then written by us on our cards next to the punched holes (each puncher left a different configuration).

And then it was off to the next checkpoint.

Except Igor’s bike chain had come off. And not just come off, but had inexplicably come over the gear wheel and was now around the pedal, jammed in against the gear shift. I hurriedly worked it back into place as seven teams disappeared off into the woods.

The chain now on, Igor and I crossed a wooden footbridge and furiously biked off after the other teams. On top of a hill, we couldn’t see them, so I reached for the map.

My hand felt cloth.

There was no map.

After the first checkpoint, I had shoved it in my left jacket pocket.

It was not there.

My pumping legs must have knocked it out.

Fuck.

Leaving Igor at the top of the hill, I went back the way we came, looking for the map. The other two teams, the ones that had walked their bikes down the hill, passed me. I went twice along the distance between the hill and the first checkpoint and could not find the map. Possibly someone had picked it up; there were Ukrainians walking along the paths we were riding on. Possibly one of the two trailing teams had grabbed it, but that was unlikely. Ukrainians are remarkably sportsmanly. It had occurred to me to stop one of the trailing teams and ask them to share one of their maps, but I knew that they would say yes and that it would be unfair to impose ourselves on someone for the entire race.

In the end, Igor and I went back to the starting point and got another map.

That was Daniel mistake #1.

***

New map in hand (firmly clutched in hand), it occurred to me to skip the next checkpoint and catch up with everyone (there’s a 30 minute penalty for each missed point), but I wanted to do the whole race. If I was going to loose, I was going to at least complete it.

Half an hour later we were lost in the woods. There was a circle on the map on a green bit and there was a clue for a “half ruined tree”, but after a lot of circling, we couldn’t find that tree. Found a lot of live ones and a few dead ones, but no “half-ruined" ones that would have a hole puncher and a code. The forest was a maze of crisscrossing paths and while I could always get us back to civilization, I didn’t always know where we were in relation to that circle.

My mobile rang.

“How’s the race?” asked Jon.

“Igor’s bike chain came off, I couldn’t find our map and now we’re lost in the woods.”

“Huh,” said Jon, helpfully.

“And we haven’t even reached the second checkpoint.”

“Yeah, sounds like you’re doing well,” said Jon. “Good luck, then.”

After more of not finding that tree, I decided that we’d have more fun doing the climbing challenges that would come later, and didn’t feel like spending any more time wandering around frozen in the woods. We were going to loose anyway, why worry about a tree?

“Let’s go, Igor,” I said.

***

At the next checkpoint, we found lots of bikes leaning against trees. It was the orienteering section, which was meant to be done on foot.

The check-in for the orienteering section

Two race volunteers were checking teams in and out, writing their times on a clipboard. I looked at it. A team was actually still behind us. Apparently they’d had a bike problem. Five other teams were out in the woods. I looked at the three teams that had finished this section. They’d all taken around 45 minutes to find four points which were out in the woods, and they’d been the fastest. According to the times, some teams had been out there for more than an hour. It had been snowing for a week in Zhytomyr, and had all that snow had melted in two days of above-freezing temperatures. Although it had been below-zero in the morning, it was back up now and the whole forest was mud. Still, I’d been sweating under my sweaters (they finally lived up to their names) and now felt like I was freezing with their wetness against me.

“Want to do this?” I asked Igor.

He shrugged. “Whatever you want to do,” he said.

Walking around cold in the mud for an hour?

“Yeah, we’re not going to do this part,” I said, handing the map back.

The race volunteers balked.

“We know we’re going to loose, so we’re going to keep it fun,” I said.

They laughed and waved us good luck.

Igor and I went to the next point.

***

The next checkpoint actually was fun: we found ourselves under a large bridge over a small river. Two more race volunteers were there and the challenge, as they pointed out, was to climb up the inside of the bridge, walk across the scaffolding under the bridge (clipped into a rope they’d strung the length of it), hole punch your card with the puncher dangling from underneath the bridge and then rappel down.

Finally, something worth doing! I strapped on my harness and began climbing, got to the scaffolding, clipped in and began dodging around steel beams, pulling myself through holes made by their “X”s, clipping in on one side of the hole and unclipping from the other. As I navigated under the bridge (the Red Hot Chili Peppers song starting in my head and not leaving for a long time), Igor snapped pictures of me.

Climbing under the bridge

In the pics above and below I am rapelling down

Rappelling down, I was now halfway down a steep, concrete embankment leading to the river. Rather than go up the embankment and bike across the bridge, though, the volunteers were telling us we had to cross the river.

Looking down, I saw one of the teams ahead of us doing so. Looking back up, I saw Igor lifting a bike over the barricade.

“Wait!” I yelled, but he had already let go, the bike sliding on its side and smacking into my outstretched hands a few seconds later, but not before the front reflector had broken off.

“Was the bike injured?” Igor asked me in his not-always-perfect English.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, the bike was injured.”

“Oh no!” he said earnestly (if there was a Ukrainian version of “Leave it to Beaver”, Igor would be its star).

I climbed up the embankment, shouldered the other bike and began carrying it down, which really meant I was sliding on my ass, trying to keep my hands away from the broken glass, the remains of decades of idiots tossing beer bottles from above.

Carrying the bike down the glass strewn embankment

This wasn’t just extreme, this was Ukraine extreme. If my feet slipped, I’d go tumbling down to the river, tangled up in ten pounds of bike. This is always what scares and excites me about Extreme Marathons: real danger. In America we have a lot of fake danger: jumping out of a plane with a parachute is scary, but you’re only going to get killed if two sets of equipment fail, which part of you realizes isn’t likely. It’s adrenaline without real fear. Real fear was last year, where getting to one hole puncher meant climbing down a well, feet braced on one side and back on the other, a rushing underground river at the bottom, no protection if I fell. There is no culture of litigation in Ukraine. If you get hurt from doing something stupid of your own free will, a Ukrainian judge will laugh if you tried to sue. So dangerous challenges that would give an American organizer pause are nothing to Ukrainians; in fact the participants seem to have a certain relish for them(we are talking about a country that birthed Leopold Von Masoch, whose writings gave us the word Masochism). And even though I’m an American, even though there’s no way in hell I’d, say, climb down that well for the fun of it, in the middle of a race and hopped up on competition, I hadn’t thought twice about going down it. And now, part of me was wondering why I was sliding a bike down this embankment, but it was only a small part, one quickly shoved away by the concentration of survival.

Igor getting his bike down to the river

We got the bikes down, adrenaline making my muscles vibrate, and began carrying them across the rocks poking out of the river. I had thought to wear my waterproof boots for the race, but they’re heavy and thought my cheap-but-light sneakers would fare better on a race that was mostly biking. This is what I get for thinking.

Bam, my foot slips and is plunged into the freezing water. Igor fared worse, getting both feet wet. On the other side, frost formed on our shoes. I wrung out my wet shoe (the pair was $10 at the bazaar; the soles are so thin that I can literally wring them out) and my sock before Igor and I manhandled our bikes up the grass on the other side.

Some of the teams behind us, bringing their bikes down the embankment and beginning to cross the river

I was slightly frustrated at the experience. We could have gone across the bridge, but it seemed like the race was being extreme for the sake of being extreme, making us go down the embankment, across the river and up the other side. Later, I realized why that was.

At the top, we began biking some more. According to the map, the next street would take us directly to the next checkpoint: a graveyard. But there were no side streets for quite a while. According to the scale of the map, we should have hit it already, but we hadn’t seen one. Looking behind us, I saw another team of bikers, so we must be going the right way.

Turned out, they were following us.

The street, I realized, was the dirt road that was on the other side of the river. I thought the street we were supposed to get on was paved: we had biked on it earlier in the day and that section had been blacktop. On the map there was nothing to indicate that it turned from paved into dirt, but it did. That was why they sent us across the river: the road was right there.

By the time I realized the mistake, it was better just to cut south and try to reconnect to the road later, the other team following us the whole way. Despite skipping two checkpoints and getting back in the pack of teams (and being spatially, if not technically, ahead of six other teams), the roundabout way of getting to the graveyard meant that we and the other team were now in last place. Except the other team had done all the checkpoints, and Igor and I were about as far behind as we could possibly be.

That was Daniel mistake #2.

***

We stuck with this other team, more or less, for the remainder of the race. Its members were Dima and Irka, a boyfriend/girlfriend team that Carrie and I had spent most of the last Extreme Marathon trading places with. It seemed fitting.

In the cemetery, our next checkpoint was to write down the day that Karol Something-Or-Other died. If “Karol” doesn’t sound very Ukrainian, it’s because he and most of the other occupants of the cemetery were Polish, having been buried at a time when Poland controlled Ukraine. We found his grave, a huge one, behind the cemetery’s tiny church.

Igor, biking ahead of me in the graveyard

We wound our way out of the city and back into the country, crossing another footbridge and temporarily interrupting the four adolescents that had been smoking cigarettes and fishing there (even after two years of living in Ukraine, it still surprises me to see a 12 year-old puffing). We found our next checkpoint code spray painted on a pipe dumping strange contents into the river, found the next one spray painted on some small cliffs a half-mile past it.

Above, Irka crossing the footbridge with the smoking/fishing kids. Below, two more of the kids, one still holding his cigarette

We possibly found some criminals as well. Two guys were using a cross-cut saw to cut firewood, watched by two other men (there’s a Ukrainian proverb that goes: there are three things a man can always watch: fire burning, water flowing and other people working). One of the guys cutting had lost an eye and had a slash across it that looked like it came from a knife. The whole tableau looked interesting and I asked to photograph them. I’ve never had a Ukrainian refuse to have their photograph taken, but they did and began looking around, slightly worried that I had asked. I decided it was best to keep moving.

Irka biking past hills covered in frost

Dima, Irka and Igor carrying their bikes over some rocks

I did like that about the race: it put us into contact with a lot of people going about their daily lives on a Saturday, showed me a lot of areas of Zhytomyr I had never seen before. I probably saw more new things in Zhytomyr in the six hours of the race than I’d seen in the past six months.

In the pics above and below, some of the scenery around Zhytomyr

***

Despite the newness, I was extremely familiar with the next checkpoint: it was the cliffs I had been climbing on for over a year. Getting there meant lugging the bikes up to an overpass, crossing to the other side of the river and then lugging them back down.

Carrying the bikes up to yet another overpass

At the cliffs, we were required to climb a route to get our cards signed by one of the volunteers there. The route I had to climb was one I’ve climbed at least 50 times before: a sweet, easy little crack that shoots up for 70 feet. Except I had never climbed it in wet, muddy, $10 tennis shoes after spending four hours biking. My feet kept slipping and I ended up climbing the thing hand over hand, absolutely exhausted when I got to the top. Igor, who had been belaying me, gently lowered me down.

“Good work!” he said, trying to encourage me.

I nodded, too out of breath to speak.

Irka was climbing the route beside mine, with Dima belaying her. She was only halfway up and, not wanting to get any farther behind, Igor and I set off.

Igor goofing off

Our next point was down a well again, me holding Igor’s legs so he could lean in and punch the card. Igor had begged off the climbing challenges because he was tired from the biking. I honestly thought Igor wouldn’t have much of a problem during the race, because he has a lot of endurance. He often goes jogging with Jon (who regularly runs marathons) and, unlike me, is always able to keep up with him. Still, even though he didn’t seem to be uncomfortable on the bike, he was constantly trailing behind me. So, because he seemed more tired than I was, we had reached an unspoken agreement: I climbed things, he crawled into things, which is how he ended up half inside a well.

Igor in the well

Irka and Dima biked past us a little later, while I was Daniel mistake #3, which was to ask an old woman how to get to another street. Ukraine doesn’t have street signs. The street names are stenciled onto buildings when someone decides to mark them, which isn’t often.

I was asking her how to get to a lake that was on the map, which was the next checkpoint. She kept trying to get me to go to the river. "The river is a much nicer place to go," she said. She didn’t really get that this was a race and I needed to get to the lake. “Go straight and then take a left”, she said. I knew a left would get me to the river. Irka and Dima took a way I had suspected would get there, but also suspected would leave us lost in a bunch of unmarked cross-streets. The problem with not growing up in Zhytomyr is that I don’t really know the place. I wanted to get out to a main road and take it up towards the lake.

Of course, I was now trying to get away from the old woman, who didn’t want to let go of my map and didn’t want to stop telling me how to get to the river. Two other old women came up and they all began arguing over which way I should go.

I gave up on directions to the lake. “See this road?” I asked pointing to a main one. “How do I get there?”

One of the old ladies pointed at a building. The main road was on the other side, she said.

“Thanks.”

Igor and I biked past some old playground equipment, crossed in front of the building and headed up the main road.

***

We found Dima and Irka at the lake. The clue said the hole puncher was attached to the small dock there, but they hadn’t found it yet. Igor did his job and, legs on the dock and torso wrapped under it, managed to see where the puncher was hanging. We passed him our cards to punch, and then moved onto the next challenge, in a wooded area of Zhytomyr.

Dima, Irka and Igor at the dock

Dima and Irka were leading the way, so they got to do the challenge first: paintball.

I had been excited about this bit, and it was partly why I had skipped out on the orienteering. I thought paintball would have all the teams pitted against one another, and I thought that if Igor and I got too far behind, we’d miss out.

Actually, each team of two was pitted against snipers. This was the way it worked: five wooden targets had been nailed to trees. You and your partner shot the first two targets to learn how to use the guns, then lit and threw a smoke grenade into the woods. You were then supposed to use the smoke as cover as you went deeper into the woods to shoot the other three targets. The snipers (two of the guys working for the paintball company) tried to kill you and you tried to kill them, or at least survive long enough to shoot the targets. You got your card punched whether you won or not.

Dima and Irka playing paintball

Dima and Irka were soon killed and Igor and I began pulling on the gear: pullover plastic camo pants and a jacket, kneepads, a bandanna, and a vest that held the CO2 canister for the paintball gun, which looked like an M-16.

In the pics above and below, Igor and I getting suited up. I'm on the left.

I was handed a smoke grenade and one of the snipers explained how to use it. There’s still a lot of words I don’t know in Russian and to me it sounded like this: “You see this hurgle? You pull it to pull the cap off one end and then you pull this hurgle on the other. Inside is a blibity and you light that with this lighter and then you throw it. Understand?”

And I said yes because the hurgles were obviously the cloth strips on both ends and a blibity had to be a fuse.

The snipers disappeared into the woods and, shortly thereafter, Igor and I ran in after them. We shot the first two targets, then hid behind a tree while paint balls exploded around us. I pulled one end off the smoke grenade, then the other. Inside one end there was nothing and in the other there was a metal ball. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never lit a Russian-made smoke grenade before and was a little stumped. I’ve never so much as lit a firework while in Ukraine and so didn’t realize that there was a different way to do it. I held the lighter to the metal ball for a few seconds and then stopped, deciding I didn’t want to blow my hand off.

“Just go!” I said to Igor, dropping the grenade and shooting at the snipers, making them get their heads down. They ducked behind trees, and Igor ran out and shot one target, then the next. He started shooting at the third, then realized he had no bullets. I found that I was out of bullets, too. They’d only given us ten or so each and we’d used them all.

Igor dropped to the ground, lying on his belly in the leaves.

“Go on!” yelled one of the snipers.

“I’m out of bullets!” yelled Igor.

“Me too!” I yelled. I thought this mean we were finished, done, game over. But apparently the snipers didn’t think so.

“Then get back to the start!”

“But we don’t have bullets!” I yelled.

“Go back!” they yelled again.

They wanted us to run with them shooting at us?

Igor started to get up.

“Go! Go!” I yelled, shooting my gun. Yeah, there were no bullets, but it still made a popping sound when I squeezed the trigger and that made the snipers get behind the trees, thinking that I had lied to them. Igor ran past me and I began to run as well, zigzagging as a small firestorm of paint balls hit the trees around us.

We finally got back alive, and, soon thereafter, the snipers came out of the woods, asking what had happened with the smoke grenade. I told them it didn’t work. We went back to where I had left it by the tree.

“Hold the lighter to it,” one of the guys said.

I did, and after a few seconds nothing happened.

“Keep holding it,” he said.

Finally, the metal ball must have heated up enough to ignite an internal fuse because sparks began to come out.

“Throw!” the guy ordered.

I did, and out came the smoke, quite uselessly at this point.

Still, it was pretty cool.

Me, coming back from having lit the smoke grenade, which is going off in the background

Stripping off the gear, I had wondered how paintball could possibly be included in a $1 per person entrance fee for the race, but as the owners were asking us if we liked it, told us about prices and handed us business cards, I realized how smart the organizers were: each team gets a little ten minute experience with just couple dozen paint balls and a smoke grenade and no doubt wants, like I did, to do it again and this time with a full magazine of bullets. Paintball hadn’t been part of the entrance fee; the paintball guys had donated it to generate business. Pretty smart.

***

We caught up with Dima and Irka at the next checkpoint. Although they had left fifteen minutes before us, they must have gotten lost. Igor and I had almost gotten lost as well, our dirt path through the woods disappearing and us breaking trail on our bikes, mowing down grass and brush as we raced past abandoned houses in the woods. The reason we didn’t try to relocate the path was that wild dogs were chasing us.

We’d been chased by dogs all day. It’s part of what makes an extreme Ukrainian race so extreme. But in the city, the dogs, which generally make up the totality of any given Ukrainian home security system, never chase you past the territory of the house they guard. But these dogs didn’t seem to have a territory and chased us all the way down to the river. For the tenth time that day, as they were nipping at our pedaling heels I thought: “We are going to die.”

As is, the river was our goal and we followed it to the next check point: an abandoned house that stood on a bluff overlooking the water (the property alone would be worth tens of thousands in America). Dima was climbing the tree in front of it, trying to reach hole puncher at the top. He wasn’t tied into anything; that wouldn’t be extreme. Rather than risk death yet again, I handed Dima our card and he punched both while I watched the sun start to set.

Dima up in the tree

As we got back on our bikes, it became obvious that we wouldn’t finish the race. No matter how many checkpoints you finished, all teams had to be at the finish line at 4:10 PM, six hours after the race started. We’d be lucky to get two more checkpoints in.

We biked, pushed said bikes and carried said bikes along the river, crossing intersecting streams and moving over and under fallen trees and along the edges of cliffs.

At one point, I was charged by a goat. A woman was sitting in a wooden rowboat beached beside the river, watching her three gazing goats. I stopped and took a picture of her and one of her goats must have thought this was threatening because it began running at me, head lowered. I was quickly starting to pedal when she yelled at it and it stopped mid-charge. I didn’t even know you could train a goat like that.

The lady and her goats. The one in front is the one that charged me

Charging goats? They forgot to put that in the race description.

Two checkpoints later we were at another favorite Zhytomyr point of mine: the riverside cliffs that Marina and I had climbed on all summer.

The challenge there, the last for us, was to rappel down to some rocks sticking out of the river, punch the card and then jumar up the rappel rope to the top. If you don’t know what a jumar is, imagine a metal handle with a wheel on it that only spins in one direction. If you clamp it on a rope, it slides up, but not back down. Jumaring up a rope uses two of these: one with webbing attached to your harness, one with a piece of webbing you put your foot in. You stand up on the webbing, lifting your body up, then slide up the jumar attached to your harness. This lets you sit into the harness to take weight off our foot and slide that jumar up in order to stand up on it again. This is done on straight ropes where there’s no way to climb up the rock, as was the case now because they’d hung the rope off an overhang, which meant it went 70 feet straight down to the river and those rocks.

Rappelling down over the river, the sun setting and turning it red and orange, was amazing. Jumaring back up after all the other exertions of the day? Stand up, slide up one jumar, sit down, breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Slide up other jumar, stand up, slide up first jumar, sit down, breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

One of the race volunteers

When I got to the overhang, I didn’t so much pull myself over the top as crawl and then roll and then lie there. Dima took the jumars and rappelled down.

Dima jumaring back up

Here you can see the mechanics of jummaring: the top jumar goes the the harness, your foot is in webbing attached to the bottom one

I wasn’t in a hurry to get up because we didn’t have enough time to do the last three checkpoints. I was happy about that, though. The next checkpoint required finding another tree. I don’t like finding trees because if there’s a problem with forests, it’s that it’s full of them.

I photographed Dima coming over the edge, felt a bit of satisfaction that he, taller and more muscular than I, a veteran of a number of adventure races, was just as exhausted as I was when he got to the top.

The four of us biked to the final stop, on the other side of Zhytomyr. Perhaps knowing it was the end, Igor, who had been trailing all day, was now right behind Dima and both of them sped ahead of me. Irka ended up falling way behind. Igor and Dima didn’t seem like they wanted to slow down, though, nor were they looking back, so I was in a strange tug of war trying to keep up with them ahead and trying keep Irka in sight behind. Finally I got stopped at a traffic light and Dima and Igor disappeared completely.

I pulled out a map and Irka caught up, saying she knew the way: it was to a factory that made climbing harnesses and sleeping bags. I had no idea that Ukraine had a company that made climbing harnesses, let alone one with a factory in Zhytomyr.

I let Irka lead, which is how I was the absolutely last person to reach the finish line.

***

Inside was a thing of beauty: a table laden with food. Igor, who hadn’t brought any food for the race, had eaten most of mine, and we had run out hours ago. Since Dima and Irka kept us racing hard, we never gave ourselves time to so much as stop to grab a candy bar. I had also been freezing all day, and the wisps of steam from the hot tea on the table called to me.

The most beautiful sight in the world after a race

Our card, after all the codes and hole punches

After everyone was inside the factory and they’d collected our cards to determine placement in the race, we were invited to eat. And as soon as we got up to move, though, the race coordinator asked us to go outside. Apparently the others were as hungry as I was and there were a number of protests. Still, we shuffled back out into the cold to line up in the dark for the awards ceremony, the food untouched.

Above and below are pics of the awards ceremony

Igor and I, as we suspected, placed tenth out of ten, but we got the prize everyone else did: free tee-shirts (again why I love Ukraine: I paid $1 for an adventure race and along with everything else, it included food and a tee-shirt). Third and second place got lanterns and I’m not sure what first place got because by then it was too dark to see.

The tee-shirt I got

We shuffled back in and pigged out.

***

“Seriously, let’s take a bus,” I said to Igor after about an hour of eating, talking and watching the video from last year’s Extreme Marathon.

Outside, it was back to below-zero and all my clothes were still soaked with sweat. My legs ached, and I was very, very tired.

The factory was located on a main road that ran straight (but for several miles) back to our apartment building. Any bus running along it would take us and our bikes home for the bargain price of 12 cents each.

“We should bike home!” said Igor. “We should finish on our bikes!” Despite his being tired all day, he must have processed that food pretty fast. Kids.

“Igor, it’s dark and we’re likely to get hit by a car,” I said. It wasn’t just an excuse: Ukraine is lacking in the street-light department, as well as in the sane-drivers department.

“So you’ll take a bus home and I’ll bike, okay?” he said.

He was determined to ride home, and I wasn’t going to let him go alone.

Fine. I got on my bike and listened to my legs cry.

And then another thing happened. During the day, Igor (when he wasn’t way behind) had had the not-so-endearing habit of following right behind me. This meant whenever I had to stop, his front tire would hit my back one. This time, biking along on pitch-black black top, when my front tire went into a water-filled hole I had not been able to see and my bike flipped forward, depositing me over the handlebars (but luckily on my feet), Igor crashed into the back of it, ramming my own bike into me.

I wish I had taken that bus.

Igor apologized about 700 times.

I picked up my bike and kept going.

After a while, the slight uphill grade we’d been moving on for 20 minutes turned into a downhill one. We coasted the last mile back to our apartment and completed the final challenge of the adventure race: carrying the bikes up the four flights of steps to my apartment.

***

I had come in last and I hadn’t even technically finished the race, having missed five checkpoints. I was cold, sore and extremely tired. Still, looking at the pictures that night and remembering the day, it was a great experience. My adventure race record may be pitiful (I’ve done two and completely finished neither), but it’s something I’d like to get better at, and America is definitely the place for it.

Maybe I’ll start one in Orlando.

"Do you think black cats know they cause bad luck?" asked Diana as we sat down on the bus to Uman. Apparently a black cat had looked at her on the way to the bus station and, just as she neared it, purposely walked across her path.

The bus left at 7:00 AM. Diana said it would take three and a half hours to get to Uman. This is what they had told her when she bought our tickets. They had lied.

"Nature takes her clothes off with dignity," said Diana several hours later, apparently in a poetic mood as she looked out the window. The bus was rocking down a road paved through the middle of a forest. On either side, trees blazed red and orange and yellow. Soon those leaves would fall and leave nature naked, but before then she'd have one last burst of glory.

At 11:00 AM, when we should already have been in Uman, Diana asked the driver if we'd soon be there and laughed at her. The bus kept on its slow way, stopping, it seemed, every fifteen seconds to pick someone up or drop them off on the side of the road. Diana and I were going to Uman on a whim. Uman is famous in Ukraine for it's park, reputed to be the Versailles of Ukraine (which, admittedly, doesn't say a lot). Neither Diana nor I had been there, but we thought it would be great with the fall foiliage. We were discussing this on Friday. Not having a lot of time, we decided to do it as a day trip on Sunday.

Finally the bus pulled in, six hours after we left Zhytomyr. It being near winter, it was already starting to get dark. It was raining. In the bus station we found there were no more buses headed back to Zhytomyr that day. Still, we knew we could still get back to Kyiv that night (all roads lead to Kyiv) and if we could get to Kyiv, we could get to Zhytomyr. We headed over to the park, which was in walking distance of the bus station and, when we got to the entrance, Diana found that she had lost her wallet, either on the bus or in the bus station. We went back to the station, but it was not to be found. I was going to find that black cat and kill it. Deciding to make the best of it, we headed back to the park.

The park was built in honor of a woman named Sophia. A little over a century ago, a nobel had fallen in love with a Polish concubine and built the park over several years as a gift to her. As with everything in Ukraine, much of the park was destroyed during World War II, but it was famous enough to have been rebuilt under the Soviet Union. And guess what? Even with the overcast skies and dim light, it was still beautiful.

A map of the park

The following photos show nature in her dignity (and show Diana and I being not quite as dignified)

This was kind of cool: there's a long tunnel that goes under the park. For 2 UAH you get in a boat and a guy pushes the boat along the tunnel using a stick. For most of it there's absolutely no light (except from idiots who can't turn off their mobiles and people like me who insist on taking pictures)

The trip back was shorter than the trip there: a marshrutka to Kyiv and then a marshrutka to Zhytomyr. Unlike buses, marshrutkas haul ass. Of course, the bus station and the train station in Kyiv (which is where one marshrutka arrived and the other left from) are on opposite sides of the city. Also, for all their really efficient Soviet planning, the bus station is inexplicably far away from any metro stops. Which, with it raining again and raining hard, meant we got pretty wet. I blame the cat.

So, on Halloween I was at the orphanage's costume party (but sans costume myself) and had a lot of fun. Here's the pics:

Tanya and I talking to the orphans about the history of Halloween and how it's celebrated in America. We were kind of put on the spot about this and I found myself lacking a lot of the necessary vocabulary

Playing limbo

I think she's supposed to be a cat

Tanya getting mobbed

Monsters everywhere!

Break dancing

A traditional Ukrainian game of passing a handkerchief in a circle

The break dancing boys. They asked me to show them some of my moves

So, yeah, fun all around.

Happy Halloween! I’m not celebrating it in any real sense, but I have been invited to the orphanage tonight to see their “Scariest Costume” contest. Should be fun.

Yesterday was the first snow in Zhytomyr. This might be more welcome if we had heat in my apartment building. Some parts of Zhytomyr have heat, some don’t and no one seems to know when the rest of the city will get theirs (this is the favorite topic of conversation at the institute, though). I have a space heater that keeps my bedroom warm and otherwise I just stay in my three layers of clothes. Yesterday I even managed my first multi-layer quick change. Since I had pulled off my “casual” layers (long-sleeve shirt, fleece, Harley-Davidson hoodie) all at once, they were still intact on the chair when I stripped off my “nice” layers (long sleeve shirt, dress shirt and tie, nice sweater) all at once and pulled on my casual layers as if it were one item of clothing.

***

Sarah left just ahead of the real cold, and now she’s back in the states. Soon she’ll be going to India where she has a seasonal job as a kitchen manager at a yoga retreat. In India, I don’t think they have a word for cold.

Since I was teaching we really couldn’t leave Zhytomyr, but here’s some of what we did:

Sarah was missing yoga while she was here, so we went with my friend Tatyana to her yoga class one evening. The instructor had not shown up (for the second class in a row) and an 18 year-old girl who said she knew a lot of yoga volunteered to teach it. What she was showing us was more of a warm-up for a dance class, though, including kicks. We’d be in a dance stretch and someone would ask what the pose was called and she say “I don’t really know, but it’s good for your legs.” The most yoga it got was mid-way through when she asked us to sit in a lotus position and chant “Om”. The problem was that one of the older guys in the class (who was one of several that spent the entire class telling her that she was doing this or that wrong) was trying to convince her that she was doing her “Om”s too quickly. Of course we’re following her, but then while we’re all going “Oooom” he’s doing “Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom”. He was literally trying to out om her. Finally the class broke down entirely due to their tug of war and Tatyana suggested that Sarah show us some things since she was very into yoga and had been doing it for a while. This is how Sarah, who speaks only English, ended up teaching a half-hour yoga class to Ukrainians…and doing a good job, too.

***

All the decked-out Ukrainian women convinced Sarah to attempt to beautify. Since they're so cheap, she got a facial, a pedicure and a manicure while here. My friend Irina took her to all these things and then taught her about the joys of make-up.

***

On my one day off we took a day-trip to Kyiv to see the Percheska Lavra (Caves Monastary)

***

I took both Sarah and Amy to visit both an old USSR collective farm and to the mass graves from the Holocaust. Above and the next three below are the remains of the farm, where villagers still graze their horses. During Soviet times, farmers were required to keep all their livestock and mill all their grain here. It was unproductive, but let the Soviets be able to take their cut.

Above and below are pictures of the mass graves

***

I got interviewed on television. The local news station had a camera set up by a statue of Sergei Korolov that’s near my apartment. Korolov, if you’ve never heard of him, designed Mir, the first manmade object in space, and also designed the ship that let Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space (yes, we did loose that part of the space race). Having been raised in Zhytomyr, Korolov is my city’s favorite son. They stopped Sarah and I as we walked past and asked me if I knew who the statue was of. It was Korolov’s birthday, and they were doing a piece on him, seeing what Zhytomyr residents did and did not know about him. I said I did and said who he was and they could tell from my accent that I wasn’t Ukrainian. They asked where I was from and I told them and they seemed excited to interview an American. They then asked if I knew why Korolov was famous. Here, my Russian ran into trouble. I didn’t know the word for “design” or “spaceship”, so what the citizens of Zhytomyr heard last night was an American telling them that their local hero had “prepared the first car to go into space.”

***

Sarah and I took two of the bikes we got with the grant and did a circuit across the condemned bridge, down to a path by the river, along the river to the man-made waterfall/dam (where sewage is also dumped) and then we carried the bikes across the river to ride up to the WWII momument (with the eternal flame that wasn't burning) and then back to my apartment. Done at sunset, the whole route was gorgeous.

Here you can see the WWII memorial in the distance as we bike along the Teatriv River

Me, carrying my bike in front of the waterfall

***

Sarah was kind enough to talk to a English-education group at the local library. She brought photos and told them about her work as a wilderness ranger in Alaska

***

This is what I have been doing since Sarah left:

It is the entire British Councils Recertification Curriculum (what we teach at the Institute), re-written. Since almost every teacher attending courses at the institute has already done the curriculm (they have to get recertified every five years), we needed a new one, which is essentially the results of me developing my lesson plans over the past two years. It took a week to get everything typed up and organized, but there you go: one copy for me, one for Peace Corps, one for the institute and three for the new Teacher Trainers that just arrived in Ukraine last month (and whom I worked with and gave feedback to when they came to give practice lessons at the institute two days ago)

Here's some pics from my lastest group of teachers:

Doing a reading/creative thinking exercise

Rewriting a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip

Working with flashcards

***

And that's about it! I'll leave with one final photo:

My friend Amy wanted to visit Zhytomyr to hang out and climb and asked to bring a friend. "Is she cute?" I asked, jokingly. Turned out she was. She was a New Zealander (Kiwi) named Livvy who was living in Prague and met Amy, who lives in Ukraine, when Amy was in New Zealand. Confused yet? Anyway, it turns out she actually was cute and I got to make out with my first Kiwi. Between her and "Lord of The Rings", I'd really like to visit New Zealand now.

Me, Livvy and Amy before going to a club

I feel horrible at the moment. For reasons I'm not even sure of, I got another bout of gastroentiritis and was up all night while my body tried to get rid of every last bit of fluid inside me. Not fun, but as this is my fourth in two years, they get a little easier to deal with each time.

I've had a crazy couple weeks with Sarah (who left Saturday morning) and when I wasn't working, she and I were tearing up Zhytomyr. Haven't gotten any of that up on the blog, though, 'cause I've been a bit busy. I only have three weeks of work left. It's odd. I realize I need to start packing up and stuff, but I haven't even begun thinking about it. Mostly I'm trying to get this last cycle of teaching done and get my lesson plans in order to turn over to the next batch of teacher trainers.

Anyway, one cool thing that has gone on is that the Deputy Director of Peace Corps (as in, the whole world-wide program) was visiting Ukraine and came to see the wall. I was told I should have a training session going at 3:00 PM on a Thursday. This is the time when everyone is at work or at school and it's a little hard to get a group of kids there. Panicked is not the right word, but stressed is.

Luckily, one of the teachers I have trained agreed to bring her class. I called in a few favors to Polissya, ACET and my climbing friends and everyone was good enough to take the afternoon off from work or skip their university classes and the whole thing went off without a hitch. The Director of Peace Corps Ukraine was with her, along with two guys from the Peace Corps communication department who were taking photos, one of which also took a stab at climbing the wall.

Here's the email I just recieved from the Deputy Director:

***

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for welcoming me and my staff to the Zhytomar Climbing Wall. I was so impressed to see how you managed to combine elements of fun with HIV/AIDS education. It was very clear that under your guidance, kids who visited the wall received important life lessons, as well as a boost in self confidence (this became abundantly clear when our own Chris Harnisch made it to the top of the wall and was smiling for the rest of the day!). I applaud you for your can-do attitude and the determination that you have instilled in much of the youth of Zhytomyr. You represent the highest ideals of a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I wish you the best of luck for your final month in Ukraine.

Sincerely,

Jody Olsen

Deputy Director of the Peace Corps

***

Kinda cool, huh?

It was an island uninhabitable by design: a small oblong of razor sharp rock covered in thorny brambles. Weary of the interior, I opted to sit on a short stone spire sticking out of the ocean, my feet protesting as I tried to find smooth places to place them, my backside no happier when I finally sat down, legs just over the sea, the water gently lapping up against them.

Sarah swam up from a sandbar she had been exploring, pulling off her mask and snorkel and tossing them beside mine on a nearby protrusion. A few hundred yards away floated our yacht, the blobs of color around it were our fellow passengers, who always seemed reluctant to swim more than ten feet away from it. My pockets were full of interesting shells, some of which would later prove to be owned by other creatures of the world. Having snorkeled nearly every inch of shoreline of the bay where our yacht was anchored and around the island itself, I was taking an enjoyable break to get warm in the sun, saltwater drying on my skin.

“Think we could climb that?” I asked Sarah.

Mountains—albeit small ones—rose up from the shoreline of the mainland. Their surfaces seemed like piles of pebbles left by some god child, stacked steep up to three separate peaks, the middle one noticeably higher than the others. Goats made noises at each other as they picked their way along the rocks, chewing on the scrub brush growing from the crevices. There was nothing remotely approaching a path to those peaks; there was nothing remotely approaching flatness, actually, but if you thought in terms of climbing rather than hiking, it was just a grade four scramble that couldn’t take more than an hour.

“Probably,” said Sarah, leaving it at that. I took her lack of enthusiasm as an idea rejection.

***

Several hours, the rest of a book and a number of backgammon games later, Sarah proffered a suggestion. Most of the shells had been cleaned and were drying in the bathroom of the small cabin Sarah and I shared with Doyon. The fact of other ownership became known when a couple of the shells magically moved themselves several feet away from where I had put them. The owners and their homes soon found themselves on an unasked-for adrenaline joyride through the air before splashing back into the brink.

“Let’s climb the mountain,” Sarah said to me.

She said this, of course, with only an hour before we were scheduled to leave the bay. I wasn’t sure we could get up and down in time. Sarah had spent the past two hours tanning herself and writing in her notebook a few feet from me. Why we hadn’t started earlier, save perhaps to make the experience intense instead of leisurely (I do not deny that Sarah’s subconscious as well as mine decides things in this way), I don’t know.

I thought for a moment.

“Cool.”

***

“Don’t let the devil goats get you!” Brenna yelled from the ship as Sarah and I kicked our way to shore, shoes held over our heads. The goats had been so named because, yes, they did have a certain malevolent look about them. They stayed out of our way, though, as we put on our socks and shoes and started scrambling up the steep rocks, showing up their prowess and hurting their collective pride. They “nahhed” at us in scorn.

Sarah took the lead because we both have our areas of expertise, and trailfinding is certainly one of Sarah’s. Trailfinding here entailed locating climbable rocks while avoiding the sharp branches of the shrubs. The rock was a hard, porous limestone, which made climbing up them easy, a plethora of holds available for hands and feet. We practically ran up the thing, and within half an hour were on the top, looking down at our ship and the others in the bay.

It was amazingly beautiful, but I’ll let the pictures tell the thousand words. We had enough time to pose for them, take a couple more of ourselves bouldering with that beautiful backdrop, then rock hop back down to the shoreline to swim to the boat, our little adventure taking less than 45 sweat-soaked minutes.

On top of the mountain

On board, I looked at the maps of the area. Although the mountain range behind the one we had been on had its peaks named, ours must have been too small to merit labels, or the map wasn’t detailed enough, being more concerned with the topography of the ocean floor. The point is, as far as we knew, our peak was unnamed.

So we named it, smashing our own together.

We had just climbed Mount Dan-Rah.

***

After seeing a sunken city, the foundations of its houses visible through the clear water, after seeing a fishing village on an island reachable only by ship, a castle clinging to its one peak, we sailed into a cove and dropped anchor.

As the day gave way to night, we started secretly drinking the vodka and raki (a Turkish liquorish-flavored liquor not unlike ouzo) that we had smuggled on board after our stop in Kash. We were not supposed to bring any drinks on board, which meant the ship had a monopoly of the market and allowed them to mark everything up 100%. Because we didn’t have the World Bank on our side, we were forced to turn into raki runners and Pepsi pirates (my treasure trove of cans now buried at the bottom of the ship’s cooler). Tipsy and happy, we scarfed down dinner and got dressed. Here, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were going dancing.

At 11:00 PM, a speedboat pulled up beside the yacht and everyone under the age of 30 got on board, the older people begging off, perhaps thinking it wasn’t their scene. The speedboat stopped at the other boats anchored in the cove and soon a party was making its way to a sandy beach, to a dance club reachable only by boat.

“Pirate’s Cove” was a three sided wooden building on stilts, its open side facing out towards the water. Between it and the docks were a number of wooden platforms with pillows and chairs, and they’d already lit a small bonfire before we arrived. The selection of music, spun by one of the bartenders in between getting drinks, was the most eclectic I’ve ever heard, from Counting Crows to Jay Z to Madonna, the only seeming criteria being that the next song had to be an absolutely different genre from the last. This made for better dancing because I can get bored of the same stuff after a while and loved moving to a beat never stopped changing.

Brenna, Me, Sarah, Stella, Ryan and Doyon

We danced for hours before taking a break on one of the wooden platforms, cooling off in the night air. A movie moment happened shortly thereafter: all the Americans on the boat were on that platform, as well as Stella and Doyon, who simply watched us with raised eyebrows. A fair amount of America bashing had been going on during the four days on the yacht, about its foreign policies and attitudes in general, about Bush in particular. The most virulent bashing came from the Americans, Brenna spearheading it, and the lone defensive voice was me. I was quite an America basher until I lived in Ukraine, and now I feel that even though we screw up a lot and deserve most of our stereotypes, we’re still a damn good country trying to do damn good things. I even think one of our better qualities is our self-criticism, but all of that floated away for a few minutes on the opening chords of Don Mclean’s “American Pie.”

“A long, long time ago/I remember how that music used to make me smile…”

It came to us on the night breeze from the over-amped stereo system, and no matter what we thought about our country, at that moment we felt. The thirty or so other people sitting outside—all from other countries—quietly listened, as the four of us began singing together. We four sat and looked off at the sky, the water, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly singing for ourselves, our voices in near whispers during the verses but rising up joyously together on the choruses. The four of us: Sarah, Ryan, Brenna and me, are all travelers; we pride ourselves on having visited and lived in many places, on speaking other languages and being comfortable in other cultures, but that moment something was very clear, at least to me: we were inescapably American. No one else on that beach, in that club, knew those words, at they were one of thousands of strings that bound us together as a people, a culture, a nation. And while it looked like a cool Almost Famous/”Tiny Dancer” movie moment, it was more than that because we all felt very close just then, something we remarked upon later, drawn together by childhoods staring out car windows while this song played on car radios, now adults out in the middle of nowhere in an area of the world that mostly hates us and being together being very, very American. And normally to be “very American” is a negative label, but just then it was a very positive, very beautiful concept.

***

Leave it to the Australians to ratchet up the party. At some point in the evening two of the Australian girls had gotten behind the bar and were helping to serve drinks, getting in a shot or two (or seven) for themselves. At one point I was getting hit in the back with ice cubes and, when I turned around, Jess, one of the Australian girls, was tugging the front of her tank top down and offering me a target. I underhand tossed one cube of ice at her and she maneuvered to catch it between her breasts. Another ice cube, another perfect catch and soon our Turkish bartenders, Vinnie and Hussein (yes, that was their names), happy about all that close-by cleavage, started giving out free bottles of water and soon lined up glasses and gave us all a free shot of vodka.

The dance floor was a loud group of moving bodies. Ryan was glued onto Stella at that point and possibly I should have been going for Jess but I was having too much fun dancing with Brenna, even though I knew it would probably cost me any action that night. Sarah was dancing with Ahmed, the first mate of our boat, who had started the evening by saying to her: “I want be with you tonight.”

Groovin' at Pirate's Cove. Ahmed is on the right

The lack of English meant that the insinuation could have gone either way but it was pretty apparent when, a few dances later, he was pushing his tongue in her mouth. Being attractive, Turkish and made of muscle, Sarah wasn’t minding.

***

I stripped naked and dove into the water, narrowing missing Sarah, who was dog-paddling in all her pinkness. Skinny dipping had not been our idea: it had been suggested by Brenna and seconded by Stella. Stella was now under a pile of blankets with Ryan on the top deck, though, and Brenna had become morose and lonely during the evening (there had been a distinct lack of lesbians at the club) and had gone straight back to her cabin. Most of the boat was still back at the club, our group calling it a night at 3:00 AM while they were still going strong. The music carried across the water towards us, seemingly as loud at the boat as it had been on the beach.

Never ones to let a good idea die, Sarah and I decided to still go skinny dipping, even though no one else would. Besides, who wouldn’t want to say they had gone skinny dipping in a cove in Turkey in blue-black water under a moon one day from full?

Inexplicably, the water four inches under the surface was warm while the top layer was cold. Although it was fun, the novelty wore off the colder I got and I told Sarah I was going in. Showered off and carrying my blankets up on the deck, I noticed Ahmed spreading out a blanket over two of the deck cushions and putting more on top, creating a double bed. He was ambitious. I knew he had told Sarah things like: “Look my eyes” and “I think I loving you,”, but from what I understood, she had declined his offers. Still, I made my bed up as far as possible from his.

A few minutes later, I couldn’t find Sarah. She wasn’t in the water, she wasn’t on the deck and she wasn’t in the cabin. I didn’t think she was drunk enough to have had a problem swimming, but it was too small a boat for her to have disappeared. Finally, though, she swam into view from the front of the boat and I handed her clothes to her when she got on board.

In a life moment Sarah declared to be one of her cooler ones, Ahmed had descended the chain that stretched taut from the bow of the boat down just above the water and sat on it, his feet dangling in the water. Sarah had pulled herself up out of the water, one hand on the chain, the other on the back of his head, breasts exposed and dripping in the moonlight, to make out with him.

I think her next decision to sleep on that bed with Ahmed fell into the category of teasing. She had no intention of having sex with him: with a stranger on a deck filled with half a dozen other people (most of them from the boat’s 50-and-over contingent) was not her style, but the topless making out probably gave Ahmed the idea that he was on his way to scoredom.

I awoke a few hours later, almost at daybreak, to hear her telling him to stop and that she wanted to sleep, her hushed whispers carrying over the deck. Sarah can take care of herself, but when I still heard her sharp protestations a few minutes later, I thought I might have to get up and say something (and that would have been an interesting fight to film: two guys sliding around on a dew-slicked deck, ropes and booms and elderly tour patrons all caught up in the fray). Apparently he laid off his groping, though, because soon it was quiet and I fell back to sleep.

In the debrief the next day, Sarah told me the climax of the evening had been the making out at the bow of the ship, and that it had been falling action from there. Although happy to cuddle and make-out with Ahmed, she had discovered that his idea of kissing was of the “shock and awe” variety, and she showed me where his tongue, in its forceful incursions, had actually torn a bit of that flap of skin between her tongue and the bottom of her mouth. It was swollen and bleeding a little.

Apparently for her, it had not been a Turkish delight…

***

And that was the end of our adventure. We got off the boat the next day, made our way to Antalya and spent the evening walking around the winding cobblestone streets of its walled old city. The next morning, while merchants were carrying their goods out of their stores to display in the streets, we caught a cab up to the airport and flew back to Ukraine, our ten days in Turkey at an end. Still, it had been an amazing time, and our memories were carried with us in our heads, our notebooks, our cameras, and, especially, in Sarah’s slowly healing tongue.

This was one day…

Sarah and I awoke with the rising of the sun, stirring out from underneath the blankets we had laid over the blue foam mattresses strapped to the deck of the yacht. We were anchored near St. Nicholas Island, once home to a Byzantine trading town, now home to sprawling ruins, the peeking sun painting yellow and orange the white stone shapes poking through brush and marching up the spine of the island to its rounded top.

There was no boat to the island, but no matter. Without saying anything to anyone, we climbed down the ladder into the water, held our sneakers over our heads (my camera wrapped in a trash bag and stuffed into one shoe), and swam the few hundred miles to shore.

On the island, we tied on our shoes (Sarah looking sexy in her bikini, me in my Speedo looking more like the cover boy of the Gay Times’ special Twinks edition) and set off to explore. We had maybe an hour before we needed to get back to the ship, so we followed ancient paths past roofless houses, churches with collapsed domes, mausoleums that no longer held bodies, mosaics barely visible beneath overgrown grass. We were alone on the island save for insects, working to the crest of the island and finally greeted with gorgeous views all around: the mainland, the yachts anchored in the cove below, the water surrounding everything, so blue…

Sarah in the ruins

The view from the top

Sarah

Me, at a long corridor that once connected two churches, its roof now collapsed

We made our way down through the rubble, picking our way past thorny bushes that scrapped at our copious amounts of exposed skin, exploring nooks and crannies, rambling past hundreds of buildings that represented thousands of years before we finally found our way back to the shore. We put our shoes up over our heads and swam back to the ship to eat breakfast.

***

I got to drive the boat through an inlet between the shore and an island. Yes, the captain and the crew entrusted their lives to me, though I've never driven a yacht before, allowed me to steer the ship even though this was dangerous, technically exact stuff.

Okay, so the inlet was like a mile wide and the captain was always two feet away, but I still got to drive the damn boat…

Me, with everyone's lives in my hands...

***

If you come at the right time, apparently Butterfly Valley is home to millions of butterflies who come their to mate. We missed the right time by about a month. We also had no time in general because due to an anchor issue and some other scheduling problems, the captain had been trying to pack two days of itinerary into one. Rather than cut some things out, he simply shortened everything, often drastically. When the yacht anchored, 200 yards from shore, we were told we had 30 minutes.

Butterfly Valley

Most of the other passangers choose to just swim around the boat, but our motley tribe decided to swim to shore. There we found many people on tours, basking on the beach, sitting in a wooden bar listening reggae music, paying to go parasailing. We wanted to see the valley.

They guy at the gate in front of the path into the valley wanted 4 lira each. This was like $2.50, but, as we tried to explain, we had swam to the shore and had not thought to bring money. No matter, said the guy. No lira, no valley.

This thwarted all but Brenna and I. Possibly not to either’s benefit, we found that our personalities formed a closed loop of headstrongness that soon had us pushing through a worker’s access gate about 100 yards from the pay gate that had a nice big “No Entrance!” sign on it in English and Turkish. Everyone else refused to follow, so Brenna and I Navy SEALed the fucker, communicating by hand signals as we snuck along an irrigation ditch past the guy at the pay gate and finally crossed some fields, flanking the guy and finding our way to the path into the valley.

Brenna was keeping an eye on time and we had none. By the time we got to the valley, we had only five minutes to get back to the boat. Satisfied that we’d at least got there, we turned and sprinted.

We were a good mile from the gate at that point, and running in wet bathing suits and sneakers is never comfortable, but we had a boat to catch (not that they’d leave without us, but pretending otherwise did make it exciting). We stopped as we reach the fields and once again silently snuck along the irrigation ditch and back through the worker’s gate, running for the beach, kicking off our shoes and swimming like mad for the boat.

I saw exactly one butterfly.

***

I met Yahya outside his carpet shop in Kash, overlooking a harbor packed with yachts, one of which was ours, anchored for the night. Although it was evening and the streets were mostly empty, his store was still open and would be until midnight, a managerial decision I never had explained to me.

Sitting outside in the warm late summer air, lit by the open doors and unshuttered windows behind him, he was finishing his day’s work: repairing a long tear in a large kilim that was someone’s family heirloom. Walking up, I would have told you he was fixing a carpet, but the the difference between a carpet and a kilim, as well as a dozen other carpet-related things, would be my educational experience for the night.

Yahya repairing the kilim

I asked to take his picture and he consented, then invited me to sit with him, pulling a pillow at me . I did, watching his hands quickly work a crochet hook over and under the weave, pulling through a piece of yarn that then bound the tear together, perfectly matching and making the rent disappear.

Yahya spoke fairly decent English and immediately corrected me when I asked him how long it took to repair the carpet. “Kilim,” he said. “No carpet. Kilim flat weave.” He demonstrated what he meant, showing me that that horizontal wool was woven over and under vertical wool, creating a flat piece of material. In carpets, he later showed me, thousands and thousands of strands of wool was individually tied onto vertical pieces of wool, causing them to stick up and creating a plush softness.

He asked where I was from, pleasantly surprised, as I have found many Turks to be, that I am American. Yahya later explained why this was. “Many Americans came to Turkey, but after 9/11, none of them come.” His opinion was reinforced by some other Turks a day later. The Turks we met seemed happily seemed to think Sarah and I represented the beginning of a resurgence in American tourism. We were baffled, because neither of us had ever regarded Turkey as unsafe. It is predominantly Muslim, yes, but is also a liberal, secular state with a fully-functioning democracy that is only a few hurdles away from EU membership. I regard Greece and Italy, with their rampant corruption and criminality, not to mention a strengthening mafia, to be far more dangerous. I was surprised to hear that Americans had stayed away.

As if to disprove the Americans comment, Brenna, Sarah and Ryan came up from their shopping to find me sitting with Yahya and reminded me that it was time for dinner before walking off to the boat. Sarah stayed behind and Yahya invited us inside. “I know you will no buy carpets,” he said. That was obvious, from Sarah’s $2 sunglasses to the duct tape holding one of my sandals together. “Come, I give you little gift.”

We went inside, to a store with its walls and floor covered in carpets, and hundreds stacked around the perimeter of the room. Yahya pointed out the four different types of carpets: wool, silk, cotton, and carpets that are amalgams of these materials. After explaining, carpets obviously being the obsession of his life, he pulled out a stack of woven pillow covers and told Sarah and I to each choose one as a gift. They were old and obviously had been used, not to be resold, but that he was giving us such a unique gift was still awesome. I chose one with two red squares, two blue ones and bordered in green. Now covering a pillow and sitting in a chair in my apartment, it clashes with absolutely everything, which is just the way it should be.

Yahya invited us back for tea after dinner.

***

While the rest of the boat went out in search of a bar, Brenna joined Sarah and I back at Yahya’s shop. Yahya, sitting on the floor with a glass of apple tea beside him, came under a barrage of questions.

Yahya was originally from Capodocia, a poorer region in the center of the country with a landscape better suited for the moon. He learned carpet weaving at his mother’s knee and was so good at it by the age of 13 that a carpet seller, making his rounds of the villages to buy carpets for resale in Istanbul, invited Yahya along. Only just a teenager, he left his family and everyone he knew to go weave carpets in Turkey’s largest city.

“I had to cook for myself, clean my dishes,” he said. “It was very hard.” I had to smile. I was thinking of this huge, bustling city, adults who may or may not take advantage of him and his skills, loneliness, exposure to bars, clubs, brothels, and yet Yahya’s memories were of a boy whose mother was no longer doing the domestic duties. After a few years, Yahya moved down to Kash, on the southern coast, where tourists came in on their yachts looking to spend their foreign currency on woven wool. He know owned half the shop, manning it until the wee hours of the night.

“Demi Moore, she come here,” he said. “And Madonna,” listing the famous people who had passed his carpet store. “She have two boats.”

When I told him I lived in Ukraine, he smiled knowingly. “You should visit,” I said at his smile. “Why?” he asked, the thought disdainful to him. “Beautiful things in Ukraine,” I said. He winked. “I know. They have come here.” His tongue darted up and touched the gap in his two front teeth, something he did whenever he made a joke.

“You like Ukrainian women?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to die!” he said. “And I don’t spend money.” It took a few minutes to get clarification on this, but Yahya was of the opinion that Ukrainian women, all Ukrainian women were prostitutes and he neither wanted to A) pay for their services or B) get any lethal diseases. It was easy to see how he arrived at this generalization: most Ukrainian women who lived in Turkey were prostitutes. I wanted to point out that many were victims of human trafficking, lured to Turkey (and Germany, and Britain, and…) by promises of jobs as waitresses and hotel staff but then put to work as prostitutes, their passports taken from them and objections met with beatings, but Yahya was so adamant that Ukrainians the world over sold their bodies for money that it didn’t seem worth the effort and I didn’t want to upset him with an argument.

He put in the last word on it any way: “And they no buy carpets.”

***

“Flying carpet!” said Yahya, and one spun through the air towards me. He stuck his tongue to his teeth again, proud at his pun. I looked at the carpet now lying on the floor in front of me. It was beautiful, and this from a guy who didn’t get why people think carpets are beautiful. On a white background, a tree emerged from the bottom, multicolored birds on its branches. It wasn’t large, perhaps the size of a poster, but it was made of silk, said Yahya, then he flipped it over to show me how tightly packed all the knots were. It had come out of a wooden dowry chest that he stored his most valuable carpets in. He would sell it for around $3,000. In American it might fetch $15,000.

He went into the back room to make more tea and I overcame the urge to roll it up and run. $15,000 could be mine if I could just get out of the country. Instead it was right where Yahya had left it when he came back with more tea.

Yahya said that in a year he would probably sell about 600 carpets. Although of different values, he was still pulling down probably half a million dollars, much of which went back into inventory. Still, he wasn’t hurting: during the course of the evening he pulled out both a very expensive digital camera and an even more expensive mobile phone.

The carpet business was apparently a good one.

After our second glass of apple tea, Brenna asked about the differences in carpet quality. Yahya didn’t quite have the English for it, but he took us to a loom in the corner. He showed us the knot used in most carpets, especially those done by machines. It looped under itself only once. Giving a hard tug on the yarn, it came out of the vertical lines of wool. He then showed us the knot used in Turkey, which doubled back on itself twice, something only dexterous human fingers, not machines, could do (well, not cheaply anyway). No mater how you tugged on it, the yarn wouldn’t come out. Pulling a book off a shelf, Yahya showed us a picture of a 1,200 year old Turkish carpet currently in a museum in St. Petersburg. It looked dull and worn, but was completely intact.

Now that’s quality.

I had Yahya show me the knot again and sat down to do it while he pulled out a carpet he had woven himself to show Brenna and Sarah. The knot was hard to do, my fingers fumbling, but I slowly got it down while Yahya explained the symbolism woven into the carpet, and how each shape demonstrated what was on his mind when he made it: the yearning for love. Eventually I had knotted ten or so pieces of yarn, finishing another line over the one Yahya had done. After cutting them to length with a pair of special scissors that must have been 50 years old, my line perfectly matched. I had just helped make a Turkish carpet! Make that a Cuban-American-Turkish carpet!

Yahya showing me the Turkish double knot

Trimming the yarn down after knotting a line

My one line of carpet

Yahya explaining the symbolism in a carpet he had made

The tea had forced me to leave and go to the bathroom shortly thereafter, and when I got back, Brenna had pulled me aside. Apparently, while Sarah had been looking at carpets on a wall, she and Yahya had a conversation that had gone like this:

“You like girls? You lesbian?”

“Yes,” Brenna had said.

“You dated guy before?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you date one again?” he had asked hopefully.

Later, he convinced her, to mild protestations, to give him a back massage. Since he had been kind and had given her a pillow cover as well, she obliged while Sarah flipped threw a carpet book, and I laid down on a stack of carpets, realizing how tired I was.

Everyone relaxing in the carpet shop

The carpet on top was old, almost a hundred years old, and huge, about fifteen feet by six feet. Expressing my happiness at its softness, Yahya offered it to me for $600. Everyone’s mouths dropped open.

Yahya offered me the top carpet for $600

“Take it,” said Brenna. It would easily fetch $3000 in America.

Of course I didn’t have that much money. Nor that much room in my backpack.

***

The end of the evening, after Yahya closed shop, found us in “The Secret Garden”, a bar with a hookah (“Nargehleh” in Turkish). Brenna had made sure she was sandwiched between Sarah and myself and I felt almost bad for Yahya has the conversation, aided by much apple flavored tobacco (which, since we don’t smoke, definitely gave Brenna and I a buzz), sped out of control and mostly centered on male and female roles.

Sarah on the hookah

The rest of the boat crew inadvertently found us when they independently came into the bar. “Bar” tends to connote a smoky interior, but we were outside, sitting on cushions, smoking out of a pipe so long it looked like a musical instrument, hooked up to a four foot tall hookah with a metal horse impaled on the pipe leading up to the coals. I will say one thing: Turks have relaxation down to an art form. Although the rest of the party took over another table, Stella came over to ours and nestled in beside me. The ambiguity of whether her wrist, hand hanging limp, was on my knee out of necessity or flirtation was pleasantly distracting, and as smoke curled out of my mouth I reflected on waking up on the deck of a boat, swimming to an island covered in ruins, steering a yacht for the first time, sneaking into a valley, weaving a carpet and ending the evening smoking flavored tobacco on a warm, moonlit summer night with the warmth of a beautiful Greek girl beside me.

Stella and I

And Americans were afraid to come here?

Good. More for me.

What does one do on a guliet (a traditional wooden yacht) for four days? Swim. Read. Tan. Talk. Eat. Repeat.

For a go-go-go traveler like me, taking a “Blue Cruise” along the Turkey’s southern coast seemed an egregious waste of time. But when Sarah was too sick to go north, it seemed a good idea, especially when we read that the itinerary would things like sunken ruins, fishing villages, and a dance club reachable only by boat. The price, $180 each, seemed a little steep, but we haggled down to $140, a price that we were sworn to secrecy over.

The boat we spent four days on

I was glad Sarah was along: no matter who the other dozen or so passengers were, I knew we’d have a good time. But as it turned out the other passengers made it worth it. For social reasons explicable only to an anthropologist, our group rapidly split into three tribes who would little interact during the entire voyage. There was the older group, the retirees in their 50s and 60s who dissected every aspect of everything: the food, the color of the water, the comfort of the cabins. There were the Australians, who numbered five, came separately and immediately congregated together (I’m sad to say that they’d still win in any survivor situation) and the rest of us: four Americans, one Greek and one South Korean.

A motley crew we were: Brenna was a lesbian (she would make sure you knew this fact within minutes of meeting her, so it’s kind of a defining characteristic) who had worked as a masseuse in Greece, which is how she met Stella, a distracting beauty who routinely kicked my ass at backgammon (I blame the bikini). Stella was pursued by Ryan, a graphic designer from Colorado on an extended world tour, (who would quasi-succeed with her by the end of the trip). This left Doyon, on an eight month trip and who had stopped to teach math for a month in a hut in Nepal “because I thought it would be fun.”

Me, Stella, Ryan, Brenna and Sarah. Doyon is taking the picture

I’ve met a number of people while traveling, exchanged a lot of email addresses but a couple hours at a hostel or a club does not let you now a lot about a person. Four days on a boat is a really good way to actually get to know people. With Ryan and Doyon I talked of travel and women. With Stella I flirted, but mostly kept that chill so as not to get in Ryan’s way. With Brenna I also talked about travel and women (she was ready to jump on the first ferry across the Black Sea to Ukraine when she heard of the women there), but she and I connected in a way I rarely do with people and we spent many hours talking and laughing and debating about absolutely nothing.

Me conning Brenna into giving me a back massage. Baring the needed tools, it was done on the dining room table with suntan lotion serving as massage oil

Our patterns on the boat were quickly established. While the boat was on the move we’d read (between buses and the boat trip I went through three books in nine days), tan, talk, and play backgammon and chess, all to a constant soundtrack from the music blasting from the galley, everything from Cat Stevens to Moby to Turkish pop.

Chilling on the boat. This is also where most of us slept since the nights were warm

As you can see, life was very difficult

The boat would stop, usually in some unidentified cove, and everyone would jump overboard and swim in water that was blissfully warm (with strange cold eddies that would hit you).

Sometimes we snorkeled with leaky gear. Sometimes we fished with nothing but fishing lines and hooks. Sometimes we would go cliff diving (the first time it took me an hour to work up the courage to actually dive, that is head first, from the top of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water. Before then I would jump, scream like a girl and curl into a cannonball).

The clarity of the deep, fish-filled water

An octopus caught with nothing but line, bait and a hook

Me, jumping off a cliff

After a while our captain, Mustafa, would tell us we were leaving and we pull ourselves out of the water, arrange ourselves on the deck, and ply the blue waters some more, to swim, tan, talk, eat, read, repeat.

Getting my ass kicked at backgammon

Could you concentrate on the game?

Often, Turks would come out to the boat to sell us ice cream or stuffed pancakes

Me, hanging off the bow

Delicious Turkish food, three times a day

Stella, Ryan, Me and Sarah jumping off the boat. Stella didn't quite get the idea.

Every morning started with a traditional Turkish breakfast

The harbor at Fetiye, packed with yachts that travel along Turkey's southern coast.

Women canning olives. Turkish life is lived outside.

Spices at the market

Before the Romans ruled this area, it was controlled by the Lycasions, who left little behind but these graves carved into the cliffs

The grave of some Lycasion king

Now with a Daniel on it

Lycasion sarchophogi are all over the city. Rather than move them, people simply built the streets around them

A family enjoying the warm late evening air

We were in Fetiye to catch a boat. And after this relaxing day, that's just what we did...

I am covered in a layer of oil as I type this. It's not that I'm too lazy to take a shower (which is usually the case) but that I was told it was healthy to leave it on for an hour so my skin can absorb it.

I have oil on me because it was put there for half an hour by a man wearing only a towel. This was in a Turkish bath, so Jerry Falwell (I know you read this), you can reast easy. The visit to the Turkish bath (Hammam) was the third to last thing on a long itinerary. It was pretty cool: sauna, then soap massage and getting rubbed down with a coarse glove followed by rinsing and then that oil massage (Sarah opted for a pedicure instead of the massage). I found it pays to be an attractive female: there were three girls in the marble tiled soap massage room when we entered, two lying on the marble pentagon altar-thingy in the middle and being soaped/scrubbed.

The one being soaped, the looker of the three, was soaped for the better part of fifteen minutes, the man vigorously soaping everying inch of her, paying particular attention to the breasts and insides of her thighs (which she didn't seem to mind, saying in a British accent: "Oh, I lah-ike thaat"). He even massaged her face. I thought perhaps I needn't have paid for the massage after, if the soap massage was that involved. It turns out my soaping was less than two minutes, as it was for the girls after her as well.

Apparently being Ukrainian might help: we were talking with the female manager before this and she said she did get a lot of Ukrainian customers during the tourist season (we are in Bodrum, on the mediteranian coast, and it's a a package-tour destination). The massuesses, according to her, slaver like dogs over the ladies. The manager wasn't impressed with them, though, saying they're stuck up and don't know English, making her communicate through gestures. She also said some of them knew Turkish but hid it, so that they could listen to her conversations with the workers. Now, the stuck up thing I could agree with: Ukrainians, like most of those who lived under the USSR, are exceptionally proud and lean heavily on racial bias: they tend to think of Turks (or anyone south of them) as dirty, despite the fact that everything, from restaurants to buses to hotels, is palatial compared to Ukraine. I cannot see, well, any Ukrainian knowing Turkish though. Obviously some might but Turksih is not taught in any schools, there is not a significant amount of commerces between the two countries, and the females she was complaining about were probably not likely to know it. I think it's part of the Ukrainian/Turkish distrust that's been going on since Kyivian Rus bumped up against Crimean Tartars a millenia ago. Anyway, despite the historical antagonism, be a Ukrainian hottie and you'll get a fifteen minute soap massage.

The oil massage was pretty good: I've had two bad experiences paying for professional massages in the past and so I guess the third time is a charm.

The reason I was getting a massage in Bodrum and not in Istanbul was that Sarah didn't get better and couldn't stomach (literally) a ten-hour overnight bus trip. We stayed an extra night in Selchuk and headed south to Bodrum in the morning: three hours, which to her was manageable. Originally our itinerary called for three overnight buses. Now we won't do any and will put along the Mediteranian coast until we get back to where we started and catch our plane home.

Today started at 6:30 AM so we could catch our bus.

Since then we have:

Visited THE Mausolium, where they buried Mausolus, whose name the structures came from. Except his was fourteen stories tall and only had one small room that held his small urn. It was one of the seven wonders of the world before it was torn down for building materials, leaving only the foundations. Yes, on this trip I have now been to TWO wonders of the world. Might make it a goal to get to all seven. Sarah's got a pic of me lying on the floor of the exposed burial chamber.

What's left of the Mausoleum

What the Mausoleum used to look like

In the burial chamber

Messing around in a connecting tunnel at the Mausoleum

Visited St. Peter's castle, which is where all that building material went. In addition to being a cool castle with views from the turrets of the yacht-laden waters on one side and the thousands of sugar-cube houses stretching up the hills on the other, it had the world's largest underwater archeology museum. Although it had way too many pots (taken from hundreds of shipwrecks in the thousands of years that ships have been plying thiese waters), it was one of the best museums I've been to, well laid out and really informative. Don't ask me about it any time soon because you'll get an earful of shiplife for the past four millenia. Yes, four millenia: they had artefacts from a bronze age ship that sunk before Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. I was touching stuff (in the case of some stone tablets) older than the Bible.

St. Peter's Castle

The view of Bodrum from the turrets

Me, looking over my kingdom

Bronze age pots that are older than the Bible

The castle dungeon. The inscription says "God is not here"

Shopped with Sarah because she needed a bathing suit and clubbing clothes, having brought neither on her trip. This was actually more fun than it sounds like, mostly because I finally convinced her to buy a tight red top with "Playboy" written across the chest. If you know Sarah, you will know why this is funny.

Turkish bath was the third to last thing.

Getting dinner, even though it's almost 11 PM is the second to last thing because the restaurants here are open to 5 AM and are especially busy because it's Ramadan and observing Muslims can only eat at night.

The last thing is to hit an open-air club on the beach called Hekeropolis. It's so well-known it gets a paragraph in Lonely Planet and one poster we saw while walking around the city said: "You haven't been to Bodrum if you haven't been to Helekarnos." Tonight is "Crazy Foam Night". I have no idea what it means.

Should be fun.

But first I'm going to take a shower...

After I wrote my blog yesterday I had to go searchıng for Sarah. She had come up lookıng for the key to the room, I dıdn't know where ıt was and she left to go lookıng for ıt. And lookıng for ıt... And lookıng for ıt...

She had got ıt ın her head that ıt had gotten lost whıle we were out followıng the drummers and was scourıng the neıghborhood wıth a Spanısh gırl also stayıng at the hostel named Lyra.

I found the key on the couch where I had set ıt down and went downstaırs to be ınformed that Sarah was off and about. I went out ınto the neıghborhood, pushıng my Turkısh ınto the longest sentence I've managed thus far: 'ıkı bayan nerede?' Where are two gırl? Now,thıs statement could have a number of meanıngs but most people knew what I was askıng about and poınted me the rıght way, especıally a small group of old ladıes sıttıng on plastıc chaırs on the sıdewalk, who poınted me wıth great glee. I knew the words for 'two' and 'where' because I've been orderıng two of everythıng (tıckets, water) for two days now for Sarah and me and also frequently askıng 'where ıs the toılet?' The word for gırl I learned because whıle the toılets wıll be marked 'bay' and 'bayan' respectıvely, they generally don't have the helpful pıctures to tell you whıch ıs whıch. The fırst tıme I got yelled at for walkıng ınto the wrong one, I learned pretty quıckly.

Sarah and Lyra passed the old ladıes before I found them and the old ladıes motıoned for them to waıt and then a lady sent a kıd to come fınd me. All together, we were taught a handful of Turkısh words by the old women (who were really entertaıned by us) and we fought through a language barrıer to say who we were and where we were from and to establısh the famılıal relatıonshıps of everyone hangıng around. Sarah lıked the whatever that one of the ladıes was crochetıng and so the lady went ınsıde and came out wıth some beautıful embrodery and lace that she had done. Sarah ended up buyıng one of the embroıdered headscarves the lady had made.

Mack-ing the old ladies

Sarah with her new headscarf

Sarah and I ended the evenıng watchıng a lıghtıng storm from the roof of the pensıon.

***

The next day Sarah was feelıng sıck. She'd been sıck for a couple days but was really naseous today. We went to the ruıns of Ephesus, the best preserved ruıns on the Medıteranıan, but after twenty mınutes she was throwıng up on saıd ruıns (and goıng one better than the spıttıng Dıana had asked me to do) and decıded to catch a marshrutka back.

Sarah adding ambiance--and breakfast--to Ephesus

I spent a couple hours wanderıng around. Not only the sprawlıng remaıns of a cıty that probably held 30,000, but some of the houses were so well preserved you could see the paınt stıll on the walls and ıntact mosaıcs on the floors. For the fırst tıme I got a real sense of what a Roman cıty was lıke because unlıke a monument here or a buıldıng there as I had expereıence before, I was walkıng the streets, seeıng the areas for the market, the remaıns of the lıbrary and the stadıum and even pokıng around the rooms of the brothel (yes, I have vısıted a brothel ın Turkey now). It really put thıngs ınto perspectıve and made me realıze that, wıth central heatıng and ındoor plumbıng, the Romans weren,t doıng much worse than we were even a century and a half ago, and ıt really was a fall from grace when thıs part of the world fell ınto the Dark Ages.

The ancient city of Ephesus

The library of Ephesus

Close up of the library

A mosaic of Mary

Inside some Roman homes that had been buried by an earthquake and preserved. Notice the painted walls and floor mosaics.

A Roman toilet. The pipe on the floor carried waste away

Me with the massive theatre at Ephesus

Waıtıng on the marshrutka back, I was talkıng to a cab drıver named Mufasta and he convınced me (only after much hagglıng and gettıng my fırst 50% dıscount on a haggle) to go to Mary's house. It was a ways away and there wasn't much to see, but I have vısıted what ıs belıeved to be (by the Catholıc Church and they tend to be an authorıty on these thıgns) the last place Mary lıved--as ın vırgın Mary, mother of Jesus. Apparently she came here wıth St. John and lıved out the rest of her lıfe. Her grave has never been found, but the restored remaıns of her house have been turned ınto a small chapel. I found prayıng slıghtly dıffıcult; I don't have a dıalogue wıth Mary nor readıly ınclude her ın my relıgıous contemplatıons so dıdn't really know what to say or pray. Other than a 'Haıl Mary', mostly I wondered what ıt would be lıke for her, havıng just watched her son be brutally murdered, to then have to leave her homeland, come north and lıve the rest of her days almost alone (although close, St. John contınued preachıng and wrıtıng half a day's journey away). So ıt was less prayıng than thınkıng.

The restored house where the Catholic church said Mary lived out the rest of her life

In addıtıon to the small church ın her restored house, there ıs an old stone drınkıng fountaın buılt on a sprıng that the church also holds that Mary would have gotten her water from and drank from. The water ıs now consıdered to work mıracles. After drınkıng some, I fılled up a bottle to brıng back and hopefully cure Sarah. Eıther way I'm brıngıng a half lıter back wıth me, so that my Mary mıracle water can sıt on the shelf wıth my blessed Pepsı.

The water from this fountain is said to work miracles

Sarah wasn't around when I got back and no one had seen her. I was a lıttle worrıed and walked around to see ıf maybe, havıng felt better, she went out to eat or maybe went back to the carpet store. I fınally found her back at the pensıon, ın a room at the back of the pensıon. A pensıon worker had saıd she could sleep ın an unoccupıed room (we had checked out thıs mornıng) and saıd worker was hımself asleep, whıch ıs why no one had known she was back.

Trıed to go to a Turkısh Bath, but ıt turned out to be women's day. Sexısts!

Goıng to go get dınner and get on that overnıght bus to Istanbul...

Gettıng lots of great photos but no vıable way to get them up (they are too bıg and ınternet ıs too slow) untıl I get back.

Peace!

It took comıng to Turkey to realıze how lıttle I knew about Turkey. Although completly wrapped up ın Greek, Roman and Bıblıcal hıstory, I only thınk of Turkısh culture as Ottoman.

But yesterday I vısıted the place where St. Stephen was martyred and burıed. Today, ın a cıty called Selchuk on the western coast, I vısıted the church over the tomb of St. John. As ın St. John who wrote the Gospel of John and Revalatıons ın the bıble. I dıdn't know thıs, but ıt ıs accepted church belıef that St. John and Mary (as ın, vırgın, mother of God) came to what ıs now Turkey and lıved out theır lıves. A sıgn near the church has a dıfferent ınterpretatıon: 'these thıngs beıng done, John took Mary ınto hıs hose.' I don't know ıf they meant the kınd you wear on your legs or the kınd water comes out of, but ıt ıs an ınterestıng theory and one Rome may not have taken ınto consıderatıon. A huge church was buılt over John's tomb and were ıt stıll standıng ıt would be the 7th largest ın the world. Instead ıt ıs a sprawl of columns and stone that Sarah and I explored for an hour.

The ruins of the church to St. John

St. John's grave

After that we walked to the 700 year-old Isa Bey mosque. It ıs Ramadan, but the mosque was strangely empty. When the call to prayer rang out from the mınuret, only the two men sellıng Korans and scrawlıng people's name ın Arabıc for a fee went to pray, dwarfed ınsıde the sprawlıng ınterıor (mosques ıs mostly one large empty space covered ın carpets so that many people can pray together).

A mosque in Selchuk

After that we walked to the Temple of Artımes, one of the seven ancıent wonders of the world. Robbed for buıldıng materıals, only parts of the foundatıon and one lone column stand. It's not much of a wonder, but I can say that I vısıted ıt.

The temple was Greek, the church Byzantıne and the Mosque Ottoman, all were wıthın ten mınutes walkıng dıstance of each other.

This is the lone column left of the Temple of Artimes, one of the seven wonders of the world. In the upper right is the Church of St. John. In the upper left is the Isa Bey Mosque. Behind it is a Citadel built in the 11th century

Hagglıng has been the norm. Other vısıtors don't seem to realıze thıs. Hearıng other people ın our pensıon talk, they are payıng askıng prıce and are not aware they can pay any other. Our bus tıckets to Istanbul tomorrow started at 80 lıra (1 dollar=1.5 lıra) and we talked them down to 60. Our room started at 30 and we got them down to 20 wıth breakfast thrown ın. The older Australıan couple we talked to apparently paıd 40 (maybe because we're younger they proprıetor thought we couldn't afford as much). And the hagglıng really came ın at a carpet store. I don't want to gıve away what I bought (ıt wasn't carpets) because some of the recıpıents read thıs blog, but I emerged wıth 1/3 off what was already a steal by Amerıcan prıces and thıs ıs the key word here: cashmıre.

Had a good dınner back at the pensıon, whıch was surprısıngly sub-par to what we've been eatıng. Huge portıons and amazıngly delıcıous. The Cossacks stole many thıngs from the Ottoman Turks durıng raıds: money, slaves, jewlery. Why couldn't they steal some recıpes? But ın return for raıds the Turks had agaınst the Ukraınıans, Dıana asked me to spıt on Turkısh ground. Apparently thıs ıs a tradıtıon when Ukraınıans come to Turkey (a lot do--ıt's cheap and they don't need a vısa, so package tours go to the coast; yesterday I heard more Russıan than Turkısh, but we are now north of the tour locatıons).

Some of the delicious Turkish food

Rıght now, I am ın a room on the top floor of the pensıon. Through hangıng curtaıns ıs the roof from whıch I can see the cıty and a 6th castle on a hıll (whıch we can't go see because ıt's unstable). Behınd me are two Turkısh men sıttıng on the pıllows that lıne the wall of thıs carpeted room, gruntıng as they watch at football match on televısıon. The televısıon ıs to my rıght but through the door on my left ıs the waılıng of the call to prayer. Earlıer, men sıngıng and beatıng a drum walked up the street. Thıs ıs Ramadan tradıtıon, ındıcatıng that ıt's now late enough to eat (Muslıms fast through the day durıng Ramadan). I went out and photographed them and they were happy to pose. Shortly after we were mobbed by kıds wantıng theır pıctures taken and they posed wıth Sarah and I ın turn agaınst a yellow paınted wall, the kınd of photo you normally see ın guıdebooks. Everyone has been extremely frıendly and accomodatıng and the servıce everywhere has been outstandıng. People are warm to you here, the stark opposıte of Slavıc coldness. The weather ıs warm, too, and dry.

A Ramadan drummer

Getting mobbed by Turkish kids

It's amazıng.

Tommorrow mornıng ıt's the ruıns of Epheseus, the best preserved classıcal ruıns ın the Medıteranıan. After that ıt's a massage and soakıng at a Turkısh bath before gettıng on an overnıght bus to Istanbul.

I am so content rıght now.

The ırony of a blog: when I've got actual storıes to tell, I am too busy to wrıte them.

Sarah came to Ukraıne on Frıday. Sınce then ıt's been non-stop. Normally I'd talk about all the clımbıng and clubbıng we've been doıng, but that's overshadowed by better events.

Prodıgy came to Kyıv and I got to see them ın concert, not fıfteen feet from the stage. The ıntensıty of that experıence was overshadowed about fours later when Sarah and I got up ın the mıddle of the nıght to start our journey that would end fıve hours later wıth us ın southern Turkey. Another sıx hours of buses and marshrutkas (here called Dolomuses), and we were explorıng snow-whıte travertıne pools, Roman ruıns and swımmıng ın the warm mıneral waters of a pool that had collapsed Greek columns ın ıt. We ended the evenıng on the patıo of our hotel (whıch we managed to haggle a thırd of the prıce off of), eatıng spıced chıcken and rıce and lıstenıng to the waılıng prayers broadcast from the mınuret of a nearby mosque.

And that was only the fırst of nıne more days.

Grapes and pommegranates hanging heavy from tressle at our hotel

Travertine pools created by left-behind calcium

The mineral water of the pools is considered to be healthy so people come to bathe in them

To preserve the calcium deposits, you're not allowed to wear shoes on them, which meant we had to walk barefoot for half a mile to the top...

...where we found the ruins of Heiropolis, a Roman city built near the pools as a sort of ancient health spa. Here is the well-preserved theatre

Heiropolis is also the place where St. Stephen was stoned to death. Later, when Rome went Christian, this martyrdom was built over the site of his killing.

Ruins are meant for climbing

Or yoga

Swimming in warm thermal waters amongst collapsed columns.

Below are some photos from the second bike, um, "thing" with Zhytomyr's orphans. Originally, they agreed to let us take the orphans on excursions into the countryside, where we have waterfalls, cliffs, the ruins of a palace, mass graves from the holocaust, etc. But the last two scheduled times they had us bring the bikes to the orphanage (which requires rounding up ten people to bike an hour to get them there) and they're only allowed to ride them on orphanage property due to legal restrictions. Hopefully they're warming up to us and I can find an orphanage employee willing to come on the excursions. Haven't had a lot of time to do so: the last time we were there, there was also an impromptu visit from the mayor (who has been under fire for allegations of voter fraud from the last election) with a camera crew in tow. We were told the kids could ride for 20 minutes and then we had to leave. We've scheduled an excursion for non-orphans on Sunday, so hopefully we'll have our first one that actually leaves the city. I wanted to have both orphans and non-orphans on excursions so they could make friends (the orphans are isolated at the orphange), but the beaurocratic headaches might make that not happen. Still, even if they're not getting to bike out of the city, they still are getting the ACET information sessions and they have a great time just biking around (at the highest possible speeds with homicidal intentions after having surreptiously removing their required helmets).

Two of the Polissya girls who rode the bikes 30KM to the orphanage

At the orphanage

I swear I yelled at them for having their helmets off right after I took this picture

In other work news, I had my last session with this group of teachers yesterday. It was on teaching grammar and at the end I gave them a list of about twenty phrases or words that Ukrainian students consistently use incorrectly because they're incorrect in the textbooks. "I jealous you" and "I go in for sport" are common ones. They're not huge problems, just consistent ones. The problem is that the teachers tend to resist that these are wrong. "This is how we teach them!" I know. "This is how they are in the books!" Yes, I know. But they're wrong.

I can understand: how would you feel if you were told you had been teaching something wrong for years? This is the general defense, brought up even later when a teacher used a phrase I hadn't even put on the list: "Have you a mother, father, sister, brother?" Slavic languages don't have articles and don't put a conjunction at the end of a list, so this is an easy mistake, it being a direct translation. But, yes, it's also the phrase written in the books. When I tried to explain that it's "Have you A mother, A father, A sister OR A brother?", the offending teacher said: "That is American English. We teach British English."

At which point I have to explain, nicely, that I've been to Britain, I have British friends, I watch British sit-coms, I dated a girl for three years who was raised in the British Commonwealth, I have a good grasp of the differences between British and American English, and this isn't one. Don't feel bad, it's not your fault, you learned it incorrectly. That's why native speakers are here to help.

But they still don't want to admit that.

Most of this week has been cleaning my apartment and organizing my lessons. The former is for Sarah, who will be here on Friday and will stay in Ukraine for a month. We are going to tear this country (and at least one other) up!

My apartment has two rooms and since the other will be hers while she's crashing with me, this required cleaning it. Thing is, it had became the repositry of every lesson, handout, and resource I've made/found/been given for the past two years. We're talking stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of papers with no discernible order covering every flat space in the room and most of the floor. It generally looked like a hurricane fought a printing press and won. As often as not I'd end up needing this or that handout for a different version of the same lesson and not having time to go through the room, would make new ones and those would get tossed in there too.

I spent a week organizing everything into five huge 3-ring binders to pass on to the next volunteer. Several big-ass bags also made their way down to the trash receptical for someone to burn later. Whoever comes after me will either thank me or their head will explode just trying to look through them. But out of a rather boring week, the following story did happen:

***

So I decided that I needed a new challenge in climbing, and that challenge would be to do a circuit of the ten routes on the main cliff that weren’t 5.12s. I started the challenge by knocking through the first five. Then I came to the two hardest. Here’s where the mistakes began.

I started the sixth, a 5.11a called “Path of War” from the ledge at its base. To the right, the ledge drops off five feet to a lower ledge. I had been leading all the previous routes, but “Path of War” shares the same anchor with the route I had just done so I had left the rope up to save time.

Igor, my 15 year-old belayer, well, I don’t know if he had gotten bored or distracted or what, but he seemed to think I was leading the route, even though there was very obviously a rope going from my harness up to an anchor and back down to him.

Anyway, I was about ten feet up at the hardest move and Igor hadn’t been taking up the slack, thinking it was a lead climb and waiting for me to put in the first clip. The problem might also have been that Nadia was beside him, and Nadia is just damn pretty.

I fell doing that move and kept falling, straight past the ledge Igor was standing on and hitting the one below it, twenty feet in all, landing on my right foot-- which immediately gave out from under me--and then landing on my right side, smacking my ribs on the rock. I lay there for a few minutes, waiting for the pain to go away. Luckily the rope had started sucking up momentum a few feet from the rock or it would have hurt a lot worse.

I got up, shook myself out and decided to start climb some more, if only to assure a guilt-ridden Igor that I really was okay. I climbed the route perfectly after that, possibly due to the adrenaline-amp, took down the rope and prepared to lead the route beside it, another 5.11a called “Hakuna Matata”.

The hardest move on this route is the last one: a fun but awkward move that’s also ten feet above the last clip. If you fall, you fall twenty feet and get whipped into a ledge of rock. At least two of the network of lines crisscrossing my right shin are from falls on this move.

It’s a funky sequence: above you is a solid foot-wide ledge. If you do a pull up on that and get your feet under you and spread wide, looking like a hanging frog, you’ll find a nice foot hold on your right, out of sight around a flake of rock, and the tiniest nub for your toe on the left. You then shift your grip and push down on the ledge, raising your body up to where your waist is at ledge height. The goal is to now get a foot on this ledge.

Because the rock flakes up and left, you reach up with your left, grab a vertical edge of rock, lean back against it so your body is now diagonal, shift your weight onto your left toe to free up your right foot, and then push and pull at once, a trippy dynamic move to swing your right foot up to that ledge.

One of two things will happen: you’ll get the foot onto the ledge, stand up and be at the anchor, or you’ll aim too high or too low, your momentum will take your toe off the nub and down you fall.

The later happened, but due to a subconscious fear about the last time I fell with Igor holding me, I reached out and grab the opposite end of the rope to stop my fall. Hand clenched around that rope and body weight dragging the rope through my hand, I felt a sharp burning sensation before I let go and continued my fall. I needn’t have worried: Igor braked the rope like he should have and I found myself hanging twenty feet lower and cradling my hand. The whole thing had happened in two seconds, without any conscious thought, and now, as I slowly uncurled my right hand, I found I had rope burned it.

I always yell at my students to never hold the opposite rope and here I was with a rope burn. A straight line of skin on my palm looked like it had been glazed and the skin on the undersides of my fingers was raised and red. A couple of tiny blisters were under the knuckles of some fingers, at there were two fat ones on the underside of my middle finger.

While I waited for the pain to clear away, I realized I might have to leave gear on the wall to get down. The last move was difficult enough without doing it with a burned hand. Thing is, I have yet to leave “treasure” on the wall and I wasn’t about to start. Luckily, the parts of my hand that were damaged (palm and insides of the knuckles) were the parts you don’t use on a 5.11 climb. As long as the tips of my fingers were okay, and they were, I could keep going.

I was out of quickdraws, so I had Igor lower me a little, pulled two off the wall and traversed left to another route which I knew had an easier ending. I finished that route, put the rope into the anchor and felt like my hand was feeling better. Using the edge of the cliff, I traversed right to the anchor of “Hakuna Matata”, put the rope in and had Igor lower me (Igor being very confused about this latest set of events) to the last move I had completed on the route. On top rope and with falling not threatening to be painful, I climbed up and pulled the last move, touched the anchor, and had Igor lower me so I could, for ego reasons alone, do it again.

I finished the route again and, since my hand barely hurt during this, I thought that I could complete the last three routes on the circuit. I traversed over and set the anchor on the next route. When Igor brought my down, though, pain in my hand flared up and wouldn’t subside. My hand glowed an angry red and throbbed and the pain didn't go away for the next 20 minutes, despite being wedged between my left bicep and my ribs. I was done for the day.

Because there were only tiny open wounds, there was nothing really to do when I got home: took some IB Profin and cleaned the dirt off. This morning, the only real damage seemed to be the blisters on the middle finger. The rest had gone down and my hand as a whole didn’t hurt. If anything, it was like instant calluses at every place the rope touched. Bonus.

My poor hand

I felt good enough this morning that I’m going to make another attempt at the circuit, possibly tomorrow or Tuesday. And this time I won’t grab the rope.

“Have you climbed Goverla before?” the Ranger asked Brian in Ukrainian.

“No,” he replied in the same language.

“Have any of you been here before?” the Ranger asked.

“No. We’ve never been here before,” Brian said, leaning out of the passenger side of the taxi, the door open. I sat half awake in the back, Liz and Gino wedged in beside me. The taxi idled at the mouth of Carpathian National Park, which held Goverla, Ukraine’s highest mountain.

“Well, what will you do if you get lost?” the Ranger asked.

“We’ll take care of it,” said Brian.

“How will you take care it?” the Ranger asked incredulously.

“We won’t get lost,” said Brian with assurance. “I promise.”

The Ranger raised the horizontal bar serving as a gate and our taxi continued onward.

***

“Lost” can be a relative term, I suppose.

Did we know where we came from? Yes.

Did we know where we were going? No.

It should have been easy. I heard that over and over from people who had done Goverla: it’s easy.

We piled out of the cab, cold. At the end of August in the mountains, it was colder than we expected. Brian and Gino were in a tee-shirts and Liz was in a long sleeved cotton shirt. Although Brian is the Eagle Scout, I seemed to be the only one prepared. I had on a fleece and a windbreaker, but I soon loaned the windbreaker to Gino. I was the only one who had eaten that morning, as well, having saved some yogurt and hard-boiled eggs from the previous day’s breakfast. It had been an early wake-up call: 5:15 AM for me, after a few hours of sleep from the good-bye party the night before. To tell the truth, I think I was still a little drunk.

A taxi had brought us, to the tune of 150 hrivna, from our hotel in Yaremcha to the base of Goverla, 37 KM away. It was the only way to get to the roof of Ukraine before we all had to catch a 6:00 PM train back to Kyiv.

We found a sign for Goverla with an arrow pointing at a wide, rock-strewn path.

It was 7:30 AM. Between the four of us we had one liter of water and the two hard-boiled eggs in my pocket. We began walking.

***

We started up the path, moving fast to stay warm, and enjoyed the sights: mountain rivers with planks of wood for bridges, yellow and purple flowers in bloom. Within half an hour we were above the tree line and walking into a Tolkien-esque fantasy: misty mountains, their rounded green tops draped in undulating fog. It was beautiful.

Gino, Liz and Brian crossing a bridge

We approached an old house of sorts, with a tin roof and wooden slats. Higher and behind it we reached a weather station, old and made of concrete blocks, things spinning on weather vanes and wires running everywhere.

We had also lost the trail.

Brian spotted a man in boots and a huge purple parka attending to some of the instruments. He looked surprised to see us.

“Where is the path to Goverla?” asked Brian, who has the best Ukrainian among us. The rest of us lived in Russian or Surgic speaking towns and although we all had a descent understanding of the pure Ukrainian spoken in the west, we were embarrassed by our mangled attempts at speaking it.

Brian and the purple-parked man

The man waved a hand vaguely to the right. “Goverla is over there,” he said. “You’re on the wrong mountain.”

The path that had led us here had been pretty well marked and whenever it branched, obvious red arrows spray-painted on the rocks and put us in the right direction. There was no way we could have gotten lost.

“Well, how do we get there?” asked Brian.

The man waved vaguely again. “Take the path up and then go across the ridge and you’ll get there,” said the man.

“What path?” asked Brian.

The man regarded Brian for a second. “Don’t go,” he said. “You’ll get lost and one of you will fall off a cliff and we’ll have to call an ambulance.”

Brian said nothing.

“And who seriously climbs a mountain in a tee-shirt?” he asked.

Brian turned and walked towards us.

We found the path he referred to, a thin dirt trail used so rarely that the short, shrubby bushes that grew at this altitude had spread their branches nearly completely across it. The rain of the past few days and the morning dew meant the path was muddy and the water on the branches transferred to our pants. The going was steep, all of us falling and sliding at some point, using the branches to pull ourselves up and keep our balance.

Up the path

Forty minutes of this later, finally hitting a plateau, we were soaked and caked in mud. The misty fog that looked so pretty from below now enveloped us, a wet, cold cloud. The mountains and trees no longer blocking the wind, it roared around us and the temperature dropped below freezing.

Brian had his arms inside his tee-shirt. The water in Liz’s hair froze into delicate icicles. I couldn’t feel my hands. But the going was now easier and the path snaked off in the right direction, so we followed it.

We couldn’t see where we were going: the fog was too thick, visibility only a few feet. We often lost sight of each other as we spread out along the path and called to each other to stay in contact. We would periodically regroup, but then our different gaits would spread us out again.

We had no idea where we were. We were on top of a mountain, that was for sure, but we could see nothing around us, could barely see each other, could only see the dirt path under our feet. Although the wind blew constantly, sometimes a gale of it would hit us at once, causing us to brace and see, as the gust blew some of the fog clear, that on our left the ridge of the mountain went up no more than thirty feet before ending at a bush-filled peak and that below us the land dropped away into a steep valley. I now knew what the man said about falling off a cliff.

We kept walking, not knowing where we were going, picking forks in path by intuition more than anything. Then the path all but disappeared. We were following a line of slightly trampled grass, moving in a straight line when even that vanished, hoping to find something more substantial.

The water had been drunk. I had long ago eaten the eggs.

Were we lost? It’s a relative question. Besides, Brian had a promise to keep.

We kept walking.

We could have been half an hour from Goverla, ten minutes away, maybe we were on it. Maybe we were on the wrong path completely. I knew a path wended its way on these mountain tops for more than 40 km, all the way to an old observatory built by the Poles. Maybe we were on that path. Who knew?

If it had been a clear day it would have been easy. That high up we could have spotted the cross I knew to be on top of Goverla, or at least sighted which crest was the highest. We could see absolutely nothing and were shivering and stumbling around on top of a wind-blown ridgeline.

We knew how to get back: turn around. We just didn’t know where we were going. Had Brian broken his promise? It’s academic.

Since I had rounded up the crew for this hike, it fell to me to call it, like a patient dead on the table. There is a point where it becomes to stupid too keep doing what you are doing. And lost on top of a unknown mountain in the Carpathians, shrouded in fog, freezing in tee-shirts, without food and water and no idea how to get where we were going had definitely crossed the stupidity threshold.

We found our way back, retracing our steps along the ridgeline. We were about to start heading downhill again when I found another path leading higher. The three stayed while I explored it and found a path that had seen some use: packed dirt and bits of trash. I came back down and found that the others had spotted a wooden sign in the fog, up near the path I had taken.

Finally! A sign.

Up we went, along that path and found that sign, which had so many boards nailed to its wooden post that it looked like those that point the ways to different, distant cities.

There was no writing whatsoever on it. It was a blank marker up in the mountains, marking absolutely nothing.

The sign with nothing on it

We huddled like penguins, facing each other in a circle while we tried to send text messages, slowly typing out in frozen fingers. I texted my friend Heron, who had done the trail before: “did you see a sign with many boards and no writing?”

Her response: “no, are you above the trees yet?”

We’d been above the trees for more than an hour, but it was obvious we weren’t where we needed to be.

And if anyone is wondering, a penguin huddle really does work. Sharing our body heat like that, we stopped shivering for a few minutes.

Curiously, no one was unhappy. Slipping and sliding around on the mud and being lost had a “so ridiculous it’s funny” quality, and we had never stopped cracking jokes to each other. “This is better,” we said. “Climbing Goverla is easy, at least we had an experience to show for it.”

We headed back down.

I wondered at that going down. Although certainly difficult, Everest is such a popular destination that an infrastructure of fixed ropes and ladders is in place, an entire economy of porters and portable oxygen at its base. At this point, it’s probably harder to climb any of the peaks around Everest, a thousand feet or more shorter but carving the way by yourself.

I now forget the name of the mountain we climbed. I found out the name later, but only remember that it starts with a “B”. I suppose that’s beside the point. The point was we got to the top of a mountain and while 300 feet shorter than Goverla, it was a hell of a lot harder, which made it a hell of a lot cooler.

The lower we went, the less miserable it became. Once out of the clouds we finally had visibility, the temperature got warmer, trees blocked the wind. Brian’s arms sprouted out of his tee-shirt. An hour later we were at the bottom and still could not figure out how we had gotten “lost” in the first place.

The sign to Goverla still pointed to our path and there had been no diverting paths that we had missed. Brian finally saw it: around a building that was part of the nearly-abandoned hotel at the bottom of the mountain was another path, a big one, with a big sign in both English and Ukrainian and red/white/red blazes spray painted on the trees.

Now that was a path and it was obviously the path to Goverla.

On the right is the tiny orange sign pointing to the Goverla path. Notice that it is point to the right. It should be pointing at me, because I was standing on the real Goverla path when I took this picture

I looked back up at the sign pointing to our path. I reached up and lightly pushed on it. It effortlessly swung and now pointed the right way.

Came back and was swallowed by work. Just got TWO grants done, will know soon whether we got either. Teaching has started, with a group of teachers "of the highest specialization". These are the teachers who get paid the most and have been around the longest. Predominantly in their 50s and 60s, they are also the least likely to want to do any work. In two days I have gotten the excuses: "My head hurts", "I have forgotten my glasses" and "I did not put in my teeth today." Teachers are usually bad students, but if you smile a lot and not take no for an answer (a bit like getting women, actually), they slide into the flow. Three days later, no problems.

(Did he really mean that comment about women? Hmmmmm.)

Anyway, here are pics from COS:

Group 27. We came with 109 and are leaving with 75. I am on the bottom left.

How we spent the majority of each day: listening to many long, long presentations about how to get out of Peace Corps, get jobs, get insurance and get a life.

The Group 27 Gentlemen's Club welcomes you!

One of the excursions was to some nearby caves that hid partisans fighting against the Polish, led by a man named Doverbush. This rock was carved in memory of him and his troops.

A view in the Carpathians Mountains

What? Partisans hid here? I will climb it!

The hotel we stayed was the nicest I've seen in Ukraine and most of the amenities were outside our price range (originally they wanted 40 hrivna per person per hour to swim), but Peace Corps negotiated and paid for one hour for us to all swim. Here is the cluster I trained with, together for the first time in almost two years. We are one of only two intact clusters left.

We had a "Ukranian Disco" night. Everything you wore had to be bought in country. Here is me in a Ukrainian shirt and speedo with Diana Schmidt, the new director of Peace Corps Ukraine.

Sean in his outfit.

Shand in his. Shand is the one getting married upon return to America, so sorry ladies, this hunk of burning love is taken.

Another excursion was to take a ski lift to the top of a mountain. It rained, but we were herded onto the lift anyway. At the top, the attendent wouldn't let us off. Yes, we rode in one big circle in the cold, cold rain. Here is Mike and Sean behind me.

The Group 27 Gentlemen's Club invites you to dry us off.

Caitlin, post high-altitude whirl in the rain.

A wooden something or other

Peace Corps went all out and paid for a really nice farewell dinner. We ate for three hours straight.

The Obhiev crew

The Zhytomyr crew (and our infamous "Z")

Dancing to a Hutzul band

I am sitting in Peace Corps office, just having got of a 7:15 AM arriving train from the Western part of Ukraine, where my entire group just had their Close of Service conference.

We were up in the Carpathian Mountains, which were beautiful, but we realized why you don't go to the mountains in August: it rained, hard, every day. We were inside mostly, realizing that getting out of Peace Corps may be harder than getting in, what with the insanely long checklist of paperwork, clearences and tasks that have to be done in order to go. We also did a lot of feedback sessions in order to improve the program in Ukraine and filmed a welcome message to the next group (who will arrive at the end of September).

But mostly we had fun: This was the first time our group had been together in a year and a half. We had a talent show during which Sean recited Pushkin from memory in yogic poses while I did an interpretive dance behind him. We had Ukrainian Disco night with everyone decked out in the extreme end of Ukr fashions (me in a billowy cossack-esque shirt, speedos, black socks and sneakers, which I've seen more than one Ukrainian in during the summer--well, they wear sandals, but I can't dance in sandals). We socialized. We drank. We realized we wouldn't see each other again for years, if ever (there were some that I hadn't seen since swearing-in, which meant we hadn't seen each other for years).

There were a couple of rain-soaked excursions: I bouldered in caves that once hid partisans. We rode a very-ghetto chair lift up a mountain in the pouring rain and then rode it right back down without geting off. I and three others made an attempt to climb the highest mountain in Ukraine and accidently climbed the wrong one (which will definitely be a future story on this blog).

I also had the best train rides out thus far in Ukraine. We practically took over whole wagons. I was feeling particularly social last night and jammed on guitar with a couple Ukrainians, spent hours talking with the eight Americans in our wagon, played with a seven year-old kid named Igor (whose mother half liked it/half didn't like that he was now bursting with energy when she wanted him to soon go to sleep), and met and got the digits of of a cutie named Lilia who goes to school in Kyiv.

It's been a good week.

I leave you with this:

I haven't seen television in eight months (watched some in America when I was there for New Years), but I happened to be at a friend's apartment a week ago and she happens to have a lot of money (both from a good job and her mom, who cleans houses in Italy, who sends money back) and has satellite television. It was on a music station and the Shakira "La Tortura" video came on. I'd heard the song before: it's a rage in the clubs here. But I hadn't realized the video was better than porn.

Due to said lack of television and internet bandwith problems I've never seen the video again, but while surfing here in the office I did find the code so all of you can watch it for me and send the resulting vibes my way. Shakira is the only woman I know who could have sex and draw a picture and have both come out perfectly. That is to say that her body moves completely independently of itself. Need to get back to the states and Latinas.

Que buena.

LA TORTURA (Shakira)Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

Was at a bar/club in Kyiv last night with a group of Volunteers for a bachelor party, as one of our number was soon going home to marry the American girl he's been faithful to all of service. It was fun at first and I was dancing with some girls, but then found that my group had met a huge group of English speakers: people from Britain, America and Canada whose parents or grandparents had come from Ukraine. They all had been raised speaking Ukrainian and now were on a three week tour of the county, most of which were visiting their ancestral homeland for the first time.

There was a lot of cuties and I was ready to start macking when I got sucked into a conversation that took down the next two hours and left me fumming. We had tee-shirts for the bachelor party and the writing on the back was in Russian. "Why Russian?" we were asked. Because most of the people in our group spoke Russian. "But you're in Ukraine." Yeah, but we live in Russian speaking towns. "But you should speak Ukrainian in Ukraine." This is not the first time I've had this conversation with newcomers, who knee jerk think that everyone in Ukraine must have spoken Ukrainian until the USSR tried to stamp it out and now it is a matter of cultural rebirth to speak it again. To be Ukrainian you have to speak Ukrainian, goes the too-simple argument.

I got into education mode (let's point out I'd had four shots of vodka in the past two hours) and started explaining how historically much of what is now Ukraine was not part of what was originally "Ukraine". Other than a sliver of land controlled by the cossacks (and even that wasn't for long), most of Ukraine was a colony of other countries after the collapse of Kyivian Rus 800 years ago (where they didn't speak Ukrainian, but Old Slavonic). In those 8 centuries, the land known now as Ukraine was in bits and pieces, at various times under the control of the Scandinavians, the Lithuanians, the Polish, the Mongols, the Turks, the Russians, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Swedes and the Germans. To give you an idea of this, here are some famous authors: Joseph Conrad, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose writings gave us the term "masochim") and Mikhail Bulgalkov. If asked, they would tell you their nationalities are Polish, Austrian and Russian, respectively, but they were all born on what is now Ukrainian soil; it just didn't happen to be Ukraine at the time.

The "Ukrainian" identity is rather recent, coming about only during the surge of nationalism that gripped Europe at the turn of the 19th century, when intellectuals started piecing together a culture out of traditions found in villages. In fact, until the end of the 19th century, Ukrainians as an ethnicity were called "Ruthenian" and were in the same ethnic group as Belarussians. "Ruthenian" was the only distinct name they had for themselves if they thought of themselves as different from Poles or Russians or whomever, which they often didn't. That doesn't mean the Ukrainian culture invalid; in fact I am proud of Ukraine and its quest to find an identity. But while Ukrainian as a language was spread around the country, to say Ukrainians speak Ukrainian doesn't take into account that never in its history did a majority of the people living in what is now in the boundaries of Ukraine speak Ukrainian. The new edict from the government that Ukrainian is the national language and its efforts to train every Ukrainian in the language is part of a manufactured attempt to create national cohesion in a country that has never had it. Most of the political problems in the country today are because so much of Ukraine identifies itself differently and why regions like Crimea or the Donbass (which has most of the country's population and industrial capacity) keep threatening to break away. Both are predominantly Russian-speaking and constantly feel like THIER identity as Ukrainians are hijacked becaues THEY are told they are not Ukrainian if they don't get on board with an identity that mostly originated in a different part of the country.

Imagine, if in America, you were told that Texas has all the original American attributes and that to not adopt Texas traditions and the Texan dialect, you aren't American.

Is this wrong to try to create this identity? Well, that's up for debate. When I got here I thought it was a good idea. I shared every opinion voiced to me by those people in that bar. But when my Ukrainina friends or students complain that nationalists make them feel bad for speaking a language (Russian) that their families have spoken for as long as they can remember, a language that the nationlists themselves speak but refuse to in an attempt to have a seperate identity from Russia (a country that they, for better or worse, are culturally, ethnically and economically intwined with), I realized the issue was much more complex and gray than books or articles on Ukraine paint it as.

And that's what these visitors knew of Ukraine: what was taught to them at the "Ukrainian schools" they told me they attended to learn about their ancesteral history and culture, and of course what their parents and grandparents taught them. But anyone who was in the diaspora would have been fleeing the crimes of the Soviet Union and of course this would make them nationalistic, rendering their opinons valid but biased, especially of what it's like on the ground in Ukraine today.

In my opinion you CAN'T go around trying to shovel under the Russian langauge and culture because that's as bad as what the Soviets were trying to do to Ukrainian language and culture (let me make the point, though, that I live in a predominantly Russian speaking city and speak Russian, so am unduly influenced by their views). My point is: let people speak what they want to speak, identify as they want to identify. It's just so ironic because Ukrainian culture IS Russian culture and vice versa. As slavs they share common cultural and linguistic anscestors and are much, much, much more alike than they are different. Most of what is Ukrainian "culture" is what is not shared by Russia, Belarus and Moldova (and even then they argue; some say bortch is Russian, others Ukrainian; the same for matroishka (nesting) dolls).

I was shouted down by several members of the group for all these opinions and angrily so. To a Ukrainian-American or Ukrainian-Canadian, Russia is the enemy and West is best. I was told I didn't know anything about Ukraine, that they'd been studying it their lives. They WERE Ukrainian, they said ("I'm a Ukrainian who just happens to live in Canada" said one guy who later admitted this was his first time in Ukraine). One guy in particular and and I argued for a long time because he refused to belive that perhaps, having lived here for two years and with the resulting intensive study of Ukrainian history, politics, culture and language, I might know a few things that someone who was visiting Ukraine for the first time might not. I've heard a lot about Cuba from my family and read a lot of books on it, but I'd like to think I'd let my assumptions be challenged if I visited Cuba and met an Australian who lived there for two years. This dude actually started getting in my face. I was calm, but he started yelling, calling me a retard and an idiot. He thought that everyone in Ukraine should speak Ukrainian, period. "They can speak what they want in their homes, but in the streets, in schools, they should speak Ukrainian because this is Ukraine," he said. I'm from America, but I don't speak American, I said. I speak English. The name of a country does not determine what it's people speak. The people do. Anything else is manufactured. I was reminded of the Spanish/English arguement in America, which he tried to pull in, but the two are dissimilar: students learning in a Spanish school in America are likely not to learn English, which may hold them back in a predominantly English speaking country. Ukraine is neither predominantly Ukrainian nor Russian speaking. Areas are predominantly one or the other, but you can hear both in every city in the country, it just depends what percentage or even how much the two intermixed. This guy didn't even realize that most places simply spoke dialect mixes of the two: because that's the nature of language. What it is in a book is never what it is on the street. He had never even heard of that or the word "surgic", the Ukrainian word for the mixed dialects, but then again, he doesn't live here.

He was also pissing me off because some things he "knew" were flat out wrong. He traced his ancestry to the Harkov oblast and I know that to be a Russian speaking oblast (I visited it last summer and Elizaveta, one of the Ukrainian girls I've dated lives there; Russian is the language she speaks at home), so I thought it was strange he was so gung-ho Ukrainian. When that was pointed that out, he said everyone in Harkov spoke Ukrainian and if they did speak Russian, it's becaues they felt forced to. I brought in Sean, who lives there, and he calmly explained that as a teacher trainer living in that oblast, he travelled around it regularly, was on a first name basis with hundreds of its teachers and only two of those he knew could speak Ukrainian. "90 percent of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian. I read that on Wikipedia!" the guy yelled. "That may be," said Sean calmly, "I'm just telling you what I know from living there." I realized the conversation was going nowhere and had to devolved into issue entrenchment and excused myself, letting Sean take over. Then I realized that my more combative nature had kept me in it for that long, and by then it was 3:30 AM and the group was packing up to leave. No cuties to hit on and I was annoyed beside.

Grrr.

Okay, so I never made it to KaZantip.

I talked to Peace Corps about how likely my trip was to go FUBAR with all the train problems due to exploding ordinance on the tracks (RE: last blog). My manager told me that the fire was out and trains were back to normal, but that people were protesting the incident by standing ON THE TRACKS, slowing down and halting traffic in and out of Crimea. He was harried because he was covering for three other managers, had to contact volunteers in the area to give them updates and was dealing with a few volunteers stranded in Crimea.

People were protesting because a number of trains simply sat in fields for 8-10 hours, with no food brought to the passangers and no information given to them. Somehow the protestors thought delaying traffic FURTHER and causing more delays for the people on the trains would somehow make their lives better.

I actually talked to one volunteer in the office who had been trying to go to Crimea, had found her train was routed to Hirsone (a town on the south coast) and no one had told her that (for hours she thought she was in Crimea), and it sat in Hirsone for about 8 hours. Finally, frustrated and running out of time she got on a bus back to Kyiv. About 35 hours to make a useless circle. And she was travelling with a friend who was visiting from America. Welcome to Ukraine.

My manager said that the Travel Ministry had told them everything was back to okay and running on time and, that while he himself wouldn't risk it, if KaZantip was worth it to me, then go.

That afternoon I was in the train station with ten minutes until my train. No line number by the train. No line number by any of the trains heading into Simferopal. It appears that while the Travel Ministry says everything is okay, they've gone ahead and cancelled every train running into Crimea.

There was a predictable mob at the window to get new tickets. Most of the discussion was about how to get on buses into Crimea and a couple of smart scalpers were haggling with people in the group, offering to get them onto buses or marshrutkas. There are no lines in Ukraine, so I wedged, body blocked and elbowed my way for an hour until I got to the counter. An ingenious lady behind me, holding a two-year old girl asked me, since her arms were tired, if she could put the girl on the counter. The ploy was obvious, but how could I say no? This put her ahead and a couple opportunists squeezed in behind her, shoving my ribs into the counter and now this little girl was blocking my access to the window. Still, I was Zen about it: I was on a couple hours of fitful sleep and really didn't care. I finally got my ticket in the window and they wordlessly rebooked me, as they were doing everyone, onto the 23:00 train into Simferopal.

I took stock: if nothing else went wrong and there was no guaruntee of that, I'd have about 12 hours at KaZantip. This was enough because 12 hours of drinking and dancing and oggling women does tend to wear one out enough to just get back on a train. But that was if nothing went wrong. I could well spend that 12 hours sitting on a train because someone decided to take a nap on the tracks in protest. And for some reason, I've been risk-averse lately, with my gut sliding to the safe side. Must be getting old.

Plus, I didn't feel like spending six more hours waiting on yet another train that may well get cancelled, stranding me in Kyiv another night. Burn me once, burn me twice, I ain't sticking around for a third.

Let's recap the past two years of delayed/cancelled travel:

Hurricane Jeanne: Florida

Widespread Flooding: Romania

Train wreck: Hungary

Exploding armory: Ukraine

I went and got a couple drinks with some Peace Corps volunteers, got back to Zhytomyr and got my tickets refunded (I was NOT going to wade into another line at the Kyiv train station. And yes, you have to go to one window to get rebooked, then to another window to get a refund) and then went and slept like the dead.

Dissapointed about KaZantip, but there's always next year...

Trains: I think by now they may be back to normal. My first train (coming down from Moscow) never arrived. I got put on one the next day. The next day, my train was cancelled again, this time because most train traffic between Kyiv and Crimea was disrupted due to a fire in an armory that had ordinance exploding everywhere. 4,000 people got evacuated and a lot of trains just sat on the tracks for 8-10 hours. In protest, people started blocking the train lines, causing more problems. One volutneer I ran into in Kyiv had gotten as far as Hirsone, waited for 8 hours and finally caught a bus back to Kyiv. 35 hours to make a circle and do nothing. Worse, she had a friend visiting from America, and that's what the friend got to see of Ukraine. They put us all on an 23:00 PM train, but I'd only have maybe 12 hours at KaZantip, IF nothing else went wrong. The Ministry said everything was back to normal, but they said that BEFORE they cancelled all the afternoon trains to Simferopol (by the way, that created a mob at the window that I had to elbow and fight my way through for an hour before getting the 23:00 train ticket). I just had a couple drinks with some other volunteers, went back to Zhytomyr, got my ticket refunded at the Zhytomyr train station (because I was not going to try standing in another line in Kyiv) and went straight to Tatyana's apartment.

Thus far my trip was gong really smoothly: I had cleaned my apartment, packed up, hung out with some friends and caught the marshrutka to Kyiv. I had called Tony, the guy I was staying with, and found out that "the horde", the group of Peace Corps males in my group who were spending the last of their vacation days marauding around Crimea, was staying with him for the next two nights, so I was walking into a party before I was even going to the festival. I was so pumped I was pumping my fist, excited to be back on the road after almost two weeks of sitting in Zhytomyr

I was in Peace Corps office, writing a blog as to where I was going: a whirlwind two night trip to Crimea to party at the alcohol-fueled nudist beach with a techno beat that is the month-long KaZantip Music Festial, when the series of unfortunate events started. After spending about forty minutes writing about the festival and my plans, I clicked the post button. Nothing happened. I had forgotten: the internet in Peace Corps gets turned off at 10:00 PM, and that had happened three minutes before.

Oh well, not a huge loss.

I leave Peace Corps to go the metro and arrive at the train station with exactly ten minutes until my train left, right on time. I look at the board, notice that the Kyiv-Simferopol train was ten minutes later than the time on my ticket, but thought maybe they had changed it.

I go to the train and the lady looks at my ticket: it's the wrong train.

I begin to run, something I'm familiar with at train stations, and get into the main station to look at the main board listing. There's my train, but there's no line assigned. That's bad. I look at the information board. My train has been delayed by four hours, to leave at 3:00 AM. That's very bad.

I go to the information window. An older guy ahead of me, in his fifties, asks about the same train I'm supposed to be on. The lady tells him 3:00 AM and offers no more information. Enraged, he spits on the glass seperating him from her. Since he summed it up for me, I just walk away.

I notice on the board there are two other trains leaving to the exact same destination, each leaving in ten minutes. Of course, there's a train full of people thinking the exact same thing. There's a mob at the sales window, and a lot of yelling. I figure it's not even worth it, and leave. It's strange, though: I've had problems with many trains in many countries, but in nearly two years I've never had a train in Ukraine be late.

I catch the metro back to Peace Corps office and read for three and a half hours, then call a cab because it's 2:30 AM, the metro is closed, and the last time I walked that late at night in a Ukrainian city alone, I got mugged. Because it was so late it cost 20 hriven, for a ride that should have cost six.

At the train station, the information board now says the train will leave at 4:30 AM. People are sprawled, sleeping on their bags, and the station is calm, quiet, a relief from the chaos just a few hours before. The situation is familiar, though: the last time I was on a train that was continually bumped back (in Budapest), it never arrived. I figure it's better just to catch a different train the next day.

I go to the information window and asked where to change my ticket. I was told at the sales windows on the other side of the train station, and this is a long, long train station.

I walk and walk and get to a window and ask about my train. The woman is honest: the train is coming out of Moscow and there are problems, but she's not specific as to what. No one actually knows when it will arrive, she tells me. The honesty is nice: In Budapest they kept us waiting at the station for more than ten hours before someone finally confessed there had been a train wreck and it wasn't coming at all.

I asked about trading in my ticket for a new one. Can't do it, I was told. I'd have to turn in my ticket and lose ten percent and then buy a new one.

I walked towards the sales window, but then passed a tiny window, manned by a guy wearing a tie. That looked promising. I told him the situation and he wordlessly stamped and signed the ticket so that I could get a full refund.

Another window later I had my refund. Another window later I had bought my new ticket. The ticket was exactly 20 hriven less than the one I turned in. So, a lot of time had been wasted but financially I had broke even.

I was deteremined to keep it even: the walk back to Peace Corps office was about 20 minutes, mostly uphill and with that risk of mugging, but I didn't want to bother with getting ripped off by another cab.

I walked outside into heavy rain. It was fucking raining. And all the cabs were full. After trying to find one for about ten minutes, I finally flagged one down. I told him my stop and even though it was five minutes by car, he said he didn't want to go there and didn't bother giving a reason. He was driving off as I was shutting the door.

Oh well, the rain meant no one's was going to mug me.

I walked, soaked, but luckily it was a warm night. I reflected on my situation and the possibility of getting mugged. The fact was that I looked Ukranian. I was travelling as light as possible to Crimea since I knew I'd be taking my stuff in with me to the festival. All I had was a bathing suit, a towel, a toothbrush, a contact case and a book in a canvas satchel. In my hand was a baba bag with some train food, which just made me look even more Ukranian. Add in the crew cut, the shaved face and the fact that every item of clothing I was wearing save my underwear, right down to my shoes, was made in Ukraine. On the street I passed a guy in the rain who was trying to flag down a car, a huge backpack on his back and NOT looking Ukranian. I thought, "hmm, maybe I should just mug him. Come out financially up for the night."

I kept walking.

Back at Peace Corps office I told the guard my story and he said I could sleep on a couch in the lounge. Only I knew they had two beds in the medical office for people who were sick. Are they being used? No. Can I sleep in one? No. Why not? We need permission from the medical staff. Can you ask? He glanced at the clock. It was nearly 4:00 AM. Too late to call. Whatever. I went upstairs, used my towel as a pillow and slept on the couch, clothes still wet.

A few hours later, volunteers started coming in, getting off early arriving trains. Their conversations woke me up, kept me up, so I went back downstairs to ask the guard to call medical. It was almost 8:00 AM, but after two calls to two numbers he couldn't get medical on the line. This is a business day, and medical is supposed to be reached 24 hours a day. Whatever. I went back upstairs and tried to get a few more hours of sleep.

I think I was happiest with my reaction to the situation: a combination of stoicism and determination. Peace Corps does that to you. I was never even annoyed during the whole thing, just went with the flow. I kept remembering Budapest and what a nightmare that was: ten hours in a fugue-Zombie state of half sleep at the train station before using the last of my cash to get a cab back to the hostel and then using my passport as collateral just to get a bed to get to sleep. That had cost me a lot of time and money. This cost me some discomfort and my trip getting pushed back a day (and now it really would just be a one night blitz at the festival), and I'd miss partying with the horde, but things were still on track.

I woke up on the couch a few hours later to hear volunteers complaining to each other that out that train traffic into Crimea was being severely delayed. I got online and found out that an arms depot right on the tracks leading into Crimea had caught fire and that ordinance was going off every two or three minutes, launching shells 900 feet into the air.

My train from last night was going right past that depot. Possibly that was the reason the train never came into Kyiv, although unlikely. The terminus was in Crimea but plenty of people would be on it from the Moscow-Kiev route, so it should have come in before turning back. So maybe that was my saving grace. I figured my trip would be scrapped, but then I checked my train routes. The depot was on the Eastern line. The train I had gotten for today, even though it was three hours longer (I had only picked it the night before because the departure and arrival times were more convienient), took the Western line. If I had picked the next train, leaving later and arriving earlier (and saving time), I would have been going past that depot.

So that was my series of unfortunate events, but things seem to be looking up (if not being on a train scheduled to go past an exploding arms depot is up). I'm more determined to go and have a great time at this festival, and, at the least, it's a story.

I leave in six hours.