The wedding was awesome. I can’t say it enough times. Getting there was a little piece of hell, but once we made it, everything was fantastic.
To make the final days even more stressful, UN Volunteers had a workshop in Bonn for all the programme officers the first week of December. So, I had to spend the last full week before guests started arriving in another country, stressing about all the things I should or could be doing in Kyiv to get ready. The good thing, though, was that I got a great pair of shoes and a bunch of presents while in Bonn, plus I got to spend a day with my friend Jayne. The trip was good, but it was nonetheless not the best timing for me to spend a week away.
Igor, therefore, was the lucky one who had to go to Korsoten 10 days before the wedding date to confirm with ZAGS (the civil wedding registry place) that indeed we still wanted to get married – a rather bizarre requirement that can only be fulfilled in person exactly 10 days before the wedding (makes me wonder what happens if you want to change your mind, say 4 days before the wedding – do they somehow force you to get married anyway because it’s “too late” to change your mind?). We were technically supposed to go together to confirm our intentions (no phone calls, only in person), but Igor managed to get around this requirement, explaining that I was, in fact, not in the country, and for some reason they accepted his word that I still wanted to marry him (why could they accept his word about my intentions, but we couldn’t confirm by phone, email, fax, notarized letter or any other means except in person?!). Igor used the day in Korosten to finalize a bunch of other details, too.
When I called that evening from Bonn to see how the day had gone, I was impressed with the efficiency and thoroughness of Igor’s work. ZAGS confirmed – check. Hotel rooms reserved – check. Dinner menu set – check. Flowers ordered – check. Red, white and blue balloons – check. Huh? We’re having balloons? Live band from Chernihiv with an English-speaking tamada – we’re having a live band? And what the hell is a tamada? Fireworks salute – fireworks?!! All I could think was “Who is this and what have you done with my Igor?”
Four days later, back in Kyiv, I was still trying to figure out what the hell had happened. Before I left for Bonn, we had sat down one evening to go over the guest list, sort out the number of hotel rooms to reserve, etc. We were both shocked when the list reached fifty people – this was supposed to be a small, simple wedding! We couldn’t understand what had happened, and the feeling started to creep over me that we were losing control of this thing. One week until the wedding, I realized that it was all completely out of control – that this “small and simple wedding” was going to be anything but small and simple.
Monday afternoon the first guests arrived, my dear friend and matron of honor Julee, her husband Jeff and their two adorable girls Rhyan and Grace. Tuesday, the second group arrived, comprised of my father, his sister Aunt Mary Ellin, my nephew Kyle, and very dear friends Madeleine and Dick. Kyle, it should be noted, lives in Texas, which is basically a desert. He had never been farther than Ohio, and had never seen snow. Let’s just say that there were a lot of firsts for Kyle on this trip. Thursday, my brother Scott, his wife Carina and their two wonderful girls Tayler and Tyler arrived. Somewhere in between all those trips to the airport, I got my hair cut and colored, had a manicure, had a final fitting for my dress, fed people, tried to show them a bit of Kyiv, took them souvenir shopping, and dealt with various issues related to the apartments I had arranged for them to live in.
As luck would have it, Igor’s organization decided to have a huge reception that same week, and he was trapped at work morning to night every day. It started to become a joke amongst the American guests whether or not he was real, and whether or not they might finally see him at the wedding. I did my best to stay supportive of him, knowing that he was very stressed by problems at work, and I tried to handle as much as I could on the homefront by myself.
By Thursday night, though, I was at my wits end. I hadn’t sleep more than an hour or two a night for the entire week. I still didn’t have my dress, there were still two more guests to pick up on Friday at the train station, people had to be moved out of their rented apartments and all their bags moved to our apartment for the weekend, we had to be in Korosten by 6pm because Igor’s mother insisted on having everyone over for dinner Friday night, and Igor said he needed to go to work until at least lunchtime on Friday. We had the third fight in our two years together – actually it wasn’t much of a fight, it was more like me having a total breakdown and Igor finally coming out of his stupor over work and realizing there was something else, slightly more important, going on in our lives. He was fabulous again after that, and I love him all the more for taking charge on Friday when he was also exhausted. He didn’t, by the way, go to work.
By this time, I had become good buddies with one particular taxi driver, Viktor, who the service had sent a couple times during the week because I asked for a big car and he has a station wagon. I called him Friday morning and asked if he’d be interested in running errands with me for a couple hours. Neither of us expected that we’d spend the better part of the day together. A couple errands in Kyiv on a weekday can be all that you accomplish – the traffic is soooo bad! But we managed to get my dress, return Carina and the girls to the apartment, and get to the train station to meet Anya and Gresha (my host parents from Moldova) at the train station exactly the moment their train arrived and I was running along the platform to greet them right as they were getting off the train.
In the meantime, Igor took my brother Scott to the Lavra for a little sightseeing, and then all hell broke loose. 6 people’s luggage was transferred to our apartment for the weekend (which, I may remind you is on the fourth floor with no elevator). Igor had arranged for a marshrutka (mini-bus) driver from Korosten to pick us up in Kyiv and transport us all to Korosten. Only the driver didn’t want to come to Kyiv with an empty bus, so he was waiting until he had enough passengers from Korosten to make the trip worth his while. Igor called me periodically with updates “He’ll be here around 1.” “He’ll be here around 2.” When he called and said “He’ll probably be here around 3 or 3:30”, I had had enough and told Igor to tell the driver we would pay him to drive to Kyiv, too, just so long as he got his butt on the road now! Igor fussed a bit about spending the extra money, but he soon got over that and by the end of the weekend he had thoroughly accepted that sometimes it’s worth spending the money to make your life easier.
The Friday afternoon traffic was so awful, and the marshrutka driver so unfamiliar with and afraid of Kyiv, that we decided it would be better to get all our people to the usual Korosten bus stop instead of the bus driving all across Kyiv to pick us up at home. That was another circus. We needed at least four taxis, but no taxis wanted to waste an hour driving across Kyiv at that time of day in the horrible traffic. Igor finally got one company to send four taxis, then there was a mix up at one of the pick-up sites, and the company got angry and canceled all our taxis (yes, Kyiv taxi companies are that horrible and that rude as to cancel your urgently-needed taxis because they don’t like you). Igor got to work again organizing taxis. I, in the meantime, was picking up the Moldovans (as they came to be known) at the train station. Viktor the taxi driver seemed to be enjoying the circus as I relayed one new disastrous complication after another. He and I got the Moldovans, we headed to the bus station, and arrived well ahead of everyone else. I suggested we wait in a nearby cafe, and Viktor, curious to see how this soap opera was going to end, joined us. He told us about a 3-day wedding he had once attended in a Carpathian mountain village – total and complete chaos; eating, drinking, dancing and fighting for three days and night. I laughed, and cringed, to think about the stress and insanity of a 3-day wedding celebration.
Igor called again.
“They are all in taxis and on their way. There’s a cell phone in each car and they will call you when they are at Sviatoshin so you can tell them where to meet the bus. I’m going back to the apartment.”
“What?! Are you changing your mind?” I said, only half-jokingly.
“No,” he laughed. “I’m going to check on things, make sure that cat has food for the weekend, and lock up. I’ll come by metro in a bit.”
He was there before any of the taxis arrived.
We loaded up the bus and settled in for the two hour drive to Korosten.
Anka in Kyiv 