Travels

I’m in Lviv today. Took the express train last night, left Kyiv at 5:00 pm and arrived in Lviv at 11:30. A friend told me to get seats in the second train car, which I didn’t really understand until I saw the first car (where my seat was) – definitely on the crappy side. Oh well, next time I’ll try to plan my trip earlier and get the second car. Anyway, it wasn’t bad, just hard for an early bird like me to stay alert until midnight when I finally hit my hotel room.

Good meetings today, including a presentation at Ukrainain Catholic University. We also met with faculty at the Ukrainian Academy of Printing – who knew there was such a cool place? They gave us calendars designed by the students, with each month printed in a different font and a short explanation of that font. Way cool.

The faculty were apologetic about the “poor” conditions of their state-funded univesity. It looked great to me! But I’m also easily impressed after three years spent mostly in the very sad and disadvantaged Chornobyl-affected territories. Visiting places like Lviv make me realize I have had such a skewed view of Ukraine.

I posted a few pictures from my Russia trip. I promise to write about that trip soon, there’s so much I want to say, I don’t know where to start. I discovered today in Lviv that my camera is broken, so no photos from here.

Books on the go

My brother turned me on to Podiobooks a few years ago – an excellent solution for a fanatic reader with limited access to English-language books and who walks a lot every day. I’ve lost count of how many Podiobooks I’ve listened to the past few years, some of them really fantastic, some not bad, and at least one that I canceled after a couple of chapters. They mostly have new authors, a lot of male authors (why do males still dominate the science fiction and fantasy genres?!), but Mur Lafferty was a fabulous discovery for me. (Note to Podiobooks: please make the author’s name a link so you can see all the books by that author!)

I admit that I am on the slow-side of taking to new technologies, plus I don’t have much patience for trying to figure things. So if a website doesn’t have a giant “click here and everything happens automatically” button, I’m not often inclined to spend much time there. It’s taken me a while to get into LibriVox, another fabulous book site my brother told me about ages ago. I don’t remember now why I thought the website looked intimidating the first time I visited way back when – maybe they didn’t have the big buttons on the homepage then? Or maybe the catalog overwhelmed me. Who knows. The important thing is that I realize now it’s easy, and I am downloading podcast books to my heart’s content. You can pick a book yourself from the catalog, or you can throw caution to the wind and opt for the Books, Poetry or Short Story Podcasts. All LibriVox books are in the public domain, which means a lot of classics. I’ve listened to Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre, both books that were in my library at home for probably decades but which I never got around to reading.

My brother, ever far far ahead of me in technological know-how and coolness, recently finished his first full recording for LibroVox. He blogs about the process of recording his first solo project, Thuvia, Maid of Mars. He’s got a great voice, and it was fun to listen to my little brother tell me a story this past week.

And did I mention that LibriVox is a volunteer operation? How cool is that?! You can volunteer for LibriVox and help make public domain books available for free on the internet. I haven’t told my brother yet, but I’m hoping he’ll give me a crash course in audio recording next time I’m home. This is the kind of volunteering that (a) I can do from anywhere, (b) I enjoy the benefits of myself, and (c) is so dang cool!

It would be cool to get some Ukrainian and Russian volunteers to contribute to the site as well. Anyone game?

What a day!

I just watched the inauguration video – what a day to be alive, what a day to be an American!

I tried to put into words for Igor the way I feel this evening, to express the pride that I feel. It’s hard to express this overwhelming feeling with English words, even harder for me with Russian words!

Like many Ukrainians disillusioned with the defunct Orange Revoluntion, Igor cracked “We’ll see how you still feel in 6 months.” I do have high hopes and high expectations for President Obama. But as with the Orange Revolution, an important change has occured that cannot be taken away. My country is not the same today as it was yesterday.

It can be argued that no one could live up to the expectations placed on President Yushchenko, and maybe no one could live up to the expectations now placed on President Obama, but we have them. And we have hope and faith in a great country.

What a day to witness!

This sums it up for me today

fingerpost

Russia

I’m in St. Petersburg – the first time since I studied here in 1992. It’s such a beautiful city. I have fallen in love with it all over again. I spent most of my free afternoon on Sunday visiting my old stomping grounds. I was amused to see that my old dorm is now called “Hotel-type dormitory”. It was sooooo far from anything “hotel-like” when I lived there! I hear that it’s still not so hot, despite very nicely remodeled reception area. Personally, I think it would have been easier to demolish the place and start over, rather than try to renovate that monstrosity.

The biggest frustration by far during this trip has been with internet – I have definitely wasted a significant amount of time and energy trying to find places where I can get online. I’m sitting now in a “Mac Cafe” (McDonald’s answer for the cool cafe crowd), which has free wifi, but it is dolled out in 15 minute increments. Argh! The hotel in Nizhny Novgorod had free wifi, which helped a bit with the ridiculous price of staying the night there. But I’ve got to find a better way to deal with this if I’m going to be traveling this much all the time. It’s just too frustrating.

Anyway, this is my last night of this trip, thank goodness! 4 cities in 9 days. Lots of impressions to write about, but I can’t get it all out in 15 minute increments. Time to head back to my quiet hotel room and read the book I bought yesterday at Dom Knigi – which will deserve a post in and of itself – the visit to Dom Knigi, ie Book House, on Nevsky Prospekt. Actually, the book might deserve a post, too – “Wolves Eat Dogs“, by Martin Cruz Smith. I bought it for the flight home, but looks like I might be leaving it in Russia! So far, a good read.

Happy “Old” New Year

I’m in Russia, visiting advising centers in 4 cities. A different bed nearly every night for 9 days! Today we are in Nizhny Novgorod, an old city on the Volga. Unfortunately, as usual, not much time for siteseeing, but the little I’ve seen is impressive. I’m exhausted from the overnight train trip to get here, and a poor night’s sleep in Moscow before that. We had a super chatty and friendly taxi driver from the train station to the hotel, so we had a very quick but entertaining tour at 6:30 this morning. I love taxi drivers like that – I almost don’t mind getting ripped off by guys like that, the commentary was worth the extra money we paid.

This was my first “Old” New Year without Igor in 3 years. That’s a bummer. The hardest part of these fun and interesting trips is missing my wonderful husband.

Holidays, cont.

This is the season of never-ending holidays in Ukraine. Or at least it starts to feel that way to me by about this time every year. We’ve had Latin Christmas, New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas (Jan. 7), with one more to go – the so-called Old New Year, which celebrates New Year’s Eve by the the Julian calendar, even though the region changed to the Gregorian calendar 90 years ago. Man, those Slavs will think of any excuse for a holiday! 🙂

We spent both New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas with Igor’s family, as we usually do. It was the usual festival of gluttony and sloth, ending with several doses of something to calm the stomach. Fun was had by all. Igor’s father fulfilled his life-long dream and, in the year of the Cow (as it is called in Ukrainian), he bought himself a cow. (It wasn’t actually his life-long dream to buy the cow in the year of the cow, it just worked out that way.) So, his farmstead is now complete – pigs, sheep (his second lamb was born last month, almost one-year to the day from the first one, which was born on the morning of our wedding), a goat, chickens, turkeys, rabbits and a cow. He’s convinced he’s going to keep us all alive during this economic crisis with the products of his farm – let’s hope things don’t get that desperate.

They slaughtered one of the pigs in the last few days of 2008, so the big excitement for everyone during the holidays (except, of course, us vegetarians) was the homegrown pork, salo, and other various pork products. I’m sure it’s all quite tasty.

Since our trip to someplace (anyplace) warm and sunny didn’t pan out, Igor and I decided to spend a night at a spa center just outside Kyiv, creatively called Spa-Center. Since we sold our car not long ago, we headed to the bus station where various buses depart in a northwestern direction from Kyiv to find something that could drop us in the vicinity of the hotel. Lo and behold, right as we came out of the metro, the Korosten bus was pulling out directly in front of us. The driver slowed down, opened the door and yelled out a greeting to Igor – an old acquaintance! Although his bus was full, he let us stand in the aisle for the 15 minute ride to Vorzel. As we walked up the long driveway to the spa, we both laughed that we were probably the first people to arrive at this up-scale spa by foot.

We checked in, changed to our bathing suits, donned the hotel robes and headed to reception to get set-up with access to the spa center. And boom, the lights go out. It was still early afternoon, so there was plenty of natural light, but then the smell hit us. Something was definitely burning. As we descended the stairs we quickly realized the problem – the door to the utilities room was wide open and the stench was coming from the electrical panel. That was more than a blown fuse. After about an hour or so, Igor asked at reception if we should pack up and head home. No, they assured us, the power will be back within the hour. To their credit, it was back on in about 30 minutes. Of course, it went again several hours later, but by that time we had already thoroughly enjoyed the spa facilities.

We enjoyed the novelty of sitting in the steaming outdoor jaccuzi while snow fell around us, then took a quick dip in one of the pools. Igor was anxious to get to the highlight of the experience for him, the various saunas. They have a steam room, a Finnish (dry) sauna and a Russian banya. You can get a “treatment” with a venik by one the spa workers, or you can buy your own birch or oak branch and go to work on yourself with the leaves. Igor opted for this, and pretty much got the full experience – getting on a good sweat in the banya, swatting himself with the birch branch, and then stepping out of the banya and dumping a bucket of cold water over his head. That whole process is too extreme for me, but he did convince me to let him do a gentle “massage” with the birch branch a couple of times. Not bad.

After a couple of hours, we were thoroughly relaxed. The transformer blew again just as we were leaving the spa, and the electricity was out for another hour or so. I was a bit afraid to actually stay the whole night there, not feeling particularly confident that the place wouldn’t catch on fire at some point, but thankfully no more transformer problems.

We easily caught a bus back to Kyiv the next day, and decided to check out an appliance store before heading home. We’ve been talking about getting a juicer, and I did some investigating a few days earlier. I had found that for a little bit more, we could get a food processor that includes a juicer, instead of just a juicer. Well, one thing led to another, and before we knew it, we were lugging home a small space ship, I mean large kitchen “combine” (as they are called here), that does everything except wash the dishes. Oh wait, it has some self-cleaning mode too. We tested the juicing function first thing, and Igor got a little carried away. Next thing I knew, we had several liters of juice from all kinds of things – beets, carrots, parsley, cabbage (that’s particularly disgusting, I might add), apples and I don’t even know what else. The machine works great, and we found some combinations with beet juice that aren’t too bad actually.

Once these holidays are over, we are going on a mostly-juice diet for a while – we both feel fat and out of shape. There’s not much we can do for more physical exercise at the moment, since it’s damn cold with plenty of snow, but we can work on our eating habits and get back on track with eating healthier. I love the holidays, I enjoy the time with family and friends, but I’m ready to get back to work, to a schedule and a routine. One more trip to Korosten this weekend for an early celebration of Old New Year with friends, then the holiday season officially ends and we’re back to normal.

Pining for Pechersk

We were back in our old neighborhood the other day, visiting the Lavra with some friends. It hit me like a Mac truck how much I miss Pechersk! It wasn’t just that everything was familiar, somehow the entire atmosphere of the neighborhood feels different from where we are living now. I was hesitant to tell Igor that I missed the area, worried he’d be upset or I don’t know what. I finally told him, and he looked as relieved as I felt – we both miss Pechersk soooo much! We decided that as soon as we can, we’ll move back there. I don’t care if it’s farther from my office, it feels like home there. We also decided our next move will most likely be to an apartment that we purchase. Real estate prices are falling, and it just might be possible for us to buy a modest apartment in the coming year.

It’s weird to be more financially secure than we’ve ever been, thinking about things like buying our own apartment, in the middle of a global economic crisis and living in a country that has been hit quite hard. (Well, my retirement funds have tanked, but otherwise…) Although we are personally benefiting from the strong dollar right now, I do sincerely hope that the hrivna stabilizes soon so that so many other people don’t suffer any longer.