31 August

Currently I am on yet another train – they seem to be good places for me to write, I guess. This one is headed from Lviv, Ukraine to a small city called Ternopil. It’s only a couple hours between the two, and Sean is going to be meeting me at the station, as he didn’t trust me to find my way to his village on my own (it’s a two hour bus ride, and then probably a good walk from Ternopil, so I felt bad about having him make the trip when he’s done it several times this week already, getting ready fro the new school year, but he insisted, so I wasn’t going to argue too hard). Since it was only two hours, I bought the cheapest ticket this time, which was equivalent to 3rd class. Everyone has their own bunk/sleeping space, but they are somewhat cramped together. It’s fine, but I’ve decided through  my various voyages that any long distance traveling, its worth it to buy the better ticket. Especially in places like Ukraine, where this ticket cost around $4. I think the 2nd class seat would have been $6. Some things about this country are dirt cheap, others, not so much, but when the exchange rate is 5 to 1 in your favor, even the pricey stuff is okay.

I spent the last two days in Lviv, or Lvov in Russian, or a completely different set of letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. When you cross the Ukrainian border from Poland, you have two choices. You can take a bus over bad roads all night, or you can take a train all night, and wait for several hours at the border while they change the wheels to a different gauge of track. Given that the trains get very hot and sometimes stinky when not moving, I opted for the bus, and went to Eurolines, one of the deluxe bus companies hoping to make the best of it. That was before I knew how bad the roads were. It’s frustrating because the two cities (Krakow and Lviv) aren’t that far apart. It’s just the roads and the border are between them, and there’s no avoiding them.

That said, I do have to say that after the morning and afternoon spent seeing Auschwitz, my radar seemed tuned to images and things that made me happy. It started earlier in the day, but kept going all through the night, even as I was getting annoyed at not being able to fall asleep. Here are a few of the things that redeemed the human race in my mind that evening:

- The old man who was minding the washroom in the bus station in Krakow was super friendly, and if you do much traveling, you know how unusual that is. Usually the people taking your money in the bathrooms, especially in bus and train stations are a surly bunch. This guy wasn’t. He tried chatting, but my Polish was no where close to up to it. So then, as I went from the bathroom to the locker where I had my backpack stashed, I was leaning over, putting things in and out of it, repacking, etc, and felt a hand on my head. Now, of course I immediately turn to see what the hell is going on, and it turns out it’s the old man from the washroom, and he’s closing a locker door that has swung open above me (or perhaps was already open). I felt so badly about thinking the worst that I made some lame joke to him and motioned like I’d hit my head. He laughed an d shook my hand and went back to his post in front of the water closet.

- Sitting in the bus, waiting to leave the station, there was a late middle aged man who looked just like my old high school teacher Mr. Porter putting his teenage daughter and younger son on the bus, probably to go visit relatives or something similar. Maybe it wasn’t the first time he’d sent his daughter off by herself, but it sure felt that way, and he was hovering nervously, smoking cigarettes, not willing to leave until the bus was long gone. The daughter was playing it cool, but kept looking out the window occasionally. Every second or third time, he would see her looking and wave, despite the fact that the bus wasn’t moving yet. She would wave back, playing it with her little brother, as though it was for his sake. When the driver shut the door, they waved again, and then again as the bus was backing up, and again as it began pulling away, with Dad walking out into the driveway a bit, seeing us off. What she didn’t see, and I did, is that as the bus pulled around the station, making a partial circle in order to head off in the right direction, Dad had walked out, around the building, whether on the way back to his car, or whether he knew it would have to go out that way, I don’t know, but he was there, waving again as we got going for real. She didn’t notice because she was settling her little brother into his seat, making sure everything was good to go. Somehow it was both happy and sad, seeing her Dad waving like that, sending his little girl who was obviously growing up quickly off.

- Later, after we’d been going for a while, and a lot of people were asleep or off in their own world, I looked back through the bus, and there was an attractive blonde leaning back, her sons head in her lap with his eyes closed. Each one of them had one earphone from the mp3 player in their ear, and she was stroking his hair, but very lightly, as if she were almost asleep as well, and it was as much for her own comfort as his. He’s smiling in his sleep though, and I wanted it to go on forever.

And of course after a few more hours of getting tossed around and not being able to sleep, it almost seemed like it did. So, after a sleepless night that included sitting at the border for two hours (equal blame – Poland and Ukraine each took an hour to let us through, which from what I’ve heard, is good fortune on the Ukrainian side) and what seemed to be a single continuous construction zone, I arrived in Lviv. Sadly, I had no map and no money, and it was 6am, which meant that most things weren’t open yet. Ever the trooper, I sat in front of the bus station for a while and watched to see which way traffic was going. Assuming I was pretty close in to the center of town, as most bus stations are, I hefted my pack and started walking the same way most of the buses and taxis were headed. Well, my assumptions were 50% right on. I headed the right way without a problem, but found out only two days later that the international bus station is a full 8km South of town. No wonder if felt like I was walking all day. I did find an open bank along the way, which solved the money issue, but foolishly persisted in walking when I should have just hailed a cab. By the time I did finally begin to reach some sort of real city, and found a map, I’d been walking for the better part of four hours and still had a good two km to go before I got to the hotel I was aiming for. Still, the lady in the kiosk sold me a map, bitching at me in Ukrainian about being paid with a 100 rb note for a 7 rbl map, but at that point I didn’t care. She was lucky I paid her at all. So then I sat down on a step and began to try to sort out where I was and where I should go.

Normally this is quite easy, of course, but in this situation I’d been walking for so long, I had no idea, other than various landmarks, and a park where I might be, and on top of that, the map was in English, which was good later, but at that moment meant that I had to translate the Cyrillic street names (where there were street names) to English. Part way through that process I began to figure out which letters had different meanings in Ukrainian than Russian. Things like r which is a hard g sound in Russian, but in Ukraine, is a “ha” sound instead, except when it’s not. Needless to say, lots of streets began with r, and that meant I was looking for “g” names on the map, when they were actually “ha” names. You get the idea.

In any case, I figured it out, helped along by knowing the approximate shape of the park I’d just trekked through, hefted my pack once more, made a couple false starts (North is that way? Really? Thank you compass watchband!) and hiked on towards the Golden Land of the George Hotel and the promise (hope) of a bed. Around 1:30 I arrived at the George, which was easily found, thankfully, was overjoyed to learn that they had rooms available, and crashed hard for several hours.

There’s not much to say about Lviv. It was a city similar to many of the others, but perhaps less interesting, or maybe it was just that I was back in a land where no one seemed to speak my language (Latvia and Lithuania spoiled me) and that seemed to make things harder. I spent a couple days there, seeing some sights, walking around, and taking it easy. I went to a casino one night, and after being turned away at one because I didn’t have respectable shoes (those WERE my respectable shoes!) I went to another which was seriously lame. All video, of course, and no drinks available. I was playing with a 50 rb bill, which was worth about $10. At one point I was up from my 50 to around 200 playing blackjack, and I started to cash out, then remembered that it was still only about $40. So I started playing with bigger chips, and eventually ended up losing it all. I had another 50 in my pocket I’d brought and was fully prepared to lose, but the casino was so uninteresting that I decided to save it instead.



Maybe I wasn’t really in a picture taking mood, but I didn’t get any good shots out of Lviv for the most part. The one exception is this statue that I stumbled on walking around one of the days. I never did figure out exactly what she is doing, but I liked her look a lot. I got several good ones, but I’ll only show one, as things are going to get real picture heavy in the next couple days. I’m nearly in Ternopil, I think, and I need to start watching train stations as the Ukrainian trains don’t have loudspeakers to tell you where you are. On top of that, the woman took my ticket, so I have to remember how to spell the city’s name. It would really suck for Sean if I were to not get off at the right stop and leave him there wondering what happened to me. Not to mention how much it would suck for me.

Bye for now,

Stephen
 

4 September,

Hello again! A few days have gone by and after spending a couple days in Shumsk, Sean’s village, we have both felt the need for at least a tiny bit of civilization, and taken the bus back to Ternopil (now I know the preferred English spelling – it’s pronounced similarly to Chernobyl, to the extent that another peace corps volunteer who Sean and I had lunch with thought I was trying to arrange a tour of Turnopil, and was very confused) and hung out here for a couple days. I managed to arrange a tour of Chernobyl for Thursday (It took a bit of work, and also a bit of luck. The tours are very expensive, but I managed to get on with a group that was already booked, so it will be a manageable $150), book a room in Kiev for three nights, buy my train ticket to Kiev (which leaves in four hours) and a plane ticket for Friday the 8th to get me to Zagreb, Croatia by 2pm that day. (having Sean as an interpreter made much of that easier than it would have been, especially the plane ticket.) That should give me plenty of time to pick up my kayaking clothes from the post office there (assuming they’ve arrived, but I trust my mother to come through) and then catch a bus up to Ljubljana to either meet the group at the airport late Saturday night or make my own way up to Bovec before them. (I don’t know how long it takes to get between the two, but from the map, I’m guessing it’s a couple hours, and the idea of arriving at the hotel at 2am after a long day of travel and then getting up early to hit the water doesn’t sound that appealing). It all depends on how tough it is to get to Bovec and the hotel by public transportation.

So, other than booking my next few days at the one internet spot in this town, and a random travel agency we managed to stumble across, Sean and I kind of just bummed around for a couple days. It was good to see him, and he introduced me to the local Mexican/Texmex restaurant (My burrito had no cheese and wasn’t very spicy at all, to give you an idea) as well as a couple other places. We people watched a lot, and tried to go to the local WW2 museum, but it was closed on Sundays and Mondays. This afternoon, he did some shopping and then caught the bus back to Shumsk, leaving me to fend for myself for the last six hours or so, at which point it started pouring rain. I took some video of the rain in the central square and then as it started really coming down, took refuge in a restaurant which he and I found yesterday, which may very well be the only place in Ternopil that has a (somewhat) English menu (if you request it). The red fish (salmon) steak rocks, and they’re letting me camp out with the computer and keeping a beer in front of me, so life is pretty good.

Hanging out with Sean has been great, but other than a morning when he slept late and I wrote for a while, I have been in the weird situation of being around him constantly for four days after being pretty much completely on my own for four weeks. It wasn’t a big deal at all, and in fact I got to know him much better than I ever did in the time he and I worked at the bookstore together which was great, but it was definitely strange suddenly being around someone and having someone to talk to. It was also very funny having some of my observations confirmed not just by him, but by his conversations with the other volunteers in Ukraine. Since I haven’t really touched on them yet, other than maybe a brief mention, I will lay them out here, now that they have verification.

1. Ukrainian/Russian/Slavic women are stunningly gorgeous. I live in Austin, which for the most part has a higher per capita of good looking women then any other place I’ve been in the US, excepting perhaps LA and San Diego, but walking around a large city in this part of the world is like shopping at the Supermodel Mall. It’s ridiculous.

2. Ukrainian (etc) women generally look older than they really are. If you think she is in her late twenties, odds are she just graduated (high school).

3. Ukrainian women go from looking 25 to 45 in their late twenties. It’s true. Walking around, and being 38 years old (nearly) it’s kind of disconcerting to see an enormous number of amazingly attractive twenty year olds, and literally almost no attractive women my age. Life is hard here, for sure, but it really seems like there would be a few. There are not.

I know that little list sounds shallow, or whatever, but according to Sean, everyone there has noticed it in some form or another. Not even just the men. It turns out that there is even a sort of market for men who come here in search of wives. Not a real market, though there may be one of those too, and probably is, but I mean in a more metaphorical way. Apparently the city of Odessa is the capitol of it, and everywhere you look there are well off foreign men with slightly too young Ukrainian women on their arms. I find it pretty disturbing, but not unbelievable.

Anyway, these three facts are making life for Sean here hard, I think. We ran into his school for just a few minutes the other day, and being the curiosity that I am, I was introduced to two of the English classes, one older (11th grade – about 12 kids) and maybe 6th grade or so – about 25 or 30 kids). From what Sean has said, and from my observations while I was in Shumsk, I can tell you that pretty much every girl from age 8 to age 17 (11 grade – when they graduate) as well as some of the teachers has a crush on the handsome American English Teacher. I can tell you from direct observation that the man is showing great restraint and keeping himself well away from any potential situations. He’s a better man that I am, I think. I’d like to think that I could keep myself out of trouble the way he is doing, but on the other hand, when a tall, gorgeous woman with long brown hair and startlingly blue (or green) eyes starts using those eyes on you, all bets are off.

Something else that he and I agree on, which makes resisting temptation a bit easier is that Ukrainian women (and Russian also, and somewhat so for the Latvian and Lithuanian women) is that they are a bit too traditional for our tastes. Even the very smart, very driven women we’ve met who have careers still seem ready to drop the lives they’ve made for themselves when they meet the right man. I’ve always been attracted to strong, independent women (damn it) and having conversations with women over here where they make a point of saying things like “A woman should always dress like a woman and look her best” (I swear I’ve had that conversation at least six times already!) just seems weird after so many years of American attitudes. After a while, it becomes clear that what they really mean is that the man should always be in control and the woman should know her place. I guess if I were the type who went to Ukraine shopping for a wife, I might be happy about that, but if I’m looking for someone who can surprise me and challenge me and be an equal partner, then it just becomes kind of a turn off, after a while.

Anyway, there are my wild generalizations about all the women in all of Eastern Europe based on all ten I’ve met. I hope you enjoyed it.

So how about some images from Shumsk and Ternopil? I didn’t get as many as I should have, but I can show you a bit.



First off, for those of you who don’t know him, Sean used to work at Half Price Books with me, and he is now in Ukraine working for the Peace Corps teaching English. He is nearly one year into his 27 month commitment, and school started last Friday, so he is just starting his second year as a teacher. I might have mentioned it before, but Sean was the second American to come to Shumsk, as far as anyone can remember, and I was the fifth. I know I mentioned earlier that he is a bit of a superstar there, but its all relative. For the time I was in the school, I was a bit of a superstar myself. Despite being the district capital, with a pretty nice school, a hospital and two or three banks, if you go to the bus station, you will see about an equal number of cars and horse carts there to pick people up.



Pretty much all the horse carts I saw look pretty much like this one, except with no flat tires (poor horse). Sean says that they can get internet there, either by dial up phone line or radio (which is pretty unreliable, fading if the weather gets bad) but both are pretty slow. On the other hand, there is a cell phone tower within sight of his apartment, and it seemed to me that at least fifty percent of the population had them. That may be high, but certainly nearly all the kids and people under the age of 30 seemed to have them, and many older folks as well. Sean did have a hard time finding a place to live, and he won’t be offended I’m sure if I tell you that I nearly froze sleeping on his floor the first night. The apartment doesn’t have heat, which is going to be a big problem come November or so, and he’s starting on that now, trying to get the school to find him another place. Here are a couple shots of the view outside his window. I meant to take a picture of the building itself, but I forgot. It’s a typical 5 story or so Soviet era concrete structure. There are no lights in the hallways or stairs, and no hot water.





So those are the negatives, but the good thing is that he seems to have a lot of friends outside the village (he calls it a village, I’d call it a town) and everyone in the village pretty much loves him. They all seemed really nice, but one of my regrets is that I didn’t get to meet more people there. It was clear Sean didn’t want to play translator all day to the local citizens grilling the new arrival for information, and I can understand that. Being the local celebrity would be bad enough… having to translate the same set of questions and answers again and again would get old really fast.



The one full day I was there in Shumsk, he and I went walking, heading out one of the roads and talking. Along the way I spotted this abandoned gas station and took a few shots of the old style pumps and the building, as well as a good one of Sean. Part of the time I was doing that, he was off stealing apples for us, which he claims is the equivalent of stealing sand in Austin. I have to admit that mine was damn good. Later that day we walked out by a park and a small lake as well, and saw some really nice houses as well as some of his fellow teachers who were a little toasted after a celebration for the first day of school. He explained that because the teachers there are respected as community leaders more so than in the US, they can’t really go out and have a drink in the easy way that US teachers can. That means that when there is an occasion, such as the first day of school, or the last, or holidays, etc, they tend to do it right. I say good for them…



So I arrived in Shumsk on Thursday, and we stayed there that night and Friday night, and then took the bus to Ternopil (with a stopover in a town whose name I can’t remember to have lunch with another peace corps volunteer named Celeste and a Ukrainian woman whose name I missed due to the loud music and never managed to get. I asked Sean, but he missed it too.) and stayed there Saturday and Sunday nights. Ternopil is a regional capitol, I think, and has around 200,000 people if I remember right. That sounds about right, for what I saw.



We stayed in a run down little place within spitting distance of the train station (a phrase Sean says is very funny to the Ukrainians, and completely unfamiliar to a lot of the volunteers from the North East. How can that be? I know we had it in Ohio when I was growing up.) and spent the evenings having drinks at the sidewalk cafes, and mostly spent the days there too.

I'm finishing this off a couple hours later, on the train to Kiev. I'm in a four person comparment with a really nice couple (though we have no common languages) and a very large guy who snores loudly. That is where the ipod and high quality headphones come in. I wanted to throw in a couple photos I took at the Train Station just before I left.





And with that, I will leave you all. I'm off to Kiev for a couple days, and then an adventure of traveling into the area around Chernobyl, and right up to the now concrete encased reactor. Once again mixed feelings about it... it's going to be interesting, but no doubt a little sad as well.

As always, love to everyone... and write me and say hello! It's very depressing not checking email for several days and then not having anything to see!

Stephen