Yesterday officially marked the point of two weeks at site. Well, kind of. I took a slight detour for a few days. Long story short, I went to visit Conor my first weekend at site. (Well, technically it was my second weekend, but the first weekend doesn’t really count since that was when I arrived and I spent the whole weekend cleaning my new apartment. Well as it turns out, when my counterpart took me to the train station to show me where it was, she pressured me to buy a ticket. I wasn’t really ready to buy a ticket since Conor and I had not really set a date in stone due to not exactly knowing what our new organizations would want from us or had planned for us in the immediate future. After going back and forth with my counterpart where she said, “Let me help you buy the ticket…” and I said, “I’m not sure of the dates…”, I offered to call Conor to get some clarification.
This resulted in Conor getting his counterpart (Anton) on the phone, and his counterpart demanding to talk to my counterpart. Well, within thirty seconds my counterpart was all too happy to get rid of me my first weekend at site and send me to be the responsibility of Conor’s counterpart. They decided that a long weekend was best since in Ukraine, it was a holiday weekend… maybe. (It’s hard to tell when the real holidays are since, special occasions seem to be called holidays…). My director was there and he okayed the whole thing and before I knew it, I had a roundtrip train ticket and I was going to visit Conor. I would leave at 12:30 am from Balakleya and arrive in Markivka around 6:30 am. Conor and Anton would collect me in Markivka and that would be that. Crazy.
Even crazier, this was forcing me to take a taxi to the train station in the middle of the night and then ride in a compartment with complete strangers. I’ve done stranger things and I’ve done it all before in different countries where I don’t speak the language, so while I was a bit nervous I knew it would turn out fine. I mean, my counterpart is a woman, and she didn’t seem to think it was a problem. Well, so goes my introduction to travel within Ukraine.
After ‘working’ approximately for 4 days in Ukraine, I was already going on a vacation. Neat! I would like to take a moment to point out that at this point in time, working for me means going to the office and looking busy while other people work and then being available to go on visits and/or adventures with my Director when he decides to just get in his car and… I don’t know, drop by the administration building to shoot the shit, or pay bills in town, etc. I am using the time to think about potential projects and grants that I can write, as well as studying Russian and reading some of the wealth of materials the Peace Corps dropped on us during training that we didn’t have time to read.
We did have a drop in at the office though, a little girl who was extremely dirty came to play with our toys. The cleaning lady said that her mother was an alcoholic. The cleaning lady didn’t say this in words so much as she flicked her neck a few times with her fingers. Flicking the neck on the side below the chin is a gesture that indicates that someone is an alcoholic. The more obvious gesture is for drug users because they do the same thing, except they flick the veins in their arm.
Me and Looda (Ludmila) the psychologist sat down with the young girl and drew some pictures, but ‘Nastia’ was really interested in one of the toys that sang annoying songs in repetition. We sat with her for a couple of hours, then, we kicked her out so that we could go eat lunch.
On Thursday (I was slated to leave for Conor’s at 12:30 am on Friday), work was pretty uneventful. I dipped out around 3 or 4 since if I want to use the internet, I need to leave work. There is no internet signal in the forest. So as I was walking home, I noticed my Director had pulled the car over and was gesturing for me to come over. He had been at the hardware store researching boilers for me and came back with an estimate. He told me the boiler was going to cost me 900 greevs and then around another 200 for something. I didn’t really understand the something. I mean logically, I figured it was the nuts and bolts and piping, but since I didn’t know those words, I said… show me. So I got in his car and we went to the store and he showed me my new boiler, explained that it was a sample and that if I wanted it, the store owner would order it from Kharkiv. Done. He said we could install it when I got back from my trip. Done. So in the very near future, I would no longer be precariously lugging a heavy tea kettle filled with boiling water to the bathroom for my bucket showers. I would have HOT WATER.
After that, I went home and had some dinner and shot the shit with a few people on the phone. I was going to try to take a nap before going to the train station at midnight, but as is the case here in Ukraine… when I want to sleep, inevitably someone calls me. For instance, my Regional Manager called me to tell me that he couldn’t see the map I drew on my Emergency Locator form that I had emailed to him. So I told him to open the document and stare at the blank page for a second and the image would magically appear. And it did. But he was also checking to see if I was ready for my trip, and I told him I was.
My counterpart had called a taxi to pick me up at midnight and sure enough, just as I was locking my door, she called me to tell me to go outside, the taxi was on the way. I did, the guy knew I was foreign, he dropped me at the station and refused to take anymore than the fare when I tried to tip him. I asked a whole bunch of people which platform to be on and everything went off without a hitch. They check your tickets when you get on the train, so you can’t get on the wrong train. My compartment had a dude already there playing video games, and then 2 ladies and a small child got on with me so we set up the car and then went to sleep. I called Conor around the time I was supposed to get in and told him that it wasn’t clear which stations were which, that he should call me when he saw a train coming, and that worked. Turns out my car attendant had fallen asleep otherwise I would have gotten a wakeup call from her.
Conor and I grabbed a pizza for breakfast (there wasn’t a lot of choice on the menu) and then headed to the bus station to take the bus back to his place. All in all the travel experience went off without a hitch. Then we spent a few great days together making good food, drinking beer and eating chubarecki (fried dough pocket with either season ground beef or cheese) in the beer tents, having a shish-kebob picnic in the woods with Anton and his wife, and checking out Donetsk which had an okay, but overpriced Mexican restaurant. We saw Hot Tub Time Machine in Russian, I’m sure it’s hilarious in English, but I can’t be sure about that. We also rode a Ferris Wheel in Donestk and rented a paddle boat for a half hour in Khartsitzk. Hey, we had some time to kill.
One noteworthy event that has stuck with me happened outside Conor’s apartment. The day before we saw two older ladies with a red poodle puppy and they let us touch the puppy, because they were so enamored with it. The next day, some older dude had a cute little puppy in a box, so I went over to pet the puppy. The guy said something that I realized was ‘Don’t touch him’ the second time he said it. WTF? Why would you bring a puppy down to the street and then not let a cute girl touch him? It rubbed me the wrong way. It felt kind of xenophobic, but I’m not sure if that was the reason he was so rude. I guess that’s what I get for trying to touch another man’s puppy.
Conor brought me back to Markivka and put me on the train at 10:30 at night. My trip back was pretty uneventful. I was in a compartment with a babushka and her husband and then an hour or so after I got on, another dude came in the compartment. We all slept. A whole 45 minutes before I was supposed to get off the train in Balakleya, the car attendant came in and actually woke me up. I had my alarm set for 15 minutes before arrival, but he came in a gently shook me awake at 2:30 am. I got off in the right place and found a cab home and was back in my apartment by 3:30 am. I’m happy to say, I had a seemingly successful first solo travel experience in Ukraine.
