Мое великое возвращение

I want to apologize to the few of you who I know check this blog regularly and have been wondering where I am and what I've been doing. I really have no good excuse for neglecting the blog. I've just gotten really lazy about a lot of things lately, and I guess the blog just kind of fell by the wayside. I'm starting to get my act together again, and I figured it was time to let everybody know what I've been up to these past couple months or so. I can't really approach this entry the way I usually do (i.e. chronologically), so I guess I'll do it topically instead.
I guess I should mention some of the people I've been hanging out with. After I got back from my Western Ukraine / Moldova trip, I finally met the four students from Willamette University who had been studying Russian here since September. I had known they were around, but somehow never got the chance to meet them until just a few days before they had to head back to the states. So, we ended up hanging out quite a bit for those few days back in early/mid December. They showed me some cool restaurants around town that I hadn't been to before, and I impressed them with my sweet bachelor pad. They were all living with host families, so I think they really enjoyed having an apartment they could all come to to hang out and not have to worry about imposing upon their hosts (or being imposed upon my them). They came over one of those nights to make mexican food with some tortillas and guacamole mix that one of them had received by mail from her mom. Of course the mexican food wasn't quite as authentic as any of us would have liked, given the limited availability of authentic ingredients around here, but it didn't turn out all that bad. As long as we had some drinks to wash it all down with, none of us really cared too much. On their second to last night we all went "clubbing" (though I loath to use that word) along with my friend James from the local medical school. We went to this place downtown called Camelot that I had walked by several times before but never realized it was a night club. It was a typical sort of place, with flashy lights and big crowds and music so loud you can barely talk to one another. There was even a small balcony where a girl was hired to dance like she was in a cage or something. I had a good time though, talking with the group and dancing a little bit. Med students aren't allowed back into the dorms after 11:00, so James had to crash at my place that night.
The Willamette crew left for home a couple days later, via Istanbul and Prague as part of their exchange program. Fortunately one of the four, a guy named Sascha, was coming back after a few weeks for about three more weeks of Russian training before heading off to his next study abroad program in Estonia. So, he got back in early January, and for the rest of his time here we spent a lot of time hanging out. He was staying with his old host mom, and taking private Russian lessons at the same university he was at before (the same one I'm affiliated with). We'd usually meet for lunch once his classes were over for the day and then walk around town or hang out at my apartment for a while and watch a movie or something. I got him addicted to Twin Peaks a little bit before he had to leave for Estonia, so he didn't even get to finish seeing the whole series. We also took a couple of weekend trips together, along with some of my other friends (more on that later). Sascha finally left for Estonia on Monday, but we've been scheming and making some plans to meet up in the Baltics in March and hopefully have an adventure in Belarus, though I'm not at liberty to discuss that just yet. He's a cool guy and I already miss hanging out with him.
Someone else I've been able to see and hang out with on occasions is actually a friend of mine from college. Grace, whom I've known since my days in the dorms during freshman year, is now a Peace Corp volunteer in Ukraine! I had known she would be in the country since last summer, but she didn't know where exactly she would be placed until early December. Turns out they sent to Crimea, to a small town named Kirovskoe that is only about two hours away from Simferopol! What are the odds? We first met up soon after the new year in a town called Feodosia, which is one of the larger towns in Crimea and is quite close to where she lives. We walked around town a bunch, checked out a gallery of the city's famous painter Aivazovsky, and explored the ruins of a Genoese fortress. I went with her back to Kirovskoe to check out her site and to crash on her couch. The town is quite small and quiet, but generally pleasant. After being gently harassed by a drunken man in a little shop the next morning (he was just very suspicious of us and what we were doing in his town / country), I headed back to Simferopol (via Feodosia cause the direct Simferopol bus had already filled up). The two guys sitting directly in front of my got into a fist fight on the way to Feodosia, and it took the pleading of one guy's wife to get the driver not to kick them off. Grace has also visited me in Simferopol a few times, just to get her fix of "big city life." We usually hang out downtown and have lunch somewhere (there really isn't a whole lot more to do around here, really). It's really cool having an old friend so close by on the other side of the world.
Speaking of Peace Corp volunteers, there's another one in a tiny village outside of Simferopol that I've seen a few times lately. His name is Sam, and I first met him through Alison, the volunteer who left recently. He had to crash at my place the first night after new year's, since on his way home from a Peace Corp party the night before he lost his wallet somewhere en route while in Simferopol, and didn't have the money to get home. Turns out some girl found his wallet and tracked down his phone number to give it back to him, with everything still intact. I'm still kind of blown away that somebody would do that in this country. Sam and I have met up for lunch a couple times, and I've bailed him out one or two times with a few grivnya to get him home while he was still sorting out the lost wallet debacle.
Besides Sascha, the person I've been seeing most lately is a local girl named Zeyneb. I was first put in touch with her last summer by her friend and my fellow Fulbrighter Idil (who doesn't arrive to Simferopol until March). Zeyneb was going to help me find an apartment in Simferopol, but then I started talking to a professor from the university via email, and she helped me set all of that up before Zeyneb ever got the chance. For some reason I never bothered getting in touch with her again once I got to Simferopol, and it wasn't until I found out that my friend Maria was a friend of hers as well that I decided to send her an email. She first came over with her friend Elmira the night the Willamette crew and I were making mexican food, and she later invited me to a "Christmas fair" at this place where she studies German. Since then we've been spending a lot of time together, and she's also introduced me to some of her other friends with whom I've begun to hang out with as well. Zeyneb has been studyin English since she was four years old, and spent a year as an exchange student in Alaska while in high school, and so her English is pretty exceptional. This is in addition to speaking fluent Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar (she herself is half Crimean Tatar), as well as very good German, French, and god knows whatever other languages she's picked up (so I'm told, at least). She studies political science at the university where I'm affiliated, and despite having some opinions and views that sometimes rub me the wrong way, she is quite smart and very capable. I've had her over for dinner a couple times, since I've been trying to teach myself how to cook a little bit lately and it's always better to have someone else sample my attempts at cooking (they've gone well so far, I'm happy to say). She's totally cool and it's been really great spending a lot of time with her, and yes, there is something you should be reading between the lines here...
I've had the opportunity to do a little more traveling lately, mostly during the weekends. About a month ago I took a day trip with Zeyneb to a town called Evpatora in eastern Ukraine. It's the third or forth largest city in Crimea, and got some international news coverage on Christmas eve when an apartment building suddenly blew up there. Zeyneb and I took the bus on a cold and sunny morning, and went straight to a children's summer camp / sanatorium where her aunt worked as a seamstress. Zeyneb wanted to pay her a visit and drop of a calendar that she was featured in. We walked around the grounds of them camp and along its sea shore for a while before her aunt had to get back to work, and the two of us set off to explore more of Evpatoria. Our first stop was the site of the explosion, of course. The area was sectioned off with sheet metal fences, but we could still see it well enough. One whole section of a long, 5-story apartment building was missing, leaving just a small chunk of the building separated from the rest by about 30 feet. You could see into the living rooms of the apartments that had been blown apart, and even see their refrigerators and rugs still hanging on the wall. The verdict is still out, but they think it was caused by some oxygen tanks exploding in the basement. We milled around the scene for a while, pondering the fate of those who were killed in the blast and wondering if any of their decapitated body parts were still lying around somewhere. It was all pretty morbid, so we headed back to the waterfront to wonder the promenade for a bit. It's a popular tourist destination in the summer, but in the winter it's completely dead. I kind of liked it that way, though. We found our way to a Chuck-E-Cheese type place called Dinopark that supposedly had mexican food. The restaurant had an international menu that did in fact include a mexican section, but the quesadillas we ordered were hardly up to snuff. We kept walking after that, looking for the place where they have (or at least used to have) whirling dervishes. We didn't actually find it, but we did find a cool mosque, a cool church, a cool old town with winding back alleys, and a beautiful sunset. It was dark by the time we headed back to the bus station. Evpatoria was a lot of fun, and I intend to get back there if for nothing else then to find the whirling dervish place.
Another great trip I took happened a few weeks ago with Sascha and Grace. Sascha and I met up with Grace on a Friday evening in Feodosia, from where we caught a bus to a little seaside hamlet named Koktebel. This is also a fairly hopping place in summer I'm told, but this time of year it's as dead as dead can be, and we were practically the only people out on the streets at all. We got a great deal on a nice little hotel room, and had a cool time walking along the water front in the morning and posing for silly pictures. There's an annual folk festival here every September, and it looks like I may end up being here until then, so maybe I'll get to check that out. After Koktebel, our plan was to head down the coast to a larger town called Sudak, but when we discovered that there were currently no buses going there, we had to settle for a cab. It's a good thing we did, because our cab ride turned out to be a whole different adventure from what we had planned. Our driver was very knowledgeable about the area, and kept pointing out the name of every little geographic feature. We decided that, instead of having him take us directly to Sudak, we'd have him take us of the main road to see some cool little places along the way. First stop as a tiny village named Kurortnoe, which we had read was only ever visited by "hardcore travelers," which we of course fancy ourselves to be. This is the base of the nearby Kara-Dag nature reserve, and although we didn't actually go into it, we got to walk on the coast a little bit nearby and admire the rocky landscape of the reserve from a distance. Next the driver took us on a little detour off the main road trough a town called Solnichnaya Dolina (Sunny Valley), where we sampled and bought some wine at a little sampling room. He then drove us to a barren coastline where we were watched by curious dogs and gazed upon a large boat that had run aground off the coastline about a year earlier. Nearby was a great little secluded beach that I really want to find my way back to when the beach weather arrives. Just above the beach was a large hillside that looked right out of eastern Oregon or Washington, except perched right above the sea. From there we actually drove trough Sudak to a tiny town on the other side called Novy Svet (New Light). The beach here is considered to be one of, if not the best beach in Crimea, and although we certainly weren't there on an ideal beach day, I could see why it is so popular, It is sheltered by big cliffs on either side of a little bay, and the water looks so blue and inviting. There wasn't another soul on the beach, but I can just imagine how packed it gets come summer. I definitely intend to come back this summer and pack right in there with them! Back to Sudak we went to check out the famed Sudak fortress, which is probably the most famous and well persevered of the Genoese fortresses in Crimea. This thing is huge. You could fit an entire town within the walls of the fortress. There isn't much inside the walls themselves, just a big grassy field that gradually, then quite steeply slopes upward to the crest of a cliff on the other side of the wall. From the top of that cliff the view of Sudak and the Black Sea is absolutely magnificent. Grace and I tried walking along this narrow pathway along the upper part of the wall that was on the outside edge for some reason, but were scared from going too far up by the sign that read, "no entry, dangerous for life!" We then walked back down to the parking lot, where I faithful driver was waiting and ready to take us to the bus station in Sudak to catch a ride back to Simferopol. Grace came back with us and crashed at my place before riding back to Kirovskoe the next morning. It was a really great little trip, and the whole area around Koktebel and Sudak is definitely a place I want to get back to. Maybe I'll take Strand and Lily there when they come in May!
My other big weekend trip happened a couple weeks ago. Sascha and I took an overnight train to a city called Kharkov in eastern Ukraine, where we were met by fellow Fulbrighter (and for Sascha, fellow Willamettian) Tye from Kyiv. Kharkov is Ukraine's second largest city and former capital, and it retains a very Soviet feel in its architecture and aesthetics, but because of its many universities and large student population, it has more of a laid back feel to it. We rented a really nice apartment for a couple of nights, but spent most of our time wandering around the city. Kharkov has a pretty big metro system, which makes it easy to get around, and our apartment was only about a ten minute walk from the nearest station. Kharkov is famous for it's massive central square of which half, according to legend, was converted into a small park so as not to compete in size and grandeur with Red Square (knowing the Soviet mindset, I totally believe it). So, the square didn't feel as huge as I hoped it would, but taking into account the park attached to it I could see how big it may have once felt. Queen actually played a huge AIDS benefit concert right here in this square back in early fall. Don't ask me who they've got singing for them. While we were there the square played host to a number of ice sculptures and slides. With their low centers of gravity, most of the kids around had no problem going down these slides on their feet, but Sascha was the only one of us brave enough to give it a go, and he paid for it with a bad spill that left him sore for days. That first night we walked up and down the main drag a bit before stopping into a little Stoloviya for a couple beers. We then tracked down an Uzbek place called Bukhara (obviously close to my heart), where, after almost being thrown out for not being dressed well enough (this place was surprisingly swanky), we enjoyed some of the best and most authentic Central Asian food I've had since leaving Central Asia. They had a very extensive menu, including the Kyrgyz delicacy Besh Barmak (not even all restaurants in Kyrgyzstan serve that!). I of course had to go with the fried lagman, and was delighted to see that the noodles were actually done right! It was magnificent. After dinner we moseyed back to the apartment, where we stayed up watching trashy Russian music videos and eating delicious candies. We wanted to take it easy that night because we planned on making our second night our big night out (planned, anyway...). The next day we hit up the local market, where I got a ton of awesome pictures and Tye bought a sweet leather and fake-fur had that the Russian and Ukrainian men seem so fond of. I was also in the market for a hat, but nobody had one that was quite big enough for me. Curse this massive cranium! Afterwards we checked out a couple churches and waited a ridiculously long time for pizza at a family restaurant called Mafia. We later wandered into a cozy little cafe for a couple beers and the strongest hookah session that any of us had had in a long time. Once it started getting dark we made our way back to the apartment to "pre-game" before hitting up a local club for Rockabilly Night, as per the flier we saw. Unfortunately, that's not the way the night went. We could hear our neighbors shouting and blasting music next door, and soon enough we ended up being invited in for some shots and snacks by a group of about six Ukrainian guys about our age, plus one girlfriend. They all seemed pretty friendly but rowdy, and within a few minutes of our being there they challenged us to a friendly round of arm wrestling. I've come to really dislike arm wrestling because I feel like I'm really not all that good at it despite what people might think by looking at me. Plus I always end up with really sore arms for days afterwards. But, there's really no way of refusing once they've set the stools up and are all ready to go. So, the three of us took turns arm wrestling these goons (as I've taken to calling them) until we were all shamed into defeat and the acknowledgement of Ukraine's superiority. It wasn't all a lose, actually, Tye got one sold win in, and I think I came to a draw after my opponent fell over mid-arm-wrestle. I did end up with a thumb that felt like it was asleep for a few days after as a result of one of my tougher-fought matches. After the arm wrestling wrapped up we did some more drinking and bullshitting with the guys. One of them was really enthusiastic about smoking cigarettes, and we ended up shouting "SMOOOOOOOKIIIIIIIING!" along with him for a few minutes. Eventually talk of a trip to a night club started circulating the group, and after what seemed like an hour of waiting around in the cold outside and drunkenly shouting at each other in our best Russian (because one's Russian really is at its best while drunk), we started walking north towards this mythical night club. Some said it was ten minutes away, others twenty, and others thirty, but we didn't really care. Some how along the way the entire group splintered into smaller groups until, by the time I looked up, left me and Sascha by ourselves with no idea where everyone else had gone to. We stood around in a field by a metro station for a bit while I talked to Zeyneb on the phone when I got a call from Tye saying he had also lost the group and didn't know where he was. He said he thought he could find his way back to the apartment, so Sascha and I headed back as well to meet him there. The two of us were pretty darn drunk as well, but with my keen sense of direction I got us back no problem. Tye had called again and said he thought he was there, and was waiting for us in front of the building. Of course, he was somewhere else completely, and nowhere to be found when we reached the building. Being the keeper of the key, I let Sascha into the apartment to pass out while I waited outside and talked Tye through getting home over the phone. He really had no clue where he was, so he wisely just got in a cab and had it take him to the address of our apartment, which I was able to give him. After a bit of confusing Tye finally showed up with a bag of frozen pelmeny he wasn't quite sure where he had gotten. Back in the apartment, Tye set out to cook the pelmeny while I caught up with Zeyneb again on the balcony. Just as I had suspected, once I got off the phone I found Tye passed out on the couch in the kitchen, the pelmeny still in their bag. The toilet was running and quite loud, so I tried to fix it before passing out myself. Because of the stupid design of Russian toilets that have a flushing button right in the middle of the tank lid, it was hard to fiddle with the pieces inside the tank and I ended up snapping off the little bobber piece that stops the water from running once the tank is full! I frantically tried to get the water to stop, but some of it spilled through a hole in the side of the tank and I had some cleaning up to do, but I was finally able to partially shut of the hose and rig the flusher to stay open so that the water was continuously flowing down the bowl, but at least it wasn't overflowing. I left a note for the guys and finally hit the sack after a long and interesting night.
I didn't feel too bad the next morning, but Tye and Sascha felt just awful. I volunteered to head out in search of water and juice to help cure their hangovers, and who should I run into at the little shop downstairs but our neighbors from the night before, getting an early start to their day with some beers and champagne. They asked me what happened to us the night before and I was barely able to compose a complete sentence. They seemed fine, and the smoking guy told me lightheartedly, "you gotta start drinking in the morning!" We stayed in the apartment past our designated check-out time, and when a guy came buy we asked for one more hour to get our stuff together and get out. I showed him the broken toilet and he said it wasn't really a big deal. What a relief! We hit the streets with bags and stopped by a McDonalds on our way to the train station to put our stuff in the left luggage area until our train later that night. The downstairs area of the train station was like a Soviet time warp. It was obvious it hadn't been touched in decades. All the lockers used special "tokens" that were actually Soviet 15 kopek coins, and the bathroom smelled like it hadn't been cleaned since the soviet era either. It was a real trip. Tye kept his bag with him, and we headed out to find some cafe where we could while away a few hours. We got of at an arbitrary metro station and found the nearest cafe, where we sat and had some drinks and snacks for a bit (only Tye was up for beer). Tye's train left earlier than ours, so he headed back to the station while Sascha and I set out in search of food and internet. We ate at a nice cafetria-style restaurant and found a hot and smoke internet club filled with cursing gamers. When it was time to catch our train we returned to the train station, only to be stopped by the police on our way out of the metro. Actually, we had been stopped the day before inside the train station by some different police after they saw us taking pictures. They just let us off with a warning for not having student papers or some bullshit. This second set of cops could just spot us as foreigners I guess, and they actually took us into their little office inside the metro station for a search. I realized then that I seen some Africans (most certainly students) in that same little office twice before while walking by without realizing it was a police operation, and it then became clear to me that their racket was tracking down foreigners. They put Sascha and I in separate rooms and made us empty our pockets onto a table. My guy asked me of I had any drugs or anything, and he went through all my stuff with a fine-toothed comb. Luckily he didn't take anything out of my wallet or anywhere else, but Sascha's guy took a piece of his gum. The police left and after a few minutes we realized we could leave too, so we gathered our stuff and headed straight for our train. We were riding kupe this time (four bunks to a room), but aside from a hop-on just riding to the next village, we had the room to ourselves. The ticket lady had told us there were no two lower seats in the same kupe available heading to Simferopol, so Sascha took the top bunk, and we couldn't figure out why nobody ever came to claim the other lower bunk if it supposedly hadn't been available to us. We rolled into Simferopol the next morning, and I had to turn down an invitation from Zeyneb to go to Bakhchisarai for the day with her and her friends from Donetsk because I was quite tired still and just needed to rest in my own place for a while. It was a very fun weekend, and I look forward to more weekend trips like this to other towns around Ukraine.
I actually do have another trip lined up for this coming weekend. Tomorrow I'm heading to Kyiv for the mid-year Fulbright orientation. Attendance is optional for us, and it's really only for the scholars who are just arriving, but there are some interesting seminars to hear, and Fulbright will cover my transportation anyway, so I figured it would be a good excuse to spend some more time hanging out in Kyiv. They aren't springing for a hotel for me this time, so I'll be staying with Tye again. I don't know which of the other Fulbrighters will be there, but it should be cool to see some of them again (for the first time since DC in some of their cases).
So, yes, I have been doing a fair amount of stuff lately, but sadly the one thing that I've been slacking in is my research! The university was onits winter break for a while and everything was just kind of slow-going, so I didn't feel too guilty about slacking on that stuff a bit, but now I really need to get back in the swing of things. I haven't seen my advisor in almost two months, so I really need to touch bases with him and see where I should be taking things. I have amassed a fair amount of material in the form of books and articles, some of which I've borrowed from my advisor. I've been reading some of these articles in Russian, which does take a while for me still but is pretty rewarding. I'm keeping a journal of all the new words I come across, so it takes some time to write that as I read through the articles. I've recently come up with some good ideas about the direction I want to take the research. In a nut shell, I want to look at self identification among different segments of Crimea's population and the relationship between ethnic and place-oriented self identification as it relates to Russians most specifically. My hunch is that this plays a big role in explaining how Crimea has maintained its unique character and avoided the kinds of conflicts that have occurred in other parts of the former USSR. My next step in the research process will be to hit the local libraries and start gathering the material that can help explain these issues of self-identification in Crimea. I know this is also the area of expertise of my advisor's wife, so she will be somebody important to talk to as well. A little further out I'm planning to line up some interviews with some local big wigs too. Oh yeah, I'm also planning on applying for a 2-month extension to my Fulbright grant that would keep me here through September. Mainly, I feel like I need to be here for the summer to really experience Crimea, since that really is the time when it blossoms and sees all the tourists. There will probably be some good opportunities to speak to tourists and those in the tourism industry about their take on all these Crimean issues, and I think I can probably put together a convincing enough proposal for an extension.
Well, there's probably something I'm forgetting to mention, but I think I've done a fairly decent job here going over the major goings-on of my life since I last wrote a blog entry. I seriously promise not to go so long before my next post again. This lack of posts really was a symptom of my big lazy spell that I just described above, but since I'm finally starting to get over it I think you'll see a resurgence in blog activity from me. Until then, keep it real!

P.S. I have been updating my flickr page regularly, so if you haven't been over there in a while go check it out to see pictures of all the stuff you've just read about!

Сказка про путешествие

Yes yes, it is that time. I am long over due, but I've finally found the time and the internet to write something up. I left on a trip, as you may recall, to Western Ukraine and back a few weeks ago. I've been back in Simferopol for a week since I got back, but let me talk about the trip first. Maria and I headed out fairly early on a Tuesday morning in late November and set a course for Lviv. Just outside of the town of Armyansk in the very north of Crimea, we were pulled over because Maria was going twice the speed limit (the speed limit arbitrarily goes up and down all along the highway, and we got caught in some sort of speeding trap), but we were sent on our way without a fine after Maria brilliantly pretended not to speak or understand Russian, much to the officer's frustrated chagrin. We took some pictures of a dilapidated church in some village, and had delicious Georgian food for lunch in the city of Nikolayev (that's Mikolayiv to you Ukrainians). We listened to NPR podcasts as Maria drove almost blind through the darkness and drizzle, but we made it safely to our halfway stop of Uman. We stayed in a really great, really cheap hotel right next to the city's renowned botanical gardens, but since it was dark, cold, and snowy pretty much our whole time in town, we didn't get to see them. We headed out early the next morning and drove through the picturesque snowy landscape, unfortunately bypassing the bigger towns like Vinnitsya and Khmelnitsky. We did go through the small city of Nemirov, home to one of Ukraine's most famous vodkas (written "Nemiroff"), and to the small village of Medzhibizh that the Lonely Planet recommended so highly. We really wanted to make it to Lviv before it got dark, since it had been such a pain driving in it the night before. Luckily we made good time and got to town with an hour or so of daylight to spare. Maria dropped me off downtown while she went to meet up with some family and drop of her car. I met up with my friend and fellow Fulbrighter Sarah by the Shchevchenko statue and we headed back to her apartment. She has a really nice, big place right in the center. After chatting a bit we met up with Maria again and got some dinner at what was supposedly an Armenian restaurant, then popped into a cafe so Maria could meet up with an old friend (she's got serious roots in Lviv).
The next day was Thanksgiving, and also my day to explore Lviv, as both Sarah and Maria had business to attend to. I spent the day doing what I always do when I get to new cities: wander around and take pictures. Lviv is quite conducive to this, fortunately. It's by all accounts a European city, unlike most places I've visited in the former USSR and certainly unlike Simferopol. The center is tangled with small alleys and side streets lined with colorful neoclassical and baroque buildings. Like I said, it's European. Still, there is that tinge of former-Sovietism giving its own accentuation to everything. It was much colder there than it had been in Crimea, with some snow on the ground and a freezing drizzle hanging over the city, so it wasn't the most comfortable day of wandering. I didn't really have any specific sights I set out to see, just kept going from cathedral to monument to neat facade as I came across them. I found a small book market where a guy was selling records, and bought a small pile of some great Soviet-era rock groups, including my favorite album by Akvarium. I left the records with Sarah along with some money to send them to me, as I didn't want to lug them around for the rest of my trip. That night we had our own improvised Thanksgiving feast that turned out quite well, I must say indeed. Maria and I had made a pumpkin pie at my place just before leaving SImferopol, which we had saved for Thanksgiving. At Sarah's we roasted a chicken (not a bad turkey substitute), and made mashed potatoes, steamed carrots and Brussels sprouts, and of course gravy. We spiced the potatoes up with lots of garlic, onions, and green onions, and they turned out great. The most surprising part of the meal was our faux cranberry sauce, which consisted of apple, pomegranate juice, and blackberry jam stewed together on the stove. It wasn't really our intent to try to replicate the taste of cranberry sauce, just to have something to fill its place, but the concoction actually tasted like something approaching cranberry sauce! We were blown away. Topped off with some good wine, the dinner was a real hit. I only really helped by chopping vegetables, but I was happy to have made at least a small contribution.
The next morning we all had to be out of Sarah's apartment early, since she was meeting up with our fellow Fulbrighter Christi-Anne at the train station for an early-morning train to Krakow, and Maria had to get heading to Krakow as well on unrelated business. I went with them to the train station and dropped my backpack off at the left luggage area, said goodbye, and then spent the rest of the day exploring some more before my evening train to Chernivtsi. It was still dark and cold by the time I got back to the center, so I found a cozy cafe (which Lviv is famous for) and warmed up for a while with an espresso (I think that's what it was. I still don't know anything about coffee). When I emerged it was bright and sunny, and I found a second wind for exploring. I took a walk outside the center a ways to the much-touted Lychakiv Cemetery ("don't even think about leaving town without visiting this," the Lonely Planet guide told me), which was definitely worth going out of the way for. It was huge, with graves piled on top of graves and all kinds of cool fancy headstones. Some of the graves were covered so high in flowers that I couldn't tell whose it was. I spent a good hour and a half just wandering around exploring the cemetery before heading back to the center, where I idly waited out my last few hours in town before heading back to the train station. I ate lunch at the famous Ukrainian cafeteria-style food chain, which was pretty good and made me wish there was something like it in Simferopol.
The train to Chernivtsi from Lviv takes about five hours, getting in at about 11:00 PM, but they use the typical second-class (platzkart) overnight train cars. It's sitting-room only though, and nobody sets up their beds as they would for an overnight trip. Most lower berths had three to four people sitting on it anyway, though the top bunks were generally available to those who wanted to nap. This train was full of young people, and at first I thought they were all on a field trip together or something. On the train, though, they all seemed very quite and subdued, not at all like a bunch of rowdy teens on a trip together, and as many of them began getting off at various stops along with way like Ivano-Frankivsk and Kolomiya, I realized that they were all probably out-of-town students in Lviv heading home for the weekend (this being Friday night). Not many were left by the time we got to Chernivtsi, and once we rolled into the station it was pretty late I was pretty beat, so I had already mapped out my route to the nearest hotel using my trusty Lonely Planet guide. I managed to find the Hotel Magnat, and despite the somewhat steep price, I was impressed with their rooms and just ready to crash. Since it was a little more than I had wanted to pay for a room, I headed out again the next morning for a nearby hostel, but I tracked down the right building and couldn't find anything about it outside anywhere. I rang the bell to what was supposed to be the apartment number, and called both the numbers given in the guidebook, but couldn't get a response from anyone, so I trudged back with all my stuff to the Magnat and settled back in. At least the woman at the counter was very friendly and helpful. I set out to explore Chernivtsi, not really knowing that much about it. I had decided to come check it out since it was along my route back towards Crimea, and I had heard some nice things about it. I must say that I was quite impressed with the city. I first checked out its famous University, which has a a fun and whimsical design. From there I headed to the central square, which was lined on all sides by beautiful, freshly painted Hapsburg-era buildings. The city had just celebrated it's 600th anniversary, like, a month before, so I think the whole place had really been spruced up. The main pedestrian strip was cobble-stoned and flanked by more colorful buildings, and the whole place had a very friendly atmosphere and relaxed pace. For lunch I checked out the Lonely Planet's "Our Pick," a restaurant called Reflection (spelled out in Cyrillic just like that: "Reflekshin"). I've come to really trust those LP picks (that's how I found my favorite restaurant / hookah bar in Tashkent), and Reflection was no exception. It was tastefully decorated, the waiters were very attentive and friendly, the menu had well-translated English, and the food was cheap, delicious, and well-presented. Hah! Listen to me, I'm like a food critic. I had some fantastic chicken alfredo, and continued on towards the bus station very satisfied. I went to the bus station to by tickets for my next two days' trips (which you'll find out about if you keep reading), and afterwards headed back to the center with just enough time to see the crazy "crooked" cathedral before it started getting a bit rainy. Later for dinner I checked out a place near the hotel that was really cheap, but altogether not that tasty. I guess not every restaurant can be Reflection.
Early the next morning I caught a taxi to the bus station. I wanted to take the trolleybus but I was running out of time, so I settled for a taxi. The driver was really chatty and happy to meet an American. I had an early bus to the nearby town of Kamyanets-Podilsky, and it took a couple hours to get there. I walked from the bus station through the new town, passed the morning church service at the central cathedral (it was Sunday, after all) and then over the bridge into the old town. The old town of Kamyanets-Podilsky is built on what is basically a cliff-flanked island surrounded on virtually all sides by a natural bend in the Smotrych River, which acts as a natural moat around the whole thing. The narrow strip of land where the bends of the river almost meat is guarded by a big, making the ancient city brilliantly fortified. It really is quite a dramatic setting. The city itself had been very cosmopolitan, with Polish, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities, which each had their own little district inside the old city. There really isn't a whole lot to the old city, but one thing I thought was really cool was a Catholic church which, after the cities had been conquered by Ottomans, had been turned into a Mosque and had a minaret added, but once the Poles retook the city they put a statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the minaret and incorporated it back into the church. There was also a statue of Pope John Paul II outside the church. On the way towards the fortress I ran into a big group of soldiers, who are apparently stationed nearby and spend the weekends hanging around the old town. As I was admiring the view of the fortress, they were all called to order and then marched towards the fortress, where I later ran into them again all just hanging out and exploring before they were all marched out again. I'm not really sure what the point of all their marching around was, but it sounded cool anyways. The fortress is great because almost no part of it is off limits; you're free to climb all over stuff and really check it out. There are several towers with multiple levels, and secret hidden hallways linking them. There's a pit where apparently, back in the day, they used to keep people who were behind on their debt until they could pay it off. I didn't really get how they were supposed to be able to pay off their debt while they're stuck in a pit, but I think the idea was that people would pity them and throw money down to them. They put a dummy at the bottom and it kind of creeped me out. I had lunch at a place in the old town called )New York Street Pizza," where I had disappointing lasagna. I then slowly ambled my way back to the new town and eventually back to the bus station to wait for my bus back to Chernivtsi. After hanging around for a while and having some annoying run-ins with Romany beggars, I was on my way back to Chernivtsi on an uncomfortably cramped bus, but satisfied with my day trip. I returned to Reflection for dinner, which was again a great experience. I swear, this restaurant could be big even in a town in the US. In the corner there was an older American man talking economics to a woman who I assumed was his translator / assistant for whatever business he had there, but I preferred not to let my own Americanness be known. I hit up an internet club and then settled in back in my hotel room for my last night in Chernivtsi.
I used the internet again the next morning, ate a few blini for breakfast, and did a little more walking around before collecting my things and heading once again back to the bus station for my bus out of town for good. The destination: Chisinau (that's Moldova, in case you were wondering). My ticket was for noon, but the noon bus to Chisinau didn't seem to actually exist. at about 12:15 I went up to the counter to see what was up, and they simply changed my ticket to the 2:15 bus to Chisinau, which I had already seen waiting out in the lot. Go figure. The bus was largely empty, and got emptier as we rode along and people started hoping off. The border crossing was a cinch; I didn't even get up out of my seat, and the Ukrainian border guards just handed all of our passports off to the Moldovan guys for our entry stamps, so we really only had to make one stop along the border. We made a quick pit stop just over the border, where I used what may have been the worst outhouse I've ever seen, then went barreling through the darkness towards Chisinau. We stopped briefly in Moldova's second largest city, Balti (pronounced "Balts" cause there's supposed to be a tail below the "t" that makes it a "ts" and you're not supposed to pronounce "i" at the end of words in Moldovan / Romanian [they're basically the same language {why not add a third set of parenthesis?}]). I only had enough time in Balti to learn that the exchange counter was closed. We got into Chisinau around 8:00, and I got a cab from the bus station to take me first to an exchange booth to finally get some local currency (the Moldovan Lei), then to the apartment of a Fulbrighter named Sean, from Nebraska. Sean was a Fulbrighter from the year before me, but had been one of the critical language people and was thus still in country wrapping up his grant period (he left for home a few days after my visit). I had been put in touch with him by another Moldovan Fulbrighter named Mike, who I had met in DC and again along with his brother in Sevastopol a week or so earlier, but since he spends most of his time in Transnistria, I stayed with Sean instead. I'm glad I did, because Sean was a really cool, really smart guy, and we had lots of interesting things to talk about. He's a big economics nerd (I tend to meet a lot of those these days), and it was kind of fascinating to hear about how he approaches nearly everything in life from an economic perspective. Another thing that I thought was cool was that he had basically been teaching himself to cook the whole time he was in Moldova by going through and trying every recipe from the book "Cooking for Dummies." I think I'll have to do something like that. He had a nice apartment, too, and I was very comfortable staying there for a few days.
I explored Chisinau the next day, and quickly found that there isn't a whole lot to it. There's one main street (Stefan cel Mare), and then a lot of medium-sized streets going off of it. I watched a big hoard of pigeons outside of the central cathedral, then wandered down the main drag to the edge of the center. I bought a sim card from the local state-runned telecommunications company, Moldcell. It's kind of unfortunate that their country's name starts with "mold," but they sure aren't shy about putting it at the beginning of everything. Moldova has the world's only freely-elected Communist government, by the way, which really doesn't mean much except for the fact that some of the big companies are state owned, like Moldcell. I moseyed around taking pictures, and wandered up "August 31 1989 Street ," where, in a little square outside of a church, I was approached by a TV reporter and cameraman. I told them that I was a foreigner and that they probably didn't want to ask me about anything, but they got really excited to have an American, and the reporter spoke English, so we commenced with the interview. I'll try to recreate it as best as I can remember:

Reporter: Is there anything you want to say to anybody?
Austin: To people here, or to people back home?
R: Anybody, it's going to be on TV.
A: Well, hello from America. I am enjoying my time in Moldova and Chisinau. You have a very nice country.
R: Yeah. What would you do if you were the President of the United States?
A: Uh, well, first I would end the war in Iraq, and then start rebuilding our relations with countries around the world, and this is what I hope Barack Obama will soon do once he becomes President.
R: Uh huh. Do you know who Walt Disney is?
A: Yeah... He was the creator of Disney, of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and all those characters.
R: Who is you're favorite?
A: My favorite Disney character?
R: Yeah.
A: Uh... (long pause) I guess Goofy is funny.
R: Hahaha. Who else?
A: Um, I don't know, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, they're all great, I don't know.
R: Ok, thank you very much!

They never asked for my name or anything, so I assumed it was just going to be part of some montage of people on the street. I really wish I could have seen it. I met up with Sean a bit later and we went for dinner at a delicious Greek restaurant that he frequents.
The next day was an exciting adventure that I'm just now realizing maybe I shouldn't be writing about here, but I don't think it should be any big deal. So, one of the main reasons I wanted to go to Moldova was to visit Transnistria, one of the "de facto independent" states or "breakaway regions" that I wrote my honors thesis about. It forms the narrow eastern edge of Moldova, and, as I found out, it pretty easy to get to. I was supposed to go with Mike's brother Andrew, who was still visiting from the states, but he decided not to go at the last minute and I made the journey alone. From the central bus station there are several marshrutkas daily heading to the Transnistrian capital Tiraspol, and I hopped on one for a few bucks and we were on our way. It was a foggy day, so I couldn't see much from the window, but we soon reached the "border" and the Transnistrian check point. I had heard of foreigners being ripped of or jerked around at this border, so I was a bit nervous, but it went really smoothly for me. For Moldovans and Transnistrians they just take a look at your passport, but all foreigners need their passport scanned and then need to fill out an immigration card in another room. I filled out the form pretty quick and handed it to the agent. I had been told that if I'm just going for the day I don't need to register in Tiraspol, and he said to be sure I was out by 9:00 in order to avoid any hassle with not registering. I was in and out of there pretty quick, even quicker than the couple of Ukrainians from our marshrutka. I think the trick is to just be confident in what you're doing, speak Russian, and act like you've got nothing to worry about, cause you really don't. It's only when foreigners start acting nervous and confused that the guards start taking advantage of them. So, I was in, and after a few more minutes I was at the bus station in Tiraspol, where Mike and his Transnistrian girlfriend Tanya soon arrived to meet me. We took a trolleybus to the center and strolled the streets for a while. Tiraspol is pretty small and with not a lot going on, except for the interesting signs of their de facto independence and separatist spirit. Some of my favorite sites included: The bank where they mint the Transnistrian Ruble (yes, they have their own currency [the local cognac distillery graces the five ruble bill]), the big billboards showing the Presidents of Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia meeting, the Abkhaz / South Ossetian "consulate" (the three mutually recognize each other's independence), signs for the popular pro-Russian "Proryv" movement, and the big picture of Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow mayor / supporter of pro-Russian breakaway regions / provoker of Russian fervor in Crimea / general nationalist asshole. We walked along the Dniester River a bit (from which the territory receives its name), had lunch in a dark but fairly nice cafe, and sang some Russian songs we knew while looking at the statue of General Suvorov. We caught a marshrutka to Transnistria's second city, Bendery, which is only a few miles away. It was fairly pleasant as well, with a nice church and some nice old buildings. There was a big government building that still had bullet holes in it from the war in the early 90's. Bendery was actually where most of the violence occurred in that war, and though we tried to visit the museum of the "tragedy of Bendery," a man who looked like a satanist informed us that it was closed. Right in downtown Bendery there is a really slick cafe / night club that amazingly had wifi, though without my laptop it didn't do me any good. It's such a novelty there that they even had little leaflets explaining what wifi is. I feel like those who don't know what it is aren't really going to be able to benefit from it, though. At the supermarket I bought a small bottle of 6-year old cognac from the local Kvint Cognac distillery, then Mike and Tanya walked me to the Bendery bus station where I was able to catch a direct marshrutka back to Chisinau. They had to scan my passport again on the way out, and there was Moldovan security on the other side who took my passport inside for a few minutes, but other than that it was quite smooth leaving as well.
Back in Chisinau I ducked into a restaurant for dinner cause I saw on their sign outside that they had khachapury and khinkali (Georgian food), so I stuffed myself full of the stuff and then met up with Sean, who himself had just met up with some local girl he had met through couchsurfing. We went to a bar where the bar itself was a bus, and this girl kept complaining about how smokey it was. She was really quiet and we couldn't hear her over the noise of the bar, and she didn't seem to really understand anything we were saying or think any of our many jokes were funny, even though she spoke English pretty well. I guess joking about how we should get into a fight with the big group of guys at the next table requires a certain sense of humor to appreciate, and while Sean and I certainly could, it just didn't click with what's her name. It was super awkward, and so we parted ways with her after the bar and headed back to Sean's apartment. Sean made brownies and explained supply and demand while we got drunk on cognac. He told me stories about the economics class he teaches at a local university, and how the students either don't ever show up, don't really understand English when they are supposed to, or just outright cheat and plagiarize. For her oral exam, one student of his actually read back to him an essay he had written and given them earlier in the term, as if he wouldn't realize she was reading his own words.
There is an autonomous area in southern Moldova called Gagauzia, where the Gagauz people live of course, and although I knew it would be a pretty big waste of time going there, I felt like I had to just to say that I had been there and seen it. So, my last full day in Moldova I found my way out the the edge of Chisinau where the bus station is for buses headed south, and caught the bus to the Gagauz capital, Comrat. The Gagauz are decedents of the Turks, and speak a Turkic language very similar to Turkish, but they're a Christian people. They have autonomy over an area of non-contiguous land in southern Moldova, though Comrat is really the only city of any size (that size being about 30,000). Upon seeing the town once I stepped of the bus, my suspicion that it was going to be a waste of time was confirmed, but I set off anyways to see what, if anything, Comrat had to offer. The streets were dirty and he buildings where dilapidated, and I felt more like an outsider than in any other place I've been in in a while. I felt like everybody was looking at me, and it made me uncomfortable. There was a fire truck that looked like it had come from the US, and they were using its ladder to set up lights on a building. There was a decent-looking church, but it was closed and they wouldn't let me in. I took some pictures of some government guildings with the Gaguz flag, and walked up and down the main street. I found the local university, which the Lonely Planet guide was sure to point out is the "world's only Gagauz university," which is like saying it's the world's only university located in this specific town. I took a picture of a disgusting outhouse and a bunch of taxi drivers standing around nearby dropped all conversation and just stared at me. There were a lot of donkey-drawn carts around. After about an hour and a half of underwhelming exploration, I decided it was time to head back to the station and back to Chisinau. They have Mountain Dew in Moldova, which I found somewhat novel so I had a bottle at the station (a glass bottle [doubly novel]) before rolling out. Unless you're a geography nerd like me, there's absolutely no reason to visit Comrat or Gagauzia, so just in case you were considering it, please reconsider.
On the bus back I got a call from Andrew, who was meeting up with some local girls for dinner and wanted me to come along. I invited Sean along too, and though he sounded interested at first, he never ended up meeting us. I met up with them outside of the McDonalds, and then we headed to a Romanian restaurant for dinner. Mike and Andrew had met some woman when they were in Yalta, who had a niece in Chisinau named Nadya, who they had met up with a few nights before and now Andrew was meeting up with her again while Mike was in Tiraspol. Nadya brought along a friend of hers, and both of them spoke pretty good English. Dinner was pretty good, and I'm glad I got to try the traditional Romanian / Moldovan dish known as Mamaliga, which is like mashed corn meal. Mike's Romanian roommate showed up at one point but only stayed for about five minutes before leaving to go place Soccer (Europeans, go figure). Nadya's friend also left after a while to pick up her five-year-old son from school, and so Andrew, Nadya, and I were left. It was all kind of weird. Nadya was very secretive about herself. When I asked her what she does she said she's starting a business, but she couldn't tell me what it was. She had Dollars and Euros in her wallet that she would show us, but when I asked why she had them and carried them around she couldn't tell me that either. She kept saying that she was tired because she had a really busy day, but of course she couldn't tell us what she was doing. It was all very suspicious to me. She kept talking about how Andrew thinks too much, and that it's not healthy to do that. She said she used to think a lot but now she doesn't. Apparently a few days before Andrew had mentioned that he "over-thinks things" or something like that, and she just really latched onto this idea and made a big deal out of it. It was pretty obvious that she was trying to get Andrew to come home with her too, either because she genuinely liked him or she was trying to take advantage somehow (cause she just seemed so shady), and she invited us to some bar/restaurant near her apartment where we ordered a hookah and chilled out for a bit. Afterwards she made us walk her back to her apartment, about which she had already been really ambiguous, saying she had her own place outside of the center, but that her parents lived in the center and she stayed there sometimes, but it was all very hard to follow. She didn't push for Andrew to come up once we got to her building though. I don't know, the whole evening was pretty weird to me.
So, the next morning was my last one in Moldova, so Sean and I went for lunch at the local fast food chain "Andy's Pizza" before I left for the station to find a bus to Odessa. My taxi driver was a friendly guy who had been in the army in Turkenbashi, Turkmenistan (back when it was called Krasnovodsk), and was interested in hearing what it was like now once he heard that I have been there. I caught my bus to Odessa, and sat next to a friendly guy a little younger than me who was heading to Odessa to visit his girlfriend. There was a really annoying drunk guy sitting across the aisle from me, who kept propping himself up with the back of my seat and then dragging his hand across my back whenever he pulled it towards himself. Otherwise the ride was uneventful, and the border crossing was a breeze again. I rolled into town and called up my next Fulbright host, Christi-Anne, and we arranged to meet in the center right by her apartment. She showed up with her friend Boris, who apparently was really protective of Christi-Anne and suspicious of me upon first meeting me. He took off, then I dropped my stuff off in Christie-Anne's tiny apartment and we headed out for some pizza down the street. Back in her apartment, she was kind enough to offer me her bed while she slept on a pad on the floor. I felt pretty uncomfortable about it, but she insisted. Her apartment is really just a single room with a nice couch that folds out in a really fancy way into a bed.
Next morning we met up with Christi-Anne's Russian tutor and her friend to check out a flea market. This place was great. It was like a huge garage sale spread out over several blocks, with people selling all kind of crazy old junk. These are my favorite kinds of markets. Of course I was on the prowl for records, and tough I found a lot, there was nothing that really interested me. I did buy a few tapes and CDs though, including an MP3 CD of Spark's later albums and a real, legitimate copy of their latest album, "Exoctic Creatures of the Deep." What a place to find it. I talked about Sparks briefly with the vendor, and realized it was my first time talking music like that in Russian. I mainly just took a lot of pictures of people's junk. There were some cool musical instruments including accordions (sorry, Cielle), and even some old gramophones with the big bell-speaker. I even found some Twin Peaks books in Russian, and almost bought them, but realized that I'll never really read them and that they would just be a waste of space. It was quite exciting to find, though. Another cool think was a huge painting of Stalin that was just the canvas, without a frame, draped over a car hood and for sale. After the market, Christi-Anne had some stuff to do, so I set out exploring on my own. I first headed down the main pedestrian drag, Deribasavskaya, past the opera house and down to Primorskaya Boulevard, right to the top of the famous Potemkin Steps. This is where the super famous scene from Eisenstein's film "The Battleship Potemkin" was filmed. You know, where the baby carriage rolls down the steps. I was really excited about finally seeing these steps, but they were a bit disappointing. The main disappointment is that they end not on a rand promenade or anything, but rather on a fairly busy street across from a car dealership. Beyond that, though, is the main port of Odessa, so I descended the steps and found my way through the weird building and up onto the big dock jutting out into the harbor. There's a seaport here, along with a big shiny new hotel. The dock was line with bit cruise and shipping vessels, and at the end there were a lot of private yachts from places as far away as the Comoros islands (look it up). I sat and looked out at the sea and the port for a while, then headed back down the dock, up the steps and back into town. Next stop was the "Mother-in-Law" footbridge, where it's a nuptial tradition to attach a padlock with your names written on it to the railings, and there are thousands of them lining the whole thing. Apparently, they have to remove them about once a year because they start to weigh down the bridge and it gets to be dangerous. I then wandered every which way around the central part of the city, finally ending up at the train station where I hoped to by a ticket back to Simferopol. Turns out all the lower spots were already taken in both platzkart and kupe for the next day's train, and I really can't fit myself into the upper bunks, so I decided to catch a cab back to the bus station to buy a bus ticket home instead. This was Saturday, and I bought a ticket home for Monday morning, giving me one more day to explore Odessa. I met up with Christi-Anne back at her apartment, and we then went for a walk to check out Odessa by night. Back on Primorskaya, the trees were all strung with christmas lights and it looked amazing. After a little nighttime sight seeing, we checked out another one of Lonely Planet's "our picks," a great Turkish restaurant called Turkuaz. Christi-Anne had never tried Turkish food, but I think she liked it. We split a cheese pide, which tasted just like khachapuri, and I had the iskander kebab while she had the beity kebab. Good stuff!
While the weather had been very nice my first day in Odessa, the next day it was really cold, grey, and rainy. Still, I headed out to see some more of the town. I found a book / dvd market near the apartment, and bought an official Ukrainian copy of "The Goonies" just for the hell of it. I say under an awning for a while to wait out the rain before checking out the Privoz Market, supposedly the largest outdoor farmer's market in the former USSR. It was pretty gross and muddy in the rain, but I enjoyed walking through the fish section and seeing all the disgusting looking fish chunks everywhere. I stopped by "Mister Sendvich" for a snack and to get out of the rain, then continued back towards the center to meet up with Christi-Anne for a proper lunch. We checked out an Irish Pub that seemed to do a fairly good job recreating the experience. I had some chicken fingers and a smoothie, which seemed like a strange thing to order in a pub like that, especially since for some reason there were some rough and tumble Brits at the next table who really seemed like they'd fit in at a real place like this in the UK. It was a late lunch and it was already getting dark by the time we finished up, so we swung by a grocery store to pick up some stuff for the dinner party that Christi-Anne was having at her place in a few hours. She was going to make spaghetti, so again I did what I could by chopping vegetables and helping prepare the table, etc. The guests included Lena, a translator that Christi-Anne had worked with and who spoke impeccable English, her two friends Yulia and Yulia, and Christi-Anne's friends Boris and Vlad. Everyone was very nice and spoke decent English, which they always do with Christi-Anne because she's a beginner at Russian, but I would slip back and forth between English and Russian with them all night. Dinner turned out really well, then we spent the rest of the night playing Uno, which Boris and Vlad had recently been introduced to and were totally obsessed with. The girls all seemed to like it too, and we played several rounds. When it came my turn to deal, all the guests were amazed at my ability to shuffle the deck using the traditional American method, and it made Vlad very nervous to me bend the cards of his prized and difficult-to-obtain deck. They were all impressed with my knowledge of Soviet and Russian music and pop culture, and Vlad was particularly happy that I had some music on my ipod by his favorite band, Aria (Russian metal / rock). They were all rock fans, and we even drank a toast to the "destruction of rap." Boris plays guitar, and was happy to learn that I was a fellow musician and music guy. He later told Christi-Anne that he thought I was a good guy and that he was no longer suspicious of me. All of them were pretty cool, and I wished that I could have had more time in Odessa to get to know them. I was a bit drunk by the time they left and we hit the hay, but I had to be up early to catch my bus the next morning.
The bus ride home was pretty uneventful, though I did enjoy stopping in some of the towns along the way. The bus was rather empty, and I had plenty of space to myself. We stopped in Nikolayev, Kherson, Nova Kakhovka, Armyansk, Krasnoperekopsk, and some other villages I don't remember the names of. We would usually wait for up to a half hour in most of the towns, giving me a bit of time to walk around the station, grab a snack, whatever. The bus went to the central bus station in Simferopol, which meant I had just a short walk back to my apartment, and my excitin two-week journey had finally come to an end!
I've moved into this new apartment, which I don't think I've talked about here yet. I like it a lot, and now that I got the internet set up here it's got almost everything I need (the one exception being a washing machine, but I may be taking care of that soon). This past week since I've been back has been fun, and once again I have met some new friends, but once again it happens to be right before they leave. In fact, they're already gone. I'll save this last week for the next post, because this one is already ridiculous. I hope everyone is doing well and getting ready for Christmas, New Years, etc. Christmas here will likely be very boring and sad, but New Years may make up for it. I'll let you know more when I know more. By now.

Подождите, пожалуйста

Yes, I'm back from my trip and with stories to tell, but my new apartment isn't set up for internet yet and I haven't found the time yet to sit and write about everything. Something is forthcoming though, I promise. Stay tuned.

то, кто знает свою географию, понимает свою политику

Things have been happening around here lately. I've been meeting more people and have generally been much busier than in the previous weeks. A lot of the new people I've met are Peace Corp Volunteers, though only one of them actually lives in Simferopol and she's leaving for good this weekend. Her name's Alison, and Maria put me in touch with her because I was looking to buy a guitar and Alison was looking to sell hers. She actually brought it with her from the US, so it isn't some cheap Russian brand. It's actually a Fender in pretty good shape, and she gave me a pretty fair deal on it as well. I'm happy to be able to play around on a guitar again, and since getting it I've even come up with a bridge for a song that I've been tinkering with for seven years or something crazy like that. Last Friday, Alison took me and another PCV named Sam to the Window on America in Simferopol. Many towns in countries around the world have these, and they are basically Embassy-sponsored American cultural centers where people can access US news material, books, movies, and all kinds of general information in English. They also offer "clubs" or classes on different topics lead by Americans, and Sam and I went there to get set up to lead some of these clubs ourselves. I'm waiting to hear back from them about what they'll have me do exactly, but it sounds more like straightforward English teaching than anything else, which should be pretty fun. I think the clubs are usually weekly, so it isn't too big of a commitment. It will be good to have something like this to structure my days / week around.
Alison also had a sort of going away party for herself and some other Crimea-based PCVs that are headed out soon, and there were others there who will be sticking around for a while. On Saturday night we all hung out in Alison's apartment drinking and playing charades for some reason. There are some pretty cool people around here in Peace Corp, and now I have some contacts for people in some different towns around Crimea. On Sunday, Alison again introduced me to some new people by inviting me along to dinner with her friend James. James is Chinese-Malaysian, and a student at the local Medical University. The school has a lot of students from Malaysia, as well as a number from India, the Middle East, and Nigeria. Apparently the school actively recruits students in these countries, and appeals to those who can't afford to attend universities in the West. After Malaysia recognized a degree from Crimean State Medical University as a legitimate medical degree, a huge wave of Malaysians came. Apparently the government has since revoked the decision to recognize the degree, once it came to their attention that the school isn't so great, but all those who had already come will have their degrees honored. So, James cooked us a delicious Chinese dinner, and we ate with him and his roommate Wong in their dorm room. On the way there we got stuck in the dorm's elevator for about five minutes before Wong came to break us out. Both of these guys were super friendly and spoke great English. James had gone to an English boarding school in India, so he was particularly well-spoken. Over dinner they told us more about life at the university, and about being Asian in Crimea. Apparently most people are used to seeing them around by now, and they don't get stared at as much as they did when they first arrived. Wong told us about the characteristics of our respective Chinese zodiac signs, then read our palms and showed us his tinctures. I had a very nice time with them, and hopefully I'll get to hang out with them some more in the near future. There's a night club here called the Cobra Club that apparently all the Malaysian students go to, but James has never gone. I told him that if he ever wanted to go I would go with him, so maybe I'll be checkin that out at some point. While at the university, Alison also pointed out where the Middle Eastern restaurant hidden among the dorms is, and now I'm excited to go back and check that out.
The other thing that's been going on lately is the arrival of a journalist who's writing a series of articles about the Crimea situation for the inline magazine Slate. His name is Joshua, and Maria had met him in DC and gave him my email address. He arrived on Saturday, and I arranged it so that he can stay in my new apartment during the week or so before I move in. While waiting for our meeting with the landlord, I showed Joshua around town a bit. We ate lunch at a Turkish place I hadn't been to yet, and wandered around the downtown area. On Monday the two of us took a day trip to Bakhchisaray, where we met up with Maria and wandered around town taking in the general Crimean Tatar-ness of it all. We saw the first medrassa in Europe (currently undergoing reconstruction), and I visited a master jeweler in his workshop. Joshua asked him some general questions as he started to form in his mind the article that he'll be writing about the Crimea Tatars. After our meeting and a little lunch, we checked out the Khan's Palace, which I had missed the last time I was in Bakhchisaray. Maria's ethnographer friend met us there to give us more background on the Crimean Tatars. He showed us around the grounds for a bit while Joshua asked some more questions and Maria translated. We got to see the legendary Fountain of Tears, about which Pushkin's famous poem "Bakhchisaray Fountain" was written. This poem was basically responsible for the sparing of the Khan's Palace and the small remnants of Crimean Tatar culture in Crimea during the Soviet period (apparently Stalin was a big fan). Considering the legend behind the fountain, I found it to be quite disappointing. It wasn't all that cool looking, and there was barely a trickle of water coming out of it at all (check my flickr page for a picture). After the palace we headed through the old town and up the hill behind it towards the Crimean Tatar settlement on the other side. This is where many of the Tatars settled in makeshift houses after returning from Central Asia beginning in the late 80's. There are a lot of settlements like this in Crimea, especially all around Simferopol. These settlements have since been given legal status, and the houses have been improved, but they are still generally very poor areas. The sky was getting very cloudy, dark, and sinister-looking, and made for some great pictures. I got a great one of the local Mosque with the creepy sky (again, check flickr). After a long walk back down the hill, Maria headed off and Joshua and I headed back towards the bus station to catch a ride back to Simferopol. Once we got there it started to rain for the first time in about a month here, so we jumped on the first marshrutka headed for our neighborhood. This was unfortunately heading the wrong way, so we had to backtrack a ways towards Bakhchisaray, and once we reached the end of the line had to ask the driver to let us on for the ride back into Simferopol. At least we got to stay out of the rain.
The last couple days Joshua has been going around and interviewing various people to collect material for his articles, and I've tagged along for most of them since I'm interested in essentially the same topic. In fact, a few of the interviews were with people that I suggested. These included the head of the Institute for Strategic Research, which reports directly to the President of Ukraine on Crimean issues, and the director of the Central Crimean Museum. I met both of these people last week when my advisor Sergei Nikolaiovich took me to meet them. Both are good friends of his, and they will both be helpful to my research in the coming months. I also took Joshua to meet my advisor at the university, and between the three of these people I think Joshua got some good stuff that he can work with. These Russian academic types, I'm finding, tend to say a lot but never really get to the point, and when they do the things they say are sometimes kind of crazy. For instance, my advisor said that he thinks Crimea has avoided conflict because Russians have a genetic predisposition towards avoiding conflict. This is something that has kind of come up before, and I know he's kind of got some weird Russian nationalist views, but at least he realizes his views as subjective and can still be helpful in guiding my research. Ignoring some of the crazy stuff, these guys made some interesting points about a number of issues surrounding the current Crimean geopolitical situation, and I hope they've been useful for Joshua. I personally didn't take a lot of notes, but it all got me thinking about some things that I'll be able to elaborate upon later with these same people. We also had another meeting with the Editor in Chief of the largest Crimean newspaper, Krymskaya Pravda. Like the others, he made some pretty crazy statements, but generally made some interesting points that he believes reflect the general feeling of the Russian population in Crimea. He said that he met earlier this year with Putin and Medvedev, thereby giving me and everybody I know a direct link to those two in the game of "six degrees of separation." He spoke very good English, but in order to explain everything in detail he preferred to speak in Russian. Joshua had hired a translator named Gulya to do all the translating at these meetings, and I must say it was nice being able to hear everything in English after hearing it in Russian, because there are still a lot of things that I miss in conversations like these. Gulya's a Crimean Tatar girl who has interned at the UN, and generally seems like a really cool person. I got her number, so hopefully I'll be seeing more of her around. Our meeting with the editor went really well, and he seems very accommodating. I told him that I'll be here doing research until July, and that I may wish to speak with him some more, and he seemed all to happy to help me. I'm just glad to finally be making all this good connections around here.
So, there are some interesting things coming up for me: Tomorrow Maria is driving Joshua and myself out to the far east of Crimea to the city Kerch, which is just across the strait from Russia (where I took a ferry a couple of years ago). Joshua is hoping to talk to someone there about the row over an island called Tuzla back in 2003 between Russian and Ukraine, but I have a feeling not much will come of it. It should be a fun trip either way. In the next few days I move into my new apartment, which I'm very excited about. Also in the next couple days, a Moldova Fulbrighter and his brother will be visiting and with them and Joshua I think I might head down to a town called Balaclava near Sevastopol, where they have a really cool submarine museum. Then, on the 25th, I head out for the big road trip to Lviv with Maria. I'm working on my return route back to Crimea, which I won't go into just yet, but it should be very interesting. I'm not sure if I'll get anything posted here before then (probably not, actually), so this may have to tide everyone over for a while. So, see you when I see you.

-Austin

к сожaлению, мой пол всегда грязный

So, I've been keeping fairly busy this past week or so. Let's start with last Wednesday. I met briefly in the early afternoon with a woman at the University who had just gotten back from a Fulbright-sponsered conference in Kiev, and she had been given my Fulbright ID to give to me upon her return to Simferopol. It turns out I had actually met her briefly during my first tour of the university a number of weeks ago. She's a professor of Political Science and speaks great English. I think she was on a Fulbright program in the US before. I got her card and I think I'll get in touch with her sometime soon to learn more about the Poly Sci department there and how they might be helpful for my project. After our meeting I headed downtown to grab some lunch at Cafe Piroga, and just when I couldn't find any open seats who should I find there but Maria, the grad student I had finally met a couple weeks before. We sat together while we ate our lunches and gushed over our happiness for the election results. We caught up on our recent trips (she had just returned from Turkey), and finally made plans for her to swing by my apartment later that evening to pick up a book she had lent me. She had to stick around to use the cafe's wifi, while I went for a little walk. She had told me about a music store where I could find a guitar, so I went looking for it but never actually found it. I did end up in the vicinity of the central market, though, and since I still hadn't checked it out I decided it was finally time. It is a lot bigger than any of the other markets I've been to so far in Simferopol, and reminded me a little of Osh bazaar in Bishkek (which is definitely a good thing). I'll now be keeping this market in mind whenever I need to buy just about anything. I finished exploring the market and headed home to wait for Maria to come by. She was the first person besides landlords, delivery people, cable installers, etc. to see my apartment, and I think she thinks it was pretty funny. She said it was the quintessential post-Soviet "remonted" (like remodeled) apartment, and she is right. It's kind of made up to look nice and shiny, but its kind of soulless and sterile feeling. I haven't really minded it too much, though, and besides the lack of hot water I haven't really thought of any good reason to move. Then, she mentioned that her old apartment was now free since she had just moved to Bakhchisaray, and she said that the rent is about $100 cheaper per month than it is here. It also has it's own water heater, and a lot more furnishing, storage space, utensils, bedding, etc. I had visited her there once before, and I did think that it was a nice cozy place, so now the prospect of moving there was starting to sound pretty good. As she was leaving, she invited me to tag along with her the next day to a Crimean Tatar music "festival" about an hour north of SImferopol, which sounded like a lot of fun, so I agreed to come.
I met Maria early the next morning at a corner near the central market, and we rendezvoused with some of her Crimean Tatar music connections who would be leading us to the festival. Maria is here researching Crimean Tatar music and ethnography, and she has made many friends and contacts in the Crimean Tatar community. Two of the people we were going to the festival with are apparently pretty well-known singers within the scene, and they were going to be judges at the festival. Maria has her own car, so we drove separately as the other car lead us out of town to a small village called Pervomaiskoye, in the northern part of Crimea. The festival was held in a small auditorium, and featured performances from acts all around Crimea. It really wasn't much of a festival, but more like a talent show. Many of the performers were children, but there were several adults as well. The acts were fairly versatile, and included a number of solo vocal performances, musical groups, traditional dace troupes, and even a skit. A lot of the dance numbers seemed very similar to me, and a lot of the music was lip-synced, or even instrument-synced. One of the groups featured a keyboard player whose keyboard wasn't actually plugged into anything, which made it fairly obvious that he wasn't really playing. I enjoyed it, and got a kick out of many of the acts that tickled my funny bone in a way that was very Tim and Eric. The problem, however, was that the festival featured 42 performances, so it really started to drag on way to long. Both Maria and I were enjoying it at first, but we started getting antsy and hungry as the acts started getting more and more monotonous. Once the scheduled performances had all finished, there was an additional musical interlude as the judges deliberated over their choices. I really don't know what they had to deliberate about, because there really didn't seem to be any winner. Instead, every single act was called up to the stage one-by-one to receive a certificate and some sort of prize. The prizes were a joke; some got stuffed animals, some got wooden owl statues, some got electric water-heating pitchers, and others got awful, cheesy dentist waiting room-style framed "art work." We had to sit and watch as each act was called up to receive these gifts! Once they had passed out all the prizes, and just as we thought we were free, two of the singers we had come from Simferopol with proceeded to give a mini concert for all their adoring fans in the audience. This is just like the typical synth- drum machine-backed, slightly eastern-sounding bland pop music you'd expect to hear in cabs all across much of the former USSR, and the people still eat it up. One of the singers got everyone, especially Maria and me, to et up and dance around in the aisles. Everyone does the belly-dancing style arm gestures when they dance here, and I tried my best to fit in but just felt ridiculous. Finally, they wrapped up all the singing, but we still weren't free to go. We had been invited to dine with our hosts and many others from the festival at a local restaurant, and although we were hungry, we knew we would be stuck there for a while. We followed everyone to the restaurant, where all the tables had been covered in snacks, salads, and drinks in anticipation of our arrival. It was a big group, so we took up the whole place. Everyone started snacking and sipping, and soon the toasts started. Apparently some Crimean Tatars adhere to the Islamic rule against alcohol consumption, but like Central Asians, many do not, and we drank toast after toast to the festival, to their culture, to friendship, blah blah blah. Since she was driving, Maria abstained from all but a couple toasts, but I happily joined in each time and as a results got pretty drunk. Everyone took turns giving toasts, even Maria when she was asked, and I was trying to mentally prepare a toast if they asked me to give one, but it never came around to me. Our soup and shashlyk finally came, and then the singing and dancing ensued. I was called up to dance with one of the singing sensations. Maria was getting really anxious to go, so in order for them to let us leave, she offered to sing and play some songs. She got up to the keyboard and played and sang a beautiful Ukrainian folk song, and everybody was so happy to learn that she was a musician herself. We got the person blocking us in to move their car, and we were finally off for the dark drive back to Simferopol. Once I got back to my apartment I realized that my cell phone had fallen out of my pocket, and I hoped it was still in Maria's car. Luckily she had just gone to use the internet before heading back to Bakhchisaray, and I was able to reach her by email in time for her to find my phone in her car and bring it back to me. [Side note: There's a lot of screaming and banging going on in the stairwell somewhere in my building, and it sounds like there's a serious fight going on or something. I'll try to ignore it.]
The next day was Friday, and I arranged a meeting with Maria's old landlord to see about renting the apartment. She had called him on my behalf the day before, and I set up a meeting the next evening to take another look at the apartment. The landlord's name is Sergey, and he is very friendly and seems to be very honest. When I had been there before I had only really seen the kitchen, so it was good to see the rest of it. There's a living room that's bigger than my bedroom here, with two couches (one of which folds out into a bed), a few bookshelves, a TV, and a nice big rug. There's a bedroom as well, but almost all of it is filled with a mountain of stuff that belongs to the Sergey's mother, who lives in New York. The room is mostly unusable, except for a fairly large bed that is tucked away in a nice little nook. The kitchen has a large table and with chairs, a refrigerator that's much larger than mine, a microwave, and all the utensils and cooking stuff I'll probably ever need. Oh, and a water heater of course! The only real downside is that there is no washing machine, but if it becomes a problem I could always buy one for not too much. There's also a weird closet that had a water leak in it recently and as a result smells pretty moldy, but Sergey has supposedly already cleaned it out some. The location is pretty great as well. It's only a few minutes walk from my current place, but closer to the center and even closer to the bus station and my local market. I also like the building itself and the neighborhood a lot better than where I am now. He agreed to rent the place to me for $300/month for at least the next three months, then he would have to reassess and depending on the economic situation in Ukraine, he might have to raise the price. I can live with that. I told him I was set on renting it, but that I'd just have to talk to my current landlord to make sure there won't be any problems with ending my lease early. I've been dreading calling him, but yesterday I finally mustered up the courage. I told him that I had found a new place that was cheaper and that I liked better, and that while I still liked my current place, I thought it would be better to move. By the time I called him the hot water had actually finally come on in my place, so I couldn't use that as a reason anymore, but I think it's still worth it to move. He seemed a bit upset at first, and didn't understand why I was moving now when I had told him before I'd be staying until August, but there wasn't really any way he could force me to stay, so he reluctantly said OK. I'm already paid up here through the 23rd, so I'll stay until around then, but I hope to start my lease on the new place around the 20th. My landlord called back a little later and suggested that he could lower my rent a bit if it would make me stay, but I said I just liked the other place more, and he finally gave up trying to win me back. He's a nice guy, and I felt a little bad bowing out of my lease so early, but it's totally worth it. I really like this other place.
Now, allow me to backtrack. On Saturday I took my first trip out to Bakhchisaray so Maria could show me around a bit. Bakhchisaray was the old capital of the Tatar Khante in Crimea, and today remains the center of Crimean Tatar culture. Maria is living there with a host family for a few weeks to be closer to all the action. The bus ride takes about a hlaf hour from Simferopol, and from the bus station I caught a marshrutka to the end of the line, which is right where Maria is living. The old town in Bakhchisaray is flanked on both sides by big cliffs that lead up into a couple different gorges, and it's just a really beautiful setting. From her place we started walking up one of the gorges to the Uspensky Monestary, built into the side of the cliff. Apparently it had first been carved out by some proto-Christian group centuries ago, then later incorporated by the Orthodox church, and just within the last five or so years it has been spruced up with new paintings and structural components. It was very beautiful, set into the side of the cliff face, and it looks like it has really benefited from its recent face-lift. There were a fair number of visitors and many vendors out, selling souvenirs, honey, wine, wild tea leaves, etc. From the monastery we pushed on up the gorge to the cave city of Chufut Kale. It is perched on a plateau above the cliffs and overlooking some nice gorges. A unique religious group called the Karaims lived here for many centuries. They're basically an offshoot of Judaism, wherein they believe in the Old Testament and use Hebrew, but they don't believe in the Talmud. I just recently read a little more about them, and apparently they migrated into Crimea and and a few other areas in Europe centuries ago from the Middle East, and lived in isolation for a long time. The cave city itself is quite different from the other cave city I visited recently. This one had a bit of a street plan to it, and generally seemed more thought-through. I'd say Ulistsikhe was cooler, just because it seemed much more ancient and spooky. This one did have some great views, though. After a bit of exploring we headed back down to town for some lunch. There are a few Crimean Tatar restaurants right around Maria's place, but only one was open, so we sat on their patio in the sun and had pretty good lagman and manty. After lunch we went back to her host family's place to trade music from our hard drives. This ended up taking much longer than we thought or hoped it would, and so I missed my chance to visit the Khan's Palace, the main attraction in Bakhchisaray. There will plenty of other opportunities. We chatted with her host mother for a while while we went through files. She teaches English in a classroom adjacent to the house, so she spoke to us in very good English. She gave us some background about the monastery and the cave city and about Bakhchisaray in general. She found it strange that I only wanted to drink water instead of coffee. By the time we finished with the files it was already dark, and since Maria was headed into town to use the internet, she gave me a ride back to the bus station. I waited around in the cold night for a while before the bus left for Simferopol, then had a nice ride back listening to Jesus and Mary Chain on my ipod.
I hung out with Maria again on Monday, after she called me in the morning and said I should meet her at the Crimean Tatar library. After some lunch at Piroga, I met her near the park and she showed me where the library is. She needed to talk to someone there, and thought it would be good for me to see it in case I needed to utilize some of their material for my project (which I very well might). She's also hoping that I might be able to help the director of the library develop and refine some grant proposals that she's been wanting Maria to help her with, but that she's just not able to do. I don't really have any experience writing up these rant proposals (they're very different from the Fulbright), and I don't even know where to go about finding this kind of grant money, but I'm going to try to help however I can. The director of the library is a very sweet older woman who said that I look just like one of her sons. She gave us a short tour of the library and gave me her card. Maria sent me some drafts of the rant proposals today, and they're aimed at developing a center to help raise awareness of the legal rights of ethnic minorities and the disabled, as well as arranging a conference along the same lines. It sounds pretty interesting, and I hope I can help make stuff happen. After the library, Maria had to pick up a new mobile modem she got to get online anywhere in the country where there's a cell phone signal. She has a mac just like mine, and we waited around the store for a while while they tried to get the modem configured. It was taking quite a while, since they aren't used to macs, so we went for a bite to eat while they took care of it. Maria hadn't had lunch yet, so we went to this pizza place that's pretty tasty (she gave me some of her pizza). When we got back to the store the internet thing was working, so we packed it up and headed out. Maria showed me a language school that's looking for native English speakers, and I took down the number from the sign. She also showed me the music store that sells guitars, but then she also remembered that a Peace Corp volunteer she knows who is leaving for home very soon is looking to sell her guitar, so it looks like i might be buying it from her. Maria gave me a lift home and invited me to a Crimean Tatar concert later that night, but I wasn't feeling up for it and decided to stay in.
Today I went to the University to finally get my student ID thing that will allow me to use the libraries and everything. I brought a small photo of myself to the Office for international student relations or whatever, and the told me to walk around for a bit while they made up my ID. I decided to check out the reservoir that just a little ways up the hill from the university. It took about 5 or 6 minutes to walk there from the university, and it's a fairly nice little body of water. The water level seems pretty low, and there were a lot of seagulls hanging out on the sloped side of the dam. There was another student there kind of hanging out. He was Asian, so I thought it might be one of the chinese students studying at the university. He seemed kind of lonely, and I thought about saying hello, but I had to fight that American tendency of mine, not knowing how it would be interpreted through possibly two cultural prisms, if in fact he was chinese. After throwing rocks in the water for a bit I headed back to the university, and waited around in the office while they finished up my ID. They gave me some fancy pens and a day planner, all produced in honor of the university's 90th anniversary. My ID turned out not to be any sort of handy card, but rather a half sheet of paper with my picture glued to it and stamp to verify it's authenticity. It basically says I'm a student there so let me do whatever. They didn't have a laminator, so they started explaining to me where I could et it laminated, but I just bought a little plastic folder to keep it in. I did a little grocery shopping at the market before heading home to take a nice, lukewarm shower. Even though the hot water is now on, it isn't always that hot. All the more reason to move.
That's pretty much my week, I was supposed to meet with my advisor on Monday, but our meeting keeps getting pushed back because he's been sick. As of now we're supposed to meet on Thursday so he can take me to the big library downtown. Hopefully it will pan out this time. Other things on the horizon: a farewell party on Saturday for some Peace Corp volunteers who are finishing up. I'm hoping there will be some there who aren't leaving yet, because it will be nice to meet some more people who will be around. Also, around Thanksgiving it looks like I'll be road tripping it out to Lviv in western Ukraine along with Maria, as she will be moving out there and doesn't want to have to drive all the way there by herself. It will take at least two days, and of I love long road trips, so I'm really looking forward to my first European road trip like this. There may even be the opportunity for a quick trip to Krakow from Lviv once we get there, and I'm starting to plan a trip back to Crimea for myself that would take me through Moldova. I'll tell you more when I know more.

-Austin

საქართველო

For a couple of different reasons, I've decided not to publish an entry I've written about my recent trip. If you'd like to read it, however, just send me an email ( austincharron@gmail.com ) or make a comment, and I'll send you a copy.

-Austin

...И горячей воды ещё нет

So I'm taking care of some last minute thins before heading off to Georgia tomorrow. Well, just to Kiev tomorrow, and then Georgia the next day. One thing I have to do is write something up here about my trip to Sevastopol on Saturday. My bus left around 10:30 Saturday morning and arrived about 11:45. All the guidebooks say that it takes two hours to get to Sevastopol, so I was surprised to see that it was really so much quicker. The ride back took closer to an hour, even. The ride out was pretty nice, The weather wasn't great; overcast and a little chilly, but at least it never rained. The countryside isn't as nice as on the way to Yalta, since that road goes through the mountains, but there was some nice scenic farmland and wooded areas. We skirted around the town Bakhchisarai, which is now at the top of my list of places to visit in Crimea, after having taken care of Sevastopol. The landscape gets pretty cool once you get close to Sevastopol. There's a town called Inkerman at the end of Sevastopol Inlet, where there are a bunch of cool cliffs that look like they have caves carved out of them. It gets pretty hill as you get into town, with lots of smaller towns all along the way. The bus station is right next to the train station, at the south end of a small inlet off of the main inlet, and from here one must head north to get to downtown Sevastopol. There was an old train engine on display outside the station with car attached that had a huge gun mounted on it, and on the engine was written "Death to Fascism!"
I caught a minibus into town, and was confused by the payment procedure. I guess buses do it differently in every town, because in Simferopol you usually pay the driver when you first get on, where as in Sevastopol you're expected to pay as you get off. I tried paying the guy when I got on and he wouldn't take it. I hopped off once I saw the statue of Nakhimov and I knew I was in the center. I headed straight for the water, and was pleased to find a nice little promenade area where people where out for a weekend stroll. This is where Sevastopol's famous eagle statue / pillar mounted on a rock out in the water is, though I was surprised at how close to the shore it was. I always figured it was out a ways in the water, but it was only about ten feet or so out. I walked along the water for a bit, when I saw some sort of huge awesome statue on a hill on the other side of a small harbor, and I knew I had to go check it out. I headed back up to the main drag and started in the direction of the statue. From the main street I turned down a path into Sevastopol's central market, which was fairly busy, this being Saturday. I didn't really bother stopping to look around the market area, because markets around here are more or less the same, really. Besides, I was on a mission to find the statue. I had lost sight of it by this point, but relied on my sense of direction to guide me. I ended up back down on the waterfront, this time on the other side of that small harbor. I found some stairs leading up, walked through a parking lot, then found another, much long set of stairs that took me to the top of the hill, from where I easily found the statue. I walked towards it along a dirt path, then down into the big open square below the statue. The statue was of two soldiers, one with his arm outstretched towards the sea (of which there was a nice view from the top of this hill) and pointing his bayonetted gun towards the sky with his other hand, while the other had his gun posed to shoot. To the tip of the bayonet the whole thing was probably about 50 feet high (though I'm bad at judging the height of things). I'm not really into all that militaristic stuff, but I thought this statue was really cool. I was just so blown away by the size and grandiosity of it. I sat beneath it for a while, watching the few other people mill about the square. There weren't a lot of people around since the statue is pretty out of the way. There were a few teenagers skateboarding, and when once tried to do an ollie his friend yelled out to him, "you got about 5 millimeters there!"
From the statue I headed back towards downtown. From the that hill I had seen to the top of another hill in the main part of town, and I could see another large statue, this one of Lenin pointing towards the sea. I started heading up that hill to find it, but got sidetracked by other things along the way. First, I came upon a nice looking orthodox church, and sat in its courtyard for a little while. There was a big water tank covered by a little roof with a cross on it, which I assumed meant that it was regarded as some sort of holy water. Most orthodox churches have some sort of spigot on the grounds where worshippers drink and wash their hands a faces, but it was funny to see this one coming from a normal-looking water tank. I saw quite a few sailors out as I walked up the hill as well, reminding me that I was in a Navy town. I got near the top of the hill and found a viewpoint looking down on South Bay (inlet, really), where most of the Russian Naval facilities are. In case you didn't know, Sevastopol was home to the Soviet Union's Black Sea Fleet, and when Ukraine became independent in 1991 there was a long drawn-out negotiation process between Ukraine and Russia over control of the fleet. In the end, Ukraine took a portion of the fleet for its own navy, while Russia kept most of it and was allowed to "lease" the port from Ukraine for a contracted period. They currently have it leased through 2017, and while Russia would certainly like to extend that lease when the time comes, while President Yushchenko has signaled that he would like to see the Russians leave and not have the lease renewed. Of course, 2017 is a long ways off, and a lot could happen between now and then. This struggle over Sevastopol is central to the tensions between Ukraine and Russia and the whole Crimean question that I'm here to research. I was actually quite surprised at how low-key the port seemed from the hilltop. I could see some warships, but there seemed to be only a few, with not a lot of soldiers around or anything. I guess I just expected there to be more activity or something. From this viewpoint I headed up into a park. There were some nice statues and fountains, as well as a carnival with rides, but the main attraction in this park is a large building called the "Panorama," that has a large panoramic mural of the history of the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. It seemed interesting, but you can only go in with groups and at scheduled times, and I didn't want to bother waiting around for another tour to start, so I skipped it. I know I'll be back to Sevastopol and have plenty of opportunities to see it.
I sat on a bench in the park for a while, when I saw a girl walking around who screamed American. She had a Vasser sweatshirt on, a backpack, and she was carrying around the old Lonely Planet Ukraine. I though it would be nice to have someone to talk to, so I caught up with her and asked if she spoke English. I think I made her nervous and startled at first, but when she realized I was asking a question in English she realized what was going on. She was, in fact, from the US, but she had grown up mostly in Argentina. Her names was Malina, and she did in fact go to Vasser. We walked out of the park and talked for a while. She currently lives in Kiev volunteering at some organization that helps the Jewish community in Ukraine (I can't really remember what it is they do exactly). She was in Crimea for a conference in Yalta, and was taking a day trip to Sevastopol. She also studied Russian in school, and also spent a semester in St. Petersburg after I did. She was on her way back to the bus station but decided to tag along with me for a little bit in my continuing quest to find the big Lenin statue. We went down a small street in the direction I thought it would be, but after a while it was beginning to look like we weren't really getting close to anything. I assumed, since the statue was so big, that I'd spot it eventually, but it wasn't working out. She was getting worried that we had gone too far in the opposite direction of the bus station, so we took some stairs down the hill towards the street that heads to the bus station so she could head out. I had already bought a ticket back to Simferopol for 8:00, so I headed back towards town to do some more sight seeing. We traded email addresses as we watched a man going into epileptic seizures while his friends tried to help him. We thought about trying to help, but we really didn't know what we could have done.
I walked back to where the statue of Nakihmov was and took some stairs down to a little dock area behind it. There was an old lady trying to recruit people for a guided tour on a boat, but I politely refused. On the dock, the captain of the boat also asked me if I wanted to take a ride. I was afraid it would cost too much, so I turned him down again, saying I was just there to take some pictures. I thought about it for a little while, and decided it probably wasn't that expensive, and that it was probably worth doing either way. I asked him how much it cost, and hie said 40 Grivnya (like, $7), so I decided to go for it. It was pretty late in the day by then and starting to get pretty chilly, especially out on the water, so I put on my new big warm hoodie. The tour started by heading down through South Bay (where the fleet is), where we got a closer look at all the ships. There were more there than I had initially seen from the top of the hill, but it still seemed pretty quite for such an important naval base. The captain also gave a guided tour with with all kinds of historical and topical information about this sights, but he didn't have an intercom or anything and I was sitting in the back, so I could barely hear him over the sound of the engine. I have a very hard time understanding Russian if there is background noise anyways, so I gave up quickly trying to listen to what he was saying. The tour was nice anyways, and I got some decent pictures of the boats and of the town from the water. after South Bay we headed out a little ways into the main bay to get a look at the eagle column, then headed back to port. On my way back up the steps, that same old lady stopped me and asked me where I was from. She asked me if I wanted to go to Moscow, so I said I'd already been there. She handed me a card of her tour company and asked, "Do you want to go to Moscow right now? Nobody goes to Moscow except us." I told her "maybe in the future," and was on my way.
I stopped into a little restaurant for dinner, and felt quite awkward the whole time as I was the only person there. I had a beer and an eggy pork chop wit french fries. Not that good, but not terrible I guess. I was starting to wish I hadn't bought a ticket back for so late, as I was getting tired and the sky was getting dark. I had a couple hours to kill, so I sat on a bench on the promenade for a while, looking out at the sea and listening to Kino on my ipod. I then wondered up some more stairs towards some other monument, but it was too dark to really see what it was of. I still had some time before I needed to be at the bus station, but I decided to head down there anyways, since I didn't really have anything else to do. I hoped in a marshrutka heading towards the station, but since it was dark I wasn't really sure when the station was coming up. I figured somebody else must be getting of there, or somebody at the station getting on, but I saw it go passed with nobody asking for the driver to stop, and by then I was too nervous to shout out for him to stop, so I kept riding it until somebody else needed to get off. This turned out to be quite a ways through what seemed like a bit of a sketchy area, so I figured it wasn't a good idea to walk back from there. Instead, I crossed the street to catch a bus heading back in the opposite direction. As I was boarding the bus, there was a bit of a jam of people near the door, as some people were trying to pay the driver before getting of while others were trying to get on. One guy trying to get off was getting frustrated. I had just gotten up the steps when he tried to shove his way down, and in doing so we kind of bumped into each other. Not a big deal or anything, but this guy got really mad and shoved me as hard as he could into the bus and into a group of people, and shouted at me, "YOUR MOTHER!" Now, this is a very common Russian insult, except he left off the first word, which means, "I fucked," though because of the grammatical structure, that part is still implied. I think this is the first time anybody's said that to me, which I guess makes it something of a milestone. I didn't really fall or anything, just kind of stumbled back a bit, and as he got off the bus I just gave him a look that said, "are you kidding me?" You know the look. Right after he got off, another woman caught in the jam of people tried to go for the door and got tripped up on something, falling into the area near the driver's seat. She never said anything but had an angry and embarrassed look on her face I helped her up with a couple other people, including the angry guy now outside the bus, and i was worried that she was with him and that the guy was going to get angry again and try to hit me or something, but he didn't say anything and the bus was quickly on its way. The whole incident happened so fast, probably about 15 seconds all together. I rode one stop back to the bus station where, thankfully, somebody else had to get off too, so I didn't even have to tell the driver to stop.
I waited around the station for about an hour before the bus left. It was more of a marshrutka than a bus, and I ended up with the very front single seat, so I had lots of leg room. The ride was quick, but unfortunately took us to the bus station downtown next to the train station, not the one near my apartment. I grabbed a quick shaurma, then caught what was probably one of the last buses of the night back to my neighborhood. A few stops down a huge crowd of people got on, which was very strange considering it was bout 9:30. When I got on it had been pretty empty, so I had a seat, but the bus got more and more packed. It was the most people I had ever seen on a bus in Simferopol. I figured that maybe it was literally the last bus of the night, so everybody had to pile in or they would be stranded. For a while I wasn't sure how I was going to et off, since there were so many people packed between me and the door, but enough people got off before my stop that it cleared up a bit and I was able to get off OK. I was pretty beat from a long day of sight seeing, and slept in nice and long Sunday morning. I was surprised to see that my computer's clock had gone back an hour, and then discovered that European Daylight Savings Time ended Saturday night, a whole week before it does in the US. SO, for this week only, I'm nine hours ahead of PST instead of 10.
On Monday my internet cut out, and I realized that I was supposed to pay the day before and had forgotten, so I headed over to Ardinvest to pay up. As of today the internet still wasn't working, so I headed back to see what the dilly was. As soon as I told the secretaries my internet was down, they said, "Vorovskogo 60?", which is my building number, so I immediately understood that the whole building (or cluster of buildings, as that address applies to at least ten buildings) was having problems. They asked for my apartment number, and told a guy in the back who was working on the problem. He asked what the number of my "something," and I didn't know what he meant. I said I didn't understand, so the secretary asked him, "do you know what it is in English?", and his face lit up and he asked, "You speak English?", in English. He seemed delighted to use his English, which was pretty good, though he still didn't know the word he needed, so he had another guy sitting next to him look it up. Turns out it was a word for "entry way" that I didn't know. He said that they were doing a lot of rewiring or something in my building, but that he would call his engineer and tell him to take care of my line right away. He gave me has number to call if it wasn't fixed by 4:00 today, but thankfully it was and I was able to get online just in time to Skype with mom.
Today I also bought some glue to fix my shoes, since after walking around Sevastopol I discovered that my brown shoes had cracks in the sole that were wearing through to my insole and had actually ruined my sock on the left foot. The shoe repair guy said he couldn't fix it, so I went to the "shoelace" ladies too see if they had some good glue. I was thinking something along the lines of Shoe Goo, but they gave me some super glue that supposedly works on shoes as well. They seem to be holding up pretty well so far, but I have a feeling they'll wear through after a bit of walking around. I was planning on wearing them to Georgia, so hopefully they'll at least hold up that long. I also bought some new insoles, which will hopefully keep my socks safe.
One last thing - Monday I had another meeting with Sergei, my advisor. We met briefly at the University to go over my project plan. Since it's still a bit up in the air, we came up with some general ideas. For November and December we agreed I should focus on reading and developing my ideas, as well as meeting and talking with some of the important people he knows. He told me about a good library downtown that has the best collection of material on Crimea anywhere, and he just happens to be friends with the director. He's going to take me there once I get back from Georgia. He also said that he's going to help arrange excursions around Crimea for me, which I'm very excited about. I feel like I'm in good hands under his tutelage, and I think he can provide a lot of good opportunities to meet people and make connections while I'm here. He's going to be showing a short film about the recent Georgia conflict and giving a brief lecture about it tomorrow afternoon, and although I might be busy getting ready for my own trip Georgia, I'm going to try to make it. He'll also be bringing some books for me to borrow. Should be interesting.
Ok, that's that. Expect something about Georgia once I get back in about a week. Wish me luck!


-Austin