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!