Waiting to Exhale...

…describes the way we’d felt for the last couple weeks. Can’t tell you how often our conversations had opened with, “As soon as we get into our own apartment…” It felt as if everything was on hold until we could identify our home for the next two years. Peace Corps required us to live with a host family for the first month in our permanent city, but that month was quickly coming to a close. We had looked at a few apartments with the help of our university counterparts, but either didn’t react fast enough to the couple we liked, or didn’t feel we could be as “flexible” as some of them would have required us to be. Our still-very-poor Russian language skills prevented us from doing the apartment hunting on our own, and our counterparts were now on vacation. After a few days of being in the awkwardly frustrating position of wanting to do the legwork to find an apartment but not feeling able to, our host mom came to the rescue. We had been anxious to find a place, but we didn’t want to offend her with our eagerness to do so. But last Thursday morning she said, we think, why don’t you go and buy the new classified ad newspaper (it comes out weekly on Thursdays), read through it to find apartments you’re interested in, and I’ll make the calls for you. (Perhaps she was as anxious for us to find a place as we were?) Well, she is the heroine of this story, because by the end of the day, with her calling, organizing, charming, and coordinating, we had looked at three decent apartments, and committed to one that we’re thrilled with.

Breathing
We moved in on Saturday, again with the charming and energetic coordination of our host mom whose friend was available on short notice with a small truck, and couldn’t be more pleased. The apartment is centrally located within walking distance of all basic needs, and only short marshrutka rides away from each of our universities. Many major Ukrainian cities have central parks with statues of Lenin featured prominently. Well, our new apartment is a block and a half from this city’s Lenin. It is relatively spacious, well-maintained, furnished, clean and light. There’s electricity and hot and cold water 24/7. It’s a “two room” apartment, which here means that it has two rooms in addition to the assumed bath and kitchen. Along with the bedroom there’s a living room with cable TV and a couch that opens to a second bed. Most of our belongings are unpacked for the first time in four months, and it’s beginning to feel like home.

Summer “Work”
Now that we’re settled in our apartment, we’re using our unstructured summer days to try to get a better handle on this Russian language. Peace Corps provides an allowance for us to hire a tutor, and we’ve started working with a good one two or three times per week. She is patient, gracious, speaks English, has a husband and an 18-year-old son, a brother living in Canada whom she’s visited more than once, and an untypical international perspective on life. (She likes and makes sushi, for example.) She serves not only as a language tutor, but as a cultural interpreter as well. We prepare lists prior to each session with questions about our assigned language lesson and about the particular mysteries (to us) of the day. Next up: how exactly does this couch open into a bed; if indeed this special plug in our kitchen links to the local radio station, where do we get a receiver to hear it; what’s the exact meaning of this combination of words we saw at a restaurant, etc.

Making “vodka” at home
We had the pleasure of watching this process recently, but based on our host mom’s reaction to our attempts to photograph it, we probably shouldn’t be telling you about it. The process she used matches that described to us by our first host dad when we asked how the homemade vodka, called “samaHONE”, is produced. He drew a small diagram, and what happened in the kitchen recently was that sketch come to life.

The ingredient list is short: water, beet sugar (the only kind here), and yeast. They are combined in a large vat in proper proportion, kept warm (our host mom wraps old heavy coats around what looks like a well-used ten-gallon milk can which then sits undisturbed deep under the kitchen table), and allowed to ferment. After two weeks or so, it’s time to check for readiness. This is done by lifting the lid and placing a lit match inside. If the match goes out, fermentation is still occurring. If it doesn’t go out, fermentation is complete and it’s time for distillation.

Distillation takes several hours, and two main parts are required. There’s the milk-can vat with fermented ingredients. And there’s a metal condenser, a 10-inch long by 3-inch diameter cylinder, with two openings at the top and two at the bottom. One tube connects the vat to the top of the condenser; another connects the kitchen faucet to the other opening at the top of the condenser. There’s a bucket placed below the condenser to collect the water which passes through it and exits from one of the openings at the bottom, and a large jar to collect the condensate (the whole point of this exercise!) which exits from the other opening at the bottom. The (heavy!) milk-can vat is placed atop the stove, the rubber tubes and condenser are all connected and taped tight, and the heat is turned on. As the juice in the vat is heated to evaporation, it passes into the condenser where it is cooled by the cold water dribbling past it in the neighboring chamber. The condensate drops into the glass jar to be enjoyed later as is or perhaps a hot pepper or walnuts are added for flavor. About one gallon of “samahon” is produced, and the six or so gallons of cooling water are saved to water plants. (We didn’t see what, if anything, remained in the vat at the completion of the process.)

We were fascinated watching this process, so much so that Peter got out the camera in order to document it. Immediately our host mom said, emphatically, “Nyet!” And something like, “What are you thinking?” Though no photos were allowed, our experience indicates this apparently illegal process occurs in many Ukrainian kitchens.