Extremely hot weather has returned for the moment, and we’ve taken to calling ourselves Ralph and Alice (as in Kramden). You don’t want to picture this, but when we get home to our hot, small, 9th-floor apartment (which we still like very much), we turn on the electric fan, pour a couple of cold beers, and enjoy them in our underwear, because wearing any more than that is just too hot. We’re experiencing tenement living at its finest!
More Cultural Moments
We learned recently that Ukrainians, when saying their email addresses, call the “@” sign “sobachka” which means little dog. We’ve read since (in the Int’l Herald Tribune which we were thrilled to find, along with a current WSJ, in Kiev) that many languages have come up with their own descriptive names for this symbol. In Czech it’s their word for “a herring wrapped around a pickle,” in Hebrew it’s “snail”, in Mandarin it’s “little mouse,” and in Thai it’s “wiggling worm.” Never thought about how someone who doesn’t speak English would have to come up with something to call this funny symbol with no meaning.
Speaking of dogs, there are many apparently feral dogs (and cats) that live on the streets here. What’s noteworthy is how calm and unthreatening they are, even when running in packs. Unlike the Central American experience of our son, whose knee-jerk reaction to seeing a stray dog now is to grab the nearest stick or rock in order to protect himself, these dogs are universally not problematic. Our theory is that they are so well cared for by locals, who seem to really love the dogs, that they’re rarely hungry. Our local host mom is an example. She keeps in her refrigerator a container for bones and other table scraps, which she regularly carries out to the fields near her apartment to give to the dogs. We even heard the mother of a young boy, who had dropped one of the pretzels he was eating at an outdoor play area, tell him to “leave it for the dogs.”
It is not unusual to see Ukrainians working in their gardens, whether at a more private dacha or in an open, more public plot on the outskirts of town, wearing only their undergarments. (Peace Corps volunteers have made jokes about “Speedo gardening”) It’s hot out there, and it’s just more comfortable.
News Flash
We are sad to report that, as of today, the one English-language TV channel we could get here, BBC World News, has just been replaced by…MTV-Ukraine! We could try to be grown up about this and say it will be better for our language study to have no English-language TV, but in fact we're quite disappointed. It's another opportunity for us to say to ourselves, "Remember, we're in the Peace Corps."
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