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.

Gratitude

We would like to express our profound gratitude to family, friends, and especially our fabulous children, for your love, support, communication, and understanding as we proceed on this adventure. We’re happy when we hear that you read these words, happier to hear directly from you of your own news, and happier still to imagine the various gatherings, celebrations, and performances that occur in our absence, though we often ache to be there. We can almost taste the tangerine martinis being sipped on the front porch with Lake Washington and Mt Rainier in the background.

More Cultural Moments

• We’ve eaten more different chicken parts here than ever before, but the most unusual food we were served, which was gamely consumed by Peter, was pig’s ear, marinated with salt, pepper and garlic. Crunching on the cartilage, he said it tasted more like nose than ear.
• Mayonnaise is the favorite salad dressing of Ukrainians. It is also widely used as a garnish, as a dip, as a topping on just about anything you can imagine, and some things you can’t.
• It is fashionable for men to shave under their arms.
• The largest grocery store sections are those for cooking oil and for vodka.
• It is exceedingly rare to experience good customer service.
• Sidewalk entrepreneurs take a regular household scale, cover it with plastic, and set it out next to a handmade sign advertising, “Your weight for 50 kopeks,” about 10 cents. (Yesterday a price war began: your weight for 25 kopeks.)
• Ukrainians have a lovely tradition at birthday dinners. Everyone in attendance at the dinner table is expected to make a toast to the birthday celebrant. Not just a quick “to your health,” but at least a paragraph of eloquent compliments and good wishes, and even some of the youngest do it. They occur for the duration of dinner, and all hold up their shots of vodka while the toast is made, then clink their glasses all around before bottoms up.
• At every museum we’ve visited, each room of the museum has a person attending it, who turns on the lights in that room before we arrive, and turns them off as soon as we leave to go to the next room.
• We can count on one hand the number of racial minorities we’ve seen in Ukraine. If we don’t count Americans, it’s no more than two.
• There are essentially no English language newspapers or magazines here. It’s rumored that the New York Times can be found in Kiev, but there’s nothing in English in the two cities in which we have now lived.
• Our eyes tend to focus at our feet as we walk – to watch for the ubiquitous uneven sidewalks, big gaps in the asphalt, and uncovered manholes.
• So far our favorite name for a local enterprise is the “BrokeBusinessBank.”

Bye for now.

At the Dacha

We have visited our current host mom’s dacha three times now, and it’s a notable experience. Before coming to this country, we thought a dacha was an elaborate Russian summer home. From our limited experience so far, we understand that most dachas are small properties, no more than an eighth of an acre, usually with a small rustic cabin, whose primary purpose is to grow food in a “kitchen garden.” They tend to be in what might be called dacha developments, side by side by side in neat rows, sharing services such as well water and power. There’s no indoor plumbing. Outhouses are located on the opposite end of each property from the cabin. We mentioned earlier that our first host family, who live in a village just outside of our training city, had a large garden on their property as well as another garden a short walk away. Dachas seem to serve the same purpose, of growing one’s own food, for apartment dwellers, as well as offering a nature break from the cement high-rises in which many live.

When we go to the dacha we’re out the door by 7:00 am to catch a marshrutka bus to a small boat dock. There we board a small low-slung metal boat with fabric roof that holds a lot of people, all heading out to their dachas. The main reason for the early start is that on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from 8:30 to 10:30 AM (and only those times), river water is pumped through the pipes in the dacha development, so everyone can water their crops. When we arrive at our host mom’s place, we first change into our dacha clothes: well-worn and oversized shorts, T-shirts, and plastic sandals. Then we clomp around getting hoses set up, and once the water comes on, we’re focused on getting everything soaked. Everything currently includes tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, squash, potatoes, onions, garlic, and lots of flowers. There are also fruit trees: apricots, berries, apples, peaches, pears, and a spectacular grape arbor that is bending with the weight of plumping fruit. We city-slickers have enjoyed watching things grow from the first time we were there six weeks ago during our brief “site visit” until now. It is currently the season for apricots and cucumbers, as well as some absolutely delicious berries, unlike any we’ve seen before.

The setting is quite beautiful. Across the river from the city, these dachas are surrounded by green trees and bushes that make them invisible from the river. Small river-lets snake between the different little islands, and many folks enjoy the option of jumping in to cool off.

At the dacha, after the watering is done, it’s time for breakfast. There’s a hot plate for cooking, and soup, eggs, salads, and of course potatoes, are all on offer, as well as coffee, homemade vodka, and juice. After breakfast, with bamboo fishing poles in hand, we’ve usually gone to our host mom’s second “dacha” which in this case is another similar-sized property, with no structures, used strictly for gardening – mostly potatoes. It is located on one of the river-lets, with a few planks propped up at the river from which to fish. Our host mom catches three or four times more than anyone else, and the fish range in size from two to five inches. When we return to the cabin, they are promptly cleaned, floured and fried up for lunch -- the smaller ones eaten whole.

The Tom Sawyer feeling is augmented when we must cross a different small river-let to get to and from this second dacha. We now call it the “chain raft” and here’s why. The 20- by 8-foot metal raft is attached to chains on either end, which are each permanently attached to small metal docks on either side of the river, about 30 yards across. To cross, we first pull on the chain that connects the dock we’re standing on to the raft in order to get it to our side of the river, and we board it. Next, we grab the chain that’s attached to the other side of the raft, and pull on it, which results in the raft’s moving across water. Mission accomplished.

Peter has become made the primary “shashleek” preparer, always considered a man’s job here. At the dacha it involves stacking a few bricks in two short rows and starting the BBQ fire with kindling from the yard, papers, and small pieces of firewood. Chicken parts have been marinated, and Peter skewers the meat alternately with onions from the garden, and then tends them on the fire until they’re done. They’ve been part of either breakfast or lunch on different dacha visits.

The last thing we did before returning home most recently was to shake the big apricot tree so that bucketsful of perfectly ripe and sweet apricots fell. We’ve been enjoying them both fresh and cooked into jam since. Apricot overload is possible, but not likely.