Tulips and Beer Tents

Tulips and beer tents are popping up all over, our heat was turned off a couple of weeks ago, and Orthodox Easter was celebrated here on Sunday, so spring is definitely here. Another annual event also occured recently, though we didn't know about it until it was in progress.

Most nights, between approximately 10:00 pm and 6:00 am, the water in our apartment is turned off. (We've always questioned the reasoning behind this: why turn it off if most folks are asleep at that time anyway? One PCV posits that perhaps it's because so many Ukrainian toilets run, so that shutting it off would in fact save water, which is the only plausible explanation we've heard.) Anyway, last week on a day neither of us was scheduled to teach, the water failed to come on at the normal time. We waited, assuming it was just a matter of time before it would be turned on. Well, our wait lasted until late the next day. Turns out that the water in the whole city is turned off for 1-2 days once or twice a year for cleaning and maintenance. It was announced on the radio, so the locals all knew about it, but we missed it. When you know it's coming, you fill buckets and big bottles with water in anticipation, and life can go on fairly normally. When you don't know, as we didn't, well, life isn't quite so normal.

We ended up hunkering down in our apartment, basically waiting for the water so that we could shower and get on with our day. We did have to teach the next day, so we sponge-bathed with the bottled water we buy, and finally learned about this annual pipe-cleaning when we spoke with our colleagues at school. By the time the water came on, our kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes and, well, you don't want to know about the bathroom. So we survived another unexpected cultural moment or, in this case, two days. But we're chagrined to realize that, after more than a year in this country, we're still so far from being fluent or even tapped in to the local scene. Basically, a large notice could have been posted in our building's elevator, and we could have stared at it multiple times a day, and we wouldn't have understood what was going to happen. Ah, motivation to keep at our Russian language studies...