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...

Twenty-five Years!

We celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary last week with a trip to Odessa, one of our favorite Ukrainian cities. It’s only 3 ½ hours away by bus, and it’s a delightful big city with lots of charm, especially in its older leafy center. In honor of our anniversary, Peter gave me a very romantic gift – a classic heavy padlock with our initials and wedding date written on it. This is romantic? Yes.

Here’s some background. When we visited Kiev in January with our kids, we took a self-guided walking tour of the city and came across an unusual pedestrian bridge in one of the central parks. It was a wood plank bridge with attractive metal-work railings, stretched across a ravine near the big stadium of the popular Kiev Dynamo soccer team. On the bridge were signs of a newly-popular practice: attached to the metal rails were hundreds of padlocks of all shapes and sizes, most labeled with the first names or initials of couples who’ve pledged their love for each other by attaching their lock and throwing away the key. Above is a close-up of this unusual bridge in Kiev.

When we shared this discovery with local friends in our English Club, they said this practice is only a few years old and in fact there is a similar pedestrian bridge in Odessa. Knowing of our plan to visit Odessa this weekend, Peter’s clever and, yes, romantic gift brought us laughs, smiles and appreciation of our fortune at having 25 wonderful years together.

Our visit to Odessa was for the combined purpose of celebrating our anniversary and attending a meeting of a “support group” for older Ukrainian Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs). Our group of visiting older PCVs participated in a delightful walking tour of central Odessa given by a knowledgeable younger Odessa-based PCV who is a history teacher by training. Lo and behold, what should be one of the final points of interest on the tour but the famous Mother-in-Law Bridge – a pedestrian bridge across a ravine. It was supposedly built by a former mayor whose mother-in-law lived across the ravine. Two reasons have been given. He had the bridge built in order either to more easily enjoy her wonderful borsch or for her to more easily return home after a visit, rather than spending the night there. In any case, the bridge has become a favorite among lovers and newlyweds, and it is adorned with hundreds of labeled padlocks! See all the locks stretched across the Mother-in-Law Bridge above right.

So in the middle of the tour, we whipped out our padlock, chose an appropriate spot on the bridge, and attached it in honor of our anniversary. Our Peace Corps friends documented the moment for us.