The week of Interweb

My fourth internet session in one week. If only I was permitted to upload pictures...  It's pretty easy really, just 30 min north on a packed bus, a 10 minute walk and the internet club is nice before all the teenibopers come in to play online games in the afternoon.

 

Mainly this week is just resting between camps.  I've reaquainted with my violin, studied Ukrainian every day, read a few books including some Gogol short stories, and begun trying to use up my solid kitchen stocks (flour, sugar, salt, oil, oats, potatoes, lots of other grains).  It is now definite that I will be moving to a new apartment by September 1st.  Nobody knows where this new apartment will be.  My landlady's other daughter is coming back from a nearby village so that her son can attend our school, a bit better than the village school. Of course eating this stuff doesn't make sense in the fruit vegetable season, where everything else is fresh and cheep, so I'll probably just leave it in the apartment, or carry it to wherever I'm moving to. 

 

The kids I'm taking to the next camp (two girls from University and my most talented 7th grader, Dima) I'm working at don't have sleeping bags or pads yet and we're leaving on Monday.  I'm excited for this next camp because it is already well organized, and I know alot of the other volunteers who will be there, people who just get stuff done, in a cheerful manner, without complaining.

I'm teaching environmental ethics, I think I already said that.  Also have to come up with a bunch of icebreakers.

 

And right after that camp Sam is coming. Romania...?

Wow, a post in presentish tense

After returning from the lakes, I am quite happy to have a week in my town to unwind and clean clothes. I feel guilty seeing all of my neighbors and knowing that I have probably already travelled to more places in their own country than they will see in their whole life.  I had to restock my fridge, but think I may have gotten too much stuff seeing as I have other camp that starts in 6 days and I have to move out of my apartment at the end of August.  I should be working on my stores of grains and flour, so I don't have to move them.  I have not found another apartment yet, but it's really up to my school director anyway.  I have heard rumors that I will be moving into a building on her property, which is fine, but will not be nearly as convenient as living in the very center of town. 

 

I am reading some short stories by Gogol, known as a Russian author, he was actually born in Ukraine.

 

My violin playing is pretty rusty.

 

My soccer team lost again on Sunday, despite me being there.  We simply don't pass quickly enough. Many players were absent at weddings or on vacation.  This loss takes us out of first place in our league and sends us to tied with 5th.  I am really out of soccer shape, and the day after the game, I had trouble walking, mostly because of my achilles.  I've decided to start physical therapy but have to wait until after the camp season so I can complete a sesson uninterupted.

 

So, one more summer camp, taking three students from my town, teaching environmental ethics and leadership.  Then Sam will arrive and we will make a quick loop through Romania on a whirlwind tour.  Then it's time to report back to school for lesson planning, teachers meetings and remodling.  Hopefully I can avoid all fumes and work only on outside projects.

 

I'm excited for the olympics and need to find a tv to catch the running events.

 

What else is going on? I guess just a week to unwind a bit and get organized for the last part of summer.  How is time moving so fast?

Yet more fun, Shatsk Lakes National Park

If you look a map of Ukraine up in the northwest corner near the borders with Belarus and Poland, you will see some lakes.  These are filled with clear water and surrounded by forests.  A friend from language refresher invited me because he had been invited by some friends from his site.  The tent area was a bit dirty and stinky because people didn't use the dumpsters and the toilets were so gross that many people made their own out in the woods, so there is room for improvement.  The weather also didn't cooperate as we would have liked, only about 6 hours of sunshine the whole time.  But it was nice to hang out at camp, on the beach and in the forest.  We also walked 9km to a more secluded lake and found it to be much cleaner and if I go back, that's where I'll make camp.  I am now an expert at baking potatoes under a campfire. I know this is not very impressive.

Language Refresher, July 10-14

One of the best parts about Peace Corps is getting to learn another language.  It helps with the second and third goal the JFK layed out for PC.  'To give citizens in other countries an better understanding of americans and to give americans a better understanding of other peoples'.  The first goal is to provide trained men and women to increase technical capacity, and strong language skills obviously help in this respect also.  I've already mentioned that the initial 3 months of language training was excellent.  In continuing support of our language skills, PC Ukraine provides summer and winter language refreshers.  Basically a summer camp filled with classes and fun activities in Ukrainian.  The teaching was excellent, lots of 1on1 tutoring and generally fun activities including games with sticks, cooking, poetry, dancing, singing and acting.  I have nothing but good things to say about the experience and am completely psyched to continue my language study.  If I can get a good semester of study in this fall, I might start to study russian in the spring.  That would be cool, although just a start of course. 

 

I tried running again after a month of rest on my achilles.  Little improvement.  I timed a 4km run for the fun of it (I know, a great way to treat the achilles on the 4th day of running) and confirmed my suspicion that not running for a month really hurts fitness.  Awesome games of soccer and volleyball, historical movies, sauna+cold plunge, generally living the life.  Instead of going home after this vacation...

Survival Camp, July 1-9

I missed the first two days of digging pit toilets/compost pits and mowing grass and generally preparing a campsite in the wilderness for 50 people.  The camp was situated about 4km outside of Kosiv ontop of a ridge maybe 400 feet above the valley floor.  The first days of camp were pretty successful, but then the discipline started to slip, and there was a weekness in leadership which left many students feeling unfulfilled.  It was supposed to be an english only camp, but no one enforced this.  The morning excersises also stopped after the first few days.  However, there were many awesome things that happened.

 

On the third day we hiked up PipIvan, the 4th highest mountain in Ukraine.  While only slightly over 7000ft, the hike was really beautiful, winding through sparkling medows and dark enchanted forests (I will upload pictures, but this internet cafe does not allow uploading of any kind) for about 11km.  This was a long hike for our youngest campers (14yr olds) and I ended up on rear guard trying to keep them moving.  All went well to the top, we had a nice lunch at the old Polish observatory, and then gathered one bag of trash each to bring back down the mountain.  I could not believe how much trash was up there.  It would have filled two dumptrucks at least, and I felt that our 50 bag subtraction barely made a dent.  The way down our rear guard 14yr old girls got dehydrated most likely because they weren't drinking for fear of having to pee somewhere without cover (above treeline).  They also were sunburned and generally tired.  The 5 hours down the mountain was a test of patience, which I passed, thanks in a large part to Jim and Curtis, who joked, sang and walked every slow step down the mountain.

 

Jim and I also had some wicked boot skiing on a patch of north facing snow. It was a great patch of hard icy snow maybe 50m long that got steeper and steeper as it went down and ended in a boulder field. Curtis has videos which will appear on youtube?...

 

The bus ride home was fun because we sang almost the whole way. The number of traditional songs that Ukrainians know is one of the coolest things about their culture, and something that Americans can not compete with.

 

Teaching ecology lessons at the camp went ok, but I have nothing to brag about.  It could have gone better, that's for sure.

 

Another highlight was the Ivana Kupala celebration.  This literally means the bath of Ivan, and was an old pagan celebration involving young maidens, big fires, dancing and drinking given a saint's name and incorporated into the church calendar.  We hiked down to the river, cooked shashlik (shishkabob) while the girls all made flower wreaths and the boys wore white traditional dress shirts.  After eating, the wreaths were placed on the water with a candel floating in the center and sent downstream.  The boys all waited downstream to try to catch a wreath, this being symbolic of...Unfortuantely, the wreaths all got stuck in an eddy, and it was left to one forward thinking Jason to plunge into the water and pile all the wreaths onto his head.  Then there was jumping over the fire in pairs.  If your hands held together, than you would be set together for life, but if not...  So is it bad that I jumped over with students?  Overall a really fun night.

 

Camp ended up being a really good learning experience for how to make camp better in the future.  Only two of us American  will still be in Ukraine when it is time for the same camp next year. Hopefully we can make it more survival oriented and less gourme cooking for 50 people over a campfire.  Each group of 2 americans and 6 ukrainians had to cook four meals each.  This involved a long treck into town, carrying tons of stuff back up the mountain, and a lot of potatoe peeling.  In the future, if the camp is called survival camp, the food needs to be plain and boring, much less work and maybe only one resuply trip into town. Just a thought.

 

The Journey home June 27th-29th

The three of us bought round trip train tickets from Poprad, Slovakia to Budapest because they were cheeper than the one way.  So I used nina's and my return tickets to get to Zita's house and again all the way back to Kosice, Slovakia.  From there I took the bus back to Uzhgorod, retracing my steps back to Lviv and Velyki Mosty.  It was a long journey including a long conversation with a Ukrainian journalist who was absolutely pissed at the slow progress of Ukraine and wished he had been born in another country.  He thought that it was a mistake have drawn the borders in a way that put Uzhgorod in Ukraine rather than Slovakia.  His English was excellent and indeed he did not remind me of many Ukrainian men I have met.  Then there was a huge downpour of rain and hail which I waited out hunched up inside of an atm.  Unfortunately my boney but was not lucky enough to punch the keypad in a way to make money come out.  When I finally got back to my site on Saturday, I decided to stay through my soccer game on sunday and the European Championships Final and go to my next camp a day late on Monday morning.  The trip down through Ivano Frankivsk made me miss the fast trains in Slovakia and Hungary alot.  How does it take 6 hours to go 200km?  Hmm, this brings me almost to July, with 4 minutes of internet left...

Budapest and Mezokovesd

is completely modern. It was also really hot. Cool buildings, museums, castles, and baths.  Those pesky turks who ruled here for 700 years left public baths in almost every city.  It is a cool shade of culture and empires and conqering history.  The events and sights seen in Budapest are too numerous to mention.  The exchange rate was interesting and very confusing in math.  I bought some new clothes with the fashion advice of Claire and Nina (the first clothes I had bought myself since high school) and was glad not to know exactly how much they cost.  I also accidently bought a cd when we were dancing on the grass at an outdoor impromptu band performance because I though I was giving a 100 bill, not a 1000 bill.  It was dark, ok, and it's really only about $10, I think...

That same night/morning, Claire and Nina finally got a taxi to take them to the airport (though I think again they used their exchange rate to profit on us americans) and I took the train out to Zita's town in Eastern Hungary.  Her town is called Mezokovesd and is as hard to say as it is to spell.  It was a completely different world out in the agricultural village town system than Budapest, but still what seemed to me to be a very prosperous country.  Zita and her family were great hosts, showing me the whole town and surounding countryside, and nieghboring castle town and going to more Turkish baths (we couldn't swim because we didn't have swim caps) and local wine and teaching me how to play tennis and yeah, one packed awesome 24 hours. 

The highest point in the Carpathians

High Tatras national park looks almost like the Tetons.  The trails are well marked and well populated with tourists from all over europe.  There is a system of huts to sleep in much like the AT in america.  We only went for a day hike and didn't summit anything mainly because we packed way to little water.  The coolest part was as soon as we got off the bus in a little town called Nova Lesna at the base of the mountains, these kids playing in the park invited us back to their house where they had a few extra bedrooms for travellers just like us.  It was very affordable, and I got so excited that I accepted the grandmother's dinner offer also, much to the chagrin of my fellow travellers who were not nearly so accustomed to a diet consisting of cabbage and meat.  I thought the food was fine, but it was by no means subtle.  Ok, I think this brings my blog up to sometime in late June.  What did we do next???

American Women in Velyki Mosty

After another long border crossing (come on EU, let Ukraine in) we (Claire Nina and I) made it back to my city-like village.  It was nice to have a more relaxing day, and highlights included blueberry picking, swimming in the river and making banana bread for Ira's birthday.  Unfortunately, by the time we got to her house on a trail which didn't really exist, we forgot to sing her happy birthday. 

 

The next day we explored Lviv, it was cool to see new reactions to things that had become routine for me.  I saw my second ballet and made a complete fool of myself trying out some dancing moves afterwords.

 

That night we took a train to Uzhgorod, a border city mixing Ukrainian, Hungarian, Roma, Romanian  and Slovakian cultures.  Most poeple there seem to think of themselves as more European than Ukrainian.  We could see the mountains in the distance, but didn't have time to get out there.  It was nice to stay in a hotel with a stand up shower.

 

The next day we crossed the border to Slovakia.  Everybody was bringing things they bought in Ukriane across the border to resell at higher prices.  Trying to understand what one dude on the bus was trying to get us to take for him until we crossed the border provided an introduction to Melanie, a Switzerlandian girl who was brave enough to travel Ukraine by herself.

 

Slovakia was absolutely beautiful, the same rustic feeling as Ukraine, but cleaner somehow.  Maybe it was the addition of trash cans in public places, or maybe a growing recycling industry, but it was nice to see a really clean country.

Krakow, way back when

I will try to update a crazy summer in a series of out of date, surely inaccurate and probably dreadfully insufficient posts.  Starting where I left off.

 

Krakow, June 16^th and 17th.  My bus arrived earlier than I thought it would.  I had time to kill and a bladder to empty before Claire and Nina would arrive at 9:30.  The only problem was Central Europe's obsession with pay toilets.  It was not expensive, but I had no local currency, so, beginning to move into the pain stage of bladder control, I found an atm and got some money.  Went back to the bathroom,  but my money was too big and the toilet lady could not give me change for such a large bill, so, back upstairs to find some breakfast and break the bill.  It all worked out in the end, but I wish that some public funding could go to free toilets in all big cities.  It would make metros and city parks so much better smelling.

            As the train stopped, I happened to be standing exactly outside the window of the train car that Nina and Claire were in. 

            The night on the bus made me quite tired.  Krakow is beautiful, castles, churches, dragons, rivers.  Only one night in the hostel.  Day two out to Auschwitz and Birkinau.  Overwhelming death and sadness.  Almost dulling to the senses, especially walking through a room full of shoes, human hair and a reconstructed gas chamber.  The sense of memory is strong, but I think I feel more touched by the synagogue I walk past everyday in my town, a more relatable level of history, where the actual reality is imaginable, horrible and terrible, but not overwhelming.  No more internet time here.  Next entry, Claire and Nina's visit to Lviv and Velyki Mosty.

away from internet

I promise to update everyone about at least some of the adventures (lots of camping, and swimming) I've been having on Saturday.  I'm home for one day now and headed up to some national park with lakes tomorrow morning. Saturday, blog update.  Got it.