Here we go again

I'm getting really good at this short story stuff. By now I have enough material to drop out of school and become a professional writer. Where am I getting all of my material from, you ask? It's simple really. You try to spend two weeks amidst Russian conversation where you have to make up four out of five words. Most of the time I'm comically far from the truth and so come my ideas for short stories. I'll call them "Russian Conversations", I think.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. Spending so much time away from native English speakers has taken a toll on my mother tongue, but has done wonders for understanding and even participating in conversation. The last part is a lie, I still can't even talk my way into giving alms to someone on the side of the street (It took a couple of iterations before she understood that I wanted to give her money). Understanding is a whole 'nother story though, and it's worked wonders during our two week trip to Ukraine.

In short we wandered around our first city with a brilliant artist, stayed at a self-important weapon collector's house for new years, slept beneath telescopes, in the middle of an excavation site, swam in the icy waves of the black sea at the feet of mountains littered with palaces. You know, all the usual new years stuff.

As eyes are the windows into your soul, strangers are the mirrors through which you can look back through your eyes. This is even more true when you're immersed in a different culture and language. Things become simpler, those complex, dramatic ideas you have floating around in your head are distilled to the simple ideas easily communicated by hand gestures, grunting and occasionally a coherent sentence or two. In this way, I spent two weeks learning a great deal about myself and my friends (not to mention Russian).

Details? You want details? Oh man, that's a long story. We'll save those for the slideshow when I see you next. We'll keep with general impressions. Ukraine is a palpably different country from Russia. What do I mean? When I first entered the Ukraine, Oksana and I were greeted with the stereotypical police bullying-for-bribes scenario that we are all told to expect. The cities at first glance looked similar to Russia, the language was the same, hell even the potatoe pies were the same. You have to wait for the differences to show themselves. For instance, I saw fewer than eight police on the streets, in all the eight cities I visited in Ukraine. People were not only better versed in politics but they had an opinion, maybe because there was more than one opinion broadcast on tv. Presidential elections are this week, and all around Yalta and Sevastopol there were booths for not one, two, but five different parties. And not all of them were directly affiliated with an authoritarian president/prime minister regime.

I left Moscow two weeks ago, and I returned to a completely different city.

I'll try my best to put up some photos in the near future, and maybe write some more narrative before I forget the good stuff.

I hope you meet the new year in festivity, joy, and good champagne!