Moldova: A Poor Country With a Fun Gypsy Feel

The train ride to Moldova took 15 hours, from 8:30 a.m. until 11:30 p.m., most of the time being spent sitting at border crossings waiting on slow moving border guards and customs officials to check the whole train. Hours passed slowly. The countryside was pretty, though littered with plastic bags and bottles of beer. The bag of snacks was dwindling, not enough pretzels, not enough beer, not enough grapefruit juice. The Moscow-to-Chisinau had mostly emptied in Kiev, and most of the remaining passengers were getting off well before reaching Moldova. By the time we hit the border, my friend Fleur and I were almost the only people in our wagon. Rolling into Chisinau, I was immediately struck by the lack of capital flair. The main train station was a dull affair (in contrast to the stations in Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, and other big Soviet cities), and the feeling of provinciality hung over the dull buildings built in the later Soviet style—cheap 1970’s eyesores. We managed to get a hold of our host over Skype on the McDonalds Wi-Fi. Lena, a 20 year old German, picked us up and brought us back to her apartment in a high-rise Khrushchevka (build under Khrushchev, of poor quality). She was a volunteer with the European Voluntary Service, which is a bit like the American Peace Corps. She lived with a few other Germans and one Belgian guy. Fleur, who is from the Netherlands and lived in Berlin for a while, was right at home speaking German and Dutch with our new friends. Chisinau was an interesting mix of Soviet and Romanian. Moldovans are really just Romanians who were separated when Stalin decided to incorporate the Bessarabia region of Moldova into the Soviet Union after it was taken by the Red Army. The Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic was created and a policy promoting Moldovan national heritage was put in place as a means to stifle pro-Romanian sentiments. They started writing Romanian in the Cyrillic alphabet and calling it the Moldovan language. In 1990, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, the Moldovan Soviet changed the language policy and brought back the Latin alphabet. Strong nationalist parties took control and there were cries for reunification with Romania. Radical elements wanted to expel all of the Slavic peoples (Russians and Ukrainians mostly), who made up a majority in some regions. I’ll deal with that history separately. For whatever reason, Moldova remained its own nation and will probably continue to be its own nation since Romania has now joined the EU, and the EU doesn’t want to take on the poorest country in Europe. Downtown Chisinau is basically just one street with a few big government buildings and some Western high-end stores that have come in to cater to the ever-present small group of super rich in every post-Soviet country. Most of the old buildings are crumbling ruins. Lena took us to an abandoned theatre. We had to climb through what used to be a window to get inside, and I ripped my pants in the process. The building used to be beautiful and opulent. Intricate Corinthian columns and ornate moldings were now covered with graffiti. The floor was rubble, bits of plaster and stone chipped or torn from the walls and ceiling. Trash filled the corners. In one of the stairwells was a dirty cot where someone had obviously slept the night before. The ceiling had fallen away in parts, leaving the rooms completely exposed to the elements. This had probably once been the most beautiful building in the city. The Soviet buildings aren’t fairing much better, particularly the housing blocks on the outskirts of town. The main government building in the center has a big pedestal in front where an enormous Lenin used to stand. He fell quickly after the Soviet Union. On both sides of the building were semi-permanent protests, one about discrimination against blacks in Moldova and the other set up by a veteran of the Transdnistria war who wanted government benefits. I knocked on the door of the little shack where the veteran and his wife were living. His wife emerged from the smelly room with a toddler by her side. She agreed to an interview the next day. Pavel, a 19 year old Moldovan and a friend of Lena’s came along with us to the interview to translate. Inside the shack it was hot and smelled strongly of body odor. The place was heated by a small woodstove and there were no signs of a water hose or spot to cook. A few socks were drying on a piece of string strung across one wall. The woman sat on the dirty sleeping pallet with the toddler, while Fleur, Pavel, and I squeezed in on the cardboard floor. The interview was conducted in Romanian. The lady told us that her husband had been wounded in the war and was now an invalid, unable to work. They were hoping to get some kind of benefits from the Moldovan government so that they could buy an apartment. She told us that when Joe Biden came to Moldova, she and her husband had been chased out. She went on describing their life in the shack, a vacant expression on her face, speaking at an abnormally timid pace. She said that she was 44 years old, though I would have guessed 62 judging by the wrinkles and her generally tattered aura. I was too distracted by the surroundings to pay much attention to the interview, which started to sound like a bunch of rambling to me. The toddler, Gabriella, didn’t smile once, even when Fleur tickled her cheeks in a girly maternal way. While interviewing her, we met a young guy named Maksim Nidelku who was a self-proclaimed Moldovan-Romanian nationalist. We went with him to the park for another interview in which he detailed Moldova’s historical connection with Romania and how the Soviet “occupation” had created an artificial division. He claimed that it was the fault of a weak former president that Moldova had not been reabsorbed into greater Romania. On his jacket he wore a ribbon with the colors of the Moldovan flag. He rubbed his knuckles nervously during interview and balled his hands into fists. He talked a bit about the break away state of Transdnistria and said that it was being “occupied” by Russians and was just an arm of Moscow. He suspected that it would reunify with Moldova at some point. When asked if he would fight to regain the territory he answered with an emphatic affirmative, saying that he would take up arms with the hope of Romanian and NATO backing. Not likely. Moldovan culture is like one big wine-fuelled street festival with a strong gypsy feel. The markets in Chisinau were lively and chaotic, with people yelling back and forth over crates of pomegranates and madcap arrangements of tacky electric picture frames that make noise and have a moving light that simulates flowing water—the kind they always have in Chinese restaurants. On the sidewalk old ladies sell fatty cuts of beef and whole chickens with the heads and gizzards stuffed inside. There is no refrigeration and the meat just sits on newspaper all day in the sun. I bought a pair of handmade fur-lined slippers. I asked the lady what kind of fur it was, she answered proudly: dog. Moldovan food is quite a bit better than the bland Slavic cuisine. Wine is always the centerpiece, and it comes in the liters. Because of its more Southerly position, fresh vegetables play a much larger role in the food, though they are still very heavy on the cheese and meat. Most interesting for me was a dish that was really just grits, like what we eat in the south, though without the cheddar cheese. We sampled the local cuisine, particularly the wine, over a few parties with our new German expat friends. We also went to a salsa club in Chisinau, which was tremendously boring for me, though the salsa dancers were surprisingly good. Two days was too short a time for Moldova, but Fleur and I had to be on our way. We said goodbye and hopped on a bus bound for the breakaway region of Transdnistria.

Artist's Commune

On the floor of Anna’s room in the artist’s commune empty cans of spray paint sit in the corner. A Styrofoam mattress obstructing the doorway had steel netting nailed onto it, molded into what looked like flowing lava. Little bits of paper flew up in brief flight as the wind from my footsteps woke them. Colorful fingers made of plaster stood on the cluttered coffee table along with other knickknacks, a miniature kaleidoscope, a homemade pipe with wings and a propeller, and some incense holders.
A broken TV had been painted completely white save for a stenciled men’s bathroom figure over the screen, which lit up with static black and white ants when the TV was on. Skeletal wire forms like hollow clouds hung from the ceiling on copper thread. They glowed in the dark when the lights went out.
We had just been to the market in Shevchenko Square on the very outskirts of Kiev. There, grandmothers had come in for the day to sell potatoes, cabbage, carrots and onions from their gardens, $0.50 a pound. Fish from the thawing ponds and rivers were on display next to buckets of pickles and loose cigarettes. Anna led me around as we haggled with the women on the price of cottage cheese, sauerkraut or marinated eggplant. With each new purchase the bag I was carrying got heavier and heavier as it was filled with onions and cheese, wine and salo (salted pork fat).
I had taken the marshutka, a small private bus, out to the Northern tip of Kiev. Anna said she had a gun that we could shoot in the woods near her house. These woods mark the official end of Kiev and extend all the way into Belarus, though the Belarusian and Northern Ukrainian section of the woods were heavily contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1987.
The house sits on a hill just past a scrap-metal yard. It is secluded, a real escape from the city. From its high vantage point you can see the smokestacks and onion domed steeples of Kiev in the distance.
Disintegrating concrete steps crumble a bit as you step up onto the porch. In the entrance corridor the wall is bare in dirty and the floor is missing tiles. Artwork is strewn around the downstairs and discarded in corners after gallery appearances. Two bronze statues of some-or-another Soviet notable stood facing one another next to a shapeless wire sculpture. On the wall hung a proletarian scene of some cheerful workers taking a break, a grey factory in the background in what would otherwise be a country landscape.
Anna explained to me that this house had been requisitioned by the state from some high-level military commander. The house was converted into studio space and given to the National Academy of Arts, in whose possession it has remained. It was occupied by Soviet artists for decades, busy churning out “masterpieces” of Socialist Realism to grace civic centers across the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Today, selected artists are given the space free of charge.
On the upstairs landing I met one of the other residents of the house, a tall Ukrainian girl named Ira with jet-black hair, cut into a bowl. A tall watercolor of a wrinkly gnome was drying by the window in her room. She told me later that she did illustrations for books.
There was a couple with a young daughter who lived in the small house on the property. The Dad did airbrush painting and the Mom made batik fabric like they do in Ghana. Their daughter was rambunctious and loved the attention of all of the adults gave her (not that I’m an adult, really).
I helped Anna fish out the rifle case from behind an oversized yoga pad that was wedged behind an antique mirror and some other miscellaneous junk. We walked down into the front yard to meet everyone, me with the rifle case and a bottle of my favorite unfiltered Belgian style beer. I slung the rifle case over my back and we walked down the hill and across the street where we entered the first little neck of woods. A few hundred yards on we climbed an overpass that stretched across a busy highway leading into the city, and then through another neck of woods that was eventually dissected by a trolley car that ran right through the trees.
Our merry group trudged along through the snow, which was still thick on the ground in spite of the recent thaws. The snow in the forest stays around long after the snow on the sidewalks because it is never cleared.
The little girl, Marta, was leading the group and would lie in the snow and roll down every hill we came to. She was learning English in school and told me about ten or eleven times that “I’m seven years old, my name is Marta!” In Russian, she told me that she was actually six, but had forgotten how to say that number in English.
In an empty field that interrupted the forest we decided to shoot. I unpacked the gun and was disappointed to see that it was actually only a pellet gun. I was under the impression that it would be a real rifle, and it certainly weighed as much as one with a wooden stock, full metal casing and an expensive scope too. It was probably better that it wasn’t a real gun though, as none of us had ear protection and Marta was running all over the place. We shot at a penciled cross on a piece of paper, but no one hit it because the scope wasn’t calibrated.
Over on the path someone pointed out a tiny mouse on top of the snow. It began to scrabble away but Marta was immediately on it and had it in her hands. The little critter was flustered after being dropped and scooped back up after trying to scurry away. This game went on for a few minutes until the mouse finally fell into deep snow and burrowed itself away from capture. Marta dug frantically and when she couldn’t find the mouse, she stomped on the hole in frustration.
It surprised me to see this little girl do that, to be cruel. Her Dad pulled her away angrily and chastised her. She ran off to pout. Luckily, the mouse reemerged a few minutes later unscathed, and we made sure not to point it out to Marta.
The leather of my boots was darkening with moisture and my socks were already soggy, so we made our way back to the house. This time one of the other guys carried the rifle.
Back in Anna’s room we unpacked the food from the market and started to boil some potatoes on a little hot-plate in the “kitchen,” which really amounts to a shelf with some spices on it and just enough room for a cutting board. I transferred the pickles, sweet celery root and eggplant salad into separate bowls while Anna made tea and heated up some gretchka, or buckwheat.
While Anna was making tea I scrolled through the music on her computer and was amazed to find a big collection of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who is a folk singer from Kentucky, not well known in the States and virtually unheard of in Ukraine. I put on one of his familiarly weird songs with its eerie Appalachian sound, Southern vocal inflection, and grim lyrics.
After a while some of the others began to file in and one of them brought a bottle of Ukrainian samogond, or moonshine. This same guy who brought it also recognized the Bonnie “Prince” Billy song and I discovered the source of Anna’s collection!
We poured a few shots of the homemade spirits and then a few more. A hot plate appeared and we began to slow cook onions and celery root and pork fat directly on the griddle. There were handled pans that we filled with potatoes and cooked fixings, and then covered with chives, dill, cottage cheese and yellow sharp cheese. These dishes went under the hot plate to melt into a mini casserole. It was a Ukrainian fondue, but with more oils and fat.
A few more shots of samogond and a glass of wine or two (brought from France by Anna’s Ukrainian expat friend), and I was nearly falling asleep on the Styrofoam mattress that had been moved to the floor.
We got up together and everyone walked back down to the square where I missed the last marshutka of the night by a few seconds. We walked over to a bus stop where a couple of other late night revelers were trying to hitch rides with passing cars. Anna hailed an unmarked car and negotiated for him to take me home. As my unofficial taxi sped off, I saw my friends wandering off to find more wine.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Two blind men with canes were waiting to cross the zebra stripe that bisects the busy street. They flailed their canes about, feeling for cars, trees, people, and snow banks. A man with an acne-scarred face and an off-kilter beanie hat held close to his friend in a dark leather jacket with sheep-skin lining. They both gazed absently at some undeterminable point in space, concentrating on the sounds around them. As it swung about, one of the canes nearly hit a young girl in the face. She recoiled and stared at the men as if they had done something quite unseemly. Standing at the crosswalk, I put my hands on their shoulders, applying a bit of pressure— telling them to wait. They could hear the cars going past, but could not gauge the distance between them. When a small lull in the traffic came I helped them across the street.
We made it to the other side, though the two men had been hesitant to cross since they could still hear the engines and the sound of the tires rolling over the snow. A driver had stopped to let pedestrians go, but they couldn’t see that and I didn’t know how to explain it in Russian. One of the men asked me “can we cross?” “Da,” I said.
I left them in the park, assuming they were capable of feeling their way through. It was a pathetic sight watching them step into filthy unseen puddles and stagger into piles of melting slush. The melting icicles drip down onto the sidewalk now that the thaw has begun. The blind men may have thought it was raining.
A big tree grows through the middle of the sidewalk, and the two blind men stopped short in front of it, feeling it with their canes. What was this obstacle in front of them? Not a person because it doesn’t grunt or squeal when the cane hits it. Not alive because it doesn’t jump out of the way. The muffled thwack as the cane hits probably suggested that it was a tree, or perhaps a signpost.
They stepped to the right to pass but the man with the acne-scarred face found himself reeling in deep snow. They stepped back, together. In front of the tree again they felt around for the presence of empty space with their canes, drawing a mental map with this intimate cartography. After a few seconds of surveying and plotting, the two men decided to make a pass on the left side. They made it.
Physical disability in this country is incapacitating. There is very little support for invalids or the disabled, neither social nor infrastructural. This leaves many of them as beggars. The other day a man with a horribly disfigured face stood at the bottom of the stairs in the metro with a sign that read, “Help me please.” One of his eyes had severe discoloration, a striking opalescent white where there should have been coffee colored iris. His lips were frozen into a scowl, an expression of agony, disfigured by some nerve damage or maybe a stroke. I dropped a few loose bills into his bag. I wasn’t sure whether he registered it or not.
A young gypsy-faced girl hobbled down the length of the trains on crutches, stopping every few feet to recite some spiel in Ukrainian. Her legs were twisted, as if by rickets, into grotesque contortions and paralyzed in a living rigor mortis. She would have been delicate and pretty in another life.
Grizzled geriatrics stand in the corners with mittened hands or cardboard coffee cups extended to collect change. Some of them mutter prayers under their breath. They seem absent, chewed by dementia maybe.
People help most of the time. On every pass there is always someone who drops a few Kopecks or a few Griven into the collection bags, cups, or hands- equivalent to about $0.50. Is it enough to live? Not by a standard that we know.
I watched the two blind men for a while after I left them in the park. The sympathetic impulse to shepherd them through the thicket of cigarette-and-beer kiosks and snowed under ornamental landscaping left me pinned to the spot pondering the moral implications. Surely, I thought, they wouldn’t be strolling about if they weren’t confident in their navigational capabilities. Would it be patronizing to stand behind them and lead them along by the shoulders? Ultimately, I decided against it.
As I turned the corner to the Zoloti Vorota metro entrance, I saw them walk to a dead end, a park bench placed against a snow mound. They could not walk through the park, but had to hug the perimeter in a trajectory of right angles, using the landscaped border as a guide. They would soon come up against the steps, covered in ice and snow and treacherous whether one is blind or not. Would there be someone to help them make their way down the stairs? They held one another close, whipping their canes around like a pair of feelers, tugging left to avoid trees. The blind leading the blind.
Alongside the beauty of this country there is a foulness that emerges unexpectedly from time to time to sting you. Beautiful girls in fur and delicate hosiery juxtaposed against the maimed men huddling in the entrance to the metro for warmth. Young men in the middle of the day sliding along the walls for support, a liter of cheap vodka vandalizing kidney and liver, stripping them of cognizance, and perpetuating the demographic trend of 60-year male life expectancy. The latest model Porsche Cayenne speeding past the crosswalk where two blind men wait to cross the street.

Pickle

I bought a pickle in the metro station on my way home today. The pizza I had at lunch had been small and I inadvertently paid about double what I owed, so by mid afternoon I was feeling rather foolish and rather hungry. The pickle only cost $0.15 and was much more satisfying. I bit off the end of it with my front teeth and crunched it with my molars. The vinegar so acidic it must have eaten away the thinnest outer layer of cells on my tongue.
Wearing the customary face of total indifference, verging on a misanthropic scowl, I passed the little card table where this woman was selling homemade produce. She had a type of sauerkraut and a tray full cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and meat. The pickles were in the center of the table. They were swimming in a milky bath of acid in a clear plastic drawer that would have been better suited for storing old pay-stubs and tax returns.
Next to her was a younger girl selling currants in big glass jars that she had sat on the dirty stone floors. People had been tracking filth through this corridor all day. The grey slush sticks in the tread of boots and melts in the relative warmth of the underground passage. Muddy slop covers the whole floor, and puddles form if the workers don’t squeegee it every few minutes. The granite blocks that pave the floor are completely for this climate. Rain and melted snow makes them impossibly slick. How many hips are broken on the steps leading down to the corridor, I can only guess.
These sellers had pitched their little stands just in time for the rush hour swarms that would come rushing out of the station. Maybe a few would stop to buy something. Men without wives to cook for them; wives without time to cook; young professionals who left the village and miss folksy fare. However, most of the horde would just flow past with blinders on.
There is a word in Russian to describe a traffic jam of people. They say tolpa, which is distinct from the word for a traffic jam of cars (probka). As nearly everyone relies on public transportation in this part of the world, the congestion can be horrendous. Like tens of thousands of bees in an immense underground hive adorned with icons in the style of socialist realism, they undulate and oscillate moving to and from the exits. A screeching drone fills the subterranean metro chamber as the train rolls in. A great mass of souls files out of the newly arrived train, and another mass squeezes itself in. Everyone rushes for the escalators.
The metro station is a hub for economic life. Semi-permanent vendor stalls cram together both underground in the station and up on the street. Each stall tries to corner some market. There is a stall for meat, a stall for central-Asian bread, for candy, for school supplies, tea and coffee, DVDs, and one for slippers. Sometimes old women sit at card tables and sell individual cigarettes for 20 kopek, or around $0.04. There are newspaper stands, where I buy my Komsomolskaya Pravda, and snack stands where I buy my pretzels.
I had passed by the woman selling pickles. My stomach felt sorely empty. I hesitated and then stopped, interrupting the flow of the mass behind me. I made an about-face and went back to the little woman, all wrapped up in a thick coat and a fluffy knit hat. I asked her how much her pickles were.
“Fifteen Hriven per kilo,” she said.
“How much for one?” I asked. She thought for a moment. People usually buy in bulk here, and I understand why. Often times I will go to the store and they will have none of the products that I want to buy. When they are stocked it is exciting and I feel the strong urge to buy their whole inventory and bring it home to store in my own little cache.
“One Hriven,” she said. She put a plastic bag over her hand, fished one of the pickles out of the acid bath and handed it to me. I paid her the money and munched on my pickle as I climbed the stairs out onto the street.

Ukrainian Food: meat, grease, and sour cream

One major way in which the United States differs from the rest of the world is in its lack of a national cuisine. There are a few patently American dishes, like hotdogs, boiled peanuts and corn bread, but nearly every other dish is a hybridized form of some other nation’s culinary fare. French fries are Belgian, pizza is Italian, fried chicken is West African, and hamburgers are [allegedly] German- from Hamburg. Not to mention Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and Thai, which have also found their way into our national culinary culture. Of course, we are a nation of immigrants, so it’s perfectly sensible to be this way
In Eastern Europe, however, national cuisine is still a defining characteristic, as defining even as language. Ukrainians eat Ukrainian food every day, for every meal, and have little desire to broaden their tastes. Ethnic food has hardly taken off. You can find an odd assortment of Italian and Japanese restaurants in the cities, but there is little beyond that. In Moscow, a city of over 10 million people (larger than New York), there were only 2 or 3 Indian restaurants. I have only seen one in Kiev (a city of around 6 million).
I have been living here for nearly a month and have eaten nothing but Ukrainian food. Every day I wake up to a Ukrainian breakfast, go to a Ukrainian cafeteria for lunch, and come home to a Ukrainian dinner. If I go out to dinner, it is to a Ukrainian restaurant.
There is no real breakfast food here, so the morning meals vary from day to day. Some days breakfast is fatty sliced sausage or cheese laid over thickly buttered bread. Fried eggs are popular, though they never fully cook the egg white so it is a bit like eating cold snot. Some days it will be thick sausages that taste like bologna, other days it will be hot-dogs and pickles. One morning I was given salmon patties and gretchka, or buckwheat. The safest dish is kasha, which is basically just slightly sweetened oatmeal.
If breakfast did not pack on enough calories from fat, then lunch certainly does the trick. The first course is usually a salad, but do not let that confuse you. Salad here means a few vegetables to go with the mayonnaise. Borsch, a bright pink soup made from beets and cabbage, is a staple and is delicious with a dollop of sour cream. Then come potatoes and stroganoff or maybe fried cutlet. Finally, a serving of vereneki, or dumplings, with more sour cream on top. I usually wash it all down with a glass of chilled berry tea, or compote.
Dinners are a somewhat lighter affair, consisting of soup and some kind of meat entrée. Potato patties stuffed with ground beef, ground pork cutlets with onion, ground fish patties, or dumplings are typical. If eating at a restaurant, I wash all of this down with a liter of beer.
The other day I walked into the kitchen to find my host mother preparing food. She had a big bowl of slimy dark meat that she was about to fry with onions. Fearing for the worse, I asked her what kind of meat it was. She smiled and said “pechonka,” or liver! I flatly refused to eat it in spite of her protests and insistence that it was “vkusno,” or tasty.
Even though it is usually over-salted, bland, greasy, fattening, starchy, and reheated in the microwave, I have been enjoying the food. The extra calories are absolutely necessary in the extreme cold, even if you can feel your blood running thicker.

Freezing Arctic Weather and Pick Pockets

This is the absolute coldest time of year- right in the heart of winter- and the temperature creeps down into the -20’s during the daytime. In this kind of weather you can feel the boogers in your nose freeze when you breathe. When I walk to the metro after taking my morning shower, my hair freezes. Coming out of the metro I am engulfed in a huge cloud of steam as the heat coming through the doors instantly vaporizes the frigid air.
Enormous icicles dangle from porches and from the tops of buildings. Some days the sidewalks are blocked off to let workers clean the roofs and knock the ice down. I hear from the Ukrainians that people are killed every year by falling icicles. The other day I picked an enormous one from a low hanging building. It weighed about 20 pounds and was more than three feet long. I can imagine what it would do to a person if it fell on them from three stories up.
Although it is as cold as the center of hell (think Dante’s hell) the weather has been beautiful. Every day has been sunny and bright without a cloud in the sky. It’s too bad it’s too cold to go on walks.
It is so cold here that my classes were cancelled for the week. Only my economics classes though, not the language ones. I guess Ukrainians can’t handle the cold the way Russians can.

Today the French traveller fella’ and I were planning to go cross country skiing, even if it meant battling the frost. I stepped into the crowded metro and was bumped into by some guy. I felt something move in my back pocket, and when I reached back and patted myself my wallet was gone. The metro was moving at this point and there were three guys standing close to me who were all likely suspects. I grabbed the guy closest to me and started feeling his pockets, but there was nothing. He even opened his bag to show me that it was empty. There was another greasy Euro-trash acne-scarred guy who I confronted, and then some other guy in a black hat who was acting suspiciously unaware.
Basically, the wallet was gone. The first guy was probably the guy who grabbed it out of my pocket. He then probably passed it off to one of those other guys, but how was I going the prove that? I decided to try to follow the guy in the black hat and so John Christoff and I got off the train. The guy in the black hat disappeared in the crowd and the other guys on the train were long gone.
They didn’t get that much: only 200 griven ($25), a few 1$ bills (useless here) and an assortment of small bills from Ghana and Lithuania. But, now my driver’s license, library card, gym card, student i.d., and my 50% off coupon for the Ukrainian cafeteria are all gone. It’s frustrating and inconvenient, but everything is replaceable.
After being robbed at machete point in Ghana, I can’t complain too much.

Expats

Expatriates are a unique breed of people and consistently prove to be more interesting than the general population. There is some extraordinary grit in the expat soul, some insatiable restlessness that pushes them along to greater adventures. They straddle the border of madness and eccentricity, living lives outside of the cultural box that they were born in. They can’t really be said to belong to any nation, to be bound to any country, culture, or people. They are global citizens, so to speak, as they hop from country to country and continent-to-continent, living and working.
This quirkiness usually makes for an altogether charming and friendly person. The Americans and Western Europeans who I have met here in Kiev and also in Russia, Estonia, and Ghana are like characters out of books.
Living in a foreign country, you are part audience and part actor. You spend a lot of time observing the locals and marveling at the strange ways in which they conduct their daily lives. It’s like being Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas present: you can watch the people and see how they live, but cannot interact. At first you are caught off guard, especially when they start babbling at you in their foreign tongues and you have no clue what it is they are intending to communicate. It feels like being on a different planet at first. But then you start to notice that when the locals interact with one another they are dropping recognizable emotional cues. Whatever that guy just said to that girl, she is obviously smitten; whatever happened today, the woman on the metro is just ready to get home. You can see things in people’s faces that language need not express.
With time, the strange scenes take on a feeling of normalcy and you start to notice yourself assimilating. Of course, you never become like the locals, but the strange babble they speak starts to take on meaning and you are even able to babble back. You start to feel like you are an actor in the drama and another one of the people making the city operate.
I am studying at a language school here in Kiev called NovaMova and it attracts people from all over the world trying to learn Russian.
People come to NovaMova for a few weeks at a time or a few months, as in my case. Most people come here alone, so everyone is always very open to making friends. I always make sure to talk to the newcomers (although, I am a newcomer myself) and make them feel welcome by inviting them to lunch or something. In this way, we have made a giant entourage that always goes out together to bars and other social activities.
Everyone has some story to tell. I met one British guy who lives in Geneva working for the United Nations. He had been sent as a translator to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which, for those who don’t know, is one of the worst places to ever go on the whole planet. He was sent as a translator to document war crimes and human rights violations.
Another guy here is a professional wind-surfer/sailor and extreme sportsmen. He works 4 months out of the year during the summer season, and spends the other 8 months travelling and learning languages. He was a GreenPeace activist and was shot at with tear-gas canisters while protesting in the West Bank.
Then there is another guy who is a professional traveller as far as I can tell. He is French but lives in Singapore, and has been to almost every far-flung region of the earth. He was telling me about sailing around Antarctica, hiking through the Himalayas in winter, trekking through the wild mountains of Tajikistan (at the border of Afghanistan), riding over snowy peaks on an old Soviet helicopter in Kazakhstan, sightseeing in Yemen and Eritrea, and crossing the Sahara on foot from Senegal through Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia. He also toured North Korea and Madagascar.
One of our good friends from Switzerland, Lorraine, just left with her boyfriend, Paddi, to take the Trans-Siberian railway. They will be heading from Kiev to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and then across the vast Russian wilderness past the Ural Mountains and through Siberia. At Lake Baikal they will catch a southbound train and go through Mongolia into China. The train ends at Beijing, and from there I think they will probably travel around Southeast Asia.
Several of my good friends here have studied in Central Asia- in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan- and that has really fueled my desire to visit. So, if it works out, next stop Kyrgyzstan!
There are a lot of good folks here and I am really enjoying myself.