The Four Mile Circus

Georgia on My Mind

2011-12-22T12:36:00.015-05:00

It's been weeks since I returned from Georgia, but given the time I had, my snowy weekend in Tiblisi is still powder fresh on my mind. Forgive the Ray Charles title, but I'm sure Georgians would be proud to call that old masterpiece theirs.

A "mashrutka" is a beat-up van that acts as affordable regional transportation in the rising land of the Fallen Red Star. They are always running (except when they break down), often rusty, sometimes quick, and they never have seatbelts. The driver is usually a smoking, black-jacketed, well-worn wise man of the road.

I attempted to take the posh way out. I booked a flight from Yerevan to Tiblisi a month earlier. Eventually I discovered secondhand that Armavia was canceling all Tiblisi-bound flights. I never got a phone call or email from the airline about my cancellation. Good thing I had a friend on an email list of consequence, or else I'd have been left at the sleek but empty airport without a way across the Caucuses, bereft of at least 24 precious hours of my Georgia time.

The mashrutka was the way to go anyway. The ride was as one friend put it through "stunning" landscape. On the way out of Yerevan, the lesser Caucuses lifted on either side of a climbing plateau like giant, rolling white capped waves. Eventually flowing water reversed course and the mashrutka switched back and forth along steep curves into a barren, but gorgeous valley. Here I remembered the rule about riding in mashrutkas: never look forward through the windshield, lest it affect your stomach, your bowels, or your sense of attachment to mortality.

According to the sign, the new border post on the Armenian side was built courtesy of the US Embassy. The mashrutka driver ordered everyone off, and after passing through an open air immigration checkpoint, I walked across a bridge into Georgia. It reminded me of the border between India and Nepal at Kakarbitta, which was the last time I walked across a bridge that formed the boundary between two nations.

In the midst of the jet age, it is a great thrill to walk over a border.

It's always a marvel to me that so many nations are completely different when passing over an artificial political boundary, as if long ago people sensed the different aura and separated themselves as naturally if the border had been the impenetrable wall of the Andes or the Sahara.

Whereas Armenia's mountains are round, yet rough and foreboding, Georgia's mountains seem more crisply defined, but smooth and storybook like- decidedly more Alpen. The pine forests in Georgia are thick, whereas Armenia has sparse taiga-esque vegetation.

Entering Tiblisi for the first time, I immediately got the magic of the place. The spires, the lights, the steam of the hot springs, the smoke of the chimneys, and all the energy filled the river gorge which the city straddles. Tiblisi means "Hot Springs" in Georgian. Funny that there's also a Warm Springs in the State of Georgia where FDR used to go to recoup and divest himself of the weight of the Potomac.

This was the first place I've ever been to that seem like three major religions live in complete harmony. This is of course an illusion: given history, not all has always been a religious love-in in Tiblisi, and some gigantic places like New York, Jerusalem and Istanbul have even more churches, mosques and temples all in one place. But it was the way the three types of buildings were contently situated around the town - as if halls of worship were like different colannades of the same temple.

So I have a confession to make. I didn't really do a whole lot when I was in Tiblisi. But like any good student of political science, I have plenty of excuses. First of all, it was snowing beautifully (i.e. pretty hard) for nearly the entire time I was there and I didn't bring proper footwear.

Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine have something in common. The Soviet Union saw to that. They all have sword weilding "Mother" statue on hills above their capital cities. The USA installed television towers. Tiblisi has both.

I had a cozy hotel room at the Hotel City which had a glass elevator and thoughtfully supplied a corkscrew in every room (eh hem Le Meridien Senegal!).

Also I enjoyed eating so much that sightseeing played second fiddle. Georgian food is MARVELOUS. I first discovered it in Ukraine a few years ago, as there was a Georgian restuarant for a time in Sevastopol. The higher ups in the Soviet government used to take visiting foreign dignitaries out for Georgian food in Moscow to brag about this region's culinary acumen.

Next time I'm back in Georgia, I'll blog about exactly Georgian food is, but if you don't know, google it and then make a reservation. Meanwhile, above is a picture of a khatchapuri joint. Look at the adverts on the window and listen to your belly grumble.

I did go out one night. I had dinner with a Georgian friend of mine who I went to grad school with back in Denver five years ago. We ate and drank and told stories. She explained how she just barely escaped the Russians invading her country in 2008. We talked proudly for hours about how productive and awesome all of our friends are.

Ahhhhhhrrrrkkkkitechture. Very impressive here. Balconies! Pitched roofs! A mix between Crimean Tatar, Key West and Kyiv. What a match heaven and the gorge made.

Then there were the hot springs. I love hot water and will go out of my way to lounge about in it. Tiblisi's namesake is of course its hot water, the Orbeliani Baths date from the 17th century, and Pushkin had the best bath of his life there (thanks Lonely Planet). According to Gilpin, the best bath of his life so far was on Mt. Kurama in Japan, but awarded second place in his exhaustive list is the sulfur-infused, Samarkandish Orbeliani Baths in Tiblisi. This experience had all the finest ingredients. There was a near perfect temperature (around 105 degrees F) and total zen tranquility - one is granted his own private chamber with a hot spring pool and a circular hole in the 400 year old domed ceiling, just big enough to let steam escape and snow fall on one's bended arm.

It took this experience to decide that I must install my retirement cabin atop a geologically volatile area. With an daily experience like the Orbeliani Baths, earthquakes and volcanos could't possibly cause an old man to worry about dying anything but extremely happy.

So as you can see, I took lots of pictures with my new camera. These pictures demonstrate the extremely rich and diverse religious and cultural heritage of one of the greatest places I've ever visited.

These pictures speak for themselves. I didn't do any reading, tour-patronizing or museum-going. So it follows that I will end this blog by telling you all how I paid $50 to swim in 50m long Vake Pool, one of the greatest swimming pools on the face of mother earth. Not a single drop of chlorine. It is filtered by UV radiation.

Georgia - what a glorious place in time to have existed, if only for 60 hours.

Thanksgiving in Armenia

2011-12-05T11:57:00.024-05:00

It's little more than a quick hop from Kyiv to Yerevan. It's like flying from Baltimore to Chicago, with plenty of time for turns with heavy traffic and a little weather over Midway and O'hare.

But only there's not a whole lot of air traffic over Yerevan. The plane, which had been filling the entire flight with illicit cigarette smoke leaking from the bathroom, simply began its slow descent somewhere over the Black Sea coast, and continued on that way all the hour long way to EVN. The kids next to me were Ukrainians in a rock band, on route to a gig, barely conscious, though enough so to constantly offer me the bottle of Jameson they were drinking. "This is for courage!" They said. "We're scared of flying!"

The sky was brillantly clear on landing, even in the late afternoon in winter, fortune on my side, I inhaled almost choking on the breathtaking scene of Mt. Ararat and the snow capped wonderland scattered about the wheel wells and wingtips.

The Ukrainian band opened another bottle, this time, it was Jim Beam. "What is that one for?" I asked. "We've landed."

"Of course, to celebrate that we are in Armenia!" They responded, befuddled at my nescience.

I'd come to Armenia to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends. This was my fourth Thanksgiving away from home, and I'd learned that the only proper way to spend the best American holiday abroad was with good people. (See blog I wrote on Thankgsiving for the US Embassy in Ukraine's website: http://usembassykyiv.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/its-thanksgiving-everywhere/#more-697)

I immediately liked Armenia. It adds some more post Soviet intensity to what I'm used to in Kyiv. For example, a lot of people wear black leather coats and duckbill hats in Kyiv, but in Armenia, everyone wears black leather coats and duckbill hats. In Kyiv, a lot of men smoke, but in Yerevan, nearly all men seem to smoke, and a lot too. The buildings outside the very center are ruthlessly proletariat.

This scene is actually the entrance to a metro station. The very central one.

But then again it's definitely not like any of the old red star realm I had been to yet. Like Crimea, Armenia is multi-sided crystal reflecting the bright spectrum of influences surrounding it. While Russian is widely spoken, vendors sell saffron from Iran. Turkey looms large over the food and music. One can have a khatchapuri for lunch and hear Georgian. The nut store we visited reminded me of visions of a travel show on Syria.

I always thought that a nation with such a heavily scattered diaspora across the globe should have a population at least of fifty million. After all, I think I knew more Armenian-Americans growing up than I did Canadian-Americans. But apparently, Armenia has only two million people in the whole country. This tiny mountain nation, which reminded me of windswept southern Wyoming, seems to only have half a growing season, so they make the most of it and make good cognac and good concrete instead.

My friends Nick and RaeJean live in Yerevan and they were having a big Thanksgiving feast. A good plate of stuffing is ample motivation required to hop over the Sea of Azov, even if the plane was filled with cigarette smoke. Their friend Ania flew down from Paris (much more of a trip!) and joined us for a few days of stuffing our faces with poultry, potatoes, pumpkin pie and... ...pig fat.

On orders from RaeJean (RPCV Ukraine '03-'05), from the markets of Kyiv, I brought two kinds of "salo", which is basically like spreadable pig fat, black bread on which to smear it, and of course, honey pepper vodka. The two kinds of salo are: 1.) pure fat garlic infused, and 2.) a bit ham-ish with wee-tad specks of meat amongst the fat. I was amazed at the other guests who had never tried salo before literally dove right in. Molotsi folks! The Ukrainian band kids were right - for those uninitiated to salo, liquor is liquid courage.

Thanksgiving dinner was spectacular. An American turkey and an Armenian turkey. Corn, chutney and brussel sprouts. Beer bread. Deviled eggs. Buckets of Nick's homemade beer. Salad, stuffing and Peanuts on TV. And then it began to snow.

On Black Friday, we drove up into the mountains. To the right, you can just barely see the peak of Mt Ararat erupt magestically above the clouds. According to stories this is the mountain that Noah's ark landed on after the flood. It's hard to stop looking at it, given that there are no peaks nearby that come close to rivaling it. We left the traffic clogged environs of Yerevan to visit two sites: the Monastery of Geghard and the Roman ruins of the Garni Temple. Yes, that's right, ancient Rome in Armenia - it's like trying to picture dinosaurs in Anarctica.

From the USAID funded sign at Geghard, I learned that the complex was built in the 4th century.

I really let my new Nikon off its leash on this adventure. I'll shut up and let these very postable pictures speak for themselves.

The Future of Our World is Under Water

2011-11-19T02:08:00.028-05:00

Water is the world’s most volatile conundrum. It is concurrently the hardest and the softest compound. It carves right through solid rock like butter, yet flows through our thin, delicate veins over eighty years. Too little; we dry up. Too much; we drown. It is unspeakably beautiful and indescribably horrific.

The worst floods in forty years are afflicting Thailand. Hundreds are dead and thousands left homeless.

I was supposed to go to Bangkok for a two week business trip. After that, I was going to go on vacation to Vietnam for a week of exploring the alley mazes of Hanoi and the limestone labyrinths of nearby Ha Long Bay. Twenty four hours before departure, my organization relented and canceled the training I was to attend. Waters were threatening central Bangkok and they didn’t want to take any chances.
Given the suffering of the Thai people, my problem was a ridiculously minor one. I wanted a vacation, and needed to travel within a week, but where to go? Even though I was sure I wanted to get of Europe for a bit, there are plenty of destinations on this side of the world. But something was nagging at me. I had already my heart set on going back to East Asia. And I always wanted to learn how to scuba dive.

I read a story in the Bangkok Post about how the Thai government was frustrated that tourists were canceling their travel plans to destinations in the south because of the flooding threats on Bangkok. The old airport, Don Muang was under water, but the new international airport was fully operational and safe from flooding through innovative engineering foresight of the airport’s flood walls, drainage and advanced pumping.

Then I thought how Thailand was the perfect place to learn how to dive.

Then I thought how this would be the last week long window of opportunity for probably another year to learn how to dive.

So then I made a spur of the moment decision and booked myself a ticket to Bangkok via Istanbul. I decided that I would pack up and be at a diving school down in Khao Lak, north of Phuket within a week.

I had never planned an international trip at the last minute before. It was kind of thrilling. I found an opening in an Open Water class at a reputable diving outfit with a wicked name: “Wicked Diving” and readied my old green backpack for its return journeys to Turkey and Thailand.

Cheap air tickets will some time plan your trip for you. In this case, Turkish
Airlines planned for me to spend a night and a day in Istanbul.

Returning to a place you’ve been before diminishes the stress of travel tremendously. Last time I was in Turkey back in 2009, I got lost when trying to transfer from the airport subway line to the city tram via a confusing path through a sub-road market. This time, I arrived fresh off the quick hop from Kyiv and easily found my way to my cheap hotel in old Sultanahmet in a matter of less than an hour.

I dropped off my bags, and still full from plane food (yes airlines in Europe FEED their customers even on 90 minute flights!), I picked at a hummus plate with fresh baked bread at a colored glass lantern lit bistro. I watched in bewilderment the restaurant matron, as he adeptly picked out the nationality of passer-bys presumably by the way they walked and dressed, and then beckoned to them in their native tongue, Здравствуйте, приглошайте вам к ресторану!, Hallo, Sie sind zu meinem Restaurant eingeladen!, Bonjour, vous êtes invités à mon restaurant ! Ciao, sei invitato a mio ristorante!

Istanbul was an opportunity to break in my new camera, a Nikon 3100, and finally take some good pictures of one of the world’s most photogenic cities. As you can see, my blog-worthy pictures on this trip have already improved.

The Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia look much better under the lens of a Nikon then it did under the Ergo-lens of the $35 digital I spent years with. I still miss that small, light, cheap camera though. Some dastardly Swede has it now.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I passed this one – how often does one see the flags of three lands one has lived all arranged together randomly? Maybe unintentional, but yes, as a matter of fact I do indeed agree - the flags of the US, Ukraine and Wales all seem to go together quite nicely.

It was a nice, relaxing layover. I spent the day walking around Istanbul, dropped by a 500 year old hamam for a steam sweat, visited the Galata Tower, and ate an incredible fresh fish sandwich at a restaurant under the Galata Bridge as fishermen above me reeled up soon-to-be-fish sandwiches beside my table. Then I got lost in the Grand Bazaar. Literally.

The night flight from Istanbul to Bangkok took me over Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. I saw the bright lights of Lahore, and smiled at seeing dawn break across the face of the jagged wall of the Himalayas once again. Above the waters south of Bangladesh, I completed my circumnavigation of the planet Earth. Up until this trip, the furthest West I’d ever been was Bangkok, and the furthest East I’d ever been was Calcutta. I felt like I should’ve gotten a pin or something.

Impressed by Burma from the clearing morning air, I made a note that I’d have to make it there one day… …once the clouds burn off.

Final approach to BKK showed just how devastating the floods had been outside the city. Entire communities appeared as archipelagos of steel roofs. Cars were marooned on bridges that were flooded at both ends. Boats sped across farm fields like meteorites.

Bangkok’s new airport is gorgeous. It’s probably one of the nicest transportation hubs in the world.

I hopped a small Airbus to Phuket airport, where I was picked up by a waiting taxi and sped to the town of Khao Lak and my villa among the palms.

I spent the week in Khao Lak becoming a certified diver. Diving outfits the world over turn out certified divers by the thousands daily, so this is not really a big deal anymore, thanks to Jacques Cousteau and the commercialization of undersea tourism. An instrumental version of the James Bond song “You Only Live Twice” played in my head the whole week as I became contented within the 30 meter limit of the world of non-decompression diving. The only confusing thing was that a thumbs up in diving is actually a bad thing (it means you want to go up), so I had to get used to giving the “A-ok” thumb and forefinger when someone asked me if everything was alright. One day we dove off a small longtail boat in rough seas along the shore.

The next day was the breathtaking azure waters of the Similan Islands, where sea turtles and giant moray eels awaited me. Now I regretted not buying that underwater camera.

Diving was even more amazing then I ever dreamed. Not only for the magical landscapes and creatures of the underworld, but for the sensation of feeling as if one can fly above and though it all with superhuman power with subhuman effort. And discovering the tiny little creatures of the sea floor and their living rock homes made me feel like I was six years old all over again, pouring through the fields and forests with a magnifying glass.

All week long, when I wasn’t diving or in diving class, I ran various errands in Khao Lak. I had a tailored suit made. I bought sandals and t-shirts. And I ate. I ate. And I ate some more. I devoured the most perfect fish curry I’ve ever tasted at the Dee Restaurant. My eyes were burning at the end of it – but it was FLAWLESS.

At the end of the week, the Loy Krathong Festival erupted over Thailand. This is the full moon of the twelfth lunar month and is big cause for celebration. Fireworks boomed over the beach. Thais and tourists alike lit lanterns and sent them soaring overhead in armadas of glowing thousands.

Unexpectedly by wayward way of Krabi on a misdirect minibus, I was on a ferry boat out on the Andaman Sea on 11/11/11 bound for Phi Phi Island, the groggy day after Loy Krathong. Landing at Tonsai Village on Phi Phi was a bit of a headache. Tonsai was LOUD and mad. The shopkeepers and innkeepers, the tour operators and dive operators were all ravenous.

I checked in to a cliff side, fan-cooled bungalow overlooking a reservoir and was immediately consumed by drooling mosquitoes. I smiled with pride as I remember that THIS is how I used to travel the world: a backpack, a five dollar a night dusty bed and insects galore. A cold shower was instantly followed by a long overdue, yet sweaty afternoon nap under a mosquito net and a faltering fan.

Nostalgia fulfilled, I got up and walked down to town and directly booked the following night’s accommodation in an aircon bungalow with cable television, swimming pool and a breakfast buffet.

The noise is what pollutes Ton Sai village at night. The electronica bass boomed from mostly empty outdoor clubs along the beach and poisoned any sense of isolation or island calm. I found respite at a quiet bar along the water called the Sunflower – an oasis of good music and hammocks.

A late night downpour overcame the island - this being the final l weeks of the monsoon season, and thankfully extinguished the bass from the dreadful clubs on down the beach. On my hammock as the rains engulfed the sand around the bar, a perfectly edible crab scurried below my hammock, followed by the lazy hop of a green tree frog, followed by a dizzied hermit crab. Some British pilots on holiday from their jobs at EasyJet stopped by and we chatted about innovations in air traffic control, Arizona and the unsafe low pay of US regional airline pilots.

I joined two Spaniards, two Austrians in love, and scattering of other Europeans (see picture I entitle “Flesh Boat”) on a small longtail boat on a tourist trodden snorkel tour of the environs of Ko Phi Phi Don and Ko Phi Phi Leh. A local man was the skilled skipper and boatswain of our ship - I am particularly proud of this picture. I guess this is what a great camera can do.

Along the way we kept encountering speed boats surrounded by people bobbing in the water around them in lifejackets. Evidently, many tourists cannot swim. Folks- if the world is to be covered by rising oceans, we all must learn how to swim.

We visited Monkey Island, where one of the member s of our party ignored the signs “Don’t feed the monkeys” posted in ten languages all over the place, fed the monkeys and then was accosted by them. Monkey see, monkey don’t do.

At first, I just stood back taking pictures of her as she squirmed, as the creed of the responsible nature photographer is not to interfere with the natural processes taking place (in this case, monkeys feeding and exhibiting territoriality). I only intervened after the monkey on top of her bit her head.

The limestone islands of the Phi Phis are truly spectacular. The snorkeling rivaled what I’d done down on the Great Barrier Reef. Schools of bright orange and fluorescent blue fish swam fearless alongside me through endless coral canyons.

Maya Beach (aka “the Beach” from the movie “the Beach” ) was not the greatest beach I’d ever seen and the lagoon on the other side of Ko Phi Phi Leh which was filled with garbage, but everyone has their own idea of the perfect beach. Mine would definitely have stars above. Leo though will have to keep swimming through shark infested waters to find another island as all the budget tourists of this world seem to have discovered his.

Sunset was perfect. The sun is far away. It is un-spoilable.

By the next night, I was back on the mainland in Phuket town, which was surprisingly the most friendly and approachable town I’d been to yet in Thailand. The British pilots I’d talked to back on Phi Phi had recommended it to me. I ate earth-shattering green curry, a seafood salad and some spring rolls and then watched some great cable on my room on the 12th floor at the Metropole Hotel.

Back in Bangkok. I thought I had arrived in an entirely new city, unrecognizable from my experience more than nine years ago. The skytrain bore passengers in aircon comfort high above the chaos of the sweltering concrete. Glass towers and massive shopping malls stretched as far as the eyes could see. Had Bangkok become posh?

Was it Bangkok that had changed, or was it me? Soon I fell into Chinatown on foot, not an airconned shopping mall to be had, and rediscovered my footing at the end of Bangkok’s muffler. Along the walk on the Thanon Charoen Krung from the last metro outpost at Hua Lamphong alkl the way out to the Palace, I remembered the lovely chaos of the Bangkok I once knew back in the days I stayed at a six dollar a night hovel on the Khao San Road. The mopeds and the tuk tuks. The cabs and the trucks. The chicken feet and the duck heads.

I lived it up on my last night of vacation on the 20th floor at the Le Meridien’s Plaza Athenee, a super nice hotel, although one where the lack of depth of their pool’s shallow end frustrates any serious attempt at laps. I ruminated over how in Russian they have a word for swimming for exercise (i.e. lap swimming) and a word for bathing (i.e. floating around like a manatee). In English there is only one word for swimming. And therefore many people think that swimming is a leisure activity and swimmers who swim for fitness need only the same accommodation that swimmers for leisure do. This is not correct. Please, folks, build proper pools that accommodate both varieties.

But such complaints always seem ridiculous given the context that surrounds them.
Pools collected in various parts of neighborhoods from the airport to the center, a few low-lying blocks here and there were inundated , but other than that and the sandbags at the storefronts, a traveler soaked in a tourist’s myopia could not tell that just a week ago waters were threatening to inundate the heart of the city.

Water is a conundrum. Water is what canceled my trip. Water is what brought me anyway.

Global warming will increasingly dictate our lives as the polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise. Water, on the other hand, has always dictated our lives.

The future of our world is under water.

Neh-go-shi-a-tin' O'er the Alamo n' True Texas Wed-in

2011-10-29T12:31:00.019-04:00

Y'all get a little comfortable now as I tell you a little story.

A blackenin' aerospace is what met my transatlantic outta Myoon-Nick as it galloped on down into Veh-ginya. Down below the Dulles monitors were filled with the lamentations of herds of passages delayed by two and three hours. Sighed relief, I did, when my Super 80 to Dallas was only delayed 30 minutes.

Turns out I sighed too soon.

We smoldered in the belly of our winged iron buffalo on the tarmac for 2 1/2 hours as rain torrents spilled down sorrow from the heavens. Finally ascended, corralled into the narrow calm between two 20,000 foot super cells, and as bolts of lightning flashed around, I smiled to myself dreamin' they were some gunslingers upon the control tower firin' celebratory rounds up in the air.

Away south and west we went, o'er the Appalachains, o'er the pig farms of Arkansas towards the green yards and glass canyons of Dallas.

Saddlesore at midnight, the folks in Dallas informed the passengers that the winged buffalo would go no further. She was either tired, or more likely, the crappy airline that drove her didn't want to whip a half empty plane to San Antonio at 1 am.

So, after 26 hours of traveling the widths of Europe, the Atlantic and half the States, I rested too short in an overpriced inn; a Potemkin palace with horrible water pressure.

The next morning, finally descended onto the pastures and golf courses of San Antonio. I bought sun glasses and met my companions at the baggage claim. The air of San Antoin' was fresh as any I'd breathed in a long time. We feasted on a Mexican breakfast, picked up some Amazon sundries I'd sent ahead in the wagon train and headed into town to see the Alamo.

I didn't remember the Alamo, 'cause I ain't never been there before. But I'll remember it now 'cause I seen it, and it looks real good. 'Cept for that Ripley's Believe It or Not 'cross the street - that's kinda tacky.

Then we sauntered on down long the riverwalk, browsed some shops and smelled the food at the restaurants and lunched on cold margaritas n' murdered Elk.

But the whole gosh darn reason for comin this far was to go to a wed-in in Corpus Christi where friends Eric n' Kat were tyin the knot.

Corpus is a small, nice waterside place with good people. Weddins always remind me that my friends and their compadres and kin are of the best stock and even with the coyotes, snakes and scorpions, the whole ranch will be alright so long as they and theirs are still shearin' the sheep.

Speakin of shearing, I got my head shaved for the wed-in and then we went to go get stung by jellyfish (Ukrainians call em "medusas") in the Gulf o' Mexico.

The wedding was super nice in a courtyard with pretty ladies and fine cigars. We danced that night away to Michael Jackson and ate a pudge dog that tasted like sweet cake. The night ended in a roadhouse with a jukebox and sipped suds from bottles.

But neh, I see how that fellar Stephen King stayed at a dark, aging hotel with day-glo seventies carpetin and penned a good ol' hor-rohr novel. Can still see dwarf poltergeists with wide brim hats peekin out at me from behind yellowed curtains in the pool area. That horror and the one that they didn't even give us a free continent'l breakfast.

After a trip to Texas I've become a man of few words, fewer so-called facts and as a matter of fact I will be like so for a long while.

Actually I'm done cowboy talking right now because I can't think of anymore cowboy lingo and anyhow people in Texas really don't talk that way.

Congrats Kat and Eric!

All Ways, the Sea

2011-09-18T11:55:00.010-04:00

Before September, from train window, I last saw Sevastopol sitting sadly on its harbor under an overcast sky.

The next time I saw Sevastopol it was from a Brazilian regional jet. It had begun its decent very gradually from the mainland, probably from around the departure point above the marshy shores of Kherson near the Dnieper delta, over the sandy starfish-arm of Chernomorski peninsula, over the minnerets of Yevpatoriya and down along the coast. I could only guess, since the clouds were thick with rain. But the plane finally broke through the layer directly west of the shores of Kacha and I recognized the cliff shore north of Sevastopol immediately. The Dniproavia plane took a low approach south past the Belbek airport located on a well-trodden plateau which 19th century British and French soldiers fought their way over in vain, only to be turned back the impossible fortifications of the Imperial Russian Army a little further on.

Then the plane banked, and I saw it all unfold in one gorgeous gasp; the harbor, the hero city, the cliffs of Balaclava beyond, the fields of grape vines and orchards, the Crimean Mountains in the distance. A deep sense of deja vu came over me, but not a déjà vu in light of my return to a place I lived for two years, but a déjà vu for the feeling I had when I returned to Kyiv three months earlier and felt myself a stranger in a familiar place. I was back to "the same old used to be", but just like Kyiv, I was seeing a place in a completely different light. The light had changed. The place had grown, and so had I.

Not only that, but I was in arriving in an airplane and would stay at the Best Western, the hotel chain that'd taken over the Hotel Sevastopol since I'd been gone. From the airport, which was just a building the size of a country schoolhouse along a military runway lined with mothballed MiGs, I hopped a cab to Severnaya, the north shore of Sevastopol Harbor. The car sped past the hills south of the Belbek airport, which 20th century Nazi soldiers clawed their way over in vain, only to be halted by the impossible fortifications of the brave Soviet Red Army a little further on.

Back at the port, I walked on to the ferry, a mighty iron trolley bus for the water, that I'd taken so many times. But now I was just a tourist. Bereft of change, I paid the 2.50 hrivnya toll with a 200 hrivnya bill, apologetic.

Too early to check in, I left my bag with the luggage storage and went out to do some sightseeing and souvenir shopping.

The first new thing I noticed was that the concrete construction nightmare on the Art Harbor was now a glass-walled mini-skyscraper. It's still vacant, but I was so happy they'd finished it.

A swim off the concrete sea wall in the cool, clean harbor: it was a quiet and cloudy day, and unfathomably relaxing. In the evening, I met with the first Peace Corps volunteer back in Sevastopol proper since I’d left and we chatted over Russian cuisine in the naval themed restaurant, “Traktir.”

Throughout two days and two nights were crowded beaches of Balaclava and Fiolent, and two perfect starlit evenings in Sevastopol, strolling along the waterfront watching the carnival atmosphere; the kissing couples on benches; the pensioners singing Soviet anthems; the teenagers laughing over the backdrop of mobile phone music; all while a tropical storm rolled over my family on the Gulf Coast.

On Sunday night I met up with friends and former colleagues for a great harbor side dinner of fried fish, vegetables and sea fare. No one had aged a day, not a millimeter off. How do I explain to my friends in their language that if language is a bread, then my Russian is beyond stale, it is moldy black croutons?

Mark Twain wrote about the south coast of Crimea when he visited in 1867, “To me the place was a vision of the Sierras. The tall, gray mountains that back it, their sides bristling with pines - cloven with ravines –here and there a hoary rock towering into view – long straight streaks sweeping down from the summit to the sea, marking the passage of some avalanche of former times –all these were as like one sees in the Sierras as if the one were a portrait of the other.”

And there I was – back on the long windy train along the cliffs that reminded me of Colorado when I first saw them. Like Mr. Clemmens said, the Crimean Mountains are a picture of the American West. And if Sevastopol and Kyiv both held some contrasting feelings of familiarity, when the natural world bends and shapes, absent the apocalyptic ax, torch and shovel, its metamorphosis is not so readily tangible to mortal men. The lizards ever run the lichened rocks, the warped, bonsai and twisted bark of the windswept miniature pine are immortal spiny monuments and the smells and sounds of these forests will forever be a threshold to my senses on at least two continents.

One then turns around to look at what he’s been neglecting by studying the mountains and the brush forests. Colorado has lacked a sea for millions of years, but Crimea lies perched like a rocky front porch over looking a most serene body that spreads out like a magnificent deep, deep blue field that stretches out from Foros to Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. Lazy waves rarely break, the water sways like blue-white grains of wheat.

The sea is the beginning and the end, and every time and place in between. And if the sea is exactly that, then here at the precipice, one can see everything and forever all at once.

Exactly where I left it, is where it is, on and off, and on again, that dusty trail, heading south, to the Sea.

Happy Independence Day Ukraine!

2011-08-24T02:31:00.017-04:00

In August of 1991, I was at a summer camp on Catalina Island off the coast of California. When the bus pulled up in front of the YMCA back in Santa Barbara after the camp was finished, my Dad was there waiting for me. We walked back to the jeep as I rambled on about the exciting week I'd had hiking, kayaking and snorkeling in a Garibaldi-saturated paradise. I asked Dad how his week had been. Just fine, he said. Just work, and planning a wedding. Oh, that and the Soviet Union dissolved while you were away.

The Soviet Union was part of all our lives as Americans during the 80's and we'd all only known a bipolar world. But being a TV tube kid of quiet middle America, I'd not known the Cold War as it was; a war fought and suffered by real people in coups, uprisings, escapes, invasions and revolutions around the world. For me, the Cold War had been waged on the movie screens of the 1980's: Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo III, Spies Like Us, Red Heat and of course, Bond flick after Bond flick. The Soviet Union, according to Al Broccoli, was a dark and mournful place, like a modern day vision of Mordor. The Head of the KGB had his desk in a location reminiscent of a cave or dungeon, while the British Secret Service office was in a bright and happy Edwardian office with mahogany, green leather couches, flowers, whiskey in crystal decanters and warm cups of tea.

I was in deep shock. The collapse of the Berlin wall did not affect me, because I never grasped its significance at the time. I recall my grandma saying "I remember when they put that wall up." But that was the bulk of my memory of the end of the GDR.

What would the world be like without the USSR? Who would Hollywood put in the dark cave now? Eventually, aliens, asteroids and terrorists would fill the void, but for the time being all of us in the Western world looked eastwards in trepidation.

In my blog post in March 2008, I walked along the cliffs of Laspi in Crimea and looked down on a red roofed dacha on the spectacular aqua blue coastline of the Black Sea. There, Gorbachev and his family were held hostage, and in a failed coup the Soviet Union fell apart.

In Kyiv, the Ukrainian Parliament drafted an Act of Independence, and on August 24, 1991 the nation of Ukraine was born. Thousands joined in the Square of Independence, singing and dancing in both traditional and modern clothes. Ukraine would be a bridge between East and West, on the border between old and new, the past and the future. The blue and yellow flag, banned for a long time in the USSR, now flew proudly all over the new nation.

Ukraine's twenty year transition to a independent country with a market economy has been turbulent and difficult, and this is putting it extremely mildly. Indeed, building a new country and a national identity is not a neat process. When my Ukrainian friends and colleagues level exasperation and frustrated remarks about the current state of development or government in their country, I try to remind them that the United States twenty years after its independence, 1796, or more accurately, twenty years after the Constitution was ratified in 1807, the United States was far, far from stable. There were several periods around 1800 that it looked like the union would fail; that special interests and parlor intrigue would tear the young state to shreds. But it's easy for me and others, who have never had to experience the tumultuous birth and awkward early years of their nations to impart advice of patience and fortitude on a people who have already suffered and endured so much.

Things are changing quickly here though, and even after only two years absence I have seen enormous improvements. I often wonder if, absent an affectionate expat's detached view, Ukrainians can really grasp how fast their country is changing.

In the Square of Independence, twenty years after the sunset of the hammer and sickle, people sang and danced, protested, sang pop songs and ate ice cream. There was a breakdancing competition in front of Kreshatik metro, a place that has become the veritable Shinjuki of Kyivan youth and fashion. Several kids performed stunts on motorcycles and performed gymnastics. Vendors sold their wares in white tents and old men sipped kvac.

It might occur to somebody walking through the Maidan, that dissent is very Ukrainian. Indeed, over several years, one can see that demonstrations are a fact of life here no matter what party is in power. Perhaps this attribute of dissent is not only healthy for a young democracy, but it is also very European.

On Kreshatik this day, there were still many who weren't thinking always about politics. Young performers in traditional dress enacted traditional Ukrainian plays and dances on stilts. One of the plays was about a timeless theme of human circumstance: a young woman, her suitor, and a disapproving would-be mother in law. The play neither used nor required any words, just some accordion-drenched theme music. There watching the performance, I allowed myself to drift slowly into daydream, there emerging with some embarrassment a retrospect on Hollywood's twisted discourse on this place, and the forests of kelp and herds of blue fish off the California coast that existed between the Cold War and the hoisting of the flags of independence. Then all of sudden a vision came over me - I was sitting on a fence post watching this same ancient Cossack performance on the plains outside Zaporizhiya. Echoing off the yellow fields of golden wheat and swaying sunflowers, under crisp blue skies filled with waning summer, were the distant sounds of... ...grasshoppers sounding off like smart phone ringtones and wolves howling the name of Ruslana, the Ukrainian pop legend...

That Shore is Kyiv. You Betcha.

2011-08-20T07:22:00.006-04:00

Every wonder what Kyiv looks like from the river in summer? Of course you did!

I promise pics will get better when I finally buy a camera this Fall.

What Babi Yar Says

2011-08-20T06:04:00.015-04:00

The Second World War was fought by a generation who had, as children, known the true meanings of struggle, of labor, of necessity and in many cases like my grandparents, of hunger and poverty. Then as young adults, they fought and sacrificed as the world around them descended into madness. They won the peace and vindicated democracy. Now to us, they are a generation we hold in awe.

The well-worn question about whether common people are shaped by extraordinary times, or vice versa rattles always in my mind. Either one believes mankind is putty in time's hands - that common man has the potential for extreme heroically good or dreadfully evil deeds; or one believes that those who do such deeds were never common to begin with and that time is putty in their hands.

The men we read about would be come know as “pillars of history” and they did walk the war and made crucial decisions that would bring about peace and victory; Zhukov, Ike, Monty, Patton, MacArthur... ...but who won the war, who every historian will acknowledge, was the common man. Common men have always won the wars, one might say - and that is true. However, finally the kings and generals were delegated second place on the post war pedestal of glory. The common humans were the ones who became the heroes - famous statues were erected to them and films made that glorified them. Think of the statue of the soldiers lifting the flag at Iwo Jima or the armies of beautiful Soviet realist statues dotting the skyline of Eurasia, all lacking nameplates of their depicted humans, in their sole aim to revere all those who fought.

One of my favorite statues is a relatively new one placed in Babi Yar of Tetyana Markus, who was proclaimed a Hero of Ukraine five years ago. A small woman, her hands are clenched in bronze defiance. As a twenty year old, she threw a grenade into a column of Nazi soldiers. Afterwards, she disappered into the occupied landscape. At twenty one, she posed as a serving girl and poisoned thirty Nazi officers in a canteen. She was arrested by the Gestapo and was executed at age twenty-two. I walked beneath the oak and pines of Babi Yar, and thought of how common people won such a world war, and how if people are putty in time's hands, Tetyana Markus and so many other heroes of WWII were absolutely, inconceivably extraordinary.

Quentin Tarantino made one of my favorite movies of all time in 1994. But his recent film Inglorious Bastards really bothered me. There are so many stories yet to be told about the people who actually lived, suffered and died. The Second World War doesn't warrant fictionalizing of any kind.

Ordinary men were also the ones who became the villains of the war - and it was ordinary men that wound up on trial in Nurnberg for crimes against humanity. They were the camp guards, the middling privates and the mediocre sergeants. The ones who had always thought of themselves as pillars, like Hitler and Goering, shot themselves like the cowards they were, leaving those who dwelled beneath the soles of their underlings to face the noose.

Hollywood has us believe that monsters are aliens in a spaceship, evil masterminds in mansions or drooling psychopaths along a highway. These depictions scare us, but give us comfort in allowing us to believe that we can come to know what a monster looks like. But just like heroes, real monsters look like us and walk among us. What differentiates us from them remains a hefty matter of argument.

Ordinary men did the evil things at Babi Yar, a filled-in gorge in Kyiv. It used to be located on what was considered the outskirts of the city, near a stream where the women would wash their lines. Now, it is surrounded by residential apartments, a park and a metro. It is still a quiet place, aside from the hum of passing cars along the highway nearby.

It's estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered in this place by the Nazis in 1941. Women, children, men and the elderly. Mostly Jewish, but also Catholic, Roma, Orthodox and Muslim. Communists, nationalists or unaligned.

Common or extraordinary, it was unspeakable massacre of humanity that took place. People were the victims, and people were the perpetrators.

Sixty-six years after the end of the war, the flotsam and jetsam of that dark tide are cast ashore all over the planet. We must pick up the pieces, look closely underneath no matter how uncomfortable and learn about what evil in man had once upon a time wrought.

Rusty and fading, or etched in eaten marble as it is, the remains of war nonetheless whisper a warning of human wickedness, "Never forget."

As I left the park, those were the only two words left I could bring myself to think of.

The World as It Is; Just Enjoy Your Swedekend.

2011-07-30T08:49:00.010-04:00

A lornful ugly cloud hung over my weekend trip to Stockholm. Of course this was due to the awful, despicable acts which occured nearby in Norway. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those whose lives were taken by that vile, twisted extremism that has cost humanity so much.

Such a tragedy made all my trivial mishaps seem all that more trifling. It stung to have my Iphone, money and camera stolen out of my locker at the swimming pool later that weekend and I walked back to the hotel with my head hung low, cursing the faceless thief and feeling sorry for myself. But this episode stopped when I returned to the hotel and saw the BBC coverage of the Oslo aftermath. I pondered memories of the bush hospital I was at ealier this year in Africa, and tried to conceive of the magnitude of loss and absence of necessity that is experienced round the planet with one passing of the sun. Nothing any weekending tourist could complain about is possibly of any consequence whatsoever. I felt ashamed for entertaining even a fleeting second of self pity.

I learned many things last weekend. I learned that the Swedes like strange tasting candy, which ranges from sour patch kids dipped in sea salt to hard jawbreakers which taste like Liquid Draino. At the Nationalmuseet, I learned that I really like an artist named Nils Kreuger who lived from 1858 to 1930 (see Spring in Halland, 1894 or Hailstorm Apelvik, 1893). After seeing a perfectly preserved 17th century sailing vessel, I learned at the Vassa Musuem that not all ships and men rot in port. I learned that socialist Sweden and certain American states have something in common: they both support the nanny state policies which mandate 3.5% beer on the shelves of grocery stores and all other alcohol to be sold in state-run bottle stores. I learned that Ho's Chinese Restaurant makes a great spicy Shanghai Chicken and wholesome wonton soup, and that that satisfied feeling you get when you eat a great dinner can last well into the following week.

What I also learned was this: weekend getaways are not vacations. Four days is not enough to relax or unwind. It's barely enough time to release a sigh. Weekend getaways exist so as to help you better appreciate where you live, how you live, that you can and that you do live everyday life, every day that you can.

It's good to be back.

Life is a Beach on an Island in the Middle of Kyiv

2011-07-20T12:53:00.008-04:00

If you've lived in Ukraine for any length of time, the following sentence would seem a bit foreign to you, "I've spent the last two Sundays kayaking and biking through nature."

But that's exactly what I've been up to.

Kayaking pictures will be absent for the time being. In this mishap-prone land, I was just too afraid of losing my Uncle-Sam sanctioned Blackberry to the Earl Grey-colored waves of the mighty Dnieper. So, I must rely on my water-borne companions to email them to me. But to sum it up, we met at Hydropark Metro on the Dnieper, sauntered through a gaudy step-right-up booth wonderland reminiscent of the Jersey Shore into the forest and down a ramp to the kayak rental place. And they actually made us wear life jackets. I was impressed.

Out on the water in our kayaks, past the skinny beach, past the crowded beach, past the restaurant log cabin boats, past the club-exclusive beach, past the all inclusive beach, past the yacht club, past the helipad, past the squirming couples-in-blankets beach, the five of us found serenity on the quiet shores of scenes that are quite hidden yet still proximate of tourist-trodden Kyiv.

This theme was to carry itself into the following weekend.

Last weekend I found myself again out in nature, out in the middle of the Dnieper, this time on remotish Myromets Island. The Kyivan-familiar will now gasp as I reveal that I... ...was AGAIN IN SAFETY GEAR in Ukraine! I was wearing a helmet! We all were, in fact, wearing helmets! Every single one of us on the excursion. I know the Kyivan-familiar will now think me over-zealous, but let me be now so audacious as to reckon that one day soon, perhaps as soon as within two years, I will see Ukrainians wearing seat belts and using child safety seats!

It's easily accessible across the Moskovski Bridge, yet dead quiet and a world away from the car horns of the city. Myromets Island is a lovely place. It reminds me of a semi-rural expanse outside Oklahoma City or a meandering pathway deep inside Codorus State Park in Pennsylvania. Just out over the horizon, if one strains his eyes over the distant wall of foilage, one might make out a few stands of concrete tower blocks, or brilliant gold, glowing glints of onion domed churches.

We stopped beside the river bank, went for a series of swims and picnicked in the sun. I watched the river bank scenes of weekending Kyivans: a woman walking through a field, two dogs at tug of war over a discarded shoe, folks playing netless volleyball with a Soccer ball, an older man rowing his umbrella-holding wife in rubber raft down the river...

After lunch, the Ukrainians began playing the pyschological role game "Mafia" and I wandered off barefoot to investigate the sounds of the forest and watch the birds fly sideways, lazily fighting sleep.

DEpressurizing...

2011-07-09T02:15:00.008-04:00

First month back in the saddle, more than thirty Kyivan days under my belt and what a busy month it's been.

My highlight so far was watching the 41st group of Peace Corps volunteers swear in. Not to sound sappy, but it was a moving moment when they played the anthems of Ukraine and the United States, and I looked down from the balcony at all the fresh faces of folks heading out to the field. Four years ago, nearly to the day, I was there, on the threshold pause of my all too short gulyat down the "toughest job you'll ever love" path and smiled to myself to think of my two years as a strenuous Black Sea hike through alternating seasons and weather patterns, intermingled with cascades of hot tea in NGO offices and interspersed with wild train rides to far-flung oblasts.

On a sunny Thursday, accompanied by a woman from my agency who worked alongside Sergeant Shriver, I not only saw a swearing-in ceremony in the midst of Peace Corps's (and USAID's) 50th anniversary, but I got to see all the fantastic staff from the Peace Corps office who supported and guided me along that two year hike, and I collected some wonderfully surprising news about my old post, Sevastopol. What a way to top off my second week.

Moving into my spacious apartment in the center of town, I soon became absorbed in the very hefty detail of what can only be described as fervent nest-making behavior. For one, I categorically abhor blank, white walls. I despise the echo of a nearly empty apartment. An empty room is like being assigned to purgatory, where there is nothing particularly pleasant or unpleasant and drabness rules the roost. My employers graciously supplied furniture so that at least I don't have to sit on the floor to watch television like I did for my first two months in my apartment in Washington. Talk about purgatory.

But the blank walls were an immediate problem. I could deal with the bedrooms: I have tapestries after all, I never settle anywhere without them. The study; well I do work in there, but I'm looking at my computer screen the whole time, so the walls to my back can wait. However, I spend a significant amount of time, lounging in the wood floor valley surrounded by the high blank mountain walls of the guilded living room. And the long, long hallway connecting the rooms of my realm was beginning to feel like the basement of a convent.

But luckily down on Andrivsky Spusk; a steep, winding cobblestone road beneath Saint Andres Cathedral, one can buy some superb artwork done by some of the region’s best artists. If you're not a true local, you won’t get a steal, likely, but you’ll probably walk away happy. Speaking of happy, there are a lot of paintings on the Spusk that there that look like Bob Ross had an especially happy afternoon (those who grew up on afterschool PBS know what this means, the rest, will be forever deprived of such happy trees and their clouds that live above them).

I walked past one painting with a tree perched on a rock above the sea, and recalled a hike I went on with some Peace Corps sitemates back in March 2008. It was in Crimea, way above Laspi where I photographed a bare tree perched by itself on a massive seaside granite monolith. (I took a picture of it and it’s on my blog posting for 9 March 2008). I bought it.

The second painting, I couldn't keep my eyes off of it, and as a consequence, paid the Russian-proficient tourist price. This one was done in Crimea as well, and I had seen this scenery a hundred times on long, pleasant walks along the cliffs of Balaclava. A small powered vessel, off by itself, leaving some unseen harbor, heading out to sea; the sun shines through the clouds above it; the painting is just the boat, its wake, the sea and the sky - nothing else.

For the long hallway, I picked up some old framed photographs of Kyiv for a few dollars each.

I could have posted pictures of these paintings, and even have the JPGs saved on my hard drive. But ultimately I decided against it because a.) someone who is creatively disabled may attempt a copy (for all I know there are hundreds already!) and b.) depriving my friends/family of these images would serve as yet another incentive to come visit.

Five Things I accomplished in my first month:

1. Renaissance, art. So I checked off wall art off my list of things I needed. Check.

2. Reinvigoration, muscular. Exercise was the next thing I needed. I joined a swanky gym that has a clean, clear, cold pool and three different kinds of sauna. Check.

3. Replenishment, household supplies and food; collected by lugging bags and bags and bags of groceries several blocks from the underground kiosks, produce markets, the commissary and large supermarkets over the course of a month, thereby also fulfilling #2 above. Check.

4. Refreshment, knowledge and practice of American culture so that I don't get rusty; well that is easy to achieve in this city in July; there was the Fourth of July Picnic by the US Chamber of Commerce in Spartak Stadium. Even in the rain, several thousand Ukrainians and some Americans showed up to eat hot dogs, watch a boisterous raffle and fireworks accompanied by pop music. Check.

5. Remember, Shashlik acumen. For all you folks who have never lived in a Slavic country before (my condolences), shashlik is the style by which skewered meat (pork is best for this) is slowly roasted over the coals of a campfire with onions and garlic. This is not shish-ka-bob as Americans know it. American shishkabob involves massive bell peppers and mushrooms and some sort of propane or chemically- drenched square briquettes. Once a carnivore knows shashlik, he/she will forever crave its tender insides and crispy, wood-smoked exterior.

I organized a few folks from work to join me on the Fourth of July on the sandy banks of the Dnieper River. First, though I needed to recall my marinade. Some keep their recipes secret, but since I didn't share with the internet public my paintings, I will now publish the ingredients of my fairly successful Fourth of Pork-U-LY Shashlik-A-Q marinade; apple vinegar, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, coarse black pepper, sea salt, red pepper, Tabasco Sauce, paprika, shashlik seasoning mix (sorry, this is not available in the USA) and garlic powder. Marinate for 18 hours in the fridge with onions and garlic cloves. Roast over open campfire alongside a river, accompanied by nice people and great music off your IPhone, on the first sunny day after two weeks of rain. Check.

Thanks Guy for the awesome pics. My hands were way too greasy to reach for my Blackberry.

Туда и Обратно Снова

2011-06-23T13:24:00.009-04:00

The title of this entry means, "There and Back Again" in Russian. I was going to translate it into Ukrainian, "Там і повернувся, щоб знову", much more gorgeous and whimsical of course, but a little bit of a mouthful for a blog title.

Туда и Обратно Снова refers to the literary genius of J.R.R. Tolkein, and is the title of Bilbo's book about his life adventures (not available on Amazon, only available on hardback in Middle Earth). A title which is a mouthful all the same, but it doesn't capture the spectacular feeling I get when I think of the passage in the Lord of the Rings when Bilbo talks about what it feels like to set out on adventure:

"It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to."

For the deliberate wanderer, those first steps are the essence of divine ignorance; that conscious incompetence, some sort of bold glee in one's own naivety, and a surrendering of self to blind faith in the face of imminent mishaps, impending discomfort, pervasive illiteracy and copious wrong turns that have always accompanied travel.

Bilbo should have added that it's impossible to keep you feet after walking out your door, or that even if you keep to your toes, you still have absolutely no idea where you might be swept off to. Moreover, being swept off is exactly the meaning of the very sort of voyage that makes Bilbo’s book worth reading, if you could ever get your hands on it.

One afternoon last year I raised my hand in the basement of the Ronald Reagan Building to swear an oath, became a public servant and enlisted in my nation's goodwill efforts abroad. I had absolutely no idea then that little more than a year later, and two years to the day after I'd left her, I'd find myself back in Ukrainia.

Even though I was returning to a country where I lived for two years, the very nature of this country would guarantee a long slate of new and surprising turns on the journey here.

Arriving in Kyiv a newly minted foreigner, I was not disappointed to feel the exhilaration of a stranger in this place once again.

This would be a completely different experience than my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sevastopol, I was certain of that, but I was throttled at the vast difference in perspective between that of a wayfaring semi-student vagabond living in the provinces and that of a sofa-owning neck-tied yuppie.

Two years and a different salary make a lot of difference. For once the city is accessible in a way it never was when I was a volunteer. Like the ability to enjoy mojitos at a Cuban joint with live (gasp: Cuban!) music serenading my rum. This time around living in Ukraine, I wouldn't have to make that agonizing kopek-pinching choice between buying beer and buying cheese.

Immediately upon landing at Borispol, I saw the changes in Ukrainia since I had left. The airport is under a sea of cranes. In the baggage claim area, the conveyer belts worked, in bright and airy new environs.

One can now buy a cappuccino from any number of college-aged entrepreneurs selling
good coffee from trunk-dwelling Espresso machines along the metro entrances. Portable coffee seems to have become all the rage in Kyiv. “Coffee House” and very other java joint chains used to only offer sit down brew. A caffeiniac was always chained to a mug at a table unless you were content on Nescafe in a plastic cub from a machine.
Now they have a take-out window and advertise how one can take one’s coffee out of the café! It used to be that in Ukraine the pedestrian would stroll the street with a beer but not a coffee. Now it has been reversed. Because of a new set of propriety laws that have been passed in preparation for the 2012 Euro Cup, it seems ever rarer to see folks walking with a green glass bottle of luke-warm Obolon Svetley in hand.

There is now a sushi on every corner of Kyiv. I'm not exaggerating.

I've seen a lot of people jogging, which I never had before.

Also the Gap has arrived. No comment there, but I have to say, I like the billboard.

Things familiar: well on arrival, I pretty much ran over anyone in my path on the way to the local market to buy tomatoes. That and sour cream. Most recently, brinza cheese, strawberries, now cherries. The produce in the place is unrivaled.

These familiar tastes and smells brought me back to the last decade (that is, two years ago). But familiarity is fleeting when once carries a visa. And then there are the scenes which may seem so familiar and mundane, but on closer inspection emerge as film in which only the passage of time and space can develop.

On a walk through a local park yesterday afternoon, I noticed for the first time how people populate the park benches after work. Mostly couples, but also families and friends. Not on the couch watching television, at a noisy bar in the midst of happy hour, in an airconned mall - no, on a sunny Friday evening, there are just hundreds of everyday people, joking, laughing, looking, kissing or talking about the day, smiling and enjoying each other’s company.

The sun never really sets here in summer. The late evening feels like early morning. I catch a whiff of envy for the days when I looked out at a horizon of the Black Sea, trying hard to determine where the sky ended and the sea began. Smiling, I realized it was only fleetingly that I longed for that familiarity.

There and back again; swept off my feet, beached on a strange and wonderful land once again.

Wula Nafaa

2011-06-11T11:34:00.001-04:00

Bloggin late now from Kyiv- more on my re-establishment in Ukraine in an upcoming post. Let me catch up with an overdue blog from a field trip to a USAID site in Senegal. - Arghh! - Again I forgot that darn small grey cable that connects my dijjie camera to my computer. It's now probably in a sweltering plywood shipping crate in some port somewhere waiting lazily for the next unhurried cargo ship... won't likely arrive for another 6 weeks :( See the questionnaire to the left and vote.... UPDATE - found the pics on my hard drive. Here they are... ...more on Ukraine soon...

In my last week in Senegal I was lucky enough to be invited by a colleague of mine who had I been in training with, an Agriculture Officer (pictured here in the wide brimmed hat, explaining the project), out on yet another site visit, this time to see the first phase construction of an infrastructure portion of the decade-long Wula Nafaa Project.

We embarked early on this long, long day-long trip with the Chief of Party (COP) for the implementer, the International Resources Group. The COP provided some valuable insight on multi-project operations of a large partner. On the way out to the site in Kaymore, one hour past Kaolack, he volunteered an honest assessment of international donor's impact in the country, and some challenges and triumphs encountered in the implementation of this particular endeavor.

We approached the project site: a large barren field that had been made fallow by encroaching saltwater in the water table; a result of creeping climate change. Although salt production is a boon to the local economy, the fields at question once thrived with cash crops. A bulldozer was excavating a large hole in the opening stages of constructing a dike. This would capture fresh water during the rainy season, allowing 500 hectares of land to be flushed regularly; thereby decreasing salinity and making the land arable. Community leaders from this municipality (chosen for its cohesion and enthusiasm) were out by the site when we arrived and greeted us. Together we watched, mesmorized as the backloader pulled up the first tons of red African earth. In two years, what we were standing on would be a field, thick with cash crops...

As we left, the COP pointed out a group of monoliths that were likely thousands of years old. An African stonehenge just sat there stoically, in peace and quiet besides a quiet village... ...and it will probably be there long, long after we are all are gone. There Bill snapped the world's only existing picture of me in Africa.

The landscape of the Sengalese backcountry is dry, but colorful. Our return back was cheerfully interupted at times by wayfaring cattle and goats crossing the street. The baobob trees (pictured in the first image above), among the most curious organism I'd ever seen, spread around us in every direction. Whereas most trees seem to like to clump together in groups, these fat limbed, sparsly leaved (in the midst of the dry season) trees like their space, even at times appearing to space themselves evenly into the distance.

Dakar: Tales from the Edge of the Diving Board

2011-05-09T15:49:00.008-04:00

The City of Dakar sits on a peninsula which juts out the bulbous, westernmost edge of the continent. It looks like a diving board. The Hotel Le Meridien sits on the very palmy edge of that diving board, and I write in my hotel room by the sound of alternating Arabic and French television commercials. I have discovered that the Jolly Green Giant has the same "ho, ho, ho…" in Francophone Africa as it does in the states.

I'm not sure what it is- maybe the digesting of the blackened fillet of thiof grilled over open flame or the very long day of paper cuts and deep, dark acquisition quarries, but tonight I lack any drive of propriety to find a different way of saying the following; "Getting here from Liberia absolutely sucked."

An hour long drive from the hotel in Monrovia to the airport at Robertsfield would be the most pleasant leg of the journey that day. Then Air Nigeria told me that my carryon luggage wasn't carry-on-able and the travel day declined from there. The formerly Virgin Nigeria Boeing 737 was three hours late arriving. Clouds shrouded the jungles of the Liberian interior and the Ivory Coast on our way to Accra - the wrong way to Senegal, but the only connecting flight up the coast outside of flying back to Europe or the States. We were met in Accra by a nice representative of the airline who proceeded to guide us over and around immigration to transit to our flight onwards. He neglected to inform his colleagues at the airline however, and we were soon directed back to customs. We waited in Accra for another late arriving flight, and arrived in the Gambia, and then Senegal, where our expediter failed to show. Delirious with a lack of sleep, we waited for our hotel shuttle for 30 minutes, only to, after the 15 minute ride, to wait for one hour in the hotel lobby at sunrise as they shuttled out the Emirati flight attendants who had been sleeping in our beds. The good news was, however, that my bed was still warm when I laid down- twenty hours after I'd left the hotel in Monrovia.

I immediately fell in love with Senegal. I suppose however, that one could conceivably fall in love with just the climate here in April. It reminded me of an unfathomably sunny December in Santa Barbara. Dakar is precisely one part desert and one part ocean. No more, no less.

But I knew after breathing it in that it was more than just the weather. Senegal reminded me of many of my favorite places. The Atlantic was just as boisterous, but only a touch of gray as it is in Maryland. I dreamt of the prettiest corners of Sedona. I marveled at what Durango what look like if the sea swept in over Utah. In the narrow port passages with locals swimming between the plodding boats, the afternoon muezzin bouncing off the minarets - a moment that felt of back home in Crimea.

And the human beings in Dakar are gorgeous - Higher cheeks than any model in Paris, with smiles that would light up the Marianas Trench. They have the clearest complexions. They are tall, slender and athletic. Women adorned in colorful, elaborate dresses and head scarves. Men don long brilliant white robes. The Senegalese walk like movie stars on the Red Carpet, yet totally unconscious or unpretentious of their superior posture and movement. And they are the first people outside of Europe, Oceania or North America that I have ever seen running alongside the road for exercise.

One could easily forget in being blinded by all these strikingly clear images that Dakar is a dusty, place - a port, yes, but nonetheless an outpost, if not a gateway, of the Sahara. Dakar is like one large construction site - the oldest unfinished place I've ever been.

In my fifth week of anti-malarials ridiculous and ridiculously magnificent dreams steal sleep from me. It took me the weekend and a week of office work before I had real time and energy to venture out into Dakar. I hopped a cab down to the port of Dakar and took the ferry to the island of Goree.

Goree is a French colonial town frozen in time. It's about half a mile wide and sits about a mile offshore from Dakar. Only a few thousand people live there, but on a sunny Saturday in May it is hardly a peaceful place (picture Colonial Williamsburg on a weekend in July, except in Africa). Goree was used as a stopover for Dutch, English and French slave ships in the 17th and 18th centuries. It has a star shaped fortress with rusting cannons. Cats doze in the shade along the dirt pathways. The roads were never paved.

I walked around in the sun lazily and played a lethargic tourist; while deflecting pleas for guided tours, I let the relentless local vendors take advantage of me as I plundered souvenirs for my many nieces.

My work here has coasted by quickly; living out of a hotel room is not a new experience for me, but living out of one that has its own in-room plumbing is.
Meanwhile in the evenings after work, I eat at my favorite ocean-front restaurants: there's Le Recife with its great green garlic olives and spectacular, manicured view, and Restaurant Ngor, with excellent fish and giant garlic shrimp served with green beans and a French baguette smothered in vinegar-based Dijon. As an appetizer (called entrée here) I nibble on slightly worn copies of the Atlantic Monthly that I picked up at the Embassy in Monrovia. In between columns, I gaze out at the big blue waves of the water bearing the same name.

I pay the check and look forward to the affordable Bordeaux and BBC that await me. Vultures line the palm trees on the walk back to the hotel. A stunning peacock runs across the road, screaming a hideous shriek. Girls stop to chat with one another, hands on hips, resting large trays of fruit on their heads.

The clear blue skies and brilliant, blinding sun have subsided over the past couple of days. The sky is hazing over with the encroaching sands of the Sahara.

Good Morning Liberia

2011-04-23T12:51:00.018-04:00

USAID Mission Director Patricia Rader being welcomed at the village of Gba.

The first thing that struck walking out onto Liberian territory was the air; tinged with woodsmoke and diesel, hot and heavy with the humidity of the sea, the perfume of the red-orange dirt.

Second was the African welcome. Not meant for me this particular time, but for an evidently famous Angolan amputee pop star who was on the plane with me, just a seat over and a row back. Donned in gold jewelry, sporting aviators and white headphones, he lingered to have his picture taken with every greeting local on the tarmac.

Roberts International Airport was built by the US during World War II. Dirty white, Soviet-era aircraft emblazoned with "UN" dotted the airport. I smiled at the first impression of a service truck sporting the USAID logo. It was parked next to a new bus, also with a USAID logo, used to transport passengers the 100 feet or so to the terminal, which was about the size of a 1950's roadside diner.

We were picked up in an airconned Toyota SUV and sped away in the dusk towards the city. It being Friday night, life was just starting to hop a little. The roadside discos had opened their doors and begun blaring their music. The airport is quite a long way from Monrovia, which was just fine with me, as I wanted as much time as possible to stare out the window, devouring my first moments in Africa.

The driver pointed out the various buildings as we arrived. The Ministry of Health. The oddly cool Presidential Palace (currently vacant, being refurbished), the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) headquarters, The Legislature building, The University of Liberia and the Methodist University. Other than these large government annexes, Monrovia is a city of closely-packed, small concrete buildings. For the moment, the landscape holds evidence of post-conflict: compunds where foreigners work and sleep are surrounded with high walls with barbed wire and bars on all windows.

There are two main hotels that foreign visitors typically stay in; the Cape Hotel and the Mamba Point Hotel, next door. Both have basic rooms, decent pools and restaurants, and one even has a casino; hidden in the back through a nice tropical garden.

Just uphill is the US Embassy; one foreign service vacancy posting called it that "great aging Club Med on the Sea." This is an extremely accurate description as it truly is an assembly of 1960's era buildings that seem more like a decrepit old Country Club with a helipad (Caddy Shack, anyone?) than an embassy. It's covered by a kingdom of weird head-banging orange lizards. The grounds crew caught a deadly Black Mamba snake in one of the buildings a few weeks ago.

(Therefore I looked under my bed in my hotel room every night before I went to bed).

As a capital city in one of the poorest countries in the world and one that is also just recovering from a civil war, in Monrovia there is currently no electric grid, no city water system per say, no land line phones or sewer system. As such, all buildings (including my hotel and the US Embassy) have their own generators and water systems. Many buildings do without.

We got a brief tour from a member of the Mission and he took us to Sunset Beach for dinner and the local brew, Club Lager Beer (which tastes like Heineken) on the beach. There I was thrilled to learn that I just happen to be arriving right as the new Mission Director Patricia Rader was making her first trip upcountry to tour projects and I was invited along. What incredible luck.

Early Tuesday morning, I hopped in the SUV that would take me across Liberia through Bong County to Nimba County. But before we made it up there, we had to get out of Monrovia, which I was assured was not small feat. There is an area called "Red Light." No, it is not a red light district, although it may be called that. It is referred to as "Red Light" because the only traffic signal in the nation used to be perched there above that intersection (it has since been removed) and in normal hours, absolute gridlock descends on the crucial way out of town. Our 6am departure indicated that we'd departed relatively painlessly.

Over my year shuffling paper in Washington I couldn't remember precisely how many dozens of vehicles I had assisted in buying in Africa, but here I was traveling northeasterly in one of the many of those models. Like the Japanese-origin/Dubai-source Toyota Land Cruisers and the Thai-origin/Gibralter-source Ford Everests that were their dusty chariots, international and non-governmental organizations whose compounds dotted Monrovia like embassies in the District of Columbia: Save the Children, UN, the Red Cross, UNDP, Africare, UNHCR, Caritas, UNICEF, MSF....

The vital road from Monrovia to Ganta connects more than 60% of the population of the country and is the main commercial artery of the country. It was last paved back in the eighties, and decades of monsoons, overloaded trucks and civil war have brought the road to a significant state of disrepair. Luckily, it will soon be repaved. It was a very scenic even if boneshaking, four hour trip on a route lined with rubber tree plantations, roadside villages, markets and palm groves.

We joined up with the party in the town of Ganta, and continued on with some of our implementing partners to see to kinds of palm oil productions nearby. Palm oil production is the bread and butter of rural Liberia, and is extremely vital to support households in purchasing food, clothing and basic supplies.

The local implementers first showed us palm oil production using the latest method: people-powered presses that yield grand amounts of palm oil from palm nuts; one barrel in sixty to ninety minutes. Then we ventured into the forest (and were greeted by singing women and children) to see how palm oil has been traditionally produced: in large clay-lined, mud pits where the nuts are pressed with feet like the way grapes are squeezed in old-fashioned wine production. This method yields one barrel per day, and is not very hygienic. For approximately nine hundred dollars, "the Freedom Mill" metal palm oil press can yield nearly eight times as much palm oil as the old way, and it can be used as shared equipment - allowing a whole village to increase their household income.

The three car entourage continued on to the town of Sanniquellie. Nimba County is bordered by Cote d'Ivoire on the East and Guinea on the West. In Sanniquellie, one of the largest towns in the area we had a fabulous lunch of chicken, rice and beans with local officials and chieftains at Jackie's. Continuing on, we drove further into the forest to the village of Gba.

The following sentence is probably the most overused in the modern international development blogosphere, but I'm going to go ahead and use it anyway; "As our vehicles entered the clearing, we were greeted by joyous, dancing and singing villagers." It is quite an experience being greeted by African villagers in the jungle: without a doubt the very best welcome I've ever received anywhere the world in all my life.

We sat in the Gba community long-house with two tribes: the Gba and the Zor. These two tribes had been warring with each other just a few years ago over their territorial boundaries in a forest. Here, now the tribes were friends and the Gba and Zor kids danced and sang together. A USAID-supported project, Land Rights and Community Forestry Program had assisted the two tribes over the past couple of years in making peace by demarcating the forest they shared and planning its sustainable use.

In the villages of Gbapa and Zolowee, we toured a crop nursery below the village where agriculture experts were assisting the locals with putting the "cash" back into locally-grown cash crops. The Gba people are nurturing high quality black pepper and the recently envogue spice "grains of paradise" in a nursery of eco-friendly non-timber forest products.**

Yet another labor-saving food production process was modeled: a cassava root shredder and presser. The cassava root looks kind of like a long yam, it's a staple of the continent and provides much needed starch to Africans. It must be shredded into tiny pieces and then strained and dried. This is quite labor intensive (especially using the old method of shredding the root with what looked like a massive cheese grater). The device called a cassava processing mill, powered by a weedwhacker-sized engine makes quick work of the cassava and another device presses the liquid out of it with a giant screw-like flange.

The field visit also brought home in heart wrenching detail the insurmountable challenges of the doctors, nurses, facilities and partners that the Global Health programs I’ve been touching in Washington over the past year have supported. At the Sacleapea Health Facility supported by the implementing partner, we listened to a doctor explain how refugees from the civil war next door in Cote d’Ivoire were exasperating the over-burdening of an already tenuous rural health facility. Over forty-five percent of the daily patients at this facility are malaria cases. When I heard that, I considered how over the last year I had assisted with the expenditures for long lasting insecticide-treated bed nets for several projects, having little notion of the scope of malevolence I had a hand in combating. Furthermore, most of the children seeking care were suffering from malnutrition, some of it extremely severe, as I saw first-hand in the pediatric ward. Walking through a children’s hospital ward in this part of rural Africa was unspeakably gut-wrenching, but it is something that I will oblige myself to do again, often.

I returned to Monrovia and my tasks there with an altered sense of levity than when I left. Even though I'd heard many times how important field visits were, the experience of actually meeting the individual stakeholders and seeing the technology of development in rural Africa caused me to reimagine the role I play... among other things.

Liberia was different than I expected. For it having had a very, very bad couple of decades, the people here are remarkably resilient, friendly and upbeat. I also saw buildings with flowers out front. I saw children playing soccer. I saw houses being fixed up and tended to. Maybe it was a mere accident that a clean up crew was out near the Embassy during my visit, picking up trash and whitewashing the sidewalk and roadside rocks with tropical white, but it certainly makes one feel that, to borrow a Reaganism, it's morning again in Liberia.

Then is often the case, in Liberia it's the women who pick up the pieces and put them back together again. And then life goes on.

On the way up to my visit to Nimba County, in the middle of Bong County we happened on a radio broadcast of an interview with the Harvard-trained President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The first female President of an African nation answered questions from respectful callers and her clear voice exuded a sunny optimism. Yes, there were many problems, she admitted. For example, they really needed to increase their exports to build up foreign reserve and there were still lingering issues from the civil strife of the past twenty years. But President Johnson-Sirleaf responded to caller's concerns with a positivity that reverberated in many of my encounters with the local people.

In an interview with National Public Radio in 2009 she said, "Today, people are out on the streets, even in the night ... no longer fearful. You can see intimidation is gone," Johnson Sirleaf said. "Children are back in their uniforms going to school. You can look in people's faces, and no longer you see despair, disappointment and dismay."*

Besides the fact that disaster and hopelessness net more viewers per soundbite, progress and development takes great time and more patience than most jet-setting journalists have the attention span for.

"I cannot afford to be impatient. I must keep my head above water and keep pushing," President Johnson-Sirleaf said.*

Liberia and Liberians will persevere. That's what I leave here with.

Tony Bourdain, that great tourist, can add Liberia to the list of places he was very wrong about.

*National Public Radio. "Liberia President Knew Hardship Before Power" Radio interview conducted 8 April 2009. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102866461

**Special thanks to C.Y. Kwanue and the Daily Observer of Liberia, "USAID Director Tours Nimba Projects" article of 25 April 2011.

Ice Cream over the Sahara

2011-04-17T13:22:00.007-04:00

Dulles was a house of madness. This rather perplexed the TSA agents, who remarked that it looked more like 5pm on a Friday before a summer holiday weekend than 3pm on an nondescript Wednesday in April. There was a Chinese tour group that was holding up my check-in line. We'd only wanted to check in at the kiosks and quickly rid ourselves of our checked luggage like stinky garbage.

But there they were, the wired, loquacious foreigners who had no idea that they'd already missed their flight.

Then there was the sorting of the hominids and their belongings - a portioning of the haves and the have-mores into two security screening lines; one for business and first class and the other, long, long one for steerage, so as to further increase the incentive to wait less by having more.

I sat at the gate waiting for my colleagues who were joining me in a business trip to Africa. As I relaxed, devouring my Times, an off-duty flight attendant found the quiet vacancy next to me suitable to chat with her beau on her mobile. She described in detail how she was deprived of her dress in flight. The reader should now lower his or her eyebrows as I endeavor to explain. The flight attendant cozied up in her pajamas on in a vacant business class seat on a four hour break on a half-full (in what I can only presume to be a Trans-Pacific) flight. She had neatly deposited her folded dress on the seat next to her. When she awoke, she found a snoozing passenger next to her. Perturbed, but reluctant to stir slumber, she ignored the probable economy ticket holder, no doubt sleepless, seeking out premium upgrade. When the flight attendant awoke, the passenger and her dress were gone. They discovered the insomniac thief curled up in First class with the flight attendant's dress bawled up by the window beside the passenger's head, reeling in its reincarnation as a pillow.

Seven brief hours is all it takes to cross the Atlantic these days and get yourself to Brussels, that manilla envelope of boulevards and strange architecture. Seven hours is exactly the sum of one movie (the new Tron) followed by another (that new movie about the Russian gulag filled with painfully accented actors, none of whom are actually Russian), followed by a slew of garbage television programming all viewed on a screen too small and too dim to view anything, all in a seating space designed specifically to torture, physically, anyone who dare grow over 5'11', the maximum height for NASA astronauts.

In Brussels, I succeeded in tricking my colleagues into taking the train from the airport to the city centre (spelled that way in Europe) rather than taking a cab, thus exposing them to some discomfort with the benevolent design to successfully transition them from American comfort and convenience to a more hearty African traveler disposition. We waited for the train for 40 minutes, only to find it too crowded to sit down. When we arrived, the door wouldn't open and the conductor yelled at us. The hotel was more like six blocks from the station rather than the three I promised, and it involved mostly stairs and cobblestones. Whatever. They'll thank me later.

A Belgian layover consists of a baguette lunch, a Turkish pide dinner, a lambic and a few Jupiters, and a continental breakfast. Then one is whisked from the Kansas City of Europe by easy cab (I figured my colleagues had had enough conditioning) and delivered to Starbucks and a lucky glass-ensconced airport that was built around it.

The Brussels-Monrovia flight was the kind of one I'd been waiting for for quite some time. A sunny, long six hour jaunt - above Paris, over the Mediterranean into Algeria and up over the longitudinal breadth of the Sahara. It truly is another sea - no, ocean, of sand. It went on forever - or four solid hours of flight time, whichever is longer. The hot sands even scorched my face at 38,000 feet and 40 degrees below zero, and I nibbled at a delicious ice cream cone high above the Sahara, marveling at the times.

Next up: Liberia.

When it Rains...

2011-03-27T19:33:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago, a few friends and I rode in three cars out to Western Maryland for a bid of peace and quiet in the woods.

Deep Creek Lake, Maryland is beyond the church steeples of misty Cumberland in the old mountains, where my ancestors mined coal and wandered summers barefoot beside rocky streams. There lives there a jovial great uncle who drinks iced tea from mason jars and slumbers mightily in long naps in a large reclining lounger.

I spent the weekend in the jacuzzi. When I wasn't in the hot tub, I played charades with my friends from grad school and Peace Corps by a roaring fire. We ventured out in the drizzle only for supplies and a brief walk along the rushing Youghiogheny River. There in Swallow Falls State Park, we also went to see Muddy Creek Falls, an impressive 50 footer, where Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone camped out together in 1919. Quick and falling waters make an energy confluence.

Still water makes peace and quiet, but eludes progress.

Dinner ended salmon and vegetables on the grill, followed by a late night dip.

Before departure, I plugged back in and forced all my compatriots to join my Sunday morning ritual CBS's Sunday Morning (i.e. calming, soothing knowledge pouring gently from a sunrise) followed by NBC's Meet the Press (i.e. argumentative, vitriolic passion blasting from a car horn).

I, innocently, was trying to lessen their shock of the buckle back to the Beltway.

Everyone’s a critic.

2011-03-07T22:15:00.003-05:00

Here are some great flicks I’ve seen over this passing cold, wet winter that I highly, highly recommend. This list is tipsy on the West and WWII, but what times and places for film fodder of the ages.

All of these films are worth discovering, although the movie below from the USSR I actually rediscovered this winter after watching it for the first time in Ukraine three years ago.

San Francisco (1936, USA)
Flame and Citron (2008, Denmark)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, USA)
A Prophet (2009, France)
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980, USSR)
The House on 92nd Street (1945, USA)
Paris Je Taime (2006, France)
True Grit (1969, USA)
Memories (1995, Japan)
For a Few Dollars More (1965, USA)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, USA)
Mrs. Miniver (1942, USA)

Land of Plenty

2011-01-20T17:35:00.007-05:00

Perhaps there was something in the air or water in 2010, because pregnant and recently-pregnant ladies are everywhere. I spent new year's eve with old friends in Pennsylvania. Nearly all of them were married, and of those, nearly all of their wives were pregnant. Another friend in Pennsylvania is pregnant. Many ladies at work, or the wives of coworkers are pregnant.

And then there's the fact that my lovely niece Emma was born just last week. What a gorgeous little girl. And, I know she's not even two weeks yet, but I swear she already looks intelligent and inquisitive like her uncle. Amazing.

The United States of America may have a slew of daunting problems: stagnant economy, lingering unemployment, crushing debt, overseas commitments etc. But one thing that we don't have to worry about is a low fertility rate.

It's true - our fertility rate is the envy of the developed world.

Low birth rates in Western Europe, Japan and the Former Soviet Union are expected to cause big problems ahead for those nations (as a young workforce will find it difficult to fund a disproportionally large elderly population).

Despite having dropped to an all time low for the US, our fertility rate is still awesome. Granted, a large part of our high birth rate can be attributed to our high teen pregnancy rate (39 births per 1,000 girls), but still - let's celebrate something going very well- a birth rate near replacement! USA! USA!

See: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/149316.php
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=us&v=31
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/30/teen-pregnancy-us-_n_802854.html

Take a Seat, Any Seat

2011-01-13T19:48:00.006-05:00

Senator Udall's suggestion, albeit adopted from the ideas of a (albeit slightly partisan) group, the Third Way, that Congress sit united, indivisible by party, at the State of the Union, is a fresh and wonderful idea.

I'm a fan of ritual when it comes to democratic government, as precedence builds a transparent structure that transmits the stability and competence indicative of a mature republic. However, tradition can do without a dark cloud of partisan rancour hanging over an annual session designed to demonstrate our unity in purpose.

On the 25th of January, let all of Congress sit where ever they want, for in a legislature of one nation that exists for liberty, while not all can be true friends, none can be really be foes.

Return to the Big Frozen Apple

2010-12-12T19:09:00.013-05:00

Months ago I planned to make another weekend trip up to New York. I knew I wanted to see the Big Apple this particular time of year and it had been fourteen years since I had seen New York in December.

There is nothing witnessing the capital city of Capitalism in its spastic, ecstatic convulsions of the holiday shopping season. No word can capture the awe, the frenzy, the lights and glitter of the sleepless electricity that takes place between Thanksgiving and New Year's. It is New York at its very finest, even if the weather descended on Manhattan is nearly at its very worst. (For the absolute worst New York weather, you'd have to be there in either late January or late July although I'm not sure which I'd loathe more).

Fortunately for me, I managed to trick three good friends into joining me on the two day trip. Little did they know how freakin cold it would be! Ha! Ha! Little did they know what kind of tour guide they were acquiring! Ha! Ha! Not a native New Yorker by any means and utterly unqualified to be a tour guide, but out of the four of us, I was the only Easterner.... ...and the only one with an I-Phone. So, after earning their trust, I marched them furiously through district after district, shunning all cabs and we patronized only the subway (except for one late Sat night from the pub to the hotel in Brooklyn, which was probably a good idea). But they failed to complain or tire, the world travelers that they were, and we wound up having a marvelous time even after the Metropolitan Museum of Art tried to hold us hostage.

We arrived to bagels and coffee, then walked through the tree, flower and wreath district to the subway station to head north a few blocks. We attempted FAO Schwartz, but the line was around the block. So a jaunt through Central Park refreshed legs stale from a long bus ride over the Delaware river and through the Jersey pine boughs. One friend was then accosted with the curses of a parsel tongue psycho. New York maybe the Capital of Capitalism, but Manhattan is also the Central Bus Station of the planet when it comes to the insane.

Then we decided to grab a coffee at the Met reasoning with our collective experience in travel that most museums in the world decide it's a good idea to gather extra revenue by attracting walk-bys to drink overpriced coffee and feel culturally enriched by the law of proximate osmosis.

Walking in the door, our bookbags were groped and stripped search, and one of my companions was directed to stand in line to acquire some strange certificate stating she was carrying a laptop. Then we were directed to stand in a long line in the bag/coat check. After standing in line for 15 mins and depositing our bags and coats, we attempted to enter the hall to acquire coffee and were informed that we would have to pay $20 entrance fee. Then we re-enetered the line for coat check to abandon the idea for coffee at the Met altogther. After waiting in line for another 15 mins, the nice coat check man asked us why we had returned so early. We told him we just came for coffee. He asked us to wait (despite our pleas to allow us to abandon the endeavor) and returned with free passes to the museum. Exiting the coat check again, we were granted enterance with our iron buttons, passed through the Middle Ages and then the Renaissance to get to the basement cafeteria and some delightful spiced hot cocoa. Finally, we recovered our things, bestowed great fortune and good karma on the nice coat check man and exited the Metropolitan Muesuem of Frustration and its Sovietness, into chilly, but more predictable weather.

I wouldn't have felt satisfied without doing a little shopping, and this was accomplished at a rather quick stopover in midtown. Then we headed under the East River to our hotel in Brooklyn. This is where insert that our hotel room was very nice, the beds extremely comfortable, but the hottub was luke warm.

Then off to Chinatown for dinner. Hot soup dumplings at Joe's Shanghai. Ducks in windows. Freshly killed fresh fish killing any hint of subway or alley urine. Chinatown is indeed a happy place.

Later it's my choice - 30 Rock plaza and the world's greatest Christmas Tree. It was so crowded, one could barely breathe. But who needs air when you have Christmas cheer? Opposite the tree, a projected snow flake animation played out on ten stories of a building front. Magical yes, but somewhere high above the tree, the cast of Saturday Night Live and Robert Deniro were getting ready to put on a show. Hmmm - one day I'll get in there.

By this time, frigid was the only thing that could describe enduring the outdoors. Lucky for us a pub evening in Brooklyn in cozy bars "Boat" followed by camp-themed bar "Camp" capped the night off. Cab back to room for sleep.

Sunday morning - further into Brooklyn for a massive, delicious brunch at Tom's Cafe, where we seemed to just miss the crowds. Then - onwards - through, rather than below or above the rooftops of South Brooklyn.

The Russian language started filling the subway car (is it still called a subway even after it "turns L"?) while it filled with pointy-shoed passengers donning cyrillic newspapers and high-heeled booted girls in fur lined collars. Brighton Beach filled all my onion-domed expectations, and exceeded them.

Inside the stores (Soviet style gastronoms, rather) they sold kielbasa, canned fish and pork-filled pelmeney. Folks walked like Slavs, shrugged-shoulder-like, in Chinese-made black coats and sweaters bought in outdoor bazaars from Central Asia to Canada. Old babyshki sold shoe inserts and socks on street corners, confirming my suspicion that street vending for the elderly is a form of social exercise as well as a way to earn a few extra rubles.

Even as it was sunny, it was hovering around freezing, with the Atlantic wind bringing the wind chill well below sane. Yet, there on the Boardwalk near Coney Island, there they were, the Coney Island Polar Bear League swimming in the jetsam of the Hudson. They were mostly donned in board shorts and full length swimsuits, so I was sure they were mostly non-Slavic.

Coney Island this time of year is forlorn, spooky and abandoned. Its calm is such a stark contrast from across the river. The wind which whistled through the skeletons of the dismembered rides sounded awfully like a moan. Coney Island was to be redeveloped soon, and this proud monument to innocence seemed to be dreading its inevitible remodel reminding one that good change is rarely ever resoundley heralded near inception.

After a Coney dog, and a brief, but excrutiating walk through seven floors of Macy's flagship, we were soon on an unheated bus back to DC's Chinatown.

Some Great Advice

2010-12-03T19:32:00.003-05:00

As well as anyone happening on this blog entry, I sincerely hope the President and every member of Congress will read David Brooks's sane and moderate advice in today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/opinion/03brooks.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212

This is a BIPARTISAN approach. Let's all be willing to take some livid gruff from the myopic ideologues forming the base of the two parties - who shoot from their hips or hearts instead of thinking with a level mind... ...and let's say yes to something... ...even if it hurts.

Bravo Mr. Brooks.

The Hunt for Sane October

2010-10-24T15:43:00.011-04:00

Sanity. According to the 2010 Oxford University Press, the word "sanity" means the following:

1. The condition of being sane.
2. reasonable behavior.

Synonyms include: 1. mental health, reason, rationality, stability, lucidity, sense, wits, mind. 2. sense, good sense, common sense, wisdom, prudence, rationality.

At the end of the mid-term election cycle here in Washington DC, it is about time that someone, anyone, finally starts talking sanity. It would be a totally worthless exercise to discuss why. If you need a reminder, just turn on your television, or click through the news headlines, or walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, where you can be accosted by LaRouche fanatics and Falun Gong enthusiasts alike.

So for the benefit of good mental health, I was fortunate enough to have two weddings to go to in this past month- ample mana required to remind one that love and friendship and other good and real beauties, still exist, indeed thrive, in spite of all the malice, ignorance and division which lurch beneath the autumn foliage of every even-numbered year. Mike and Alexis wed in Virginian wine country (Congrats!). A few weeks later, Andrew in Yulia tied the knot (officially, this time) outside of Kansas City.

And I also needed good mental health after the countless hours I spent treading numbers in the tsunami which is the end of the fiscal year. I found myself washed ashore on dry land on the First of October, ready to leave the walking dead and live among the living again - and not head into work on the weekends.

So in Kansas and Missouri I got to catch up with a pack of Peace Corps friends and see a fine city that I'd never seen before. After a decent flight over the Appalachians (and a clear glimpse of the late Sen. Robert Byrd's magnificent windmill farms), via Fedex-Memphis, I reached Kansas City in mid-evening. After meeting up with my friend Margaret and determining that there was no suitable establishment to wait out late arrivals Greg and Eileen, we decided to head downtown and check into our hotel - the Hotel Phillips - the same wood-panelled establishment President Harry Truman used to run a haberdashery out of.

Kansas City immediately reminded me of several places at once. It yearned for the "shining city on the hill" vibe of several American cities - princely among them Chicago, but also Birmingham, and even playing at a Gothic industrial cousin of Pittsburgh. Furthermore, it had a hint of my beloved Denver: clean air in blue sky, sharp lines, and bricked, turn-of-the-century buildings.

One of the great things about American cities is that you can smell the geography of a place the moment you arrive, and contrasting devices that would clash on other continents are juxtaposed so appropriately here.

Let me pose a very good example. New Orleans smells of the Mississippi - the source and origin of all its identity. From deep in the Delta, the city acts like a trawler - gathering up all the hidden jewels from its muddy bed - a menagerie of Western hints, such as Indian arrowheads and long-gone Buffalo dung, fermented prairie flowers like the jazz and other souls of the Plains, French colonial castaway coins, Caribbean and Gulf flotsam and jetsam, the dark and secret cultured streams of the Deep South mingles with a Latin conglomerate....

Kansas City faces West. It always has. It looks forward with that bright American optimism that once upon a time used to guide our view of ourselves and the world around us. It stands at the crossroads between three vastly different regions of the States. Nearby Independence, the home of President Harry Truman, used to be the launching site for the wagon trains West. Not only is this city a confluence of the streams of the South, Midwest and the Great Plains, it also once served as the last outpost for those drifting out to the Wilds of the Far West; abandoning all known sanctuaries in a tremendous leap of faith towards failure and destruction, or a better life yielded through a bold and difficult struggle for self-determination and adventure.

Now it has the world's finest barbecue, an odd, yet whimsical airport and a very fine football franchise.

Like many American cities of its size, downtown Kansas City is an extremely quiet place on the weekends. Yet also like other comparable cities, that is changing slowly as bright, classy lofts are forged out of old warehouses (even in these hard times) and folks are returning to the city center to live and play after hours sans daily commute by motor vehicle.

I only had an hour or two to walk the streets alone on that Saturday morning before the wedding - so I spent them walking around America's only dedicated World War I museum and memorial. A solemn and quiet place, it spoke volumes with few words.

The wedding was a lovely Ukrainian-American affair, with silly songs and even sillier games that Ukrainians often play with young people of the opposite sex who are dull in their puritan sensibilities.

But on a broader note, I have to say that weddings of my good friends never fail to remind me how many superb families like the Meyer's dot the nation like fine oak trees.

I returned by way of Minneapolis-St. Paul in the Fall. Impressed by Minnesota from the air, I vowed to return one day to do some fishing. The fall foliage was spectacular and I had never in my life seen so many lakes (I thought the slogan "Land o Lakes" was just good butter marketing). If I like a place from the air, chances are it will look even nicer from the ground.

October has been a busy month with events in and out of work. It has been a spectacular month for weather in the Northeast, and unfortuantely I've been stuck inside for the bulk of it all.

This past week, I was invited out on a hiking trip, but considered not going because too much was going on in the District and I felt like I couldn't afford to miss a day of it - the election cycle was in full swing, and Ukrainian band Okean Elzy was in town for a rare show.

Thank God though that I took a moment's pause and thought about how it had been more than 15 months since I'd put my hiking boots on - way back in June of last year up in the Swiss Alps. I thought how insane that was that a person who used to go hiking every weekend and who thrived on fresh air hadn't been on a walkabout in almost a year and a half because he got stuck in a comfortable bubble, got really busy with a lot of things, and didn't want to venture out.

So yesterday, I broke free, canceled all plans and found myself above Shenandoah National looking out onto the multicolored canopy. Take some time to smell the falling leaves and remember what was really real in the world. In a banquet hall out in Kansas, from an airplane window, and there on the sunny summit of Mt. Robertson, I had found some sanity in America in October of 2010, if only for a moment.

Maybe the leaves block the sun and keep us from seeing the sky for blue. Perhaps that's why the end of the calendar year is always a good time for reflection.

Lucidity. Stability. Prudence. Common Sense. Reason. I wish these on the fleeting days of October, for November and beyond.

Baltimore - Once Upon a Night Not So Dreary

2010-09-14T19:06:00.011-04:00

My first adventures to foreign land were just across the Mason-Dixon, down into the steamy or frozen red-brick metropolis known as Baltimore. To a bookish little boy growing up in the country, I leapt at any chance to be in the bustling places of the world. For a life initimate with only a tiny Pennsylvanian town known only for its sleepy antique stores, a place like Baltimore might as well have been New York or London. So whenever Dad had borrow the Y van (which he named it the "silver bullet") to pick up brochures for work at a printing shop in Baltimore, he'd have riding shotgun: a grinning, thoroughly enthralled six year-old riding companion already prematurely stricken with irreparable wanderlust.

It might have felt like it then, but my Pennsylvania hometown was in no way far from Baltimore. In fact, I later came to realize that if home was not then a defacto suburb of Baltimore; with its Ocean City-going vacationers, multiple crab-shacks and Orioles fans, than it most certainly is now. One might even imagine Governor Rendell declaring lower York and Adams Counties under threat of forsaking a portion of their Pennsylvanianess. Having lived out in the eastern portion of the State I can readily say that there doesn't seem to be the same problem with New Jersey.

And then there was my family. Both of parents, and the sum of my relatives are Marylanders. Visits with aunts, uncles and cousins were spent at pools in the northern suburbs of Baltimore with Mom's family, and rowdy holdidays down in the row home cliffs of Dundalk on the eastern side of the city with Dad's family.

By the 1980's Baltimore had transformed its inner harbor into a Cheasepeake-side tourist destination, complete with a marvelous aquarium and science center, and for a short while, decent harborside restaurants and hotels. Then a light rail came to lasso the weekend pocket money of those who had fled to the suburbs, followed by the construction of the best modern baseball park in America, Camden Yards, and even a new football team to replace those runaway Colts.

So, buried under paperwork in my tiny cubicle, I got the bright idea to organize a weekend excursion to the land of Poe as a 24 hr getaway. DC isn't that far away, but when you live in the city, it's hard both logistically and existentially to leave it. I invited a few friends from Peace Corps Ukraine (all above except for two on the right), some from grad school (the two on the right), and one from both (Megan!) and we carpooled the long, long, ....45 minutes north.

First, we hit up the Ukrainian festival taking place in Patterson Park. It had at least two of three necessary ingredients; great Ukrainian beer (Obolon's come out with a wheat beer!) and decent Ukrainian music and dancing. Unfortunately, the food was much to be desired. But at least the lines were quite long to get the food, and that is all very authentic. That and a diaspora kid holding a football.

Then, the company embarked on a ghost tour of historic Fell's Point planned by my awesome Aunt Sue (that's not actually her real name, but my paternal grandfather unilaterally changed her name. My maternal grandfather did the same to another aunt).

I'd done a ghost tour before about a decade ago in Gettysburg. Ghost tours really aren't ghost tours, more like history lessons led by some overly sassy, over-educated waitress (ie grad student), dressed up in period garb, who takes great relish in insulting other people's intelligence. But it's enjoyable because all intelligent people enjoy well-designed deprecation, and love to learn a thing or two about the place they visit, or more about the place they live.

It was an interesting stroll around a marvelously-preserved Colonial district. Fell's Point reminded me suddenly of the outskirts of Amsterdam. Like the Dutch, Baltimorians cut their teeth building ships and taking the piss out of the British. The guide spoke with melancholy of many sad tales of rich girls becoming hookers and throwing themselves out of windows and a father who mistook his daughter for her lover in the dark and shot her. Ah, never more.

The wench leading the ghost tour kept cawking away with a faux British accent - but I guess that's what an 19th century American wench sounds like. She was also flirting with my friend Marshall the entire time. So unbeknownst to Marshall, Greg had the idea of slipping Marshall's phone number in with the tour tips. It certainly was a great big fish barrel of laughs at the time. Then the wench called Marshall's ye olde cell phone on Sunday. Sorry Marshall.

We retired for a bit to eat mussels (see pic - courtesy of Megan) at Bertha's Mussels - well, not me because I had been poisoned by a tuna fish sandwich earlier in the week at the Department of Commerce. Not a big fish barrel of laughs, but a very small one of a very different sort. Fifth worst food posioning ever.

A pub crawl in Fell's Point topped off the night. My cousin Lance and his girlfriend Danell showed us Max's Taphouse. Max's had hands-down one of the finest German beer selections I have ever seen outside Duetsche-phone Europe. What sudsy heaven.

And then Marshall's long-lost twin showed up. Holy blonde cow! They looked exactly alike. They even had the same color of shirt on! How freakin' weird! A total stranger who shows up one night in a bar and is dressed just like you! Geez!

We retired to a nearby hotel ...and to dreams of boot-clad Ukrainian dancers, evil twin brothers and somehwere down on Thames Street... ...terrified pirates running from desperately mad wenches in period garb.

When in Rome, Do as Tony Does...

2010-08-21T17:51:00.002-04:00

"I'm going to be all over this like a Rottweiler on a Shitsu." -Tony

Resounding success in travel is of course, a subjective creature. Some would be so bland as remark that one has made a successful journey if one returns alive. But that would make hordes of sunburnt loudmouths returning from Daytona Beach successful travelers, and I'm not happy with that whatsoever.

Travel is one part like a craft, like cooking or cabinet making. One is not simply successful at their craft for preparing a filling meal, or plying together a pencil box. Sometimes I failed at travel because I couldn't or wouldn't turn over the logs in the forest and view the hidden locality. This intentional portion; the drive, the courage and the audacity it takes to be a successful wanderer, this is the portion that is within the scope of control of the participant.

But travel differs from cooking and cabinet making in the sense that the best things that happen on the road are by pure chance. Sometimes my travels failed because I was just unlucky and nothing really interesting happened. The hapless but lucky wanderer always has an edge over the most seasoned, but not as fortunate globetrotter. That's why I relish standing at the threshold of my home, donned in bags - wandering how fortunate my wandering will be.

Tony Bourdain went to Rome in last week's episode and happened onto one of the best insights into a culture - a squabble between customer and management. Now let's set aside that he and his film crew caused the scuffle in the restaurant - a customer was angry his food was taking too long because of the silver-haired American celebrity food critic ordering every dish on the menu. The juice of the episode was the conflict. Here, a loyal customer openly voiced his extreme displeasure of having to wait for an hour and a half for his food - and the management expressed that they couldn't give a $#!^. The layers of hilarity are too numerous and deep for a blog entry. An Italian customer in a cafe in Italy complaining that the food was taking too long?!?! Hilarious!

Can you imagine his outrageous complaint: "I don't care if a world famous food critic is at your little restaurant! I'm Italian and I want my food now! Yes, I know that this American is causing me to act like an American. No I don't see any irony."

One might imagine the Tony yelling over at the man, quoting Christopher Walken in Dogs of War, "In my jungle, you'd be just another a$$#0(&."

Indeed, aren't we all?

Conflict is unpleasant in our own daily lives, but if you're lucky enough to witness it in its mundane, innocuous form as a spectator it can be an enlightening insight to the social cohesion, peace and stability of a place. In Italy, the folks at the restaurant eventually cooled down and were better off for the heated exchange. The agony of discontent did not fester in the sweltering.

In Ukraine, the arguments were frequent, sharp, public and loud. But they were often among friends and family, and life moved on after them. In other occasions, people were publicly berated and shamed for misbehavior. Perhaps it might have been an illusion of justice, but at least it made everyone feel better that some justice was being done.

Here in Washington DC - this place is all so genteel. Affronts go unspoken in a vacuum of humid silence. Yet there are so many pleases, excuse me's and thank you's, the equation makes for the sum of an endless apology. The ritual of our society makes a vast, over-ambitious attempt to make everyone feel comfortable, but in a place like the city, it keeps everyone on the edge of their seat, apologizing for the distraction of their shaking knees.

Then, some poor guy gets shot and killed on your block, and no one ever seems to apologize for that.

American History 101

2010-08-15T10:37:00.004-04:00

Question: How many places of worship are there in Manhattan?

Answer: There are approximately 6,509 places of worship in Manhattan.

Question: Can people in America worship and assemble where ever they choose?

Answer: Yes, the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the Freedom of Religion, Press, Speech and Assembly.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Benjamin Franklin

Do you agree with the Supreme Court?

2010-07-26T17:58:00.004-04:00

The NY Times has a nifty, simple interactive tool where you can answer six questions and see how your personal opinions on important issues match the nine justices of the US Supreme Court and wider US popular opinion.

Check it out here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/25/us/scotus-quiz.html?ref=us

My opinions produced this verdict: "In these six cases, your opinions were most closely aligned with the center of the court."

What a relief! I'm a centrist!

Good Advice

2010-07-18T13:34:00.003-04:00

From the New York Times
Accessed 18 July 2010
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/opinion/18obama.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1&hp

Robert Shrum:

"After a period of transformative change in his first two years in office, Ronald Reagan saw his approval rating sink to 35 percent amid a deep recession. In the 1982 midterm election, Republicans, already a minority in the House of Representatives, lost 26 seats. Soon afterward, Democrats confidently began challenging President Reagan’s re-election, denouncing his determination to “stay the course.” Yet in 1984 Reagan was returned to office in a landslide.

During his first term, joblessness had soared to nearly 11 percent, but by the time voters considered him for a second term, it had dropped to 7.2, a bit lower than when he first took office. Reagan carried 49 states because Americans knew that while the country had not yet reached an economic high noon, it was truly “morning again in America.”

President Obama is ideally suited to stay his own course. He’s been criticized for being too cool. But that’s exactly the quality this difficult time demands. By 2012, the decisive test will be not some level of growth and job creation, but public perception of whether the economy and the nation are doing better.

Mr. Obama needs only to be himself.

President Obama could maneuver his way to re-election without a mandate. But he promised in the speech that propelled him to victory in the Iowa caucuses to lead “not by calculation, but by conviction.” “Triangulating and poll-driven positions,” as he said, “just won’t do.”

—ROBERT SHRUM, senior fellow at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University and author of “No Excuses” "
The New York Times

(In this same article, I also enjoyed Jonathan Alter's and Harry Ford Jr.'s suggestion of a six month payroll tax holiday for businesses).

Dear Tony...

2010-07-16T09:58:00.004-04:00

The Travel Channel
Attn: Anthony Bourdain

Dear Mr. Bourdain-

Your most recent episode of No Reservations (episode is exactly what I hope it is) atrociously entitled “Heartland” sought to encapsulate, in a one hour segment, the flavor of the land often derogatorily labeled as “flyover country” by so many coast-dwelling snobs. As one of those coast dwelling snobs however, I can tell you that few of even the most ardent “No-Way-I’m-Switching-Planes-in-St. Louis” urbanite would dare stopover in God’s Country on an overnight business trip, perfunctorily jot down a few ideas of their impressions of a city from the window of the Holiday Inn and claim on television that they have a sense of the place.

You’re normally so much better than that.

Perhaps it was because you derided a place so dear to my soul. Even if only four years of the past ten years of my life were spent in the Rocky Mountain State, I can tell you that world travelers who meander for even a few months can never get the crisp air, blue sky and granite water out of their veins. And the food rocks.

You went to Denver and ate exotic hot dogs and claimed you had a sense of the place. And by the way, only the Texas skiers and other snow-burnt tourists who are afraid to wander off the 16th Street Mall eat at the Cheesecake Factory.

Were you too anxious to wander down one of the wildest avenues in North America – Colfax – and savor the best Ethiopian food outside Washington DC? You should have gotten around to trying the Mexican and El Salvadoran joints on Santa Fe. Did you not hear that on the many rooftop patios in Boulder they serve some of the freshest oysters around - flown in daily from the Pacific Northwest - and that there below the Flatirons one can find fine organic restaurants which dot the city like lead-hatted crazies at a tea party? Perhaps if you scratched the surface, you’d have discovered a phenomenal Nepalese restaurant high up in nearby Nederland or the best margaritas north of Santa Fe downtown at the Rio Grande. You are a man of the written word, but did you know that Jack Kerouac loved Denver – in fact Neal Cassidy’s brother opened a bar “My Brother’s Bar” that still exists today - serving the finest Buffalo burger made to order? If you're always hungry for more, like you claim, you could pop in to one of the two best sushi joints outside of Japan I’ve been to since I left - it is located just south of Washington Square Park (Sushi Den).

One of the things that sets you apart from your rotund Travel Channel counterpart is that you do more than just sit around and stuff an over-bloated snack hole with polite groans and corny, patronizing quiffs. But while in Denver, didn’t you at least have time to take a bike ride along the Platte River? A long weekend would be all you needed to go climbing in El Dorado, see a concert at Red Rocks, or relax in a hot springs in Glenwood Springs.

And don’t you like beer? You do indeed! You missed out on the Brewing State’s 92 breweries – the state ranking number one in gross delicious beer production.

Tony - the annual Great American Beer Festival is taking place in September 16-18: http://www.greatamericanbeerfestival.com/

I believe you’ve been told before – you don’t have a very hard job.

Return to the Rockies!

Regards,

Jason

Nine Things That Happened (or Didn't) in June

2010-06-28T18:53:00.004-04:00

Hmmm - this is a rather creative way to say that I should have been writing more in my blog throughout the month of June, but I've been too busy and the World Cup is much too important.

1.) I got a cubicle. Actually, it's a desk pushed up against the wall in the file room. But me and the other three товарищи (comrades) who I share the file room with, we pulled out a giant wall map from 1992 from dusty storage, and now we call the file room "the Map Room" even though virtually every other room and cubicle in the building I work in has a world map. But "Map Room" sounds so much impressive than "I work in the file room," which implies that I am only allowed to have safety scissors.

2.) I learned that since 1992, only a few things have changed in world geography, including Zaire is now D-Rock, Rockefeller Center in New York is now 30-Rock and the Balkans have grown quite a bit more colorful.

3.) I attended two Ukrainian Barbecues this month. The first boasted hot dogs, veggie burgers and an assortment of pre-packaged mayonnaise salads in a suburban park in Virginia. The only thing authentically Ukrainian about this first party was that American Peace Corps volunteers played wiffle ball followed by an absurdly raunchy guys vs. girls version of charades. At this party, I learned the meaning of several new words which I wish I had never know the meaning.

At the second Ukrainian barbecue this motnh, we cooked shashlik over a Weber Charcoal grill in Rock Creek Park in DC. I discovered then that mayonnaise-sour cream marinade on pork skewers is a tasty rival to my own "Tatarski Shashlik" which involved chicken marinated a seasoned oil & vinegar dressing suped up with Sriracha.

After attempting two "authentic" Ukrainian barbecues this month, I happened on the conclusion that one in America might be better off on the next attempt to wander off out in the dead of Winter... ...deep into the forest somewhere with some adventurous friends, juice, Ukrainian vodka and meat skewers... ...followed in tow by several caffeinated dogs - unleashed... ...and a cell phone playing a crackling MP3 version of some Ruslan song.

4.) A few highly articulate men lost their self-control this month, some intentionally so as to appear well-meaning. Some who meant not well and had no intention to be seen losing their self-control.

5.) There was Brazilian Food Night at my friend Greg's house; a steamy establishment once owned by Nancy Reagan's soothsayer. There I ate the most perfectly prepared collared greens I had ever beheld. And it was there that I discovered the Caipirinha (Rum + ice + sugar + lime = PERFECTION).

6.) England beat Germany... ...forty-four years ago! Oh Britannia!

7.) I didn't buy a new camera this month - which is why I have no pictures from the things that happened in June. Sorry. Maybe next month.

8.) BP failed to stop the oil leak in the Gulf. BP says - Sorry. Maybe next month.

9.) Anti-corruption efforts are evidentally gaining traction in Russia. A Russian Fisheries Official who was suspected of corruption was being chased in his car by the police last Friday when he threw $322,000 out of his window. The man was arrested.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65R2UJ20100628

My Top Ten Two-Scents

2010-06-17T18:45:00.003-04:00

Will Someone please start a an air freshener company that will boast my very favorite smells?

1.) Brewing Coffee
2.) Nag Champa
3.) Jet Fuel
4.) Chlorine Fumes Eaking from Swimming Pool
5.) Pennsylvania Dutch Manure
6.) Mould Old Books
7.) Steamy Maryland Hard Shell Crabs
8.) Garlic Psycho!
9.) Burning Woodsmoke
10.) Coconut Sun Tan Lotion

Cleaning Up the Mess

2010-05-23T16:10:00.005-04:00

Golf balls and trash can stop the oil in the Gulf? Really?

Is that a solution worthy of a company that posted a $14 billion profit in 2009? But then, as one executive exclaimed, "they had no idea that such a disaster could occur."

Let's start there. Hmmmm.... ....drilling for highly toxic, highly pressurized substances mixed with highly volatile combustible gas all several miles under ground which is a mile under water off a floating platform - and no one thought that anything bad could ever happen? Forgive us slack-jawed masses... ...after all these years of off shore drilling, has no one in the oil industry invested any of that fat cash whatsoever in disaster mitigation? Last month's disaster was fully preventable, or at least mitigateable. What a lesson in project planning! Oh yeah - drill baby drill!

But let me not rant. The disaster occurred. Let me offer some solutions, and aren't these at least as good as the wacky ones already attempted?

-BP could pay to open a factory in the US that makes plush animals. Air drop thousands of these stuffed animals on the oil spill. They will soak up the oil and eventually land ashore. Then oil industry and Wall Street executives could volunteer their time to wash them off. Once clean and pretty, donate the plush animals to childrens charity. What a job-growing economic stimulus package!

-Congress could set up an online gambling site which would allow people to gamble on when and where the slick will come ashore. Use proceeds to aid cleanup and repair the economic damage.

-Giant cotton balls soak up the slick. Scoop them up, and dump them on BP headquarters. I'm sure they'd eventually find a good use for them. They'd probably box them up as campfire fuel and call them "gulf balls."

-Vinegar. Lots of vinegar!

-Fill three giant tanker ships with dishwashing soap. Then offer the US Navy free target practice.

-Build a lava lamp factory.

-Plug the holes with golf balls! And garbage! Oh, wait... ...we already tried that.

Please, gulf residents, forgive my dry humor. I'm merely pointing out how absurd it is that after all the "drill baby drill" advocates out there, they and we don't have any solutions more viable than any of the aforementioned to such (an ultimately inevitible) mess. What frustration. I can't imagine how you must feel.

Plug this hole! Let's find some way to clean up this horrible mess we've made for ourselves.

Weekend in the Jacuzzi (I mean, er, Shenandoahs)

2010-05-01T17:19:00.007-04:00

A good friend from grad school wanted to celebrate her birthday up in the mountains, and many of us, searching for any excuse to get outta town and the city for the weekend, enthusiastically obliged. She rented a cabin somewhere in the woods near Luray, and after a long 3 hour haul through Friday rush hour we found our way through the burbs, across the hills and farmland, over some minor speed bumps that Easterners consider mountains and into the deep dark woods of Western Virginia.

A Texan buddy's SUV made it up and back with her loco Costa Rican dog, Maya, in-tow. I do believe her West Texas vehicle is thoroughly haunted, as when we were just getting going the Explorer started to whine some sort of battlecry: spontaneously, the automatic door locks started to lock and unlock furiously like a machine gun. Perhaps it was issuing expletives or something more poetic, in its own Explorer lingo, like "Remember the Alamo!"

Anyway, as we entered the compound the warm glow of the fire pit greeting the company, and we sat around it telling stories and sipping on Dominican Rum and Cokes while the jacuzzi warmed up on the back porch.

As I've said before, if "sitting in hot water" was a hobby, I'd definitely be an enthusiast. Being around all those Coloradans (with their folding chairs and headlamps!) made me miss the hot waters of the Rocky Mountain state: both the rooftop jacuzzis of Denver and the hot springs of Ouray and Glenwood. We talked a long time about what size tub we'd all buy for our mountain homes once we inevitably all had grown flabby, old and lazy.

The cabin we rented out was quite authentic - and I sighed with nostalgia at the attributes that reminded me of various homes that dot rural Americana: the "Trespassers Will Be Shot" sign on the front door, the waterfowl wallpaper, the kitchy explanation of hill billy lingo ("U'sins best be gettin outta at' ere crick!") and the necessary rifle above the fireplace accompanied by a rusty knife, just in case some sad city slickers forgot to exercise their God-given right to bear their arms.

It's a good thing the landlord thought to have that covered - because all we wanted to be preoccupied with was how hot the hot tub should be (I believe 104-107 is the range which provides the optimal therapy) and whether we had enough limes to make it through the weekend.

The weekend was a success. Miraculously, we even made it out of the hot tub for a period of time. We went to Luray Caverns, which boasted among the most exquisite rock formations I had ever seen. The pool (pic above) was the most incredible: the mirror reflection on the water was such that it created the sensation of an exotic desert landscape that was vaguely extraterrestial.

New York = Building

2010-04-18T16:06:00.018-04:00

In between jobs, historically I've usually taken a few weeks or a few months off to travel, unwind and refocus. But occassionally, it's right from one assignment an on to the next. This time, I got a whole three day weekend and I decided to spend two of the three days in the Big Apple.

Over the past decade, I've only seen Manhattan from windows; from one of the two buses from Peace Corps Staging in Philadelphia carrying 70 folks headed to Ukraine via Times Square to JFK airport, or that time from a plane window out of JFK when I was connecting from overseas to a flight bound for Atlanta, then Birmingham and my brother's wedding (Happy 2nd Anniversary Matt and Meg!). Aside from the airport Sbarro's and Starbucks (which were things of dreams for a Peace Corps volunteer), my most recent memories of New York indulgences spanned nearly a decade.

The last time I actually walked the streets of New York City was back in the Summer of 2001. It was my first big interview, in a tall building near Grand Central, and I remembered telling the nice lady from a Japanese English Language Company that I really never thought of myself as a good teacher. Then followed the novel image of my 22 year old self awkward in a suit, staring back depressingly at his reflection on the subway window, thinking that he'd blown his first big opportunity. But the nice lady from AEON wound up calling him back a week later and offering him a stint in Tokushima.

Well, if you can make it in New York....

Most people don't think of New York when they need to get away for the weekend and "chill." But then again most people don't live in Washington DC.

It was hard getting up at 5am after two back-to-back happy hours (one with new colleagues from my new agency and one (on the same block) with alums from grad school. But after a few hours the cramped, but cheap Bolt Bus from Chinatown forced exhileration into my legs as the lovely New Jersey skyline of smokestacks and overpasses inspired me to humm the theme song from the Sopranos.

Tokyo may be more futuristic and massive. Mumbai may be more teeming. But New York is still the Greatest City on the Planet Earth. I know what a bold statement this is really, but I feel like I've been around the spherical block enough to make such a conclusion. And don't bother arguing with me on this point, or I'll tell you to go to Newark.

I decided to spend my night at a hotel looking out on the focal point of all the world's attention since that summer I last walked the streets of New York. I booked a room at the Millenium Hilton next to Ground Zero.

At check-in, the reception offered me a pair of ear plugs and a sound machine. That was a first.

After taking the elevator to my room on the 10th floor, I soon realized why they offered me auxillary sound proofing. My window looked out on what I saw to be the most massive construction site I had ever seen. As far as the eye could see to the walls of skyscrapers beyond, the site and chaos brimmed with activity like an upside down ant hill twelve stories deep. Even the think pane of glass failed to muffle the sound of massive drills scratching away at the tenacious Manhattan limestone. In front, off to the right, I saw David Child's abomination rising in its red skeleton above the dirt and concrete like some sort of corporate Barad-dûr.

Architecture in the public domain is a preoccupation of mine, and I'm sure many in the trained profession roll their eyes when pedestrians like me walk by and give their two cents. But my opinion is, if it's a high profile project, and if I have to look at it every day, I don't need a PhD from Princeton to conclude what looks good.

For those who don't know the background to the "Freedom Tower" (now called "One World Trade Center") here's it in a biased nutshell: After 9/11, a committee led by the Port Authority and Governor of NY held a public competition for designs of a tall building which would be built over the World Trade Center site. Daniel Libeskind, one of the greatest architects of our age was chosen by the democratically-organized committee for his soaring design featuring hanging gardens at 1500 feet with built-in windmills to inspire feelings of world peace and global unity.

Then came along Larry Silverstein, the developer with leaseholder rights and pretty much nixed the idea, inserting his own underling, David "Molotov" Childs from the Firm-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. They changed Libeskind's design and made it mediocre.

See said mediocrity at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_World_Trade_Center

I think they were trying to make the design look scary. Nice work! It looks kind of like a very tall air traffic control tower. Or a hyperdermic needle. Or an icepick.

OK- I'll try to take a deep breath now, relax and be patient. One shouldn't fume until he sees the finished product.

The other four buildings rising from the ashes on the site are a mishmash of architecture that don't seem to go quite together. But I can live with this, as NYC seems to thrive on the unmatching chaos of skyscraper architecture. At this point on paper, Lord Norman Foster's Two World Trade Center is the most promising skyscraper design on the site. Also the waterfalls cascading into footprints at Arad and Walker's National September 11th Memorial and Museum and Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub look quite intriguing.

Taking the Metro made me miss subway stations that actually had character. Washington DC's decrepit metro has so many flaws that I just sighed uncontrollaby as I found myself on Saturday night back in the dull, cave glow of the featureless Lefant Plaza, outrageously unworthy of the earth-shattering city planner it was named after. In New York, the Metro's exposed I-beams whisper the century that saw it through, the stations are all unique and recognizable. I wonder what would happen if one night some merry pranksters from UMD went to all the DC metro stations and removed the signs. Would DC commuters even know where to get off? They may be populated with rats and reek of urine, but at least New York's Metro has character.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was packed, and MoMa was even worse, but I still got them both in on this trip and hope to return again soon.

Pic right - 30 Rock. "Hey Liz Lemon!"

While sadly there wasn't the time for Billy Joel's advice and take a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line, I absolutley was in a New York state of mind, or at least, stomach. In fact, in preparation for my trp, I ate like a Whole Foods rabbit all week so that I could gorge myself on New York fare: Papaya Dog for lunch, pizza from Ray's, soup and dumplings in Chinatown, bagels for breakfast and lunch in a deli.

I took the bus up to NYC and the Amtrak back. Given how convenient it is to get there from DC, I'll be back up as soon as I can.

I finished the short trip relaxing in Central Park, wishing I had a whole week in the city instead of just 36 hours. Some guy was walking around selling margaritas in the Park. He even had a blender in his backpack. The thought of buying one passed briefly to consideration, but then the imagination cloud burst abruptly as I pictured myself foam mouthed in a seizure, my wallet and mind both gone from a delicious iced slurry of rat poison.

Six Months on the Yard

2010-04-11T14:26:00.009-04:00

This time last year, behind an Embassy-funded computer screen in the drafty attic of a building which served as home to my NGO, I watched online the American economy finish its descent into the fringes of depression. Therefore, my impending unemployment clouded my return to America, and hung over the three month vacation which followed my departure from Ukraine.

I didn't quite know for sure where I was going to move to. I thought a long time about returning to the West, where I had always felt more healthy and comfortable. But I finally settled on the notion that I needed to find work, and in the middle of the Great Recession, that necessity trumped quality of life, and any preference of climate. So I picked DC, and moved there at the end of August.

Moving to a new city is never easy. But I had done it before and also with what I had then: a few bags of clothes and just enough cash to get started out. In many ways, aside from some golden crumbs of wisdom and a much heftier resume (with the student debt to boot), I had exactly what I had in a few years ago when I bought a one-way ticket to Colorado after my stint in Japan. But opposite of my Colorado expereince, finding a good job in a great organization with exceptional people turned out a smoother episode in the District than finding a nice, affordable place to live.

It was my great fortune to have my resume picked out of the Monster pile at AE Strategies LLC, one of the very best contractors in the DC area and find a fulfilling assignment as a Project Manager at the Department of the Navy's OCHR Transition Management Office. I was even more fortunate to have worked with superb human beings from whom I learned a great deal in a short amount of time.

Together, our team dove into the pressurized depths of change management and somehow navigated the waters of government bureaucracy without drowning. Transferring 72,000 civilian employees out of a cancelled pay-for-performance system is no small task indeed, despite what certain capricious Congressmen thought. Despite its many bulwarks and an ever-increasing workload, not only was this team successful in planning and implementing a profoundly complex change mananagement process, it continues to thrive effective, efficient and mission-driven; also managing to enjoy the work and have a little bit of fun every now and again.

To my colleagues at the DON - thank you for a wonderful experience these past months at Navy Yard which gave me a reinvigorated confidence in the quality of our government and a vivid realization of how the strength of our Republic rests not only on its administration of justice, security and natural assets. The vibrancy of a soceity also pivots on intelligent stewardship of its rare and precious human resources.

America should sleep better knowing that at least one branch of our nation's service has got that end fully covered.

Upcoming posts: 1.) Regenerating New York and 2.) my new job

Regrowth '10: Back Under the Cherry Blossom Tree

2010-04-03T19:35:00.012-04:00

A torment of a winter freeze in which the District was constantly blanketed with feet of snow and gridlock from the South has been extinguished quickly with a Spring that sprang into summer with out pausing in March. It is 70 degrees in the midst of Cherry Blossom Season: tourists have descended on the Washington Obolisk like locusts in a pink-accented white marble Egypt.

Walking around the Mall today, I couldn't help but to think of Japan. Eight years ago (a few weeks longer I recall, as the trees there blossom earlier with a subtropic hormone), I joined my friends under the cherry blossom trees in the "Hanamai Festival" to feast on fish, tofu and salads in a diligently manicured park Tokushima. I once lived just down the street from that park. Now I live just up the street from the White House.

On the Mall, I spied more than a few nihonjin who peace-signed-smiling, posed for pictures on blankets with the Capitol as a backdrop. I imagined that might almost feel at home, even without the large cans of Kirin beer, octopus filled dough balls, or squid-on-a-stick.

A spectacle temporarily captured my attention: The University of Maryland's Japanese American Student Association would be performing a "traditional Japanese dance!" soon on a stage near the Washington Monument. Arms crossed, I paused in anticipation for an off-chance that I would instantly transported back to an enchanted Land of Longing. Out pranced, tripping, the dishevled troupe of Japanese, American, Japanese-Americans and some self-identifying but who were likely none of the former. They had flags. They wore something that resembled Japanese mental patient clothing. One of them had a Chinese Halloween mask. They ran around to pop music with their hands in the air laughing. That dance was not traditional, that's for sure. I shooked my head, and walked on.

Fancying myself some sort of amatuer writer, please indulge my requirement to fashion a sort of over-used parallel on the weather. Truly though, the cicumstances are irresistable. Here we are in 2010 after a freak freezing Winter met by a unseasonably warm thaw: the Dems are no longer caught in the Doldrums, the stale Winter air has broken, the curse is lifted and things are finally get done in Congress again. In addition to the historic health care triumph, we might actually get a financial reform bill through as well. Maybe the President has his mojo back? If so, let us all stand up and applaude, because no one who calls himself a patriot should ever wish the President to fail.

The weather is nicer and the sun is shining, but the political climate has yet to improve. I long for the return of a nature-loving science, philosphy and reason to return to the American countryside. Looking toward the pink-ringed Tide Pool, I asked myslef; "Where is our next Thomas Jefferson?"

Because our Union has always thrived in a plurality of dissent, we will always need the two sides: the skeptics and advocates of strong central government. But in the meantime, in the warmth of Spring, I'll patiently await the return of a worthy rival: some sunny, progressive, intellectual conservative who embraces inner-dissent. The passing passions of the majority or the special interests of the minority have no right to monopoly of discourse. And neither party should propel itself with pessimism and anger; attributes which seem to me an anathema to American progress.

Albert Einstein wrote that "What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right." He also commented once that questions of physics were not as difficult when compared to questions of solving the complicated problems of governance. Remember, you angry mobs and middle America alike, with your finger-pointing 20% Congressional and 48% Presidential approval rates (the same as this time during Reagan's presidency), that according to Einstein himself our leaders are dealing with more complicated than astro physics or travel at the Speed of Light. And remember my fellow Americans, that nobody in Washington is nearly as smart as Albert Einstein.

100th Post: Al Gore in Palm Beach

2009-11-30T18:27:00.019-05:00

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

RIGHT CAPTION - THESE ARE FACTS. People write facts in things like textbooks, international treaties and scientific journals.

This posting is about the real-life struggle between truth and opinion, opinion about truth and the truth about opinion. I get the irony that my criticism in the blog following circles like a buzzard in those who confuse fact from the opinion of others.

It was a stale November when I escaped the wind, rain and foul manure stench of the Columbian bog. The air above Washington was becoming stagnant; the winds of change were caught in the doldrums, somewhere just above the Senate floor where novelty and inspiration enigmatically eddy.

A few days of sunshine and fresh air on the South Floridian coast, were thought would do one well. Perhaps one could be rejuvenated by some refreshing sea breeze of sober fact and reason. My good friend was organizing an event in Boca Raton for the legendary Al Gore, who was promoting his new book, Our Choice and Zack’s invitation seemed like a good excuse to get out of town for the weekend and clear my head. Perhaps as a citizen of the Republic of Rhetoric, in the District of Dispute I’d lost my patience waiting for composed argument.

Palm Beach is very near to the Bermuda Triangle. Perhaps that’s why it is a showcase for the wacky.

Think of bat-winged ballots, chads hanging like limp palm fronds and several hundred nearly blind liberal senior citizens who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan.

Think of joggers on the beach near Boca Raton, quizzically noticing a type of Howl’s moving extraterrestrial castle hovering over the surf on a sunny Saturday morning, then laughing it off as they treat themselves to skim soy mochachinos and cranberry scones. Such a scene could be an overly complicated allegory of the comfort-seeking behavior of suburban America: witnessing firsthand fantastic unnatural phenomenon that could spell doom for all of human civilization - then going on seconds later pretending that it couldn’t possibly affect their primetime viewing schedule or their conversations about what amazing things were happening on reality TV. It just could be an allegory.

Think of a golf cart tricked out with fluorescent lights and flat-screened TVs, piloted by an eighty year old cruising the strip on a Friday night.

Think of throngs of people calling themselves tea baggers, protesting fact, lynching science and stoning reason.

Now you have a sense of it. Being on a permanent vacation in the Sun Belt - like in Florida, Arizona or California sometimes gives those who live there license to leave their senses.

And South Florida in particular is a truly bizarre place. But the weather is nice there and I almost had a respite. On a Friday the 13th, I found myself walking for miles along a bucolic white sandy beach, free of superficialities and ruminations of consequence alike.

The next day, I was lulled out of my sea calm; rudely awakened on the front lines of a rowdy insurrection against science and reason. It could have been Galileo’s 16th century Italy. The geocentric mob was blood thirsty. They were ready to string up their heretics. It was reported that they had already strung up a Congresswoman in New York… …or at least chased her out of town with lit torches.

What I found in Florida that weekend was that things in our peculiar political climate were every bit as bad as they seemed in Washington, and maybe much worse. Whereas the folks in Washington know the facts and play rhetoric to their political advantage, folks in other parts of the country don’t know the facts, don’t care to know them, and what is absolutely the most reprehensible: they exhibit open disdain for the facts and a unrestrained glee to burn the messenger.

The mob was foaming at the mouth. Was it a severe case of misinformation? No other putrid affliction besides rabies or Rupert Murdoch could possibly describe their horrendous behavior.

With my glowing optimism (I am after all, but an American), I expected the Al Gore event at Mizner Park to be something like a quiet college lecture outdoors on a balmy Saturday evening. Instead, 200 hate-filled teabaggers screamed from the small park across the street throughout the 90 minute course of Mr. Gore’s presentation, as if he was promoting the flooding of Florida to save the environment. In fact, he was simply stating that the environment must be saved to stave off the flooding of Florida.

At the end of the night, the well-read book club liberals and young college students left still convinced of their position, and this, Al's well paid-audience was simply even more disgusted with what they considered to be club-weilding knuckle draggers outside the gate. Ironically, it was the teabaggers themselves who were taxing the event and threatening the very fringes of private property. Thus they achieved nothing but further dishonoring themselves and their cause; demonstraing for local television cameras how incredibly dimwitted, callous and inconsiderate a mob can be.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" -Isaac Asimov

Global warming shouldn’t be a controversial topic. It is widely accepted FACT that the planet’s climate is changing. I’d quote copious sources, if I’d think the occasional skeptic who happened across my blog would read them. The summer Arctic ice is 50% of what it was 50 years ago. I can’t pay for your flight to the pole, and anyway you wouldn’t go if I could, so I must be lying about the whole thing.

If you’re still skeptical that the world is warming nowadays, chances are you probably aren’t really well read on the subject, and might not care so much about the “subjective” opinions of international organizations and scientists. What’s actually causing the polar ice caps to melt is a far more controversial topic, although the number of those with PhDs claiming it’s a purely natural (i.e. conveniently non-human) phenomenon is fast dwindling.

“…you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.”

-Tom Friedman, New York Times
18 November 2009

And if the venemous spite of the right wing wasn’t bad enough, some random disenchanted Microsoft executive evidently had threatened to “sabotage” the event. No kidding! My eyes were glued to the heights of the amphitheater’s projection tower the entire night, waiting for a glimpse of an Armani-suited nitwit climbing the clock tower in his Cole Haan loafers, knife-in-teeth aspiring to cut the cord and redeem his silicone honor.

CAPTION BELOW - THESE PEOPLE ARE EXPRESSING OPINIONS. OPINIONS are things that are not always true, and cannot be independently verified. Opinions are expressed by many. Bimbos, shock jocks, movie stars, snowmobile racers, and even dogs have opinions. For example - Dog A like Kibbles & Bits and Dog B likes Purina. Both dogs may or may not have rabies.

Poor Al Gore. This guy just keeps getting a raw deal in Palm Beach County.

“He who follows truth too closely at the heels might get kicked in the teeth.”

-Sir Walter Ralegh

Longing and Sincerity on Either Side of Greenland

2009-10-31T14:28:00.005-04:00

Certain moments among my days, throughout the weeks past I have paused for more than a sentimental minute on the Russian-soaked, salty longitudes of a former land. And it's not just fleeting sighing at the absence of the Sevastopol sea wall, or the strange longing for the stale stenches of vodka and sweat on a crowded bus.

There are those on this side of Greenland who are all together quite American in the way they express their opinions, and now my knee leaps with impatience. The Slavs know no phrase such as "passive aggressiveness." All things former-Soviet are either passive or aggressive, but not both. They speak their mind, and albeit it brutally insulting, are forthright in their communication.

America somehow imagined saddling a chimera with the head of an eagle and body of a mouse. We say rarely exactly what we mean, and the desires and thoughts inside us fester and boil until we are old, sick and in visible full-blown life crises or hidden depression. The politics of work and friendship are so often resigned to behind the scenes games of intrigue and poison. In such atmosphere it is not hard to see how once can so long for the emotional knife-fight of a Slavic disagreement on the coal dusted streets of Donetsk, rather than to endure one more day of incremental back injury by a billion paper cuts of Anglo-Saxon propriety.

Washington is easily one of the most polite metropolises on the Globe. No where else in the world will so many excuse themselves of affront. The rituals do serve us in so much that they prevent sharp elbows and pushing prevalent on mass transit in other corners to devolve into some facility of our handguns (a novel subject in the District). But I counter that drenching in all situations that absurd gentility is not always self-serving.

And then you have those who, with respects to gentility, are extraordinarily Russian in their discourse, like Representative Joe Wilson.

On a different note, I read in the New York Times recently that President Dmitry Medvedev indicated that he would like to see less glorification of Stalin and Stalinism in Russia.

For whatever controversial circumstance or cultural substance, order and justice are prioritized differently in different parts of the world. It just so happens here on this side of the Atlantic, ostensibly we place justice on a higher dias than order.

Having witnessed in parades glossy-eyed young, middle-aged and elderly rank-and-file holding high in reverence, gold-framed portraits of a Georgian Butcher in sunny Saturday patriotic parades, one can say that at least the demons of one nation's past walk un-masked in the streets; not cloaked in mystery, quiet, unnoticed, sneaking through the backwoods of South Carolina.

See article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world/europe/31russia.html?_r=1&ref=world

Real change in Washington

2009-10-17T17:07:00.004-04:00

It is autumn in the District of Columbia and at happy hours across the pubs and bars of the city, life is summarized in two minute long sound bites offered up like the contemptible, hackneyed appetizers at Chili’s. It’s like blogging, except you have to balance the plate of food while holding a drink and shaking hands with dozens of strangers who may or may not be infected with swine flu.

Then you wonder whether, in this most unhealthy of swamp airs conjured by the almighty on the planet earth, you are not infecting others with your especially severe variety of rhinovirus. Only here, in the place where mosquitoes thrive impossibly below frost, where the yellow fever nearly wiped out all of Congress can one who survived the crowded, germ-laden buses, trains and vans of Eastern Europe and South Asia relatively unscathed, be pulled under by the American common cold.

Gleaming white temples of government, lined with antiseptic corridors and vats of complimentary vodka-smelling, germ-killing sluice pose no bulwark to a metropolis of disease and infection. Needing no further alliteration, I recline and let the reader carry on with their own metaphors. Still the reader should remember that in the midst of all this affliction and alliteration, there remains a bill on the floor of Congress regarding our health care.

I am here now, as I thought I would be, working in the depths of a cubicle ocean, under fluorescent heavens in the vast dominion of my nation’s central government. Although I work under the waves of bureaucracy, head swimming under volumes of policies and procedures, I am an outsider; a marooned traveler waiting at the docks for my time to turn Fed. But a contractor!

The suspense of if or where I will embark next is killing me. But this now frigid floodplain of a waiting room, this literate dock along the Anacostia River boasts a wet bar and cafeteria, including the finest burger joint yet, Good Stuff on the Hill.

Let the reader not think I tap my fingers in a stagnant pond. Despite the exasperations of right and left alike, real change here is everywhere.

And I’m here among friends. This is the first new town in all my chronicles where I’ve had friends living in some dear place before I arrived. And more new friends seem to be arriving by the fuselage load every week, hailing from Peace Corps Ukraine, the University of Denver and even further back into the Glossary. Welcome to the state of DC; the one with representation of every state and ethnic group in the country, and of every country and political entity of consequence in the world, but a city with absolutely no representation in Congress.

For the past four years, I did dread arriving here. My downbeat thoughts on the District revolved around various self-aggrandizing douche bags of Georgetown I had come across in my past encounters in the place and the various shadowy, slimy figures slinking around the glass buildings of Arlington, ravenous for corporate and legal opportunity I read about in newspapers and novels.

Also – being removed eight years I had forgotten what weather in America’s northeast really feels like. It’s already inhumanly dreary compared to even the iciest winter mornings in Colorado or Ukraine.

Yet affairs of this place are far better than I imagined. My new neighborhood, Columbia Heights, is full of boisterous, vibrant energy. A dull night is not to be had here. Encroaching gentrification may be spoiling the cultural luster of my row-homed surrounds, but the bars are coming off the windows and doors, locals walk down the street singing with a happy spring in their step. Walls are being painted. New Kenyon square was just inaugurated by ivy-capped Mayor Fenty. A new soccer field behind Harriet Tubman Elementary is regularly at capacity, with dusk-time all weather games occupied in harmonious multicultural revelry. Despite the growing pains, the chilly shocks to a still-acclimating system… …it’s quite a good time to be in the midst of real change in Washington.

Can I Ever Get Home?

2009-09-24T20:35:00.005-04:00

“You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.”
~Maya Angelou

Given the culture shock most returned expats face, disembarking on the white plastic castle of hassle after being gone more than two years should be excruciatingly shocking. After all, the last two times I’ve returned from living abroad were quite a struggle; the second being a lot harder than the first. When I returned from Japan in late 2002, I found my own people to be ruder, louder and more abrupt than what I had left them. I couldn’t keep down a hamburger, I suffered hopelessness in daily identity crises, and the soul-strangling strip malls and lonely asphalt fields depressed one into a dull, three-month-long funk. I suppose this is perhaps what living in an East Asian society will do to the sensitivities of an impressionable American.

But this wasn’t the case this time around, although admittedly the fluorescent lights, the strip malls, the parking lots and the over-wide boulevards still take their toll on optical pleasure. Returning from Eastern Europe to the American East Coast, in the first month home it was easy to marvel in the everyday friendliness and happiness of the population, to discover joy in the re-invigoration of intellectual debate on the airwaves and a tangible positive change in the substance of human relations; to leap from county to county, from state to state, with a bewildered, reconstructed reverence for homeland and countrymen.

I first landed in Washington D.C. late on July 4th via Amsterdam, Dublin, Shannon and Boston. I had never been through US immigration before in a country other than the USA. But, apparently there is some new US government program to check visitors and citizens INTO the USA, when they’re not even in the country yet. After a short hop from Dublin to Shannon, we were all directed to deplane and check into the USA… …in Ireland. I wonder when Russian immigration officers will take up residency in O’Hare?

Once back, I relaxed little at first, trying hard as much as possible to “hit the ground running” with respect to my job hunt. Even when I was supposed to be relaxing, or seemed to be, I was restless with the consciousness of desire in my next step in life to be spelled out in black and white, signed, sealed and delivered. But movement towards big life steps is not that way, and, except in instance of global war or fast food, nor is employment ever an easy affair, least of all now.

After a few nights of steak in Kennett Square, my first week back was spent at Chicoteaque, Virginia at a house on an inlet. I fished with the Imlers and caught myself a 22 inch flounder which was soon to become a delicious fried fish sandwich.
The next week I took down wallpaper in Hanover, Pennsylvania and ate the following world-famous food items of my hometown; 1.) a “Fat Boy” cheeseburger (secret sauce-French dressing?) from the Tropical Treat with Texas Fries, 2.) a hot dog with everything (including one metric ton of chili) from the Famous Hot Weiner, 3.) an Apple Crumb donut and a French Crueller from Dunkin Donuts, 4.) a Caesar Salad (must have something healthy!) from Panera Bread and 5.) Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy and coleslaw from Claire’s Restaurant. After two+ years of deplorable restaurant food, I finally caught up.

I also drove my first golf cart, and returned to my favorite happy hometown bar, Kclinger’s to find it smoke free and sadly abandoned by its drinking public in favor of sad, nicotine-infused crap holes serving as alternatives to the cigarette-crazed.

It’s hilariously ironic that the Winner’s Circle is for winning… …not for anything but maybe lung cancer.

The following week I applied to approximately fourteen jobs in the public, private and non-profit sectors. My mom cooked perfect eggs over easy and my stepdad Tom grilled to perfection fillet mignon. Also of note was that after ravenously craving CNN for two years, I got sick of it and turned it off due to reckless broadcasting of “viewer comments.” If I wanted to hear unqualified people give their opinions on subject matters they have no expertise or competency in, I would have asked Ukrainian restaurant managers to weigh in on the merits of providing high-level food quality and good customer service. Perhaps we ought to ask North Carolina Senators who espouse isolationism and don’t know what the capital of Canada is to lend voice on America’s future role in emerging economies of developing nations?
Oh wait… …we already did that one time. Garbage in, garbage out.

Then I flew to Alabama; a place, which, interestingly enough knows more about BOTH great quality food and excellent quality service than most places on our fair planet. Go figure. Of course, my opinion is more than slightly imbalanced since my brother works at one of the best restaurants in the country: the Highlands of Birmingham. I may be biased, but as usual  I am right. I spent a few days with Matt and his wife Meg in steamy Birmingham, consuming venison harvested from the local forest, fresh New England oysters in the half shell, spicy fish sandwiches, superior sushi, authentic tika masala and high-brow seafood fettuccini at a bevy of fine culinary establishments in the area. After such a week of feasting, I feel like the esteemed Tony Bourdain ought to get his sea-urchin invested ass in gear and make a visit back down to the Deep South.

After two weeks of fattening up off of blue collar fast food and steaks in the Northeast, and a week of fattening up off of white-collar quality food in the South, I flew to Phoenix to sweat it all off. My SWA 737 traveled via a stop Houston; a massive curb-side parking lot paved haphazardly over a coastal swamp as a practice target for and a monument to hurricanes, floods and other natural and man-made ecological disasters.

Traveling west in the USA by plane always make me happy. Watching the landscape change below is spectacular – the steppes, crevices, craggy mountains and stretching desert on a clear blue-skied day always seem to obscure true distances and twist perspective all to fool one into believing could just stick his hand out of the window and caress the flesh of the entire horizon at one time.
Phoenix was hot. But it was also spicy. My stepmom Faye’s margaritas cooled down the backyard evening under the hum of misters while tortilla chips swam in citrus salsa. Geckos played on the stucco walls, swarms of hummingbirds crazed on sugar water feeders and the ballpark bat cracks of Dad’s Cubbies echoed off of speakers above the tepid pool. When finally the Arizonan heat got too much, we drove through the desert, past DHS Border Patrol checkpoints to my stepbro Tim’s place in the Gaslamp District of San Diego and to the climatic relief of the Pacific Coast. There, we went to San Diego Padres baseball games, the doggie beach and ate Californian omelets or giant strawberry waffles like way back in the early 90’s when the three of us lived in Santa Barbara.

After two weeks in the desert, I was ready to cool off at home in Colorado. Getting back on America’s very best air carrier, Frontier Airlines was pleasing enough. Yet coasting northeast over the Four Corners and then above all the best easily-recognizable geological sites through which I had spent four years of my life exploring: Telluride, Ouray, Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Mount Evans – this was supreme. Coasting down over the Front Range, over southern Denver - within view of the University of Denver... …I was back at DIA before I knew what hit me.
Need I go in so much to what I actually did in Denver? I think I’ll keep a good bit to myself, as it was so nice to arrive and so hard to leave what I have come to know as one of Gilpin’s favorite spots on the Globe (after all I have a whole rural mountain county here!) – the reticent space where I keep mile high preserved is truly “read-only.” For six days, I did what I often craved from afar – burgers at My Brother’s Bar, beers at Mountain Sun in Boulder, margaritas at the Rio Grande, hiking in the Flatirons, and of course A BURRITO FROM CHIPOLTLE. It was nice to see some old friends and thank some of the mentors who have been so supportive of me in the past couple of years. More than that, I won’t squander away any more words on Colorado of August, since any more words would not give away anymore anyway.

I returned to Washington to interview, network, to happy hour and to apartment hunt. Only two of the four were successful initiatives that week, although I quickly learned that in the District of Columbia, the two are one in the same.

I took Amtrak back to Wilmington, Delaware to pick up my mom’s car and drive it to Florida after quick overnights in Marietta, PA (with the Kitchen clan), Hanover again (thank you Imlers) and back to DC for yet another interview. Then I drove the Jeep to Lorton, Virginia where I put it on Amtrak’s Auto Train.
Strange that last year I was on a Ukrainian train southbound seventeen hours from Kyiv to Sevastopol – comfortable flat bed, BYO-food and booze and abrupt service. Now I was on an American train southbound seventeen hours from D.C. to Orlando, no bed, but complimentary catered fare served at an actual table including free wine and wonderful, genuinely friendly service. Of course, this being America and all, I brought a car along for the ride.

After delivering the Jeep to my aunt’s extraordinary renovated turn-of-century house in St. Petersburg, I flew the next day to Miami’s horrific airport and took the inaptly named TriRail to Boca Raton to visit my friends Zack and Kristina and their terrific newly-minted Cooke, Oliver. After a day at the beach and a night of film and fish dip, I flew back to Washington to seek out employment and a place to unpack and finally hang my hat, if only for a while.

Back to Switzerland...

2009-09-13T20:28:00.023-04:00

Apologies for the blogging hiatus - I have been living out of backpacks and duffle bags for the last three months while I traveled Europe and the US, and have now just settled in Washington- expect more regular updates as my bags are now, thank heaven, finally unpacked.

Leaving crowded southern Europe for an alpine paradise had the same effect on me as it did in 2000; I relaxed, forgot about my troubles (this time they were unemployment, my stolen hardware etc). After all, I had been dreaming about returning to Switzerland since I left it just after the turn of the millenium. Setting foot on Swiss soil, I was instantly recharged by the cool, clean, dry air and unpredictable weather of altitude. My bags may have been packed, but I was home.

But first I had to get there. From Athens I took a well-catered plane ride on Olympic Air over the spectacular western Greek highlands, over sun-baking Germans in Dubrovnik and the Croatian coast, before descending rapidly into Munich - an expediency only matched at Denver International Airport.

I took some time, but not too much, to enjoy a small bit of Germany. Deutschland had always just been a place I passed through on the way to a seemingly more interesting part of Europe. But this time I was determined to stop for a few days and spend time with German ingenuity and efficiency.

I swear the only people on earth who would put carburetors and metal bending machines in a museum are the Germans. The Deutches Museum in Munich was quite impressive though. It is kind of like the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, except more machine-nerd-friendly - a vertible Disneyland for engineers.

Deprived of my drug chlorine for far too long, I was determined to immerse myself once more in a culture which treasures its aquatic sports and doesn't require an odious "license" from a doctor to swim at a public pool. Back home in Sevastopol I tried in vain to continue swimming at the Russian Black Sea Fleet's ship-shape pool, but the the white-frocked, strong-armed matron standing arms-crossed under an imposing portrait of Vladimir Putin kept me from my water asylum for far too long ("American, do you not understand? That is Ukrainian doctor form, you need good RUSSIAN doctor!").

The Müller´sches Volksbad is one of the oldest swimming pools in all of Germany, and was easily the oldest and prettiest pools I've ever had the pleasure to plunge into. It was built way back in 1901, in the midst of the Guilded Age. A painted dome rose above a crystal clear pool. Neoclassical statues adorned the sides of the pillared hall and fountains spurted from the lips of masonic fishes at the shallow end. The only problem was that I felt bad swimming speedy laps and doing flip turns; I imagined I was jogging inside a museum.

Of course I saw the center of town; some nice churches and streets - but this is all yawning for my readers. The only other item of ordinary note was my foray into the Hofbrauhaus, which of course every American in Munich makes his/her destination. Pretensions of the well-honed traveler considered, the beer hall is an absolutely indespensible European cultural destination, and I'm surprised it hasn't been successfully replicated in the US. After all, we Americans love beer and pretzels. In fact, I sat and had a stein with... of course some Americans from Denver, go figure. One of them was a fireman, and the other a school teacher. They were very nice people, but after a few beers the fireman wanted to start chanting USA! USA! USA! Given the audience (all Americans) this probably would have been well-received. However, I reminded them that certain expressions of nationalism and beer halls don't historically have such a good reputation together. Although the Hofbrauhaus was a hoot, I remember and recommend more fondly the intimate small and large brew halls of Salzburg.

Olympia-Schwimmhalle is where the 1972 Olympics took place - although extremely noisy and crowded, it was a grand complex, and I rocked 50m laps in the same pool where Mark Spitz won his pile of medals - only recently outdone by Mike Phelps. After that, I went to a German sauna in the complex, which was both inclusive and quite eye-opening. I'll embellish another day. My new ranking for baths worldwide:
1.) Japanese "onsen" 2.) Colorado hot springs, 3.) German sauna, 4.) Turkish bath and 5.) Slavic banya. Sorry, Ukrainians, but in my view getting whipped with birch branches is still at the very bottom of my "best way to unwind" list.

Moving on was easy to do, especially since I was returning to Switzerland for the first time. This was also easy to do because I was traveling in Germany by train.

One need only to travel to Germany to see how far the USA has fallen behind the rest of the world in terms of transportation. I believe Tom Friedman covered this exasperation at the state of our infrastructure in an opinion peice he wrote last year after returning from China of all places. Well, if you go on a train in Germany, you see your individual ticketed destination in digital letters above your seat, then you are whisked away at 180mph in cushion comfort. I know just how phenomenally and genuinely friendly all the folks are at Amtrak, since I rode it twice this summer (they still haven't found out how to engineer friendliness or customer service). Also, nifty new trains don't necessarily ensure punctuality - Amtrak was an hour and a half early in Florida, but my German trains were all late. But folks - OUR ANTIQUE TRAINS REALLY NEED WORK! WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN!

I was in Switzerland, on a double-decker coach in no time flat. I got to Interlaken late at night, ready to sleep. But the grand old lodge lobby at the Funny Farm hostel enticed me to have a few Swiss beers with adventure sport guides. When they told me that even though I have been to a lot of places, I really haven't lived until I've done some sort of adrenaline-laced endeavor, I responded that I am a live and well, and jumped out of an airplane right there above that town more than nine years ago. That ruined the conversation, they saw they weren't making a sale that night and we all went to bed.

Escaping from the pen-knife peddlers and chocolateers of Interlaken as soon as possible, I marveled my way through the valley up to Grindelwald. It was a nice, serene place - but shrouded in cloud, only occasionally subsiding to reveal the wall of white and black rock jutting up from nearly all sides of the valley. The hostel's veranda was surreal. In fact I dropped a bottle of red wine on the floor of the hostel when I got there that morning. Not because of the view, but because I get clumsy when I am excited. And besides I've been waiting a long, long, long time to come back to Switzerland.

The next morning, I headed out to what was really the most dramatic and phenomenal place on earth, what really my whole month long trip evolved around. I was going to the mountain hamlet of Gimmelwald, high above the green enchanted valley of Lauterbrunnen, into which dozens of waterfalls cascade from pristine white peaks above.

You must take a cable car to get up to Gimmelwald. You must be willing to hike all day to enjoy the solace of the out of the way and quiet nooks and crannies of the Alps high above. Unless you are a millionaire, then you can afford to take gondolas all over the region.

One place that is not for millionaires is the tremendous Mountain Hostel in Gimmelwald. It is the best hostel on the planet - the way every hostel on the planet should be, but never was. Picnic tables overlook heaven on earth and making new friends is easy, even mandatory- (think of a natural enhancement on digitally-born scenes from the movie "What Dreams May Come").

I wonder why the whole planet isn't living in the Lauterbrunnen valley. I wonder why, once mankind has dicovered this place any soul with eyes and ears and yearning feet would ever leave again. Then I think of my credit card and bank balances and remember that all great moments, experiences and places are fleeting... ...and many are unfortunately also sensationally expensive.

That being said, I made it around on a shoestring budget. I cooked maginficent meals in the very communal kitchen of the Mountain Hostel (fried sardines over homemade tomato sauce and garlic noodles) and drank cheap Italian wine bought at the supermarket a mile and a half away.

Forgoing the gondolas I nearly made it all the way from Gimmelwald to the top of Schilthorn by myself. Sadly I had a late start and the weather arrived just as I reached the glacial lake near the summit and I had to turn back. I respect nature (which is why I turned back when the weather came in) but in Switzerland you have to be a real low-lander to get lost on hiking trails. All paths are well marked by yellow hiking signs, with estimated hiking time and exact distance.

For four solid days, all I did was hike in lovely solitude amongst the magestic Swiss Alps. I could spend my entire life exploring Switzerland by foot. And that's exactly what I intend to do - little by little.

Since I lack the words to sufficiently describe my Alpine ecstacy, I need only state that now as I sit in my 7'x9' room in a row house in Washington DC, the fragrent scents of goat manure, the calming resonance of cow bells and the residual breath of the Alpine forest still lift my soul above the drone of helicopters flying overhead.

Greece is for Lovers, Not for Laptops

2009-07-28T14:28:00.018-04:00

What I learned over the course of a week in Greece, is that it's not easy being a single, solitary man in the land of Zorba. Nor is it easy being an aged Dell left carelessly in a dilapidated Gyro joint in the center of Athens.

I had a terrible time getting from Turkey to Athens on the train. The first section of the trip was well fine - a sleek two-berthed cabin allowed for a perfect night's rest, especially when it follows an afternoon massage in a Turkish bath. But getting into Thessaloniki and finding out that there were no spaces left on trains going from Greece's 2nd largest city to its capital was disappointing. So too was finding out that the train ticket I bought was supposedly transferable, yet non-refundable. But nothing to do as a lone traveler in these moments but sigh, and pull out more plastic for the long bus ticket to Athens.

The bus trip was nice enough - the blue calm waters of the Aegean framed a tropical splendor that I had long anticipated. I think we went through the area where the Spartans held off the Persians.

When I got there, I suffered simultaneously from a momentary lapse of judgment, a spike in hunger and expanding bladder. After walking into a dodgy restaurant, I left my laptop and luggage by my table while I ran up to use the men's room. When I came back, my laptop case was gone. What a moron I was.

Only thing to do is to sigh, and think of how that's one less thing I need to haul around Europe.

But the next day was better. After some pleading, I did cash in my unused train ticket (it turns out it is refundable after complaining), I booked a ferry to the islands and had a nice day exploring Athens.

Athens' sister city should be Osaka. They're both concrete messes hiding archeological gems and radiating pure heat from their dull gray radiance. Each should bulldoze a large swath of their downtowns in order to restore a portion to their ancient, narrow-streeted brilliance.

The crumbling marble of the Acropolis was every bit as lovely as I had always dreamed. My oh my what a place it must have been at the time of Alexander.

I walked for a bit by some featureless, rather boring ruins at the bottom of the Acropolis which used to be the heart of the ancient city of Athens. I was about to leave bored, when I looked over and saw a sign which stated that I was looking at the exact place where Socrates imbibed hemlock.

Among the things I learned while in Athens is that someone who looks just like my brother Matt lived there about the time of the Roman Empire. Strangely though, the statue is absent the ancient Greek letters tatooed on its ankle, which would indicate a certain lapse of judgment that the statue apparently never suffered one night after running around the pubs with his fraternal order.

Given the chaos of Athens I made no small rush to make it out immediately to the islands. The island of Santorini is where I was bound and it was a nine hour journey out and back on the Blue Star Ferry, which boasted deplorable food and chain-smoking Greeks but phenomenal views of the sometimes lonely and extremely desolate, yet often populated islands.

I remember reading how Mark Twain called the islands something along the lines of "hideous." While I would certainly disagree that the islands were ugly, they were more lifeless than any other islands I had ever seen. Nothing stirred on the desert cliffs of the treeless barren rock. It is astonishing that these islands were the seat of civilization for so long so long ago.

Santorini is simply spectacular. No where in the world had I ever seen such stark beauty on an island. And not only did the natural world wow the wonder that one all ready feels on gorgeous ocean paradise, but the towns, especially Oia, where I stayed, seemed to frugally fit the dramatic landscape. Clean lines, tones and color. Domed abodes. Rooftop patios. Over fed cats lounging on sunny porch steps. Steep stairs to the sea and impossibly comfortable narrow passageways. It is a place where all structures seem to perch, hang or cling like slumbering clouds on seaside cliffs.

Life on even a touristy destination like Santorini has remarkable moments that probably reflect what life has been like for quite some time. For example, I watched an old man donned in a speedo briefs emerge from the water near a small village on the outlaying island of Thirasia. He was wearing a snorkel and mask, and having speared an octopus, brought it to shore to slam it against a rock a dozen time before carrying it to his restaurant grilling friend nearby. Then he sauntered back into the water to find more prey.

My brother and his wife Meg spent their honeymoon here more than a year ago. It turns out, nearly every other couple did and continues to do so as well. Marveling at the multitudes of paired humans drifting around at sunset, amorously wistful, many questions whisked through mind. I wondered how many children have been made on these cliffs alongside the sesame-covered peanuts and the paintings of cloth-covered windmills.

So Greece is for lovers. And right now, I don't feel so much like one, especially since I hope that whoever stole my old Dell has strained his back from lugging around that monstrosity and it has infected his memory stick with all the old wicked viruses that were scurrying all around Slavic cyberspace.

Fishing for Boar

2009-07-19T15:45:00.011-04:00

Trying to find the delicate balance between attending one's fixations of culture, relaxation and adventure is the traveler's ultimate challenge. Then again, many tender just one or two of their favorite themes; content to spending the bulk of their vacation either relaxing on a beach, hands folded behind oneself exploring ruins or perhaps waste deep in a kayak attending to white water adrenaline. I always attempt an easy balance of the three, on avoidance of an overload of museums and churches (as I once suffered on my first tour of Europe) or a burnt, bored guise (the result of too many sun-soaked beach days in Thailand).

Turkey had a bevy of themes to choose from, and I already got a little kayaking in, more than a little hiking and spent a little bit of time on the beach. But I came to this country expecting to overload on antiquity and binge on museums. I left the coast reluctantly, but ready to explore one of the world's most celebrated archeological treasures.

My first stop was the ruins of Hierapolis located around and on top of the Pamukkale hot springs in Western Anatolia. I kept running into Koreans the length of my trip in Turkey, and finally relented in adopting two Korean girls as part of my traveling family. During the daytime explorations, the girls explored on their own while I went off to smear white mud on my face from the milky blue healing waters and walk around the ruins of what used to be the Palm Springs of the ancient world. Warm water eeked out of every crevice, and the geological marvel of the white-Uluru-esque bluff that the city was built upon seemed to leak stories from every marble-strewed corner.

Hierapolis was destroyed by earthquakes twice during the height of its Roman prominence, only to be rebuilt each time by loving titans who refused to see it fall into oblivion. Perhaps they should have stopped deliberately building their temples over fault lines. Maybe the Romans were testing their gods' ability to stop natural phenomenon afflicting temples dedicated to their worship.

Spooky faces adorned the rubble - faces of drama and intrigue from happy years long forgotten in this place.

Nearby, an old sanctuary called "Plutonium" (thanks Wikipedia for reminding me of the name) harbors noxious carbon dioxide gas that ancient priests used to pretend to endure to prove they were divinely appointed (really they just held their breath). They would probably thrive today on K Street.

The whole time I could have been back in Crimea, as sunburnt, Speedo-donned Russians chatted boisterously while walking on top of the ruins, snapping pictures of their bikini-clad wives posing in luscious pin-up girl fashion.

Thinking of Crimea in proximity to the ancient world made me think of the Goths, and how they plundered these settlements in the 3rd century, and would sack Rome soon after.

Next stop on the next day and also a one-time Goth playground was Ephesus, located near the rather nice modern-day town of Selcuk. According to legend, the founder of the famous port metropolis of the classic world had to leave Athens after the death of his father and visited the oracle at Delphi to determine the next course of action at this crossroads in his life (I would have visited Delphi also, but als the oracle there has long since vanished). The oracle told him that he would find and establish his home at the behest of a fish and a boar. That answer must have made him excessively pensive, until one day when he was cooking a fish in a marsh near a fine harbor when the fish jumped out of the fire, causing a brush fire to spread and a boar to run out of the buring brush - to be speared by the now-assured founder of Ephesus. It seems like back then destiny coherently beckoned the life-hero; as clear, categorical and profound as a choir leader.

Unlike Androklos, I haven't heard about my destiny yet, but a little hostel named the Kiwi hostel beckoned me to the check-in desk because the divorced owners boasted a spring-fed swimming pool located in the middle of an orange grove. Swimming in pure spring water - there's nothing quite like it.

While the harbor has long been filled with silt and the sea is now invisible from the present day vantage, the ruins at Ephesus were definitely among the most impressive I had seen yet - save the mind wrenching archway I saw in the forest near Olympos. Is it ironic that the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World did not survive intact but the Library of Celsus (pictured behind me)did?

Meanwhile, I sat down at the theater at Ephesus, like I had the day before at the one at Hierapolis, and it made me contemplate what life had been like before squawking television hosts, endless movie star scandals and noisy, annoying commercials. I came to the conclusion that I like devouring the mass media vomit of the 21st century, and continually crave its devices. Still, what would it be like to be here on a starry night? My belly would be filled with wine and mutton, my eyes fixed on a stage illuminated by oil-lit torchfires, with only the bellowing echo of actors voicing the simple scripts of ancient myths and metaphors... ...what kind of comfort would that have been?

There amongst those magnificent stages of man, I felt at ease in introspection. The contemplative forces soaked the soil and the marble pillars - there, and in the library... ...and even in the ancient stone-slabbed public toilets nearby.

Where does one find a wild boar?

Marshmallows and the Fall of Civilization

2009-07-13T20:51:00.007-04:00

Off then for a brief respite on the coast – needed some breeze, and to smell the salt air after all that land-locked beauty. Actually, the whole point was to kayak for a day, so that is what I did. But traveling down to Olympus on the Mediterranean from Turkey’s center was no small affair, and it took an entire night on a bus, and pretty much all of the following morning to get down there.

But Olympus was breathtaking: gorgeous mountains, slightly bigger than the Crimean Mountains jutted straight up out of the coastline, framing a wild paradise and walling what little civilization thrived from the overzealous bustle of touristy, semi-Slavic Antalya nearby. And amongst the ramshackle beach hostels and faux “tree house” accommodation (they fancy themselves some sort of “Turk Family Ataturk” high up in the trees but really they’re just ground-level beach shacks!) sat the ruins of an ancient Classic city: befallen pillars, giant majestic archways and great tombs (like the pilfered one pictured here of a ship captain) strewn amongst the seaside forest. It occurred to me that Yalta might look like Olympus had it but the ruins of Sevastopol and been forgotten entirely by locals as too inaccessible to be a fun development endeavor.

I came across a massive archway in the forest and screamed with delight. This door to what once was a temple to Zeus is probably the most fantastic threshold to ancient Greek world that I have ever come across.

My kayaking day was splendid and I even fit in some snorkeling although I’d have top say that snorkeling back home on the Black Sea was a far more visually pleasing experience. It seems I spent a lot of time in Olympus comparing it to Crimea.

The history is similar though, like many maritime trading cities of the period, it was totaled many times by pirates and barbarian invaders.

On my only night in Olympus, I joined a nice Canadian couple on a trip to see “the Chimera” a span along a mountainside strewn, not with Hellenic ruins, but ancient fires that bellow out the undersides of rocks, burn in honor of the ages from the bowels of the earth for all eternity. I had never seen such an odd natural phenomenon. The flames are now no more than a foot or so high, but are they quite numerous and once were so big and bright that the seagoing ancients could navigate by them. Ironically, what saved the ships of civilized trade probably also guided the plundering hordes on nighttime raids.

I probably should have been thinking at that moment, looking out on the sea, the eternal fires and the night sky about the tenuous nature of civilization or about the dawn of time. But all I could think about was how I wished that I had brought some marshmallows.

Goreme Puree

2009-07-13T19:34:00.008-04:00

Yeah, well - you try updating a blog after your notebook computer was stolen in Athens! Try being prompt as your flash drive is left in a hostel in the Swiss Alps, only to be stolen by a US postal worker (however rare that is) as it arrives via airmail after prompt forwarding by friendly hostel staff. Yeah, I know... excuses, excuses, excuses.

Enough about my tardy blog entries! Time for a Gore-rem-e pure-e! That's right, I'm taking a spectacular part of the world, putting it in a blender and shredding every fiber of its beauty so that I may bring it to you here in a semi-digestible tidbit. IT's the American way!

But let me catch you up to where I left off: after Istanbul, I traveled East to Cappadocia, a region which I'll rename now the "Zion National Park of Eurasia." I ran into a rambunctious ramble of Spaniards and French en-route, and we decided to shack up together upon arrival in the town of Goreme… …in a cave. That’s right, I slept for two nights in a cave with a rooftop swimming pool.

For three days I hiked and hiked for nearly eighty miles along the dusty hot tracks winding beneath eerie rock formations that I once thought only existed in the Western USA (here they’re called “fairy chimneys” – while some broad-rimmed-donned macho ruffians back home would probably feel terrified around such nomenclature).

At sunsets during my time in Goreme I sipped wine and listened to the lovely lisping Spanish chatter among the French and Spanish. One night we walked out for a full-moon night hike photo session (my $40 Ergo was not up to the task) and were out till well after 3am. Indi (long haired/bearded fellow pictured below) – I still await my emailed time-elapsed photos!

It’s funny how different Europeans are, even though they live so close together. For example, we embarked on a hike one day, me (the American), an Aussie, a German, the three French and two Spaniards. After ten minutes I noticed that we Anglo-Germanics were all alone in our rigorous leadership, the Spaniards had long ago lingered to shop for clothes and the French were way back, lounging in a restaurant in sun, sipping on tea.

All along the trail we came across ruins of churches and cities thousands of years of antiquity. It was all just time - dissolving so rapidly, yet just imperceptibly in the wind.

This isn't really a puree you know. After all, I only put one piece of the fruit from the basket in this mix. The rest is all mine to savour at my own pleasure.

Istanbul: Elephant Ballet, St. John’s Arm and a Soapy Bath

2009-06-11T07:27:00.009-04:00

I nodded off somewhere over Lithuania, missing Ukraine entirely, coming to somewhere over coastal Romania and the brilliant blue expanse of the Black Sea unfolded once again on the left side of the aircraft. It followed the coast of Bulgaria for a long descent into Istanbul. I really wanted to see Istanbul for the first time from the sea much as travelers had for ages in the past – its minarets and towers ever growing on hills in the horizon. But final approach directly over the old city was certainly the next best thing, seeing the great Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia and the impossible narrow streets and alleyways unfolding below in a dusk brown and green medley.

Arriving was no hassle whatsoever. Masked immigration officials manned monitors that read passenger body heat searching out the piggy flu. But the metro bore me into town, where after a slight half-hour of being lost in the poor direction of a construction detour and losing forty gallons of sweat amongst the oven-like hustle and bustle of suburban Istanbul, I finally found the tram and got to Sultanamet, the tourist heartland of the city.

Spending three days and two nights in Istanbul, I walked the lengths of alleys and steep hills amongst the spires and the enchanting call to prayer. As expected, Justinian’s Aya Sofia and the sultan’s Blue Mosque both blew me away. The dome indeed must be the most perfect of all architectural innovations ever happened upon. Seeing the sun set over the city, framed with forlorn seagulls and jets barreling in overhead, I would not at all describe the scene as peaceful as motion and movement seem to be Istanbul’s calling cards. Yet it is more like seeing the sun set over a jungle, a peace and calm settling the city and cooling the nerves in a way that assures that nightlife will consist of tea and quiet conversation, having exhausted all recourse to frenetic indulgence. In the evenings, I sat on the rooftop patio of my hostel, which overlooked the busy Bosphorus, and chatted with a few Aussies, Americans and Turks for not long into the night.

I spent nearly four hours at the Topkapi Palace, once the seat of the most powerful man in the world, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. There were several attractions to capture my time: the gardens, the treasury (which boasted a diamond the size of a tennis ball, found in a dump and sold to a spoonmaker for three spoons), the portraits, the rod of Moses (really?), the jewel-encrusted arm and skull of St. John the Baptist (he would have loved that!). But what really stoked the fires of imagination was walking through the Sultan’s harem.

The harem: before the reader envisions scantily clad belly-dancers throwing themselves at the whims of a silk-robed, turban-donned sovereign, one should keep in mind that first of all, belly dancing is Egyptian, and second of all, “the harem” is simply where the sultan’s private quarters are located. After all, his mom shared the place with him, and since she was the second most powerful figure in the affairs of state and approved of all of his women for him, and this situation to me can’t be less indicative to what I always imagined what I thought was some sort of sexy aristocratic free love of the 16th century. There were painstakingly elaborate rituals behind being adopted into the Sutlan’s court, and it was anything but what we think of today as a “harem.”

Even in their current state of age and disrepair, the rooms were beyond description. The light filtered in from above to fill the rooms with a majestic light of deity. The Sultan’s “oval office” which isn’t a very good metaphor as it was reserved for family only (affairs of state took place in another part of the palace) was a domed wonder – a patchwork quilt of differing tiles, styles and designs ranging from Ottoman to Rococo to Baroque. I lingered in this room the longest, imagining what it must have been like to sit on the seat of the preeminent world power of the time.

I took the ferry across the Bosphorus to Asia and back again – marveling in what must be the busiest waterway on God’s earth; behemoth container ships, giant cruise liners, speeding ferries and lingering yachts move around each other in perfect synchrony, like a ballet of elephants on ice skates.

If I wouldn’t have ever been to India, I would have found the constant restaurateur touts annoying. But I had, and chortled at their impotency. Still, I relented to some of them in order to stuff myself with spicy meat-filled wraps, salad, fresh bread and Turkish-style pizza (called “pida”).

Comparing the ritual of hot water purification in different areas of the world is somewhat of a fetish of mine. Being somewhat averse to the violence and harshness of Russian/Ukrainian style “banya” (super hot sauna followed by hitting with birch branches superseded by jumping in snow or freezing cold water, anyone? Anyone? Anyone?), I was eager to try out a Turkish bath (“hammam”). Donning only a towel a burly Turkish guy roughly massages you with soap on a hot stone, while the German tourist next to you groans something about his bad back. Anyone? Anyone? In my opinion, no nation has anything on rejuvenation, zen and calm of the Japanese bath “the onsen”. In close second place is an American chest-deep in his homeland: in a hot spring in a snowstorm winter somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Next item to evaluate will be the German sauna.

-Sorry for the sorry state of photos - these pics are unedited - dowloaded from the road

Via Riga, Latvia: Land of the 11pm Dusk

2009-06-11T07:20:00.004-04:00

Photo courtesy of Ricardo Liberato, Wikipedia. My pictures are currently under edit.

My Peace Corps service ended un-ceremonially at midnight on the Monday evening of June 1st. I convinced three departing Group 32’rs (Andrew was heading home to Missouri, Greg was bound for the trans-Siberian and Eileen was soon gone for Thailand) and Ravi (a friend of mine from Group 33 who we were passing the torch of seniority on to) to grab a beer in a high-end Irish pub in a swanky area of Kiev. I got us lost, but we made it just in time before closing. Wheels up the next day above Borispol airport, I was happy and sad, excited and apprehensive all at the same time. It was a feeling all too familiar; a cognizance dampenıng all four emotions.

“AirBaltic” is the cataclysm of the low-cost carrier. Nowadays on some cut rate airbuses they even charge for a cup of coffee ($3). Charging for liquids in an artificial environment which boasts humidity approaching 20% borders on inhumanity, in my opinion. Nonetheless it was a clean, new airplane that bore me to Latvia – after all the cheapest fare to Istanbul. Besides, at least I’d get a taste of one of the Baltics, if only for an evening.

We arrived in mildly violent turbulence, the result of an approaching storm which would drench all 18 hours of my time in the tiny nation. A city bus and an hour after landing my things were stowed in my hostel and I walked around the colorful, clean and comfortable city of Riga. I avoid the adjective “charming,” even though it applies heavily as I heard Europeans are sick of Americans thinking their continent cute or applying adjectives comparable to stuffed animals and Ethan Allen furniture.

The first thing I did when I arrived was eat a giant salad. The next thing was to order a great big frosty Baltic beer and imbibe my pallet in a tasty brew that was nether Chernihivsky nor Obolon nor Roghan. I walked the town in the rain, and enjoyed the sharp tall spires of a handsome city smelling vaguely of salt and cheese. Latvians are an extremely attractive people, with light hair and clear complexions – a people who like other former countrymen had the audacity and daring to stand up to Soviet rule throughout fifty years. A somber museum stood in the center calling attention to the occupation. Russian is spoken by much of the population, and the Russian ethnic minority consistently cries foul, but the Latvians are eager to move forward as Latvian-speaking, Latvian dominated EU nation. I asked a Latvian girl who I met at the hostel pub that night about a few billboards (I could read some Latvian because it has some words, although Romanized, which resemble Russian) calling attention to the shrinking ethnic Latvian makeup of Riga. She replied that it was a growing problem and that Latvians wanted their country to stop using Russian as a second language (perhaps to be replaced with English and German). We mused together on the painful bitter hangovers left over from the Soviet Union continuing to manifest themselves in political and ethnic strife in Ukraine and the Baltics.

I spent my late night in Riga reveling in backpacking tradition – in a cozy hostel pub arguing with an over the hill Australian complaining of Americans who throw their money around, giving advice to some young Brits just embarking on their first tour of Europe, and talking to an Indian businessman about his hometown of Varanasi. It was still light outside an hour before an aged traveler went to bed at midnight, whose frayed bag straps decayed with delight in the corner.

Fare Well Sevastopol

2009-05-18T03:28:00.012-04:00

My last weeks in Sevastopol are a quiet affair. My colleague Lydmilla is in the US on a professional development visit w/ the State Department's IVL Program. It's the end of the academic year and Sevastopol's 24 universities and colleges are empty of their youth. The tourists haven't yet arrived in droves, but the weather is perfect and all is green. The Black Sea is a strange body of water regarding temperature - two weeks ago the water was so cold that it was painful (well, for guys at least). But just last week, the water mysteriously became tepid. The sea remembered summer over night.

Ambitious plans were set forth months ago to see all of Crimea before departure. Maybe I would spend my last weeks traveling by bus, electric train and van criss crossing the peninsula: I would see Kerch, Feodosia and make my way back to Bakchasarai and Yevpretoriya one last time. But in the end, I was too exhausted. Frugal with my time, I lavished my last days in Ukraine here at home, in the very best city: Sevastopol.

I've had guests every weekend for the past four weekends. If it hadn't been my last weekend in Sevastopol, I would have turned away any knockers without hesitation to forage amongst the chestnut trees or join the wild dogs for shelter under a parked car. But, it was my last weekend and I wanted to spend it with friends. After a final rendevous at the wide square at Nahimova's landing, all seven of us made our way out to the south coast and hiked out along the sea for one more group barbecue under the cliffs of Balaclava (Ravi's pic right). I marinated chicken all night to roast on skewers over an open charcoal fire: my last shashlik on the beach (Also Ravi's pic).

After a couple of swims, we hopped on a boat and made our way back to Sevastopol to pack my pad where one could find hot showers and the latest episode of SNL on a laptop. In the evening, we walked the town to watch a lively summer evening in one of Europe's prettiest ports: bands played on the waterfront, teenagers skated and rollerbladed, the sun set over the breakwater, a starry night fell and fireworks boomed overhead.

Picture right is me with fellow Peace Corps Crimea volunteers.

The Balaclava-Silver Beach-Sevastopol circuit was a hosting ritual that I had repeated about two dozen times, but I would dearly miss it. Especially if my future is resigned to a cubicle in a pumped-in-air-concrete box in Washington.

As indicative of the lure of the place where I have lived, my retiree sitemates Phil and Carol from Group 31 (who departed in November) are already back - to spend a month here in a rented apartment while their house is being built in Florida. This couple, like me, feel like bonified Sevastopolans. They spent the winter traveling the States visiting family. I recollect what Phil said to me last week when he returned that was hauntingly familiar: "This is the first time since I left in November that I feel like I'm home." My heart already aches.

The thought of departure does slightly dampen my spirits. Nonetheless I have a certain itching that occurs when I know it's time to get moving. Besides, I'm ready for my month-long vacai across Europe. I know I've said it before, but I MEAN IT this time: this is the last time I sleep in stinky eight-bedded hostel dorms, cheap eat at bars, cook in crowded communal kitches, use coin-operated showers and the last time I fill up water bottles in the bathroom sink in the morning. This is the very last time I take a backpack across Europe! Next time, I'll be trailing a wheeled Samsonite.

This is it. Once again, here at the end of the pier; the end of one voyage and the beginning of the next. I find it so easy to change ships after so many ports. I wonder if I will get landsickness like I always seem to get after being on a boat for so long.

What's the next voyage? STOP ASKING ME THAT QUESTION. Or at least wait until I get back on dry, static earth.

Goodbye Ukraine. Goodbye Peace Corps. To quote some curious Vermontans, "This has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way."

THIS BLOG WILL BE CONTINUED AFTER PEACE CORPS. As of June 2, 2009 "Gilpin on the Globe" will no longer be a "Peace Corps" blog but will be continued as a my blog without US government censorship.

Севастополь! Part III: Sixty-Five Years of Victory Over Fascist Scum

2009-05-13T02:39:00.014-04:00

Every May the 9th, Sevastopol joins much of the Slavic world in celebrating the defeat of fascism in Europe. Almost sixty-five years ago, the city that had remained an island of fortitude long after the rest of Ukraine and Crimea fell; Sevastopol - the city that held out against relentless attack by the Nazis for an astounding 240 days, was liberated by the rebounding Soviet Army after more than two years of occupation.

On Saturday morning I found a hilarious assortment of humans strewn across my living room floor – especially bizarre given the day – there I was hosting three Germans, two Americans and two Ukrainians who had arrived in the horrendous Friday night rain to witness one of the world’s most renowned tributes to war veterans. Looking up to the 1948 crown moldings on the ceiling and the 1949 wallpaper I imagined for a brief minute that Stalin would have surely shipped the whole lot of us out to the gulag had the plaster been wet and the glue new.

Having a feeling that this year, because it was the 65th anniversary it would be a spectacle bigger than the few that preceded it – I assembled my host guests early and we hit the uniform clad, goose-stepping streets of Sevastopol. We staked out a good pieced of real estate on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Sevastopol and in the sunny brilliance stood in jaw-dropping awe of the fine specimens of the human race who marched past.

Suitably, the rain had been defeated with the rise of the Victory Day sun: subtropical warmth cast appropriate light on the pressed army, naval and airmen uniforms of what remained of the mighty Soviet armed forces. Here, for all to see and admire were the men and women who stopped Barbarossa in its tracks and endured as a human wall against one of the most horrific bombardments in human history – the Nazis had used the world’s largest gun ever created against Sevastopol: nicknamed “Dora” it had launched projectiles that were 7 tons, 31.5 inches (80cm) in diameter and 11.5 feet (3.51 meters) tall.

These noble, bent-backed titans of the 20th century then had the great honor of liberating the city from the hands of the fascists – and every year since then, at least once a year, they are treated as liberators once again.

Спасибо! (Thank you!) The crowd cheers. Поз-драв-лаи-ем! (Con-grat-u-lations!) The audience cries with appreciation.

The soldiers wipe the tears of triumphant joy with ironed handkerchiefs.

Little children bring the soldiers flowers as they walk. There are too many for some to carry – some gentlemen attempt to fit dozens of bouquets under their wrinkled palms wrapped around their cane. Inevitably, a multitude of surplus May flowers lay out like a carpet beneath their feet.

Except for the age of the soldiers, the digital cameras and the clothes of the audience – it could easily have been spring 1945.

Behind the exalted ones: the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (WWII), veterans of other periods of the Soviet Age walk with heads held high. The veterans of the Cold War submarine fleets, of the navy and air force walk behind the signs of their regiment or beloved ship.

Then came the brown-clad veterans of the Afghanistan War – they are under no obligation to sterilize the title in calling it something obscene like a “conflict” or “operation” like the Americans. Even though some of the veterans march in the same crutches and artificial limbs that welcomed them home twenty years ago, I saw but victory in the eyes of the veterans. I was certain that it had something to do with the way this society treats its veterans like heroes – always.

It wasn't just the favorable light on May 9th that makes one notice that war is certainly not a beautiful thing, but those who survive it exude an unutterable, crowning radiance. How can individuals be mired in the most brutal horror of the very worst of this world and then walk the years after, carrying flowers, glowing in the sunlight?

Faith in the human experience, like the bulbs cast 'round... ...renewed every spring on the streets of Sevastopol.

Around Ukraine IV: There and Back Again

2009-04-30T08:25:00.014-04:00

In travel, and in life, getting there and back again deserves milestones. Thank you Bilbo Baggins. For Frodo, it was throwing that darn ring into the fires of Mordor. For a major league baseball player, it's retiring without getting caught doping. In Peace Corps, it’s reaching one’s close of service (pic above courtesy of PCV Rebecca Rogers) .

On a brilliantly clear day, with bright blue skies it took the entire day from Lviv to reach Slavske, the resort where Group 32’s close of service conference was to be held. Heading south by bus from Lviv, we bolted via Bogdhan bus via greening villages which seemed a little cranky in stirring from revelry of the long Easter weekend. Past the steeple-strewn city of Striy, a roaring clear river tumbled across the plains, and finally the Carpathian Mountains erupted out of the distance. Before long we were among them, winding along the valley floor in the bare shadow of old, small mountains that seemed much smaller than the foothills behind Boulder. But in the spring, many volunteers who are daily starved of any vertical landscape whistled in wonderment in the green velvet which seemed to cover the small bones and give one the some feeling of size. For a fleeting second my mind almost compared the valley to the hills east of Katmandu, but catching the absurd notion quickly, I laughed to myself in a mild and quick breath of hilarity.

But the landscape could and should be described as cute, darling, whimsical, or charming. Costumed old ladies hanging laundry outside wooden houses and golden-onion-domed churches in small valley floors among rushing rivers – this was postcard Ukraine.

We arrived at Slavske ready for ice cold “Lvivske” beer and sat out back, on a hill overlooking the swimming pool and the green valley below. The resort at Slavske was easily Holiday Inn quality, but not the food, which was better than any Holiday Inn crapshack, and could be compared with Cracker Barrel. All the rooms had balconies… …and BBC world news which put me in 15 minute bursts of TV-land ecstasy during the news updates. The “conference” wasn’t really a conference, since Peace Corps did most of the talking. Evidently it takes almost as much paperwork to leave Peace Corps as it does to join up.

Over the course of those brief sixty hours in Slavske, I ate well, drank well, learned a good bit more about job hunting than I ever thought I would, and I even got an hour to sweat it out one last time in a Slavic sauna (minus the back whacking of birch branches). I also distributed almost 90 superlatives to my fellow volunteers and received a few myself (“Most Likely to Barack Your World,” “Putting the Bombay Back into Sevastopol” and “Most Likely to Write a Grant to Fund a Party.”) I'd never do that last one, but during Grad School in Denver I did actually throw a party to fund a social project.

On the last night, my fellow Group 32’rs wowed me at the talent show, the video extravaganza (keep an eye out on U-tube for the Odessa Group Ltd.) and the hour long slide show.

I pulled an all-nighter’ and left the resort after bidding my goodbyes in the pitch blackness at around 3:30am armed only with a small green plastic flashlight the size of Bic lighter that I was given by the Division of the Colorado State Parks. Some strange furry farm animal followed me all the way to the village train station. I think he was after the breakfast the resort had packed for me.

The electric train bore me the three hours north back to Lviv. I jumped on a street-tram, then on a bus to the “airport.” Parenthesis are good for describing what should be or what ought to be, but isn’t quite what is.

This is the Lviv International Airport (pic courtesy of www.lviv-life.com). I am not kidding. No, I did not use Photoshop. No, this isn’t a library outside Minneapolis. It’s an international airport. Not kidding.

But despite the strange surroundings of the airport, I was soon sitting in leather seats on a brand new Airbus on "Wizzair" (pic courtesy of blog.kievukraine.info) rocketing high over the flatlands of Moldova, due southeast home towards Crimea. I saw Kherson and the great tributary of the Dnieper, coasted over Chernomorkse and the northern coast of Crimea, down over Odessa over the green-blue coast for a bouncy fun and perfectly-piloted landing in Simferopol. Ninety minutes of flight time for just under $17 one-way. I may be polluting the environment, but I think my own gas and negative energy generated after thirty hours on a train ride would have been far worse for planet earth. A low-cost airline in Ukraine – what progress!

Bleary-eyed upon arrival I looked up at the Simferopol airport. It looked kind of like a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Duluth, perhaps.

Around Ukraine Part III: From East to West Ukraine and Everywhere Between

2009-04-27T04:37:00.009-04:00

We rented out two coupes on the Lugansk-Lviv train and settled in for the 27 hour jaunt. (Picture clockwise from foreground left), our party consisted of 1.) Jonathon (South Carolinian bound for my alma mater @ DU), 2.) Adam (Tennessean bound for law), 3.) Me (Pennsylvanian who has no clue where he’s bound but will know it when he gets there), 4.) Greg Sullivan (Arizonan off on a solo trip on the Trans-Siberian to Mongolia, China and Vietnam), 5.) Joseph Garza (Texan staying in Ukraine till the end of the summer), 6.) Zach Zarnow (Californian returning to the good life) and 7.) James Mosher (Ohioan not pictured because he’s taking the shot - thanks James for the pic).

Upon our exit west, the train traveled through tremendous industrial complexes that doubled as residential areas. Some of them were apparently still in operation. I remember going to a Weezer concert in 1995 in a refurbished factory like this one in Birmingham.

As the sun began to set, we popped the tops on premium beer we purchased at the supermarket in town: Bavarian luxuries long past due; timeless symbols of good providence in the season of greening. We toasted the journey west in the comfy cabin of the train and time seemed to stand still for long periods of the night. Somewhere near Poltava, it was long after midnight when we finally retired our Scrabble and turned off the music pumping out of my mobile phone (as we were unfortunately without speakers for the notebook computers and MP3 players).

On a train in Ukraine, sleep lasting ten or even twelve hours is not unusual. After all, the bunks are mysteriously comfortable, enhanced by clean sheets on top of three inch mattresses. The motion of the train lulls and steadies one into slumber. It all depends on the quality and calm of one’s “neighbors” (in this case meaning one’s bunkmates), and given that my neighbors on this trip had the same designs on sleep that I did, I had no problem sleeping until we reached Kyiv at 10:30 the next morning. I stirred somewhere on the eastern outskirts and was surprised to be crossing that bridge across the Dnieper, casting my eyes on Kyiv’s statue of victory, the iron lady, Madame Rodina Mat.

Throughout the afternoon, the train trip west was the usually unusual visual feast of farms, fields and friendly parishes; white cottages with apple-green shutters, blue houses with white and yellow doors, horse-drawn carts covered in hay, children waving, colorful churches, townspeople feasting on Easter barbecues in the forest, a pig chasing a dog or vice versa.

I finished Candide, and played a long, long game of Scrabble that lasted almost until Lviv, which we finally approached at 9pm. There was a backup on the city’s tram system (just with trolleybuses, if one breaks down, THEY ALL stop working), so it took us a good amount of time to get into the city. The first thing one who lives in the Russian-speaking south or east notices when entering the West is the sing-songy rhythms which is the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian is the easy, laid-back south Louisiana of Slavic languages, minus the abundant Cajun spices and all the cussing.

A few of us sipped on warm, spiced beer in the square and it hit me that everything was starkly European again - cobblestones, sidewalk cafes and Catholic churches. But this is still Ukraine. The delicious warm beer was served in then plastic cups. The cheapest late-night meal in this part of the world, like most of Ukraine is a shwarma (something vaguely resembling the Mediterranean variety - flatbread filled with chopped cabbage, carrots and grilled chicken - topped with gobs of mayo and ketchup). Waking up the next day in a rented apartment, it took the better part of the day to get out to Slavske, 3.5 hours south in the mountains, the site of the close of service (COS) conference.

Around Ukraine Part II: Lugansk

2009-04-27T03:41:00.009-04:00

Picture above, and last pic in this entry both courtesy of PCV James Mosher. Other pics are from train ride in Lugansk oblast (region).

The four of us hopped a sleek new coach bus the next day, bound east. The landscape changed wildly as the steppe opened out on all sides. But the land also began to roll in waves like it does in eastern Colorado, to let the traveler know that he’s not in Kansas anymore. Giant slag heaps and the smokestacks of industry dwarfed the tiny villages which snuggled them.

Lugansk is a premier example of Soviet planning: a metropolis born in the fires of industry, grinded by the hammer and machined into sharp lines to crease civilization into the Ukrainian steppe. Like Donetsk, downtown Lugansk was quite free of litter. The two buildings which formed the two cornerstones of the central square resembled the train station in Simferopol, which is topped with the same-box like Soviet neoclassicism, and topped with spires adorned with red stars for good measure. The central square also boasted an outrageous glass-covered public information notice board maintained by the city government, the contents of which will be examined in a future post.

After meeting up with James, (who came all the way from the western Ukraine just to take a 27 hour train ride back in that direction) and Adam (who lives near Lugansk), we did what any traveler should do when they are in Lugansk; we went out to eat Indian food. Simferopol used to have an Indian food restaurant located on the campus of a medical university, but Lugansk has one in operation; one that has absolutely amazing, tongue-rocking, wallet-happy food. After dinner, we headed to a PCVs apartment and fell asleep early in the sleepy town. The next day, we went food-shopping for the train ride, lunched at a Kurdish restaurant showing belly-dancing music videos, and then went back to the pad to watch a movie about American professional wrestling.

Joseph showed at the bizarre train station to round out our fellowship at an even seven. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday, so the city had an abandoned manner to it that was hard to describe. But Lugansk itself is indefinable – fuzzing an impression of a concrete and electric island jungle on a sea of a windy and desolate prairie. Hope and despair seem interchangeable adjectives here, applying to both the island and sea that surrounds it. Even as we were preparing to leave and I was happy to make my west again, I couldn’t help but to feel some measure of curiosity that this place was harboring some deep secret to one of mankind’s most notorious problems.

More bizarre perhaps was this slag heap below that resembled some part of Utah.

Around Ukraine in One Hundred and Eighty-Nine Hours

2009-04-27T03:04:00.011-04:00

Ukraine is quite a big country (simply gigantic by European standards), and it is amazing how different each region of the country is from the other. These differences can be tremendously drastic or precisely subtle, but it takes a sober effort of scrutiny for one to uncover them. The only truly homogenous feature of the country is really the concrete monuments to the USSR, and even these vary in content and character. Of course some places resemble others. What strip mall boulevards back in the states in one ‘burb don’t remind one of another? But the people, the atmosphere, the language, the greenery and the scenery in Ukraine differ as much as during a road trip of interstate travel in the American Mid-Atlantic.

My close-of-service conference was to be held in the Carpathians in late April out on the far Western border of Ukraine. Yet there I was on the clear, sunny Thursday evening before in Sevastopol, boarding a train to the eastern Ukrainian capital of mining and industry: Donetsk. Why? Because I’ve never been there before and few people ever make Eastern Ukraine a travel destination. Because I had friends there. And because some of my buddies were slightly off their rockers and wanted to take a train from Lugansk (on the border with Russia) almost twenty-seven hours west to Lviv (not far from Poland) in order to get a “feel” for the country. It was a noble endeavor yielding ample possibilities for adventure, and might make for good blog material.

Part 1: Donetsk is kind of like Birmingham, Alabama

The train ride from Sevastopol was a little rough: I was back in third class (platzkart), sharing my area with a bunch of rowdy young soldiers returning home for the Easter holiday. At around midnight, the conductor finally told them to shut up and the wagon got a little sleep after that. Starting my completion list for “last time I did this…” I began the column with “Last time I ever took platzkart in Ukraine was on that trip to Donetsk.”

At six in the morning, I arrived in Donetsk. I had heard both good and bad opinion about Donetsk from a variety of sources. I have to say now that I agree with those who had a more favorable impression of the city. Donetsk is a clean, sharp, ship-shape city. The rough-edged, yet attractive residents of the Donbas (the mining region where Donetsk is located) struck me as hardworking and fiercely proud of their homeland. New buildings lit up on the skyline with the rising sun. I contemplated the mandatory Lenin, relaxed on his pedestal in the central square as the city stirred. I smiled to myself, realizing that so many Lenins in Ukraine are located within sight of McDonald’s. But this Lenin is not the crazy type, hands in pockets with a gentle smile adorning his lips. He seems like he’s finished his work and is happy with the results. One of my friends would later label this particular statue, “Menswear Model Lenin.”

Greg and Jonathon had missed their bus from the Dnieper, so I killed the morning drinking coffee and reading Voltaire’s Candide. More logic expunged on this Friday morning as it soon became evident that one of the principal influences of the revolutionary optimism among the titans of the American Enlightenment was in fact a European pessimist. Go figure.

Zach, another PCV from my group lives in Donetsk and met up with me at mid morning in front of Olympic Stadium, near the statute of the giant pole-vaulter. We walked around and saw the sights of the city: some interesting buildings, nice parks, imposing monuments and the impressive stadium being built for Ukraine’s 2012 Soccer bid. The stadium being constructed by the country’s most flagrant billionaire, Akhmetov, will also house the home games for one of the country’s two best football clubs, Shaktar Donetsk (Shaktar means “mine” in Russian).

I’m fairly critical when it comes to modern architecture, but this giant, smooth disc of an edifice appears if it’s been cast from one piece of massive, gleaming iron ore in the foundry of Volcan himself, spun on an alien lathe, polished by comets and destined for some unspeakable galactic travel. But in fact, all that will happen within this new universe will be 70,000 people watching a ball moved around on a square of grass. Zach’s been to a few of Shaktar’s ongoing games in the old stadium and recounted tales of seeing coal-dust-faced miners just off of shift, screaming team anthems in an only partially-assisted intoxication of fan fervor supposedly unparalleled on the planet. I say supposedly because, I know firsthand the seasonal psychosis caused by another football team far off in Alabama, which is also adorned by the influence of Lord Volcan. And to continue the irony honoring the day, I was just across the ocean in Donetsk’s sister city a year ago to the day.

The city of Donetsk has about a million and a half inhabitants, yet it is situated on top of a working coal mine. All around the metropolis, one sees the evidence of the industry. “Slag heaps” are mountains of earth created by mountains and rise up out of the horizon like manmade ranges. The mining culture is infused in public art, and several noble examples of mining are scattered around the infrastructure. In a pedestrian underpass, one may see a sledge-hammer-wielding worker, or on the platform of a tram line, one will see a statue of a miner holding aloft a lump of coal or a frieze of a miner seeking out the dusty jewel like some ignitable holy grail. Sean Connery as Henry Jones whispers in my ear, “The quest for the fossil fuels is not geology… …it’s a race against alternative energy!”

Now THAT’S Good Diplomacy!

2009-04-07T03:54:00.010-04:00

The day after the visit to the USS Klakring which was docked in the port (see previous post – March 2009), US Ambassador William Taylor visited my organization, Sevastopol Youth Center “Volunteer” and the project I am collaborating with them on; a youth media development project for Crimea, receiving support from the US Embassy’s Media Development Program.

Picture right- Here I am with a colonel and a political officer from the embassy. I assure the reader that I didn’t deliberately intend on posing in “official-government-business-hand-clasp-pose.” Haven’t even applied to a fed government job yet and I’m already a stooge.

Ambassador Taylor came down to visit our student government project last year (see previous post – June 2008), and we were thrilled to have him down for another visit. This was especially exciting for my colleague Lydmilla (pictured below in glasses), who is the head of the organization and project manager, and will soon be going to the US on a three-week US State Department leadership development program designed for professionals of youth non-profit organizations in Ukraine.

The project “The Expansion of the Possibilities of Youth Journalism in Sevastopol and the AR Crimea” envisions trainings for television, print, internet and radio journalists and creating several editions of an independent youth newspaper for Crimea. Sasha (pictured below with Lydmilla), who developed our think tank project website last year, is an internet expert who is teaching our online section. Mass-media has been steadily opening up in Ukraine over the past couple of years – in some regions faster than others. This project seeks to train youth journalists and build confidence in free speech and professional journalist news
coverage, autonomous from political influence. If by the end of the project (which will be quite some time after I leave Sevastopol next month) independent youth media entities are created as a result of the work, it will be a tremendous step forward for media in Crimea.

Our participant training group is filled with a diverse body of youth journalists, representing the various ideologies and cultural backgrounds of the city. Some, as one can imagine, are dubious towards US interest in the region, but nonetheless were attentive and interested to hear from the ambassador. He evidently left a magnificent impression. One project participant who was perhaps the most cynical of our group exclaimed how different the encounter was from her expectations. “He was so humble! None of our important officials are so open and accessible to the common people.” She went on to exclaim how wonderful it was that the Ambassador thought to spend an entire hour of his busy time answering questions from novice journalists. Some of the questions were about his wife, or even as mundane as what his favorite Ukrainian food was. He likes vereniki (dumplings) with cherries and he spent his 30th wedding anniversary on vacation here in Sevastopol with his wife, not on any official business. “It’s so interesting that he is just an average person, and a good husband.” One impressed journalist commented.

Another one of the participants was tasked by the local TV network he works for assembling the television coverage of the visit. The piece impressed both me and my colleagues – devoid of commentary, implied opinion - it simply covered the details of the US Navy ship visit, a protest objecting to the vessel (including images of protesters burning the US flag) and coverage of the ambassador’s calm, honest replies to audience questioning. The news program just stuck to the facts, and let it up to the viewer decide the rest.

Also in the news segment covering the visit to our project, one of the reporters asked the ambassador what he thought about the protests in Sevastopol. He replied exactly the way that I would have to the question. He said in so many words (quoting roughly) “I’m glad that people have the right to protest here. In Ukraine there exists freedom of speech, something lacking in many other places in the world."

And in that one sentence, the ambassador summed up the point of the project.

An American Navy Ship Visits Sevastopol

2009-03-30T04:12:00.005-04:00

In the middle of March, Peace Corps informed me that the US Ambassador was inviting a small group of Peace Corps volunteers and Ukrainian non-profit organization representative to tour a US Navy ship due to be docked in the harbor toward the end of the month. I was asked to invite around a dozen people.

American Naval ships had visited the port before during my almost two years in Sevastopol. Most recently a US Coast Guard cutter was here in September and before that, a US Navy ship docked last summer to celebrate either Sevastopol’s 225th birthday or the birthday of the Russian Black Sea Fleet or both, I forget. At any rate, this was the first time I would be invited onboard, and was grateful that Ambassador Taylor had thought of us.

I invited a group of six Ukrainians connected with social projects in Sevastopol and five Peace Corps volunteers visiting from Crimea and other parts of Ukraine (in fact I had NINE Peace Corps volunteers and one Ukrainian staying in my apartment for two nights). We were all snazzed up in formal attire when we met at the statue of Admiral Nahimov to head to the international port area.

The USS Klakring is a submarine-hunting frigate based out of Jacksonville, taking a goodwill tour of the Black Sea as part of its six month mission. I was expecting chips, soda and an hour of small talk in the white tent set up on the helicopter pad on the back of the ship. Instead, we were met with a full buffet and a generous reception on behalf of the captain, officers and crew of the US Navy.

My Ukrainian colleagues were stunned at the friendliness of the crew, the modesty of the officers and the fact that four female officers lived on a ship with 170 men. Yet they were seriously daunted by the unfamiliarity of the free-flowing, unstructured conversation involved in the very American conception of a cocktail reception. This dictated that I spent the evening busily translating for my Ukrainian contingent and navigating them around a form of social interaction ("mingling") that simply does not exist in Slavic culture. But in between translations, I gorged myself on spicy Swedish meatballs and rice and boneless fried chicken probably prepared by a bonafide Southerner) washed down with a beverage that came in a 12 ounce can.

Picture above; me with the Ukrainian delegation from Sevastopol I invited. Picture right; Lydmilla, Zhenya and Alla with a USN seaman.

I find it hard to explain exactly how bizarre it was to suddenly be on American soil right in the middle of my Peace Corps site. Out of the dull night blue of Sevastopol’s dark harbor, I entered the warm light of inner Florida and was greeted by the wide smiles topping our finest humans decked out in neatly pressed uniforms speaking with the smooth tongues and open cheeks of my motherland. The atmosphere in the tent was intensely American, but the conversation topics were not so much so; I chatted with a representative of the International Republican Institute about democracy grants and Tatars, with an Army officer about the Black Sea economy and with an ensign about the challenges of entering the Bosphorus. But it all went so quickly, so much so that it might as easily been just a fond, hour-long dream I had while dosing on an electrishka.

Before we knew it, we Peace Corps volunteers were walking off the gangplank off of America and back into Ukraine. It might easily have been a dream. But if it really was a dream, then we wouldn’t have a giant plate of foil-covered fried chicken that the captain insisted on us taking with us.

Thanks USS Klarkring!

Пикник on the Beach

2009-03-30T04:00:00.005-04:00

Not much fun is scheduled in March. Easter’s not till April and St. Patty’s Day isn’t a real holiday outside of Chicago or Boston. Not to say that March is a bad month- it’s a heck of a lot more interesting than those first two months. It’s kind of like the October for the beginning of the year; a prelude to fun months again. So in an ardent effort to combat the blahs here on the Crimean peninsula (a last grimace of the bad weather, if you will), I invited some folks down to Sevastopol in the vain hope that the weather would miraculously turn for the better in time for an afternoon picnic. It didn’t, but they came and we went anyway.

Friday night was kicked off with beer and chili. Nastia came from Alushta. Cary and Lauren came from Sovietski, north of Simferopol. Sam arrived from a tiny shire located somewhere in the middle of peninsula, far from the fires of Mt. Doom and Mordor. Andrew and Yulia came down from Nizhnigorski. Ravi came from Yevpatoria, somewhat already floating on air as he was heading on a visit home to sunny southern California the next week. I had a full house, but was rather looking forward to having this Crimean volunteer summit with some of my favorite neighbors.

On Saturday we scrapped plans for an ambitious hike out to my special happy place, Silver Beach located on the south coast near Balaclava. Due to the horrendous weather; a bitey 4 degrees Celsius (about 40 Fahrenheit) with high wind, we opted for a beach much closer to my home, on Uchkuyevka Beach, located in Sevastopol’s northern suburbs. This way, instead of a series of buses and vans followed by an hour long hike, we just had a short walk through town, then a ferry ride across the harbor, followed by another brief walk.

The wind was so persistent that it almost blew out both fires that we lit (one for cooking, one for heat), but once we got them going, everything was quite bearable. Shashlik (marinated pork and onions on skewers) is a Russian staple, and Nastia sizzled them up nicely on Sam’s newly purchased Shashlik poles. Seeking American picnic persuasion, I made a big tub of potato salad and veggies with ranch dressing (made from a Hidden Valley packet poured into a container of sour cream). Lunch was followed by soothing puffing on a Shisha (a hookah stuffed with flavored tobacco) which has gained popularity amongst all PCVs serving in Crimea. Those Turks and Tatars are getting us hooked! Well some restaurants in Denver now have them too.

It was too cold to stay all day, so we went back via the ferry to Nahimov’s square enroute home, where a happy canine vagabond found Andrew and Sam. They thought the dog wanted to play. But alas the furry bum was just using them to break the stick in smaller pieces. After the dog’s mission was accomplished, he left the guys sad and lonely, seeking a big stick of their own to play with.

Apparently, General Ulysses S. Grant will be throwing an “Last Grimace of the Crises Dance Club Party Festival” at the Russian Officer’s Club in Sevastopol in a few weeks if anyone is interested – evidently picking his teeth satisfactorily with the bones of the once-dancing proletariat.

Lowering the Drawbridge: Komsomolsk and Kirovograd

2009-03-13T05:28:00.014-04:00

Pic right: me @ the Laspi coast (between Yalta and Sevastopol), Crimea, 1 year ago.

It’s not exactly easy leaving Crimea in general. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not really logistically that difficult to walk up the street a block and half, through Ushakov’s Square, descending the guilded white steps next to the new Wi-Fi equipped coffee shop, down the hill to the train station to hop on any number of northbound trains across the Perekop Isthmus or the Chonhar Spit to the mainland. Sleeping on long-distance trains is usually quite easy, and sometimes I even look forward to countless hours reclined on a bunk mattress with a good book or any one of my (legally) downloaded radio episodes from American National Public Radio: “Foreign Dispatch,” “It’s All Politics” or “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.”

But it’s hard metaphysically to depart this insular peninsula. Maybe there’s something peculiarly moat-like drifting in the Crimean air – after all, such feelings have their historical precedence. I’m working on my grad thesis (a research paper in the strictest sense of the word), and in the site background section, explored this phenomenon:

“Refuge, separation and isolation would also become themes of Crimea. Perhaps the recluse paranoia of the region was born at time much earlier than the Soviet Union. Nearby Sevastopol, in the Crimean Mountains high up on a remote plateau with breathtaking views of the surrounding terrain, is a desolate mountain top retreat known as Mangup Kale. It is a strange, magnificent place, and naturally impregnable; sheer cliffs descend in all directions, qualifying it as a virtual island-on-land. It was originally established by Goths who had arrived from southern Scandinavia, of all places, in the 3rd century A.D., and later the city was fortified by Justinian I to shield the coastal cities from attack off the Steppes. A Jewish sect of Mesopotamian origin known as the Karaim, who had broken with mainstream rabbinical Judaism in the 6th century AD arrived in Crimea in the 12th century, having fled the turmoil of the First Crusade in the Holy Land, took over the impressive forts at Mangup Kale and neighboring Chufut Kale, where they withdrew and stayed to themselves on these fortified plateaus which are still considered quite remote today, although they did trade quietly with local tribes and new arrivals like themselves for almost 700 years. Another divergent group which would become synonymous with Crimea is the people today known as the Crimean Tatars. They originated as an independent southern branch of the Golden Horde invaders, who, due to the weak organization of the horde exercised full autonomy from the headquarters of the main tribe encamped in southern Russia, establishing in 1423 the seventeen year long Crimean Khanate. Having converted to Islam in the 14th century, they were well-positioned to receive the Ottomans, who had reached the northern Black Sea coast after conquering Constantinople. The Ottomans allowed the Tatars to flourish with a great deal of autonomy, and the Tatars, under allegiance to the Sultan remained in control of the peninsula until the mid 18th century.”

-Kudos to author Neal Ascherson (“Black Sea,” Hill and Wang, New York, 1995) for info contained in my above excerpt-in-progress in my work-in-progress; “Democracy and Youth Organizations in Sevastopol: An Analysis of Project Approaches” (expected June 2009)

Everyone who arrives here in Crimea seems reluctant to leave and then cuts off contact with the outside world. Especially in the gray winter, all seem to just want to curl up in a blanket in their cave fortress, Khanate villa or Soviet apartment, make a cup of honey herb tea and bolt all entries from all intrusion.

Given a recent angry tirade posted online by a Hungarian couchsurfer, we here evidently don’t like hosting guests, either. She said something about how Crimeans need to learn that they should host complete strangers for free in the height of the tourist season. She said that there must be something wrong with Crimeans and not hosting guests since there were more than 40 couchsurfers on the peninsula, but no one would host her and her boyfriend when they visited last summer. Perhaps this has some validity, as I read somewhere (I forget where) that before the ancient Greeks arrived, the tribes who inhabited the southern coast near Sevastopol used to eat the ship-wrecked. Or maybe Crimeans are just reluctant to host complete strangers they met off the internet because it’s kind of a new thing and few people here speak English. Hmmm… …too difficult to decide which it could possibly be.

Anyway in order for me to leave behind my usually-warm apartment and the thesis I really ought to keep going on, I had to have a good reason. Well, running away from my thesis was one. The other was my friend Greg asking me to present a seminar at his professional skills workshop. I consented to lower the drawbridge and come down off of my windy, sea-walled plateau for a long weekend up in central Ukraine on the Dnieper River.

Traveling north from Simferopol overnight through the once-great-Soviet-missile-factory-city of Dniepropetrovsk (now known for its swanky shopping malls) and on north to Poltava, then south where I awoke as I was coming into the city of Kremenchuk. From there, I hopped a bus on a half-hour journey through fields of brightly colored Ukrainian cottages, through intermittent pine forest and potato fields to Комсомольськ.

Modern Komsomolsk (approx. pop. 50,000) is a Soviet central planner’s wonderland; perfectly uniform streets, identical apartment buildings, realist statues dedicated to the socialist state and the heroes of the USSR and riverfront walkways. I was here almost a year ago; in mid April on my way to Alabama for my brother’s wedding. The weather was much nicer then, in early March it is windy, rainy, dreary and cold.

My compliments to Greg - the seminar went extremely well. Greg is a Business Educator at Komsomolsk City School Number 1, which specializes in Economics and Law and the seminar was held in the school’s sleek conference room sporting a smart board, multimedia projector and computer. Our audience was an attentive group of progressive community leaders, non-governmental organization directors and members of the local press. First, PCV Richard, a spry 70-something entrepreneur gave a presentation from the perspective of small-business development; focusing on the mentality needed to change how one thinks about mission, fundraising and organizational development. The second presenter was PCV Erin who gave an enlightening presentation on donor cultivation harvested from her 5 years experience working for Chicago United Way. I presented last on project management and international grant writing.

Afterwards, the seminar convened to adjacent classroom where the project participants were welcomed with a surprise spread of salads, anchovy-stuffed green olives, grilled chicken w/ mashed potatoes, pickled veggies and vodka. This prompted numerous toasts, during which I apparently misunderstood a posed question and replied that yes, dinosaurs are indeed still living in Denver. Of course, I could have quickly inserted that I was referring to Colorado-based neoconservatives, but I just didn’t think fast enough on my feet. Then all the Americans retreated upstairs to help Greg with his Thursday evening English club populated by impressively gifted students and interesting conversation regarding gun control and Pulp Fiction.

The bulk of the next dreary day was spent mostly inside Greg’s fifth floor flat watching a marathon of Season 2 of Boston Legal. I had not cut my hair since June last year. The state of it after 36 hours without showering prompted me to gleefully liberate my scalp of eight months of hard water-fed hair in a basement barber shop.

Early the next morning, I hopped on a four hour bus ride south west to Кировоград to visit my very awesome friend Jenny while Greg went north to a meeting with our former language teacher, Sergiy in Cherkasy.

Over the river and thru the woods and fields to Jenny’s town in Kirovograd I went. I was tired of getting Jenny’s $#!+ for not visiting her centrally-located residence, so I relented this weekend to spend a day there on a detour back south. It was a most pleasant experience in a very livable community in the center of Ukraine.

Aside from the particular brand of architecture, Kirovograd could easily be a bigger Ukrainian version of Hanover, Pennsylvania, my hometown. However, even with regards to architectural paradigm, the two have something in common. Both are blessed with old style churches, quiet parks and attractive brick buildings while simultaneously plagued by modernist eyesores, 70’s structural hemorrhoids and drab government buildings which attempt and fail at intimidating the populace.

Walking around town, I really began to appreciate the pleasantness of the place and the people seemed friendly and content. I appreciated the sense of humor about the place, and could appreciate the story of the Soviet sculptor who allegedly subliminally disfigured the statue of the jackass he was tasked with accurately figuring.

I enjoyed the power of the war park, and the simple, silent beauty of the paused work on a local skyscraper. Although half-finished buildings and projects aren’t at all uncommon as a result of Soviet-style planning practices, the economic crises has stopped many large-scale construction projects all over the country. (Ukrainians call the economic crises the “Kreeses” – like “Reeses” only without the yummy peanut butter filling).

My time in Кировоград was spent eating what should be categorically certified now as the best pizza in Ukraine: at Pizzeria La Vita, where I ate tuna-covered garlic sauce pizza (I am currently into fish-covered pizza in a big way – see blog entry below). As a few other volunteers arrived from around the oblast and Ukraine, time together was also spent playing cards, randomly calling up our friends in the country to poll ludicrously outrageous information and finally a night on the town at Velvet, where I tormented Jenny by sitting down and complaining about the music. I usually don’t enjoy dancing, not even fake-like, to music I don’t care for. Since I can no longer complain significantly about the current administration in Washington, club music in Ukraine seemed like a great topic for me to dwell on for the evening. Jenny was not amused.

I’m normally a fairly bright and cheery fellow who wallows in his own pretentious self-righteous optimism. But I should be allowed to be grumpy and negative every now and again, especially here in the midst of what is unquestionably my least favorite time of year. Like I said before, I’m supposed to complain, I’m a Democrat.

Speaking of the despondent; dear irritated couch surfer – this weekend I’m hosting EIGHT guests. But alas, they’re all Crimeans. Perhaps Crimeans aren’t inclined to lower the drawbridge for disgruntled Hungarians. Perhaps we’re just holed up together, preoccupied under gray skies, munching on the shipwrecked.

Pic below: lovely Kirovograd

What’s Cookin’ in the People’s Kitchen?

2009-03-13T05:18:00.005-04:00

What’s cookin’ in the oven of the proletariat? No not Bernie Madoff. Well a lot here has been cooking lately, just like the books on Wall Street. I never really used an oven much, only really to grill an organically-harvested trout once for Thanksgiving. Hungry with evening time breaks between grant applications and grad paper work, I have drafted my Slovak oven quite a lot lately.

I remember last year I proclaimed on my blog that I was proud of the fact that I finally learned how to flip an omelet. That’s kind of embarrassing in retrospect. Now my omelet has taken on a whole new can of kick ass. Two weeks ago I made the perfect quiche. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture because I was just too darn hungry. The crust was the best thing, as simple as it is. I made it for me and a vegetarian, so therefore it is:

*Pastry Crust:
2 cups flour, plus more for dusting
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon sugar
150 grams unsalted butter, cold and cut into small chunks
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons cold water, plus more if needed

*Combine flour, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add butter and mix with hands until coarse crumbs form. Beat yolk and ice water together and add to pastry. Work to bind dough and squeeze together with hands. If the pastry is too crumbly, add more water 1 tablespoon at a time. Form a disk, cover with plastic wrap or bag, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

**Quiche Filling:
1 ½ cups Holland or Cheddar cheese, grated
¾ cup cottage cheese
5 eggs, beaten
¾ cup milk
1 cup frozen broccoli
¼ teaspoon oregano
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon red pepper
¼ teaspoon salt

*Using a rolling pin or wine bottle, roll out quiche pastry into a ¼ inch thick circle. Dust with flour as needed to prevent sticking. Gently place in a pie pan or iron skillet that can go in the oven. Press pastry down into pan and mold crust around edges with knife or fork. Whisk together quiche filling ingredients. Pour into pastry crust. Bake in medium oven (350F) for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until filling is set and the top is golden brown. Serve hot. Yields 8 slices.

*Courtesy of the Babyshka’s Cookbook – Peace Corps Ukraine Publication
**Courtesy of me improvising

I’ve also been on a homemade pizza binge. I made four pizzas in a three week period, the dough and sauce both from scratch. My favorite topping was a can of Portuguese sardines (pictured in Technicolor above covering half the pie) that my old sitemate Phil had bequeathed to me back in November.

That and his premium chopping knife which I have fallen in love with and will somehow try to take with me in my carryon luggage home in June.

My ultimate winter dish has evolved from the recipes of several friends. Veggie Greg introduced me to the glory sauce: soy sauce mixed with spicy mustard with a touch of hot ginger sauce. I drown this on chicken, rice, carrots, walnuts, red onions and garlic fried up in oregano, cumin, basil, red and black pepper.

I’m also big on TV dinners these days. To the right you see fried chicken sandwiches with green onion, mayo and some small tomatoes that are already showing up in my local bazaar. I think the old babyshkas are growing them in their windowsills. They are accompanied by natty cut French fries that a local diner back in Hanover, “the Tropical Treat” used to call “Texas Fries.” I call my chili spice batter version “EU Expansion Fries.”

Севастополь! Part II: Some Exceptional Views on Transit

2009-02-25T06:04:00.013-05:00

Photo above courtesy of PCV Cary McCormick.

I concluded recently that I more often enjoy the trip much more than the destination. Although I should have gotten the hint if I thought about how I never had any problem with seasickness, only the land sickness from the lack of motion when I return.

It was on my weekend hikes in Boulder I came to the realization that my favorite form of transportation is in fact walking. Coming to despise how trail runners and mountain bikers would pounce on my position unexpectedly from behind, and thus intrude on my own personal zen I one day had a slight epiphany that walking was now the ultimate luxury. After all, so few of us in America seem to have the spare time or motivation to use our legs for errands, to visit friends or just for the joy of the exercise.

It follows that there is something utterly profane about the sport of speed walking. Not only does it look completely ridiculous, but it insults the whole point of walking in the first place. Walking is not a sport.

In Colorado, I fell in with the near-spiritual experience of riding a bicycle. Not only can you perform errands more quickly on a bike than in a car in some municipalities, in a place with 300 days of sunshine you can feel the air at all points in your busy schedule. It’s less dangerous than a metal box full of electricity and gasoline. One is also less apt to be a slave to the traffic light or be pulled over for speeding after a few hours at the pub. Oh, yeah and it’s also good for the planet.

My third favorite is conveyance is by airplane, which dropped to number three from number one when I was younger. I just spent too much of the past 20 years sitting in airports and on the tarmac to keep flying at my current number one. But at 35,000 feet on a clear day out over planet earth, I still can’t help but to look across over the aisle in utter wonder that no one else is looking out the window, helplessly feeling like I’m somehow disrespecting my ancestors if I don’t savor such a visual extravanganza seen from an extremely gorgeous and expensive flying machine that embodies the sum of human civilization's technological accomplishments.

Fourth, and one I have rarely been afforded, is the luxurious, leisurely and environmentally-friendly form of transit powered by the capture of wind over water. That form of transfer ties to number five, the one I have often been afforded; the energetically-frugal means of marine transportation via paddle. How many 21st century children will ever see what magnificent civilizations exist in the depths of six inches of a freshwater creek?

It’s not a betrayal of citizenship for an American to say that he does not love the automobile. Now and again, I do enjoy a nice autumn drive in Pennsylvania with the music turned up really, really loud. I also enjoy rocketing down a multilane highway on a sunny day, under an electric blue sky across a rugged Western landscape where the horizon goes on forever in every direction. And if there are no cars behind me at night to blind me, making me feel bullied and hounded I relish the minutes coasting through the quiet and calm between just me and a starry night. But these are rare moments for me behind the wheel in a four wheeled tin can.

On the ground, by daily distance, I categorically appreciate mass transit.

I have to. I haven’t owned a car since 2001, and don’t plan to own one for the next decade. Had to find a way to pay for grad school somehow.

But mass trans isn’t just something I’ve put up with over the past decade because I had to. It really is about acquiring a certain quality of life and sharing time with others, a virtually incommunicable experience that daily car commuters are deprived of. Folks on the highway simply don’t see civilization the same way a mass transit rider does; smelling the bodies, hearing the chatter and feeling the current of the pulse of humanity. They don’t get the tranquility before the hurry of work, the quiet after the hustle of a workday; to stare out the window in a deep, vegetative meditation, to daydream in a magazine or listen to the conversations around while pretending or attempting to read a newspaper quietly to one's self. They certainly don’t get to see some colorful lady in Yevpatoria waiting for the bus, taking home a snazzy new carpet.

I know for sure that many, if not most mass trans commuters don’t feel the same way as I do. Perhaps if they could afford a car, to come and go on their own schedule, they probably would be down on the Ford lot in a heartbeat, after all Fords sell well abroad.

There are several forms of mass transit I’m not particularly fond of. For example, any kind of trolleybus annoys the living crap out of me. For you American readers, a trolley bus is a European tradition that sports a fork-like extension off the top which connects to electrical wires above that run down the middle of the street, suspended like electrical cables. All that sudden jerking and constant stopping is really absurd. Just the street sound of that forked pipe sliding across the cable sends shivers down my spine.

The old Soviet ones here in Sevastopol seem to always come off their cables, which causes them to stop, blocking traffic and the next bus behind them as trolley buses obviously can’t pass one another if they are using the same overhead wires. Thus, you will sometimes see dozens waiting in line behind one another because one has broken down.

The brand new trolleybuses in the gilded capitals across Europe aren’t much better. They may boast the fresh plastic smell of a vehicle right off the assembly line, but they jar the human out of their passengers. Forget a crowded rush hour on one: bags from one passenger catapult into another’s legs and there never seems to be many seats available.

The other forms of mass transit I dislike are certain kinds of buses. For example, old and slow local buses that sport scents of cheap-whiskey-drenched-body-odor like in center city Denver, or unheated or unventilated, Indian-built regional buses here in Crimea, or of course the run-down, dodgy, third-world night buses which exist nearly everywhere in the world (I’m thinking of Greyhound’s so-called “fleet” in America). Like I said before, what kind of Democrat would I be if I didn’t complain?

But buses can also be fun, like the recycled, once yellow American elementary school buses used as local transport in Guatemala, or the super-sleek DVD-equipped buses running up and down the Australian coast. And I enjoyed commuting everyday for two years on the unassuming, but quiet and comfortable RTD regional buses which ran between Denver and Boulder.

(Ferry in winter Sevastopol, pic courtesy of PCV Cary McCormick)

Ferry boats are cool, if you are lucky to live in a rare city where you can travel by boat everyday instead of on land. I use them as much as possible when traveling; it’s often the cheapest and best way to sightsee, unencumbered by traffic signals and congestion. I’m really looking forward to gazing at Old Constantinople in this fashion when I get there in June. Unfortunately I don’t get around to taking the ferry here in Sevastopol too often because I live in the center of the city. But in summer, there are some nice beaches to the north and that’s the best way to get there.

By far, the best form of mass transit is by rail; above or below ground. I plan to do a blog segment on subways later on this year when hopefully I’ll find time to document the various rather attractive metro stations of Kyiv. But in examining the pluses of above-ground light rail, an immediate advantage is that one gets to watch slaves of the iron beast yield to the mass trans commuter as he moves through the metropolis unimpeded. Also, there are few, if any stairs to deal with. Mile-high light rail seems to me to be the ideal of 21st century transport: quiet as a Segway, almost as quick as a subway, with giant windows framing the sights of the city in a cheery, stress-less calm which is impossible underground or on the street. I actually went out of my way just to ride on Denver’s light rail when the new DU metro station opened up a few months before I left town. I’m such a dork.

Photo right: the new University of Denver Light Rail Station, courtesy of Tim Lomas.

What a change in commuting experiences from when I was living in Colorado two years ago! Now when I want to boot around Crimea cheaply I take an “electrishka” an electric local train, like this beauty pictured above. It creeps along at around 30 or so miles an hour and stops at about every 2 or 3 kilometers or so. One stop near Sevastopol has no platform or walkway because the station is in fact a farm field. Electrishkas are loud, have sparse climate control and the wooden benches are kind of uncomfortable after an hour or so. But these minor inconveniences don’t equate that traveling on Denver’s swanky new southeast rail line is necessarily any more premium of an experience. The RTD light rail is devoid of a significant feature of electrishka travel: the extraordinary entertainment. I’m not just talking about people watching – Lord knows that Denver is just as full of colorful people as Crimea is. But you won’t find an old man playing the accordion for spare kopeks on D line, you won’t listen to the latest Russian pop number belted out from a guitar-wielding, amp-toting teenager on the C line or spend your ride home from a game at Coors Field listening to an elderly man bare his massive chest tattoo of Stalin as he nostalgically sings a revolutionary serenade. I will miss these Ukrainian spectacles when I return to the dull plastic stateside grind this autumn.

Finally, a form of mass trans that is well worth mentioning that exists in Ukraine and Russia is the “mashrutka.” A mashrutka is a van or small bus that transports people around town. It acts like a bus in the respect that it has a numbered, set route and designated stops. But being a van and having less passengers, it’s a lot quicker than any bus – and just a tiny bit more expensive. Here in Sevastopol, a trip all the way across town, a trip of nine or ten miles, costs all of 40 cents. The vans are so frequent that you never seem to wait long to get going – even late at night. The system is so efficient, and evidently so profitable, that I wonder if a car-loving metropolis like L.A. or Houston would want to adopt such a system after Congress sees the profound wisdom of my proposed $3,000 Federal Auto Purchase Tax Program ($7000 for trucks and SUVs) and my $2/gallon gas tax.

Севастополь! Part 1: The Dead of Winter in Sevastopol

2009-02-10T04:16:00.015-05:00

The sheer quantity of photographic product from my trip to India caused me to realize that it was about time to take more pictures and write more about Sevastopol. I took more than 250 pictures in the Ganges-side town of Varanasi alone, a place I had only spent two days in. I’ve spent almost two years here in this extraordinary city and have snapped maybe 150 pictures in the city limits. My best pictures so far of Sevastopol were taken during last year’s Victory Day (see May 2008). But in this entry, you will see some of some of my pictures taken on a day out in February where I walked the city in search of photo fodder.

Sevastopol looks good in black and white or sepia in its not-so-balmy season. Besides, it makes it looks colder than what it actually is, and thus fulfilling more of the reader’s possible perception of this place being frigid. At the top of this blog entry, you will see two views over the “Art Buxta,” the inner harbor area. The tall white obelisk in the background is a Sevastopol landmark; commemorating the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (WWII). (photo below courtesy of PCV Cary McCormick)

The peninsular “hero city” is ultra-quiet this time of year. Right now I live in the heart of the city off of Bolshaya Morskaya, the busiest street in this city of reportedly 300,000 people. Yet on a given Saturday at noon, the streets in front of my building are deserted. Nicely-dressed women hurry to the market under permanently overcast skies, in earnest effort to get back home to their warm, cozy apartments as soon as possible. Soldiers and sailors march quickly around the city, chatting wildly, yet with heads down and hands drawn in their woolen overcoats. Not that it is at all cold outside, about hanging steady at 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) for weeks now. We had a cold spell back in early January (when all of Cary’s pictures were taken) when snow actually fell for a night and stayed on the ground for a whole weekend. Today (February 8th), the weather is 17 degrees (64 degrees Fahrenheit) although windy and overcast.

Some of the people in Sevastopol would fit right it in any old American city, with regards to winter attire. For example, young men tend to wear blue jeans, sneakers and black coats. But I think the little details of the balance of the population would make the average New Yorker suspicious. Fur, real or not, is quite in chic here, and some of the men and nearly all of the soldiers and sailors don fur hats, as if it were 50 below, not 50 above. The women are in full-blown regalia mode when it comes to fur; ranging from head-to-toe stark white fur capes to brown fur short coat and hat ensembles and then there’s the drop dead beautiful young women in tailored fur-collared coats with knee-high high-heeled patent leather boots. Needless to say, when there are people around, people watching is a blast year-round here in this place.

After growing up in south central Pennsylvania, just a 20 minute drive from that famous Civil War battlefield, I can’t help myself from incessantly conjuring up the image of a seaside Gettysburg here. Iron cannonballs are welded together in two foot tall pyramids. The holes of cannons are stuck with candy bar wrappers and beer cans. Bearded men stare back stoic from panel friezes back in a time when extravagant facial hair was in style. The big difference between the two memorial cities (and not addressing geography, culture etc) is that none of Sevastopol’s 19th century buildings remain and very few of its Crimean War statues persist. Hitler destroyed nearly everything when his goons drove over Europe.

Everyday, teenage cadets march in front of Sevastopol’s eternal flame honoring the heroes of WWII. The austere purpose noted, it is nonetheless always thoroughly entertaining to watch goose-stepping.

When friends were in town last month I finally made it to the city’s landmark visual monument “Panorama,” a giant domed structure housing a massive two story, 360 degree painting. The piece is of a view from the top of Malohov Kyrghan, the hill I used to live near, during the height of the Crimean War. Panorama paintings were quite the rage during the turn of the century, especially for museum exhibitions about the wars of the mid 19th century. I believe Gettysburg had one too. The painting is lucky to still be around. When the Germans started bombing the city in 1942, the painting was taken down piece-by-piece and whisked away to the inner Soviet Union, just in time as the domed building housing it was soon destroyed by bombardment.

There are quite a number of Crimean War statues around Sevastopol – like this one of Admiral Nahimov, the man who is credited with staving off the British invasion (not the Beatles) by destroying his own ships, thus blocking entrance to the harbor. The next time I talk with a military historian, I will be sure to ask him or her exactly how many military leaders in history they know of who were lauded for destroying their own ships. I know very few who laude Cortez. (photo below courtesy of Cary McCormick)

The more common cast inhabitant of the city is of post-WWII birth. Before coming to Ukraine I expected that I would ultimately disdain Soviet realism as an homogenous artificial art form inspired by politics and not by creative energy. But the massive iron statues that number across the post-Soviet World are awe-worthy. Even the most ardent critic must accept that they are indeed powerful. It is truly good public art: instantly comprehendible among even the dullest sensitivity.

This brilliant, moving behemouth which overlooks a hidden corner of the city depicts a sailor and a soldier fighting side by side in defense of the city against the fascist scum encroaching. To get a sense of how big it is, take a look at the smaller picture: those dots at the bottom are organic humans.

Of course Sevastopol has a statue of V.I. Lenin. Nearly all Ukrainian cities do, although some municipalities in the west are dismantling theirs. Our Lenin is a big guy, who seems like he’s pointing north to Yevpatoriya (as if to say "let's hit that beach. It's got sand!") Soviet sculptors must have had a profound sense of humor. For example, look at the following two pictures of the same statue. In the picture to the right, it's Monday and Vladimir’s all business. In the one below, it seems likes it's Friday, he just got off work, and is doing the funky disco sky point in celebration.

My time in this marvelous place is waning. I have sixteen weeks left before I cast off once again to wander the uncertain seas – in search of territory friendly to my eyes, intriguing to my mind and noble enough to worthy countless heroes, sung and unsung among its citizenry. To that end, I spend these quiet winter weeks wondering, will I ever again disembark at another Sevastopol?

Human Rights and Legal Awareness Campaign: “Protect Yourself!”

2009-02-10T04:06:00.004-05:00

It’s February once again and for Ukrainian public organizations it means that it’s time to get back to work after the long holiday season. One organization I have been working very closely with over the past year is the Legal Clinic “Peacemaker.” The two young lawyers who started and now run this non-profit legal aid organization in Sevastopol have participated in several of the projects I helped plan and fund since I began my service in June 2007. Roman Shamrai volunteered on the student government project and both Roman and the organization’s head, Andrey Geftman (pictured below right giving seminar) participated in the four day youth congress which established the all-Ukraine youth research center.

The Legal Clinic “Mirotvorets” (meaning “peacemaker” in Russian) provides free or low-cost legal consultations to elderly pensioners and the poor, as well as in certain cases, representation in court. They are also heavily involved in various human rights projects throughout the Crimean peninsula.

Andrey and Roman came up with a great idea last autumn to provide free seminars for the community, young people especially, in order to educate them about their legal rights as citizens of Ukraine under the Ukrainian Constitution, and their human rights under international law. In order to smoothly interact with police, local government and the courts, legal education is also especially important to building confidence in the legal system and feeling secure in one’s recourse to justice and access to freedom of speech.

Together we devised a project in September and the following month I wrote a grant for USAID’s Small Project Assistance (SPA) program. We were notified in November that we were awarded the funds.

Over 90 hours of seminars will take place through the end of April, and the local community is very interested in what the organization is doing. The project has already been the subject of several newspaper, internet and television pieces and this visibility has increased participation and weekly attendance of the seminars.

I am now working with Andrey and Roman to seek funding for another legal aid project; one that will benefit the elderly in providing seminars and legal consultations regarding their property and land rights.