Recap:So far flights:
Toronto – heathrow
Gatwick – jersey
Jersey – Gatwick
Heathrow- Iceland
Iceland – heathrow
Stansted – berlin
Warsaw – Prague
Prague – Frankfurt
Frankfurt – Venice
Venice – Bucharest
Bucharest – Istanbul
Istanbul – Tashkent
Tashkent – Istanbul
Istanbul – kiev
Still to go:
Simferopol – Istanbul
Istanbul – doha
Doha-singapore
Singapore – perth
Perth – Darwin
Darwin – alice springs
Alice sprints – ayers rock
Ayers rock – Sydney
Syndey – fiji
Fiji Sydney
Sydney – hong kong
Hong kong – manila
Manila – koror
Koror – manila
Manila – hong kong
Hong kong – Chicago
Chicago – Toronto
Trains so far, none left
Berlin – Gdansk
Gdansk – Krakow
Krakow - Warsaw
Tashkent – Urganch
Kiev – Kharkov
Kharkov – Simferopol
Countries So far:
Canada
England
Jersey (depends on who you ask if it is a country or not. They seem to think so)
Iceland
Germany
Poland
Czech Republic
Italy
Romania
Turkey
Uzbekistan
Ukraine
Russia (oddly enough, sovereign territory inside Sevastopol)
Still to go:
Qatar
Singapore
Australia
Fiji
Hong Kong
Philippines
Palau
Canada
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
secret submarine base at Balaclava
Secret Submarine Base Balaclava
submarine base door
Thursday October 29, 2009
Visited today the small seaside town of Balaclava close to Sevastopol and on its own lovely little bay and sheltered harbor. It was here in 1953 that the Soviet Union started building a top secret submarine tunnel for hiding and repairing submarines and to protect them and workers against nuclear attack from the United States. It is now a museum to the Cold War and also a museum of the development of the Ukrainian Navy.
I actually chose not to go into the museum due to foot problems and also time constraints as my guide was chaffing at the bit to get done with me so he could go spread manure on his wife's flower beds. Woe be it to me to come between a man and wife and manure. I did buy the Balaclava booklet on the base which has been translated, semi-badly, into English. The booklet is a wonderful example of "things I never heard of in U.S. history" of “how the other side sees things.” A lovely bit of propaganda is put forth in the booklet.
fish farm and comorants
I am sorry that I didn’t have the time because the place was a marvel for the time that it was built. It could hold up to 9 small submarines and held a dry dock as well. The doors on each end of the tunnel were immense, able to stand a nuclear blast and the attendant water shock wave (based on calculations from Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The town was wiped off the map and clearance was limited to a small number of workers and military personnel for many years.
Of course all has come to light now and it is a beautiful little harbor full of pleasure craft. There are fish farms in the bay (and a lot of cormorants waiting to steal fish), small hotels (and one ugly out of place one yet to open) and fish restaurants. Where no unauthorized man once trod on military soil, now tourists stroll in and out of the secret, secret base. This is definitely a “go back later and see more thoroughly”.
submarine base door
Thursday October 29, 2009
Visited today the small seaside town of Balaclava close to Sevastopol and on its own lovely little bay and sheltered harbor. It was here in 1953 that the Soviet Union started building a top secret submarine tunnel for hiding and repairing submarines and to protect them and workers against nuclear attack from the United States. It is now a museum to the Cold War and also a museum of the development of the Ukrainian Navy.
I actually chose not to go into the museum due to foot problems and also time constraints as my guide was chaffing at the bit to get done with me so he could go spread manure on his wife's flower beds. Woe be it to me to come between a man and wife and manure. I did buy the Balaclava booklet on the base which has been translated, semi-badly, into English. The booklet is a wonderful example of "things I never heard of in U.S. history" of “how the other side sees things.” A lovely bit of propaganda is put forth in the booklet.
fish farm and comorants
I am sorry that I didn’t have the time because the place was a marvel for the time that it was built. It could hold up to 9 small submarines and held a dry dock as well. The doors on each end of the tunnel were immense, able to stand a nuclear blast and the attendant water shock wave (based on calculations from Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The town was wiped off the map and clearance was limited to a small number of workers and military personnel for many years.
Of course all has come to light now and it is a beautiful little harbor full of pleasure craft. There are fish farms in the bay (and a lot of cormorants waiting to steal fish), small hotels (and one ugly out of place one yet to open) and fish restaurants. Where no unauthorized man once trod on military soil, now tourists stroll in and out of the secret, secret base. This is definitely a “go back later and see more thoroughly”.
Sevastopol by the Sea
Sevastopol – By the Sea
Soviet Memorial to WWII
Thursday October 29.2009
Sevastopol is a lovely city and on the Black Sea coast, indeed a beautiful place to visit. Drove around to different monuments and such today but the things I learned from my guide were ever so much more interesting than some of the things I saw. So here are my guide tips.
My guide is almost my age and I so hate saying that I am getting to be the "older person" on my trips rather than the guides or other travelers. My guide is a retired Soviet Union Naval Officer. Isn't that a mouthful? He served 25 years in the Soviet Navy on different ships which including being a submariner for awhile. When I found out there was a lot of scuba diving in Balaclava – diving on old wrecks from the Crimean War onwards – I mentioned that I was a diver. He explained how he would have to crawl out of torpedo tubes every time the submarine was getting ready to leave port, as a check out the ship kind of thing and an emergency preparedness thing. He didn’t much like it as it wasn’t in the lightweight (yes, comparatively speaking) equipment we use to pleasure dive. He would be in full deep dive equipment which weighs an awful lot. I don’t think I would have liked it a bit either.
Memorial to scuttled ships of Crimean War
Sevastopolians (Sevastopol people) mostly still speak Russian. They seem to be more Russian than Ukrainian and they seem to have more ties to Mother Russia than Baby Ukraine. That is logical after all as the Russian Navy in the Black Sea has been stationed here for many, many years and is still stationed here. When the Soviet Union dissolved and Russia broke up into its component parts and the Ukraine became a free country again, the agreement with Russia sort of split Sevastopol between districts that would remain under Russian control and districts that would go back to the Ukraine. So everywhere I walked and looked, there would be Russian flags flying over certain buildings: the Russian Navy headquarters, the Russian Navy Officers Club, the Russian Consulate, the Russian harbor side territory, etc. In fact, according to international law, I was inside the sovereign territory of Russia today and on Russian soil. Wow, I didn’t even need to get a visa and sure didn’t think I would be traveling to Russia on this trip.
Lenin
There are many monuments around town that are dedicated to Soviet things, to Russian things, to Ukrainian things. Several buildings have busts on Lenin on the walls and some have the hammer and sickle on the walls also. In the harbor sit more Russian Navy ships than Ukrainian Navy ships. It’s definitely a city that doesn’t know who it is yet.
The city is so Russian that I found myself looking around at policemen and other people in uniform wondering if they were going to stop me taking photos of whatever I wanted. But there is definitely a freeness about the city as there are cruise ships that come into port and tourists wandering throughout the city in all places and most with cameras. Per my guide book, Sevastopol wasn’t even allowed to have tourists until 1996. They have made up for it in opening their arms to anyone who wants to come and laze by the sea or stroll around their streets or shop for souvenirs. I’m sure they will work out eventually whether they are Russian or Ukrainian.
Soviet Memorial to WWII
Thursday October 29.2009
Sevastopol is a lovely city and on the Black Sea coast, indeed a beautiful place to visit. Drove around to different monuments and such today but the things I learned from my guide were ever so much more interesting than some of the things I saw. So here are my guide tips.
My guide is almost my age and I so hate saying that I am getting to be the "older person" on my trips rather than the guides or other travelers. My guide is a retired Soviet Union Naval Officer. Isn't that a mouthful? He served 25 years in the Soviet Navy on different ships which including being a submariner for awhile. When I found out there was a lot of scuba diving in Balaclava – diving on old wrecks from the Crimean War onwards – I mentioned that I was a diver. He explained how he would have to crawl out of torpedo tubes every time the submarine was getting ready to leave port, as a check out the ship kind of thing and an emergency preparedness thing. He didn’t much like it as it wasn’t in the lightweight (yes, comparatively speaking) equipment we use to pleasure dive. He would be in full deep dive equipment which weighs an awful lot. I don’t think I would have liked it a bit either.
Memorial to scuttled ships of Crimean War
Sevastopolians (Sevastopol people) mostly still speak Russian. They seem to be more Russian than Ukrainian and they seem to have more ties to Mother Russia than Baby Ukraine. That is logical after all as the Russian Navy in the Black Sea has been stationed here for many, many years and is still stationed here. When the Soviet Union dissolved and Russia broke up into its component parts and the Ukraine became a free country again, the agreement with Russia sort of split Sevastopol between districts that would remain under Russian control and districts that would go back to the Ukraine. So everywhere I walked and looked, there would be Russian flags flying over certain buildings: the Russian Navy headquarters, the Russian Navy Officers Club, the Russian Consulate, the Russian harbor side territory, etc. In fact, according to international law, I was inside the sovereign territory of Russia today and on Russian soil. Wow, I didn’t even need to get a visa and sure didn’t think I would be traveling to Russia on this trip.
Lenin
There are many monuments around town that are dedicated to Soviet things, to Russian things, to Ukrainian things. Several buildings have busts on Lenin on the walls and some have the hammer and sickle on the walls also. In the harbor sit more Russian Navy ships than Ukrainian Navy ships. It’s definitely a city that doesn’t know who it is yet.
The city is so Russian that I found myself looking around at policemen and other people in uniform wondering if they were going to stop me taking photos of whatever I wanted. But there is definitely a freeness about the city as there are cruise ships that come into port and tourists wandering throughout the city in all places and most with cameras. Per my guide book, Sevastopol wasn’t even allowed to have tourists until 1996. They have made up for it in opening their arms to anyone who wants to come and laze by the sea or stroll around their streets or shop for souvenirs. I’m sure they will work out eventually whether they are Russian or Ukrainian.
halfway point
Halfway date
I actually missed it by a couple of days. Hadn't realized I had been traveling this long already. My halfway date was Tuesday October 27 in Kharkov, Ukraine. So far I have covered these countries and places, some just a touch (maybe just going through the airport) and some more extensively: England, Jersey, Iceland, Berlin, Poland (Gdansk, Warsaw, and Krakow), Prague, Venice, Istanbul, Uzbekistan, and now the Ukraine. I have yet to go: Qatar, Singapore, Perth, Darwin, Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, Fiji, Sydney, Puerto Galera & Sabang Beach (Philippines), Hong Kong (just the airport – twice) and Palau. It’s been quite a journey so far. I’ve met and traveled with some wonderful people. Traveling once with my husband for 26 days and will be meeting him again in Perth for another 26 days of travel together. Then everyone I met in Uzbekistan through the Explore/Adventure Center trip was just wonderful and the guide was great. My host at Snorri’s guesthouse in Iceland was terrific – Thanks Magnus. My city guides in Uzbekistan were great. My hubby and I really enjoyed our stays in Berlin and Poland, Prague and Venice. Also just chance meetings with people out and about have been quite interesting and entertaining. The policemen in Uzbekistan who were waiting to be bribed to open the minaret for climbing, the salesladies with gold teeth who try not to smile for the camera and then end up guffawing at the photo you show them, the Segway guide in Prague who tried so hard to show off and ended up falling off his Segway more than any of us, Torban in Berlin who walks way too fast, Helen in Kiev with her great ability to locate seated toilets as well as fantastic knowledge, and many more: all have been delightful.
The Ukraine has proved to be more of a challenge to me. I had chosen to go with apartments rather than hotels and as such, each apartment has been several flights up stairs in dark hallways and my hips and knees and feet are not happy travelers these days. There will be an appointment with the podiatrist and chiropractor when I get home, definitely, many appointments. But unless I had chosen to go with 5 star hotels in the Ukraine, chances are I would be walking up flights of stairs in every location, so you gotta do what you gotta do. My travel agents here are trying their best to make is easier on me to get to the locations but the one I have at the moment is more like a cheerleader – "You can do it! Come on! Climb those stairs! Walk up that mountain! Sit cross-legged on that floor!" That last one I couldn’t do even before I was bedeviled by arthritis.
I’ve slept in everything from the 5 star posh fancy hotels where walking in the door practically costs you extra to a pad on the floor in a yurt, to a private apartment, to a narrow train bed. Oddly enough, the ones where I sleep the best have been the cheapest places but possibly I’ve been the most tired in those places. I’ve eaten all kinds of foods many in Uzbekistan and Ukraine that I still don’t know what it is I ate. I’ve been lucky enough so far not to be sick with the dreaded tourists disease (knock on wood for sure) but did have a wicked cold that my husband gave me in Poland.
My biggest problems health wise have been that my feet and hips are not taking to the trip well. In Poland I had to start using my walking stick for my hip and have continued with it. In Poland also, my feet balked at all the cobblestones and rough pavements. I’ve now gone through 5 different types of inserts and cushions to try and east the pain but some days it’s like walking on nails. I don’t like this new development at all as I have plans to do a lot more trips and a lot more walking. Some how I will have to solve this problem.
My daughter is the one who has taken up the burden of keeping things going at home. She’s been beset with numerous problems that I should have been there to handle and tasks I should be doing. She’s a wonderful person though and does everything without complaint. But I do feel guilty that I have left at a very inopportune time for various projects going on in our lives.
Other than that, sometimes I have been quite lonely, sometimes I have been ready to chuck it all and go home except for all the money I would lose but mainly I am glad that I am traveling and seeing things and meeting people. I have always wanted to do this and am glad that I finally have the time and money to accomplish it. I do wish I had been able to make it a six month trip but on the other hand, I think I will be more than ready to go home at the end of 4.
My last two months will be at an easier pace. Going through Australia, we have several days in each location and there’s not that much to see and do in some of them so I think there were be book days and TV days and sitting on the beach days. My feet will appreciate it. And after my husband goes back to work at the end of November, it will be a diving vacation for me so lots of swimming and lots of sitting around “off gassing” (waiting for the nitrogen in your blood to disburse so you can go under again). I am looking forward to the relaxation and seeing what new things I can find underwater. If I had to rate my trip so far it would be a 5 out of 5. Can I plan or what!
I actually missed it by a couple of days. Hadn't realized I had been traveling this long already. My halfway date was Tuesday October 27 in Kharkov, Ukraine. So far I have covered these countries and places, some just a touch (maybe just going through the airport) and some more extensively: England, Jersey, Iceland, Berlin, Poland (Gdansk, Warsaw, and Krakow), Prague, Venice, Istanbul, Uzbekistan, and now the Ukraine. I have yet to go: Qatar, Singapore, Perth, Darwin, Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, Fiji, Sydney, Puerto Galera & Sabang Beach (Philippines), Hong Kong (just the airport – twice) and Palau. It’s been quite a journey so far. I’ve met and traveled with some wonderful people. Traveling once with my husband for 26 days and will be meeting him again in Perth for another 26 days of travel together. Then everyone I met in Uzbekistan through the Explore/Adventure Center trip was just wonderful and the guide was great. My host at Snorri’s guesthouse in Iceland was terrific – Thanks Magnus. My city guides in Uzbekistan were great. My hubby and I really enjoyed our stays in Berlin and Poland, Prague and Venice. Also just chance meetings with people out and about have been quite interesting and entertaining. The policemen in Uzbekistan who were waiting to be bribed to open the minaret for climbing, the salesladies with gold teeth who try not to smile for the camera and then end up guffawing at the photo you show them, the Segway guide in Prague who tried so hard to show off and ended up falling off his Segway more than any of us, Torban in Berlin who walks way too fast, Helen in Kiev with her great ability to locate seated toilets as well as fantastic knowledge, and many more: all have been delightful.
The Ukraine has proved to be more of a challenge to me. I had chosen to go with apartments rather than hotels and as such, each apartment has been several flights up stairs in dark hallways and my hips and knees and feet are not happy travelers these days. There will be an appointment with the podiatrist and chiropractor when I get home, definitely, many appointments. But unless I had chosen to go with 5 star hotels in the Ukraine, chances are I would be walking up flights of stairs in every location, so you gotta do what you gotta do. My travel agents here are trying their best to make is easier on me to get to the locations but the one I have at the moment is more like a cheerleader – "You can do it! Come on! Climb those stairs! Walk up that mountain! Sit cross-legged on that floor!" That last one I couldn’t do even before I was bedeviled by arthritis.
I’ve slept in everything from the 5 star posh fancy hotels where walking in the door practically costs you extra to a pad on the floor in a yurt, to a private apartment, to a narrow train bed. Oddly enough, the ones where I sleep the best have been the cheapest places but possibly I’ve been the most tired in those places. I’ve eaten all kinds of foods many in Uzbekistan and Ukraine that I still don’t know what it is I ate. I’ve been lucky enough so far not to be sick with the dreaded tourists disease (knock on wood for sure) but did have a wicked cold that my husband gave me in Poland.
My biggest problems health wise have been that my feet and hips are not taking to the trip well. In Poland I had to start using my walking stick for my hip and have continued with it. In Poland also, my feet balked at all the cobblestones and rough pavements. I’ve now gone through 5 different types of inserts and cushions to try and east the pain but some days it’s like walking on nails. I don’t like this new development at all as I have plans to do a lot more trips and a lot more walking. Some how I will have to solve this problem.
My daughter is the one who has taken up the burden of keeping things going at home. She’s been beset with numerous problems that I should have been there to handle and tasks I should be doing. She’s a wonderful person though and does everything without complaint. But I do feel guilty that I have left at a very inopportune time for various projects going on in our lives.
Other than that, sometimes I have been quite lonely, sometimes I have been ready to chuck it all and go home except for all the money I would lose but mainly I am glad that I am traveling and seeing things and meeting people. I have always wanted to do this and am glad that I finally have the time and money to accomplish it. I do wish I had been able to make it a six month trip but on the other hand, I think I will be more than ready to go home at the end of 4.
My last two months will be at an easier pace. Going through Australia, we have several days in each location and there’s not that much to see and do in some of them so I think there were be book days and TV days and sitting on the beach days. My feet will appreciate it. And after my husband goes back to work at the end of November, it will be a diving vacation for me so lots of swimming and lots of sitting around “off gassing” (waiting for the nitrogen in your blood to disburse so you can go under again). I am looking forward to the relaxation and seeing what new things I can find underwater. If I had to rate my trip so far it would be a 5 out of 5. Can I plan or what!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Cave Cities
Cave Cities
cave monastery sister organizations
Wednesday October 28, 2009
I was picked up promptly by my guide and driver this morning. I slept on the train very well but I'm still tired. My guide is a chatty fellow and while he is Ukrainian and Crimean, he is more Russian than anything and says everyone here speaks Russian even though they are supposed to speak Ukrainian. He also visited the U.S. this year to see 5 of his former clients who all invited him over. So he saw Utah, Nevada, Southern California, and Arizona. He loved Bryce Canyon and Yosemite and took 5000 pictures while there. And he is flexible so whatever I want to do, he will accommodate me and he has suggestions to see different things. Today he missed his volleyball game because he had to come pick me up at the train station but he has been playing for 40 years and plays on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He is retired after 25 years in the Soviet Navy on all kinds of boats but he couldn’t retire until after the Soviet Union broke up because you just don’t retire from the Soviets but he got his pension. WHEW. I learned all this on the walk from the train carriage to the car and before we were ever out of the parking lot. I think I might be too quiet and dull for him. Oh dear.
caves monastery
Driving from Simferopol (train station) to Sevastopol (apartment), we are to stop at the town of Bakhchisaray where there is a palace and also a Caves Monastery. We are too early for the palace so we drive through the town to the monastery and although you are supposed to park at the bottom of the hill, he drives halfway up, lucky me.
The Caves Monastery is not very large. These are limestone bluffs with seashells in the layers so it is easy to dig out caves. The monastery has 17 monks now and a wall of affiliations with other monasteries and churches throughout the world. Each one has a small inset on the plaque with dirt in it from that church or monastery. The chapel is quite small but lovely. As we are leaving a group of about 40 older people filed up the stairs and into the chapel for a service.
cave city
My guide tells me that there is a cave city that is about a 20 minute walk from here and it is a good one and the easiest one to reach as the path is paved. My feet aren’t hurting yet so I say let’s go. What he neglects to tell me is that the path is only paved part way and the entire way is uphill. The last half to the city gate is all rocky and steeper at the end. As we go he tells me a story of one of his clients who weighed 225 kgs but wanted to get up there so climbed slowly and made it. How could I possibly turn back after that story?
silk road between limestone cliffs
We made it to the gate which was cleverly hidden around turns so a battering ram could not be used to breach the gate. Into the city and to see any of the caves, there is more "up" over more steep rocks and wagon ruts in the path. I gamely follow him. There are school holidays now so there are several groups of mixed age children roaming the cave city. My guide takes me to the viewpoint so we can look down upon the old Silk Road snaking through the limestone bluffs. I didn’t need translation to know the teachers were forbidding their students to get close to the edge.
We wander through the city and look at some of the buildings that are standing, a couple of Knessets, a mausoleum, and the first wall. The Tartars had built this city or rather they were good fighters but not good builders so they hired the Crimea people to build the city but refused to let them live inside the city walls. The Crimea people weren’t dumb so they built them a wall but then built themselves a second wall to protect their homes. The Tartars were fine with this because they now had two walls to stay behind.
weeping fountain and Pushkin
We go into the largest cave which the students are standing in and hollering to get the echoes. Finally it is time to head back down to the car and we pass several vendors who daily make this climb to be close to the cave city and sell their goods.
We are now able to visit the palace which he warned me would not be as nice as Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. This was a small palace that was mostly a museum now but it did have some lovely fountains including a weeping fountain that Pushkin wrote a poem about and all the students must learn this poem in school. Also a very nice Muslim cemetery. It didn’t take long to visit the palace and as my legs were still jelly from the climb up and down the mountain, I declined going up more stairs to view the art museum which he said didn’t have much.
Now he asks if I want to go directly to my apartment in Sevastopol or take a country road drive and have some lunch at a Crimean Tatars restaurant. I opt for this and we go driving through the country past the location of the Charge of the Light Brigade. I am going to have to bone up on my Crimean War history. The restaurant had good food but we had to sit at a short table and “lounge” at the table which I can’t do with my arthritis so I wasn’t able to eat all my food because it was too painful and uncomfortable for me. My guide had them put the rest of my lunch in a doggy bag but I wasn’t able to bring home the rest of my soup which is sad because it was very good.
A stop at the grocery store so I will have some breakfast and then to the apartment. I am staying in a beautiful 2 bedroom apartment that has a lovely view out the back of the dry docks. However, where I had too much heat in Kiev and Kharkov, here I have no heat yet as they haven’t turned on the city heat. Luckily there is a small unit for air conditioning but also does heat. So I have deserted the living room and am holed up in the bedroom where it is warm, probably too warm now to sleep. It’s either too hot or too cold for me most of the time. And I had counted on the warm radiators to dry my laundry.
cave monastery sister organizations
Wednesday October 28, 2009
I was picked up promptly by my guide and driver this morning. I slept on the train very well but I'm still tired. My guide is a chatty fellow and while he is Ukrainian and Crimean, he is more Russian than anything and says everyone here speaks Russian even though they are supposed to speak Ukrainian. He also visited the U.S. this year to see 5 of his former clients who all invited him over. So he saw Utah, Nevada, Southern California, and Arizona. He loved Bryce Canyon and Yosemite and took 5000 pictures while there. And he is flexible so whatever I want to do, he will accommodate me and he has suggestions to see different things. Today he missed his volleyball game because he had to come pick me up at the train station but he has been playing for 40 years and plays on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He is retired after 25 years in the Soviet Navy on all kinds of boats but he couldn’t retire until after the Soviet Union broke up because you just don’t retire from the Soviets but he got his pension. WHEW. I learned all this on the walk from the train carriage to the car and before we were ever out of the parking lot. I think I might be too quiet and dull for him. Oh dear.
caves monastery
Driving from Simferopol (train station) to Sevastopol (apartment), we are to stop at the town of Bakhchisaray where there is a palace and also a Caves Monastery. We are too early for the palace so we drive through the town to the monastery and although you are supposed to park at the bottom of the hill, he drives halfway up, lucky me.
The Caves Monastery is not very large. These are limestone bluffs with seashells in the layers so it is easy to dig out caves. The monastery has 17 monks now and a wall of affiliations with other monasteries and churches throughout the world. Each one has a small inset on the plaque with dirt in it from that church or monastery. The chapel is quite small but lovely. As we are leaving a group of about 40 older people filed up the stairs and into the chapel for a service.
cave city
My guide tells me that there is a cave city that is about a 20 minute walk from here and it is a good one and the easiest one to reach as the path is paved. My feet aren’t hurting yet so I say let’s go. What he neglects to tell me is that the path is only paved part way and the entire way is uphill. The last half to the city gate is all rocky and steeper at the end. As we go he tells me a story of one of his clients who weighed 225 kgs but wanted to get up there so climbed slowly and made it. How could I possibly turn back after that story?
silk road between limestone cliffs
We made it to the gate which was cleverly hidden around turns so a battering ram could not be used to breach the gate. Into the city and to see any of the caves, there is more "up" over more steep rocks and wagon ruts in the path. I gamely follow him. There are school holidays now so there are several groups of mixed age children roaming the cave city. My guide takes me to the viewpoint so we can look down upon the old Silk Road snaking through the limestone bluffs. I didn’t need translation to know the teachers were forbidding their students to get close to the edge.
We wander through the city and look at some of the buildings that are standing, a couple of Knessets, a mausoleum, and the first wall. The Tartars had built this city or rather they were good fighters but not good builders so they hired the Crimea people to build the city but refused to let them live inside the city walls. The Crimea people weren’t dumb so they built them a wall but then built themselves a second wall to protect their homes. The Tartars were fine with this because they now had two walls to stay behind.
weeping fountain and Pushkin
We go into the largest cave which the students are standing in and hollering to get the echoes. Finally it is time to head back down to the car and we pass several vendors who daily make this climb to be close to the cave city and sell their goods.
We are now able to visit the palace which he warned me would not be as nice as Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. This was a small palace that was mostly a museum now but it did have some lovely fountains including a weeping fountain that Pushkin wrote a poem about and all the students must learn this poem in school. Also a very nice Muslim cemetery. It didn’t take long to visit the palace and as my legs were still jelly from the climb up and down the mountain, I declined going up more stairs to view the art museum which he said didn’t have much.
Now he asks if I want to go directly to my apartment in Sevastopol or take a country road drive and have some lunch at a Crimean Tatars restaurant. I opt for this and we go driving through the country past the location of the Charge of the Light Brigade. I am going to have to bone up on my Crimean War history. The restaurant had good food but we had to sit at a short table and “lounge” at the table which I can’t do with my arthritis so I wasn’t able to eat all my food because it was too painful and uncomfortable for me. My guide had them put the rest of my lunch in a doggy bag but I wasn’t able to bring home the rest of my soup which is sad because it was very good.
A stop at the grocery store so I will have some breakfast and then to the apartment. I am staying in a beautiful 2 bedroom apartment that has a lovely view out the back of the dry docks. However, where I had too much heat in Kiev and Kharkov, here I have no heat yet as they haven’t turned on the city heat. Luckily there is a small unit for air conditioning but also does heat. So I have deserted the living room and am holed up in the bedroom where it is warm, probably too warm now to sleep. It’s either too hot or too cold for me most of the time. And I had counted on the warm radiators to dry my laundry.
Night Train to Simferopol
Night Train to SimferopolOctober 27, 2009 The night train left at 9:32 p.m. from Kharkov to Simferopol. I had a first class compartment to myself in car 11. There were 26 cars on the train so it was a long train. The car conductor came to visit me shortly after I had settled into my compartment but I could not understand what she was saying so gave her my tickets and that was the last I saw of her that evening. Closed and locked the door and climbed into my bed because it was quite chilly in the compartment. The heater was not running in the train. Just as I was thinking that I bet the conductor was asking me if I wanted heat, I fell asleep. Usually I do not sleep well in trains. The stopped and starting and slowing and speeding keeps me awake. I had been warned that while it was a fast train, there would be maybe 10 stops or so. From 11 p.m. when I fell asleep until around 5:30 a.m. when I woke, I could have been home in my own bed as I was so sound asleep. No, I take that back. At home, my cat would have waked me around 3 a.m. so I slept even better than in my own bed. How unusual for me. The train was to arrive at 6:22 a.m. I got up and got dressed and sat on the edge of my bed and fell back asleep. When I woke again, it was about 6:15 but the train didn't stop again until maybe 6:45. As it wasn’t a big station, I figured that the time had changed on me again because I knew that my station was the very last one and the conductor would not let me stay on the train if she was trying to clean up sheets and such. Finally we arrived at Simferopol at 7:45, just a wee bit late. My contact was waiting for me and since he knew what car and compartment I was in, he was outside my window knocking on it. I saw him but he didn’t see me but he was on board and hauling off my suitcase for me by the time I got to the exit. Very nice train ride.
Kharkov in the Dark
Kharkov in the Dark
lady with the heartbeat
Tuesday October 27, 2009
My original itinerary was to visit Kharkov city and sights on Monday. Then I was to do the out of town landowner's estates on Tuesday which would have put me finishing my tour around 8 p.m. and then go right to the train station for the night train. Didn’t work out that way. Vlad swapped my days so we could get Mikail as a guide. Then we had the car trouble and didn’t get back until late. But that still meant Vlad had to do something with me after the Kharkov city tour because if we started at 9 as planned, we’d be finished by 1 or 2 and then have to wait somewhere for the train because I would have to be out of the apartment. So we started the tour at 3:00 instead.
KGB mass graves memorial
Vlad has still got some time to fill with me and he felt really bad that I missed the last estate yesterday and the museum so he thought he would add some of the sights that weren’t originally planned. First we went out of town to the huge parks that are on the edge of town. We visited the Great Patriotic War Memorial that is in Wood Park. Another name is the WWII memorial. The Park is huge so the memorial is huge. There are two large bas reliefs at the entrance then you walk down this long sidewalk, past several memorials to different people who fought or suffered. Supposedly there are mass graves in this park from Kharkovians who were killed by the Nazis. The Nazis perfected killing by suffocation as they would load up a truck full of people and the exhaust would be fed into the truck where the people were kept. By the time they had driven to the Wood Park, the people in the truck were dead from carbon monoxide suffocation.
Engineered Famine memorial
At the end of the pathway is the main plaza which is a very large and tall statue of a mother who has lost her sons in the war. The face is grim rather than mourning I thought and there is an eternal flame at her feet. But the oddest thing about this memorial is that you can hear a heartbeat as you get close to the giant statue. Truly a rather freaky thing to walk up there and hear "lubdub". I understand the sentiment and the reasons behind doing something like that but it was creepy.
Our next visit was also on the grim Kharkov tour. We stopped by the mass graves of the Soviets and Polish officers who were killed by the KGB on Stalin’s orders. These killings took place in 1938-40. The Polish officers included men who had never fought, e.g. doctors. Vlad had a client once who came to look for his father’s name and he did find it so he knew where his father was, sort of, in one of the mass graves there. Crosses in the memorial indicate where each mass grave has been discovered and crosses with two cross bars are Orthodox Christians and the crosses with the single cross piece are Catholic Christians.
Sunset over Kharkov
We are doing all the grim stuff today so we next visited the Engineered Famine memorial. This visit got personal. Vlad’s grandmother remembers being in Kharkov during this famine. The people in the cities had some food although it was rationed. The people in the countryside had none with a very circular reasoning. They could grow food so therefore they didn’t need ration cards BUT Stalin had ordered all their grain and vegetables confiscated and sent to Moscow so they didn’t have any food BUT why would they need ration cards since they could grow it. There were even laws passed that made it illegal (with a sentence of either 10 years hard labor of death) if any amount of grain was “stolen” and this included gleaning from the fields. Vlad’s grandmother remembers peasants coming into town and dying on the street of starvation. I really can’t understand the reasoning behind this famine but to know someone who knows someone who saw it is equally creepy with the heartbeat and sends shivers down my spine. Location, location, location. Being born and raised in the U.S. means I never saw anything like this.
Lenin Statue
It is getting dark now so I figured we would stop somewhere and hold up until train time but Vlad is going to show me everything the city has to offer even if I can’t see it in the dark. We head back into town and stop at several churches. We have to walk around them to find the open door which was rather silly since people were coming for service and had we just followed them. The churches inside are beautiful, I think. There were very few lights inside except for the candles and a service was being held at both churches we visited. We didn’t stay long and I certainly didn’t take any photos.
One church had three saints in the sanctuary. Two were in coffins but the Archbishop of Constantinople was in a seated position. He had gone to Moscow (at that time, the Moscow czar was quite powerful) to get help but had been killed on his way home. He was buried. Eight years later they dug him up and he had not decomposed so he was wrapped in his Archbishop robes and moved around for awhile but eventually ended up at this cathedral in Kharkov. In the dim light, he looked at first like he was wrapped in Saran Wrap but when I got closer, it was his robes and they glittered from the jewels in them.
We walk across the street to see the British tank, in the dark. I almost ran into it before I saw it. There were also cannons and artillery guns. A lover’s statue was somewhere but I think it was obscured by lovers.
Vlad drives in town like he drives everywhere so we were making U-turns and going up one way streets and driving around the square where we weren’t supposed to be but gosh darn, he was going to show me this stuff. We did a screech and halt beside a statue of Lenin which I snapped a photo but it’s pretty dark. A screech and halt past a fountain that was lit, past a statue of one of their writers, and past another couple of memorials that I couldn’t even see from the car in the dark. We stop and visit an art museum which is really an art gallery with paintings for sale. We try to visit the miniature museum but they had painted it so we couldn’t go in. We stop at a bookstore to look for English books but they have only 1 shelf of English language books and I didn’t like the choices. We run into a small grocery so I can get drinks and a sandwich for the train. Finally it is so dark that unless Vlad drives his car right up to a statue and shines his lights on it, I’m not going to see it. It’s still another hour before we can go to the train station so he asks if I want to use the internet at his office. So I end up sitting in a Ukrainian travel office for over an hour on the internet.
When it is time, Vlad takes me back to the train station and we wait for my train to arrive. Then we have to wait for the car conductor to open the door on my car. When she does, Vlad deposits me in my compartment. I have purchased both of the beds in my compartment because I thought that might be better for me rather than have to share with a stranger who may or may not be female. Vlad apologizes again for all the problems with the car and with not seeing certain things but I am fine with it. I had a lovely time in Kharkov in spite of the car troubles and in spite of the grim tour today. Time to move on to the Crimea.
lady with the heartbeat
Tuesday October 27, 2009
My original itinerary was to visit Kharkov city and sights on Monday. Then I was to do the out of town landowner's estates on Tuesday which would have put me finishing my tour around 8 p.m. and then go right to the train station for the night train. Didn’t work out that way. Vlad swapped my days so we could get Mikail as a guide. Then we had the car trouble and didn’t get back until late. But that still meant Vlad had to do something with me after the Kharkov city tour because if we started at 9 as planned, we’d be finished by 1 or 2 and then have to wait somewhere for the train because I would have to be out of the apartment. So we started the tour at 3:00 instead.
KGB mass graves memorial
Vlad has still got some time to fill with me and he felt really bad that I missed the last estate yesterday and the museum so he thought he would add some of the sights that weren’t originally planned. First we went out of town to the huge parks that are on the edge of town. We visited the Great Patriotic War Memorial that is in Wood Park. Another name is the WWII memorial. The Park is huge so the memorial is huge. There are two large bas reliefs at the entrance then you walk down this long sidewalk, past several memorials to different people who fought or suffered. Supposedly there are mass graves in this park from Kharkovians who were killed by the Nazis. The Nazis perfected killing by suffocation as they would load up a truck full of people and the exhaust would be fed into the truck where the people were kept. By the time they had driven to the Wood Park, the people in the truck were dead from carbon monoxide suffocation.
Engineered Famine memorial
At the end of the pathway is the main plaza which is a very large and tall statue of a mother who has lost her sons in the war. The face is grim rather than mourning I thought and there is an eternal flame at her feet. But the oddest thing about this memorial is that you can hear a heartbeat as you get close to the giant statue. Truly a rather freaky thing to walk up there and hear "lubdub". I understand the sentiment and the reasons behind doing something like that but it was creepy.
Our next visit was also on the grim Kharkov tour. We stopped by the mass graves of the Soviets and Polish officers who were killed by the KGB on Stalin’s orders. These killings took place in 1938-40. The Polish officers included men who had never fought, e.g. doctors. Vlad had a client once who came to look for his father’s name and he did find it so he knew where his father was, sort of, in one of the mass graves there. Crosses in the memorial indicate where each mass grave has been discovered and crosses with two cross bars are Orthodox Christians and the crosses with the single cross piece are Catholic Christians.
Sunset over Kharkov
We are doing all the grim stuff today so we next visited the Engineered Famine memorial. This visit got personal. Vlad’s grandmother remembers being in Kharkov during this famine. The people in the cities had some food although it was rationed. The people in the countryside had none with a very circular reasoning. They could grow food so therefore they didn’t need ration cards BUT Stalin had ordered all their grain and vegetables confiscated and sent to Moscow so they didn’t have any food BUT why would they need ration cards since they could grow it. There were even laws passed that made it illegal (with a sentence of either 10 years hard labor of death) if any amount of grain was “stolen” and this included gleaning from the fields. Vlad’s grandmother remembers peasants coming into town and dying on the street of starvation. I really can’t understand the reasoning behind this famine but to know someone who knows someone who saw it is equally creepy with the heartbeat and sends shivers down my spine. Location, location, location. Being born and raised in the U.S. means I never saw anything like this.
Lenin Statue
It is getting dark now so I figured we would stop somewhere and hold up until train time but Vlad is going to show me everything the city has to offer even if I can’t see it in the dark. We head back into town and stop at several churches. We have to walk around them to find the open door which was rather silly since people were coming for service and had we just followed them. The churches inside are beautiful, I think. There were very few lights inside except for the candles and a service was being held at both churches we visited. We didn’t stay long and I certainly didn’t take any photos.
One church had three saints in the sanctuary. Two were in coffins but the Archbishop of Constantinople was in a seated position. He had gone to Moscow (at that time, the Moscow czar was quite powerful) to get help but had been killed on his way home. He was buried. Eight years later they dug him up and he had not decomposed so he was wrapped in his Archbishop robes and moved around for awhile but eventually ended up at this cathedral in Kharkov. In the dim light, he looked at first like he was wrapped in Saran Wrap but when I got closer, it was his robes and they glittered from the jewels in them.
We walk across the street to see the British tank, in the dark. I almost ran into it before I saw it. There were also cannons and artillery guns. A lover’s statue was somewhere but I think it was obscured by lovers.
Vlad drives in town like he drives everywhere so we were making U-turns and going up one way streets and driving around the square where we weren’t supposed to be but gosh darn, he was going to show me this stuff. We did a screech and halt beside a statue of Lenin which I snapped a photo but it’s pretty dark. A screech and halt past a fountain that was lit, past a statue of one of their writers, and past another couple of memorials that I couldn’t even see from the car in the dark. We stop and visit an art museum which is really an art gallery with paintings for sale. We try to visit the miniature museum but they had painted it so we couldn’t go in. We stop at a bookstore to look for English books but they have only 1 shelf of English language books and I didn’t like the choices. We run into a small grocery so I can get drinks and a sandwich for the train. Finally it is so dark that unless Vlad drives his car right up to a statue and shines his lights on it, I’m not going to see it. It’s still another hour before we can go to the train station so he asks if I want to use the internet at his office. So I end up sitting in a Ukrainian travel office for over an hour on the internet.
When it is time, Vlad takes me back to the train station and we wait for my train to arrive. Then we have to wait for the car conductor to open the door on my car. When she does, Vlad deposits me in my compartment. I have purchased both of the beds in my compartment because I thought that might be better for me rather than have to share with a stranger who may or may not be female. Vlad apologizes again for all the problems with the car and with not seeing certain things but I am fine with it. I had a lovely time in Kharkov in spite of the car troubles and in spite of the grim tour today. Time to move on to the Crimea.
5 1/2 hours from dark woods to apartment
5 ½ hours, dark woods to apartment
Stalin and Svetlana in peasant hut
You might recognize this number if you have been following my blog. It took me 5 ½ hours one day to get from the airport in London to my hotel. As soon as I said 5 ½ hours again to my husband, he remembered and said, Oh the number comes up again. Yesterday it took 5 ½ hours to leave the dark Ukrainian woods and make it back to Kharkov to my apartment and this is after my full day of touring.
We had finished with the Sharovka estates and were working our way over to the last stop on our route or the Natalivka estates. They were built by a rich man wanting to have fine estates for his daughters. This one was built for Natalivka. Vlad is speeding down a bouncy country road when Mikail hollers and Vlad stands on the brakes. We back up to the huge gate set beside the road. It is the entrance to Natalivka estates. We sit and look at it for a minute while Mikail explains that it was designed and built by the man who designed Lenin's tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Personally, he thinks this gate is a much better design.
At a little after 4 p.m. we are crossing the road to head up this dirt drive into the estates which I cannot see anywhere but only see woods on both sides and in front of me. We bump over a large hump and the bottom of the car hits it. Vlad is driving slowly down this dirt path and trying to keep the car out of the worst of the ruts. We bounce the undercarriage off the path a couple of more times and then suddenly the air is filled with the smell of gasoline and Vlad stops the car and turns it off. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to me.
He opens the car door and leans out to look underneath the car and shortly he is out of the car and circling it and looking underneath the car. In just a few minutes he is trying to move the car by pushing it over to one side so that it is at least level again. At this point, I get out of the car as does Svetlana, his business partner, and Mikail, the Ukrainian speaking guide.
I had thought several times during the day that this car is on it’s last legs as at various stops the car hood would steam and it would smell like very hot car and possibly burnt rubber but it kept taking us places. Now it seems to be a dead car totally. Vlad is not totally unprepared for car disaster as he does have a big rag to throw on the ground so he can lie down on something besides dirt and also a tool box of sorts and a huge jug of water. He lifts the lid and sees that there is something loose that shouldn’t be loose. He lies down and soon he is pulling this long thin stick out from underneath the car. I thought at first that it was a stick and must have punched into something to stop us but as he gets it all the way out I see that it is a long thin tubing, a part of the fuel line that goes from the tank to the engine. The floppy part under the hood that he was flipping around is the other end of this line. Something cracked and broke our fuel line which also accounted for the exceedingly strong smell of gasoline.
This indeed does not look good at all. Vlad is all over the car, up and down and under and in the trunk and in the hood. Mikail is apparently not a car person because he just stands and looks rather helpless. Vlad says we can go walk down the road and see the estate and he’ll explain later what it is that Mikail has shown me but Mikail doesn’t move and neither do I. Luckily for Vlad, I have brought along a flashlight so I hold it for him to see under the car. He pulls out the attached end of the fuel line and has to hold it carefully or fuel will gush out of it since it is still the part attached to a fairly full gas tank. There is a lot of discussion between the three which is not translated. My husband later asks why they didn’t call a taxi and have me driven back to town. I think in this part of the world, it is not an option nor do I think a taxi would have ever found us. Vlad and Mikail had a hard enough time finding the place and they supposedly knew where they were going.
So Svetlana and I stand and offer moral support until Vlad finally decides he and Mikail must go for help. They walk off down the dirt road towards some hut in the far distance and Svetlana and I are left in the deepening twilight until it finally turns into dark. I must admit that the stars were beautiful but that was about the only good thing about staying there. Svetlana talked a lot about her life in very broken English but I think I got the gist and ended up being a social worker again for a short time as I counseled and listened to her problems.
I am getting colder and colder and there is no sign of them returning. Finally a light shines in the distance and Svetlana jokes about the "light at the end of the tunnel". I think she is more nervous than me. Why is that? Does she know something about these woods that I do not? She has called the local people strange. Are they Deliverance strange or just strange to a city girl? She also jokes about wolves in the wood and I have to admit I do give an ever so slightly start when a night bird starts calling in a weird sort of wolfish way. I too have read the stories of wolves pulling people out of troikas. But we see a small LED that is definitely coming closer so Svetlana flashes her cell phone at them and Vlad shouts to us.
He has come back with a pair of pliers and wire cutters, a couple of screwdrivers, and a couple of pieces of rubber hose and some tie wraps. With this he hopes to repair the fuel line so we can drive back to Kharkov tonight, some 100 kilometers over rough roads without shocks. A couple of local boys are walking down the path towards the car in complete darkness. They have no flashlight or anything. I don’t see how they can find their way. Vlad asks them for something and one of the boys runs up the path. In a few minutes you hear him running back at full speed and then he is in our flashlights and has several more screwdrivers and a knife.
Vlad tries to couple to broken piece of fuel line to the attached piece with one of the rubber hoses but it leaks every time. Finally he cuts off a piece of the good and true fuel line hose and is able to cable it together with the broken pieces and no leak. He reattaches the shorter fuel hose to the fuel line that he had patched together and voila! The car starts and there is no shooting fuel out of any of the three junctions. He stops the engine and gets back under the car to tie the fuel line to the undercarriage so that it won’t drag on the ground or road and break again. In a few minutes he is up and putting everything away and sorting out the borrowed screwdrivers and knife to give back to the boys who have been standing in the shadows the entire time watching the drama unfold. Svetlana long since gave up and got in the car to stay warm if possible. I’m holding a flashlight and Mikail is holding his LED light and we are the only light around.
Vlad says we are ready to leave and I say to him that we will all walk until the car is off the path and out of the undercarriage bump area. He says he is going forward as the road is better. So he gets in the car and slowly drives away, the boys have disappeared, Svetlana and Mikail take off following the car in the dark and I have my flashlight which I shine upon the ground to make sure I don’t fall into a fuel line eating hole or trip over a bump. I go a few yards and look up and I am the only thing on the road and the only light for about a kilometer. How the heck did Svetlana and Mikail disappear so quickly.
Well, I am the client and therefore worth money and I haven’t paid for this portion of the trip yet so I am fairly sure they will not let me get lost or if so, they will come back to find me. I trudge on and eventually get closer to some of the distant lights and suddenly Mikail has turned on his small LED and is showing me that I must make a turn and follow the side road. Good that he did that or I would have kept going. Then he disappears again but we are closer to habitation now and I am able to find my way to the car which is parked in a yard and the fuel line has been pulled off again.
Svetlana is waiting for me and beckons me to follow her. I’m thinking she’s found a nice toilet which would be absurd because there are no nice toilets in the villages. They all have outhouses. No, she’s found something even better to her point of view, a heater. We walk into a large barn area where there is a trough and a man is washing up at the trough. Svetlana and the man exchange a few words and he beckons to another door. We open it and we are in a one room peasant hut. There is really no other way to describe it. It has two very soiled cots in it, a very old desk that is falling apart, a cupboard that has no doors and just has several articles of clothing either hanging or laying in the bottom, a small faux leather chair where the stuffing is bursting out of the seams, and a row of three fold up chairs that are attached to each other. There is very little room in this hut to move around. But there are two wonders in it that make the whole experience fascinating. One is the heater. It is a coil that is wrapped around a clay ceramic pipe and wires trailing from it have attached it to an electrical outlet somewhere. The coils are glowing red making the room almost cozy. I was able to get warm and take off my gloves and unzip my jacket but I had to stop short of actually taking off my layers of two jackets.
The final item in the room was something I had not expected to find anywhere. It was an old poster of Stalin. Wow, how bizarre is that! I have already experienced a general underlying hatred of Stalin from different people in the museums and from my guide in Kiev as he had been the purveyor of the engineered famine that killed many Ukrainians through starvation. So to see this poster in a peasant hut where obviously he is liked or even loved was quite a shock. As Svetlana and I were the only ones in there, I whipped out my camera for a photo immediately. Later Mikail came in and he was as surprised as me and whips out his camera too.
The Stalin poster is attached to a door that is locked with a padlock larger than size of my fist. Two men must live there because while we are waiting two men came in at different times and walked around us to thread their way to the locked Stalin door. Finally I realized that everything they have of value is behind this locked door because the hut cannot be locked and probably the barn can’t be either. They brought out tools to help Vlad work on the car and always locked the door carefully behind then.
The black and white TV blares some movie and when it ends, Svetlana changes to a news station and reports that they are telling a story about some old elevator in an old building. Since I am currently staying in an old building with an old elevator I am not real eager to watch this even without understanding anything so I just close my eyes to take a nap.
Around 8:30 p.m. Vlad finally enters the hut and announces that the car is fixed and we are ready to leave. Svetlana and he exchange a volley of super fast Ukrainian before she stands up ready to walk outside. We thank our hosts profusely. I ask Svetlana if I can again sit in the backseat rather than the front. She is a bit confused but agrees. My asking this is two fold. One - I don’t want to be anywhere near the engine in case it catches on fire so I figure the left passenger seat behind the driver if probably the safest spot, if there can be a safe spot. Two – I don’t want to see the road as Vlad drives as I have had enough of the wild ride.
So we are in the car, it starts, and we are moving out of the yard and back to Kharkov. And it is a wild ride. Again, Vlad can’t drive that fast because the car just won’t do it but it sure seems like it when he is swerving to miss a pot hole or bouncing out of one that he didn’t miss.
I sit in the back and hold onto the chicken handle and chant a mantra the entire way. I did get blessed by a priest three times this morning. I do hope I am not using them all up in one car ride. I can tell when we get off the country roads and onto the highway and the bouncing isn’t quite as constant and the pothole swerves are a little farther apart. Finally I figure it is about time to get close to town and I open my eyes and can see lights on the horizon and in a little bit we are on the outskirts. Yea! We pull into a bus station and Mikail leaves us. Vlad is back in the car and I make him take me to a super market. It is 9:30 and I am not going to wander about the streets looking for a restaurant. He takes me to Billa and Svetlana and Vlad wander around behind me as I make the fastest choices I can. I love other country supermarkets and always go through them but this was a hurry up and get home time so I just grabbed and ran.
Vlad pulls into the driveway of my apartment and it is about 9:30 p.m., five and one half hours since the car broke down in the woods. He is profusely apologizing for the day and the missed sights. I tell him it was a great day. How often do I get blessed by a priest, have a breakdown in the deep woods, and see a Stalin poster in a peasant hut. You just don’t get experiences like this most of the time. As I was always sure I was never in any danger, (except for the car rides) I loved it. It was just a bit inconvenient but the experience made up for that.
Stalin and Svetlana in peasant hut
You might recognize this number if you have been following my blog. It took me 5 ½ hours one day to get from the airport in London to my hotel. As soon as I said 5 ½ hours again to my husband, he remembered and said, Oh the number comes up again. Yesterday it took 5 ½ hours to leave the dark Ukrainian woods and make it back to Kharkov to my apartment and this is after my full day of touring.
We had finished with the Sharovka estates and were working our way over to the last stop on our route or the Natalivka estates. They were built by a rich man wanting to have fine estates for his daughters. This one was built for Natalivka. Vlad is speeding down a bouncy country road when Mikail hollers and Vlad stands on the brakes. We back up to the huge gate set beside the road. It is the entrance to Natalivka estates. We sit and look at it for a minute while Mikail explains that it was designed and built by the man who designed Lenin's tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Personally, he thinks this gate is a much better design.
At a little after 4 p.m. we are crossing the road to head up this dirt drive into the estates which I cannot see anywhere but only see woods on both sides and in front of me. We bump over a large hump and the bottom of the car hits it. Vlad is driving slowly down this dirt path and trying to keep the car out of the worst of the ruts. We bounce the undercarriage off the path a couple of more times and then suddenly the air is filled with the smell of gasoline and Vlad stops the car and turns it off. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to me.
He opens the car door and leans out to look underneath the car and shortly he is out of the car and circling it and looking underneath the car. In just a few minutes he is trying to move the car by pushing it over to one side so that it is at least level again. At this point, I get out of the car as does Svetlana, his business partner, and Mikail, the Ukrainian speaking guide.
I had thought several times during the day that this car is on it’s last legs as at various stops the car hood would steam and it would smell like very hot car and possibly burnt rubber but it kept taking us places. Now it seems to be a dead car totally. Vlad is not totally unprepared for car disaster as he does have a big rag to throw on the ground so he can lie down on something besides dirt and also a tool box of sorts and a huge jug of water. He lifts the lid and sees that there is something loose that shouldn’t be loose. He lies down and soon he is pulling this long thin stick out from underneath the car. I thought at first that it was a stick and must have punched into something to stop us but as he gets it all the way out I see that it is a long thin tubing, a part of the fuel line that goes from the tank to the engine. The floppy part under the hood that he was flipping around is the other end of this line. Something cracked and broke our fuel line which also accounted for the exceedingly strong smell of gasoline.
This indeed does not look good at all. Vlad is all over the car, up and down and under and in the trunk and in the hood. Mikail is apparently not a car person because he just stands and looks rather helpless. Vlad says we can go walk down the road and see the estate and he’ll explain later what it is that Mikail has shown me but Mikail doesn’t move and neither do I. Luckily for Vlad, I have brought along a flashlight so I hold it for him to see under the car. He pulls out the attached end of the fuel line and has to hold it carefully or fuel will gush out of it since it is still the part attached to a fairly full gas tank. There is a lot of discussion between the three which is not translated. My husband later asks why they didn’t call a taxi and have me driven back to town. I think in this part of the world, it is not an option nor do I think a taxi would have ever found us. Vlad and Mikail had a hard enough time finding the place and they supposedly knew where they were going.
So Svetlana and I stand and offer moral support until Vlad finally decides he and Mikail must go for help. They walk off down the dirt road towards some hut in the far distance and Svetlana and I are left in the deepening twilight until it finally turns into dark. I must admit that the stars were beautiful but that was about the only good thing about staying there. Svetlana talked a lot about her life in very broken English but I think I got the gist and ended up being a social worker again for a short time as I counseled and listened to her problems.
I am getting colder and colder and there is no sign of them returning. Finally a light shines in the distance and Svetlana jokes about the "light at the end of the tunnel". I think she is more nervous than me. Why is that? Does she know something about these woods that I do not? She has called the local people strange. Are they Deliverance strange or just strange to a city girl? She also jokes about wolves in the wood and I have to admit I do give an ever so slightly start when a night bird starts calling in a weird sort of wolfish way. I too have read the stories of wolves pulling people out of troikas. But we see a small LED that is definitely coming closer so Svetlana flashes her cell phone at them and Vlad shouts to us.
He has come back with a pair of pliers and wire cutters, a couple of screwdrivers, and a couple of pieces of rubber hose and some tie wraps. With this he hopes to repair the fuel line so we can drive back to Kharkov tonight, some 100 kilometers over rough roads without shocks. A couple of local boys are walking down the path towards the car in complete darkness. They have no flashlight or anything. I don’t see how they can find their way. Vlad asks them for something and one of the boys runs up the path. In a few minutes you hear him running back at full speed and then he is in our flashlights and has several more screwdrivers and a knife.
Vlad tries to couple to broken piece of fuel line to the attached piece with one of the rubber hoses but it leaks every time. Finally he cuts off a piece of the good and true fuel line hose and is able to cable it together with the broken pieces and no leak. He reattaches the shorter fuel hose to the fuel line that he had patched together and voila! The car starts and there is no shooting fuel out of any of the three junctions. He stops the engine and gets back under the car to tie the fuel line to the undercarriage so that it won’t drag on the ground or road and break again. In a few minutes he is up and putting everything away and sorting out the borrowed screwdrivers and knife to give back to the boys who have been standing in the shadows the entire time watching the drama unfold. Svetlana long since gave up and got in the car to stay warm if possible. I’m holding a flashlight and Mikail is holding his LED light and we are the only light around.
Vlad says we are ready to leave and I say to him that we will all walk until the car is off the path and out of the undercarriage bump area. He says he is going forward as the road is better. So he gets in the car and slowly drives away, the boys have disappeared, Svetlana and Mikail take off following the car in the dark and I have my flashlight which I shine upon the ground to make sure I don’t fall into a fuel line eating hole or trip over a bump. I go a few yards and look up and I am the only thing on the road and the only light for about a kilometer. How the heck did Svetlana and Mikail disappear so quickly.
Well, I am the client and therefore worth money and I haven’t paid for this portion of the trip yet so I am fairly sure they will not let me get lost or if so, they will come back to find me. I trudge on and eventually get closer to some of the distant lights and suddenly Mikail has turned on his small LED and is showing me that I must make a turn and follow the side road. Good that he did that or I would have kept going. Then he disappears again but we are closer to habitation now and I am able to find my way to the car which is parked in a yard and the fuel line has been pulled off again.
Svetlana is waiting for me and beckons me to follow her. I’m thinking she’s found a nice toilet which would be absurd because there are no nice toilets in the villages. They all have outhouses. No, she’s found something even better to her point of view, a heater. We walk into a large barn area where there is a trough and a man is washing up at the trough. Svetlana and the man exchange a few words and he beckons to another door. We open it and we are in a one room peasant hut. There is really no other way to describe it. It has two very soiled cots in it, a very old desk that is falling apart, a cupboard that has no doors and just has several articles of clothing either hanging or laying in the bottom, a small faux leather chair where the stuffing is bursting out of the seams, and a row of three fold up chairs that are attached to each other. There is very little room in this hut to move around. But there are two wonders in it that make the whole experience fascinating. One is the heater. It is a coil that is wrapped around a clay ceramic pipe and wires trailing from it have attached it to an electrical outlet somewhere. The coils are glowing red making the room almost cozy. I was able to get warm and take off my gloves and unzip my jacket but I had to stop short of actually taking off my layers of two jackets.
The final item in the room was something I had not expected to find anywhere. It was an old poster of Stalin. Wow, how bizarre is that! I have already experienced a general underlying hatred of Stalin from different people in the museums and from my guide in Kiev as he had been the purveyor of the engineered famine that killed many Ukrainians through starvation. So to see this poster in a peasant hut where obviously he is liked or even loved was quite a shock. As Svetlana and I were the only ones in there, I whipped out my camera for a photo immediately. Later Mikail came in and he was as surprised as me and whips out his camera too.
The Stalin poster is attached to a door that is locked with a padlock larger than size of my fist. Two men must live there because while we are waiting two men came in at different times and walked around us to thread their way to the locked Stalin door. Finally I realized that everything they have of value is behind this locked door because the hut cannot be locked and probably the barn can’t be either. They brought out tools to help Vlad work on the car and always locked the door carefully behind then.
The black and white TV blares some movie and when it ends, Svetlana changes to a news station and reports that they are telling a story about some old elevator in an old building. Since I am currently staying in an old building with an old elevator I am not real eager to watch this even without understanding anything so I just close my eyes to take a nap.
Around 8:30 p.m. Vlad finally enters the hut and announces that the car is fixed and we are ready to leave. Svetlana and he exchange a volley of super fast Ukrainian before she stands up ready to walk outside. We thank our hosts profusely. I ask Svetlana if I can again sit in the backseat rather than the front. She is a bit confused but agrees. My asking this is two fold. One - I don’t want to be anywhere near the engine in case it catches on fire so I figure the left passenger seat behind the driver if probably the safest spot, if there can be a safe spot. Two – I don’t want to see the road as Vlad drives as I have had enough of the wild ride.
So we are in the car, it starts, and we are moving out of the yard and back to Kharkov. And it is a wild ride. Again, Vlad can’t drive that fast because the car just won’t do it but it sure seems like it when he is swerving to miss a pot hole or bouncing out of one that he didn’t miss.
I sit in the back and hold onto the chicken handle and chant a mantra the entire way. I did get blessed by a priest three times this morning. I do hope I am not using them all up in one car ride. I can tell when we get off the country roads and onto the highway and the bouncing isn’t quite as constant and the pothole swerves are a little farther apart. Finally I figure it is about time to get close to town and I open my eyes and can see lights on the horizon and in a little bit we are on the outskirts. Yea! We pull into a bus station and Mikail leaves us. Vlad is back in the car and I make him take me to a super market. It is 9:30 and I am not going to wander about the streets looking for a restaurant. He takes me to Billa and Svetlana and Vlad wander around behind me as I make the fastest choices I can. I love other country supermarkets and always go through them but this was a hurry up and get home time so I just grabbed and ran.
Vlad pulls into the driveway of my apartment and it is about 9:30 p.m., five and one half hours since the car broke down in the woods. He is profusely apologizing for the day and the missed sights. I tell him it was a great day. How often do I get blessed by a priest, have a breakdown in the deep woods, and see a Stalin poster in a peasant hut. You just don’t get experiences like this most of the time. As I was always sure I was never in any danger, (except for the car rides) I loved it. It was just a bit inconvenient but the experience made up for that.
Tales From the Ukrainian Woods
Tales of the Ukrainian Woods
pom pom tree
Monday October 26, 2009
My guide for the day is Mikail, a rather woodsmen looking fellow with limited or no English. My translator is Vlad, who is also my driver and my travel agency contact and solver of some problems. He hasn't solved them all yet but he’s trying.
Mikail starts chattering as soon as we are out of the driveway. He talks about 2 or 3 minutes and then Vlad gives me a one or two sentence translation. I am always amazed at how many different languages take a paragraph to tell when it only takes a sentence in English to tell the same thing. Ok, raise your hand if you didn’t realize I was being sarcastic. Again I ask, where is my universal translator because I am sure the stories are much more involved and intricate and interesting when heard from the master storyteller or in the native tongue.
outbuildings of Sharovka estate
We drive by a few buildings where I get the "this is blah blah blah and before I can look, we are past it and I’m not sure what I was looking at or for. Finally we are in traffic enough for a slow drive past the prison. Now I start getting stories.
Cold Hill
That’s the name of the prison. A side story is during the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow, some of the pre events took place in the Ukraine and there must have been a pre-event here in Kharkov. Moscow did not want people to see the prison and didn’t want questions about it so they painted it to look like an apartment building complete with fake balconies and flowers. It has since been re-painted again to look like the prison that it is.
reflection
Prisoners were put away in a cold place or put away in cold storage. So the hill was then named after the prison. But the prison was only there since the 20th century and the hill has been called Cold Hill for much longer so that can’t be the name. Vlad translates, “So I don’t think that’s the reason for the name."
Next it is said that Catherine the Great of Russia loved to travel and as such, she traveled to and throughout the Ukraine. When she was in Kharkov, she had to walk sometimes as it would be too boggy and muddy for her horses to carry her. It is said that she had cold feet up on this hill. The legend also has that she lost her hat up on this hill so either because of her feet or because of her hat, she said that this hill was very cold and hence the name of the hill became Cold Hill. But again the hill was there and referred to as Cold Hill long before Catherine the Great strode about its heights so Vlad translates, “So I don’t think that’s the reason for the name.:
Stone of Love
His third story of Cold Hill was much simpler. The first settler was a man named Cold. The hill was named after him because people needed to know how to get to his house and people would say he lives on Cold Hill. Vlad translates, “So I don’t think that’s the reason for the name.”
But there were no more stories of Cold Hill so I will leave you to take your pick of which story you want to name Cold Hill.
Free Ukraine
We are driving in an area that was known as “Free Ukraine” since earlier times. This was not a political statement in that the people were “free” such as a democracy but more that they were invited to come and live there “for free”. The region was beset by problems, mainly with the Tartars swarming up from wherever and helping themselves to the riches of the region, grain, furs, water, women, sheep, etc. So it was quite a dangerous region to live. The Czar of Moscow (there was no Russia at this time but there was a Moscow and it had a Czar who was pretty powerful) knew that the way to tame a region and eventually bring law and order was to have people live there and farm the land and settle. So he invited people to go and live there and he had his three freedoms that he would allow if someone would go and settle. Freedom one was free land. You could go and settle on as much land as you think you needed/wanted/farmed/held. Freedom two was no taxes. That was a pretty amazing freedom for those days as most Czars and rulers lived on the taxes of their subjects/serfs/peasants. Freedom three was the right to make and drink as much vodka as you wanted. Again, an amazing freedom as making vodka was often the province of the ruler so that he could collect taxes on it. So people did go and settle and even with the Tartars coming around and making their lives miserable, the Czar of Russia would also come in every once and awhile and protect them.
Natalivka gates
It is said that at one time criminals were sent either to Siberia or to the Ukraine. While you might think that they would prefer the Ukraine, criminals preferred to go to Siberia because while it was much colder, there weren’t the dangers from the Tartars. They could probably, hopefully survive the cold but there weren’t many ways to survive the Tartars should they come into the village where they were being held a prisoner.
Cossacks and Chumacks
Cossacks were people misplaced so ended up living in the woods and as they were basically rather lazy, they would ride out and rob and pillage trading caravans going through their territories (remember I am not swearing to historic accuracy, this is just tales I was told as we drove along). Chumacks (not sure of the spelling, this is what Vlad said) were traders of salt and fish. They would band together with their wagons and travel through various regions and sell the salt and fish.
The Chumacks had an agreement with the Cossacks in being allowed to travel through their territory. The Cossacks would know they wagons were coming and place a set of sticks by the road where the wagons would pass. For an example, if there were two long sticks and one short stick, it meant that each Chumack trader was required to place two bags of salt and one bag of dried fish at the crossroads for the Cossacks. A boy would be placed to watch and count to make sure the tribute or toll was paid. If it was not completely correct in the number of bags of salt and fish being left, the boy signaled to the Cossacks who then rode out and surrounded the Chumacks. The Chumacks would circle their wagons and wait for the guilty party to admit he had not left the correct party. No words would be exchanged anywhere for this encounter. Finally under the weight of the collective disapproval of the Chumacks and Cossacks the guilty party would step forward and be taken away by the Cossacks and the rest of the Chumacks could go on their way.
The guilty Chumack then gave the correct number of bags of salt and fish and one would think that would be the end of it but as a punishment, the Cossacks would remove the skin from the bottom of his feet and then he was free to go back to his wagon train. Of course it would be rather hard to do without any skin on the soles of your feet. I would also think that after this happened one time that none of the other Chumacks would risk shorting the Cossacks in their tribute but apparently they weren’t always that smart as it took several Chumacks without skin on their feet before the lesson was learned.
Cossacks and Hidden Treasures
Every once in awhile, the rulers would decide they needed to clear out the woods of the robbers which included the Cossacks. So they would swoop down on the forest villages and the Cossacks would disperse and leave for another area for a time. Usually the Cossacks were aware that the military was sweeping down on them and would take time to bury their treasures as it would be too much to carry with them. The leader of a tribe or unit of Cossacks would have a hole dug. It would be deeper than the height of one of his men. The treasures would be put into the bottom of this pit and one of the men would get into the pit on top of the treasures and they would bury him alive. While this seems like a punishment, the Cossacks were happy to do it as it was considered a great honor. I don’t think I would like to meet the charismatic leader who convinced men it was wonderful to be buried alive on top of a bunch of treasure.
Of course it wasn’t enough to just put a man in there to “guard” the treasure. All sorts of chants and rituals also accompanied the burying of treasure. One went something like, “He who covers this treasure will be he who discovers this treasure” meaning of course that only the owner of the treasure would be the one who digs it up.
And equally of course, people knew of these pits of treasure and holes of men and treasures and chants to protect the gold. Some robbers because quite ingenious and if a Cossack leader was capture who had treasure, and if he could be convinced somehow to reveal where it was, the robber would cut off the Cossacks hands and use the owners hands to dig with until they uncovered the gold.
Finally, some Cossack leaders just couldn’t remember exactly where there pit of gold and treasure was buried. It is said that a very ugly and dirty woman would appear to the Cossack band and she would ask for a favor. She would ask to have her face washed. If the Cossack leader refused, she would ask another member of the band. When a man finally washed her face, she would dissolve and turn into a heap of gold at his feet.
Other bits and pieces
Guilds:
Most professions had guilds. There were guilds of icon painters and they were mobile and moved from village to village to paint icons for the churches and homes of people who could afford to pay. Usually as is with most professions of the day, the children were taught the profession of their father and carried on his business eventually. But icon painters couldn’t just be anyone. They had to be approved by the church.
Musicians were also in guilds. The guilds controlled the territory that a musician was allowed to wander. Each musician had their own small area of villages and towns where he was allowed to go and play.
Sugar Hill and the Stone of Love:
Parhomovka is the village of the sugar beet factory. Housing was provided for workers but now it is a derelict building. The museum is in an Italian style Palazzo because the builder of the sugar beet factory loved Italian things. Later the owner was Koenig who built the palace of Sharovka.
Sharovka’s owner was German and missed his homeland so his outbuildings were designed by a Russian but made to look like German style buildings at the time. He really didn’t like Ukrainians either so he took the village that was close to his palace and resettled them to the Ural mountains. The villagers didn’t take much to the Urals as the land wasn’t as fertile and the landscape was alien to them so they made their way back to their home village which was totally gone as Koenig had swept it away.
Koenig had a lovely wife that he loved dearly and tried to do everything to make her life easier and grant her every wish. One winter she wanted to go sledding on the hill that was behind their house but there was no snow at the time. Being owner of a sugar mill, Koenig solved the problem by covering the hill with sugar so his wife could sled. Thus this hill was named Sugar Hill.
Koenig also would send his wife away on trips to “rest”. One trip sent her to the Crimea for a rest. Koenig sent his plant manager down to the Crimea to check on his wife and see if she needed anything. When the man returned, he was obviously nervous and upset and just looked at the floor as he stammered out that his wife was fine and didn’t need anything. That raised Koenig’s suspicions as you would expect and he decided to go to the Crimea himself and see if his wife was ok.
Upon his arrival, he asked the hostess of the lodging where his wife was and she replied that the wife was out in the woods for a walk. Sure enough, when Koenig rounds a corner, he sees his wife in the embrace of an officer in the military. He says not a word but stands with his arm crooked until she comes to take his arm and they walk back to the inn together. The officer fades into obscurity and not sure if he ended up being killed by Koenig but I am thinking that it is yes. The translation muddied here and I never got around to asking for clarification because of subsequent events.
This was a time when people of leisure would take walks for 5 or 6 hours a day because they basically had nothing else to occupy their time. Koenig’s wife would walk in the gardens around their house for hours. Koenig never said anything to his wife in recrimination but he had the rock where he had discovered his wife and her lover shipped to his home and put it in the garden where she would pass it everyday on her walks. So it is either called the Stone of Love by some or the Stone of Betrayal by others depending on your point of view.
Whether the stone there is actually from the Crimea and a part of a love triangle is anyone’s guess but it is has enough graffiti now to qualify as the Stone of Love.
pom pom tree
Monday October 26, 2009
My guide for the day is Mikail, a rather woodsmen looking fellow with limited or no English. My translator is Vlad, who is also my driver and my travel agency contact and solver of some problems. He hasn't solved them all yet but he’s trying.
Mikail starts chattering as soon as we are out of the driveway. He talks about 2 or 3 minutes and then Vlad gives me a one or two sentence translation. I am always amazed at how many different languages take a paragraph to tell when it only takes a sentence in English to tell the same thing. Ok, raise your hand if you didn’t realize I was being sarcastic. Again I ask, where is my universal translator because I am sure the stories are much more involved and intricate and interesting when heard from the master storyteller or in the native tongue.
outbuildings of Sharovka estate
We drive by a few buildings where I get the "this is blah blah blah and before I can look, we are past it and I’m not sure what I was looking at or for. Finally we are in traffic enough for a slow drive past the prison. Now I start getting stories.
Cold Hill
That’s the name of the prison. A side story is during the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow, some of the pre events took place in the Ukraine and there must have been a pre-event here in Kharkov. Moscow did not want people to see the prison and didn’t want questions about it so they painted it to look like an apartment building complete with fake balconies and flowers. It has since been re-painted again to look like the prison that it is.
reflection
Prisoners were put away in a cold place or put away in cold storage. So the hill was then named after the prison. But the prison was only there since the 20th century and the hill has been called Cold Hill for much longer so that can’t be the name. Vlad translates, “So I don’t think that’s the reason for the name."
Next it is said that Catherine the Great of Russia loved to travel and as such, she traveled to and throughout the Ukraine. When she was in Kharkov, she had to walk sometimes as it would be too boggy and muddy for her horses to carry her. It is said that she had cold feet up on this hill. The legend also has that she lost her hat up on this hill so either because of her feet or because of her hat, she said that this hill was very cold and hence the name of the hill became Cold Hill. But again the hill was there and referred to as Cold Hill long before Catherine the Great strode about its heights so Vlad translates, “So I don’t think that’s the reason for the name.:
Stone of Love
His third story of Cold Hill was much simpler. The first settler was a man named Cold. The hill was named after him because people needed to know how to get to his house and people would say he lives on Cold Hill. Vlad translates, “So I don’t think that’s the reason for the name.”
But there were no more stories of Cold Hill so I will leave you to take your pick of which story you want to name Cold Hill.
Free Ukraine
We are driving in an area that was known as “Free Ukraine” since earlier times. This was not a political statement in that the people were “free” such as a democracy but more that they were invited to come and live there “for free”. The region was beset by problems, mainly with the Tartars swarming up from wherever and helping themselves to the riches of the region, grain, furs, water, women, sheep, etc. So it was quite a dangerous region to live. The Czar of Moscow (there was no Russia at this time but there was a Moscow and it had a Czar who was pretty powerful) knew that the way to tame a region and eventually bring law and order was to have people live there and farm the land and settle. So he invited people to go and live there and he had his three freedoms that he would allow if someone would go and settle. Freedom one was free land. You could go and settle on as much land as you think you needed/wanted/farmed/held. Freedom two was no taxes. That was a pretty amazing freedom for those days as most Czars and rulers lived on the taxes of their subjects/serfs/peasants. Freedom three was the right to make and drink as much vodka as you wanted. Again, an amazing freedom as making vodka was often the province of the ruler so that he could collect taxes on it. So people did go and settle and even with the Tartars coming around and making their lives miserable, the Czar of Russia would also come in every once and awhile and protect them.
Natalivka gates
It is said that at one time criminals were sent either to Siberia or to the Ukraine. While you might think that they would prefer the Ukraine, criminals preferred to go to Siberia because while it was much colder, there weren’t the dangers from the Tartars. They could probably, hopefully survive the cold but there weren’t many ways to survive the Tartars should they come into the village where they were being held a prisoner.
Cossacks and Chumacks
Cossacks were people misplaced so ended up living in the woods and as they were basically rather lazy, they would ride out and rob and pillage trading caravans going through their territories (remember I am not swearing to historic accuracy, this is just tales I was told as we drove along). Chumacks (not sure of the spelling, this is what Vlad said) were traders of salt and fish. They would band together with their wagons and travel through various regions and sell the salt and fish.
The Chumacks had an agreement with the Cossacks in being allowed to travel through their territory. The Cossacks would know they wagons were coming and place a set of sticks by the road where the wagons would pass. For an example, if there were two long sticks and one short stick, it meant that each Chumack trader was required to place two bags of salt and one bag of dried fish at the crossroads for the Cossacks. A boy would be placed to watch and count to make sure the tribute or toll was paid. If it was not completely correct in the number of bags of salt and fish being left, the boy signaled to the Cossacks who then rode out and surrounded the Chumacks. The Chumacks would circle their wagons and wait for the guilty party to admit he had not left the correct party. No words would be exchanged anywhere for this encounter. Finally under the weight of the collective disapproval of the Chumacks and Cossacks the guilty party would step forward and be taken away by the Cossacks and the rest of the Chumacks could go on their way.
The guilty Chumack then gave the correct number of bags of salt and fish and one would think that would be the end of it but as a punishment, the Cossacks would remove the skin from the bottom of his feet and then he was free to go back to his wagon train. Of course it would be rather hard to do without any skin on the soles of your feet. I would also think that after this happened one time that none of the other Chumacks would risk shorting the Cossacks in their tribute but apparently they weren’t always that smart as it took several Chumacks without skin on their feet before the lesson was learned.
Cossacks and Hidden Treasures
Every once in awhile, the rulers would decide they needed to clear out the woods of the robbers which included the Cossacks. So they would swoop down on the forest villages and the Cossacks would disperse and leave for another area for a time. Usually the Cossacks were aware that the military was sweeping down on them and would take time to bury their treasures as it would be too much to carry with them. The leader of a tribe or unit of Cossacks would have a hole dug. It would be deeper than the height of one of his men. The treasures would be put into the bottom of this pit and one of the men would get into the pit on top of the treasures and they would bury him alive. While this seems like a punishment, the Cossacks were happy to do it as it was considered a great honor. I don’t think I would like to meet the charismatic leader who convinced men it was wonderful to be buried alive on top of a bunch of treasure.
Of course it wasn’t enough to just put a man in there to “guard” the treasure. All sorts of chants and rituals also accompanied the burying of treasure. One went something like, “He who covers this treasure will be he who discovers this treasure” meaning of course that only the owner of the treasure would be the one who digs it up.
And equally of course, people knew of these pits of treasure and holes of men and treasures and chants to protect the gold. Some robbers because quite ingenious and if a Cossack leader was capture who had treasure, and if he could be convinced somehow to reveal where it was, the robber would cut off the Cossacks hands and use the owners hands to dig with until they uncovered the gold.
Finally, some Cossack leaders just couldn’t remember exactly where there pit of gold and treasure was buried. It is said that a very ugly and dirty woman would appear to the Cossack band and she would ask for a favor. She would ask to have her face washed. If the Cossack leader refused, she would ask another member of the band. When a man finally washed her face, she would dissolve and turn into a heap of gold at his feet.
Other bits and pieces
Guilds:
Most professions had guilds. There were guilds of icon painters and they were mobile and moved from village to village to paint icons for the churches and homes of people who could afford to pay. Usually as is with most professions of the day, the children were taught the profession of their father and carried on his business eventually. But icon painters couldn’t just be anyone. They had to be approved by the church.
Musicians were also in guilds. The guilds controlled the territory that a musician was allowed to wander. Each musician had their own small area of villages and towns where he was allowed to go and play.
Sugar Hill and the Stone of Love:
Parhomovka is the village of the sugar beet factory. Housing was provided for workers but now it is a derelict building. The museum is in an Italian style Palazzo because the builder of the sugar beet factory loved Italian things. Later the owner was Koenig who built the palace of Sharovka.
Sharovka’s owner was German and missed his homeland so his outbuildings were designed by a Russian but made to look like German style buildings at the time. He really didn’t like Ukrainians either so he took the village that was close to his palace and resettled them to the Ural mountains. The villagers didn’t take much to the Urals as the land wasn’t as fertile and the landscape was alien to them so they made their way back to their home village which was totally gone as Koenig had swept it away.
Koenig had a lovely wife that he loved dearly and tried to do everything to make her life easier and grant her every wish. One winter she wanted to go sledding on the hill that was behind their house but there was no snow at the time. Being owner of a sugar mill, Koenig solved the problem by covering the hill with sugar so his wife could sled. Thus this hill was named Sugar Hill.
Koenig also would send his wife away on trips to “rest”. One trip sent her to the Crimea for a rest. Koenig sent his plant manager down to the Crimea to check on his wife and see if she needed anything. When the man returned, he was obviously nervous and upset and just looked at the floor as he stammered out that his wife was fine and didn’t need anything. That raised Koenig’s suspicions as you would expect and he decided to go to the Crimea himself and see if his wife was ok.
Upon his arrival, he asked the hostess of the lodging where his wife was and she replied that the wife was out in the woods for a walk. Sure enough, when Koenig rounds a corner, he sees his wife in the embrace of an officer in the military. He says not a word but stands with his arm crooked until she comes to take his arm and they walk back to the inn together. The officer fades into obscurity and not sure if he ended up being killed by Koenig but I am thinking that it is yes. The translation muddied here and I never got around to asking for clarification because of subsequent events.
This was a time when people of leisure would take walks for 5 or 6 hours a day because they basically had nothing else to occupy their time. Koenig’s wife would walk in the gardens around their house for hours. Koenig never said anything to his wife in recrimination but he had the rock where he had discovered his wife and her lover shipped to his home and put it in the garden where she would pass it everyday on her walks. So it is either called the Stone of Love by some or the Stone of Betrayal by others depending on your point of view.
Whether the stone there is actually from the Crimea and a part of a love triangle is anyone’s guess but it is has enough graffiti now to qualify as the Stone of Love.
A Priest's Blessing
A Priest's blessing
icon stand
Monday October 26, 2009
My tour today was originally supposed to be Kharkov city tour but they had asked me to swap my tours so I could get the good guide, Mikail, and go out of the city today to the landlord’s estates. I didn’t care so that’s what we did. Unfortunately it put us at a museum I was to see on a Monday and like most countries and most museums, this one was also closed on a Monday. It is in the town of Parhomovka which has a sugar beet factory (which only runs two months out of the year but this was one of the months and it is nastily stinky) and a 200 year old church of Protection for God’s mother, and this museum which is in an old Italian style Palazzo building. It’s a small museum but with a unique collection including Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s that the owner was able to purchase after WWII for the price of food to the owners of the painting. Try as they could to scare up someone with a key, we never did find anyone and I have lost out on seeing this museum out in the middle of the Ukrainian villages.
Priest of the church
We did find the priest to come and let us into the church though and he was the one to show us around. That’s the first time I had a priest personally show me his church. Vlad, my agency contact and driver, translated the church as being the "Church for the Protection of God’s Mother", or the “Church of the Protection for God’s Mother”, or the “Church of the Protection by God’s Mother”. He used all three and I’m not sure but what he was translating Christ into God which would make more sense if it were Protection of/by/for Christ’s mother. Whatever it was, it was a magnificent little church. Of course it was pretty well ruined in earlier years including the middle dome and copula lying on the ground in front of the church. But donations, albeit slow in coming, had revived this church and it was renovated in a 15 year project and this priest has been there now since 1994 and is understandably proud of his flock and church.
icon painting
The priest showed us around and pointed out the various icons and paintings and scarves donated by members to drape over icons. He even opened the door between the icon stand and the priest area behind it where lay people don’t go. He let us look into the inner sanctum but as women, we couldn’t go in. There was an alter back there, and it also was entirely covered in paintings. There were also his tools of the trade, a large Bible, a chalice and a few other items I really didn’t recognize but then I was so delighted to get a look behind the screen that I probably missed seeing a few things.
Finally it is time for us to move on and he lets me take a photo of him standing next to the most prominent icon in the center of the church. As we are leaving he says and Vlad translates, “God bless you”, then later, “God’s blessing upon you”, and finally one last time as we are out of the church and on the way to walking out of the churchyard. Wow, three times I had a priest say to me, God bless you. Is it possible that he has ridden with Vlad before? I’m sure it is mainly just his way of saying goodbye but I think it has to count for something in the grander scheme of things and I’ll take whatever help anyone wants to give.
icon painting in church
From the church we are back on the road meandering from village to village until Vlad triangulates onto the next stop. We have a brief moment at the monument to fallen soldiers from the Afghanistan conflict. This is actually a very moving monument in that a dead soldier is pictured covered with his field blanket and his comrade in arms is sitting next to him with his head bowed, grieving. For a Soviet made monument, it is quite touching and not the usual large over the top gargantuan elaborate façade.
Next we head down a dirt road to the singing terraces. These terraces were made in the 19th century as a garden for exotic plants. Trees were planted on each level plus plants not necessarily native to the area. The terraces were made with bricks and faced south so that the sun warmed the bricks and released the warmth into the soil after dark and the plants thrived. Now it is pretty broken down. The steps leading up each level are just mud at this point and bricks are falling off at every terrace. The terraces were still used for parties and concerts until recently when officials realized that the terraces were in danger of collapsing. So now they are not used, not being renovated, and not well visited. Wind blow through the trees caused a whistling which led to their name but now it’s hard to say what will happen to them. There is a lot in the Ukraine that needs restoration or at least care so that it doesn’t disappear into dereliction and dust but the money is not there.
Another few stops on the road to see a well that has a stork as the long handle and to see a moose (he called it an elk) cut out that marks the spot where another memorial of some kind will be built but it isn’t happening yet. We are heading now to the Sharovka estates and after a couple of wrong turns we do find it and get out for a visit. My guide, Mikail, really doesn’t want to go inside. He has much to show me, he says, on the outside so we visit the outbuildings, the gates, the wall, the ruined greenhouses, the pond, the fountain, the outside gardens, and the imported rock (see my “tales blog for that!) until it is too late to be allowed to enter. People can really have some strange fears. They live in the Ukraine where it is quite possible they have had radioactive dust blow over them and into and around their country for years (from Chernobyl) but he didn’t want to enter the estate because at one time the building had been used as a tuberculosis sanitarium and he thought there was still a danger there from the disease. I think probably not but I have to recognize other people’s fears if I hope to have them recognize mine. This would have been a beautiful estate in it’s day and while there is some restoration of the main building, the grounds are not in good repair and not likely to get any better.
We take off and leave behind the scruffy dog that accompanied us on our walk through the grounds and head for our last destination of the day, the landlord’s estate of Natalivka. We make it past the gates that were designed by the man who designed Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. And that’s as far as we got. You’ll have to read my 5 ½ hours blog to know what happened. Hope I am keeping you in suspense.
icon stand
Monday October 26, 2009
My tour today was originally supposed to be Kharkov city tour but they had asked me to swap my tours so I could get the good guide, Mikail, and go out of the city today to the landlord’s estates. I didn’t care so that’s what we did. Unfortunately it put us at a museum I was to see on a Monday and like most countries and most museums, this one was also closed on a Monday. It is in the town of Parhomovka which has a sugar beet factory (which only runs two months out of the year but this was one of the months and it is nastily stinky) and a 200 year old church of Protection for God’s mother, and this museum which is in an old Italian style Palazzo building. It’s a small museum but with a unique collection including Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s that the owner was able to purchase after WWII for the price of food to the owners of the painting. Try as they could to scare up someone with a key, we never did find anyone and I have lost out on seeing this museum out in the middle of the Ukrainian villages.
Priest of the church
We did find the priest to come and let us into the church though and he was the one to show us around. That’s the first time I had a priest personally show me his church. Vlad, my agency contact and driver, translated the church as being the "Church for the Protection of God’s Mother", or the “Church of the Protection for God’s Mother”, or the “Church of the Protection by God’s Mother”. He used all three and I’m not sure but what he was translating Christ into God which would make more sense if it were Protection of/by/for Christ’s mother. Whatever it was, it was a magnificent little church. Of course it was pretty well ruined in earlier years including the middle dome and copula lying on the ground in front of the church. But donations, albeit slow in coming, had revived this church and it was renovated in a 15 year project and this priest has been there now since 1994 and is understandably proud of his flock and church.
icon painting
The priest showed us around and pointed out the various icons and paintings and scarves donated by members to drape over icons. He even opened the door between the icon stand and the priest area behind it where lay people don’t go. He let us look into the inner sanctum but as women, we couldn’t go in. There was an alter back there, and it also was entirely covered in paintings. There were also his tools of the trade, a large Bible, a chalice and a few other items I really didn’t recognize but then I was so delighted to get a look behind the screen that I probably missed seeing a few things.
Finally it is time for us to move on and he lets me take a photo of him standing next to the most prominent icon in the center of the church. As we are leaving he says and Vlad translates, “God bless you”, then later, “God’s blessing upon you”, and finally one last time as we are out of the church and on the way to walking out of the churchyard. Wow, three times I had a priest say to me, God bless you. Is it possible that he has ridden with Vlad before? I’m sure it is mainly just his way of saying goodbye but I think it has to count for something in the grander scheme of things and I’ll take whatever help anyone wants to give.
icon painting in church
From the church we are back on the road meandering from village to village until Vlad triangulates onto the next stop. We have a brief moment at the monument to fallen soldiers from the Afghanistan conflict. This is actually a very moving monument in that a dead soldier is pictured covered with his field blanket and his comrade in arms is sitting next to him with his head bowed, grieving. For a Soviet made monument, it is quite touching and not the usual large over the top gargantuan elaborate façade.
Next we head down a dirt road to the singing terraces. These terraces were made in the 19th century as a garden for exotic plants. Trees were planted on each level plus plants not necessarily native to the area. The terraces were made with bricks and faced south so that the sun warmed the bricks and released the warmth into the soil after dark and the plants thrived. Now it is pretty broken down. The steps leading up each level are just mud at this point and bricks are falling off at every terrace. The terraces were still used for parties and concerts until recently when officials realized that the terraces were in danger of collapsing. So now they are not used, not being renovated, and not well visited. Wind blow through the trees caused a whistling which led to their name but now it’s hard to say what will happen to them. There is a lot in the Ukraine that needs restoration or at least care so that it doesn’t disappear into dereliction and dust but the money is not there.
Another few stops on the road to see a well that has a stork as the long handle and to see a moose (he called it an elk) cut out that marks the spot where another memorial of some kind will be built but it isn’t happening yet. We are heading now to the Sharovka estates and after a couple of wrong turns we do find it and get out for a visit. My guide, Mikail, really doesn’t want to go inside. He has much to show me, he says, on the outside so we visit the outbuildings, the gates, the wall, the ruined greenhouses, the pond, the fountain, the outside gardens, and the imported rock (see my “tales blog for that!) until it is too late to be allowed to enter. People can really have some strange fears. They live in the Ukraine where it is quite possible they have had radioactive dust blow over them and into and around their country for years (from Chernobyl) but he didn’t want to enter the estate because at one time the building had been used as a tuberculosis sanitarium and he thought there was still a danger there from the disease. I think probably not but I have to recognize other people’s fears if I hope to have them recognize mine. This would have been a beautiful estate in it’s day and while there is some restoration of the main building, the grounds are not in good repair and not likely to get any better.
We take off and leave behind the scruffy dog that accompanied us on our walk through the grounds and head for our last destination of the day, the landlord’s estate of Natalivka. We make it past the gates that were designed by the man who designed Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. And that’s as far as we got. You’ll have to read my 5 ½ hours blog to know what happened. Hope I am keeping you in suspense.
Vlad's Wild Ride
Vlad's Wild RideMonday October 26, 2009 I’ve ridden in two cars in the Ukraine now. In Kiev, Constantine was my driver in a fairly new model something that he kept quite clean. We had this silent battle. I would sit in the back seat passenger side and move the headrest in front of me to rest right on top of the seat back, no clicks up. When I got back in the car, it would be moved up again to block my view. I’d move it down again until the next time I got back in the car when it would be moved again to its original blocking my view position. We did this for three days. In Kiev, there are still cobblestone roads and some hills and as such, Constantine’s car has lost it shock absorbers. We would bounce along in the back seat on the cobblestones and sit smoothly on the paved roads. Always fun for a bounce as long as it’s not too long of a bounce. In Kharkov when I disembarked from the train, Vlad is my contact and I am riding in his car which is a much earlier sickly red color Peugeot. There are no seatbelts in the back seat, the front windows are power but he has to pull his side up by hand, there are no shocks, again but then there are so many potholes in the city that they probably went out the first week he had the car, and there is stuff everywhere in the car in the door wells and the glove box and the back window. My ride home from the train station was a lesson in how to hold onto the back seat chicken bar. Vlad specializes (I hope and I hope that he is an expert) in zooming up to stop lights and braking at the last possible moment or making a third lane at the stop light where none exists and then charging forward to cut in front of the first car in the real lane. I figured it was 11:30 at night and he was just in a hurry to get me to my apartment and go home to bed. Today I was picked up at 9:30 and got into the backseat next to my guide. Vlad and his partner in business, Svetlana, are in the front seat. We are going out of town to see the landlord estates. Seconds after being introduced to my guide I realize he doesn’t speak English (not hard to do the minute he opens his mouth to start speaking) and Vlad is going to be my translator. Oh goody, not only does he get to drive the car but he has to listen to Mikail (the guide) and translate it back to me, oh, and yes, he has a cell phone as well which regular rings and he answers and talks for a bit. I do hope he is an excellent and efficient and proficient multi-tasker. I’ll get to the stories of Mikail in another blog but for now, let me tell you about the ride out of town and then later back into town. I’ve already mentioned Vlad’s drive from the train station to the apartment last night. He goes out of the town by the same method, zooming up to stoplights, zigzagging around cars already waiting at the stop light, and finally pushing the limit at the stop light by going through when it turns to yellow (stop lights in this part of the world are red and change to red and yellow when they are about to turn to green. Drivers know this and will start through the stoplight sometimes on the red/yellow combination). Once we are out of town, Vlad floors his Peugeot and we are speeding down the highway and swerving frequently to avoid the potholes of which there are many or to zoom around a truck or car that isn’t going as fast. Vlad must believe that this is like a German autobahn where there are no speed limits. The one thing that keeps me from speaking up and asking him to slow down is that his highest speed seems to be only a bit above 60 mph. sometimes a rickety old almost broken down car is good as it isn’t going anywhere fast. It must be frustrating for Vlad though as his foot is pressed to the accelerator hard enough to smash through the floor. After a few miles he asks me if I can hear him well enough on the translations. As it is a strain I say not really so he screeches to the side of the road and Svetlana and I trade places, she gets into the back seat and I get into the front where gratefully there is a seat belt which I put on and cinch down as tight as I can get it. Now I am having a really scary ride as I can see where Vlad needs to swerve to miss the potholes but also can brace myself when it is obvious he is not going to bother missing it. So bumping down the road, swerving to miss potholes or not and screeching to halts when he has missed a turn, which is frequent. There is a lot of discussion between Vlad and Mikail and Svetlana on directions so there is a lot of driving back and forth between villages or stopping to ask locals. There is always someone standing by the road hoping to hitch a ride. I feel bad that we pull up to them and their bags and then just ask for directions and whiz off again. Finally we are way out in the country, aproximately100 kilometers from Kharkov and find our first stop of the day. It has only taken us 2 hours to get here which wasn’t a factor in speed or distance but more a factor in Vlad not knowing where it was. The rest of the day goes on the same. Driving back and forth up and down the same village roads until someone finally points us in the right direction. Bumping up and down on dirt roads that are more ruts (like Vlad said, the road must have been a lot better 100 years ago when it was made), bumping up and down without shocks on paved roads with plenty of potholes, and swerving around traffic and geese and dogs and screeching to a halt when he’s passed the gate or entrance. At the end, I am again in the back seat because I don’t want to see what’s coming as we race back into town (again top speed about 60 mph) and I just hang onto the chicken strap and keep my eyes closed and chant a mantra that I will make it ok. I did.
The Ghana Train
Monday October 26,2009
My last day in Kiev was spend going out of town to the Museum of Folk Wooden Architecture. What a title. As has been done in many countries, model examples of homes from different regions of the country have been collected on this spacious area so people can come and see what the different homestead looked like in the past, albeit some are still currently in use as well. In addition to houses, they have collected a lot of windmills and also churches from the small various villages.
It was quite a nice day and there were many locals visiting as well and picnicking there, flying kites, riding horses and enjoying the fine weather. We walked down the hill to the first village and the Good Friday church. In general, the houses are small and whitewashed with thatch roofs. Often there would be a pigpen/chicken coop combination animal hut in the yard or a small roof covering the entrance to a root cellar. Many of the houses are now serving as shops selling the local handicrafts like embroidered scarves, some painted plates and spoons, some ceramics and some of the blouses and skirts the women wore.
bee hives and resurrection church
We visited four of the villages and then had to wind our way back out of the park. Their collection of windmills is quite nice but some look to be about ready to fall apart. That's probably the shape they were in when collected. As we are walking out of the park, an ultra light buzzed us and buzzed the field. I think he did a touch and go because he was back in the air shortly and buzzing away from the park.
The plan was to take me to the train after the park. I am riding from 5:30 until 11:30 to reach Kharkov, the next stop on my journey. As I have very uneasy feelings about former Soviet trains, I had insisted that my driver not leave until I was on my train and in my seat. We got to the train station about 4:30 and I went over to McDonald’s to get my dinner. Poo, McDonald’s isn’t even built yet but there was McFoxy. McFoxy sells chicken sandwiches and French fries. I was able to pantomime and point to get one of each and then back to the train station to find my train.
root cellar
My driver led the way down the stairs and past several cars to find mine. I was the first one in my compartment. A Ukrainian couple came in a few minutes later. Finally just as the train was about to leave, a joyous, boisterous, and loud crowd of young people from Ghana came into my compartment. There were 4 and I get 3 in my part.
Train pulls out of the station and the first thing they do is pull out a computer and turn on the music. Next they turn on both TV’s but at least they put them on the same station. So a kind of reggae music and an Ukrainian movie are now competing with each other for noise plus all three are having a grand old time recalling the weeks’ events. Finally the train has been moving for maybe ½ hour or so, we’ve surrendered our tickets to the conductor, the snack man and tea man have been by at least once and the Ghana crowd has had some dinner and gotten mellow. The computer is losing power so it gets put away and all three pull out their IPods and plug in to listen.
windmill silhouette
By now, I’m listening to my IPod as well. The movie is still playing but it is replaced by an Ukrainian band covering old classic rock. The trio from Ghana are friendly but so into their music. So now I have Ukrainian want to be rockers and three young Ghanans who are each singing out loud to their IPods and not a one have the same playlist. Occasionally they switch IPods and the singing starts anew with 4 songs still going on at once. What a cacophony but it was fun to see them enjoy themselves so much. They are actually in the Ukraine studying but I never did find out studying what as they all starting singing again. How nice to be serenaded down the line from Kiev to Kharkov.
My last day in Kiev was spend going out of town to the Museum of Folk Wooden Architecture. What a title. As has been done in many countries, model examples of homes from different regions of the country have been collected on this spacious area so people can come and see what the different homestead looked like in the past, albeit some are still currently in use as well. In addition to houses, they have collected a lot of windmills and also churches from the small various villages.
It was quite a nice day and there were many locals visiting as well and picnicking there, flying kites, riding horses and enjoying the fine weather. We walked down the hill to the first village and the Good Friday church. In general, the houses are small and whitewashed with thatch roofs. Often there would be a pigpen/chicken coop combination animal hut in the yard or a small roof covering the entrance to a root cellar. Many of the houses are now serving as shops selling the local handicrafts like embroidered scarves, some painted plates and spoons, some ceramics and some of the blouses and skirts the women wore.
bee hives and resurrection church
We visited four of the villages and then had to wind our way back out of the park. Their collection of windmills is quite nice but some look to be about ready to fall apart. That's probably the shape they were in when collected. As we are walking out of the park, an ultra light buzzed us and buzzed the field. I think he did a touch and go because he was back in the air shortly and buzzing away from the park.
The plan was to take me to the train after the park. I am riding from 5:30 until 11:30 to reach Kharkov, the next stop on my journey. As I have very uneasy feelings about former Soviet trains, I had insisted that my driver not leave until I was on my train and in my seat. We got to the train station about 4:30 and I went over to McDonald’s to get my dinner. Poo, McDonald’s isn’t even built yet but there was McFoxy. McFoxy sells chicken sandwiches and French fries. I was able to pantomime and point to get one of each and then back to the train station to find my train.
root cellar
My driver led the way down the stairs and past several cars to find mine. I was the first one in my compartment. A Ukrainian couple came in a few minutes later. Finally just as the train was about to leave, a joyous, boisterous, and loud crowd of young people from Ghana came into my compartment. There were 4 and I get 3 in my part.
Train pulls out of the station and the first thing they do is pull out a computer and turn on the music. Next they turn on both TV’s but at least they put them on the same station. So a kind of reggae music and an Ukrainian movie are now competing with each other for noise plus all three are having a grand old time recalling the weeks’ events. Finally the train has been moving for maybe ½ hour or so, we’ve surrendered our tickets to the conductor, the snack man and tea man have been by at least once and the Ghana crowd has had some dinner and gotten mellow. The computer is losing power so it gets put away and all three pull out their IPods and plug in to listen.
windmill silhouette
By now, I’m listening to my IPod as well. The movie is still playing but it is replaced by an Ukrainian band covering old classic rock. The trio from Ghana are friendly but so into their music. So now I have Ukrainian want to be rockers and three young Ghanans who are each singing out loud to their IPods and not a one have the same playlist. Occasionally they switch IPods and the singing starts anew with 4 songs still going on at once. What a cacophony but it was fun to see them enjoy themselves so much. They are actually in the Ukraine studying but I never did find out studying what as they all starting singing again. How nice to be serenaded down the line from Kiev to Kharkov.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Heat
remember traveling in Russia with my husband in 2000. We flew into Irkutsk from Moscow, were lucky we were able to land because of cloud cover, and promptly took the bus to Listyanka (probably misspelling, it's been awhile). It was either early June. From Irkutsk, we took the train to Ulan Ude where we would spend a couple of days and then train it through Ulaan Baator in Mongolia and on into Beijing. It was a very interesting trip. We had jackets but we were almost always chilly. Yes, it was Siberia but we had thought, June, - got to be warm. In Ulan Ude, we learned about the heating system of former Soviet towns. No one has their own furnace. All the heat is controlled through a central system and pumps the hot water to homes all over the city. And because it is a central system, it has to be turned of and shut off by one monitoring place and they used the calendar system to do so, meaning that the system had been shut off in April. Surely June is definitely warm enough NOT to need heating. So in Ulan Ude, Siberia, Russia, in June, we had no hot water, no heat, and it was dang blinking cold! We had to heat water on the stove, put it in a pan, run into the shower and dump it on ourselves, soap up with the other one of us was busy heating some rinse water. And forgot about just sitting in the apartment at night to read or talk or watch Russian TV. By 6:30 we were in the bed and snuggling under the covers in hopes of sharing our body heat and keeping warm.Now I am back in a former Soviet republic and it is late October and now I have the opposite problem. The heat is back. This is a studio apartment and there are two heaters. Both are running at full blast. Heat was turned on for the city on October 15 and will go until April 15. I suppose for many, it is convenient to know when you will have heat and when you won't whether you need it or not. Both of my heaters have been painted numerous times so that any controls there might have been to regulate the heat are long since painted inoperable. It's full blast or nothing. So during the day if I am here, I sit with both windows wide open to cool the place. When I come in after a tour, I start shedding my jacket as soon as I enter the sauna that is my studio apartment. When I go to bed at night, it is fairly cool outside and cool in the apartment, so I shut the windows then have to get up again in the early morning hours to open them again. I believe this problem will probably chase me throughout my stay in the Ukraine. Now that I think about it, it is a good thing I am in an apartment rather than a hotel because in a hotel, I might not have the option of opening a window. Always have to find the positive side.
fireworks
Must have been one heck of a rally last night. I went out of the apartment at 4 p.m. to hunt down the local grocery store and find some dinner. People were walking around the corner of my building to the pedestrian subway, crossing under the street and then walking down the block to the main street. It was crowded when I went through the pedestrian subway. Coming back around 45 minutes later, I had to fight my way to get up the steps as there were so many people going in the direction of the rally. When I got back up to my apartment, I looked out the window and people were lined up 4 blocks long to get through this bottleneck. So from my part of town, I'm estimating around 4 or 5000 people! I'll be able to find out today because the other man on my tour today was staying in the hotel right next to the square where the rally was being held. I didn't feel compelled to go see for myself.Around 9 p.m. last night I heard either fireworks or cannons. It was fireworks and a bit set of them too.
I think they would have been lovely to see. My apartment was facing the wrong direction though. All I could see was the reflections on the side of a building. Poo. I love fireworks.
I did discover this vast underground network last night. While searching for the grocery store, I followed some steps down and suddenly I was walking in tunnels with all manner of shops on both sides, clothing, shoes, bric a brac, knick knacks, souvenirs, books, appliances, furniture, towels, linens, paint, crafts, etc. etc. I didn't see a lot of ways to get out of this subterranean shoppers delight and when I finally did find an exit and arrived back on the street, I had no clue where I was but followed what I thought was the correct direction and soon arrived at a street corner I knew. whew for that. Did not want to have to go back to the tunnels to retrace my steps. Still no grocery store.Supposedly the groceries are in the basement of this luxury department store with shops like Tiffany's and other equally high end retail establishments. It's not where I would put a grocery store but I tried it and hey, it was there! I was sooooo happy. So I had breakfast this morning for the first time since I have been here. How nice is that. Am riding the train tonight from about 5:30 until 11:30. I would like to take some supplies with me but it is Sunday so I don't know if the store will be open but might pop over there in a bit and check. Otherwise it is going to be McDonald's for the train tonight.
I think they would have been lovely to see. My apartment was facing the wrong direction though. All I could see was the reflections on the side of a building. Poo. I love fireworks.
I did discover this vast underground network last night. While searching for the grocery store, I followed some steps down and suddenly I was walking in tunnels with all manner of shops on both sides, clothing, shoes, bric a brac, knick knacks, souvenirs, books, appliances, furniture, towels, linens, paint, crafts, etc. etc. I didn't see a lot of ways to get out of this subterranean shoppers delight and when I finally did find an exit and arrived back on the street, I had no clue where I was but followed what I thought was the correct direction and soon arrived at a street corner I knew. whew for that. Did not want to have to go back to the tunnels to retrace my steps. Still no grocery store.Supposedly the groceries are in the basement of this luxury department store with shops like Tiffany's and other equally high end retail establishments. It's not where I would put a grocery store but I tried it and hey, it was there! I was sooooo happy. So I had breakfast this morning for the first time since I have been here. How nice is that. Am riding the train tonight from about 5:30 until 11:30. I would like to take some supplies with me but it is Sunday so I don't know if the store will be open but might pop over there in a bit and check. Otherwise it is going to be McDonald's for the train tonight.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
things are looking up
Yesterday's blog was a bit pessimistic in outlook but things happen and sometimes everything is not all cheery and upbeat. Then today you take a tour and realize that your problems are pretty small compared to what others have faced. Plus it really helped today that I found the grocery store and finally found the Internet plug so I could get on line.
Today I was joined on my tour by a guy from Toronto. small world isn't it. Pretty foggy out today but it didn't rain on us, only meant we couldn't cross the river for a panoramic view as we wouldn't be able to see squat.
We visited the War Museum first. nothing like looking at scenes from a war that will put you in your place. It is an excellent museum but I don't know if you can get an audio tour in English. Since I had a guide and interpreter, I never checked. You need one or the other because I didn't find much in English there. But a really good museum covering mainly battles fought on Ukraine soil and liberation of some villages and cities.
And as if that wasn't enough to make me stop feeling sorry for myself, we visited the Chernobyl museum. Another excellent museum. What horrific tragedies these people have lived through.
On the up side, we strolled through the market. a lively place which is open every day and some days has vendors all the way from one end of the street to the other. I was able to get a stacking doll with a Ukraine flair. I have several of them from Russia already. And there were lots of cats running around the market which is always fun for me, to pet something warm and fuzzy.
We also visited the Ukraine Fine Art Museum which had numerous icons from various centuries. It's interesting to see a painting of Christ with a 19th or 20th century local politician painted standing next to him or to see an icon of the Virgin Mary with Ukrainian clothes. Well, why not. who knows what they were really wearing.
Several brides out today too. We ran across a bride and groom posing at St. Michael's church. Bit different from the brides in Uzbekistan as she needed a white coat over her wedding gown.
There was a big rally of some kind tonight on the main street which is closed to traffic on weekends. When I left my apartment around 4:30 to look for some dinner and breakfast for tomorrow, people were streaming up the street and carrying flags and banners. When I finished shopping and returned to my apartment, the line to go through the underground passage to cross the street was 4 blocks long. Later I heard fireworks but I was on the wrong side of the building and could just see them reflected in another building. Must have been a good rally.
Tomorrow I move from Kiev to Kharkov. I am going by train and supposedly it arrives around 9:30 but I saw a blog on the Internet from a guy on the same train that got there at 11:30 so don't know what time I will arrive. I am supposed to have an Internet in that apartment so if I do, I'll post tomorrow. If not, then the next day or so. Hopefully will be keeping up better.
Today I was joined on my tour by a guy from Toronto. small world isn't it. Pretty foggy out today but it didn't rain on us, only meant we couldn't cross the river for a panoramic view as we wouldn't be able to see squat.
We visited the War Museum first. nothing like looking at scenes from a war that will put you in your place. It is an excellent museum but I don't know if you can get an audio tour in English. Since I had a guide and interpreter, I never checked. You need one or the other because I didn't find much in English there. But a really good museum covering mainly battles fought on Ukraine soil and liberation of some villages and cities.
And as if that wasn't enough to make me stop feeling sorry for myself, we visited the Chernobyl museum. Another excellent museum. What horrific tragedies these people have lived through.
On the up side, we strolled through the market. a lively place which is open every day and some days has vendors all the way from one end of the street to the other. I was able to get a stacking doll with a Ukraine flair. I have several of them from Russia already. And there were lots of cats running around the market which is always fun for me, to pet something warm and fuzzy.
We also visited the Ukraine Fine Art Museum which had numerous icons from various centuries. It's interesting to see a painting of Christ with a 19th or 20th century local politician painted standing next to him or to see an icon of the Virgin Mary with Ukrainian clothes. Well, why not. who knows what they were really wearing.
Several brides out today too. We ran across a bride and groom posing at St. Michael's church. Bit different from the brides in Uzbekistan as she needed a white coat over her wedding gown.
There was a big rally of some kind tonight on the main street which is closed to traffic on weekends. When I left my apartment around 4:30 to look for some dinner and breakfast for tomorrow, people were streaming up the street and carrying flags and banners. When I finished shopping and returned to my apartment, the line to go through the underground passage to cross the street was 4 blocks long. Later I heard fireworks but I was on the wrong side of the building and could just see them reflected in another building. Must have been a good rally.
Tomorrow I move from Kiev to Kharkov. I am going by train and supposedly it arrives around 9:30 but I saw a blog on the Internet from a guy on the same train that got there at 11:30 so don't know what time I will arrive. I am supposed to have an Internet in that apartment so if I do, I'll post tomorrow. If not, then the next day or so. Hopefully will be keeping up better.
Kiev First Impressions
Kiev First ImpressionsFriday October 23, 2009 Often the first impressions you get of a city/country/tour/whatever become the tone of the city/country/tour/whatever. I do hope that doesn't turn out to be the case so I am trying to keep an open mind but at the moment, not having much luck. Today was my first tour of Kiev and it was good with a few problems in the tour itself. I’m in an apartment with no map, no orientation of the neighborhood, no way to read Ukrainian, and 4 flights of stairs on arthritic knees and sore feet that just aren’t happy to be here at all. To be fair, it is hard to come from a tour with happy, laughing people and go immediately into a tour where you are the only one. Still, I have paid a lot of money for this tour and I want it to work better. Coming into Kiev yesterday, it was pretty gloomy and ugly until one got past all the factories. In the city today, it’s a nice enough place with some great buildings and architecture. My guide is quite good actually. I unfortunately have this "thing" that I do with all tours. I don’t really read up on the place ahead of time. I have found over the years that reading place names and descriptions before I have seen the place just don’t remain with me nor leave an impression. I can read about the stuff after I have seen it and then I remember it and go, Oh yea. So that’s what I do. Today we went through so many mosaics and frescos and paintings and beautiful churches that it’s going to take me awhile later to read on it all. Our first stop was the House of Chimera which a rich person built out of cement and decorated it on the outside with all manner of animals both real and fanciful, including flying frogs. It’s just a fun house to see and photograph. Supposedly they use this house in commercials for cement because most people think you can’t do much with concrete. Made an impression on me. We did the Caves Monastery which is quite a complex. The churches there are beautiful and I think I like best the huge bell tower but I couldn’t climb it with the knees and feet and that makes me quite sad. Am I getting too old now to enjoy my travels by having to curtail what I do? I am hoping it gets better. We went through the Treasures Museum. It was amazing to see these gold pieces that have been dug up out of burial mounds dating back to the 4th century B.C. The work on some of the gold was just remarkable and to have been doing work like that so long ago was incredible to me. When we went down the hill to the caves, I wrapped a scarf around my pants to keep the monks happy. They like skirts on women and scarves over their hair. Then I find the caves are not really well lit so we each get a very small but long candle that we are to hold between our fingers so that the wax drips on our hands and not the floor. The monks in the caves are saints now apparently so many people come down there to kiss their coffins and pray and shuffle through the semi darkness. It wasn’t crowded today but I am thinking on a day where the narrow hallways are full, how is it that no one catches on fire? We also covered St. Sophia which has a lot of frescos and mosaics and is another church with a cast iron floor. Some of the most ordinary things to some people seems so strange to me. St. Sophia has a lot of chapels to various saints and most have frescos of one vintage or another. They have just uncovered a couple of 18th century frescos and know that there are 11th century frescos underneath them. What do you do then? You have beautiful ancient work showing and possibly beautiful ancient work underneath but do you destroy what you see to get to what you can’t see just because it is older and more historic? Certainly glad I am not on the decision making committee. But after the tour, had some problems. The apartment I am in has a door code which I have yet to get open until I have stood there and messed with it for 5 to 10 minutes. I’m on the fourth floor so I am not inclined to go up and down the stairs often. I can’t find any food markets other than the kiosks and I was pointed to a market today but it is just fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, flowers, and nuts. Not quite what I had in mind for a good meal. The other markets are supposedly close by but if it’s in Ukrainian, how am I supposed to know? I went to the internet that was pointed out to me and it has been closed for a long time from the look of the building. So I had to text my husband and ask him to email the man who arranged the tour for me and tell him I had problems. I hate it when you have problems and the person who is supposed to fix your problems for you gets defensive and attacks you rather than tries to solve your problems. That’s what happened. The upshot of it apparently is that I am a stupid person for know being able to open the door properly because it certainly worked last time he was here and how could I not find the big markets that are right down the street from me. What an idiot. Well, he didn’t use those words but reading between the lines, you can certainly tell that is what he was thinking. So tomorrow I have to hope I can get some better information from my guides as to a true internet place that is close to the apartment and to where the real market is and also I will leave the apartment in the morning with computer in hand just in case I find a Wi-Fi somewhere, then problem solved. Geez. This is my 4th former Soviet Republic and 2 have been exceedingly difficult to tour. I sure hope this one improves.
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