Oh No! Not Kazakhstan!
Yesterday Yrena (of the metro encounter) called and we made a date to meet at 11 a.m. on Wednesday at our apartment for a trial Ukrainian conversation hour. That cheered me up immensely - something to really look forward to. The better part of the rest of the day was spent revising and retyping the forms for use by the lawyers in the PD office so that Sasha can translate them into Russian (NOT Ukrainian) and get them back to us so that Ed can review them with all the lawyers when they meet on Thursday.
We finished with the forms at about 3 p.m. and decided to walk over to the Circus, which I had found on Google Earth. It's south of our apartment just across the River. I printed out the Google Earth map, and it was very easy to get there. We took Belle with us because she really needs the exercise, and she likes to get out and see the world now and then. As soon as we got to Rosy Luxemburg Square we saw the bridge leading to the circus, which in Ukrainian or Russian spells out something that sounds like "stirk," and we also saw the circus building, which looks kind of like a run down Shea Stadium. The roof looks kind of like a roller coaster, it swoops down and up around a big round building, but when we got close we saw that the place looked sort of abandoned. As I've mentioned, I knew from things I've read on the internet that it was in use as late as April 2006, when thousands of people gathered there to celebrate Purim!! But it was dead yesterday afternoon. We walked around the the back and found Club Argus - Alona had told us that the circus was very close to Argus, and sure enough there it was. We heard the boom boom boom of the base from the music inside and went in. There was a security guard - "Nyet Soboka" - Belle was not allowed in. So she and I sat on a bench outside and Ed went in to explore. He came out after about 10 minutes and reported that they do indeed have bowling there - 3 lanes - and that the price depends on what time you go - early in the day it's about $6 for 30 minutes, but later in the evening it's $12 for a half hour. That's a fortune in Kharkiv. The ballet was only $8!!! But we'll have to try it one of these days.
We got home just before the rains came pouring down, and had a nice dinner of fried little fishes (I don't know what they are - they seem too big for anchovies, although they kind of taste like anchovies - maybe they're smelts) with a cabbage, carrot and corn salad, and a tomato, cucumber and dill salad with sour cream. I already had everything at home, except for the dill because when I went to the market yesterday everybody was out of dill! Maybe the dill delivery truck didn't make it into town that day, because every market I tried was out of dill. When I went to my usual market and asked for "Deeel" (that's what I do when I don't know a word in Ukrainian or Russian, I just say the English word with what I think is a Russian accent - you'd be surprised - it often works!) they looked at me as if I was crazy. Fortunately there was no one shopping there at the time, so all the sales girls were free and had plenty of time to play 20 questions pantomime style with me. First they pointed to all the fruits and vegetables and I was able to make them understand that it was nothing that was visible at the time. I knew they kept the herbs somewhere else (I had bought dill there before - God only knows how I had done it). They showed me cans of peas and cans of corn, and I tried to explain that it was green (but I didn't know the word for green). I made chopping signs, I said "borscht" because the borscht has dill floating on top of it - so they showed me beets of course, and finally I was able to get the idea across that it was the little green herb in the borscht - DILL!!! They told me the name in Russian and Ukrainian, and of course I've forgotten it - but I just looked it up in my Ukrainian dictionary, and it says "Kreep" but that's not the word they used - so I'll have to ask them again. My brain is like a sieve - I just can't remember anything any more, especially Ukrainian and Russian words. It gets very depressing sometimes.
Today Yrena came over at 11 and stayed until 1. She's just lovely. First of all she brought me sunflowers, which, apparently, is the Ukrainian flower. I introduced her to "mi choloveek" Ed, and "moya sobaka" Belle. It was fun to talk with her - she is an incredibly accomplished person. I asked if she was born in Kharkiv, and she explained, partly in Ukrainian, partly in English, that her mother and father were both Ukrainian but were educated in Moscow (her mother is a doctor/researcher and her father a philosopher). They married there and she was born in Moscow. Her parents were divorced, and her father went back to Kyiv, where he was born. Her mother went back to Ukraine too, to a place in the northeast where there is an army installation, because she was doing some kind of research with the army ( it sounds sinister). Yrena went to Kharkiv because there is a special music school here and she was admitted to that school (she's a violinist). She met her husband here and he is a computer programmer (the University here has a good technological institute). So that is how she came to live in Kharkiv. She has a son, 1 1/2 years old, and she has taken all kinds of special graduate courses in sociology, psychology, biology, etc., in English. She teaches English at the University and she also does translating. I remarked on her very beautiful sweater and she told me that she had made it - that she makes most of her clothes because she can't find anything she likes in the shops, and besides it is much less expensive. She also loves to cook, and I bet she's really good at it too.
I told her about my family - showed her pictures of the kids, and the grandchildren. We also went through all the pictures of the dogs - Beanie, Muffin, Woody and Belle. As it happens, Jo and Tom, and Deb and Snuffy had called that morning when it was about 10:30 at night in LA to tell us how Deb and Jo had killed Tom and Snuffy in canasta! We had so much fun talking with them - it was almost as if we had been there and played canasta with them! So I showed her the picture of us with the McGuires and Waldens in North Carolina, told her about the phone call, and tried to explain Skype - all in Ukrainian!
Yrena had brought a Ukrainian holiday menu cook book with her so that I could learn some names of foods (I had mentioned that I wanted to be able to order in a restaurant better than I could now). It was a great idea. We went through the menu for New Year's (I CAN'T WAIT for New Year's dinner here - and I hope someone invites us to join them for a home made meal!!) - it was really helpful. In addition to the words I already knew, like salad, borscht, potato, tomato, peach, nectarine, banana, cabbage, meat, perogies, fish, blini, vareneky, kasha, kilbasa, bread, butter, milk, juice, tea, coffee, beer, and a few others, I now know how to say cottage cheese, pork, goose, hare, rolled cabbage, cauliflower, eggs, beets, garlic, radish, wine, poppyseed cake and the colors red and green!! (That is I can say these things if I look at my notes!)
We agreed to meet again tomorrow at 2 p.m. I'm really looking forward to it, even though I'm quite discouraged about my ability to make any progress in this language. After she left I tried listening to the Pimsleur tapes again - I was on tape 22 when we left the U.S. - I listened again, and I still couldn't get it - I don't know if I'll ever get to tape 23!!
Ed left soon after Yrena arrived to meet Gennady at the new offices and show him the forms they will go over with the lawyers tomorrow. They were installing the computers at the office today. While he was gone, an email came from the Center for International Legal Studies. (Ed had interviewed with them in San Francisco on May 15 to see if he could be placed with a foreign university or law school to teach criminal law - he had been informed that he had been accepted and that he would be told his assignment before the end of July - this was it!). The letter said they were very pleased to let Ed know that he had been accepted for a teaching position in 2007 in Kazakhstan. I almost burst into tears on the spot. I just don't think I can take another assignment that is like Kharkiv. Kazakhstan is very, very far east - it's even harder to get from there to anywhere than it is to get from Kharkiv to anywhere (and that's damned hard). Not only that, but I think it's a Muslim country, and I'm not sure that this would be the best place for a nice Jewish girl from New Yawk. It's not too far from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, so I guess we could always go to one of those countries for a weekend get-away if we wanted some excitement! I was especially depressed when I looked at the Center's website and saw that there were positions in Warsaw, Budapest, Sophia, Riga, Talinn, Vilnius, St Petersburg, Odessa, Bucharest, Belgrade and Kosovo - any one of which I would find interesting. By this time it was about 8:30 a.m. in NY so I called Betsy - always a voice of reason. She, of course, made me feel much better - she always does. While I was talking to Betsy on the computer, Ed called on my cell phone, and I told him about the assignment. He was so sweet - he assured me that we weren't going anywhere I didn't want to go. But that didn't stop me from feeling incredibly guilty, selfish and spoiled. But Betsy did when I went back to my conversation with her!
Ed got home about 8 tonight because he and Gennady went out for a couple of beers after the computer delivery and after buying a shredder for the office . It's ridiculous that Gennady has to do this stuff - they should have hired an administrative assistant to take care of things like buying the furniture and computers and shredders, seeing to the installation of the phones and faxes and copiers, painting the offices, etc., etc. In fact it probably would have made sense to delay Ed's arrival until they were further along, saved on paying some of his expenses, and used the money to get an assistant to work on this stuff. Oh well, I guess no one could have foreseen the political problems the country would be facing. Just today I read in the NY Times that Yushenko will lead the opposition party in the Parliament, that he was unable to form an alliance with Yulia, his ally in the Orange Revolution, and that the man he defeated in January 2005 as part of the Orange Revolution will probably ascend to Prime Minister next week!!! (That's the guy who opposes joining NATO and who really wants the Ukraine to be a satelite, if not an actual part of, Russia.) All of this has certainly had an impact on the project and has delayed things quite a bit, and probably will continue to delay the progress of the pilot program.
Ed and I talked about the teaching assignment and agreed that neither of us wants to go to Kazakhstan. Ed is going to call them tomorrow and ask if there is an assignment available further west - he's going to tell them that having battled the old Soviet style system in the Ukraine, he would like to go to a place that is more progressive - such as Hungary or Poland. I don't think there's much chance that they will accommodate him, but it's worth a try. I'll be sorry to miss out on the orientation for the program though. It's held in the same place that I stayed in as a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies (Law) in July of 1970 - Schloss Leopoldskron just outside of Salzburg - it's also where they filmed The Sound of Music. It's a beautiful place and it would have been nice to see it again after 36 years!!
We finished with the forms at about 3 p.m. and decided to walk over to the Circus, which I had found on Google Earth. It's south of our apartment just across the River. I printed out the Google Earth map, and it was very easy to get there. We took Belle with us because she really needs the exercise, and she likes to get out and see the world now and then. As soon as we got to Rosy Luxemburg Square we saw the bridge leading to the circus, which in Ukrainian or Russian spells out something that sounds like "stirk," and we also saw the circus building, which looks kind of like a run down Shea Stadium. The roof looks kind of like a roller coaster, it swoops down and up around a big round building, but when we got close we saw that the place looked sort of abandoned. As I've mentioned, I knew from things I've read on the internet that it was in use as late as April 2006, when thousands of people gathered there to celebrate Purim!! But it was dead yesterday afternoon. We walked around the the back and found Club Argus - Alona had told us that the circus was very close to Argus, and sure enough there it was. We heard the boom boom boom of the base from the music inside and went in. There was a security guard - "Nyet Soboka" - Belle was not allowed in. So she and I sat on a bench outside and Ed went in to explore. He came out after about 10 minutes and reported that they do indeed have bowling there - 3 lanes - and that the price depends on what time you go - early in the day it's about $6 for 30 minutes, but later in the evening it's $12 for a half hour. That's a fortune in Kharkiv. The ballet was only $8!!! But we'll have to try it one of these days.
We got home just before the rains came pouring down, and had a nice dinner of fried little fishes (I don't know what they are - they seem too big for anchovies, although they kind of taste like anchovies - maybe they're smelts) with a cabbage, carrot and corn salad, and a tomato, cucumber and dill salad with sour cream. I already had everything at home, except for the dill because when I went to the market yesterday everybody was out of dill! Maybe the dill delivery truck didn't make it into town that day, because every market I tried was out of dill. When I went to my usual market and asked for "Deeel" (that's what I do when I don't know a word in Ukrainian or Russian, I just say the English word with what I think is a Russian accent - you'd be surprised - it often works!) they looked at me as if I was crazy. Fortunately there was no one shopping there at the time, so all the sales girls were free and had plenty of time to play 20 questions pantomime style with me. First they pointed to all the fruits and vegetables and I was able to make them understand that it was nothing that was visible at the time. I knew they kept the herbs somewhere else (I had bought dill there before - God only knows how I had done it). They showed me cans of peas and cans of corn, and I tried to explain that it was green (but I didn't know the word for green). I made chopping signs, I said "borscht" because the borscht has dill floating on top of it - so they showed me beets of course, and finally I was able to get the idea across that it was the little green herb in the borscht - DILL!!! They told me the name in Russian and Ukrainian, and of course I've forgotten it - but I just looked it up in my Ukrainian dictionary, and it says "Kreep" but that's not the word they used - so I'll have to ask them again. My brain is like a sieve - I just can't remember anything any more, especially Ukrainian and Russian words. It gets very depressing sometimes.
Today Yrena came over at 11 and stayed until 1. She's just lovely. First of all she brought me sunflowers, which, apparently, is the Ukrainian flower. I introduced her to "mi choloveek" Ed, and "moya sobaka" Belle. It was fun to talk with her - she is an incredibly accomplished person. I asked if she was born in Kharkiv, and she explained, partly in Ukrainian, partly in English, that her mother and father were both Ukrainian but were educated in Moscow (her mother is a doctor/researcher and her father a philosopher). They married there and she was born in Moscow. Her parents were divorced, and her father went back to Kyiv, where he was born. Her mother went back to Ukraine too, to a place in the northeast where there is an army installation, because she was doing some kind of research with the army ( it sounds sinister). Yrena went to Kharkiv because there is a special music school here and she was admitted to that school (she's a violinist). She met her husband here and he is a computer programmer (the University here has a good technological institute). So that is how she came to live in Kharkiv. She has a son, 1 1/2 years old, and she has taken all kinds of special graduate courses in sociology, psychology, biology, etc., in English. She teaches English at the University and she also does translating. I remarked on her very beautiful sweater and she told me that she had made it - that she makes most of her clothes because she can't find anything she likes in the shops, and besides it is much less expensive. She also loves to cook, and I bet she's really good at it too.
I told her about my family - showed her pictures of the kids, and the grandchildren. We also went through all the pictures of the dogs - Beanie, Muffin, Woody and Belle. As it happens, Jo and Tom, and Deb and Snuffy had called that morning when it was about 10:30 at night in LA to tell us how Deb and Jo had killed Tom and Snuffy in canasta! We had so much fun talking with them - it was almost as if we had been there and played canasta with them! So I showed her the picture of us with the McGuires and Waldens in North Carolina, told her about the phone call, and tried to explain Skype - all in Ukrainian!
Yrena had brought a Ukrainian holiday menu cook book with her so that I could learn some names of foods (I had mentioned that I wanted to be able to order in a restaurant better than I could now). It was a great idea. We went through the menu for New Year's (I CAN'T WAIT for New Year's dinner here - and I hope someone invites us to join them for a home made meal!!) - it was really helpful. In addition to the words I already knew, like salad, borscht, potato, tomato, peach, nectarine, banana, cabbage, meat, perogies, fish, blini, vareneky, kasha, kilbasa, bread, butter, milk, juice, tea, coffee, beer, and a few others, I now know how to say cottage cheese, pork, goose, hare, rolled cabbage, cauliflower, eggs, beets, garlic, radish, wine, poppyseed cake and the colors red and green!! (That is I can say these things if I look at my notes!)
We agreed to meet again tomorrow at 2 p.m. I'm really looking forward to it, even though I'm quite discouraged about my ability to make any progress in this language. After she left I tried listening to the Pimsleur tapes again - I was on tape 22 when we left the U.S. - I listened again, and I still couldn't get it - I don't know if I'll ever get to tape 23!!
Ed left soon after Yrena arrived to meet Gennady at the new offices and show him the forms they will go over with the lawyers tomorrow. They were installing the computers at the office today. While he was gone, an email came from the Center for International Legal Studies. (Ed had interviewed with them in San Francisco on May 15 to see if he could be placed with a foreign university or law school to teach criminal law - he had been informed that he had been accepted and that he would be told his assignment before the end of July - this was it!). The letter said they were very pleased to let Ed know that he had been accepted for a teaching position in 2007 in Kazakhstan. I almost burst into tears on the spot. I just don't think I can take another assignment that is like Kharkiv. Kazakhstan is very, very far east - it's even harder to get from there to anywhere than it is to get from Kharkiv to anywhere (and that's damned hard). Not only that, but I think it's a Muslim country, and I'm not sure that this would be the best place for a nice Jewish girl from New Yawk. It's not too far from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, so I guess we could always go to one of those countries for a weekend get-away if we wanted some excitement! I was especially depressed when I looked at the Center's website and saw that there were positions in Warsaw, Budapest, Sophia, Riga, Talinn, Vilnius, St Petersburg, Odessa, Bucharest, Belgrade and Kosovo - any one of which I would find interesting. By this time it was about 8:30 a.m. in NY so I called Betsy - always a voice of reason. She, of course, made me feel much better - she always does. While I was talking to Betsy on the computer, Ed called on my cell phone, and I told him about the assignment. He was so sweet - he assured me that we weren't going anywhere I didn't want to go. But that didn't stop me from feeling incredibly guilty, selfish and spoiled. But Betsy did when I went back to my conversation with her!
Ed got home about 8 tonight because he and Gennady went out for a couple of beers after the computer delivery and after buying a shredder for the office . It's ridiculous that Gennady has to do this stuff - they should have hired an administrative assistant to take care of things like buying the furniture and computers and shredders, seeing to the installation of the phones and faxes and copiers, painting the offices, etc., etc. In fact it probably would have made sense to delay Ed's arrival until they were further along, saved on paying some of his expenses, and used the money to get an assistant to work on this stuff. Oh well, I guess no one could have foreseen the political problems the country would be facing. Just today I read in the NY Times that Yushenko will lead the opposition party in the Parliament, that he was unable to form an alliance with Yulia, his ally in the Orange Revolution, and that the man he defeated in January 2005 as part of the Orange Revolution will probably ascend to Prime Minister next week!!! (That's the guy who opposes joining NATO and who really wants the Ukraine to be a satelite, if not an actual part of, Russia.) All of this has certainly had an impact on the project and has delayed things quite a bit, and probably will continue to delay the progress of the pilot program.
Ed and I talked about the teaching assignment and agreed that neither of us wants to go to Kazakhstan. Ed is going to call them tomorrow and ask if there is an assignment available further west - he's going to tell them that having battled the old Soviet style system in the Ukraine, he would like to go to a place that is more progressive - such as Hungary or Poland. I don't think there's much chance that they will accommodate him, but it's worth a try. I'll be sorry to miss out on the orientation for the program though. It's held in the same place that I stayed in as a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies (Law) in July of 1970 - Schloss Leopoldskron just outside of Salzburg - it's also where they filmed The Sound of Music. It's a beautiful place and it would have been nice to see it again after 36 years!!
posted by Susan Spivak at 7:48 PM
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