Happy New Year

You have to skip forward a bit through the Russian, but this totally happened. This is what my life is like. Every day.

Солянка (Solyanka)

It's the middle of winter, the heat in your car doesn't work, and you don't want to go to the grocery store. You have some left-over meat lying around in the fridge, some root vegetables, but no remnants of the summer harvest. A can of olives stands in the pantry next to some tomato paste. What do you cook to beat back the chill? For many Ukrainians, the answer is solyanka. Quite literally meaning "hodgepodge," solyanka is left-over stew for those times when nothing fresh is available. One Ukrainian told me that this soup is not correct without at least 4 types of meat, but other blogs claim as many as 7 types are required for flavourful solyanka. I submit to you the Solokhin Family Recipe for Solyanka Ukrainskaya.

5 or so kinds of pork
1/4 of a chicken
3-4 potatoes
2 finely grated beets
1 finely grated carrot
1 diced onion
4 dill pickles
4 tbs of tomato paste
2 tbs of vegetable oil
lemon, black olives, and sour cream to garnish

1) In the biggest pot you got, start boiling the chicken in about 2 litres of water (fill the pot halfway).

2) Start chopping meat! All your bacon, sausage, hotdogs, salami, smoked ham, and bratwurst need to be chunked into dice-sized bites. Set all that aside.

3) Peel and cube your potatoes. After the chicken has been boiling for about 20 minutes, pull it out and throw in the potatoes.

4) Throw your onion and carrot on the skillet with your oil. When the onions are translucent, add the beets. While all that's going, dice up the pickles and throw them in too. Add your tomato paste and mix it all around.

5) In the meantime, we're keeping an eye on the potatoes. Are they half done? Throw in your meat, including the chicken that you were boiling. Just strip it off the bone and chop it up first.

6) When the potatoes are completely cooked, dump the contents of the skillet into the pot. It should be just about topped off with ingredients, so dump gingerly. Salt it to your taste.

7) Serve it up, not being stingy with the meaty broth. Top it off with a quartered lemon slice, a few halved olives, and a big dollop of sour cream.

Woah, 200th post!

Fakesgiving and the End of Fall

With fall break at the end of October, several of us decided that it was necessary to take the time off we had and gather together for a Thanksgiving-style dinner. One dish per person: that was the goal. With twelve of us coming, that meant a lot of food and a lot of work. For both M and I, this was the first time we'd ever hosted a Thanksgiving event, so naturally we wanted everything to be perfect. We tapped a lot of generational knowledge built up from years of watching our own families pull off such a feat. Respect to anyone who's ever had to do this.

We hawked the meat market for a turkey, the vegetable section for celery, and the various magazines for a decent dark beer. We started cooking 2 days in advance. M busted out an impressive 3 pies, including apple, peanut butter, and a laborious pumpkin pie from scratch. The twelfth of twelve dishes came off the stove top at exactly the right time. It was an impressive spread, if I do say so myself. A delicious and moist turkey, sausage/apple cornbread stuffing, pumpkin soup, stewed veggies, broccoli casserole, mac'n'cheese, glazed carrots, mashed potatoes with gravy, stuffed zucchini, a raspberry-pomegranate sauce, buttery bread, and a big tossed salad.

My actual service is going wonderfully. They say that the first year is hard for Americans. We so eagerly want to do that we lack the patience to build the connections necessary in this country for any sort of progress. Well, I've certainly been doing a lot of integrating and relatively little doing. My neighbors have started including me in their weekly dinner parties with their other young-couple friends. I went fishing with my language tutor, where I met his father and cousin. I celebrated some staff birthdays and the pizza joint. Slowly, I meet more and more people. Slowly, my Russian is shifting from forcing myself to listen to the noises to actually understanding them (and perhaps soon to participate in group conversation). Slowly, I'm becoming a part of this community.

Perhaps the most exciting development of all happened days after the 115th birthday of the city. My school forced me to perform a song for the town's birthday, where the guy running the lights mentioned me to the director of the House of Culture, who then encouraged the leader of a small men's ensemble to invite me to join. Since that day, I have been singing with him and his ragtag group consisting of a welder, student, security guard, and chef. It has been a huge step for my language skills and my community integration, but mostly it's just really wonderful to have a hobby and a group of friend's outside of my school and apartment. Concert in December!

Lastly, I leave you pictures of my culinary club boys, who were thrilled today to cook Russian crêpes.

Молочные реки, кисельные берега

Mark Yankov learns to some
potato skillz at culinary club.

The Russian saying "rivers of milk, banks of kisel" is used when  everything in life is going great, which is true of my first month of working here at Lutugino's School #1. I have been granted classroom independence for 9 of my 18 classes, which gives me the freedom to teach as I see fit. Also, the classes I teach alone are comprised of a filtered group of only the most motivated students, so we really have a lot of potential for improvement over the course of this next year. I'm getting along well with teachers, staff, and neighbors, and I even have a regular cashier at the grocery store and egg lady at the bazaar with whom I routinely converse. I generally feel good about the Russian progress I've been making, and I feel that my tutor is effective. I've started a club for 11th grade boys who want to learn how to cook (a skill which this country seems to think men don't need) and I'm planning to attend a conference on methodology in two weeks with my counterpart. I feel generally that the school, personal, integration, and volunteer sectors of my life are successful and fulfilling.

7 awesome ladies and me, at the regional
performance for talented teachers

If that's not a wide enough milk river for your liking, yesterday the town itself celebrated its 115th birthday. "Day of the City" is a pretty big deal, including an all day concert, basketball tournament, horse rides, street food, flash mob, and fireworks. I spent the day supporting my performing students and spreading my circle of acquaintances and friends. Here are some of the highlight pictures from the festivities. C праздником!

Soviet dance number?

Kids were encouraged to decorate the pavement in the central square.

Inside the House of Culture was a singing competition that felt sort of like Tuesday night karaoke.

My 11th grader Natasha did very well!

Horse rides around the square

Several barbecue stands popped up around the edges.

Basketball tournament in the afternoon

The local militia performs.

The presentation of the city flag

Flash mob!

The ever-fabulous Shashlik

Our technology teacher demonstrates the proper de-skewering method.

This dude had no idea why I wanted to take a picture.

Lots of my students were in this one. It was really fun to watch!

Look at Me Now, Look at Me Now...

I'm makin' papers!

My first week in the town, it was my terrifying privilege to conduct an English Camp, one of the aspects of this job at which I have absolutely no experience. Not 3 days at my site, still crashing on the couch of my counterpart, and I'm expected to organize a 3 week, 6 hour per day English camp for kids I don't know starting tomorrow. Yeah, right.

Thanks to my killer negotiating skills, I managed to get the camp down to a more manageable duration and enlisted some help from my awesome site mate and the other English teachers in my school. Distilled down to a week of getting to know each other for an hour each day, the students and I had an excellent time introducing ourselves, playing charades and pictionary, scavenger hunting, and talking about everything from hobbies to family.

It was a nice first attempt, but nothing remarkable. What shocked me was being presented with this page of the local newspaper now, so many months later, which the physics teacher saved for the whole summer. Hopefully this is only the beginning of a long string of good news.

Adaptation

So the other day, I wake up hungover from a night of Russian billiards and cards with my neighbors to the piercing toll of an 8:30 am doorbell. I totter over to the door and answer it in my boxers, despite my deeply ingrained and cultural body image problem. My neighbor leads in the employee of the electric company to check the meter for accuracy. I sign some form and lead them back out, but by this time I've had to think too hard about communication to hope for sleep.

Getting my rear in gear, I light the broiler and start to take a shower. Within 60 seconds I notice the bathroom floor is covered with water, dropping my soap into the litter box in my scramble to shut the water off. Apparently when the landlady came yesterday to paint over the rusty pipes she moved the tub, which disconnected the drain from the plumbing.

Now I'm on the floor, wading under the tub to reconnect pipes, and all I'm thinking to myself is, Well, I won't have to mop this floor for a while, and now my soap is exfoliating. Then I realize that any one of those incidents would be unacceptable to me just 6 months ago. Maybe it was the apathy of the morning after, but maybe just maybe I'm starting to adapt to the unpredictability the governs every aspect of life here.

Ukraine: it's no Africa, but it's no cakewalk either.

Interactions with the Remont-ing Community

With winters here grueling and hard on both the soul and the structures, most Ukrainians busy themselves in the summer with remont-ing, or repairing. Finally, labourers are not discouraged by the subzero temperatures, and neither ice nor frozen earth can prevent access to pipes or walls. In this summer, I've had the experience to work with 3 remonters to prepare my own apartment for winter. Here are their stories.

Andrei
Actually the shop teacher at school, Andrei came to install a light fixture in the hallway and a counter top around my sink in the kitchen. He did a very fine job and used materials from the school, so he didn't charge me anything. The most distressing thing about my new apartment, however, is the broken window on the balcony. Left as is, my home will be open to all the ravages of winter without even a single pane of glass to protect me. Andrei promised to return with glass. 8 weeks ago.

Boris
Having been left with mostly old furniture that was used by someone's grandmother for centuries and then left unattended with the rest of the apartment after her passing a year ago, the sofas and chairs here were in no condition to be used. Boris, the cousin of a teacher from school, offered to reupholster the furniture with old drapes or excess fabric in his spare time. He has done an excellent job so far, but when he came to pick up the last three sofas (right? why do I need so many?), he gave me the most honest Ukrainian answer ever.
   Me: When will you return with these sofas?
   Boris: Not soon.

Vitaly
The downstairs neighbours had been complaining about the pipes leaking water for longer than I've been here. Two years ago, they got on the waiting list for a public plumber to come remont. Finally, an appointment was scheduled for last week. Seeing as how the pipes are either in their ceiling or my floor, the landlady asked me if the plumber could work through my apartment. Of course! What could go wrong?

Vitaly arrived at nine in the morning to begin replacing the rusty old pipes with plastic ones. He stood my tub upright, removed my toilet, dug out large sections of wall and floor, and in the process covered everything in my house with a layer of concrete (and presumably asbestos) dust. Around three or four o'clock, I noticed the stillness in my apartment, but judging from the state of things, he must have been working downstairs. It was only after the landlady arrived to survey the completed work that I realized Vitaly had left.

Now, I've not had a lot of experience with American repairmen, either opting to fix things myself or ignore the problem altogether, but I have a feeling that if one's work involved creating such a mess, one would at least take the hunks of concrete and rusty pipe out to the garbage, not to say anything about the grey snow left everywhere. Worst of all, a hole the size of a strawberry rhubarb pie was left in the floor behind my toilet, not only providing an escape route for my cat but also laying bare all acts performed in one bathroom to anyone with auditory or olfactory senses in the other. My landlady's solution? To remove the rug from in front of my bathroom sink and spread it neatly over the hole.

My favourite part of this story is that all four times I have explained to a Ukrainian the previous paragraph and my expectations of a repairman, the result has been identical: uncontrollable fits of laughter.

Perhaps this is a country in which the squeaky wheel always gets the oil, or perhaps I'm just too softened by first world conditions, but at the very least this is all part of learning to operate within a new system with different standards and expectations. Who knows what life will be like once September comes and I enter this strange world of Ukrainian employment alongside other labourers!

Picnic

With my friend E visiting town, I wanted to do three things: cook, can, and relax. While we did all of those things, I also felt it necessary to show her a bit of Ukrainian culture, since she came all this way. So, Wednesday we took a break from our extravagant kitchen plans to take a bag full of meat, a watermelon, and our neighbors out to the lake behind the supermarket. The result was an excellent time, some delicious grilled шашлык (shish kebab), and some great memories.

The spread

Shashlik

Kimchi!

Ira's niece refused to even look at me. I'm gonna be a great teacher!

Beware of hop-ons. You're gonna get some hop-ons.

Totally found a hedgehog, but no one could get a  focused picture of it for unknown reasons.

Integration!

Pickles Got Made

About a week ago I made a request of all my neighbors: If you are canning something, just knock on my door and let me watch. You don't have to give me anything but the recipe. Three days ago, Paulina took me up on that. She gave me a list of products to hunt down for home-made pickles. With limited Russian ability, I was only just able to locate all the specific ingredients (it is so hard to say "liter jars with lids"!). While gathered around  the potable water refill truck, I mentioned to Paulina that I now had everything I needed and would like to know what to do next. She gave me some lose instructions (some of this, cut it, add that), but I guess she could tell that I still wasn't quite sure what to do. 15 minutes later my doorbell rings, and there's Paulina with every other married woman from the building. They marched into my kitchen and made pickles happen. Here's how it went down.

They started by "sterilizing" the jars with cold water and baking soda. Does anyone know if that's a real thing? Meanwhile, one of the women was chopping the dark green leaves from horseradish and plucking yellow flowers from dill weed. They threw that with whole peppercorns and some garlic cloves (halved lengthwise) into the jars.

Yet another lady was slicing horseradish root at an angle to be added in. At the same time, Paulina was cramming in as many cucumbers as could fit in the liter jars. Some got cut, but she says that doesn't matter.

The jars were topped off with cold water, not vinegar. A tablespoon of salt and a heap of ground mustard got added to each one. In two of the jars, I convinced the women to allow a dried chili pepper to be added for some extra heat.

We didn't actually can them per se. These plastic lids sat in boiling water until they became malleable then were crammed on the jars. Now they've hardened again, but next time I can I think I'm going to do it legit. The product is three murky jars of pickles-to-be, just waiting for winter. It was all over as quickly as it started, and the women filed out.

Lutuhyne Bound

I've been busy, as you can imagine. Training ramped up to a maelstrom of hectic stress, with teachers rotating, projects culminating, and a speech in Russian to prepare for the embassy, just to top it all off. We took trips to Kyiv and Chirnigov, the nearest surrounding cities. We cooked, chopped, built, planted, and conducted. It was a busy time, but the hard part was the lack of ownership. Everything in training was temporary: the town, the family, the school. By the eleventh week, as we all gathered in the capital for our swearing-in ceremony, I felt completely psyched being just days away from my own town in which I could integrate, my own students with whom I could interact, and my own kitchen in which I could cook in nothing but underwear.

In Kyiv, on May 31st, my fellow members of group 43 and myself officially joined the ranks of the Peace Corps, swearing in at the brand new American embassy. Unfortunately, there is no video documentation of my phenomenal rolling 'R's featured throughout my Russian speech, but rest assured that they were magnificent. Much handshaking took place as later that hour I found out I was elected to represent my group in the Volunteer Advisory Committee, a body through which the volunteer community can address it's concerns with the management in the head office. What a proud day it was.

Goodbye to my Oster family: Luda, Nikolai, and Ram

I was introduced to my counterpart, Tatyana Sergeyovna. More on her later, but suffice it to say I was scared out of my pants. Everyone knows I love to talk, but I found it hard to get a word in edgewise through all of her plans and opinions. At least her English is extraordinary and her enthusiasm is top notch. It certainly was a long train ride together though, out to the eastermost oblast (province?) with nothing but time and women beleaguered with goiters and snores.

But now I'm finally home in Lutuhyne (loo-TOO-gi-nuh), and so much is going well. The town is fantastic: green and friendly, located in the midst of rolling hills near a lake. There's so much possibility for good work here! I've already begun establishing connections with the directors of the music and art school, the mayor, the department of social work, and the House of Culture. I've been invited to concerts, tea, and family dinners by my neighbors, all of whom are absolutely welcoming. My apartment is sizable and comfortable, and my friend Slukom has joined me. I've worked at two English summer camps already, thanks to the extremely friendly community of other volunteers in my area. I really feel like this is going to be a good year. It's so wonderful to show up in the middle of berry season rather than the dead of winter, isn't it?

Good things to come, but next up: a bumping vegetarian borscht recipe!