Community Encounters: Leonid Antonovich the ex-Militiaman

NO! We are talking!

Scarcely an inch over five foot, Leonid Antonovich bellows up at me, his catastrophic blood pressure evident by the firetruck complexion. My clustermate J was assigned this cherry bomb of a host dad, who kindly issued an open invitation for any PCT to stop in for tea. I had considered this a good opportunity to start making community connections as well as practice my Russian self-introduction. No sooner were my boots off than was I at the receiving end of a very intense interrogation.

Where have you come to now?
I'm in your house.
NO! Where have you come to now?
Where have I come to now.
NO! We are talking!

Clearly this man has a very specific idea of how this conversation should go, even more specific than I do (and I only know one phrasing of one of the many possible answers.) He whirls on J and continues his tirade.

WHY doesn't he KNOW this??
It's not my fault! (I'm so sorry Steven.)
Show me your papers!

He means of course the passport copies that I'm supposed to carry with me at all times. J has already told me that Antonovich is a retired militiaman and that he has instructed J in all the tricks of dealing with his brethren. For example, you should never surrender your papers but hold them just out of reach while they are being read. I'm totally ready to impress Antonovich. My fingers have gotten the pocket zipper halfway undone when the bellowing begins anew.

NO! We are talking! Where are your papers?
[does he want me to repeat the phrase?]
Where are your papers.
NO! Where are your papers? WHY doesn't he KNOW this?
[does he want me to ensure that he's really a policeman first?]
What do you do for a profession?
NO!

At this point I pull out the page of "Really Survival Russian" phrases and turn to the emergency section, the one reserved for near-rape scenarios in dark alleys of the capital.

Stop! I will scream!

Antonovich's onslaught evaporates like a broken fever. A twinkle glints across his eye and he lets out a hearty guffaw. Now we're in the kitchen, cracking walnuts, sipping tea, and pointing out on the map the towns in which he used to hawk potatoes before independence. We come to the conclusion that Leonid Antonovich was just looking for some entertainment and the bumbling Americans posed a perfect target for some good old-fashioned chain pulling. Next time I visit, I'll hopefully be strong enough in Russian to return the favor.

(Perhaps it's improper to speak of someone else's host family before my own, but I'm a sucker for a good story.)

Ya Amerikanitz

Every story has a beginning, and this one started two Decembers past with a lengthy application process and a disturbingly thorough physical examination. 3 months ago it took an unexpected turn when the Kazakhstan country program was cancelled. Having been reassigned to another former Soviet country, I began preparing my belongings and my life for the Ukraine. Sadly, the majority of my enthusiasm was spent on Kazakhstan, so I did next to no research to prepare myself for this country or its language. I'll be as surprised as the rest of you by what's coming next.

I had finally gotten my two bags below the acceptable weight limit, which the Peace Corps is so kind as to augment from 75 to 100 pounds on account of the bitter cold winters. With the car piled full, my mother and I set off to Bishop International airport for the first of four flights this week. I hop to Detroit in the smallest plane I've ever ridden, then continue on to D.C. There in Georgetown, I meet the other 61 people who have committed to serving in Ukraine, bringing the total number of volunteers in the country to well over 400. There's a surprising and immediate camaraderie between the group of us, all being a unique personality type and all at the exact same point in our lives: same aspirations, same anxieties. Lengthy seminars seem to fly by under the pressure of such anticipation and in the midst of such good company. It seems like no time at all before we are all on a Lufthansa jet over the Atlantic.

I've done this all before, and not simply the prolonged transportation. Peace Corps expectation number one is that I am prepared to give my life to this country for at least 27 months, but I spent a cumulative 42 in Korea. I've learned a second language, and then without total immersion. I lived with a host family and integrated into the local culture. Despite having done all this and without the assistance of a 51 year strong organization or a family of 489 peers, I still can't get myself to sleep on either the flight to Frankfort or to Kyiv. When we finally touch down in a half dug up parking lot for planes and presidentially descend the staircar into the blustering flat expanse, I feel delirious but relieved. I'm finally here.

For the next 2 days, training abounds. What should I do to stay safe? What will my host family be like? What will my classroom be like? What's the alphabet? Already my peers are being more precisely defined. Separated from the other volunteers who have come to work with community or youth opportunities, the other 11 English teachers and I form what's known as a "link." Together we will live in neighboring homestays, meet for group work and field trips, and support each other for the next three months. Even more specifically, among the 12 of us two "clusters" are formed, each with six teachers. We will be a language, culture, and methodology class until finally we are separated further: we will all be alone when we are sent to our sites in June to begin actual service.

In the village of Orset, known for its discotheque and river banks, I drag my luggage off of the bus and am accepted into the arms of Ludmila. While my new host mother is kissing my cheeks, her husband Nikolai is heaving my 100 pounds of luggage onto the roofrack of his 1979 Lada Sputnik. On the dashboard, a bumper sticker reads "I heart IBM," but the icons of Jesus and Mary indicate otherwise. We drive across the street without even a rope thrown across the luggage for appearances. The rusting is so severe that I can count the pebbles whisking below through the jagged holes. Their home is a spacious, stove heated, one floor house with a shed out back for the dog Ram (spelt PAM in Cyrillic). "Koli," as he's called, sits in his smoking corner by the stove every thirty minutes while "Luda" peels potatos on a nearby stool, the two of them striking an almost perfect stereotype. My bed is in one corner of the den, across from the curio cabinet and beside the faded pair of recliners. Luda practically force feeds me borscht, apricots, buttery dumplings, chicken and potatoes, and rye bread with sausage, spicy mustard, raw onion, and cold pig fat. If you know me at all you know I'm absolutely thrilled.

The room.

The family has three boarders, all of them college boys going to a local university. Leonid and I look at pictures intently, then pull out my map for pointing time. Thanks to Google translator, we're able to explain our families and majors. Through the powers of Uno, we bond and learn colors in each others' languages. "Zilony!" he declares, knowing I haven't a single green card. "Again zilony!"

At night, I sleep in my corner with the obese cat Mambo at my feet. The bed is slightly short, but comfortable and exceptionally warm. I expected a perpetual chill to hang over the house and the country as a whole, but I had to learn the word for "hot" very quickly. The parrot serves as my alarm in the morning, screeching for food when the sun rises. And I thought it would have been the rooster.

The door between my room and the rest of the house. It's a curtain.

My cluster rocks. It's very encouraging to have five comrades in the same neighborhood who are all going through similar adjustments. We will be spending around half of our waking life together, so I'm relieved to find we all get along. The other half of my life is with Luda, Koli, the boys, and the animals. I couldn't feel more supported or safe, sometimes even overly so. Everything goes swimmingly for now, but the pessimist in me can't help but wonder how long this honeymoon period can last (at most until the winter...).

So Much Longer than 80 Days

After 169 days of roaming, I'm finally home. Private, internal applause. Now to work: tell the story, start the next adventure!

When relating any part of the trip, a question I frequently hear is, "Why? Why travel so fast? Why not use airplanes?" When I've traveled in the past, it has always been to one place: I would go to a city or country for a few days or weeks, then come home. When we stay in one place for a longer period of time, we gain a deeper understanding of its culture, but we also acclimate to it. Then, even if we only go one country over, we notice all of the myriad of differences between the two. Think about even traveling within your own country. Having grown up in Georgia, visiting Michigan was never an exercise in how unified Americans are culturally but rather a shock over what strange sodas "they" drink "up there." By increasing the speed at which I traveled, I was never able to acclimate to any one given place. The effects were two-fold: (1) I lost that pervasive focus on the differences and saw the similarities between cultures, and (2) I got a feeling for the gradient between all aspects of these foreign places. How do landscapes, faces, music, food, architecture, and language slowly change over distance? That kind of observation could not be made by teleporting with an airplane in a disconnected series of dots but only by crawling along in a line, emphasizing the importance of small stops and the view from the bus window.

All waxing scientific aside, on account of the daunting amount of material of which this story is comprised, I've decided to blog the basic breakdown and do something more substantial with the details. Perhaps publish? Unfortunately for you, dear Reader, the bullet points alone are a leviathan of information. Proceed at your own risk.

I left my home in Farwell, Michigan, on the morning of the 13th of September, 2011. This would serve as the beginning and end of my land travel, since I had flown in from Korea. I rode Amtrak to start with, going first to Chicago then to New York City. I hung around NYC at museums and restaurants with some old friends before taking a car to the shipping dock behind Newark Int'l Airport. My plans having slightly changed from when I posted earlier, I boarded the CMA CGM New Jersey to cross the Atlantic.

With a Filipino and Croatian crew hard at work, I sailed for 9 days, occupying myself with whale watching, Flannery O'Conner's collected short stories, writing my journal, exploring the bridge, engine room, and fo'c'sle, watching DVD's, and preparing myself mentally for the whirlwind to come. The conditions weren't quite as spartan as one would imagine. My cabin was comfortable and the food was delicious in the officer mess. On the next to last day at sea, we threaded through the Azores.

We approached Tangier, Morocco, in the middle of the night. One of the mountains stood out of the darkness, for written upon its surface in lights are three Arabic words: God, Homeland, King. In the morning, I hopped off the ship and into a small van with an employee of the shipping company. We drove through the windy roads and arid landscape. Roadside brush fire, no big deal. Once in the city, I chuck my stuff at a hotel and start exploring. Mint tea is fantastic, the hobos make excellent tour guides of the medina, and every city in Morocco has a casbah which one could rock, if thus inclined. Yes, I bought a rug. Perhaps a terrible idea given the fact that I don't have a home, but when I do finally settle somewhere the chances are high that it won't be anywhere near North Africa. Opportunity: seized.

On the 29th of September, I rocketed across the Straits of Gibraltar in a high speed ferry, in a mere 35 minutes finding myself in Tarifa, Spain. There, in a small surfers' hostel near the coast, I had a miniature panic attack. Time constraints were already beginning to feel like a Death Star trash compactor; I had to cover the over 5,000 kilometers between southern Spain and Moscow in just two weeks! Feelings of loneliness and inadequacy started seeping through my skin, but this was far too early in the game for a break down. I got it together and hit the road on the bright, making my way to Barcelona. The snaking roads throughout the craggy Andalusian mountains weren't the least of my worries: the police hauled me and another guy who looked like me off the bus in the hunt for a murderer. Never fear, they were looking for someone else.

Here begins a non-stop whirlwind tour of some of Europe's highlight cities. The pattern was as follows: arrive in the early morning to a new city and find lodging for the night. Tour for the rest of the day and all of the next, then take a night train to the next location. During this period I was in a new country every other day and literally never slept in the same place for more than one night. I allowed myself one awesome meal in each country and mostly ate bread and cheese otherwise. I took a free walking tour through the fun-house architecture of Barcelona, climbed up a clifftop castle overlooking Nice's Côte d'Azur, spent an evening among the fast cars and high rollers of Monaco, and got hopelessly lost in the acutely worthless city of Verona. It was at this point that I gave up hope of learning any language, and, wiping the linguistic soup broth from my chin, started to get smarter about communication (though it would not be until South East Asia that I perfected it).

When I jubilantly put Italy to my rudder, I also said goodbye to Western Europe. Although Prague was the harbinger of new and fascinating sights and tastes, it did not manage to slow me down. I was then only one week from my scheduled Moscow departure, and there was little time to indulge. Arrival in the Czech Republic did bring one important change, however. From this point until leaving Malaysia, I would exclusively couchsurf, a program that would consistently afford me some of my best experiences. For instance, my Czech hosts and I visited the overwhelmingly disturbing Sedlec Ossuary, a church decorated with the exhumed skeletons of an estimated 40,000 corpses. In Warsaw, I sang karaoke and watched Xena with an awesome couple of doctoral students. In Minsk, I saw a double rainbow sprouting out of the KGB building and cooked Belorussian with Andrei and his wife.

Finally, Russia. All feelings of dizziness aside, I had kept my deadline and still had enough time to prowl the capital with a few models, enjoy borscht, and attempt tightrope walking with my host. Finally, the Trans-Siberian Railroad was just a run-through-the-glittering-subway-station away. I would stop in the industrial town of Yekaterinburg at the foothills of the Ural mountains and at Irkutsk, the Siberian town on the edge of Lake Baikal, but my apogee was the people I met. Though I seldom understood their names clearly enough to write them down and we never once shared a common language, those days of watching the browning birches hurtle past the window exceeded my every expectation. Of course we boozed and stole, but we also miraculously grew to be friends across cultural, linguistic, and generational gaps.

After freezing my buttocks off on the banks of the world's deepest lake, I veered sharply south to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. My first few hours are recorded in great detail, but I went on to sleep in a yurt-like structure, climb a tortoise-shaped rock (under the guidance of a stray dog), ride a Shetland pony-sized horse, and eat meat-ish substances. Upon departure, I distinctly recall wishing I had had more time there, the first such occurrence. Be careful what you wish for, eh? Ah, the infamous deportation from China. Let's just say that I was promptly but not inhumanely pulled from my train to Beijing over visa issues, forced to spend a night in a hotel with two immigration escorts (not the fun kind), and then gently pushed back over the border in the morning.

Getting stranded in the Gobi desert with a 200 dollar Chinese Lisa Frank sticker called a "visa" in my passport and no clue what to do next turned out to be the best thing that happened to me on this trip.
           [SPOILER ALERT::: the story only gets worse from here]
I got the opportunity to spend more time in Mongolia, and I had an improbable experience with the benevolent local who helped me back to the city. Having to break one of my criteria and fly over China was rendered less disappointing by the fact that I got to stop over in Seoul for one night of rancid soju, delicious duck, and great friends. Then I picked up my route on schedule in Hanoi.

In Southeast Asia, my paced slowed somewhat. Rather than racing through a city in 36 hours then catching a night bus, I had  room to spend four or five days in each: still meager, but comparatively much calmer. Alternately avoiding scooters while on foot and pedestrians while on scooter, Hanoi was all the steamy chaos I could have hoped for. Moving west through a mountain border crossing, the food kept getting better. I met a few couchsurfers in the capital of Laos for delicious food and what passed for beer. Vientiane was more a flat, dusty-road jungle town than a city, and exactly the sort of place in which you could lose yourself for months. Thailand offered the unique experience to play a part in the ongoing flood relief, a welcome respite from egocentric tourism, photographing locals, and gorging myself. I mentioned this being the high point in the evolution of my skills at communicating sans langue. The truth of the matter is that I was making do exclusively with thank you and I'm sorry, which I found could handle most any situation that pointing, a calculator screen, or the name of the next town could not. I suppose some may deem that to be a low point, but I 'm judging on the principles of efficacy, rapid adaptability, and ease.

FAQ 

What was your favorite place that you visited? 

On peninsular Malaysia, on the northwestern coast, is the state of Penang, regarded by its countrymen as "food paradise." Made up of little more than an island and its adjacent strip of land, Penang gained fame for its once bustling Straits of Melacca. Now overshadowed in the shipping industry by Singapore, Penang boasts all the character that its neighbor to the south sorely lacks. A gorgeous, colonial town is spread along the east side, but not so dispersed that one can't bike it easily. The multiculturalism is fascinating. It's not uncommon to find an Anglican church, Buddhist temple, and Hindu mandir at the same intersection while prayer call floats over it all. The Indian food is tied for second best I've ever had worldwide, and the local cuisine incorporates Chinese, Thai, and Indonesian with their own twist, all for prices cheaper than vending machines. Looking for some downtime? Take a bus trip to the backside of the rainforest mountain which serves as backdrop to this whole paradise, where you will find quiet fishing villages. Condos are cheaper than my rent in Athens, so you can bet your socks I'll be living here in my lifetime.

Leaving Penang was hard, but I had a powerful motivator. On the road I made many friends, but in a lifestyle of hectic change, nothing compares to a familiar and established sidekick. To my great fortune, I was met by three such cohorts during my race around the world. The first of those was flying from Korea as I clacked south through Kuala Lumpur to the island country of Singapore. (If you're wondering why I haven't added a single picture to this lengthy summary of foods and locales, it's because I suspect that it was on this train that my first 8GB of pictures slipped out of my bag and into oblivion.) Once in Singapore, E and I made the best of a fairly lifeless pile of iron and glass. The night zoo was a terrifying time of flying fox rooms, angry elephants, and other untethered creatures. The cable car (brought to you by Canon) afforded beautiful views of towering convention centers and magnificent hotels. The ritzy attractions too costly for our meager budgets, we tooled around Little India and the botanical gardens.

The fun continued in Australia, where I met the second of three magnificent mates. D and I rented a Yaris and drove that little hummingbird from Brisbane all the way to Melbourne, camping in the bush as we went along. We cooked on the barbie (burgers you racist), stood on the both easternmost point and the shore first  claimed by Cook, pulled ticks from chests as nature got all up in our business, huddled in a phone booth to shelter ourselves from the rain, sought kangaroos, both alive and in pies, and saw old friends, space exhibits, waterfalls, and koalas. We totally smelled unbearable by about half way through, and then it only got more nose-hair-singeing. Still wouldn't have traded it.

New Zealand was next, and was all anyone ever says it is. Breathtaking, variety, wonderful people, blah blah blah you've heard it all before. I did the requisite hiking and cinematic location visits without the extreme sky diving or bungee jumping. Then I hightailed it to North Island and my trans-Pacific freighter. The Bahia Negra was much the same as the New Jersey, except at sea for twice as long and with Poles instead of Croats. Together, we celebrated Christmas, combining the Polish traditions of pescetarianism and taking communion with the Filipino ones of roast boar on a spit and karaoke.

Only a few days before the new year, I watched as the locks of the Panama Canal emptied and lowered our vessel, then shortly after I disembarked. From the valley town of Boquete, I did a 12 hour hike up Volcán Barú, starting at midnight. We arrived at the summit to greet a frigid, gale-force dawn and scurry back down. In Costa Rica, I got up close and personal with sloths, parrots, and leaf cutter ants, then walked into town for dinner to choose my own sea bass from a cooler. Of course, Nicaragua saw my college education put to full use as I volunteered on a permaculture farm on the island of Ometepe for two weeks. Lots of rice and beans, machetes, and nature ensued. On my weekends, I attended bullfights, went for a dip in the springs, or biked around the island.

Having burnt all my Honduras and Guatemala time living on the island, I had to hurry to reach Oaxaca, Mexico at the same time as my third friend. I had some ugly dealings with some exploitative Hondurans at the border and my stomach finally started giving way to the forces of Latin America, but other than that I made it to southern Mexico uneventfully. B and I enjoyed local delicacies like chocolate, mezcal, and tlayudas, and visited some impressive Aztec ruins. The color and character of Oaxaca was all the more charming for the fact that the rest of Mexico possessed neither of those things in such quantity.

When it was all through I was ready for the victory lap. I passed through Mexico City with the time to stop but not the interest. I bused directly to the border with Arizona, where I slipped into Tuscon in the early morning of the 31st of January. From there, I visited my brother in El Paso and moved east toward Atlanta. Amtrak stopped long enough at San Antonio for me to go see the Alamo, but not having taken a single photograph I guess I'll just have to remember it. I stopped in New Orleans for a fun-filled night of seafood, beer, jazz, locals, and late night beignets. A series of stops in Birmingham, northside-Atlanta, Athens, and the 'burbs allowed me to visit the bulk of my friends and family still in the region. Lastly, a few days in D.C. mark my first trip to our nation's capital. On Leap Day 2012, I rolled into Grand Rapids Amtrak station in the snow, successfully circumnavigating by the two criteria that define the feat if not by my third personal challenge of staying on land for the duration.

In two days time, everything begins anew. I will join the other members of Group 43 on a flight to Frankfurt and then Kyiv, the first steps toward my 27 month commitment to serving in the Peace Corps Ukraine program. I'm still unsure what that exactly means, but rest assured that this blog will continue to chronicle it. Many thanks to my family and friends for all the good wishes and help in preparing for this step. My next communication will be from Ukraine, but that's about all I know of the future!