Traveler, Writer, Aquarius, Peace Corps Volunteer
The evidence
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The Romans used to say �in vino veritas:� there is truth in wine. Seeing as how I�ve just come back from drinking an inordinate amount of vodka over the past five hours, I feel like I�ve got a few truisms to tell.
First of all: there is no doubt that the past few days I�ve been feeling kind of down. This is due to a few reasons. The main one, perhaps, is just the result of in a foreign country where I�m alone, don�t speak the language well enough to assimilate, and have been living with host families for five months now. The other is that my friends are all away on a ski trip this week for the holiday weekend, and I�m sitting here, solo, figuring out my place in the middle of things.
Tomorrow, Monday, March 8th, is �jenski dehn,� or �womens� day.� We don�t have such a holiday in America. The closest we have is Mothers� Day, and that excludes every person with a vagina who hasn�t spewed a little miracle from the fecund fount between their legs or had one sliced out of their belly like a gutted flounder. Here in Ukraine, women are worshiped as goddesses; unintelligible goddesses, but goddesses nonetheless. The celebration of this holiday actually begins on Thursday, when offices around the country have parties in honor of their fairer sex. My institute was no exception. The girls performed songs and acted in skits and were received by ovations and howls of approval. The problem is that I only became aware of this from the sound of clapping and singing in the hallway while I was checking my email.
Yes, I was pretty pissed off on Thursday when I followed the sound of celebration down the hallway to find my whole office and all my students enjoying the holiday without me. Why I wasn�t invited, I can�t say. The nice answer is that it was an oversight and that I was lost in the holiday shuffle. But you can imagine how it felt to be the foreigner and outsider at the ball with all your colleagues when you didn�t even know there was a ball going on.
So I bitched up a storm to my host mother, who in turn bitched up a storm to my department, unbeknownst to me. That is, until I receive a phone call from the head of my department apologizing profusely and trying to convince me how friendly and kind they all are. See, Ukraine prides itself on its hospitality and the way it treats its guests. The idea that a guest was treated any less that spectacular is both offensive and painful to the hosts. So my umbrage was escalated up the ladder and resulted in a contrite apology. Whatever. I�ve got to work with these people for two years, so it�s either forgive or be bitter. I�ll end up being a combination of both.
All of this is foreshadowing today. I woke up in a fairly foul mood, having had a crazy night on Friday with a few of my students at a disco (more on that only if you ask) and a tired day of teaching all day yesterday (pro bono, of course). The last thing I wanted to do was go to the holiday family luncheon today, which I knew would consist of the following:
1. An absurd amount of food.
2. An absurd amount of drinking.
3. An absurd amount of questions about the price of gas, bread, school, and politics and life in America.
However,
It�s at this point that I got tired of writing, or closer to the truth, just couldn�t concentrate anymore. I left to go out to a party at this very cool coffee bar joint where I met this girl I tutor and some of her friends. But I feel I should finish the thought and make the most of my original good intentions. The rest of this was written the following Wednesday night and quite sober. (And one other note: the line about the gutted flounder was added later as well. While proofreading, I realized that not all mothers birth their brood through the main exit).
However, it had been awhile since I�d done the Ukrainian family party thing, and my host uncle Aleg, whose apartment we were at, is a great guy. He�s a sixty-something-year-old pensioner who worked in the mines here for forty years and now only deals with dirt when it comes to harvesting his crops of apples and potatoes. Plus it was just nice to get out of the house and eat food that didn�t have a plateful of butter soup congealing at the bottom. (Thank god they didn�t serve holladyetz, the Ukrainian national dish of meat flavored Jell-O that�s really just congealed chicken fat with pieces of chicken suspended in it. They eat that crap in big hunks like slices of pie and put mustard or horseradish on it.) So I decided to get fully dressed with my smile and suck it up.
After we arrived, my host dad Valery had to leave to pick up his mother, so I was left alone in the dining room with Jura watching cross-country skiing for half-an-hour until everyone arrived. It was boring, but at least we weren�t watching the Russian version of Tom and Jerry so I didn�t have to suffer through Jura�s incessant giggling and violent bursts of laughter (he�s nineteen, y�all. Nineteen. He has a little neon notebook he brings to school with Christina Aguilera on the cover.) As we waited, host mom Tamara and aunt Rita got the table ready with the regular treats: salami and cheese, carrot salad, eggplant salad, pickled tomatoes, crab and egg salad, oily fish, chopped liver, bread, and of course vodka, both store-bought and homemade. For the record, most of the salads they eat here are shredded vegetables slathered in mayonnaise. The eggplant salad, which is sliced eggplant marinated in oil and spiced with peppers, is actually really good. The oily fish is hard for a lot of Americans to eat. It�s raw fish that�s cured in brine and then marinated in oil and usually eaten with raw onions and bread. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.
So everyone shows up, including Valery�s mom, who�s seventy-three but looks one hundred and thirty (think the old guy in Texas Chainsaw Massacre with long hair), and we proceeded to toast the women with the inaugural shot of vodka and then dig into the grub. See, this is how Ukrainians drink. They don�t just go out to bars and booze. They prefer getting shitfaced over a big meal, and follow every shot with food (usually bread and a pickled tomato) until ending the meal with a few pots of tea so they don�t get too drunk and too hung over. It�s actually a very civilized way to do it. After the shots came the big plate of roast chicken and mashed potatoes, and then more shots, and then Valery starts to get drunk and tell his brother Aleg that I said life here isn�t that bad. He takes great pride in knowing that most Asian, African, and South American countries have it much worse than Ukraine does. This actually means a lot to Ukrainians, because they like to think that they live very poor lives compared to the rest of the world, which I think isn�t true. I told them many people in America are much poorer than they are here, and they should feel good about themselves. This brought about a hug from Aleg and another round of shots, this time from his personal stash. Whereas Valery takes pride in knowing that he�s not that poor, Aleg takes pride in me liking his vodka. He smiles nothing but gold and gaps and in Russian asks if I prefer his vodka. Of course, I say, which isn�t a complete lie. He makes some pretty good stuff.
Now, keep in mind the men are leaving the room every ten minutes to go smoke cigarettes, and I�m hanging out with the ladies hearing their stories of life in the Soviet days and grandmas stories on how she taught for fifty years. I could only understand about half of what they said, but there were lots of smiles, so I assume it was all good and they weren�t talking about selling my organs on the black market (or to UCLA). Then the guys came back, this time with Aleg carrying a plate of meat which he made and spiced himself. I couldn�t make out if he actually killed the animal himself or what the deal was, because he was very proud of the meat and said it was his, but in any case it was really good. He, Valery, and I proceeded to finish the rest of his vodka, Aleg forcing me to chase it with pieces of his prized meat. I was so full I could hardly move. But this is Ukraine, so there was nothing to do but oblige.
I�m not sure if there�s a moral to the story, but I did have a really nice time with all of them. Aleg and I embraced as we said goodbye, and though I had a hard time understanding much of what was said, we got along great and even if I didn�t know any Russian at all, I think we would have been friends anyway. I guess the main thing to get out of this is that there are a lot of down times here, but then something always happens to make you feel like it�s not so bad, whether it�s a party or unexpected surprise. I think that�s not just the Peace Corps. I think that�s life here. There�s a lot of down, but they do their best to sprinkle in the good. That�s how they�ve managed to survive this long. But with the amount these people drink, smoke, salt, and butter, it�s gonna take more than a few parties to keep surviving much longer.
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