Traveler, Writer, Aquarius, Peace Corps Volunteer
The evidence
<< previous next>>
I don�t know how exactly the argument started. I think we were debating about whether China or Japan has the higher current GDP, or it might have been an offshoot of the standard �here�s another thing that sucks about Ukraine� conversation that tends to crop up every time my German friend Patrick and I are together. But some how or other, we ended up talking about the good �ole US of A, and tempers were about to flare.
He and his Ukrainian girlfriend, Olga, started the America-bashing on two fronts: the first, of course, was the complete mess in Iraq and international animosity towards the Stars and Stripes. The second had to do with quality of living and the misperception that America was a great country to live in, compared with many other relatively well-off First World nations. Okay, in their defense, I might have actually said something like �well, America is still the best country on earth� and �all things considered, America is the best country to live in.�
The truth is, I�m not sure how much I believe either of those statements. I think hubris and defensiveness have a lot to do with it, and if I were to actually take those questions seriously, I could probably come up with a lot of rebuttals to my own assertions. I mean, honestly, take away the smoke and mirrors of the entertainment industry, all the consumer marketing gobblety-gook, the strength of our military and size of our economy (which are more important on a macro level), and look really hard at the quality of life of the average American family. I know that�s hard for most, since I�d say 90% of the people reading this live in Manhattan, upper or upper-middle class gated communities, or are well-off in general and only have to worry about where to eat for dinner and their diversified portfolios. But throw away the flat-panel TVs and digital cable and TiVo and iPods and fusion cuisine just for a second and see a place where the average family raises their children in day care and with television, can�t afford most major medical coverage (certainly not without a job), gets two weeks of vacation a year, eats mostly frozen or junk foods, and the standard raise is 2-3%, if they�re lucky. I won�t even go into the mess with our legal, insurance, education systems and government. But we always come back to the same thing: the United States is still the best place on earth because it is a democracy (yeah, I know, save the Civics 101) and people are free to live their lives how they choose, say essentially what they want, and can improve their lot through hard work.
At least that�s what I said. My argument didn�t cut very deep. Patrick is a devout Communist, and when he looks at America, he sees a country of great disparities in wealth and opportunity and a place that not only doesn�t take care of their needy, but doesn�t care about them. Now, before y�all jump on the Communist thing, let me say this: Patrick grew up in a Turkish ghetto in Germany, never went to college, and is one of the sharpest, most well-informed, articulate people I know, not to mention that he�s arguing in English, which is his fourth or fifth language (he speaks German, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, English, and a moderate amount of French.) But he maintained that there are a number of other countries where people live just as well as America that provide quality social services, pay their workforce well, and encourage quality of life over blind dedication to the accumulation of wealth. Not to mention that education is a priority, not a secondary issue to deal with (most international people I�ve met all share the same idea, that most Americans are quite stupid and uneducated. The current administration isn�t doing much to quell their suspicions.)
Of course, I countered that it�s a whole lot easier to deal with those issues when your country is half the geographic size of America and culturally homogeneous. This point is being illustrated all over Western Europe with the EU expansion, and just look at how those homogeneous countries are scrambling to keep their white Christian identities and shared cultural values in place. But what really ticked me off was Olga, who being the Ukrainian patriot she is, felt the need to compare Ukraine to America, which is like comparing the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to the Yankees. She asked me if I had ever met a really rich Ukrainian, hinting that this country has lots of rich people just like America, and therefore Ukraine is akin to the US.
Yes, of course Ukraine has many wealthy people, and many people who live very well. So do Belarus and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. But they make up something like five percent of the country. And then there�s the whole widespread corruption, government-censored media, barely paved roads, crumbling housing, alcoholism, unemployment thing that just about scrapes the surface of the problems these countries face. But it did get me thinking about what subtleties I take for granted in America, and I realized that maybe most America is a vapid landscape of Wal-Marts and Gaps and Olive Gardens, and maybe the ideas of freedom most Americans embrace are the freedoms to choose between red, green, and purple ketchup, or twenty-seven varieties of fish at their supermarkets. But one thing I will give America major props for is our sense of customer service. This is something Ukraine is light years away from figuring out.
Take, for example, my train ride home from Crimea. We arrived at the station in Simferopol about an hour before our train was scheduled to leave. At this point, everyone working there knew trains were delayed for hours. But there were no signs or announcements. No one cared to say �oh, you�re going to Donetsk? Don�t expect to leave any time soon.� So we sat outside with everyone else, looking at our watches, wondering where our train was. We still didn�t know what track, and it was supposed to leave in two minutes.
Finally, Dima, Margarita�s brother, managed to find someone inside who told him that the train that�s supposed to take us hasn�t even arrived yet and probably wouldn�t be in for another two hours. While the news was unwelcome, it gave us time to eat dinner reasonably rather than wolfing it down on the sidewalk. We (I should say Rita) talked the train station restaurant into letting us eat our food at their table for a small fee. They even prepared it on a platter for us (while customer service remains as foreign a concept as sobriety, hospitality here is unrivaled, a point that will soon be illustrated further. If your curious at my distinction between the two, hospitality is the restaurant going through the effort to make our platter; lack of customer service is them failing to tell us that we have to pay a 20 griven food tax each and that our train actually left five minutes ago � neither of which really happened.)
We finished most of our meal, played some cards, paid our fee (a measly ten griven), and then suddenly Dima and Rita rose in a panic. It seemed that there was some announcement about our train, and from what I understood it was leaving immediately. We quickly grabbed all of our bags, ran out and down the hall to the trains, and learned that our train not only wasn�t about to leave, but wouldn�t leave for another few hours. At this point, it was 10 pm. We returned to the restaurant, bags in hand, to find the wait staff eating the rest of our food. I think they were as embarrassed as we were surprised when we sat back down.
The place closed around 12, and we ventured into what can best be described as a makeshift refugee camp. Throngs of teenagers were sprawled out across the floor beneath a mountain of backpacks. Families slept on top of one another. People meandered outside the station among the vendors who were now making a fortune selling water and ice cream. And still no idea when our train was arriving, let alone leaving.
We ended up taking off a little after 3 am, which by my estimates should have gotten us into Donetsk by noon, just in time for the May 9th holiday, which is their Veteran�s Day for people who fought and died in World War II, or what they call the Great Patriotic War. It�s a holiday where families and friends get together and go out to the forest or seaside and have picnics with their traditional food, shashlik, which is grilled meat like a shish-kabob. This was something I didn�t want to miss.
I woke up around 9 am Sunday morning, and Dima and Rita were still sleeping. To be honest, �woke up� is a misnomer, because that would imply that I actually slept. Let me describe trains here for a second. First of all, they are divided into three classes: third class, or platzcart, which is assigned seating with bunks on either side but completely open so that people are free to walk around and talk all night; second class, or kupay, which is a small four-person berth, with bunks stacked two by two; and first class, which is just like kupay except it�s only two people and has an electrical outlet in the berth. Outside of those small differences, the rest is pretty much the same. The train hallways smell like a four hundred pound hairy drunk guy slept there in the same sweaty outfit for three days, died, and spent a few more days decomposing. If you�re lucky, the private berths smell just a tad bit better. The interior design is retro Industrial Age, like they were content to smelt a few steel bars together and nail some cloth over the windows for decoration. Each bunk is covered in cracked leather has its own dirty mattress rolled up on it. However, in order to use the mattress, you have to pay seven griven for linens. Nice little game they�ve got going on. And if you�re over 5� 10�, forget about sleeping comfortably.
The three of us were in kupay, and while our hallway did indeed smell like sweaty armpits, the berth wasn�t too bad. So I was up for awhile, doing some reading, when my two sleepy compatriots finally got out of bed around 12 pm. It was then that I learned that after traveling all night, we were as far away from Donetsk as when we had started. Here�s what happened: in the town of Melitopol, which lies directly between Donetsk and Simferopol, there was a huge series of explosions at a military munitions depot. Something like eight people died and hundreds were injured over the course of two or three days. How did it happen? Well, accounts vary from the simple, which is they just stockpiled too many heavy pieces of artillery on top of each other, and the grenades on the bottom went boom, and then the whole place went off like a fireworks factory, to the conspiratorial, which is the explosions were set on purpose for political reasons, to the likely, which is some lazy guards were smoking cigarettes and threw lit butts into a huge ammunition cache without thinking about it. In any event, my wonderful Crimean vacation was starting to end on a rather sour note.
next>>
Other interesting stuff
Stay in touch
Lewkraine Productions
"Making the world a safer place to play."