February 10-13

February 10 -13
Classes went well on Wednesday. I had met with Mykola the previous Monday to discuss my syllabi and I learned a few things about the Ukrainian system of higher ed. One, syllabi are not common in Ukraine. Two, plagiarism is rampant (evidently the students are overtaxed with too many courses required as part of their degree program- this is their justification for plagiarism, plus there is a bit of the Soviet mentality that all property is communal). I have been encouraged to explicitly discuss plagiarism and its repercussions in my class. Three, students, audience members, etc. talk during class/presentations. I have harped on this the first two class meetings and it has been effective. Four, I have been told by other Fulbrighters that students turn in late assignments regularly. The penalties for this are also outlined in my syllabus. Wish me luck. I hope my efforts will not be futile.

A few other things I have learned: I have a great chair. Mykola has been nothing but helpful, encouraging of the way I usually do things (he and the students want me to teach these classes the way I would teach them in the US). The students’ command of English is great. I have been very impressed with them and with the American Studies Center at Chernivtsi. Even the courses the Ukrainian profs teach in this dept are conducted in English.

After class we went to the travel agent to get plane tickets to go meet AGG in Kyiv and also for the trip with AGG. After much research and deliberation between Prague, Krakow, and Odessa for our mini-visit, we decided upon Odessa. I hope it isn’t too snowy to go up and down the Potemkin steps!! Odessa has a very different feel to it, from what I understand, than Chernivtsi or Kyiv. It is much more Russian-minded. It is supposed to have a beautiful opera house and great nightlife. Of course it would have been awesome to have visited when we could hang out on the beach in a bathing suit, but oh well. This is still going to be super fun. Odessa is on the Black Sea coast. I know it is going to HURT to be so close to Yalta and not go there (it is the 65th anniversary of the Yalta Conference in February!) but I have heard it is a bit of a beast to get to. Plus, we are supposed to visit the Crimea in May. Can’t wait for Anne Genevieve to land!

Thursday AM I woke up to what looked like a semi-blizzard outside. Mykola picked us up to take us to the airport for our first flight within Ukraine. We got to the airport only to see 2 airport employees behind 2 different desks and no one else. The flight was cancelled bc the heavy snow made it impossible for the flight to come in from Kyiv the evening before. Uh oh. My Fulbright Orientation was scheduled to begin Friday AM at the US Embassy in Kyiv. The only other option for us to get to Kyiv was an overnight train (something I swore I wouldn’t do again) but oh well. Mykola said the train going to Chernivtsi to Kyiv was nicer than the train from Kyiv to Chernivtsi, and he was right. Although it is common to share a berth with strangers, many Fulbrighters who want some privacy have suggested to us that you buy all 4 berths in a particular compartment, then you can lock the door and there is plenty of room for luggage as well. So this is what I did. Buying all 4 second class (kupee) berths in a compartment is actually less expensive than buying the 2 berths in a first class train car.

On the unexpected 15 hour train ride, I tried to learn some more Ukrainian words and keep myself entertained. Here, I have just learned the word for chicken, which sounds like kirk- uh. Here I am trying to make some word association, doing the chicken dance and repeating kirk-uh over and over.

But back to earlier in the day... Mykola dropped me off at the travel agent after the trip to the airport bc in Ukraine when your flight is cancelled you get a full refund! I like this aspect of Urkaine. We had breakfast at Ephes bc the travel agent opened late bc of the weather. Mykola told us this is Chernivtsi’s worst winter in about 40-50 years. WHAT??!?!?!?!?! Why now?!?!?!?! 40-50 YEARS? So that is why the flight was cancelled and people are showing up to work late; this is unusual even for them. Now I am starting to get worried about whether or not the snow is going to be gone by the time my family arrives in early April.

On the walk home from the travel agent, I walked over to Vul Olgy Kobliansky, where I found what I have begun to refer to as the Man Bag. All the men around here have them. I have decided I will bring one home for my father. :)

I went ahead and worked on my lecture for next week today bc I know we’ll get back from Kyiv on Monday AM (after another 15 hour train ride) and on Tuesday I made plans to go to the bizarre (Kalynivsky Market) with Andriy and Veronika. Wednesday I teach and then Thursday I fly (hopefully) back up to Kyiv to meet AGG. The we go to Odessa and then Istanbul.

Here is the view from Mykola's car as we drove to the train station on Thursday. As you can see, it was still snowing heavily and I even wondered if the train would be able to push through.

Friday AM we arrived in Kyiv around 9:45, checked in, got settled and then took a cab to the Embassy. I joined the orientation late but it was great to be with other Fulbrighters and to see Myron and Natalia, Fulbright staff who I first met in Washington this past summer and who I have been in very frequent contact with ever since. I have no photos of this, except this cheeser one (with Obama, Biden, and H. Clinton smiling behind me) outside the Embassy office bc Embassy security took my camera and laptop.

Several different people from the Embassy (USEMB) and beyond came to talk with us. Some of the individuals who spoke to us include: Janina Jaruzelski, Director, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), USEMB; Tom Ross, Deputy Country Director, Peace Corps; Ann Merrill, Regional Educational Advising Coordinator (REAC), Education USA and Victoria Mykhaylenko, Manager, Educational Advising Center (EAC) and Alumni Resource Center (ARC); Vira Ternovska, Cultural Affairs Assistant, USEMB; Valentyna Pashkova, IRC Director, USEMB; Lilya Shylo, Cultural Affairs Assistant, USEMB, Thomas Santos, Regional English Language Officer (RELO), USEMB, and Tim Standaert, Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer, USEMB; Kathleen Hennessey, Consul General, USEMB; and Ronnie Catipon, Regional Security Officer, USEMB, among a few others. I enjoyed the informal chats I had with the Foreign Service folks…impressive crew.

These Fulbright folks run a GREAT program. I walked away from orientation today so impressed with the Fulbright staff, the program in general, and the other Fulbrighters. Awesome, impressive people. I feel privileged to be amongst them. There are many opportunities that Fulbright provides that I hope to talk advantage of while I’m here. The emphasis on the Fulbright alumni network is something I’m excited about. These people do not cut you off once your actual grant period is completed, and I appreciate that.

Tonight a van picked us up at the Embassy and took us to a traditional Ukrainian restaurant in Podil, an old section of town undisturbed by WWII that is known for it shopping and restaurants. Myron, Natalia, and Vitalley planned quite the menu, as you can see below. Of course there was vodka (horilka) at the table, so I took advantage of the fact that I was surrounded by the people responsible for my stay to try some. That stuff is strong.

Ukranian food is great but is not the healthiest stuff in the world. It seems based on potatoes, pasta, cheese, mushrooms, chicken and pork, seafood, etc. and utilizes a lot of beets, cabbage, and the one item that appears most often on a Ukrainian menu: mushrooms. They seem to be everywhere, even though many guidebooks will tell you to be careful when eating them and to try to find out from which region they come bc the mushrooms grown in the area around Cherrnobyl are highly contaminated. I’ve given up. If everyone is eating them and they are always on the menu, I am assuming they are OK.

So here you can see that we had salad (olives, pickles-pickles are very popular here- red peppers, mushrooms), then we had borsch (red, beet based borsch or green, kale based borsch), then some sort of polenta/kind of like grits topped with either cheese or bacon or mushrooms, and potato pancakes (very popular), bread with a garlic and dill sauce, varenyky (cheese, meat, or potato filled), chicken and pork on skewers, and desert, which consisted of pumpkin porridge and crepes topped with chocolate or strawberries or apples or plain. This was a 6 course meal. Needless to say, our stomachs were stuffed far beyond the point that a stomach should be allowed to be stuffed. Thank goodness we walked to the metro (our first metro ride!) and home.

I really had a great time with these folks. I really enjoyed meeting Vitaliy and his wife. I’ve also been impressed with just how many Fulbrighters have some Ukrainian heritage. About one-fourth of the Fulbrighters this year have parents or grandparents or family that go further back who came from Ukraine to America. Also, I am in a distinct minority bc I do not speak Ukrainian at least conversationally. I’m working on it, however.

Saturday AM we met at the hotel and viewed a documentary on the Orange Revolution. The director/producer was there, as were 2 of Ukraine’s leading political analysts (Oleksiy Haran and Mykola Riabchuk), to lead our discussion of it afterwards. Having produced my own documentary 2 years ago, I now view documentaries in a completely different way. I really enjoyed this one (if you want to learn about the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine I highly recommend The Orange Chronicles by Damian Kolodiy).


We had a nice discussion. I am really so glad to be in Ukraine at this moment, less than 20 years into their democracy. It makes me think of the success of the Great Experiment (America’s democracy) in the late 1700s as something extraordinarily remarkable. Also, it makes me patient. Other countries have had hundreds of years to flourish under a capitalist economy. Ukraine has had less than 20, plus the transition from communism to capitalism is extremely difficult in and of itself. Although the international financial downturn has significantly hurt Ukraine (GDP dropped 15% last year, and the dollar-hryvnia conversion has changed significantly since 2008- 1US Dollar=5.03 UAH then- to 2010, when 1USD= 8.2UAH) there are many aspects of Ukraine that I have been impressed with. There are lots of construction projects going on. There are market stalls and food stands everywhere (and I do mean everywhere). They cover the streets, they take up every inch of the underground tunnels and the metro; evidently this is proof of an entrepreneurial spirit that is alive and well in the country, even though opening up a business is evidently an incredibly beaurocratic, corrupt and trying endeavor.

After we had a late lunch with the Fulbright folks I went back to Podil. I had 3 goals for this visit to Kyiv outside the orientation. With Thursday taken away from us I thought I wouldn’t be able to accomplish them, but fear not readers! I was able to find the market from the first visit to Kyiv, so I was able to buy my mink hat (a woman’s hat, this time-yay!). While I have enjoyed wearing the hat my Mom and I bought for my grandfather, I have been getting some odd looks wearing it. Eventually, somone told me I was wearing a man's hat! As you can see from this photo, these babushkas (grandmothers) LOVE to put hats on people, and then lovingly whip out a comb and brush the fur before they hand you a mirror. They clearly take pride in what they do, and the whole experience had a very comforting feel to it.

Then, afterwards, we walked around until we found Kyiv’s number one (and possibly only?) Mexican restaurant, Tequila House. It was voted the number 1 restaurant by the readers of Kyiv Post (the English weekly newspaper). Living in SC, one becomes accustomed to eating Mexican. I have realized that other places around the world do not have the abundance of Mexican restaurants that we do in the sunny South, hence my craving. It was nice to have some chips and salsa and a quesadilla. I know this may sound a bit odd, given that I was in a Mexican restaurant, but it felt very American and very familiar.

Then I went back to Maydan to meet the other Fulbrighters at the National Academy of Music. A fellow Fulbrighter was giving a concert there. We got lost, ran into some other Fulbrighters on the Maydan outside (where there was ice skating!) and decided to grab a cup of coffee until the concert was nearing an end. It was great being on the Maydan that evening after watching the documentary earlier in the day. The Maydan (now known as Independence Square) is like NYC’s Times Square. It is the main street, full of activity at night, and with all the European stores I love. And, they stay open late. This place is full of activity!

We coordinated with Natalia (always so helpful) and hooked up with some people who were also going to Myron’s apt for a party after the concert. Dan Koppelman, FU Music prof who did a Fulbright here a few years ago, told me that if I get a chance to go to a party at Myron’s I must. We bought some chocolates to take over to Myron’s (customary to take something) and then searched for a cab. At one point, the Ukrainians we were with (one of whom, a young patent attorney, was a Fulbrigher in DC and had studied at George Washington Univ)told us we would probably hitch hike. It seems that a car going in the same direction as Myron’s apt would pull over, we would negotiate a fare, and they would take us. I was not surprised by this, having read that this was fairly common. However, that didn’t work out so we just took a cab. We got to Myron’s apt and had a bit of trouble getting in. Some of the guys contemplated throwing snowballs at Myron’s window.

One thing that is customary in Ukraine: when entering someone's home, always remove your shoes. I am already in the habit of always removing my shoes when I come back to the flat, and people who come visit us always remove their's as well. With snow all over my shoes, the flat would be a mess if I didn't. The woman who owns this flat even brings her own bedroom shoes over when she comes. It certainly does help keep the floors clean! So at the party, everyone was standing around talking in our socks! Even though many of us at the party are American, I think we all must be accustomed to this bc no one even mentioned anything about it.

Myron’s apt was great. There is a historic marker on the façade of his building bc a famous poet once lived in this building, and it turns out that she (according to the woman from whom Myron rents) lived in Myron’s actual apt. Myron, as Dan, said, does throw a great party, and we had a great time. I sampled a bunch of different kinds of Ukrainian wines but for some reason felt the need to absolutely guzzle all the fruit juices there (without any alcohol in them). Guess my body needed the nutrients bc I couldn’t get enough white grape juice, banana juice, peach juice, orange juice, pineapple juice, cranberry juice, etc. The cherry juice wasn’t great. I forgot about this aspect of Europe. They love their juice here and you can get it readily. They have far more options than the typical American orange or apple juice. One Fulbrighter present was joking that Fulbrighter kids come to Ukraine, get spoiled with all these juices, and then go back to the US and want, for instance, carrot juice, bc they are accustomed to it being relatively available.

At the party, I received some great tips on Istanbul from a new friend Steve who has been there many times. We left Myron’s around 1 and then walked back to the Express Hotel with some other Fulbrighters. In the hotel, it was nice to have CNN International. I am an Olympics nut and it was nice to get some updates in English about what is going on in Canada. At the party, there had been lots of jokes about the lack of snow at Whistler and the abundance of it in Kyiv, where, we were told, they are also experience a winter far more severe than is normal. It snowed HARD during most of my stay in Kyiv. Good thing I am going back to Chernivtsi on the train!

Speaking of Chernivtsi, I missed it while we were away. That was somewhat unexpected! I’m looking forward to going back.