March 7th 2007
Showers in Ukraine are a little different. Let us think about the word shower shall we?
S H O W E R, it seems like a good word. Not to short, not to long, not one of those weird exceptions in English spelling. All in all, not a bad word. But lets look a little deeper…this word could mean so many things. You shower people with gifts and affection. There are April showers which lead to May flowers. Bridal showers which lead to marriage etc…As well as the quick shower and the well known and loved long hot shower. Now let us look at the word “Ukrainian showers”. This word also has many meanings like relaxation after an 8 hour train ride or comfort after a really tough 8th form class where the kids looked at you like you had grown a second head when you tried to explain that “yes, nicotine IS addictive, and smoking can kill you”. However, a Ukrainian shower may also mean torture, fear, and possibly death for inexperienced Americans like myself.
First of all, lets realize that no where in the word shower does it imply that the human body should be vertical. Shower just refers to the action of the water not the position of the recipient. So in Ukrainian showers you have to sit down. Why, you ask? Well for one, the shower head is mounted around 1 to 2 feet above the edge of the tub, if it is mounted at all. Sometimes it just hangs from the faucet like a hibernating snake ready to spring to life at water pressure and smack the unsuspecting naked recipient in the back of the head. More on that later. Ukrainian bathrooms tend to be small. Ukrainian architecture is simple and compact. I can brush my teeth in the sink and shave my leg in the tub at the same time. What little space there is in the bathroom is taken up by an enormous bathtub. The tub itself is not so much wide as it is very deep. I am not sure why this is but people here, including me, wash all of their laundry in said bathtub so deep is a good thing. However, besides being deep, the bathtub is also raised up several inches from the floor so the edge of the tub is around mid thigh on most normal people. That is pretty high up, and it makes it harder to escape the bathtub in times of duress and the resulting fall particularly painful.
In order to take a shower you must first manage to understand a kolonka. If you are fortunate enough to have hot water in your house (and currently I am) but many people are not, you must light the kolonka in order to heat the water. Now, the kolonka is not on all of the time, you only light it when you need hot water and the water must be running before you light it. If the water is not running, and I mean the hot water tap, not the cold water tap sine they are covered by two separate pipes, then whatever water is in the un-flowing hot water pipe will boil, evaporate, and then make the kolonka explode. That will always add a little spice to your day. Even with it is working correctly it makes many ominous noises which I imagine are similar to what Darth Vadar must sound like when he is snoring. I learned about our kolonka on my first day in Ukraine and have only had one near death experience so far. Not too bad considering.
So here is the processes, you turn on the hot water (it is freezing cold at this point) you skitter into the kitchen where the kolonka lies in wait and you light a match, turn on the gas and light the kolonka. Making sure to light it right away because waiting to long with the gas running and then applying fire will also result in various fireworks. In that case you will need medical attention and not a shower. You skitter back into the bathroom, put your cloths into a place where you hope they will stay dry, and lever yourself over the very high edge of the tub. Now you wait for the ice cold water to warm up. At this point you adapt what I like to call the “readiness crouch”. This is necessary because the kolonka likes to mess with you. Sometimes the water will be a perfect temperature for your entire shower, sometimes it will not. Most of the time the water will fluctuate from being to hot to being okay to being too cold to okay and back again. If you are in an appropriate crouch (please remember that you cannot stand in a Ukrainian shower, there is no curtain and the shower head reaches your hip if you stand up) and can move quickly you can get wet before the water becomes too hot, get out of the way to soap up, and dash back in to rinse off before you miss a temperate cycle.
I knew none this on my first night with my host family. I had met my new family, eaten far too much excellent but rather foreign Ukrainian food, gotten settled into my room, and was looking forward to a nice relaxing shower. I was aware of the sitting in the tub thing but was prepared to tackle it. I managed to light the kolonka without a problem and vault into the tub. The water was a perfect temperature so I sat down (notice the sitting part) and turned the water to the shower. I didn’t realize that unsecured shower heads can act amazingly like giant Amazonian boa constrictors when they are not secured and water pressure is introduced. The docile looking shower head springs to life and manages to spray enough water to fill a full sized Olympic swimming pool into the tiny bathroom and clock me upside the head before I wrestle it into submission. I have managed to completely soak my clothes, my pajamas and the towel I was intending to dry myself off with. I lock the shower head in place, check the bump on my head where the shower head bit me and made liberal with the shampoo. So I have soap in my hair, on my face, and on my hands when the water suddenly turns freezing cold. Startled, I try to push myself out of the way but my hands are soapy that I only succeed in slipping and banging my head against the soap tray. I manage to back away to the safe end of the tub and stand up to avoid the hot water. Since I have soap on my face I haven’t really opened my eyes and I failed to notice that there is laundry hanging from the lines above the tubs. Did I mention that we do laundry in the bathtub and either hang it on the porch or over the bathtub to drip dry? Either way, I stand up and promptly get caught in my host sister’s hot pink bra. I try to disentangle myself without getting soap all over this laboriously cleaned laundry or into my eyes and only succeed in firmly tying my right hand to my head and looking vaguely like I am wearing a football helmet made of pink lace. The water has returned to a normal temperature and I realize that I must remove some of the soap on my free hand so I can untie myself from the Chinese torture device I have created. So I unclip myself from the cloths line, get rinsed off and release myself from my host sisters double D’s. I rinse the soap off of the bra and re-hang it believing that disaster has been averted.
Next, I tried to shave my legs…
I sat down again (how could I have been so stupid!) and pulled out my safety razor. Had I been using anything other then a safety razor I surly would have died from blood loss after this next ordeal. I have made some good progress when the water turns scalding hot. Knowing that standing up in not a very good idea, I attempt to head to the other end of the tub. Unfortunately, my legs are all slippery and I can’t manage to get to the higher end of the tub without one limb or another sliding onto the scalding water. I can’t get my feet under me either and I with lightning decisiveness I decide that this is a matter of life and death and if I don’t want to do my red lobster impression I need to escape. So in a Herculean effort, I pull myself over the edge of the tub.
Did I mention how high Ukrainian bathtubs are?
I fall for what feels like 15 or 20 feet but in reality is 2.5 or so and land on my sopping wet clothes, towel, and pajamas. Miraculously, I am unhurt so I lay there in the 1 inch of standing water I have created, soapy, naked and thanking my lucky stars that I am still alive. Then I hear it, the approaching footsteps. I had let out a blood curdling shriek when I had gone over the edge of the bathtub. My host family was coming. They must have heard the yell and the wet splash and thought I had either slipped in the tub or had turned into a mermaid. They probably didn’t know about the standing water on their bathroom floor and I suddenly as the strong desire for them not to have this particular image as one of their first impressions of me. I scramble to my feet and try and use the 2 inches of dry part on my towel to mop up my own personal swimming pool. Needless to say, that was not super successful. My host dad (of course it’s the dad) knocks on the door and says something very fast in Ukrainian. I take a guess that it is something along the lines of, “are you okay, it sounds like a naval battle in there?” and I squeak back “Ya Dobra, Ya dobra!” (I’m good! I’m Good!). He hesitates, probably seeing the water leaking into the hallway, but then heads back down the hall.
I look at the shower, I still need to rinse off but now realize that I am dealing with an entity that has proven itself to me smarter then me. I promise to sacrifice a chicken to it and I climb back in. The shower is again at a normal temperature and I rinse off, remembering to stay on the balls of my feet in a flight position. That leg will have to remain half shaved. Then I wring out my towel and pajamas, dry off (or at least become less wet) and get dressed. Then I use my towel to mop up the floor and do as much as possible to erase the damage that I have caused. All in all it takes me about an hour to take a shower that takes the average Ukrainian 5 minutes to complete. But I did learn the valuable lesson of the shower crouch. This is the very necessary position that you can use to propel yourself to safety when the kolonka decides to have a mood swing. Hello Ukraine!
May 7th,
I ate an entire fish today. I mean the WHOLE fish. My host mom has just come back from a trip to the Azur Sea and as we are sitting down for dinner she asks me if I like Sushi. Surprised, I said “yes, I love sushi” knowing that eating fresh fish in Ukraine is not really possible unless you caught it yourself or that it is a mutant fish from Chernobyl that walked itself to market. At my response my host mom heads onto the balcony and comes back with a string of whole dried fish. Basically, they take the whole fish, string a line through its jaw and let the suckers day. I am so surprised that this “sushi” that I don’t even blink when my host mom rips one of the fish off of the line and puts it into my hand. I look at it, it looks at me. It looks like it is smiling and promptly name it Flipper. This is why I never eat anything with a face. Then I watch in horror as my host mom takes her own fish and effortlessly rips its little head off. Then, holding it by the tail she peels its skin off, fins and all, like it is a banana. She then eats the thing down to its tail. I am sitting there, holding Flipper, and staring at her in horror. When my host mom notices that I haven’t laid into my fish, she must have assumed that I couldn’t get Flippers little head off. So she reached over, takes Flipper, twists his head off and puts that in my left hand. She then places the rest of him in my right hand. I look at Flippers little face, then I look at his body. This is where I had to make the conscious decision not to flip out. I thought to myself, “you joined Peace Corps to try new things, broaden your horizons, and learn about new cultures. Don’t knock it until you try it.” So…I peeled Flipper. He wasn’t half bad, I mean not something I would go out and buy myself but not horrible either. That was until I pulled a piece of fish meat off and all of (what I thought were) Flippers little internal organs fell onto the table. This was where I lost my cool, I threw Flippers head in one direction and his tail in the other and had to leave the room. My host mom was laughing so hard she probably had a fin come out of her nose. In reality, what fell out of my fish was seasoning but I only discovered that later after I had calmed down. I have been consoling myself in that fact that at least I tried it…
May 9th
It’s not running with the bulls in Pamplona but it’s close. Today, I got to meander with the cows. Jamie (another volunteer) and I were on our daily walk. I can’t jog in our town because there are a lot of dogs and they are hardwired so that anything that runs must be chased. I didn’t really enjoy that added addition to my runs, although I make great time, so instead we take walks. We were walking the other day and as we rounded a corner we merged with an entire herd of heifers. Every day, the people in our village take their cows out to graze on the communal lands outside of the town. The townspeople take turns watching the cows, my host mom who is a nurse, has already taken her turn. Each evening the two people who are cow watching, herd the cows back into town. Now once inside the town limits each cow becomes its own little homing device. The people are waiting outside their gates just like they wait for their children and as their cow comes home they simply open their gate and the cows walk in. The cows know which gate is theirs and they know how to get there. Jamie and I followed one cow around 7 different turns before it got to its gate and it never hesitated. We got to be one of the “herd” and I realized that this is as close to a cow as I have ever been. For the first time ever there were no fences it I realized that cows can be a little scary. They are awfully big up close but apparently all of our village’s cows are friendly. Some more then others. We got chased by one really friendly calf who thought we looked like its mother and we were bumped off of the road by a cow that had a serious drooling problem. I know it wasn’t rabies but one must give a large berth to a copiously salivating 2 ton animal. It made me think of the phrase, “until the cows come home”. I realized that not only do the cows come home in my village but they know the way.
May 11, 2007
So I taught my last class at my training site yesterday. It was actually a pretty good teaching day. We had a translator in class and we were going over what rights people had. The students got the chance to ask us about our rights in the US and they seemed to really enjoy finding out how things really work in America. For example, some of them didn’t know that we had to pay for our own higher education. It was a good chance for me to learn about what students think in Ukraine and a chance for them to learn about us. It was amazing how different some of the student’s opinions were. One boy thought things were getting better while another girl swore it was harder to survive in Ukraine. I can’t wait until I can understand the language better. It has been a real challenge teaching with my limited language skills but I think I am getting the hang of it. I am killer at charades now. Who else do you know that can mime “constitution”? The students at English club loved seeing all of the pictures I brought in of my family. It was funny how they paid so much more attention to the pictures of my cat then anyone else. I guess they think she is adorable as I do. My Tae Kwon Do students gave me flowers at class because they know I am leaving for my site visit soon. It was such a sweet gesture. I got lots of warm fuzzies.
