The never ending search for the water guy

The never ending search for the water guy…
In my apartment you cannot drink the tap water. Well, you can drink the water but I STRONGLY encourage you not to. My building is fairly old, dating back somewhere between when Caesar ruled and Jesus was born, give or take a few years. The plumbing in my building, to my knowledge, has never been replaced although I cannot seem to locate where they are hiding the aqueducts. However, I am always hearing gurgling and bubbling from mysterious locations so I am sure that must be them. I believe they come complete with roman slaves that were never told about the fall of Rome.
When you turn on the faucet in my apartment at first nothing happens. Then you hear moaning and clanking and distant gurgling sounds. I assume this is the roman slaves in the basement moaning and commencing to haul buckets of water from the aqueduct to wherever it needs to be put to come out of my faucet. If I listen hard enough I can hear the ocean. Ten or so minutes later, after increased rattling and groaning of pipes (or slaves) rust red water begins to spit from my faucet. The first time I saw this I screamed like a little girl because I thought I had entered a horror movie and the faucets were pouring blood. My neighbor assured me that if you let the water run for a few minutes it will pale to an only slightly tinted red color. That way when you use it to wash your clothes they only turn pink instead of a lovely shade of burnt umber. Good to know. Either way I now realize why people would rather drink vodka then tap water. Vodka is better for you. On special days when the roman captives are on vacation, the water doesn’t run at all. I have learned to plan ahead for this and keep large bottles of faintly red water in my kitchen for washing purposed on roman holidays.
This being said, I must buy bottled water for all of my drinking and cooking needs. You can buy water in Ukraine in 5 liter jugs that cost around 6 hryven (roughly $1.07). That may not seem a lot to you but to a stingy little Peace Corps volunteer I feel like I am paying for Perrier water to boil noodles. However, there is an alternative. Once you have emptied a 5 liter jug of its Perrier water there is a guy that comes around to our apartment complex every Saturday with a big water truck full of deliciously drinkable and much cheaper water (like 1 hryven per 5 liters or 17 or so cents). You find him and he will fill your empty water jugs. How do I know this? I have seen people leave my apartment with empty water jugs and return with the same full water jugs. Other PC volunteers have mentioned that the same thing happens in their communities. My only problem was that I could never find this guy. He is like a Ukrainian Carmen Sandiego.
The first time I tried to find him I followed an old Babucia who was carrying some empty 2 liter Fanta bottles. I figured she just couldn’t carry 5 liters so she opted for 2. She led me straight to, get this, the milk truck. Not your normal American milk truck with the guy in the white outfit and bottles of milk. This looked like a mini gas tanker with a hose fixed to the back and had MOЛОКО (milk) spray painted on the side. You hand the tough looking babucia at the back some money and she will use the hose to fill up whatever containers you brought with you with fresh Ukrainian milk. I am saying fresh with ridiculous optimism here but one can hope. Not having a fridge I decided that I didn’t want to buy two 5 liter jugs of milk and risk receiving some “full jugs” jokes. Although, the humor may not translate into Ukrainian.
On my next attempt I decided to follow an old grandpaw who was carrying 5 liter jugs. I hoped that he still had enough teeth that he was going to use those jugs for water and not milk so I began to tail him. If you know anything about Ukrainians you should know that they take their time getting places on Saturday morning. Especially the retired folks because this is like their Friday and Saturday night. They need to stop and talk to every other old person that is outside on that day, and they are all outside because they wouldn’t want to miss the party. It’s like they are trying to hide their tracks and one of the main reasons I was never able just watch were they went to find the water guy. In Ukraine, the shortest distance between two points is too your neighbors, around the block, stopping next door, popping into the store, and chatting with 8 people on your way to these various places. Not a straight line.
The first couple of times grandpaw stopped I just walked by him like I was on my way to some other place or on an errand. While he chatted up the Babucia in building 10K I pretended to look at fruit and had to buy some expensive peaches to make up for all of the poorly worded insipid question I asked the shopkeeper just to look like I belonged there. He meandered down the street with his jugs and I pretended to play with the million half feral cats that prowled the streets. I stopped that when they started ganging up on me and I remembered that none of these cute but armed and dangerous fuzzies had ever had a shot in their entire 9 lives. He stopped again to chat up babucia #2, this one with bigger jugs then him but hers’ weren’t in her hands if you know what I mean. I pretended to be waiting for someone, glancing at my watch until I realized that I wasn’t wearing one. I hoped he was nearsighted.
By this time, grandpaw has noticed my attentions and he was starting to look decidedly nervous. I can imagine what was going through his mind when he realized he was being stalked by the American in the building. This man lived through the cold war. I look and am harmless but for all he knows I am a trained killer. He begins to double back moving surprisingly quickly for a man stopped at a 90 degree angle and I am forced to dart behind shrubbery to hide myself. I realize that I am going to give this old man a heart attack or a complex or both so I give up that chase and he disappears around a corner. I didn’t find the water guy and now everyone who has witnessed my little prowl around the apartment complex keeps looking at me like they are checking for weapons.
I returned home from a trip to Kyiv recently and needed to stock up on supplies. I headed to the Milk Kiosk, yes they have a store just for milk and it is the only place I can buy servings of cheese for one person so I love it. I discover the Kiosk is closed and as I round the corner I run smack dab into a teenager dressed entirely in army fatigues. Being the hardened American I am I don’t yell but let out a much more dignified and Ukrainian “oi!”. We both apologize to each other and he disappears. I mean, literally disappears. One minute he is there, the next he is gone, so I look closer. Yes, I know horror movies start out this way but it was a Saturday morning so I figured how dangerous could it be? There, parked in a little clump of shrubbery is a giant green truck that has a camouflage covered flat bed. Under that camouflage is a giant water tank. It was the water guy!!! I heard angles singing and skipped off to get my depleted water jugs. Good things come to those who wait and who don’t watch where they are going when they are leaving the milk kiosk.

The Blue Days of Ukraine

It is a given to most people in Ukraine that you have to wash clothes by hand here. I remember grousing about having to buy nice clothes in America that were hand wash only and now I look back at myself and Laaaaaaugh. I am actually getting the hang of hand washing. After a couple of disastrous attempts that resulted in mixing colors or having soap stiff clothes I was beginning to feel like this might be a skill that I could master in the conceivable future. I learned that you don’t wring out sweaters or the arms will hang past your knees with it dries. You need to rinse jeans twice or it’s like wearing sandpaper and you have to be very patient when washing socks even though it is totally gross. Not to long ago I decided that I needed to wash my sheets. Now, I have new sheets in my apartment and being a typical 20 something, I just took them straight out of the package and put them on my bed. It was fine, I didn’t break out into spots or anything. But the weather here is getting colder and I decided that I should probably wash them before it got to rainy or cold because I only have one set of sheets. The more days it takes for them to dry the more time I spend sleeping in my sleeping bag. Winter will be a different story. I haven’t yet figured out how to freeze dry my clothes. Apparently in winter you hang stuff out to dry, let it freeze and then just break the ice off. Voila, freeze dried clothes. I am not sure if the person telling me this was kidding or not. Either way…
So I get up bright and early one morning and take the entire sheet set including pillowcases and toss them into my handy washing tub. I love this tub, it is probably the most useful thing I own. I was laundry in it, I take baths using it etc… The tub and I are friends. I have mixed the hot water from the kettle with the detergent and I figure I will let everything soak while I make breakfast. Satisfactorily fed, I head into the bathroom to commence with the washing. Now, I have placed the tub in my giant iron bathtub so that if there is any spillage etc…it’s not a problem and I then have access to cold water to rinse. Lots of splashing does tend to occur. Now my bathtub is raised up on some cinder blocks, I don’t know why, but that puts that edge of the bathtub at my mid thigh. I do the usual swish everything around rub it together etc…splashing water everywhere of course. On the walls and mostly on me. It is then time to wring everything out so I can rinse it. I lean into the bath tub and grab what I think is a pillow case and pull. It’s not a pillow case. It’s the heavy comforter cover. My feet, clad in slippers on the smooth bathroom tile that is now liberally covered in soapy water have no real grip and, being off balance, they flip up and I fall face first into my trusty tub with my bedding. Now I am not really hurt, just a little surprised as I spit out soapy suds and get water out of my eyes. It is then that I notice that my hand is a somewhat alarming shade of blue. Intrigued, I look at my other hand, well what do you know, it’s blue too. My fingernails are almost sapphire. Interesting. I look into the tub, the water isn’t dirty like I thought, it’s blue from the dye in my dark blue sheets. And now I am blue from the dye in my dark blue sheets. I run my hands under the tap and realize that the blue does not just wash off, in fact it doesn’t even get lighter. Then I look in the mirror. My face was submerged only for a second so it’s not as bad as my hands but is it a distinct shade of, you guessed it!, blue. I have darker blue spots all over my cheeks and forehead from where earlier splashes hit my face. “Dear God” I think, “I look like a leopard Smurf. How and I going to explain that to the kids at my school?” Maybe I can tell them it’s some weird American ritual, like green beer on Saint Patrick’s day. Will they believe me if I say Americans dye there faces and hands blue for labor day because they work until they are blue in the face? Something tells me they won’t buy it. I have to be at work in less then two hours. I am supposed to meet with the 11th graders and answer the questions they have prepared for me in English. Should I call in sick? Maybe if I wear a blue sweater they will think I an just accessorizing? I could start a new fashion! Okay, I am panicking a little. I take a deep breath and decide to finish washing my sheets while I think of an alternative. As I am hanging up my sheets it hits me. If detergent gets the dye out of the sheets maybe it will get the dye out of me. I grab some detergent, get my hands wet and scrub. It works! It kind of hurts but it works. It takes me 40 minutes to de blue myself and I won’t need to exfoliate for the next several months but I am no longer an homage to smurfdom. I also had to paint my nails because there was nothing I could do to fix that little problem and I didn’t want to keep having to tell people I was cold. On the train to work that day it finally struck me how ridiculous that whole thing was and I laughed so hard the lady sitting next to me got up and moved to another seat. I bought rubber gloves on my way home, no one can say I didn’t learn for this experience.

Me and some other volunteers singing "Baby Shark"

My new apartment!

July 23, 2007

I joined the Peace Corps to really experience the sensation of “roughing it” and to know what is means to struggle to survive, right? Well, when I ended up in Ukraine it seemed that while I many have to lower my artificially high American standards a little, roughing it didn’t really come to mind. That was until I got my first apartment. I say first because I really hope it will not be the only place I stay during my two years here and this is why.
Can you say ninth floor? So can I, and I get a lot of practice with my Ukrainian numbers because I count each step up to the ninth floor every day as I trek up and down. Now before you ask, yes, it does have a lift but allow me to briefly describe why I don’t use this lift. It is very old. It makes more noises while it is going up then the babycias do when they hike up 9 flights of stairs. When I came to look at the apartment my host sister and I rode in the lift and managed to make the trip without incident. Then next day when we came with my distressingly large amounts of baggage to move me in, I loaded the tiny lift with bags and then wedged myself in thinking, “the fewer trips on this death trap the better”. The doors closed and I pressed the button for the 9th floor. And waited…and waited…still waiting…the lift didn’t move. And interestingly enough, even though the lift wasn’t moving, the doors wouldn’t open.
Here is a brief explanation of a Ukrainian elevator. They are very small compared to western elevators, maybe 4 feet by 3 feet. They are dark but the doors (on this lift anyway) don’t close all the way so you get some light from each floor you pass and you can wave to, say hi, and chat about the weather with people on the landings as you head up to your floor. There is no such thing as a panic button that will ring highly trained help to come rescue if you get stuck. You have to beg for help from anyone who happens to be passing by, please remember that these people speak only Russian while I on the other hand, do not. So here I am, stuck in the lift will half of my worldly belongings and having no clear escape. Thankfully, I was with other people and I watched through the crack in the doors as my babycia went for help. Meaning, she got some large burly gentleman to try and pry the doors open. That didn’t work but it did make the lift shake a lot and threaten to drop into the basement. I also got a great look at this gigantic mans sweaty and very furry chest. Next they sent my host sister to look for the handy guy, he was nowhere to be found, vacationing in Siberia or something… .but if I wanted to wait.... At this point I am starting to have visions of myself becoming the only Peace Corps volunteer to successfully complete their service from inside of an elevator. I could be the new poster child for why building upkeep and renovation is so badly needed. I had visions of my Babycia passing me traditional dishes through the gap in the doors and setting up a tube that would keep me supplied with water and borsht, the only two things you really need to live in Ukraine. Desperate, I start pushing buttons, thinking to myself, “at the very worst this thing will explode and I can at least be buried in America.” The lift begins to shake, then squeal, then sigh, then quote a little Shakespeare, then the doors opened and I jetted out of there faster then a Peace Corps volunteer headed for McDonalds.
At this point we gave up on the elevator and began to hoof it up the 9 flights to my new apartment. Well, new to me anyway. I have 2 years of stuff and an 89 pound host sister to help me. By the time we were done, I was ready to just topple over and sleep on the floor. That was until I realized just how dirty the floor really was. Picture this, you are in New York, or Chicago or some other big city. Now find a building that was built sometime not too long after WWII (I am being optimistic about this date). Some of the apartments have been in families for years and are in wonderful shape with clean windows, nice carpet, and the obligatory cat sunning itself on the sill. But then you have the apartments that have been rented out cheaply to whoever needs them for however long. Students, the unemployed, Peace Corps Volunteers… Can you imagine how different those two same apartments look? I have the latter. I counted not one, not two, but FIVE different types of wallpaper in the main room/bedroom. When I turn the light on in the morning I feel like I am still dreaming. In some places there is no wall paper at all and you can see the crumbling concrete underneath. It’s very ghetto shik. The floor is some sort of red plastic linoleum with a distressing number of mysterious burns. But there is a bed and a closet so what more does a girl really need?
I have a balcony. The windows leading out to it have been painted and taped shut, as have the windows to the kitchen. I assume this is because of the super cold weather in the winter but who really knows. The balcony itself seems to cling to the face of the building through nothing more then sheer willpower and a lot of scotch tape. You think I am kidding... Two of the four widows leading to the outside world have no glass but do provide a nice breeze. I think at one time this was an open air balcony but had at some point been walled in. However, the 6 to 10 inch gaps at the corners probably let it get pretty cold in the winter. There is a nest of birds in the corner. I only go out onto the balcony to hang laundry so someone might as well enjoy it. The clothes lines are strategically hung at neck level so if you aren’t paying attention you can garrote yourself. I would call that roughing it.
I feel less guilty about not knowing much about cooking when I got this kitchen. The stove has two burners that work, two that don’t, and an oven that has not worked since Kennedy was in office. But it leans to the left so we can at least talk about politics. You have to climb under the table to turn on the gas valve manually each time you wish to cook because there is a minute leak somewhere between the valve and the stove. I am very careful to turn that bad boy off each time because I would hate to go to cook myself breakfast one morning and end up being blown through the window. All of the counters are handmade and while one of them it alright the other looks like it was made by one of my sisters modern artist friends because it has lots of funny angles and no even surfaces. I got a roll of my own wall paper and actually covered the table/counter with it because the wood was…um…not clean. Everything now has tacky plastic covers so it is all sanitary and just a touch white trashy. It is starting to feel a little more like home. Now all I need is a cat…