27.1.2008

January is almost over and the start of February will be starting with a conference for my entire group to signal the beginning of the end. The conference is signaling the end of service, which will actually happen sometime in April or May. But that doesn’t mean this past month hasn’t been at all just looking toward the end. I haven’t truly been able to think too much about that as I have been keeping as busy as possible with day-to-day activities and the full phalanx of holidays that started with New Years and continued through Orthodox Christmas and a second New Years based on the old calendar. This doesn’t include all of the smaller holidays. So it all boils down to me keeping plenty busy, but not in the general work centered way of thinking. I guess you could say I’ve been too busy to work.

Since New Years eve and my birthday coincide, I wanted to have a good time, so along with Ira and some of her friends we planned to stay in a hostel in Lviv. I had met the owner of the hostel during a party for Halloween and he was a good guy, originally from Australia. He was accommodating and it was a great time there. It was fun to see the mixture of the two styles of celebrating New Years since other Peace Corps Volunteers were celebrating in the same hostel, which was a surprise to me. Parties in general are a little bit different, Americans tend to have parties with people standing up more and walking around, they will carry their plates and drinks and eat standing up. Ukrainians have the party centered around a table, heaps of food is put on the table and they tend to sit around the table the entire time and often will watch the television shows that are on. There are shows in the U.S. too, of course, who hasn’t watched the ball fall in Times Square at least once on TV?

But the fun was to go to the center in Lviv by the Opera Theatre, a huge crowd of people had gathered around the central Christmas Tree, since Christmas had not come yet in Ukraine. A large screen showed a countdown, but what really showed the start of the new year was the near explosion of fireworks that happened. Growing up in Oregon was a tame experience since it was illegal to buy any truly exploding fireworks or rockets of any type. As far as I could tell, there is no limit on what people can buy beyond the amount they want to spend. Rockets were flying everywhere, M-80s and a variety of other fireworks were blowing up, it was absolute chaos, and a lot of fun. The best advice was to stay in crowded areas, because any open space was almost guaranteed to have a explosive of some sort thrown into it. I had no desire to visit a hospital that night, so I tried to stay as safe as possible.

After the actual turn of the new year, we headed back to the hostel, but it definitely didn’t signal the end of the night, we headed out again and didn’t actually head to sleep until somewhere around 4 a.m. All in all, I can’t complain about the night, it was a good time. But the festivities didn’t end that day because Ira’s brother has a birthday five days after me, which is followed by Christmas Eve and the holy supper and then by Christmas the next day, January 7.

Holy supper is almost considered more important than Christmas day itself. Although all of the days include quite a bit of eating. The supper itself traditionally consists of 12 different dishes, none of which have any meat in them. Although fish is in quite a few different dishes. The dishes are almost a menu of traditional Ukrainian cuisine, which consists of holybsi (cabbage rolls), vareniky (a kind of dumpling), rice, potatoes and fried different dishes. One of the dishes I only see around the holidays is called kutya, a mixture of poppy seeds, raisins, sugar and occasionally nuts. The dish is really sweet, but also quite tasty. I ate my fair share of it, and probably a bit more.

All that makes for a busy week, well at least a celebratory week. Of course the next couple days afterwards were also minor holidays or at least angel days. One of the early things I learned in Ukraine, is not only are there names that are quite common, basically every name has its own name day, most likely more than one. So the people named Tanya get to celebrate their day, Igor, Sasha. They all get their own days when people congratulate them for having that name and have a party.
I had a few days at home after that before.

I had a few days at home, before taking off to the next trip to visit another volunteer and then to Budapest, Hungary. At fellow volunteer’s site, there was going to be a wine festival. Why they hold a wine festival in the beginning of January is beyond me, but there is so I headed to Robert Henderson’s site and things just didn’t work out the way we expected. On the way, he was bit by a dog, in itself, it doesn’t seem like a big problem, although painful, but Peace Corps requires anyone bit by a dog to either quarantine it, or go to Kyiv for rabies shots. They wouldn’t believe his story of being able to contain the dog and it was only a small scratch, so he needed to go to Kyiv, which put a crimp in our plans to celebrate the festival with him. But he left us the key to his place and we had a good time, even without him and ended up meeting up with him in Budapest, rather than him traveling with us.