Housekeeping

I added a favorite posts page to the menu bar. Please excuse the navel-gazing; it is a personal blog, after all.

Emma's Life in Ukraine, According to Me

My friend Emma moved to Ukraine at the end of spring, because that was the first exciting and far-flung place where she was able to find a job, although the people running the American English school operation were not super convincing in their capabilities to run a business and employ people of international origins. Emma didn't take a freighter there, which is her trans-Atlantic transportation preference, though she has not yet tried it out. When she traveled from Pittsburgh to Poland it would have taken too long; always, it will take too long. It only cost her about $400 to fly to Warsaw from New York, though. One-way flights...they are scary in concept, but more affordable than coming home again, at least if you have a guaranteed income-source in your new host country. I'm not sure Ukraine would consider itself her host, though. Something about visas...

In any case, now my best friend lives in an eastern Ukrainian city by the name of Запорі́жжя. That's Zaporizhzhya. Yes, that's right, two zh's in a row. I generally just call it Zaporizhia, though, which is less funny and more normal. To me.

Things I "Know" About Zaporizhzhya   

• I am choosing to remember the story this way: the first thing Emma (and therefore, I) knew about Zaporizhzhya was its deeply toxic, industrial nature. (Possibly a little harsh, here; I've never been to the place!) She started out in Kiev, you see, training to teach English, and she expected to be placed there, or in Odessa, if she was lucky. Instead, she learned she would be moving to Zaporizhzhya, and when she told her students, one of them helpfully told her: "You want see red snow? Go to Zaporizhzhya!" When I heard this, I was afraid she was destined to die a bloody death, but apparently it is a joke about the amount of pollution in the precipitation. At least I think it was a joke.
• Zaporizhzhya has "only one street." The entire city is one big road, which will take you out of the city (as roads tend to do, I guess). I hear the city's not much, although Wikipedia says it's the sixth-largest in Ukraine and it is much bigger than Ann Arbor, MI. I think Emma walks along this road until she leaves the city sometimes. She knows a graffiti artist who used to live in the bedroom in the apartment in the giant Soviet apartment block she lives in, and who taught at her school, and he knows some people (also graffiti? artists?) who live in a house which may be a dacha or may be something else, and it is on the edge of town.
• Emma's hair gets dirty, sooty, from the air. Or was that a story about 19th-century Pittsburgh and Detroit? Oh, no, I think it's true of all three. One day she said to me "my hair is so full of dirt by the end of each day." I thought this was exceedingly strange, but then I found out it wasn't, really.
• Zaporizhzhya is, like Kiev, on the Dnieper River. When I asked Emma if it was polluted, she replied, "Jesus Christ, I can't believe it's not. It's black. Absolutely." There are at least four conversations we have had wherein Emma hasn't had hot water in days. The water has heavy metals in it. When she first moved to Zaporizhzhya, she bought water from an old woman who sells water on the side of the road, or something.
Emma: something in the water is destroying my stomach
Marisa: nooooooo
Emma: even though I paid for it
Marisa: you mean bottles?
Emma: there's this little booth in the side of a building with an old lady in it
and she fills up your bottles
I think it's filtered but it's definitely not boiled
and it's slightly yellow
Marisa: uh, ew
Emma: but my roommate, and everyone else, is fine
she was like Oh you probably maybe just have giardiasis
and I was like Oh I'm gonna destroy the earth, no worries

More Zaporizhzhyan tidbits: While the weather was still warm, Emma and her fellow teachers and their students were always going to tents (on the river?) so they could eat grilled meat and drink. Like all the time. Other than that, the internet record suggests she mainly survived on fruit. Apricots, melons, strawberries, tomatoes. Figs! But now it is cold and we can only presume that Ukraine's supermarkets are empty in the winter. Emma also likes to always eat at the same restaurant chain, which serves lots of starchy delights like varenyky (Ukrainian stuffed dumplings) and bread. But maybe that is only when she is in Kiev. Which doesn't happen as much because the rabies thing is all taken care of!

Tomorrow Emma is going to Dnepropetrovsk, which is a city also on the Dnieper, I assume from its name. I know this name; it is the city where all the oligarchs are from, and the oligarchs rule Ukraine. Something about the mob? Also, Pink Pants Dima (a student in either Emma's or her roommate's class who only has one pair of pants? and they're pink) has a very nice Honda, and that is how they are going to get to Dnepropetrovsk, apparently. I always imagined a bus or a train. Anyway, that city has better shopping than Zaporizhzhya, so Emma can work on expanding her exclusively black and, I think, probably largely ridiculous Ukrainian wardrobe. Yay for Fridays!

Photos stolen from Emma via She Eats the Country She Devours the Land.

Then and Later

This is the continuation of my post two days ago. I probably didn't actually get where I wanted to go in this one either, though, because photo-heavy and high-word-count posts don't really work well together. Let's go to bed.

I wanted to call this post "Then and Now," but my studio apartment is now Meg's home, and I only have photos to show you of how it last looked as my home. Having someone I know takeover my apartment is cool, though, because I get a kick out of seeing alternative uses of space. Meg has so many cute things on the walls, and books piled on books next to books books books—pretty much the best way to decorate, right? I haven't brought that many of my books with me from my parents', so I don't use that method as much as I would like.

This was my home soon after moving in. Not all the pictures were up, but pretty much everything was decided.

Here we are the day before I started putting things in bags and boxes to move out.

There was supposed to be a gallery wall where the Croatian art poster is, but I never added anything else to the walls after my dad put all the hooks in for me. In the meantime, I've also misplaced the postcards of vintage French travel posters that were supposed to go up between the window and the archway into the kitchen.

Cooking in this kitchen was actually pretty great. The tiny counter to the right of the sink really did expand the workspace, and I could move the plant off the toaster-holding mini-fridge and have more space for whatever I was working with. The fake wood countertops looked pretty decent—warm, welcoming, and not very obviously dirty. My kitchen in the new apartment has horrible almost-kelly-green streaky linoleum on the counter and backsplash...bleh. 

The tray on top of a narrow plant stand between the fridges was quite a precarious way to store extra mugs and glassware, but it worked really well and made use of what was othewise dead space.  

The bathroom shall remain a mystery for all time. (There weren't any windows, so it was hard to photograph, and there wasn't much to look at, just my sometimes beautifully folded towels. The shower, though, was large and ever-hot, so it was great. Although now I have a nice warm BATHTUB and if I could just remember to save some relaxation time for myself, I would take an awesome bath every week.)

I am so tired and I'm getting up in basically seven hours so I can pack a lunch and pick some clothes (so hard to do in the dark while that other lucky person gets to remain in bed for hours) and be clean and whatever else I have to do in time to be at work at eight a.m. Hard times, seriously.

Getting up early isn't so bad, at least for work at nine, or even eight forty-five.

I am a zombie now, and will be a zombie at six whatever-the-fuck, though. Godless hour.

I guess that's all the hours.

Today I couldn't write a good blog post, again!, but this time, it's because the dog ate my keyboard.

Or because my brother called and offered me our homemade applesauce from last week, finally, and also chicken paprikash on spaetzle and you know, just like I don't say no when someone likes me well enough to offer me a job, I don't say no when someone offers me free, delicious food. So now tomorrow instead of today will be my no-fun-humans night, so that maybe maybe maybe I can make a little headway toward feeling calm and on track and in charge of this life. Just in time for three awfully busy days.

I signed up for that third shift at the third job, but I can't say I'm looking forward to the nonexistent down time and then this whole blogging requirement. At least my thighs have (mostly) recovered from their first dedicated workout in six months last Saturday. Gah.

I Need a Title

Two years ago, I moved into my very own apartment for the first time, which was exciting and awesome and kind of scary, especially that first night, when I didn't yet have sheets that actually fit my bed or curtains to replace the unappealing Venetian blinds that weren't wide enough for the huge window they hung in.

But when you live in a studio apartment, it doesn't take too long to get settled in, because there just aren't that many ways to arrange things, not very many spaces on the wall to cover.

Oh glorious curtains, you blocked out the eastern sun so well, even though I didn't hem you until a year and eight months later or something ridiculous, at which point I had to use a sheet to block the sun because in May it was already time to live in lethargic darkness. 

A note about those curtains: they are great when they're hanging up, but they are not great when you are deeply torn between being a perfectionist and being not that great at sewing or having enough space to actually lay things out on a flat surface and properly measure/cut/make things be right angles. For that reason, we purchased our living room curtains already made, although I still fit in a lot of agony about which ones to buy to make up for all the time I saved not almost screwing up their fabrication.

I think it's fun to see how the space changed over two years. That apartment was the longest I stayed put in any home other than the ones I lived in as a barely-cognizant infant-through-kindergartener and then from kindergarten until college. (Sidenote: Is it weird that I never realized cognizant had a Z in it until now?) Like most college students, I moved eight times in five years, thanks to some soul-stifling summers spent with my parents and that whole moving-to-Germany thing. I'm not going to say I ever got good at moving, though I like to think if I were undertaking a big cross-country move, complete with furniture and shipping giant boxes labelled KITCHEN and LIVING ROOM, I would get all the things in logical boxes so that they weren't awful to find, and everything, absolutely everything, would be packed up and out of the way so that on the horrid moving day, I'd just have to load up the truck (or have someone load it for me because maybe I'd be rich by then, please?) and head on out. But so far, I've moved an hour west, and then an hour back home, and then back to Ann Arbor again, and then six blocks away...

This is how you move a small loveseat when you are only moving it six blocks and you don't keep a car in that city; also, this might be my favorite college-era photo.

...and anyway, nothing is really that pressing when you're moving three doors down, and so that is why I am still not the best at packing.

In between those ellipses, I went to the movie theater and saw a movie that was longer than I expected. So I will postpone the remembering of my old apartment and discussion of how nice it is to rearrange furniture when you're in a place for more than a year for tomorrow.

Good Sunday

It was a good Sunday because we had an extra hour of sleep due to daylight savings or whatever it's called, so it was okay that I was at work until midnight and we didn't go to bed promptly. (I was too tired to achieve promptness.) It was good because my legs are so sore from working out yesterday that I can't move them easily, which is good because the fatigue means I accomplished something. For our Sunday dinner, let's called it—we ate after two, and our bodies thought it was an hour later—we had chicken roasted in a bath of chicken broth and carrots and shallots. Roasted potatoes on the side.

Not long after that, I had to go to work for a while, and Cooper had to suffer on through essay planning and writing. But in the background he had lots of chicken bones cooking in a pot of water, and now we have chicken broth for soup tomorrow. And a pie crust for a quiche! And I cooked extra bacon with our bacon breakfast, so that's already ready for the quiche.

This blog post basically reads like an online chat with my brother—John is always asking me which path he should follow toward sustenance. I think the answer is pretty much always quiche.

Let's hope all this rich food contributes to a richly productive and healthy week. Begone, dry throat! Next week is a busy one, and I will not stand for sickness!

This was a roast chicken dinner a few weeks ago, in the evening, with less work and fewer obligations in the way. It was also delicious.