Kiev

DAY ONE
Today we did Kiev. Saw Babiyar, several other unsettling monuments to those killed in WWII, saw Shalom Aleichem statue, Golda Meir bust and house, a synagogue, the basic Jewish Kiev tour. Was a bit interesting, a bit annoying as everyone had to take a picture at every available photo op. Which meant that we had to stand there for ten minutes in front of the Golda bust on the sidewalk of a busy street and wait for every camera to click, blocking pedestrian traffic and inviting strange stares. Visited Chesed which is sort of like an Elderhostel JCC. They loved us danced and sang and clapped the second we walked in the room. One old white haired guy kept singing and singing Oofaratzta , though we were tired of dancing and had sang the chorus maybe 7 times already. Later we saw that he only had one leg. One old man had all of his army medals pinned to the lapel of his sports coat. Apparently a lot of the men do that, but unfortunately this man was the only one my group got to see. We ate a lovely meal of rice, borsht (our first bowl of many) and burnt-wood flavor tea.

A bit on Ukranian home furnishings: they are 50 years behind the rest of the free world. (This may be because for 50 years they were not part of the free world.) It would be euphemistic to call their decorating schemes "interesting." Miriam and I played a game called "Guess which century the wallpaper came from." For example, in our room at the Lodge, the carpet was red with green stripes, the curtains were bright orange with yellow flowers, the wallpaper was beige with brown and orange flowers, the blankets were red and yellow striped, and brown and yellow plaid, the shower was pistachio green, and the toilet seat was the pink commonly known as "Pepto Bismol."

The toilets deserve a paragraph all of their own. From far away, the toilets look like normal American toilets, bright colors aside. But once one looks INSIDE the toilet bowl, one notices The Shelf. There is a concave shelf in the toilet bowl. That is, one separate from the flusher-hole dip. IE, everything sits on The Shelf for full examination, not unlike a Science Fair project, until the flusher is released, at which point a barrage of water carries Shelf contents into the flusher-hole to eventual descent into sewer. I think they have sewers here.

A bit about the scenery-- everything looks pretty much how Poland did, with the old boxy cars and the trees and hills and crummy houses, but the most striking thing again is the trees. Those forests just do not STOP. Tall skinny trunks, thin branches that don't reach far, sparse leaves (it's just barely spring here). But the weirdest part is that the forests are just all over the place. At home, in foresty areas of California or in Providence or Minnesota, the forests stay within forest boundaries. But here, it is as if they cleared some land to build the city, and then the forests saw that they weren't using square acre XYZ, and so they moved in. There are no bare batches of dirt on the ground; every un-used space is Forest. The trees start right behind people's homes, right next to the road.

At night we met with our Ukranian counterparts to plan our seders. I was in a group with Miriam and Adam, and our Ukranians were Ira, Tanya, and Alona. The meeting was pretty dull. This was because we didn't plan anything. We decided it would be more beneficial to get to know our Ukranians by playing cards. So we tried to teach them Canadian Asshole and Kings in the Corner. The high point of the evening came when Adam tried to heat some tap water using the Kaf chashmal, the "electric spoon," the thing that you plug in and put this metal stick piece thing into a glass of water and it heats up the water. Only we didn't really do it right. You are supposed to keep the metal heating side submerged in water the entire time the thing is plugged in, otherwise it could overheat. Adam heated a glass of water and then removed said water heater and went to fill another glass of water to heat, without unplugging. It sort of blew up. By "blew up," I mean the metal side got all red and glowing and hot, and then there was a loud "POP," and then some powdery stuff came out of the wall (actually, to this day we are not quite sure if the powder came out of the wall or out of the metal piece, but it sounds more dramatic if we say it came out of the wall. As if we managed to destroy not only our own little water heater, but also the entire electrical system of the building we were in), and then we noticed that a part of the metal piece, a piece which had not previously existed, was sticking up out of the handle, smoking and very springy. We reported the malfunction to Esther and Ofer. We were told it was a byproduct of our own stupidity. They gave us another Kaf Chashmal and we promised to use it correctly.