a truly Ukrainian adventure

So, I have a new friend. Her name is Anya, Annie for "short." I met her at church when I first got here five months ago but we have just recently started hanging out and getting to know each other. She is a doll and her life is full of fascinating stories. She took me home with her last weekend and I had a true Ukrainian experience - outside of the city.

She lives in a little town called Romny which is about four hours (on the bus) north of Kiev. The two biggest attractions there are the train station (where both her parents work) and the bread factory that makes bread all day long, seven days a week. Whatever part of the town you are in, you can smell fresh baked bread in the air. Ukrainians love their bread.

My first experience in Romny was getting stuck in the ice on one of the back roads that led to Annie's house. A family friend of hers, Vanya, picked us up from the bus station in his tiny little car and got stuck, nose down in an 8 inch deep tire track. So we got out of the car, tied a rope to the back bumper and pulled with all our might. No dice. So we pushed. And we dug at the ice, and we pushed again and pulled again. And it still didn't budge. So we looked at the stars for a while (which were amazingly visible outside of the city) and then Annie and I walked the rest of the way home. Another car eventually came and helped pull Vanya out of the ice and he was able to bring our suitcases home. Normally getting stuck and having to exert physical effort like that would have been irritating, but strangely all I could do was smile.

I don't even really know how to explain the time I spent there. Everything was just so adorable. Her parents have lived in the same little house for some thirty years and have just recently done some work on it to make it more modern and put in indoor plumbing. Her grandma lives in the house next door, and happens to be the cutest babushka I have ever seen. They make all their food from scratch and they don't waste anything. And they are always eating yet stay in good shape from all the walking they do. They walk everywhere. Even the oldest, frailest people.

Annie and I rode the bus for two hours (one way) on Sunday to get to church. The closest church is in Sumi and in order to get to church on time we had to wake up at 6, be ready to leave by 6:45, walk twenty minutes to the bus stop, buy tickets, and be ready to board the 7:20 bus. When it dropped us off two hours later in Sumi, we had to catch a local city bus that dropped us at the corner by the church and made it in time for our 10 o'clock meeting. It was a Russian-speaking branch so Annie translated for three hours for me, the doll. All I could think about the whole time was how amazing Annie is that she would go to so much trouble to get to church every time she is home visiting her family. And how grateful I am for the church building that is literally up the street from my house in Arizona. It really put things into perspective for me.

Above all the other experiences I had over the weekend, the experience of eating the food was the best. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a seafood lover. And we had fish every day for the four days we were there. But surprisingly enough, the fish was one of the easier things for me to swallow. I wouldn't say that I am a picky eater, because I like a wide variety of food, but I guess you could say that I'm pretty particular about what I eat. There are some things I have eaten all my life that sometimes gross me out because it doesn't matter what it is, if I think about it too much, I just can't do it. And it's not fair to say that things are "gross" because it's not really true. Food is is just one of those things - it's all relative. Having said that, I'm going to list the things I ate because, well, I'm pretty proud of myself for trying them. (And just for the record, there were a lot of things that I really really enjoyed.)

• Salo - thick, white pig fat.... nuff said.
• Borscht - traditional Ukrainian stew, that I usually l-o-v-e, but this one had SARDINES in it. Gulp...
• Fish with tomato and onion sauce. I don't know what kind of fish it was (neither did they...) but it was good. Besides the fact that it still had bones and skin! Eek.
• Blinchiki - little miniature pancakes made with flour, eggs, sugar, raisins, and kefir (a fermented milk). We dipped these in jam and they were pretty tasty. As long as I wasn't thinking about the fermented milk.... :)
• Plov - rice in oil with chopped carrots... one of my favorite Ukrainian dishes. This one had chicken in it (I couldn't think about what parts of the chicken were in there, but it was good....)
• Blini - Ukrainian pancakes, similar to crepes. We had some with a cottage cheese/egg mixture and some with sauteed meat and onions. De-licious. The best part about these though is that I learned how to make them!
• Pashdet - liver, carrots, and salo fed through a meat grinder and made into a paste and covered with butter to spread over bread. Um, again, too much thinking.
• Fried, battered fish. Good, even though it was the WHOLE fish - tail, bones, and all.
• Smoked fish. Uh, no le gusta - this one's head was still attached.
• Vyinigret - quintessential Ukrainian salad made with chopped beets, potatoes, pickles, carrots, peas, and whatever else you want to add... Love it.
• Olevye - salad made with boiled eggs, mayonnaise, peas, white beans... It was pretty good.
• Stuffed peppers - red bell peppers stuffed with meat, rice, and onions. My mom made something similar when we were growing up and I love them.
• Kolbasa domashna - homemade sausage made with different kinds of meat and big chunks of salo... not my fave.
• Cabbage salad - salad made with cabbage. And apples, carrots, walnuts, cucumbers, and raisins. Super tasty!
• Piroshki - bread balls stuffed with cabbage or potatoes or peas and deep fried. Mmmmmm.... so good!
• Zapikanka - cottage cheese, sour cream, eggs, rice, raisins all baked in a casserole dish and served warm with sugar sprinkled on it. It was.... interesting...
• Napoleon cake - layers of baked dough with a bavarian creme type of filling. Delicious.
• Compote - one of the only non-alcoholic Ukrainian drinks (kidding...). It's cherries and apricots and whatever other fruit soaked in water with a little bit of sugar. They drink it all the time - at room temperature. It's interestingly good.

* I don't know how to spell most of these things in English so I just went ahead and made up the spelling... just fyi.

Yeah, that was a long list of food. But seriously, the majority of my time with Annie was spent eating. Monday was Women's Day - a huge holiday in all former Soviet countries where they celebrate (and drink to) all women - and we celebrated all day. And by celebrate, I mean eat. And eat. Lots. Of. Food. I literally felt like I was going to explode. More so than I ever have on Thanksgiving.... and that's saying something.

Living in the city you don't get a lot of that "true" Ukrainian experience because it's all apartment complexes and bad driving and lots of people. I mean, don't get me wrong - it's still a great cultural experience. But going home with Annie gave me some good insight to how most people grow up here. I learned a lot about her and her family and I had a great time watching them interact with each other. And I did so many things I never thought I'd do. I had my first "hole in the ground" bathroom experience at a bus stop on the way. I sat on the kitchen floor with Annie and learned how to crack and empty walnuts and I learned how to make blini. I squatted in the bottom of the bathtub and sprayed myself to get clean. I watched a movie in Russian while Annie told me what was going on and I ate sardines and liver. I ate lots of fish.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it was something I will never forget. I loved every minute.

Romny

I liked this little gazebo

For the love of salo!

We got flowers for Women's Day at church... aww

Sumi... Brrrr

Me & Annie and a pretty church - city square in Sumi

To keep the street dogs out?

All the vendors on the street selling flowers for Women's Day

Having ice cream... What?

Annie's adorable grandma - making piroshki

Annie's family friends, Vanya & Eira - love loved them!

The Women's Day feast!

Annie's mom Tanya, dad Tolya, Vanya, Eira, and me - they were the best.

Feast #2 at grandma's house... Annie's grandma, aunt, cousin, cousin's husband, and kids

How I felt about the fish...

Leaving Romny and meeting the taxi at the end of the road because he refused to drive on the "back roads" - yep, that's Annie's mom pulling a sled with the suitcase on it.... classic

Good times.