theunlitsea.com

This is nuts. It’s after midnight, I’m in a hotel room after being evicted from our house by an unfortunately placed oak, and my life is bordering on eight different kinds of chaos. In fact, things couldn’t be more different in many ways than when I was writing regularly back in Odessa. But I’ve been thinking for ages about coming back to this blog; in fact, I’ve tried several times and failed for a diversity of reasons, ranging from technical ineptitude to lack of motivation.

Part of the trouble is I’m not sure what it should be. Ordinary life seems so, well, ordinary. But there are things I’d like to share with everyone, and maybe this is the way to do it. So let’s give it a shot.

My favorite blogs tend to be about food, decor, funny stories and pretty pictures. I’m not much for funny stories at the moment — those may come — and I’m not cooking much in the Residence Inn. But I am now redecorating two rooms of our house, thanks to the above-mentioned tree, so maybe I can at least use this spot as a sounding board for ideas.

What else would you all like to see here?

Hello, is anybody out there?

The Ukrainian Parliament voted to dump Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister today. It’s no surprise after she lost the presidential election last month. It’s also probably not the last we’ll see of her, either.

Tymoshenko is a fascinating character. I found that the longer we stayed in Ukraine, the more interested, even obsessed, I became with her. First of all, she’s a powerful, political woman in Ukraine, and even though many Ukrainians pooh-pooh that fact — I even heard one say they couldn’t understand why we made such a big deal over Hilary Clinton running for president — in that macho culture, it’s meaningful.

She’s also, in some ways, a cult of personality. There’s the famous blond braid, a Ukrainian emblem she adopted as her own (after being a brunette early in her career). There are the designer outfits, the ideal of so many Ukrainian women who I saw spend a fortune I couldn’t believe they had in tony boutiques. There’s the way she’s created a sort of cultural shorthand, like the campaign posters etched with images of traditional folk embroidery and bearing simple slogans like “They talk, she works.” No explanation necessary of who “ona” (she) is.

She’s apparently a charismatic speaker, a native Russian speaker who gives all her public addresses in near-perfect Ukrainian. She became the pro-Western, pro-democracy candidate, although some people say she’s in bed with business and got her money through tricky oligarch tactics. (The New York Times had an interesting profile of her.)

She certainly knows how to work modern technology, too. She’s got her own Web site, which had a post up already today about the Parliamentary vote of no confidence. She also has a blog, where she disses her political opponents and talks about the white tiger cub named after her:

“The zoo has received all the necessary means for keeping Tigryulya. The only thing that it complains about is that it has such an authoritative character that it chases everything around the cage. That is exactly why she is different from everybody. “

How pleasant a surprise is this? Even better, in eight days, Randy will be home.

(Thanks to Melissa Jacobowitz for the photo.)

I’m leaving at dawn, but this certainly isn’t the end of the blog; it’s not even the end of posts about our time in Odessa, because I’ve got about four posts drafted and more to come.

But just to say goodbye, a glance at our second-to-last day. Alex and I did a tour of his favorite parks, with some shopping in between and his favorite lunch at his favorite cafeteria — mashed potatoes and a small Fanta. Then we treated ourselves to a carriage ride along Primorsky Boulevard, with all the lights shining.

Goodbye, Odessa. For now.

One of the things I love best here is the open-air markets. These aren’t farmers’ markets, per se, although some of the sellers are selling their own products. But, really, you can get everything: meat in all sorts of shapes and sizes, much of it not refrigerated; chickens either whole or in bits, including big tubs of feet; lately rabbits whole and skinned; fresh-made sour cream and cottage cheese (tvarog) and salted cheese (bryndza); fish — the smoked fish selection alone is astounding — plus tins of caviar, squirming buckets of crayfish called rak and, occasionally in tubs placed outside the market, live carp.

Some of the items are indisutably Slavic. There are mushrooms, fresh, dried and canned (look next to the big basket of berries, which are medicinal kalyny):

There are more potatoes that you’ve ever seen before, often being sold straight out of trucks parked outside the market:

There are grains and beans, different kinds of flour, various grinds of buckwheat, and things I can’t identify:

And — of course! — a whole section devoted to pickles, with great heaps of sauerkraut shoppers stick their fingers into to taste as they cruise the crowded aisles, plus pickled cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, mushrooms and, yes, whole small watermelons.

There are plenty of exotic items, too. On one trip we found feijoas, one of Randy’s favorites, and they turned out to be not only cheap but perfectly ripe and delicious. Although we think of the former USSR as all bleak semi-tundra, it’s a good reminder of the abundance of good things that come from the nearby Caucuses and, a bit farther away, Central Asia. Right now, two of the big specialty stands are persimmons and pomegranates (plus a stand that squeezes fresh pomegranate juice, YUM!),  which probably come in from Georgia or Armenia. And of course, all year round, there are the dried-fruit-and-nut men, who are as aggressive in hawking their wares as any seller I encountered in the Turkish bazaar.

There are non-food booths, too, and the specialty is astounding. Yesterday, I bought a couple of brooms from one of about five broom-makers tucked away in the corner of Privoz, the largest markets. There are shops with just toys or knitted goods or shoes or CDs. There are booths or stands that seem to just carry string and rope, or just plastic bags (which are taken very seriously here), or just cooking implements.

There are shops that just seem to carry buckets and mops:

Shops for bras:

And plumbing:

And fishing equipment:

And pets. In fact, these pictures and the two above come from the market that specializes in hardware, outdoor gear, animals and animal supplies:

(Don’t worry, the bunnies were at the pet market, not the meat one.)

I’ve always loved open-air markets — there’s just something about the rush in the air, the buzz of picking out exactly what you want, and the opportunity to roam the aisles and compare. Then, when I started getting into food, I quickly learned that the closer you can get to the source, the better, and it’s hard to beat buying dill picked that morning in some babushka’s backyard or fish caught locally and brought to the market swimming in a tub.

But now that we’re preparing to leave, I realize there’s something more: the people. While customer service is generally a gaping black hole, people get it at the market. They call out to shoppers to offer a taste and a smile with their wares. They’re usually shocked to find an American shopping there, since few tourists stray outside the city center, and usually pleased to tell me what different foods are or which apples are sweetest.

Our time here has been so short that we’ve made just a few friends, but I do feel an odd bond with my regular market vendors. Oh, sure, Privoz is such a zoo that half the time I struggle to find the pickle section at all, much less remember which woman I bought those delicious eggplant from last week. But at the smaller market, Alex and I are enough of a novelty — and we’ve been routinely enough — that the woman with the good pears now has a big smile and a greeting for us, and Korean salad lady may present him with a little gift of carrot slaw. It’s really very sweet, and it’s going to be very hard to leave.

A quick update to the machiny post; Alex and I discovered this really cool car parked outside one of our favorite coffeeshops the other day. It took a little hunting (God Bless the Internet), but it turns out it’s an old Soviet contraption called the invalidka.

As you might suspect from the name, it was made just for the handicapped — and made tiny enough for anyone to use it — and they were given or sold very cheaply to people who qualified. The brakes and gas are on the steering wheel, and the engine is two-stroke. Yep, like a lawnmower.

They were apparently made up into the 1990s, but are now rare and kind of a collector’s item. And why not? They’re adorable, and probably even easier to park than a Smart car. Especially, if, like here, you just park them on the sidewalk.

Check out my new, custom-designed (by me) blog header! Gone is the pixillated photo filched from the Web. Instead, this is part of a shot I took from our climb up high above the Black Sea in Crimea. Plus some new text.

Now that the header looks better, and I realize the whole theme is kind of ugly. You should brace yourself for more changes in the future.

In fact, you could say that the photo itself symbolizes our tentative steps into the next unknown. Come on in … the water’s fine!

Sometimes, traveling with a small child feels limiting. We can’t do all-day walking tours, we’ve bypassed out-of-the-way destinations that require long bus rides, and we don’t always get to eat when or where we want to.

On the other hand, we’ve just learned about a piece of Russian popular culture that we would never have encountered if it weren’t for Alex: Doctor Aybolit.

Aybolit is sort of a Russian Doctor Doolittle, although the poems by Korney Chukovsky are very roughly based on Doolittle and are in verse. His name is a play on the words “Ai!” (ow) and the verb for “hurt.” Like Doolittle — or probably more so these days — he’s a classic character, and so is his nemesis, the evil Barmaley. He’s been made into several films, including a series with wonderful, Terry Gilliam-like animation from the 1980s (that was actually made in Ukraine). The first one’s above.

So why all the fuss over the good doctor? Well, today Alex and I saw a ballet based on his adventures. An Aybolit ballet has been around since the 1940s, but this seems to be a new version, with the evil Barmaley cast as a TV mogul surrounded by henchmen who also act as paparazzi. The costumes were spectacular — especially the crocodile, who didn’t really dance but had a giant snapping head and bit Barmaley at a crucial moment — and Alex quickly grasped that the dancers were animals and were telling a story, even if he couldn’t quite tell what it was. (Although he did spend a good part of the first act asking “Is the doggie a he or a she? Is the fox a he or a she? Is the goat a he or a she?”) In fact, since Randy missed it — he’s fighting a stomach bug — he may take Alex again next week. Which is good, since even before the curtain went down, he asked “Will they come do it again?”

Ahhh, it was nice to miss Black Friday, except for the email ads from Macy’s and Amazon and eBay and everyone else. I did do a little shopping today, heading over to the apartment of an expat we met yesterday (she’s from Jackson, Miss. and has been here 15 years) who’s selling some Ukrainian Christmas decorations on behalf of a local friend of hers who apparently helps run a farm for foster children but is in dire financial straits. Anyway, that little trip, plus lunch at the mall cafeteria (best salad bar around), was my little tribute to this day of capitalism back home.

Of course, there is no Black Friday here, and I’m not sure how much of a shopping season there is. A few Christmas tchotchkes have popped up in the large grocery and toy stores in recent weeks, even though Christmas won’t be celebrated until Jan. 7, which is where it falls on the Orthodox calendar. The fir and spruce trees that I’ve seen popping up will be decorated for New Year’s instead, and Ded Moroz, or Grandfather frost — who is a Santa figure although he only sometimes wears red, isn’t so fat and rides in a horse-drawn sled — brings presents then, too. Darlene, the woman we met up with today, said that the children often have to recite a poem or sing a song in order to earn their gifts, which sounds lovely.

And on the way home, we even saw a couple of local restaurants getting into the holiday spirit.