My landlord Igor

Elena is the liaison for expat teachers here at the school. She finds apartments for new teachers, relocates teachers who hate their apartments, and gets paid very little money for a lot of hassle. A couple of months ago, Elena stopped by to tell me "Mary, you are very lucky, you have best landlord of the school! He calls me to ask how is Mary, does she have problem? but you have no problem! He says you are good tenant, beautiful! intelligent!" (which is now a running joke with me and Patty "beautiful! intelligent!" what was lost in translation?)

I was tickled to hear that I had the best landlord, but just learned that Elena has been going around saying that to several teachers, probably to quell dissent.

However, Igor IS a great landlord. He runs over whenever I do something stupid like locking myself out (only once). When internet/phone service is down, he immediately takes steps to correct it--it may take a few weeks, but that's how things go here, and Igor takes care of it.

The first time he came, in August, he arranged water delivery (can't drink the water here, it's full of radiation from Chernobyl), helped me buy a cell phone, and sat around telling me stories about his life in Kyiv.

He comes over at least twice a month to take care of bills. He's usually in a hurry but I'm always trying to pick his brains. Early in January a Ukrainian politician was shot and killed in a hunting accident. Yevhen Kushnarev was supposed to be well-supported and well-liked, but this is a country where the president was poisoned by dioxin in his soup (his kids go to my school!)

"Hey, Igor," I said,"what's the deal with this hunting accident? was it an accident or an assassination?"

Igor paused as he was pulling on his boots. "Oh, it was accident, they were drunk, I don't know how it is in civilized countries, but here, hunting, bottle of vodka, two bottles of vodka..."

Of course, all of the Americans here were making jokes about Dick Cheney.

Living space

Here are photos of my apartment. Everyone who sees it says it looks very "Soviet"--the furniture is bland and utilitarian (fine with me!) and the kitchen is rather stark and simple, but everything works! Some of my friends have had real problems with their apartments and their landlords, ie Victoria kept getting electrical shocks when she used her stove, Pat and Roman were without water for several days and without hot water for two weeks, someone else's toilet leaked, etc., so I'm lucky.

I'm also lucky because my landlord, Igor, speaks English. He's about my age and managed to survive and even thrive under the Soviet system. Some of my friends say he must be crooked--anyone who has any money here is suspected of being connected to the criminal underworld. But Igor may have other connections. He told me that when Ukraine gained independence in 1991, the new president received the first visa to the US, and he (Igor) received the second.

On the other hand, as his tenant, I'm supposed to be his "cousin from America who doesn't speak Ukrainian." So who knows?

Pubs and Catastrophes

My cultural events for the weekend were Canadian Pub Night and a visit to the Chernobyl Museum. The order should probably have been reversed.

The school staff is a mix of Ukrainians, English, Irish (Republic and Northern), Australians, Americans, a few other nationalities like German, Dutch, Guatamalan, and French---and a LOT of Canadians.

Canadians have a nice accessible embassy (unlike the US embassy which of course is a fortress, you go through two metal detectors and surrender all potential weapons: water bottles, cell phones, chapstick).

The Canadian Embassy also has Pub Night! So nine Canadian and four American teachers had a jolly time discussing Canada, the U.S., and Ukraine, and fighting about Alice Munro (well, that was just me and a couple of Canadians).

Then on Sat. a friend and I visited the Chernobyl Museum (here in Kyiv, not in Chernobyl, which is 60 miles north of here). I remember eating lunch outside with my colleagues at Holmes Middle School, on a beautiful day in April 1986, when one of them looked up at the sky and asked if we'd heard about the disaster.

The USSR wouldn't admit anything had happened until Swedish scientists noticed rising radiation levels from a giant radioactive cloud blowing north from Chernobyl. The Ukrainian public had no idea until about a week later. People in Ukraine tend to blame any health problem on Chernobyl---no wonder.

The museum was heartbreaking. ID cards of the first responders, before and after photos of the hundreds of towns and villages that were evacuated, photos of weeping elderly displaced "babushkas" (Ukrainian for grandmother, generic term for old woman), walls of photos of children, now dead.

The first responders were firefighters who had no clue what kind of fire they were really fighting. Apparently the higher-ups called them "bio-robots" (see link) .

The official death toll was just raised from 31 to 56. But it's probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Road trip to Berlin

Our Christmas break is a wonderful three weeks. I took the train to Berlin from Bohl-Iggleheim after spending Christmas and New Year's with Patty and her family. She and Kai met me there a couple of days later. We managed to see quite a bit of the city, thanks to a walking tour led by an extremely enthusiastic guide. It was supposed to be four hours long but turned into seven hours. Kai was impressed to stand on the ground above the site of Hitler's suicide--it's now a parking lot.

The next day we toured Hohenschonhausen, a Stasi prison for political dissidents or anyone suspected of being a political dissident or anyone who might have known someone who might be suspected of being a political dissident. "The centre of communist repression", as it's called. I never thought much about freedom of speech before coming to a place where it was unheard of. Our guide was the daughter of a former prisoner. She didn't tell this to the entire group, but Patty asked her how she happened to become a guide. Apparently all of the guides have a personal connection to the prison; some of the guides were prisoners themselves.

So the guides have inside information about various methods of torture---psychological, not physical. Psychological torture is easier and doesn't leave any outward marks. It was harrowing even to hear about it. Patty and I agreed that we'd be very easy to torture.

(Patty: "I'm cold!" Me: "I need privacy!" My friend Zig, when I told him about it: "This is the wrong kind of ice for my martini!")

Today is Orthodox Christmas. It's great to celebrate Christmas twice!