Dental problems

My mother, Patty, and Kai are coming to visit tomorrow. Kai will spend Friday at school with me. He's fourteen and in the eighth grade. I have eighth and ninth graders together in the same ESL class, so I told them about Kai and asked them to show him around on Friday.

"What does he look like?" the girls asked, naturally enough. "Oh, here's a picture," I said, and handed them the photo at left.

These kids can be pretty wild, but they looked at the picture and passed it around in shocked silence. It wasn't until I heard a whisper "what's wrong with his teeth?" that I started laughing.

Public art

We walked past this sculpture in Helsinki one night after dinner. The three of us, two women and one man, stood and silently contemplated it for a minute. My male friend finally said "I don't know what you women think when you see this kind of thing, but as a guy, I see penises near heavy machinery and I know I'm gonna at least put on some underwear before I break out the buzz saw..." This guy is one of the funniest people I've ever met. I'm incapable with laughter when he's around. He's usually in the classroom when I'm teaching grade 5---it's hard to keep from guffawing in the middle of some explanation about adjectives vs. adverbs.

Lenin's statues

People here in the FSU (former Soviet Union) don't hate Lenin the way they hate Stalin. A joke among ex-pats (among citizens as well? not sure, probably, where else would this joke have come from?) is that whenever anything goes wrong, just blame it on Stalin. Your rent went up? Stalin's fault. No hot water? Stalin. Slipped on the ice? Stalin again. But he and his henchmen did so much damage, most problems here really can be attributed to Stalin.

However, every town and city still has one statue of Lenin. There may have been ten or twenty statues before 1992. Most of them were pulled down, but, in every community, one has been allowed to stay.

This statue is just off the main avenue in downtown Kyiv, Kreshchatyk vul./blvd. I walk past the statue all the time, and always look up at (not to) it.

Another bad thing about Stalin

Stairways in public places often have steps of different heights. The steps leading down to the subway stations vary, so you can never take climbing stairs for granted, you always have to pay attention, keep your head down, watch your feet. Stalin knew what he was doing. He killed off the "intelligentsia" in the purges, and no one was left who understood how to design public stairways, or nuclear power plants.

Jokes in translation

I thought it would be interesting to have my grade 8 and 9 students translate jokes from their first languages into English. Would the humor come across? Well, no, partly because of their language skills, but also because humor is so culture-bound, especially puns.

One Russian-speaking kid translated a joke that requires you to understand that the Russian word for "woodpecker" is also the word for "snitch." (the joke was about a legendary Russian spy named Shtirliz who allegedly infiltrated the Nazi system in Germany during WWII.) Stepan couldn't explain the joke very well in English, although all of the local kids laughed their heads off.

A few days later, I was at a party with Ukrainian teachers. I asked about this spy, this joke, the pun on the Russian word for "woodpecker." They were happy to explain it to me.

The derivation of the pun is the knock on the door in the middle of the night, knocking like a woodpecker knocks against a tree, the knock that means there's a snitch, one of your neighbors or friends or family members has betrayed you and now the KGB is here to cart you off to the gulag. It was chilling.

Scandinavian winter break

Public schools in Kyiv have been closed for the past couple of weeks for the annual "quarantine." Apparently every year when there's a flu outbreak, schools and businesses close. I'm not sure exactly how serious the flu epidemic is, and think that maybe the quarantine is scheduled to give people some time off--there are no snow days to look forward to in a city like Kyiv.

My school was not affected by the quarantine, but we had a winter break last week. My friends Regan and Zig and I visited Stockholm, then took the ferry to Helsinki for a few days. It was a real contrast to leave a poor cold country like Ukraine and spend time in rich cold countries like Sweden and Finland. People don't appear miserable and beaten down by weather and circumstances, as they do in Kyiv.

Everyone dresses well but not flashily, everyone looks healthy, you don't see anyone drinking in the streets. (a gauge of public health: how many citizens are swigging beer at 7 a.m.?)

The greeting in Stockholm and Helsinki is "hej" which sounds like "hey." So all day long we were hearing "Hey!" "Hey!" "Hey!" It made for a jolly atmosphere.