The Adventures of Smurf Hat and the Giant Peach

I'm not so good at keeping updated with blogging. I'm just going to get that little warning out of the way early so that you know what horrors await you in this, my quarterly update. So steel your backbone, stiffen your resolve, gird your loins...ready to begin?
The season of rain has officially ended, and I've been told that the season of sun will last until the end of August. So if any of you all want to come and visit, I would highly recommend the summer months! Of course, when water becomes scarce, we all must make sacrifices on the altar of personal hygeine. I was originally resolved not to shave my legs until the end of the term in July, but I'm beginning to have an increasingly vivid fantasy in which an Oregonian backwoodsman shoots me after mistaking me for the rare African ginger Sasquatch.
Last weekend, I braved death and ran in the Kigali Peace Marathon. Okay, that makes me sound so much more in shape than I am or ever will be. I actually ran one leg of a Peace Corps relay team, so I only went 10 kilometers instead of the full 41. But I lived to tell the tale, which is the important part. And Kigali seemed so wonderfully flat after 'training' in my village, which sits atop a mountain with a 75 degree gradient. I'm currently planning to run a half-marathon in July, assuming my sense of self-preservation doesn't intervene in the next month or so.
Time for a dark confession: I have started drinking coffee. This is quite possibly the most disturbing lifestyle change I've encountered in the past few months. I'm not even sure how it happened. One day, the cup was there, and I took it, and I drank. And now I can't stop. Eight months in Rwanda has done what even four years in Seattle never could. And it isn't even good coffee either. I suspect that my brain wants the quick jolt of caffiene so much that is has assassinated my tongue's taste receptors.
Well, one of the more interesting things that has happened to me over the last three months was my trip to Ukraine, which I have utterly failed to blog about thus far. Not only to I fail at writing blogs, I fail at communication in general. So, first things first: if you ever feel the spirit move you to travel anywhere via Kenya Airways...reconsider. I ended up getting delayed for a full 24 hours in Kenya, much to my annoyance. As a matter of fact, I was beyond annoyed. I was peeved. Still, Nairobi was a fun place to be stranded for a day. I got to pet giraffes, see baby elephants, go to the national museum, visit an awesome Masai crafts market, take my first hot shower in six months...truth be told, the shower freaked me out a bit. There was so much steam! I spent the first five minutes laughing hysterically, and the next five minutes feeling suffocated and claustrophobic. And I still had a baseline level of grime on when when I was finished. I am like Siberia. I am permagrimed.
As my plane landed on Ukrainian soil, I was greeted with flurries of snow. I had been hoping to see some snow, but from a more warm, congenial distance. I was hilariously underdressed for the weather, to say the least. Flip-flops are great for Africa, but in the former Soviet Union, flops flip you! And then there was the fact that I was wearing actual colors. The Rwandan way of dressing involves piling on as many different and often clashing patterns as possible. Even so, my outfit was completely tame by African standards: only five different colors, and all of them in solids. But there I was, aboard a plane of vampirically pale Europeans, all dressed in black and looking like they hadn't seen the sun in six months. Which they hadn't. Because they live in Eastern Europe.
My lovely sister met me at the airport, and there was much hugging and rejoicing. Two years was far too long to go without seeing each other. And thus the sisterly hijinks began. If an artist with too much free time were to make a cartoon about our escapades, it would have to be titled, "The Adventures of Smurf Hat and the Giant Peach." Like I said earlier, I was about as inappropriately dressed for the Ukrainian April as possible. Margaret lent me what was been affectionately dubbed "the smurf hat" (there are far too many pictures on facebook), and then we were off to see the sights and sounds of grand ol' Kiev.
Probably the most distinctive aspect of the city is all the domed churches. Kiev's architects went through a very pronounced dome phase, when they roamed the streets, stroking their bushy beards and wonder what, what could possibly make that church more ornate? Someone must have had an old copy of that architectural best-seller "Our Domes, Ourselves" lying around, and the solution soon became obvious. The churches are all incredible, both from the inside and the outside.
By the end of the day, I'd seen more white people,gold, products of the insane Polish mind, and WWII monuments than my brain could handle. I was also freezing, and my body was going into some kind of shock about the face that it was seven at night and the sun showed no signs of setting. Needless to say, I was a bit overwhelmed when we stopped off at a cafe to get coffee. Yes, a real cafe! With toilets! That flush!
Now it's time to welcome our second erstwhile protagonist. Moog, smurf hat firmly on head, left me to bask in the warm anonymity of a European cafe while she headed over to the Peace Corps office to retrieve a pea coat that another PCV had left behind in the free bin. The coat was warm and toasty. It was also ankle length, too big, and unrelentingly pink. Thus bedecked, Smurf Hat and the Giant Peach left the cafe to face the cold Ukrainian night.
In short, the trip was a blast. One night we went to the ballet (Zorba the Greek, and you know he's Greek because he's so jaunty). Even after looking up the plot on wikipedia, we still couldn't make sense of what we'd just seen. Who was that man dressed all in black? The music seemed to suggest that he was evil, yet everyone danced so sadly when he died. And did he actually die, or was that merely an overly artistic interpretationof the indigestion that follows eating too much Greek food?
And on the subject of indigestion--after eating a steady diet of rice, beans, potatoes, and pineapple for six months, Kiev felt like the promised land of culinary delights. Ukraine in general had more food options than I knew what to do with, in so many ways. From ice cream to Oxana's borscht to that sushi in Odessa, well let's just say that the Giant Peach got a bit more giant, and Smurf Hat got to have an awkwardly hilarious conversation with a poor pharmacist one day. But hey, sis--if you can ask for that in Ukrainian, then I'd say you're pretty well fluent...
We stopped off at Sofievka gardens on the way to Moog's village of Chechelnyk. Nothing much was blooming, but the scope of the place was still impressive. We only got to spend one full day in Chechelnyk, but it was action packed. Her host family made some of the most amazing food that I've eaten in a long while, and there were many toasts, which did little to help my heavy eyes stay open. One of the lesser known perils of living on the equator is that your body becomes frighteningly in sync with the rising and setting of the sun. When it gets dark, that means it's bedtime. It took us four tries for me to make it through the latest Harry Potter installment, and we were ultimately successful only because we watched it in the middle of the afternoon.
The next morning we got up dark and early and went to Moog's school. The English teacher that she often works with wanted me to give a presentation about Rwanda to some of her classes. Being in a Ukrainian school was such a change of pace for me. Ukraine's population is shrinking, and the class sizes reflect that fact. The students were all blown away to learn tha there are over 1000 students at my school. They loved seeing all my pictures, especially the ones with animals. I was tempted to tell them that I wrestle lions every morning, but I settled for regaling them with tales of my cricket-eating days instead.
After school, we went to the town bakery and wandered the slushy streets of Chechelnyk eating the loaf with our bare hands. At this point, I'd traded in the giant peach coat for my sister's much more normally hued green coat. Still, a few people did stare as Smurf Hat and the Giant Pea munched their way around the church grounds, the war memorials, and the derelict sugar beet factory.
We headed out to Odessa the next morning, that beautiful city on the sea. It was definitely my favorite city in Ukraine, and not just because of the delicious sushi. After a day of museums, sight-seeing, dithering about on the Ptomkin stairs,and other such delights, Smurf Hat and the Giant Pea donned their finest tiaras for a night at the opera. I can't actually remember the name of the show that we saw, but the opera house is a spectacular sight unto itself.
And then suddenly it was time to return to Rwanda. Of course, Kenya Airways wouldn't let me go without a fuss, and I got delayed in Paris just long enough to get irked. And yes, I went to McDonald's while I was in Ukraine--for the cheap coffee and clean bathrooms. And to watch Ukrainians eat ice cream at eight o'clock on a blustery morning. And then I tried to imagine the concept of fast food in Rwanda. And then I laughed.
So that's kind of a briefly long-winded summary of life over the last three months. Obviously, other interesting, exciting, perplexing, and intriguing things have happened, but let's keep the mystery alive a little longer, eh?