When I woke up, Sara was standing in the doorway with a glass of water in her hand. "Good morning," I said. "Happy Smigus-Dingus!" she said and splashed me with the water. It was Wet Monday.
It's a peasant tradition where, on the day after Easter, men claim women by dumping buckets of water on them. I was afraid of it one year in Poland, but nothing happened. THEN, I saw it in Lviv, but it was mostly teenagers in an area fenced in for just that purpose. They were all in bathing suits.
And now it's happened to me. While I cleaned up, she went out for coffee. I wrote a little and read a little. She came back and we planned the day. We were going to spend it separately.
There was some talk of my talking a long train ride to Berdychiv, which is the birthplace of Joseph Conrad (!!!) and where Balzac got married (!?!), but it is more famous as the site of a WWII-era massacre where you can probably guess who were killed by whom.
I was more looking forward to three uninterrupted hours to read than the destination, really.
The times didn't really line up, though. I could have gotten there but not gotten back. They need to make these massacre sites more tourist friendly!
I mention this only to explain how we found ourselves at the enormous train station on the edge of town. Which is where we were and which is where we split up to find Individual Adventures.
The day after Easter isn't just Smigus Dingus, it's also a National Holiday here, so the metro was paaacked with all manner of männer. And my nightmare came true -- the fastcalator STOPPED while I was on it, lurched to a halt.
Nobody fell, but... there was always a vertiginous sense on these things that one hundred people are all a misstep away from looking like the collapsed shelving system in a Chernobyl pre-school. Folks weren't walking down, they were just waiting. Which was strange to me.
But maybe they weren't allowed? In any case, it came violently back to shuddering life, and nobody fell. A Wet Monday Miracle.
Pushed my way into a train car and roared my way to Podil, which is a little Dnieper-side nabe that lives, loves, and laughs in the shadow of St. Andrew's.
Walked along the side of a highway to something called The Friendship Between Nations Arch, which was very pretty against the deep blue sky but also looked like something that was turned in a few hours before it was due. Not a lot of... dynamic thought went into this design.
Underneath it was a Soviet-era statue of two dudes holding a banner aloft; They looked like they had just won the WWE tag-team championship belt.
There was a very pretty observation deck with a view of the river. This is a super-hilly city, and there are a great many of these views. They don't get old. I got the sense, though, that this little park with the arch was, like, Kyiv's eleventh-favorite picnic place. I climbed back down to the highway and headed to Podil.
Some graffiti on a guard rail read "Fuck TO Police" in English, and I laughed so much I almost fell into an open manhole. Lord, what an end that would have been. Funny to think about a demon in a cop costume forking me into the flames and murmuring, "Fuck to YOU, my friend. Fuck to you."
Down, down to Podil Town where an enormous biker gang had taken over an oval-shaped park. There had been an article in the Kyiv Post about a feared group called The Russian Wolves expected to roar through town. Was this they? Were these the wolves?
Hilariously, they were taking selfies and making dramatic poses in their leather capes and hoods. They looked like they had just won the WWE tag-team championship belt. It felt like some kind of spring-break for stepdads.
I wanted to see their belly tattoos and jacket patches, but I chose not to get too close. Ducked into an African coffee shop where I enjoyed a coffee with cardamom. That's the way to do it. Read about thirty pages of a book called Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile. It's about a British playwright who drank herself to death in the Thatcher era.
When I emerged from my cardamom cloud, the Wolves (had it been the Wolves?) were gone.
As quickly as they came, they were gone.
Wandered up St. Andrew's ascent and poked through some books of old postcards and shoeboxes full of coins. Vendors sold books and dolls and tablecloths. There were trays of old Soviet medals and pins with Stalin's face on them. I used to think that sort of thing was funny and cool, but those people were murderers. It's, like, not funny and not cool.
It feels morally inconsistent to be moved to tears at the Holodomor Memorial and then pin a kitschy Stalin medal on my backpack. But! I am very cool with buying nesting dolls painted by children in a mountain sweatshop, so I picked up a few "native" souvenirs!
Sara and I were due to reunite for a late lunch, so I sat on the wall surrounding the statue of Bulgakov and read about that boozer playwright some more. It felt cool to read next to a bronze writer. Between chapters, I watched families shopping, locals fondling wooden eggs and novelty cooking spoons.
Sara showed up, and we had an hilarious lunch at a subterranean diner where two old dudes sang Ukranian folk tunes on a ridiculous vaudeville-style stage. They were charming and ridiculous. The place was musty and overpriced and exactly perfect for this stage in the trip.
Outside, we finished our shopping. I was very bad at bargaining with one of the vendors and ended up somehow paying more than the asked price for something. I don't want to talk about how it happened. I just want to acknowledge that the poor woman who ripped me off has a difficult life and needs it more than I do.
There was an amazing Chewbacca matryoshka with a tiny C3P0 inside. I squealed when I saw it. I don't like Star Wars anymore, or I might have made a bad bargain for it.
At home, the plan was to take a nap and wake up in search of dinner. But we ended up sleeping for twelve hours! Twelve hours! It felt like winning the WWE tag-team championship belt.
Disco Doughnut! Or perhaps Donut!
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