On 24 Nov 2012 Alexa wrote:
TOO LONG was the comment on my last missive. So I resolve to be briefer or more frequent!
Deborah, my first American expatriate couch hostess, met me at the Odessa train station, Ukraine. She is an Ann Arbor Ph.D. candidate in anthropology and Fulbright scholar, considered an old maid at the tender age of thirty by the Ukrainian villagers she interviews about land ownership. She speaks Russian and Ukrainian, which is very close to Polish. I was impressed!
She also teaches English to village children and teenagers, using Beatles songs and Amy Winehouse to introduce the conditional/subjunctive: If Amy had gone to rehab, she might be alive today!
We took a bouncy old bus to her elegant, remodeled first floor studio apartment. Its only drawback is that the street door doesn't close or lock and needy passersby use it as a pissoir. All tenants must agree on any changes, and her parents are visiting in a few months, so Deborah is desperate for action.
We sat down to tea, homemade apple pastry and a chat. Deborah doesn't cook much since the village fare is so fresh and tasty. We dined at the cheap and filling cafeteria, Pazata Hatta, I knew from Lviv. Odessa is not the sleepy little seaport I'd envisioned, but a vibrant lit up city with dozens of bus routes and a ton of glitz.
The next day we set off to see the sights. Don Quixote, the ballet, would be premiering soon at the opera house, but only restricted viewing seats were available. I never dreamed I would see it in Romania! We admired parks and statues and then the world renown Potemkin steps which I never expected to find here. Eisenstein's stunning silent, Battleship Potemkin, was shot here and is shown in the summer with orchestral accompaniment. The steps were a man's gift to his wife!
We walked to the harbor and took the funicular back up into town. We ate lunch in another cafeteria in a glittering shopping mall with Soviet style tableaux on the walls. I saved my salmon skin and bones for a stray cat. The toilet turnstyle was a real bargain, 50 kopecks. Pay toilets are the rule. Which made me so desperate to change money going to Moldova on the bus!
Deborah has a spare laptop that came in handy. She skyped with her boyfriend in Germany, who shares her birthday, and I checked the Times headlines and environmental crises online. We even listened to NPR and the Secretary of State controversy. Her mother is my age, sedentary and overweight, and Deborah feels she would never be able to explore the city as we had.
Deborah left me with a map and I made my way to the Art Museum, a two storey palace with a friendly stray in the yard who enjoyed my salmon. Across the street a film crew was shooting screeching cars and fake gunshots. Again all the museum guards were ladies. After my visit I prevailed on a 7 foot sailor/student to point me back to Deborah's street. The apartment was then easy to find, between a Kodak store and an oculist with a large eyeglass cutout hanging over the sidewalk.
That night we were to meet at the Philharmonia for a concert and I was rushing frantically, map in hand, asking where Pushkin Avenue was and finally found her. We waited for her stylish Ukrainian girlfriend coming from work who had the tickets, and then climbed to a huge hall on the second floor to hear a wonderful quintet. A giant balailaika, an accordion and three other instrumentalists made a wonderful sound from folk music to Debussy. I am normally no fan of accordion music but in this instance it was a great addition to the ensemble. Deborah laughingly informed me one number was a Nirvana hit.
We went the next day to the bus station to get our tickets for the morrow, hers to the villages, mine to Moldova. We passed through a large market and I bought dried kiwi and fresh mozarella. You must fight very hard not to be loaded down with more and more plastic bags. We had a so called business man's lunch and that night splurged on a Georgian restaurant. Since I hadn't even thought of going to Georgia, I should at least taste the food. I had a rich cold creamy walnut soup, spicy salad and tried to smuggle out the leftover cheese pizza unobserved for breakfast.
[Then ]Off to Moldova by bus, with long pauses at the border.
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