Dear all, hello,
I thought I'd just write a quick message to everyone to let you know I'm alive and here's some news of me and what I'm up to.
So it was an awesome 2 months in Poland, of traversing the country, and finding out what Polish-ness is. Hitching everywhere, meeting friendly locals, busking on the streets, seeing immense beauty, of swimming in Baltic seas and being interviewed by local newspapers, sitting in basement bars with red brick and piwo, of seeing past horrors and learning immensely, of living with priests and families and students and officers.
My friend from Norway came over in the last week and we hitched our last back to Warsaw. There we stayed with a bizarre friend of mine - a chaos theorist, artist, physicist, polish lord with a castle and a famous poet mother and a govt. job and a weird world of starving artists, millionaires, TV stars, playing chess with mad scientists and dancing the tango under neon paintings - we saw Poland in a whole new light I tell ya. Nora the reserved Norwegian was going to come to Ukraine with me for a week but things grew even stranger and she fell in love with the mad physicist -and has moved to Warsaw to study.
Eventually i got my visa and was away - sad leaving but the lure of Ukraine and its weird mystery shrouded in pink sunsets was too much. And what a bizarre place it is. I'm in Lviv - I've just come back from a trip out into the countryside to visit a lovely Ukrainian woman and her family, whom i met on the bus coming across the border. They are soo lovely, and they lived in the most communist soviet town there ever was - consisting entirely of huge 'socialist realism' apartment blocks , with a suicidal amount of pubs, and one beautiful orthodox church- that's all. At night there were no street lamps and no lighting in the stairwells or anywhere apart from a few apartments, because electricity is so expensive, or, the village is so poor. No cars on the roads, no noises - just loads of people walking around and around these colossal housing blocks, tripping over the cracked pavements and broken roads. Anyway the family was great - 2 little boys and a jolly father and religious mother, we communicated in broken polish and I attempted Ukrainian, which is like a mixture of Russian and polish. They showed me all the Ukrainian tricks - like, putting dollop of cream (yes cream) in your beer to make you big and strong (tasted nice), having a compulsory shot of vodka and then eating a whole gherkin to enhance the flavour/experience (also nice), simultaneously eating beetroot soup and bread with a fierce horse radish mayonnaise, stuffing the 2 in your mouth at the same time to get the best taste. Very interesting experience.
Lviv is a stunning city - amazing mixture of architectural styles as it has been owned by the Russians, poles and Austrians, and is wide and grand with huge powerful churches, opera theatres, white streets and imposing statues - and all largely undiscovered. It's continuously covered by the most exotic and beautiful light - pastels of pale and subtle colours lie along the streets and buildings, everyday the sunset reaches high across the sky in misty purples and oranges, all so serene. This country so far is blowing my mind - its so extreme - vast, very beautiful, very poor, struggling so hard for everything - money, life, logic, nationalism, self respect, but mostly money. It is very overwhelming, and for the first time all I can do is sit open mouth and watch, can only try to absorb it all, unable to deduce anything ;leaving all the wild sights, sounds and thoughts lying unprocessed in a heap on the floor of my brain. Also for a country it has everything I've always wanted travelling; so different and so totally bizarre, very challenging but ultimately rewarding too - it really makes you appreciate the small things. Trying to do anything here, anything at all, like posting a letter or finding a street or getting money, takes hours and hours and stress and very determined effort - it's really frustrating, and there seems to be no or very little logic, as i know it, utilised.
The sense of time is completely different - few people work 9 to 5, no one really ever has to be anywhere, and the days are all the same in relation to time. There are no systems to anything - no patterns, everything is completely random and unexpected. So for example, if you want to catch a bus, you just have to stand on the road where they sometimes pass, wait often for hours, then run out and wave fiercely at the driver who will quote you a price depending on how full the bus is, how hot the day is, if he likes you etc etc. I can sometimes get by pretending I'm Russian or Ukrainian, but if I'm spotted as a tourist prices are tripled or quadrupled - still incredibly cheap, (eg of prices: bread - 20p, beer - 30p, bus for 1 hour 50p, ice cream - 10p 1kg of gherkins - 20p) but i become an entity, an expendable source of funds, rather than a person, if i try to buy anything. The people are awesome though - sharing, kindly and very open to strangers- words 'nowa zelandija' excite them beyond belief - most of them demand proof of my origins and then stand flabbergasted in disbelief - some places here have only been open to foreigners since 1996, and most tourists are polish or Russian.
It's national Independence Day in a few days, and considering how fiercely patriotic Ukrainians are it will be an experience for sure - I'm heading to the capital Kyiv and have been promised a spectacular and moving display. So i hope this is interesting and I will try again some day to write more.
ok must face bizarre reality outside
All my love, Melody