Which One is the Gentle Cycle? — One Angry Waitress

Recently I spent a couple of weeks in the Ukraine. I was curious about the country my ancestors came from, and while it wasn’t exactly the most peaceful time in the place’s history to go I felt like I just couldn’t wait.

“Maybe you could hold off,” my mother suggested.

“You felt the same way when I went to Cambodia,” I said, “And it turned out to be fine.”

I didn’t mention that it was on the border of Cambodia that I discovered I had been relieved of most of my cash. You need a bit of scratch to get from that no-man’s land between Cambodia and Laos to pay for cash-grab temperate tests and other fees. A dollar less and I might still be there.

I took a short flight from Budapest to Kiev and upon landing met up with a handful of friendly Ukrainians, an American, and a brother and sister who’d been born in Russia but now lived in Seattle. I felt, when piling into their friend’s communist-era van, like were the premise for some great joke.

What followed was a week in Kiev in which I found myself shuttled from baptisms to house parties to churches (the latter of which were several times the age of my home country). I tasted what was once the only available flavour of soviet iced cream, got used to people playing the accordion in my ear on the metro and learned that de-boning a fish in a dark bar after a few beers is just about as difficult as you’d imagine it to be.

I was lucky to have my new friend Alexei when sorting out how to use the washing machine in my subletted apartment, and luckier still to have him waiting for me at the train station when a too-friendly local decided to escort me there and use the time on the way to try and convince me via Google Translate that I didn’t really have a boyfriend back in Canada.

I saw what it was like to be read poetry in a park by an intoxicated Polish man (the experience of having to help him back up off his one knee afterwards doing nothing to diminish it). I experienced what traffic is like when most people prefer to purchase a licence rather than go get one in the traditional fashion. And I saw that my flat butt just might be part of Ukrainian inheritance.

I understand that Eastern Europe is not on everybody’s to go list. There were downsides. I don’t really know how anyone finds their way underground when some of the stations have two names, or why my apartment had both cockroaches and shag carpet, and somehow putting things into the mail in the Ukraine is pretty much the same as lighting half of your letters on fire (though not nearly as satisfactory).

But for its downsides I did feel like no matter how lost I was there would always be someone there to gesticulate wildly until finally, I realized that I had been in the right metro station all along.