A walk to the Black Sea

I'm trying out a companion photo blog to supplement this blog. My first entry is from the 2006 trip: A walk to the Black Sea.

We're not in Houston anymore

I have a small collection of photographs I call "Only in Odessa." That's probably not true, but it's not stuff you see very often in the suburbs of Houston. To wit:

Surly pink-haired lady selling sweets at the Privoz farmer's market.

The range of fashion styles, from country babushka to Dolce & Gabbana is breath-taking.

Gypsies and beggars hang out to make a buck off your wedding party.

Tired of the traffic? Just drive it down the sidewalk.

New life

Lana, one of my Odessa friends, and John have finally become parents. Anna was born Thursday evening in Houston. She's beautiful. She looks like John in my opinion. They all seemed pretty exhausted. We took food to the hospital two nights in a row, but we never got it right. Haven't seen the baby since Friday night. There was so much drama I really felt like I was in the way. I'm steering clear until things settle down or I get an invite. She'll still be cute.

First day of school

Sept. 1 every year is a very big day for children across the former Soviet Union. It's the first day of school. If you're a 1st-grader and it's your first day ever at school, it's even a bigger deal.

It was Sonnitchka's first day ever.

Sonya is Masha's daughter. Masha is Vlad's niece, one of Tanya's two daughters. This trip, Masha was out of the picture.

Sonya lives with her father's parents, Luda and Vladimir, left, in an apartment building next to their son's apartment building. Their son, Vladimir also, is a high-ranking police officer, a lieutenant I believe, in a neighboring village and makes good money. I don't believe he and Masha ever were married, but they had Sonya in 2000.

We met Vladimir first (below with camcorder). It was about 6 or 7 a.m. He was ironing his shirt. We sat down for a bit, had some tea. We showed him our gift of a family photo album, a necklace for Masha, a knife and MP3 player for him. We left to get Sonya next door.

She was probably confused by us. But she was sweet. And tiny. A wisp of a thing. We had brought the customary flowers, but so had his dad. She couldn't carry both, so we left ours at her home. We brought her toys, and she was torn between the new toys and the first day of school. It was a terrible dilemma we foisted upon her.

We walked to school for the ceremony. Everyone was dressed to the nines. Many of the girls wore these very large white bows in their hair. It's a very traditional custom for Sept. 1. All day, all over town you see girls, even the older ones, with these giant pom-poms holding their pony tails.

She survived the courtyard program. Long and boring by kids' standards. Everyone had a camera and a video camera. At a skyscraper across the street, construction halted on about the 10th floor as all the workers stopped to watch the show.

Some of the kids sang. A couple of them did an interpretive dance. Then, another tradition: A senior and a new 1st-grader prance around the courtyard symbolizing the new and the old. This particular senior-1st grader were siblings. Very sweet. And there were a lot of cornball mini-speeches by school administrators.

Then all the students, in their school uniforms, march around the courtyard and into their classrooms. I cried. Hell, everybody cried.

мкдоналдс

McDonald's is just down the street from Tanya, who lives on the Lt. Shmidt Street (near Italian Boulevard), and near the train station, or "vox-all." We were meeting a friend's brother who was from England for the first time the day after we arrived. We decided on McDonald's because of the proximity and our familiarity of Mickey D's and being newly arrived from the french-fried West.

Peter (in yellow with Vlad) stuck out like a Westerner as much as we did. We walked away from McDonald's and went around the square in front of the train station where people were selling tacky souvenirs, piles of dried shrimp, cell-phone paraphernalia and such. Stray dogs were everywhere. I noticed one in particular, sleeping in the middle of the promenade, as oblivous to the people as they were to him. The strays -- dogs and cats -- are one of my strongest memories of Odessa. And amid all these unwanted animals, people sell puppies and kittens on the streets all over town. Apparently spaying and neutering is unheard of here.

We met up with Vera, a friend of Vlad's and a new acquaintance of Peter's. We walked down to the sea, through town, past Vlad's family home, which is now fenced off and locked down as it's worth a fortune now and the family long since left.

We took a gondola ride on the tree-tops down to the beach. We looked at the new construction everywhere. Lots of hotels and condos going up on the Black Sea coast.

We found a bar that was open and sat outside with beers watching the ocean and the passers-by. I noticed many of the middle-aged and older people in Odessa have very lovely skin, nice tans and decent physiques. They walk a lot and exercise. Their health regimines include things like saunas, vodka sweats and swimming in freezing water. They tend to talk a lot about getting the toxins out of the body, even the ones smoking unfiltered cigarettes and swigging vodka.

My Diet Coke habit was something that everyone commented on. Most believe Diet Coke to be poison. They say I'm polluting myself, and yet they're puffing cigs when they tell me this. I think there's been some kind of disinformation campaign about Coke there. Local drink makers perhaps. It's odd that so many people found it worthy of warning me.

I managed to clean out the entire Diet Coke supply in one week in the two convenience stores on Tanya's street. That's not saying that much; I think they probably take delivery on Coke once a month.

We promised to take Dasha, Tanya's granddaughter, to McDonald's while we were there. It never worked out, but we brought some home to her a couple of days before we left. Tanya had never eaten there and poo-pooed it as Western decadence, but when we took her, her eyes lit up like Christmas.

I got a бiг теистi (Big Tasty), like a cross between a Big Mac and Quarter-Pounder. There was also the мкчикен (McChicken) and my favorite Cyrillic menu item: the филе-о-фиш (Filet-o-Fish).

The stop at McDonald's did not prove as interesting as I thought it might. It was basically the same. The food was tailored to local culture, which I expected. And the place was packed to the gills every time we walked by. Maybe because it's next to a train station? But in itself, that American-culture outpost said nothing about Odessa or the U.S. It was just an oddity.

Plane trip to Odessa

I've been absent for quite awhile, busy with both the fun and the stressful.

I want to talk about a lot of things, mostly related to my Ukrainian family. I'll just start with some ramblings about our amazing trip to Odessa last fall.

At right are Vlad's sister, Tanya, in the blue dress, and her daughter, Anuta. This was the day we arrived. Tanya's showing off the necklace and ring we brought her from the Texas jeweler James Avery.

I'll start at the beginning. The plane trip.

We had two weeks to visit. The plane trip, including stops, is about 24 hours from Houston. It's pretty horrible. You're pinned in, stuck in an S-shape for 24 hours. The airports were worse than the planes. We flew to DC-Dulles to Vienna to Odessa; returned in reverse order. Next time, I want to stop for a couple of days in Rome or Paris both ways to break up the claustrophobia fest.

We traveled with our friends Sasha and Valia, and their young son, Daniel, who just turned 5. Or is it 4? Anyway he's a cute kid. Terrible travel companion, but cute. Valia was going to her niece's wedding. We've been invited and I'm so excited about seeing an Orthodox ceremony.

Daniel's at left, outside the civil wedding complex in Odessa after the wedding. You might think he's fascinated with the white doves and you'd be wrong. He's excited about all the trash in the window well of the building. A trash can built into the sidewalk! Who'da thunk it?

Our United flight from Houston to DC was very late. We pulled into a Dulles gate about five miles south of where our connection gate was located. We were assured a United associate would be in the gate area to hold our connections. United people lie. It was like Antarctica.

Most in our party ran the five miles to the gate. I am not in shape -- well I am a very big shape, which is the problem -- and they held the only Austrian Airways flight to Vienna of the day for, well, us. And I was the last of us. I'm flashing my passport and this Austrian woman in a crimson uniform worthy of McDonald's rolls her eyes at it and is screaming at me like a movie stereotype to "Get on zee plane now!!!"

Not even off U.S. soil and already I have 3 blisters.

Austrian has little monitors in the seatbacks. We could check the plane's progress. Watch the plane cams on takeoffs and landings, my personal favorite. And watch any of a number of mediocre shows in any of seven languages. The food was not remarkable except that it was healthier than what U.S. airliners serve, when they serve anything at all.

The Vienna airport was under heavy construction. We unloaded from the tarmac and were driven to our gate on a rolling waiting room. We were in the international section and couldn't leave and come back unless we wanted to go through immigration. We didn't want any problems on this end of the vacation, so we hung around.

I was confused. You go over here and stand in line and get a piece of paper and go over there in that line and do a curtsy for someone else. I found the people working at the airport there to be pretty humorless. Don't know if that means anything.

Couldn't find a souvenir I wanted so I got nothing but an Austrian Diet Coke. And that wasn't anything special it turned out. Not like Mexican Coca-Cola Light. The Duty-Free was a joke. The prices at home are cheaper.

There were lots of young people at the airport. Many of them sleeping across 5 chairs. Chairs are hard to come by, too. Daniel found a little girl to play with. She was from Albania. She had gone to Vienna for tonsil surgery. Daniel speaks Russian and English, but not Albanian. But not to worry, running up and down the escalators is a universal language.

A plane headed for Azerbaijan is loading. The rolling waiting room pulls up to the glass doors. A bunch of people speaking Russian dressed in a style I couldn't quite place gathered near the door to board. Women in long, dark skirts, flowing scarves and Muslim head wraps. Men in dark clothing, some dressed more Western than others, and little girls with golden earrings. This you don't see every day in Houston.

I felt I was getting closer to my destination. Starting to feel very far from home. It feels great.

We board the Ukrainian plane for Odessa. Much smaller plane and a short flight of only a couple of hours. It's a Western plane. All the English signs have been taped over with Russian signs for "Restroom" and "No Smoking."

We arrived. It looked like home. Lots of trees. The drizzle blurred everything. We leave the plane and get on a large but ancient shuttle. It takes us to the terminal. Everything is in Russian. I'm sounding out Russian words like a 5-year-old.

It's exhiliarating but we're exhausted and a little nervous about immigration. Everything will go smoothly. Right?