Zdravstvuitye Ukraina

Well, I did it. I finally traveled to Ukraine to see Molly. I am lucky to have been invited. I am glad that I went. I’d had all sorts of warnings about what to expect, but it was a wonderful experience.

Having the chance to post as a guest on this blog puts me in mind of the kid from the children’s story who fell asleep over the book that he was reading, fell in, and woke up among the characters in the story.

I flew from Dulles to Frankfurt, then on to Vienna and Odessa. In the airport terminal I had a bit of a scare because there were notices on the walls of the terminal describing the paperwork that must accompany your visa. Silly me -- I had not bothered to arrange for a visa. I had read on the U.S. State Dept. website that no visa was necessary to visit Ukraine from the U.S. as a tourist, but for a moment I considered the possibility that they would put me on the next plane home when they found me visaless. Molly would have no clue as to what had happened to me.

After standing in line to get my passport stamped, I picked up my bags and went to the customs area, where I expected some special attention due to the resupply aspect of my mission in the country. They would have had a lot of Bigelow tea, hot chocolate, pasta sides, milk duds, etc. to rummage through. A uniformed official asked me a question in basic English (“Worth how much?”) about my bags. I answered with a question: “you mean just what I’m importing, or everything, including what I will take home with me?” He didn’t understand my response and waved me through in irritation. But on my own initiative I took the time to fill out a customs form, because I did not want to be thrown in jail in case someone later complained that I’d broken a rule. Some officials looked over the form, asked several questions and checked out some particulars from my luggage. As a result, I was the very last of the 100 or so passengers on the plane to finish with customs.

By that time a bright-eyed, smiling, inquisitve face was already peeking into the customs area from the double doors that led to the center of the terminal.

Meanwhile, one of the other passengers on the plane, a middle-aged man, had dressed up as Дед Мороз (Dyed Moroz or Father Frost), the (secularized?) Ukrainian version of Father Christmas. He entered the terminal with a hearty greeting to all the people who were gathered by the customs exit to meet arriving passengers. I had arrived a few days after our Christmas, but before New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas, which is celebrated by the Julian calendar.

Molly and I greeted each other in the terminal. I had not seen her since August of 2005. Then she watched over my luggage as I made my first survey of Ukrainian bathroom facilities. The bathroom was equal to the average of what one finds in the States – midway on the continuum between the Charles Hotel and a gas station. So what’s all the fuss about? Then we took a taxi to the lot in Odessa where one catches one of these marshrutkas or shuttle buses that Molly is always talking about.

Sitting in the back of the marshrutka to M——, we discovered the man who had dressed up as Dyed Moroz, now reunited with his Ukrainian wife. They opened up a bottle of champagne back there and offered us some. Ms. Personality chatted with them a bit. The marshrutka was so crowded that Molly and I couldn’t sit next to each other, but we sat diagonally across the aisle and talked. After a while I was ready for a nap – I had been traveling for about 24 hours -- and tried to sleep sitting up. Molly nudged me awake whenever my nodding head threatened to come to rest on a shoulder of one of the men to the left or right of me.

More photos to come.

—Eric


The Odessa airport terminal from the window of a bus that shuttles passengers across the tarmac