West Ukraine

I knew going into my travels last week that there is less marriage agency activity in western Ukraine, but I'm still not exactly sure why. One entrepreneur I met in Kolomiya said it's because the women are more religious, and I certainly did pick up on the fact that religion plays a much more visible part in the lives of western Ukrainians. Each farm I passed had its own little cross surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, a Jesus on the cross, a statue of Mary, or an enclosed altar in which a candle could be lit. Many of the enclosures that I saw included a date over their door, invariably from the early 90s, when the Soviet Union ceased to be an atheist state. The Kolomiya entrepreneur I met crossed himself each time he passed the enclosed altar near his bed and breakfast, which is well worth recommending. This young man said both religions in western Ukraine, both the Uniate and the Orthodox, are now competing to build bigger, bolder churches, almost absurdly trying to one-up one another. I certainly saw the proof of this. Every town seemed to have a church going up or recently finished or refurbished. The one pictured is from Rakhiv, in the Carpathian Mountains region, only a few kilometers from the Romanian border. It was built in 1991.

Another person I know echoed something this man said as well -- that western Ukrainians are more likely to leave the country for work, often illegal, in "Europe," a destination that starts somewhere near Germany and continues on until you reach Ireland. ("We may be in Europe geographically," a waitress recently told me, "but not in our minds.") Anyways, these western Ukrainians send the money back to their families from their jobs in construction or the service industry, and with these funds large houses are going up in the villages. Ukraine is a country just waiting to be a conspicuous consumer, like every other country in the west. The only reason they're called villages in this country, rather than suburbs, is because there's not a Blockbuster video on the corner and the roads into the next big city aren't flat and straight and true.

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Graduation Day

As Alice Cooper once so aptly sang, School's out forever. At least it is for some kids in Kharkov, who apparently celebrate the end of the academic year by donning old Soviet-era school uniforms that, in a pinch, could outfit a French maid.

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Women's Day

I remember the first time I drank Peet's Coffee. It was in San Francisco, in a newish shopping center between Portrero Hill and The Mission, sometime between 2000 and 2001. I ordered it black and sweetened it with sugar. Small, medium, large. Does it matter the size? I drank it and off I went. I never had coffee that strong, may not have slept for three days, and as soon as it wore off I went back for more.

Before coming to Ukraine, I worried about the coffee situation. The Iron Curtain had become the Instant Coffee Curtain, I was told. So I brought with me two pounds of Peet's Coffee, French Roast, wondering (foolishly, it turned out) if I'd be able to find the tools needed to facilitate my addiction: a grinder and a French press.

Today, to recognize Women's Day, I gave some of this coffee (and some chrysanthemums) to my tutor, who favors coffee to tea. Her daughter cooked it for us in the Turkish fashion -- the grinds staining the side of my cup and floating to the surface, reminding me of my grandmother's coffee in Norway. Very good -- but very strong, I cautioned. As I write this, at 10:30 in the evening, I wonder if my tutor has managed to fall asleep. Very tasty, she'd said. But also, very strong. We'll see. Peet's Coffee has been released to Ukraine.

For those who don't know (and I didn't before coming here)the history of Women's Day dates back to 1910, when:

The Socialist International, meeting in Copenhagen, established a Women's Day, international in character, to honour the movement for women's rights and to assist in achieving universal suffrage for women. The proposal was greeted with unanimous approval by the conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, which included the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament. No fixed date was selected for the observance.

The holiday is big over here, dating back to its observance during the years of the Soviet Union. Every major Metro stop in Kharkov has a flower stand just about, and on Women's Day they're stocked with three or four times the number of flowers and corsages. My tutor had received roses and tulips before getting my flowers, and her daughter was all dressed up and entertaining guests when I came over for my thrice-weekly lesson. Others I know measure the day in text messages -- and if one woman got sixteen, I'm sure every other woman in the country got four, or seven, or twelve or twenty-two. Just trying to send a text-message today was hard. Many times, my message wouldn't go through. The only other time I've had that trouble was New Year's, when I couldn't send a message to an uncle in Norway after receiving one from him. Only by the next day did the system settle down enough to get my SMS through.

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Feminine Virtues

This article in the New York Times should be of interest to Ukraina-philes, as it comments on the rise to power of two women to the top political post in their respective lands:

For Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (of Liberia), an economist and banker who was inaugurated Monday and is the first woman elected president in Africa, and for Michelle Bachelet (of Chile), a general's daughter who was elected as Chile's first female president, a key to victory was the power of maternal symbolism - the hope that a woman could best close wounds left on their societies by war and dictatorship.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, the strong women of the previous generation, Ms. Bachelet and Ms. Johnson Sirleaf have embraced what they have both called feminine virtues and offered them as precisely what countries emerging from the heartbreak of tyranny and strife need.

All this reminded me of something I saw a couple weeks ago (and should have photographed) when I took a ride on Kyiv's funicular, a closed-car that descends on cables down the hill overlooking the Podil district. The driver's compartment sits at the front of the car, the passengers sit behind this in segmented compartments that have five or six seats running from one side to the other. Nastia and I thought to sit in front to get the best view, but when we got to the lead passenger compartment, we saw the view from one of the seats blocked by a 2006 calendar (this was only a few days into the new year) that was beautifully designed, if blatantly manipulative.

There was Yulia Timoshenko wearing all white against a white backdrop, with the edges of her top so blurred, so vaguely ethereal, that she looked more angelic than terrestrial. Before her beatific smile, in the cup of her hands, was a small pile of dirt, so dark and rich, from which grew the first seedling of a green plant.

The calendar didn't need any campaign slogans for the March election; it was all there in the image. Vote for me. I am white and pure. I can mother you. I will help Ukraine grow.

I couldn't find an image of that calendar online, and I didn't think to take a picture, but there's another strong image above, the heart in the form of a check-mark that is being used by Block Yulia -- the coalition headed by the braided one.

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Ukraine is "more better"

When I was a teenager, my fantasies were largely unvaried. Some days I imagined the girls from the annual USC Cheerleaders calendar, others I called upon the image of an archetypal Swede -- a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty who was quick to lose her top and knew all the words to "Dancing Queen." I wasn't alone in this regard -- California and Sweden, it was the Mecca to which many men turned their lust. And why not? The Beach Boys sang about California Girls (before David Lee Roth did the same to greater visual effect), and innumerable Hollywood movies brought in a bouncy blonde with a sing-song accent whenever the plot grew too dull. There was nothing more coveted.

But today at 12:35 p.m. local time I learned there had been a revolution and that men the globe over now followed a New World Order. I discovered this in Sundsvall, Sweden, a three-hour train ride up the coast from Stockholm, after being dropped here with a two-hour lay-over en route to my mother’s Norway. At the buffet restaurant inside the train station, opera music played from the speakers, and my fellow stranded passengers sat chattering in Swedish and Norwegian at their tables. The food in the metal tubs was decidedly Scandinavian: sliced roast beef, creamed salmon so soft it fell apart at the touch of your fork, and bite-sized boiled potatoes served whole and skinless. But the restaurant’s staff was not – Middle Eastern, I thought.

The guy who approached me from behind the register was in his late-twenties. He wore blue jeans and a tight black t-shirt that didn’t fully cover the tribal tattoos on both of his arms. His hair was short and black and showed signs of styling products and a good deal of personal care. He was quick with a smile, quick with a bounce of his chin. When he said something in Swedish, I asked in English for the buffet. He rang me up without hesitation, English coming freely and easily to him, and gave me the change from my hundred Kroner bill.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“California,” I told him, though underneath this I heard something else – an echo familiar to anyone who has lived in a country trying to learn its language: Ya iz Californiyi. “But these days I’m actually living in Ukraine,” I added.

His smile grew bigger here. He bounced his chin and lifted one hand, rubbing the fingers together as if demanding money or worrying over some prayer beads. “It’s more better,” he said. “The women.”

I nodded and grinned and said something in the affirmative – always the agreeable idiot – and then took my tray and went off for my food. But as I sat down to my meal, I couldn’t help but consider this more deeply. I was a Californian, he was living in Sweden, and Ukraine was “more better?”

When he came back out with a stack of porcelain plates for the buffet, I walked up and asked how he’d heard about Ukrainian women.

“My brother,” he said, “two, three times he's brought one over. Always he thinks he’ll marry,” he said, “but always he finds another one more beautiful than before.”

They stayed a few weeks and then were gone, their visas soon to be expired anyway, and then the brother went off again to the marriage agencies of Kiev. After a little more prodding, my new friend told me he’d done the same, though only once. He loved Ukraine.

“But Swedish women,” I told him. “Some men would say they’re the most beautiful in the world.”

His face took on a new look; he recoiled as if insulted. “Swedish women are hell,” he said, “like in Afghanistan. They have money”—he slapped his hand against a back pocket—“and so they’re all”—and now he lifted his nose to the wood beams criss-crossing the ceiling.

“Maybe on the weekends,” he said, “when they have some vodka, maybe then,” he said, but then he was shaking his head as if even this weren’t redemption enough. “Where are you in Ukraine?” he asked.

I told him and explained what little I knew of the city, saying it was very large, more than a million and a half people, and just as beautiful as Kiev -- in every respect -- though certainly poorer.

“So the girls are easier,” he said, again with that smile.

I shrugged a shoulder, dropped my head to one side. Deep Throat said, "Follow the money," but he could have just as easily said, "Follow the women?" So much was economics. This guy had taken his passport, which bore Holland’s name, to Sweden on a four-year work visa, and now he was only saving up his Kroner and planning his next geographical exchange. Who was safe from all of this? Perhaps only the Swedish woman and Californian man.

“And if I”—he pantomimed typing on a keyboard.

“Plenty of sites pop up,” I said.

He asked that I write it down – Kharkov – and so I did in both English and Russian, before at last giving him my card and telling him to call should he ever find himself in town.

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Why Kiev is Male Heaven

Canadian Inna Gertsberg has been living in Kyiv for one year and working in advertising. For her one of the most memorable aspects of life in Ukraine has been the familiar sight of middle-aged expat men playing playboy lovers with girls half their age. If you could have seen these men in their own countries, she says, you'd be surprised too!

'It's Sunday night, and I've been invited to a friend's party. It's a see-and-be-seen scene, so I concede to wearing a mini-skirt, high-heel go-go boots and a sexy top. I do so knowing full well that even in my sexiest outfit it would be nearly impossible to stand out among the abundance of local beauties. As I walk up the steps of the nightclub two middle-aged western men stumble out of the door, their evening coming to an end, but their night just beginning. As they pass, one of them utters a drunken, 'Yeah baby! How about some fun tonight, dyevushka?'. It was a classic comment from someone who wouldn't dare dream of making such an approach back home. Later that night I found myself pondering Kyiv's most intriguing residents: mature Western men. Those middle-aged expats, some married, some married again, some recently single - all with one thing in common: they are utterly mad about Ukrainian women.

Story continues at Kiev City Guide.

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Death of a Marriage, continued

LA County prosecutors on Thursday charged 58-year-old Brian Joseph Cullen with murder. Cullen, who is believed to have fled to Mexico with a fourteen year-old boy, is accused of using a baseball bat to kill Irina (Iryna) Singerman, who met and married her husband Ron through a marriage agency in Kherson, Ukraine.

Ron Singerman, a certified public account and member of the Church of Scientology, says in the LA Independent that he's upset with press reports that suggest his deceased wife was a model leading a double life -- and even possibly connected to the Southland's porn industry.

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The Death of a Marriage

Well, you are the first to know outside of Kherson, but about 2 hours ago, around 5:00PM local time, I proposed to this wonderful girl Irina that I met and she accepted!!!

Weston (Rogers, operator of Russian Women Video), this is the culmination of lots of planning and research, including, for example all those chat room meetings and discussions, e.g. Elena valuable advice about body language, as Irina's was super positive with me from day #1!

Your friend, Ron
Culver City, California November 4, 2002

The above quote and photo were found on the testimonials page at Russian Women Video, an internet marriage agency. Ron and Irina are one of the agency's success stories; or they were until Irina failed to come home late last month and "financial documents belonging to the aspiring model were among the blood-soaked items found in garbage bags dumped in a trash bin behind a Woodland Hills strip mall."

I've read of several "mail order brides" being murdered or abused (see this article and this previous post), but unlike those cases, this one does not involve the husband. Instead, the police are searching for Irina's lover, a 59-year-old who is believed to have fled to Mexico. To read more about him and this case go here.

An AP article on the murder can be found at the Kiev Ukraine News Blog, where an anonymous poster also wrote this in the comments section:

This is rather sad news. I knew Irina well from the time I lived in Kherson where she came from, and also knew of her dishonest ways. She was typically one of the so many Ukrainian girls who was out to get as much money as she cold, no matter who she lied to or hurt. Prior to her moving to the U.S., I tried to warn Ron Singerman about her dishonesty, even mailing him copies of all of the e-mails she was sending to different men, getting them to send her money based on her promises to come and see them. I spoke with him after sending him the package. He said he was still going to continue his relationship with her since they were engaged. Too bad she continued her behaviour. Some people think you can always be dishonest and hurtful towards and get away with it. Obviously this is not the case.

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