Too late — Roma had already stepped on the animal. Upon noticing it, she jumped away, slid the transgressing foot off the shoe, then rubbed it against the other leg — probably an attempt to override the disturbing tactile reflex.
“Sorry, i noticed the dead bird when i arrived yesterday and forgot to tell you about it — what should we do?” I didn’t quite understand her answer, but it seemed as though it was no longer my problem.
We were clearing a few extra square meters of land to plant cucumbers, and my job was simple: to dig the perimeter, as straight as i could, and root out the bush-wannabes — i’m sure there is a precise, not-even-that-technical term for that — weeds? (Note to self: consider including more gardening books in my diet.)
I was given a shovel, which is quite fortunate because that’s something i’d seen before and could name — maybe — you’re now going to tell me that there are at least seventeen kinds of shovels, right? At least eleven — told you! There are supposedly eight types of shovel everyone should know (there will be a quiz at the bottom), and sixteen types of snow shovels alone.
I was appropriately given a trench shovel. Even so, it’s tough to dig a trench in a straight line. The process reminded me of an architect i shared the stage with at Ossobuco last year — she learned how challenging it is to build a straight wall from a construction worker, and the realization led her into a journey of acceptance of our limited control over materials.
Back in the present, i also wondered how many worms i might have accidentally sliced in half in the process — another note to self: look up how vegans who grow their own food might deal with this.
“Mika, come over here and bring the shovel.” — “The shovel?” — “Let’s bury the bird next to that tree.” — “You want to bury the bird?” — “It’s a living being.”
Having synchronized her request and my understanding of it, i dug the hole — with the trench shovel, which is also the one i was using to weed out the prospective bushes (and also kill more worms and whatnot) in the second part of my job. She dropped the bird, which she now held by the feet with her bare hands, into the hole. I covered the hole with dirt, stepped on it to compress, and stared at it in contemplation for a couple of seconds — we all moved on — it was not very ceremonial.
Or perhaps already too much — for lunch, kholodets‘.
___ Featured photo: a bench?
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‘ Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)
My TEDxDrobetaTurnuSeverin talk is out 😀 I want to thank my friend Dana once again for bringing all those speakers, volunteers and audience together, and for inviting me to be one of them.
I don’t mind the title given by the publisher, though that’s not quite the question i’m asking — what i’m wondering is whether we’re not confusing privileges for basic needs. Western society sets us up to prioritize the former, crystalizing an ever narrower and more homogeneously accepted notion of what constitutes a position of advantage. Attaining (or maintaining) that doesn’t always yield contentment.
In hindsight, i acknowledge that having the resources to ponder over the distinction between needs and privileges is itself a tremendous privilege, and i should have made that explicit in the presentation — i wanted to emphasize that this privilege is cast wider than many of us notice, and might have made neither point salient enough.
There are some issues with the audio towards the end. Rather than compromising the result, i’d like to think they enrich it. You’re invited to think about the way i dealt with the problem at the event (and the editors dealt with it afterward) as a metaphor for what i wanted to say — indeed, it was when the microphone stopped working that i finally woke up — i wish it had happened in the beginning :p
Other than that, i still stand for the bulk of what i said — i hope i will manage to pack my message more clearly, and deliver it with more confidence and energy in the future. I also hope my name in the video title will be changed to Mika, which is more than just a pen name to me.
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UPDATED October 25th, 2019 — this is a dispatch from my cycle tour of Ukraine and surroundings this past Summer with my partner Nastia, an open project on an Autumn/Winter hiatus — check out the project page more information, and sign up for my newsletter if you would like to be notified when it resumes 🙂
It took longer than five minutes — or a week — or two! And i ate the jam. It matters to me — i’m sorry to those of you for whom it also matters, for not managing to keep up.
Nastia encouraged me to share what i can, when i can — well, here i am — i want to tell you briefly about where we are, what we’ve been up to, and where we’re headed 🙂
After crossing the Dnister River, we continued our ride around Moldova through the regions of Vinnytsia and Odesa, then carried on outlining my 2017 route along the Danube Delta and the Black Sea from Izmail to the city of Odesa.
I missed my buddy Yuriy in Izmail (he was in Denmark, of all places), but managed to find and introduce Nastia to all my other hosts from that tour.
Tania, from Mahazyn Kasthan in Kiliya (Natasha and Valia were not there) — i didn’t cry upon leaving this time around — we’ll meet again (Odesa Region, Ukraine, Summer ’19)
It was invariably a blast — i feel grateful that my chance encounters on the road have so far turned out to be people i could come back to and, apparently, still offer something of value. I look forward to exploring the shape some of these relationships might eventually take.
I have honored the practice of picking something to document along our way in each administrative region, and i’m hungry to share the results on this newsletter. I hope those of you waiting for it will understand that it will take me longer than i estimated to put together what i’ve collected. I plan to keep up with the exercise going forward, and i wouldn’t mind getting some suggestions, by the way 😉
The region of Odesa has been socially intense — especially the “lump” West of the Dnister River — a few days at a friend’s place in the city of Odesa was not enough for us to recharge — we decided to stop again after just 20km, where we found some manageable short-term accommodation with minimal social obligations in the outskirts. We plan to be here for a few days to catch up with ourselves. I will set aside some of this time to catch up with my day job and work on this newsletter, and leave the rest to simply be — paradoxically, i don’t seem to have done enough of the latter since our journey started two-and-a-half months ago.
Here are a few more photos from the past few weeks since my last note — click on them to see them enlarged and read the captions.
power lines — in Ukraine, national and religious symbols are frequently bound together (Ivanivka, Mohiliv-Podils’kyi District, Vinnytsia Region, Summer ’19)
memorial to a fallen German soldier — locals found the body and decided to give it a proper Christian burial — Freudian slip or innocent act of compassion? (Ukraine, Summer ’19)
if i understood it correctly (and i asked several times), this was a Ukrainian Orthodox Church service held in Moldovan and Russian (Krutoyarivka, Bilhorod-Dnistrovs’kyi District, Odesa Region, Ukraine, Summer ’19)
trying to draw a heart shape at sunset (Odesa, Ukraine, Summer ’19)
i didn’t stop to photograph all of them, but i continued to notice bus stops along our way — i believe this one was built (or at least renovated) in 2011, together with the Cossack sculptures frequently found (and dated) near them (Yampil District, Vinnytsia Region, Ukraine, Summer ’19)
this, however, is most certainly what is left of another Soviet bus stop mosaic (Velyka Mikhailivka District, Odesa Region, Ukraine, Summer ’19)
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Talk soon!
___ Featured photo: our route so far starting from the L’viv region, then going briefly into Poland, then back to L’viv, then across the Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Vinnytsia and Odesa regions around the Carpathians and Moldova
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UPDATED October 25th, 2019 — this is a dispatch from my cycle tour of Ukraine and surroundings this past Summer with my partner Nastia, an open project on an Autumn/Winter hiatus — check out the project page more information, and sign up for my newsletter if you would like to be notified when it resumes 🙂
I finally found some time to edit, add a few more photos, and cross-post my tour de Ukraine dispatches to this website, where you may now find mildly edited versions of them:
Day #0 — my very first day back on the road, one day before than originally planned;
Polishing it up! — a quick update from our first few days on the road after getting Nastia’s bicycle;
If only this were just an extended vacation — a reflection on my travel process, particularly on how it depends to some extent on the kindness of people i meet along my way, and how i may want to change some of how i handle it going forward;
Some bus stops in the Chernivtsi Region — a document of bus stops along our route by bicycle through the Chernivtsi Region, with a few tentative notes/brewing thoughts on national borders and identity.
If you prefer sharing my writing more broadly in social media than by directly forwarding some of these emails to select people, i hope you’ll find the links above convenient — whatever you do to promote this newsletter will be much appreciated, so long as you sincerely endorse it <3
I’ve also started a page to collect photo galleries and articles from this tour, which i’m giving the working title In The Countrie — that’s a free (and intentionally misspelled) translation of у країні (u kraini), which in turn is a play on words with Україна (Ukraina), Ukrainian for Ukraine. If you don’t want me to make puns in your language, better not let me learn any of it! Anyway, Nastia likes it, and i hope the other seven of you who can speak both languages will also 😀
Speaking of Nastia and the other seven of you who can read Ukrainian, she also has a blog, where she’s been writing about her experience traveling by bicycle for the first time, as well as in the country she grew up but never saw much of. Machine translations work relatively well also.
Cool. That’s about it for today.
“I’ll be back in five minutes, please stir the jam every half-an-hour” — that came up at our dinner table with our hosts a few days ago as the kind of notice they’d give their children when going to the market, or to pick up something from the neighbor.
I thought it was hilarious — and it accurately described my own experience growing up with my grandmother! If i went out to look for her, i’d often find that she’d barely left home before getting stuck catching up with a neighbor. Upon seeing me, she’d sometimes react — “Oh, great, you’re here, can you please go to the market and get me an onion while i wrap up the conversation, so i can go finish cooking lunch?”
I love Grandma.
In that spirit, see you next week!
___ Featured photo: a still somewhat disoriented Nastia preparing our nevertheless delicious dinner at one of our wild camping sites (Ukraine ’19)
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UPDATED October 25th, 2019 — this is a dispatch from my cycle tour of Ukraine and surroundings this past Summer with my partner Nastia, an open project on an Autumn/Winter hiatus — check out the project page more information, and sign up for my newsletter if you would like to be notified when it resumes 🙂
After leaving the city of Chernivtsi about a week ago, we noticed that some bus stops in the villages were decorated with colorful mosaics. This prompted me to document bus stops along our way, and i stopped to photograph at least the ones on top of which the name of the village was shown.
I hope you’ll enjoy this collection and the notes/thoughts accompanying them. Click on the photos to see them enlarged, and with their respective descriptions — i wrote them linearly, and this post will make more sense if you read all the captions in order before moving on to the next paragraph 🙂
1980 Summer Olympics mosaics in Zelenyi Hai (Leușenii Tăutului in Romanian/Moldavian)
Marshyntsi (Marșenița) is where we first learned about the origins of the mosaics from the man selling the furniture — i forgot to ask how people feel about his using the bus stop to display his products though
Nastia thought that the photos would still look boring without her, even though the mosaics are all different (Tarasivtsi/Tărăsăuți)
in the historical region of Bucovina, most people’s mother tongue is Romanian/Moldavian, which is also how they often identify themselves rather than as Ukrainians — that is widely reflected in bilingual street signs, political campaign posters for the upcoming parliamentary elections, and the blue-yellow-red Romanian/Moldovan flag colors in public spaces (Kostichani/Costiceni)
the bus stop in Dranytsia was one of the few not to display the village’s Romanian/Moldavian name (Șendreni) — people riding their scooters without a helmet has been a prevalent feature of countryside Ukraine so far though
Mamaliha (Mămăligă) was the last 1980 Summer Olympics mosaic along our route — Mămăligă is also the name of a traditional Romanian/Moldovan dish, one of the many indicators of how national borders reflect (or not) local history and culture
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Locals old enough to remember told us that they were made for the 1980 Summer Olympics, held in Moscow (then in the Soviet Union) — the road between Chernivtsi and Mamaliha (along the Ukrainian-Romanian-Moldovan border) was part of the Olympic torch relay route from Athens to Moscow.
Newer bus stops don’t have the mosaics, but some of them are still decorated after the bule-yellow-red stripes of the Romanian/Moldovan national flags — all of them show sparing permutations of job postings, graffiti, and political campaign posters (often also in Romanian/Moldavian) for the upcoming Ukrainian parliamentary elections.
even newer bus stops, such as this one in Koshuliany (Coșuleni), might be adorned with the blue-yellow-red pattern from the Romanian/Moldovan flags
outside the 1980 Summer Olympics torch route, bus stops were mostly bare, except for some job notices, posters of candidates to Ukraine’s upcoming parliamentary elections, and the occasional grafitti (Nesvoia/Nesfoaia)
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Outside the Olympic torch path and away from the historical region of Bucovina, common features of the bus stops seemed related to the raion in which they’re located. In the Khotyn Raion, they have red caption banners.
some of the bus stops looked like they might not be used very often (Yarivka/Hajdeu de Sus)
others looked like a good enough place for a lunch break to cycle travelers unaware that it is also occasionally used as a toilet (Krutenky/Tulbureni)
at least one of them is someone’s temporary home (Dankivtsi/Dăncăuți)
Kaplivka (Capilauca) was the last one i noticed in the Khotyn Raion, where they all had the red caption panels
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In the Sokyriany Raion, the banners are blue — and the furthest you are from the historical region of Bucovina, the more common it was to see them painted with the blue-yellow stripes of the Ukrainian national flag.
Krovka (Crovca) is in the Sokyriany Raion, where the caption panels changed to blue — this one also drew my attention for the symmetry
as you move further away from the historical region of Bucovina, Ukrainian gradually returns as the predominantly spoken language (at least judged by how people responded to our greetings), and the Romanian/Moldovan flag colors give way to the blue and yellow stripes of the Ukrainian flag
i don’t have that much more to say about these (Hrubna/Grubna)
Strumok (Strumoc)
this one in Romankivtsi (Romancăuți) also grabbed my attention mostly by the symmetry — i was also amused by the goat hanging out behind the bus stop, which you cannot see on the photo, so i’m writing about it
a design departure from all the bus stops i photographed in this exercise that must be very inconvenient under heavy rain, snow or wind (Lomachyntsi/Lomacineți) — the lighting break on the symmetry was fun to play with though!
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I stopped documenting them upon arriving in Novodnistrovs’k, on the border between the Chernivtsi and Vinnytsia Regions.
UPDATED on August 21st, 2019: After i published this, a reader drew my attention to the work of photographer Christopher Herwig, who traveled tens of thousands of kilometers across the former Soviet territory documenting the fascinating peculiarities of some bus stops built during that period.
Note: I used this Wikipedia article for the Romanian/Moldovan spellings whenever they could not be locally ascertained.
This was an interesting exercise in a couple different ways.
It was a tremendous exercise in photography. After playing with a few different angles, i decided to keep it simple, and just take centralized shots from across the road — and i still managed to screw some of it up! I thought a smaller aperture with longer exposure times would capture more of the shaded parts, but this often resulted in blurred or noisy images, despite the overwhelming amount of light. Note to self: there’s no point in being lazy on a cycle tour — park the bike, take out the tripod (wherever it is and has to go back to), and savor the process! Note to the rest of you: if you have any experience with photography and any suggestions on how i could make photos like these look and feel better, i’ll be glad to read your feedback <3
I could have surely dug a lot deeper into this, but i was already satisfied (and occasionally overwhelmed) by how much more attention i paid to something i’d have otherwise mostly ignored. If i hadn’t pledged to photograph every single bus stop showing the name of the village where they’re located, i would have skipped many, if not all of them after the first one. It was almost never a good moment to stop for photos — one afternoon we were in a rush to escape from dark clouds approaching us from behind, another afternoon i was in a bad mood after a huge (and pointless) fight with Nastia, yet another afternoon we were anxious to find a roadside pension where we could spend a night or two free of mosquitoes or social obligations, just to have some rest and catch up with ourselves — simply parking the bicycle, getting the camera out, shooting the same photos, from the same angles, then putting the camera back is enough of a hassle.
It’s beneficial to have a practice to be committed to and build upon.
Having said that, i’m not convinced i can remain deeply interested in bus stops for the next three months. So, i decided to look for something different in each administrative region of Ukraine we will visit throughout the Summer — a meta-practice, if you will — what i did with bus stops in the Chernivtsi Region will ideally develop into a series of photo albums capturing, for each region we visit, something that drew my attention there, and the thorough documentation of which seems manageable in the context of my cycle tour.
We’re about to cross the Dnister River into Vinnytsia now — looking forward to finding out what that’s going to be, and then sharing it with you!
I hope that these will be easier for me to put together and for you to digest — but not so cheap that you wouldn’t spend more than a fraction of a second scrolling over it 😉 I also hope it will help keep the newsletter rolling without taking much away from my present experience, and while i look for the space to work on more challenging content.
___ Featured photo: Nastia conquering yet another sizeable hill on the foot of the Carpathians (Ukraine, Summer ’19)
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