6 June 2009

I took the FSOT this morning. There were eight other people there taking the test (only one didn’t show up). For as nice as the administrators were, the testing protocol was extremely strict. By law I am not allowed to discuss or publish specifics (I had to sign a lot of forms), but we had to go through several security checkpoints and then weren’t allowed to bring ANYTHING into the testing room; not even a pen. It was funny when I was first signing in. I have spoken very little English in the last three or four weeks, had been hearing a lot of Russian and Ukrainian and when one of the women asked me a question I completely forgot how to answer. It came out as something like “Nye-ahh-newno” and my pitch went high and then really low and everyone in the room laughed. I just said “sorry…its been a long week.”

I think I did well, but I’m nervous about it. From the start, they told us it would be ten to twelve weeks before we received results, but then when I finished the exam a screen told me it would be around five to six, and one of the administrators told me that she received hers in five, but that there is a hiring crunch right now so perhaps I will hear even sooner.

When I was leaving, I asked one of the women there what there is to do in Kyiv, and she gave me a tourist pamphlet and took down my phone number. She said her and a friend were going out for drinks later, and invited me to come along.

I managed to get a lot done today. The city is much smaller than St. Petersburg, I found a good map, and the metro makes a LOT of stops. I went to St. Sophia’s Cathedral, St. Andrew’s Church, St. Michael’s Cathedral, the Golden Gates, Andrew’s Descent, I walked up and down Khreschatuk (the Kyiv version of Nevskii…the center city main street), The One Street Museum, and I saw a number of monuments and government buildings.

I went to the Golden Gates first, because that was one of the specific landmarks I wanted to see here. Built in 1037, they were once so eroded and degraded that the locals buried them in dirt in order to preserve them. The gates are now almost entirely restored, and they have rebuilt a replica of the original cathedral around the gates to scale that supposedly sits on an interior frame to protect the original architecture.

St. Sophia’s, St. Michael’s, and St. Andrew’s were nice, but other than beautiful architecture and surrounding parks, nothing really struck me as particularly exciting with either of them. After I walked around the park at St. Michael’s, I saw a building with a word on it I didn’t understand. I got closer, and saw the explanation was that it was from French transliterated into Ukrainian, and in front there was a diorama with a model of the city with little cars and busses and things. I went up to a girl selling (and eating) ice cream and asked her about it, and she said to go take a look and that its interesting. I asked if it was a museum, and she more or less said ‘sort of.’ I went inside, and when I tried to buy tickets I found out that I was in a metro station that just happened to have a display out front. The woman behind the counter thought it was pretty funny, and when I went back to the girl selling ice cream she thought it was pretty funny as well.

The One Street Museum was a little confusing. I wasn’t looking for it, but I was exploring and happened upon it. There was no explanation outside, but I figured I came to see museums and it was on the way to another, so I bought a ticket and went in apparently the street its located has over the years housed famous artists, performers, writers, soldiers, and religious leaders. The museum is filled with antiques and memorabilia from the various celebrities to live in the area.

Andrew’s Descent was interesting. According to the guidebook, its one of the oldest streets in Kiev, and it’s a long cobblestone road that weaves and winds down a steep hill, and merchants and artists line both sides. A lot of the souvenirs are the same junk that you can find in St. Petersburg, but there were some exceptions. I haven’t decided what to get a souvenir for myself yet. I did have one bad experience, however. I happened upon a merchant with a larger setup, with two tables and a rack, and he was selling all kinds of antiques. He had old cameras, binoculars, WWII medals from both the Soviet military and Nazi (I know for a fact its illegal in Russia to sell medals from the war, probably here as well), and along the wall he had hanging two concentration camp uniforms with Jewish stars sewn onto the front with a border in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. For as much as I’ve been enjoying my short stay here, I think its disgusting that someone would be profiting off selling things like that. He looked over at me while I was staring at the uniforms, and I guess he noticed the look on my face and smirked. It made me wish I knew more Russian profanity.

Tonight for dinner I stopped into a restaurant and told the waiter I wanted to find a meal I couldn’t have in Russia. I ended up with borscht (Misha, the friend I made on the train told me it was absolutely necessary that I eat borscht while I’m here), a salad made with pickles, onions, salted mushrooms and some other taste I didn’t recognize, a chicken and vegetable cutlet, and some kind of dessert made of a slab of sweetened fried dough. It was very, very good.

Afterwards, I headed back to Хрещатик (the main street) where there were a lot of street performances going on. Immediately outside the metro, I saw a group of people huddled around a homeless man, who was holding a block of wood and dancing to some music playing from a nearby store. I have to say- he was pretty good. He had a big crowd, and he was earning his money. I don’t think a day has gone by in St. Petersburg where upon seeing the homeless people begging at the metro I haven’t thought ‘why don’t they sing or something and at least try to earn money instead of just holding up a sign or sticking out a dirty hand?’ so I felt I had to give something. I generally on principle don’t give homeless people money, so I only gave him 10 gryvna, the equivalent of about a dollar fifty. Nobody else had given him money yet, and as I walked away he picked it up and yelled “Our respectful comrade must be from America, that he has such money to give away!” and I yelled back “is it that obvious?” and he said “don’t worry, I understand. You just don’t have any more money, right?” At that point I wanted to ask for my money back. I gave him money for dancing on the sidewalk and he was complaining that it wasn’t more. It’s not my job to give him money. I had to spend a lot of money to make it to Kyiv, whereas he is living for free…even if it is on the sidewalk outside the metro.

I watched some break-dancers (who weren’t very good) and a trio playing Beatles songs (who were pretty good) and then made my way down the street where there was a big concert going on. A huge stage had been erected, and they had a large range of performances. After a while, the homeless man came over and started singing along with the performers and dancing with their music. People made a circle around him and were cheering him on and filming him. Someone bought him a beer, and he chugged it and started using the bottle as a microphone. After that, people were practically throwing money at him. I took a couple videos of him, but he wasn’t getting any more money from me.

As the last performance finished, I got a text message from Nancy, the woman from the testing center. I hopped on the metro and went to meet her and her friend. We sat in a bar and they talked to me about work as foreign service officers and asked me about my interests in the program. It was a nice time, and when I left (before them, because I had to take the metro home and it was almost midnight) they refused to let me leave money for my drink. They said “pay it forward. You’re a student, you’re far from home…we’ve been there. When you pass the exam do it for someone else.”

I’m trying to plan out my day for tomorrow. I want to go to the Ukrainian Museum of History and possibly the Chernobyl Museum, but other than that I’m not really sure what to do. I have a guidebook though, so I’ll figure something out. On a side note, I flipped through the packet left here by the hotel, and I’m pretty sure I could spend all my time in the building and never see the same thing twice. They have three or four restaurants, two bars, a massage parlor, a couple stores…

I take back what I said yesterday about the metro. There are definitely plusses and minuses when comparing the Petersburg and the Kyiv Metros. The one here in Kyiv is nice because most of the stops are above ground or not very deep, so its very easy to jump on and off the metro, but because there are only three lines the trains are very inconsistent. I thought yesterday that it was great how often they operate here, but I discovered today that you can wait thirty seconds for a train or fifteen minutes. In St. Petersburg you have to spend several minutes in line and on escalators every time you go in or out of the metro, but once, unless you’re at the beginning of a line, the longest you’ll have to wait is three to four minutes for a train.

I really get a vibe here that the Ukrainian people are just…friendlier. I held a door open for a girl at the metro yesterday and she said ‘thank you.’ In Petersburg, if you hold the door open for someone they push past you. People here smile on the street, express themselves more, and don’t seem so…aggressive. Monica, Nancy’s friend, told me a joke tonight at the bar (she lived in St. Petersburg for a while): In a crowded subway car, a man gets up from his seat to let an old woman sit down. She remarked, “you must be from St. Petersburg!” to which he answered “Why?” The old woman said, “because a person from Moscow wouldn’t have gotten up!” The man responded “Well you must be from Moscow.” To which the old woman said “why?” and he snapped back “because a person from St. Petersburg would have said ‘thank you!’”