Day 10: More Chisinau

This was perhaps our favorite day in Moldova. We woke up and made a beeline for the ethnographic museum. Beautifully composed, with a wide variety of exhibits, it was definitely a museum we are glad we visited. The only English speaking docent was an elderly woman with snow white hair who was quite excited to practice her English with us. A few minutes into our conversation, she looked at us sideways, and said:

Docent: "I am Ju-dee."
Katie: "I'm Katie, nice to meet you!"
Docent: "No, no, no. YE-HU-DI?"
Katie: "Yehudi? Gam anachnu?" ("Jew? Us too!")

Bella, AKA Ju-dee, started laughing so hard she was crying. We proceeded to utilize our hard earned Hebrew in the middle of the exhibit about extinct Moldovan birds, in the middle of the FSU, with a museum docent old enough to be our grandmother.

We spent the rest of the day catching up on our blog, making plans for our grand exit of Moldova, and helping set up for Shabbat dinner. This involved fifteen people crammed around a table for six, with enough food for eight. Somehow, it worked. I was reminded of the chair cramming, portion-cutting Shabbat dinners of our undergrad days.

To our surprise, an American studying Yiddish history and ethnography was at the table. Sebastian was a straight up font of knowledge about the FSU, something that we are both embarrassingly ignorant about. We picked his brain about Chisinau, Moldova, the FSU, the state of Yiddish in global Jewish culture, and what can be done to revive Jewish communities in the States. Once more, we stayed up far too late, but it was entirely worth it. Thankfully, Sebastian is going to be finishing up his PhD coursework in Bloomington, so we should be seeing more of him shortly.

Day 8 & 9 Night-Train (Wreck) to Moldova

No Honking! They could use more of these signs in Chisineau

Katie in our luxury 2nd class compartment

"The future of the forest is in your hands"

Why the tiny frog cross the road? So Katie could catch him.

Katie shows off a cow jaw

Day 8: Moldova Bound

After parting ways with Anne, we sped towards Vinnystia. Full of diesel-spewing and oil-burning automobiles and trucks, it was decidedly not the most scenic place we've been thus far. Nate, being that good sport that he is, went into the train station armed with pictograms of two people, two bicycles, and a map of Western Ukraine and Moldova. This would be easy enough, we thought.

An hour later, Nate came out of the train station, having been through multiple lines, plenty of hassle, and some serious difficulty in obtaining our tickets, as well as tickets for our bicycles. With this taken care of, we ran around trying to figure out which platform we were supposed to be departing from. With ramps at 10 percent grades, we mostly had to haul our bicycles up steep flights of steps to platforms. A kind cyclist tried to help us, but, surprise, the number of the platform isn't printed on your ticket: "Seriously, there is no information here. It is useless. I am so sorry," he apologized over and over. After asking people "Chisinau? Chisinau?" and realizing that it's pronounced differently in Ukrainian, Russian, Modolvan, and Romanian, we finally gave up and waited for a train to pull in at the appointed hour.

We climbed up onto the train's last car and were lucky enough to get a cabin attendant who spoke enough English to help us. Our bicycles were stowed in the back of the train car, and our belongings and tired selves were stuffed into a corner of a Pullman sleeper car. Lucky enough to snag second class tickets, and even luckier to have a cabin built for four to ourselves, we settled in for a dinner of ramen noodles.

The trip is only 100 km, but due to border crossings and rail sizing issues, it took 14 hours to reach our destination. Bicycles aren't allowed to cross via land, so we were stuck with the train as our mode of transit. We were woken up at 23:00 and again at midnight with Ukrainian and Moldovan border security wanting to know just where we were going.

In the morning, we woke up as we pulled into the sparkly, decidedly non-Soviet train station in Moldova's capital. The morning was spent being overwhelmed and horrified by hideous buildings, obscene traffic, and even worse "traffic circles." No one had explained the rules of the road to post-Soviet Moldova, and people drove like drunken teenagers on methamphetamine.

We found some peace with our new friend, Yulia, who founded Moishe House in Chisinau. Moishe House is an organization aiming to create young Jewish communities in places where there aren't necessarily thriving communities. Although we were ecstatic about the hot shower and laundry, we were most excited about figuring out just what was going on in this funny little capital city. We were given an incredible tour of Jewish Chisinau by Yulia, who is certainly one of the go-to resources for Jewish history in Chisnau. Before WWII, Chisinau was 40 percent Jewish. Currently, less than one percent of the city identifies as Jewish. We stayed up until past midnight, discussing the state of global Jewry, learning about the FSU, learning about Chisinau and Moldova, and generally being charmed by this incredible young woman. We were cajoled into spending another day in Chisinau so that we could enjoy Moishe House's Shabbat hospitality.

Day 7 Rain and Sputnik

We started the day a little late, but in high spirits. The map indicated straight, quality roads, a tail wind and eggs for breakfast had us feeling we could get close to our next planned stop, the town of Vinnitsya. Though it wasn't to be our most scenic day, there was still plenty to enjoy.

Two of our favorite Ukrainian sights in one: horsecart and painted gates

That is, until it started raining, we got soaked, and Nate's hands started going numb from the "hard covered" roads and cold, wet gloves. Fortunately, we found plenty of places to put our great little stove to work, warming ourselves up with hot tea.

Public wells make great places to hide from rain

Nate, looking classy, and sad that the bus stop had a leaky roof.

Nearing the end of the day, we grabbed some supplies from a little market, including a bottle of kvas, a fermented Russian soft drink that's somewhere in between rootbeer and Guiness. Unfortunately, Nate had picked it out to surprise Katie, and hadn't realized it was a massive 2 liters. So we strapped it on top of our bags to save for later, and went on our merrry way.

But the kvas wasn't having taking any nonsense from the dirt roads, and the second or third time it went flying off the bag, it burst a spraying hole. As we sat and chugged down as much of the stuff as we could (it did cost a whopping 8 grivna=$1US), watching village life pass us by, someone pulled up to us on a bike. There are lots of people hauling lots of stuff around on beat up old Soviet singlespeed bikes in and between all of the villages in the Ukraine, but we knew at once that this wasn't a typical villager. She proved to be our first fellow bike tourist, a German named Anne, who was working her way west from Siberia by train and now bike, visiting all the places her grandmother had lived, and suffered, in the Soviet past. After introductions and mutual bike inspections (hers is an ancient Sputnik brand, with a guitar strapped on the back, and the Russian word for dandelion painted across her bags), we all agreed to continue on and camp out together that night.

Anne, barefooted cyclist

She proved a great companion: she pushed us to ride longer, to find a great campsite waaay down a farm road, beside a huge field of sunflowers, help us make a delicious dinner, and play a lovely little good night song. It was great to have a Russian speaker to help us navigate the stores, where you need to ask for your goods, and to speak to passerby at our campsite. Her experiences as a German in Ukraine sounded pretty fascinating: it turns out that for all that Germany killed and destroyed in the Ukraine, the Soviets managed to be more hated there. Add that to the old men's pleasant memories of army postings in East Germany and their commiseration with her grandmother's time in the gulag, and she received warm welcome everywhere she went. To give our thanks back to her, Nate tried to give the Sputnik a little love. Unfortunately, its many woes were a bit much for field repair, and in the morning we parted ways as she stopped in the next village to find Soviet tools for her Soviet bicycle. We headed on toward Vinnitisya and the night train to Chisinau.

Katie's bike likes sunflowers as much as she does.

Day 6 Israelis and Soviet Monuments

With Uman as our goal, we bicycled through more closely spaced towns, featuring some spectacular monuments.

Lenin!
More Lenin!

Tractor!

Our map designates Uman a "picturesgue" town. But the way seemed to be filled with disappointly drab apartment buildings and heavy traffic over the inevitably paved, but utterly destroyed roads that mark all of the more built up towns from the truly quaint-as-all-hell villages. After getting directions from the first English speaker we'd met since leaving our host in Kiev, we found up at the gates to the apparently famous Sofiyivka gardens near the middle of town. Rather than go right in, we decided that since Uman seemed to be closer to the 21st century than anyplace around, that we should find some Internets and get our bearings. After unsucessfully cruising the main drag in search of wi-fi, we started asking people on the street "Internet?" with the hopeful tone and hand gestures that had gotten us from one unsigned village to the next. Nate found a guide with a man who led us around the corner to a basement Internet cafe. Besides sending off an e-mail to let the parents know we were still alive, we also checked out how to get to this place:

Holy Hebrew, Nachman!

This lovely warehouse looking edifice is the burial place of one of the most famous rabbis in all Judaism, Reb. Nachman of Bretslov. A couple hundred years ago, when this was more Poland than Ukraine, he advocated a pretty radical approach to Judaism that de-emphasized role of strict adherence to the rules and devotion to learning. Instead, he promoted joy in a direct, loving connection to G-d. His followers today are known for going out into nature to call out to G-d. They are also pile into vans plastered with Nachman's image, pull up at intersections in New York or Tel Aviv, jump out, dance like mad men to blaring trance-techno music, peyos flailing, and then speeding off to do it again (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhZiRPnxRfw). After seeing the the phrase Na Nach Nachman meUman spray painted on every street corner in Israel, we felt like we might as well see the place while we had the chance. It was strange to roll through this thouroughly Ukrainian town and suddendly come into a little ghetto where Hebrew was the most common language, with even the local street vendors calling out to us in it. It must be even crazier at Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish new year, when 20,000 people make a pilgramage here. Nate took the opportunity to take his first dip into a proper mikvah, or ritual bath, we said a couple prayers in the synagogue, ate some glatt-kosher pizza, turned down a couple offers of free lunch (nothing's ever free, and we didn't feel like navigating the complex world of hospitality), we returned to check out the gardens.

These proved well worth the time, as the sign said they were "charmingly beautiful in all seasons," or at least in "hot summer." Sculptures and sculpted landscape make it a fabulous place to take a stroll.

This gardener's pump was backfiring on him.

Sofiyivka park even has some of the nature

After that, we found a gas cannister from a fishing store, some cookies from a roadside vendor, and it was time to get out of Uman. While Nate checked with an old woman that we were on the right road, her goats came over to investigate Katie and our bikes. It didn't take the nanny goat long to find the bag with the food, identify the buckle holding it shut, and start to work out a way to open it. The bike tipping over didn't deter her in the slightest, but the keeper managed to shoo her along for us.

Leaving Uman meant cutting through several reasonable sized towns, which meant tricky navigation, gnarly roads, and no place to camp. People were being extra friendly, though, and one couple, who introduced themselves as Baba and Dada (grandma and grandpa), gave us a half dozen eggs. As the sun started to drop, we finally made it past last town on the route and found a little corner to throw up our tent in record time. The eggs had miraculously survived several kilometers of pounding cobbles, and we passed out with happy, full bellies.

Day 4 Hospitality gone wild

Covered in mosquito welts, we broke camp and planned our morning. With our trusty Russian map pointing us in the right direction, we took off, with the first goal of the day was to find water. This lead us a few kilometers down the road to a village so small it did not even show up on the map. Our usual request for water was made to a middle aged woman at the gate to her house. When we said we were Americans, her eyes nearly bulged out of her head. Surely, these people are crazy, and they are skinny, is what we guess she was thinking. We were shooed into the front yard of her home, where introductions were made all around. Tanya, Anna, Luda and Nina, all single, all in their fifties and sixties, were enjoying a morning of sunshine and friendship, when suddenly some crazy people showed up to make things slightly out of the ordinary.

The table was cleared off faster than our sleep fogged brains could comprehend, covered in a clean table cloth, we were pushed into chairs, and a five course breakfast appeared. Eggs, bread, goose liver pate, homemade peroshky, homemade cherry and apple drink, milk straight from the cow, tea, coffee, fruit, and more magically appeared on the table.

Anna sat down next to Katie to supervise our breakfast eating. She kept pinching the arm of Katie and pinching her rather larger one for comparison and laughing hysterically at the difference, while urging Katie to eat more. Nate received the same treatment. After insisting that we could not possibly eat more, we were led into the garden by Tanya, who showed off nearly four acres of hand tilled vegetables and orchard.

Turning down a gracious offer of a place to stay, as it was only noon, but loaded down with fried egg sandwiches, cucumbers, cherries, and cherry drink, we continued on.

The landscape of the southern part of Ukraine can be summarized as up and down, up and down, up and down. Ten percent grades were not unusual, and road conditions prevented any enjoyable pedaling down hills.

Ah, road conditions. Rural Ukraine is almost entirely neglected in terms of infrastructure. Running water, as previously discussed, is unheard of. Roads that are paved one year are nearly washed away and reduced to ancient cobbles the next. Sometimes roads are a delightful combination of cobblestones, loose gravel, sand, potholes, and seemingly completely random chunks of pavement. More often than not, reasonably paved roads between towns inexplicably turn into wicked combinations of gravel and cobblestones in town. Getting her front wheel stuck on a cobble on an uphill, Katie gracefully flopped over onto the road on at least two occasions.

Although the road conditions were enough to make any reasonable person turn around and find a different route, the plethora of baby animals made up for all frustration, bruising, and angst caused by Lada swallowing potholes. Goslings, calves, ducklings, lambs, kids, piglets and chicks had the right of way in most towns and for the most part ran amuk. Sheep, goats, and cows are tethered outside of gates, alongside roads, in parks, and are left to graze for the entire day. In the evening, traffic jams are caused by women leading farm animals down the road. In many respects, this part of the country felt like being in a century long time warp.

Ducklings appreciate bad roads, as they make for good swimming and grazing

As a departure from domesticated flora and fauna, wild storks were nesting on any and every available surface. Clacking and croaking notified us of tiny storks, making their own awful squeaking noises.

Day 3 Time to ride bicycles, but first, the train

Jordi repeatedly warned us that we should not ride out of the city. Kiev has only a handful of ways in and out of it, and they all seem to be expressways. Masha, the girlfriend of Jordi, happens to be a professional bicycle tour operator, and she reitereated what Jordi had to say about the safety of leaving Kiev. Nate braved crowds and an enormous language barrier to find two tickets. The rest of the morning was spent lounging on the grass outside of the Kiev train station.

With tickets purchased, a much needed lounge on the grass ensues

The train rideto Bialyserkov was supposedly an hour long trip. Instead, we were stuck on a Soviet era train for nearly four hours, smashed up against nearly a hundred people in our car alone, with a squat toilet between cars reeking of the worst of human excretions. In short, it was an excellent affirmation of our belief that riding bicycles is in fact a superior form a travel.

Nate is so very excited to be off the train

Getting off the train at Bialy Tserkov was an enormous relief as we practically gulped down fresh air. We were faced with two options for disembarking, one being hauling fully loaded bicycles weighing about 50 pounds each up four flights of stairs and across the train tracks. While this sounded like great fun, our second option seemed more practical, albeit challenging in its own fashion. This option featured a ramp whose gated five foot tall entrance was welded shut. We peeled bags off of the bicycles, passed them over the gate, and then climbed around the top of the ramp, which was about six feet off of rather heavily trafficked train tracks.

Ramp access is for wimps

Desperate to get moving and away from all things involving trains, we took of in what we assumed was the correct direction. Beautiful, winding, two lane country roads with barely any traffic to speak of stretched as far as the eye could see, with sunflower and wheat fields punctuated by ancient wind breaks. City traffic rapidly gave way to single speed bicycles from the 1960s and ubiquitous Lada automobiles. These seem to be the only automobiles owned by rural Ukrainians, and they only come in a handful of colors, those being green, green, or occasionally light green.

One hundred acres of sunflowers, being camera shy

Snack breaks keep Katie happy

The importance of water cannot be emphasized enough. Dehydration does not just make you feel like you want to die, it also makes you an incredibly crabby touring partner. In order to avoid dehydration and its resulting crabbiness, we were required to stop for water approximately every twenty miles. In the middle of the Urkaine, running water is almost completely unheard of. Wells, both public and private, are the only means of obtaining clean drinking water. At our first stop, we were greeted by curious peasants wondering what the hell a pair of random Americans were doing in their village of twenty families. Bemused, they were more than happy to provide us with icy cold water from 40 meters below the ground. At our second stop, we were given a quart of freshly picked sour cherries, and we stopped to enjoy them, along with more delicious water.

As the day wound down, our lovely road suddenly dead ended into a raging expressway. We realized that we had gone around in a scenic, if uneccessary triangle. Oops. With lessons learned about asking for directions, we made camp in a wind break, and with rice in our stomachs, we watched the sun set. We were promptly devoured by mosquitos, which truly added to the ambience of the experience.

Happily stretching before the influx of winged monsters