"Doing" Odessa

Yesterday marked the beginning of my fourth week living in Odessa, Ukraine!  Accordingly, I decided it's about time to give this whole blogging thing a try.

I guess it's usually best to start with the basics.  I live by myself in a really wonderful studio apartment with wood floors, two huge windows, a couch that pulls out into a bed, a small kitchen, and my own bathroom.  The apartment was renovated pretty recently, and it's therefore equipped with a surprising number of (Western?) amenities: an air conditioner, a laundry machine, a water heater, a television, a refrigerator, two gas burners, and more.  I live right in the city center, and whenever I'm at home I open my windows and listen to passing cars, endless construction, dogs and cats (Odessa's second population, I think), and people yelling at one another in Russian.  Listening to the sounds out my windows has also taught me to keep track of time by church bells and, because of a cafe and a trendy electronics store downstairs, introduced me to all the bad, American pop music I missed out on during my four years at New College.

Odessa is a beautiful, quirky port city on the Black Sea.  Its center is bursting at the seams with high-end electronics stores, clothing stores, shoe stores, and is home to multiple new, shiny, crowded shopping malls.  At the same time, I live within walking distance to independent art galleries, cafes, museums, parks, a dramatic theater, an art house movie theater, a fantastic (golden) opera house, and open-air markets.  The streets are filled with rusty cars barely chugging along, followed by glittering Jaguars, crumbling historic buildings slouching over onto new, glass-ceiling-ed shopping plazas.  Odessa is a port town above all else: the city reeks of the sea and I pass uniformed sailors every time I go for a walk.  The tourist season is just winding down, and when I first arrived, I thought, "How did I manage to finally escape Florida and end up in a seasonal, tourist-driven, beach-obsessed coastal town in Eastern Europe?"  However, of course, Odessa feels very, very different from home.  People have been far friendlier than I expected and in this "humor capital of the former Soviet Union," most natives seem to wear good-natured smirks most of the time.

My Fulbright research doesn't technically begin until mid-November and I am currently in the intensive study period of my Critical Language Enhancement Award.  This means I have Russian classes five days a week and spend most of my time alone or with other international students, studying, walking around, or going to cafes.  I've certainly already been to a few exciting/touristy activities, such as seeing Swan Lake at the Opera House, attending the first symphony concert of the season at the Philharmonic, finding myself at an experimental piano concert at the Literature Museum, visiting two art galleries, walking down the Potemkin staircase and exploring the sea port, etc.  However, my life is still significantly different from the six-week summer I spent in St. Petersburg, in which I lived with a number of other American students with whom I immediately become very close and with whom I went to museums, plays, concerts, cafes, etc every day after school and traveled with almost every weekend.  My classmates here are certainly nice, but we're all here for varying lengths of time, live away from one another, and are different ages and in pretty different stages of our lives.  Accordingly, I spend quite a lot of time alone.  The rest (not in class) I tend to spend visiting casually with international students from another language school nearby, an American writer-friend I met through a former Fulbrighter in Odessa (he, the writer-friend, is currently working as a bartender in the only Mexican restaurant in Odessa!), the one Ukrainian friend I currently have, or the Fulbright scholar in Odessa and his wife and three-year-old son (I've been for dinner at their house once and with Hannah, his journalist wife, to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah -- they're great company, but of course, their Fulbright experience is also significantly different from mine as a soon-to-be-23-year-old currently here on my own).  I'm, of course, still feeling around and trying to find my place in this new city and country.  

As I begin my year in Ukraine, I'm really trying to figure out what it means to be here as something more than a tourist: how I can really experience and live life here in a way that's different from just snapping pictures to send home, different from "conquering" Odessa and checking each little experience off on my list of things to be "done."  I recently read an article in the New York Times that I found on another Fulbrighter's blog about how people go to the Louvre and rush through and take pictures of famous pieces of art without ever stopping to look (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/arts/design/03abroad.html?_r=1) and I couldn't help but think how this could be applied to traveling.  A reader commented on the article: “And watching the young people, searching out a famous work, focusing the cell phone, clicking - without ever having even looked at the painting. Proof for the folks back home - been there, did that. Museum going as compulsive consumerism.”  Compulsive consumerism, absolutely, but imperialism, also.  It's not even just that I want to stop and look: I want to look and take in, but I also want to be affected and to affect back.  I guess what I'm saying is that I want to have an "I-Thou" relationship with Odessa and its people, and I want to find a way to do so that is humble, open, honest, challenging, and creative.  As I'm currently focusing on my Russian language skills and busy with classes, I'm trying to envision how I want to live once I really begin my research and move past my role as just an international student stopping by to have some fun and pick up some Russian.  It's certainly a challenge with the language barrier, the level of adventurousness and bravery it requires, and the tact to not come off as any sort of arrogant American who thinks she "knows [something] better."

All of that said, I certainly am learning tons already.  For one, I'm learning to ebb and flow with Ukrainian time.  People here tend to be far more spontaneous and rarely seem to make plans ahead of time.  There have already been multiple times where I've been sitting in my apartment looking out the window, lonely, bored, and thinking about how I have no plans for days to come, when someone calls me and asks me to come outside right then to join them at a free concert that's beginning in ten minutes or to go on a walk and meet some of their friends and for my day to end up 100% different from how I expected.  I'm learning to not know what to expect, ever.  Similarly, I'm learning that it's possible to make friends and connections out of every scenario one could imagine.  Up until this point, in my life in America, I've pretty much met all of my friends through school or work.  Before arriving here, I couldn't imagine how I would possibly make friends here outside of maybe other students in my language class.  On the plane ride here, I met a wonderful woman who grew up in Odessa and then married a man from Pembrooke Pines and has lived in Florida for the past five years or so!  We had a great conversation and exchanged phone numbers.  After a week or so here, I received a phone call from her God-daughter, a 19-year-old Odessan university student.  She ended up being a really friendly, open-minded woman, and we went to Odessa's Wax Museum and to dinner last week and have been talking about meeting up again this week.  My first full day in Odessa, I met a really helpful Russian man while trying to purchase a Ukrainian SIM card in a cell phone store: he turned out to be a couch-surfing, Russian hippie, and I ended up hanging out with him the majority of my first week.  Two days ago, I met two Odessan girls at the train station who helped me to buy my ticket for my upcoming trip to Kyiv.  We traded numbers, and one of them messaged me yesterday and suggested we hang out after I return from my trip.  It's really amazing to see all the different ways people can cross paths and to open up to meeting people everywhere I go!

It looks like I did perhaps wait to long to start this blog!  This post is far too long and about far too many things and I've, of course, hardly scratched the surface on my time here so far.  In the NYT article I mentioned earlier, the writer compared museum-goers today with 18th century European travelers, who "spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better."  Without particularly glorifying 18th century heritage tourism, I would like to end this first post with the hope that this blog can serve a role similar to those sketchbooks: a place to record memories but, even more so, to help me see even better.