Babi Yar

I've mentioned before that this country has some pretty incredible history. Strangely most of it is associated with World War II. (Why is it never written World War 2?) On this day in 1941, and also tomorrow (29th and 30th) there was a historical incident that occurred in Kiev. Babi Yar is known as the largest single execution of Jews in the history of WWII - 33,771 Ukrainian Jews according to the accounts by Nazi offers. Although perhaps graphic, here are the accounts of the incident according to Wikipedia ...which is always 110% accurate.

The Nazi's put up posters that led the Jewish people of Ukraine to believe they were being deported. This is what the signs said:

Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.

The summary of what happened next is essentially that they were stripped naked and driven to the nearby ravine and shot. Over 30,000 of them. An account taken from a book written is this:

One after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear … Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.

So yeah, there's your history lesson for the day.

I don't really need to shower

There seems to be no hot water today. I found this out as I went to take a shower. Instead I just washed my hair. I didn't really do anything yesterday that warranted a shower anyways.

Also, I was just drinking water from a water bottle and spilled it on my face and body. After looking around for a towel or something, the closest thing was a clean pair of boxers. Is it weird to wipe your face off with underwear - even if they are clean?

How to be a man

I've been busy working lately so there really hasn't been anything to write. Just a few little odds and ends - like a homeless man asking me for vodka or money while I was walking home on Friday.

I also made chili this weekend. One of the cans had a can opener built in to the top, one of those things you lift up and then pull back - sorta like a coke can almost. Well when I pulled it it broke. The logical solution, as most men would agree, would be to hit the top of the can with a blunt object until the can gave in and opened itself. After settling on a spoon - not exactly blunt but it was available - I went to work. After a few good whacks the can opened, and sprayed tomato sauce all over me and the kitchen. In hindsight I should have seen that coming.

Another interesting tidbit, is the fact that I am currently eating chili and spaghetti out of the pot I cooked it in. All of my tupperware is currently in the freezer with chili in it, and the only bowl I have looks like the plastic coating has started to melt off. So, the only other alternative for a bowl I had...was this nice metal pot.

Fulbright don't teach class.

I sent my 'boss' an email today asking for some clarification about something work related. In short, depending on what evaluation criteria I use, a center could be ranked as either very good or very bad.

He wrote back with a detailed answer, and at the end of the email, about 3 paragraphs complimenting the report I submitted for the Department of State the previous week. Among a few quotes:

In closing, I really appreciate your contribution to the interim report that we submitted to State last week. It was extremely well written and incisive, especially the report on the [redacted], which I specifically called attention to in the meeting.

Your report was also a nice complement to [name redacted] half of the report because you two are looking at the labs, necessarily, from two different metrics:

The points you made about the [Lab] in Armenia and the [Lab] in Uzbekistan which can attribute a lot of its success to its governmental connections were quite astute.

A few minutes later, I received an email from Miss Fulbright Parker who had this to say:

Thank you for including me on this exchange of e-mails. I am joining John’s words of appreciation of Michael’s input into our interim report. I think our analysis provides both programmatic and business perspectives on measuring success, which are very important.

I do not necessarily agree with everything in Michael’s analysis, but I still agree with most of it and value very highly everything that Michael wrote.

Kind regards,

Based on comments that we exchanged via the comment boxes in Microsoft Word, it appears she thinks I may be making assumptions based upon the information we gathered in the interviews we conducted. As I have a business degree, and she has a degree in statistical sciences and measurement, I can understand that she's much more uneasy about some of the conclusions I may "jump" to. Either way, if the boss guy was happy, then I suppose I did a good job. I get to continue writing more reports tomorrow, and for the next month. I guess I'm moving in the right direction.

Still not Kansas

These are the public toilets at the park. You have to pay roughly 25
cents to go into the bathroom. I have no idea how much athority the
lady guarding the entrance has though. Is that a city job? Does
whoever gets there first get to collect the money for the day? Does
she buy the toilet paper she hands out or is that government/city
funded?
Also, don't you think these people would be able to have some fun with
the situation and paint a bulls-eye or something around the whole.

Other happenings of the day

So besides seeing a dead person, there were a few other notable things that happened or that I saw today.

1) I saw a young homeless guy - the same young homeless guy I see most days. He was wearing the same jeans, shirt and shoes he always has on. And I'm pretty sure he uses the same McDonalds cup every day too. When I saw him today though, I realized that dude's actually got quite a gut on him. I came to a few conclusions:
a) He must eat at McDonalds every day, which explains the cup and the gut
b) Being homeless pays pretty well, because I don't think I've ever had a gut like this guy had, and I've been regularly fed for most of my life.

2) I went looking at shoes today. I found a pair that I really liked, and they were super cheap. Marked down from almost $110 to $30. I went to the cash register and the lady rang them up ...$130. I pointed out the price tag on the shoe. Apparently it was $30 the regular price, not $30 total. (I realize the numbers don't add up, I have no idea what the lady actually responded with in Russian when I pointed the price tag out, I just read the cash register.) I gestured that I only had $80 and was going to go to the bank. (It's worth noting that I know the word for ATM, so she understood me.)

Then I left the store. I didn't come back either. Just to be safe, I probably won't ever go into that shoe store again.



3) Normally at night I will get a small (or sometimes large) cup of hot chocolate at the cafe near my apartment and do a little bit of work. Tonight was supposed to be no different. I asked for hot chocolate, and a few minutes later the girl brought it to me. A large cup of hot chocolate syrup. Not the actual drink of hot chocolate that I've gotten maybe 7 or 8 times before. I went and got a menu and pointed to "Hot Chocolate" in the menu, and she confirmed that it was indeed what I got.
I have no idea how to say in Russian, "I don't know what the hell this is but it isn't what I normally get," or "Who the hell drinks an entire cup full of chocolate syrup?" So instead I had 5 or 6 spoon fulls of it, and then just worked for a little bit. I ended up spending $4.50 on a large cup of what was probably Hershey's Syrup.

I uh....just saw a dead person.

It looked like they were getting ready to put him in a body bag, that or they just had the bag out since they were eventually going to use it. Guy was probably 60, and based on the rather bloody spot on the side of his face, and what could have been a missing eye, I don't think he just fell over from "natural causes."

Have I mentioned that the driver's here are terrible?

Well that's gross

In an effort to clean everything, I just went into my bathroom to clean the toilet. Basically this meant taking the toilet bowl brush on a stick and running it around the bowl. As I picked the brush up from the container its in, my foot got splashed with a decent amount of water. Apparently it had been sitting in there since the last time I cleaned the toilet.

Needless to say, I just washed my foot with a sponge, a bunch of soap, and some hot water.

Is this wrong?

I just got done sweeping up the floors of my apartment since I've allowed some dirt and dust and all sorts of stuff in. I'm looking at the dustpan, and wondering what to do with it. I could attempt to empty it into the plastic bag that has become the garbage for the day - and that may or may not involve me having to resweep the floor. Or I could just dump it out the window. I'm wondering if that would be tacky and/or wrong.

The girl sitting next to me is gorgeous

Except for the fact that she has a mustache. It's not that hard to miss. I'm not sure how she did.

Funny how things change

Although some of you may be too old to know about this, back when "we kids" were in school and "word processors" were new, it was a common trick to make the size of the font bigger so it looked like you wrote more. You could also do the same with the margins. I realize typewriters didn't have such revolutionary technology, but I hope my analogy helps explain this. (As a side note, why are proctologists not analogists, and why does the word analogy have nothing to do with....nevermind)

Anyways, the last few documents I've had to write, I've found myself making the font smaller (is 10.5 acceptable for business writing?), and increasing the margins on all sides of my documents to .8". On some pages, the margins are different than the pages before too - this is because I absolutely hate to have a paragraph that ends a section dangle on to a new and separate page.

Finally, for those of you still trying to make your documents look longer, here's a super secret MBA/grad school trick. Go through your document and change the font size of the periods in your document. While it seems silly, it goes through and adds just that little bit of extra "content" your report may need.

Dentistry

I saw someone with braces today. This is worth mentioning since I've been looking for someone with them for about a month now. I've seen many a mouth that looks like it came from England here.
I've always known there were dentists here since you can see there work everywhere. Tons of people in the city have teeth covered in gold. I've actually started to think that the trend of grills started here in Kiev.
Also, I now have indisputable evidence that deadlines are important. I've been working on a report for the last three days that I could have easily completed in two days back in grad school. Here though, they tell me by Friday ...and they are getting it Friday.

News to me!

After seeing a few deaf people over the last day, I've been wondering if sign language is universal. Apparently it isn't. There are some common 'words', but in general things are different. I'm wondering if it would be easier to learn another language in sign language, or verbally.

Opportunity Knocks

As far as I understand, most crime happens because an opportunity presents itself. If I leave my laptop out in the open, go to the bathroom, and come back to find myself without a laptop - well certainly I'm at fault for giving someone the opportunity to steal my laptop.

Ukraine is currently going through one of its worst economic downturns in history. In fact, research is pointing to the state currency coming close to historical lows in value over the next 2 months. This would be somewhere between 9.5:$1 to 10:$1. Simply put, even the people who have jobs are hurting, and the people who don't are even worse off.

Given that, while walking home last night I came across an interesting opportunity. Lately the city has been digging up a sewer or gas line right next to the fruit/vegetable/bread/alcohol store by my apartment. This weekend they finally finished whatever repairs they were doing, and have started to cover up their work.

They haven't finished yet though, so at the moment, this is what it looks like right outside of the store. You may see a nicely organized pile of sidewalk stones; however, I see opportunity. About 200 opportunities to be exact. If I was, for instance, a hungry homeless person walking by the store at night, looking in at all the nice produce, bread, and alcohol sitting ever so pretty in the store, I'd say I've got about 200 tries to break through the glass windows of the store front. I'd also say I could just as well break through the panes of glass on the front two doors, and probably make a lot less noise.

I don't know if I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet or not. But certainly, I can't say I'll be surprised if it does happen.

Body parts for sale.

This story has picked up a bunch of press in the Ukrainian news and English language blogs lately. Since I doubt you follow either, I'm taking the liberty of mentioning it to you.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,645375,00.html#ref=nlint

The article is (long and) fascinating for a few reasons. For starters, now you know where that replacement knee you got last week came from. Second, it makes you wonder what some of these companies would do if not for those pesky rules and regulations they have to follow.

And for those of you not up to date on exchange rates; 1 Euro = $1.40 ..roughly.

A few thoughts

It's much harder to cook rice with a gas burner. No matter how low you set the flame, some part of the pot is going to end up with burnt rice.

Q-Tips work just as well as a tissue for cleaning out your nose. I think Unilever is really dropping the ball on this line extension.

Yesterday was the first weekend of college football. Tailgating for 1 isn't as fun as it sounds.

Ahh Europe

One of the things that never fails to amuse me, no matter where in Europe I am, is that it's perfectly normal to see someone with a beer at 9AM. It's actually not the best motivation tool to see someone drinking a beer at 9 when I'm walking to work on a Friday. As it is I want the weekend to come faster, and to see that people are already getting their weekend on is quite disheartening.

BS Alert! Code Red!

I'm currently working on an interim report that is due in 8 days that I was just told about yesterday. Basically it means that the 8 weeks I thought I had to complete my reports for a specific project has been changed to 6 weeks, and I'm supposed to work on this instead. Fortunately there is some overlap, so I'll be moving in a forward direction with both projects.

Anyways, I'm getting ready to take a break. Worked on the format of the report today and am trying to write everything I have completed - at this point I've finished the introduction and the methodology. As for the methodology, here is the brief explanation I just wrote. I don't think I've ever written something that smelled like so much BS in my life.

"Analyzing these four environments as a mechanism to measure RESC sustainability has both advantages and disadvantages. This strategy enables a comprehensive look at a series of criteria that are applicable to every RESC – criteria that play significant factors in the sustainability of any organization. However, this generalized methodology limits the ability to pinpoint specific details and quantify their overall affects on RESC sustainability."

Plumbing issues?

For about a week, the entrance of my apartment building was decorated with what I can only describe as non-traditional decorations. The guy who in the past has put up signs, was once again putting up signs near the elevator. I had no idea what they said, but I was leaving to go to work and really didn't care either. When I got home, there were a series of plastic bags taped to the wall. Perhaps because I had no idea what the signs and labels said, I looked rather intensely at the contents to try to figure out what the signs might say.

(As an aside, it's important to note that context is very important when you don't understand a language. While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, I honestly had no idea what the lady was saying, but because I was sitting in a barber shop, I could at least guess and assume what she was saying. If those same words were repeated on the street I would have had no context and therefore been completely unaware of what the lady was saying.)

Anyways, I soon figured out the context of the contents and labels. Shortly after the phrase, "is that a condom?" left my mouth, I realized that the rest of the contents in that bag (and the one next to it) were female sanitary pads. (Which look strangely different here. I have ideas as to why but that's not important or appropriate for here.)

After attempting to re-read the sign over the labels and plastic bags taped to the wall, I soon realized that the sign was talking about things that shouldn't be flushed down the toilet. Again, as I gained more context, I started to understand what the things were. Two of the other bags were what I can only assume were the non-dissolvable parts of many tampons. The third set of bags, as I was able to figure out through the wonders of an internet translator, were fur.

The point of this story is that for about a week I got to look at things that apparently shouldn't be flushed down the toilet every time I came home. (I won't post the pictures...)

Consider this a comedy routine

I mentioned that quite a lot has happened over the last 11 or so days. Instead of writing one very large update, I'm going to put up a series of small updates throughout the day/next few days as I take breaks from my writing. As most of the things I'll write about will be either humors or just strange, consider this to be a disjointed stand-up routine.

That said, I'm currently working on rewriting a grant application. I'm supposed to be working on a different project as of this morning, but I wanted to get all of my ideas into the document before I switch over. As I'm working,(as in literally 30 seconds ago) Microsoft word has decided to crash. Doing what you may ask? "Saving AutoRecovery file" So Word has managed to crash itself creating a backup file for in case it crashes. Lovely. Hopefully the file was created before it crashed since I need to close it now.

Happy belated birthday

Last Monday marked the 18th birthday for Ukraine. They celebrated similarly to how the USA celebrates. Lots of beer food and fireworks. Oh yeah there was a military parade with a bunch of fighter jets and army things on the street. I'd post pictures but I'm pretty beat from work. It's rather strange to see a bunch of children (and adults) climbing on tanks, missile launching vehicles, and other types of army machinery.

Certainly an interesting thought is this though. Rather often you'll hear people in the USA talk about how the "founding fathers must be rolling in their graves" about whatever is going on in politics that week/month. When's the last time Ben Franklin or George Washington gave their input? Here though, most of those founding fathers are still alive, and some are still quite active in politics. Now, obviously the land has been around for more than 18 years, but the country has only been independent for 18 years.)