Andriy, Lyosha, me, and Sasha at the Ukraine-Spain game

So much for keeping this a weekly thing, huh?

October has brought a number of things with it, including a pretty long cold spell here. Though I say cold knowing that it’s only going to get colder and this 27-50 temp range we’ve had the past couple weeks will seem nice and toasty in a few months.

But.

(Before I get into the reason for that but up there, I have to warn you—don’t freak out, there’s nothing you or really anyone can do in this particular situation. Sufficiently spooked? Doot doot good!)

But.

The thing is, when it’s crazy cold in a couple months, the heat in my building will be on. Actually, it’s scheduled to turn on tomorrow. Rumors cut through the conversations of Kievans everywhere that in some places in the city the heat would be turned on earlier than than traditional date of October 15, and in the center of center—you know, where all the fancy people live in their fancy apartments—the heat’s actually been on for a couple of days. We thought we’d get lucky here in Podil, but no such luck. And as an added bonus, once the building heat turns on (which takes the form of wall-mounted radiators), then I’ll also get hot water running through all the pipes in the apartment so I can have longer than 2 mins of hot water in the shower from my teeny tiny boiler.

Here’s the thing about stuff like this in Ukraine—energy is a big ole deal. Has been since independence. Most of the gas and oil comes from Russia, which has all kinds of problems. Like when Russia regularly threatens to shut off the pipes. Or when Russia invades the east of Ukraine, shutting off the country from all of coal mines and reserves in the Donbas. Also, as part of its Soviet legacy, energy costs have been heavily subsidized by the government to the tune of 90% in recent years. Which is great if you’re a resident, but sucky if you’re the nigh-perpetually-bankrupt government. There’s been all kinds of attempted magic with getting energy from multiple other sources, but one of the tricks they’re implementing is slowly rolling back that subsidy so that in a few years time, it will be gone completely and the burden of paying for fuel will fall to the people.

This persistent energy crisis is also a big part of the reason why the vast majority (read: non-Chornobyl) of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants are still churning.

On that note, an update on my research activities: there have been two major developments. The first is that my advisor at the Institute of Sociology at the National Academy of Sciences is the former director of a Chornobyl research group that did systematic monitoring of the social effects of the disaster from 1995 to 2007 (when the govt decided it couldn’t fund the project any more). She’s been awesome and actually gave me (as in gifted) extra copies of all of their publications! Downside: I’ve got a few thousand pages of material to go through lol. The other thing is finally getting access to the Communist Party archive of Soviet Ukraine. Another embarrassment of riches here: they have a rather decent finding guide for Chornobyl-related documents in the archive, which definitely cuts down on the searching time, and now I just have to wade through hundreds of documents to find the ones I need. It’s daunting, but also great. Archival research can be pretty fun—a slow, painstaking fun maybe—especially when you find cool, unexpected items.

A winter corset made of dog hair with leg warmers made from camels.

This week, as you can see in the pic at the top of the post, I had an old, good friend (Andriy) come into town with a bunch of his friends from Lutsk to come watch the Ukrainian national team play Spain. Even though Ukraine lost, it was still a pretty impressive game and everybody had a lot of fun. Because it was a euro game (as in, a qualifying game for next year’s Euro Cup), that meant the game was on euro time, so it started at 9:30pm local. Even so, Olympiskiy Stadium was all the way full. I was surprised I remembered as much as I did of the Ukrainian national anthem.

It was also really cold, keeping with today’s theme.

But it was a lot of fun to see Andriy after 8 or so years. Funny how fast that flew by. In that time, each of us got married, he’s got a 4 year old daughter now, I’m in a PhD program, and he’s been playing with a traveling theater group for the past 7 years in his spare time. Shout out time: the group’s called Garmyder. Three of his bros that came out with him to the game are also in the theater with him.

Here’s a list of other things I’ve been up to:

• bought some slippers and a wool blanket
• did laundry
• finally completely unpacked (ha!)
• picked up a vyshyvanka to wear to Kyiv-Mohyla’s 400-year anniversary gala tomorrow that Pres. Poroshenko will be at (!)
• completed Katie’s Little Women doll collection as a surprise
• walked probably over a hundred miles in the past 2 weeks (no joke)
• crocheted a hat