With A Camera © Jeffrey Thomas Ball

School cut out for winter break here on the 28th of December and I’d been given until the 8th to travel back to my host families and celebrate the new year. It was a really nice chunk of time to have off.

The train station in Odessa is cold this time of year. It’s not an open air building but with all the people coming and going any heat was quickly escaping to instead contribute to the larger global warming effort. People were dressed up in their nice clothes with thick coats and hats. Many women here wear long coats with fur or imitation fur around the hood. The waiting area of the train station was full. All generations of people, strangers to one another, sitting side by side just waiting. Young teens on knock-off smart phones playing games and old men and women simply sitting, watching, or maybe reading the paper. The Ukraine that these various generations live in has changed so much. Just to think, the old man sitting across from me may have been imprisoned for his political beliefs or worked to exhaustion on a community farm under gunpoint. Or could possibly have been the one holding the gun. And then to look at the 15 year old boy next to him who is changing his status on his favorite social networking site and eating frys from McDonalds. A generational gap of enormous proportions.

The train system operates to the beat of modern Ukraine but echos of Ukraine’s history.

From the difficulties of buying a ticket in a mob of a line where people feel free to cut to the front. To the somewhat illegal tea and cookie business that the train car workers run quietly from a converted bathroom in the back of the train. The whole system ringing of the past and feeling cold through the whole experience.

But of all the things I’ve seen in Ukraine the way the train tickets are printed seems very efficient. Everything you need to know is there and organized and if you have any questions you just flip it over and all the abbreviations are explained. It was one of the lessons we had in our language classes, part of the traveling topic, to learn the vocab and essentials of train travel. It was an interesting mark of my progression, to be headed back to where I started and to look down at my train ticket and read it without problem and to know have language skills capable of taking me far beyond that.

The trains for longer trips are made of sleeper cars. A bunkhouse on wheels with people and their stuff crammed into every free space. Strangers attempting to follow their nightly routines in shoulder bumping proximity to one another. The holiday feel of the train cars was a warm one, people traveling “home” to see friends and family. Sharing pre-packed bags of train snacks with one another and making conversation.

I was trying to go rather unnoticed through the whole ordeal, though this only ever works for so long, I did pretty well. I got busted once as an outright foreigner after wearing my boots on my bunk while laying down to read and not being quite ready to sleep. One of the train attendant guys saw that and just ripped me a new one. Telling me he was going to make me sleep in the bathroom while watching me wipe a smear of mud off the rubber bunk mat.

The lights went out at about 9:30 as the train rocked along on our journey. I’d laid out my sheets and a scratchy wool blanket and was trying to drift of to sleep in a way that didn’t leave my feet hanging off the bunk and getting bumped by every person who walked down the isle in the dark. At every stop I would awake from my shallow sleep to jerks and noise of a car being added or removed from the train. But the night wasn’t so bad and I awoke about an hour before my final destination feeling pretty well rested.

I think I’ll plan on more train trips like this one in the future.

I jumped an early bus this Saturday towards Killia, a nearby town, but that wasn’t my intended destination. I had seen shepherds on this route many times and had decided to try and photograph one. The route goes through farm land that is still good for grazing as snow hasn’t yet fallen this winter.

I found the bus I was looking for, the driver saw me eyeing the sign in the front window, “Enter please” he says trying trying to fill up his bus thus allowing him to get out on the road earlier. “Where are you going?” I hesitate as to what to say for a moment and then spit it out. “Well I’m looking for a shepherd.” A questioning look comes across his face. I explain my situation, what I’m looking for, why, and he agrees to keep his eyes out along the way.

The bus is a mid sixties, I’m guessing, Soviet make. A stocky blue and white thing with plenty of rust and various fixes made to just about every moving part. It’s the oldest I’ve seen at the bus stop here in Vilkovo.

We head out onto the bumpy dirt road, the transmission shuddering with every shift and the driver swerving to avoid potholes that could hide a Volkswagen.

I’m sitting near the back bouncing along and trying to keep a lookout on both sides. We come across a herd of cattle and their shepherd, the driver eyes me in the rear view mirror and I give him a shake of the head. Nope, I’m looking for a sheep shepherd today, yes sheep specifically.

And then we found him, off in the distance, a dark figure amongst a small herd of sheep. The driver eyes me in the mirror again and this time I give him the “yes” nod and ask to stop. He says he’ll be making the return trip in two hours and that I can pick up the bus on the side of the road.

I walk out to meet the shepherd hoping that my introduction goes well and that he will let me hang around. I notice his hat immediately. He’s an older man in a well worn suit jacket walking with a limp alongside an old bicycle and wearing a hat with a big pot leaf on the front. The kind of hat teenagers buy from those vendors in the mall when their parents let them go by themselves. More on that later.

He gives me permission to take some photographs and off we go. Our day together was pretty quiet, he was rightly puzzled as to why a young American guy was following him around and asked several questions to that end but otherwise we had very little conversation.

The process of watching sheep isn’t to climactic, some checking in every once in awhile to see that all is well but otherwise uneventful. The process of photographing sheep could also be described as “not to climactic.” The closer you get to the sheep the faster they move away and all you get is their back side. Did you know sheep have fluffy tails? I approached it with a “Let them come to me” type of strategy.

The shepherd was going about his daily routine, some fishing, some walking, lighting a few brush fires to improve the soil for next years crops. While photographing him I couldn’t help but notice the pot hat. An old shepherd with such good access to wool one might think he’d prefer a nice thick wool hat made by his wife.

But the shepherd doesn’t know the significance of the symbol than emblazons his forehead. One of counter culture, rock’n roll and medical controversy. The marijuana leaf displayed in this way is a symbol from the west, like the graffiti stencil text of a t-shirt or a top hit song. Remnants of a culture that has woven itself into Ukrainian daily life like the tentacles of a jelly fish.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen clothing like this worn by people with no knowledge of it’s meaning. The clothing must come originally from somewhere in Asia, at first intended for western consumption but finding it’s way to many places. In Ukraine, for many, western culture is something exotic, something glamorous, the unknown only glimpsed in films, television shows and the internet. Brought by foreigners like myself.

This has it’s ups and downs but sometimes more notable are the downs. Exported culture from anywhere doesn’t include the quality or depth of the culture’s origin. Ukraine receives small pieces of western culture, items of clothing or top hit songs, but doesn’t receive the entrepreneurial mindset of the clothing’s manufacturer or societal diversity that made that culture possible.

This spill over has seemed to dissuade creation of new culture rather than inspire it. However, the world is always changing, the older students in my classes have an extensive knowledge of American culture that sometimes exceeds my own. They have accumulated this knowledge as well as participated in the culture of their own country further mixing the two.

I’ve been looking for a good wool hat at bazars in a few different cities but haven’t found what I’m looking for, the only ones available are cotton. Cotton doesn’t grow here but we are surrounded by sheep.

The school where I’m volunteering sent students to the regional academics competitions in Killia, Ukraine, this past Saturday. I was brought along for documentation and as I found out later also to carry heavy stuff.

The thermometer has been dropping a little further every day as they get shorter and shorter. Going to this competition meant an early Saturday wake up and leaving my warm bed so early was torturously difficult. I heated up a cup of tea for the bus and was on my way.

Teachers and students were meeting at the school for a bus that would take us all to Killia, the nearby region center. The bus was cold and I could see everyones breath condensing, mine was thick from the hot tea I was drinking.

The ride is about an hour, on terrible “roads,” through flat farmland and over small branches of the Danube RIver. There were about 15 students on the bus looking over notes for the presentations they would be giving. Mostly explanations of mathematic theories or scientific discoveries. Reminded me of a science fare, I once did really well in one with a project my dad and I did on the aerodynamics of a wing.

I was expecting the competition to be a somewhat overly patriotic matter. In the Soviet era institutions were judged on being able to outdo their peers, often leading to inflated statistics, each years bigger than the previous. The whole process being a very patriotic matter. Some of these motivations seem to still exist in the schools here.

Upon arriving students, teachers and judges broke up into respective classrooms where they would be presenting their material. I was left to wander between them trying not to interrupt at the wrong moment and depending on luck to catch students from my school doing their presentations.

The whole thing was over in a few hours, some students happy to have placed well others not so happy having placed not so well. And the whole process seeming extraordinarily normal, nothing overly patriotic like I’d expected. And then we headed back. Back onto the bus, back home to Vilkovo.

I arranged the other day to make photographs of the Vilkovo Market pork section. It wasn’t to difficult, I asked the lady I usually buy pork from if I could come and make some photos. She convened with the two women selling next to her, they discussed the proposition, a few others leaning in to listen. A few wondered “Why?” One woman thought it was no problem “We’re in a democracy now, right?” She said, making the gesture of raising her hand as if she were voting. The other women agreed and in thirty seconds a verdict had been made, “Yes american boy, you can come take photos of us.”

The economic situation in Rural Ukraine hasn’t changed drastically or quite as quickly over the past 20 years as it has for much of the rest of the former soviet union. This and a combination of Ukrainian culture and tradition have left the street market as a very prevalent system. This has it’s ups and downs but is integral to the local small scale production system that dominates the country.

I arrived at the market the next day, Saturday which is a busy market day, and was immediately invited behind the counter. The meat and dairy section of these markets has a distinctive smell and feel. Meat sits openly on the counter in piles, often with other parts of the animal it came from. The appearance of an animals head gives a buyer a perspective on how good and fresh the meat is so there will usually be heads sitting on the counter too. The market is broken into different areas, roughly. Places for eggs, milk, cheese are usually together. Pork, chicken and beef usually aren’t far apart.

The pork area of our market is made up of a few main vendors and some other people that come and go. They are all local farmers who raise their pigs in nearby villages. This can usually be said for the other parts of the market as well and at most markets in rural Ukraine. It’s often women who do the selling, there are some men involved. One guy was in charge of butchering, another who held some sort of managerial position, took to showing me around. The whole thing is very old school, free from obvious regulatory pressure by government agencies. And free from corporate investment. Big wooden chopping blocks sit behind the counter where a muscular older man divides cuts of meat with an axe. Dogs hang around waiting for pieces to fall only leaving for a brief moment to avoid a swift kick. Large legs of pork hang from meat hooks behind the counter, everything fresh. Such a direct opposite from the sterile, packaged feel of a supermarket.

Many customers know their supplier by name and will often make more than small talk when making a purchase. The market is pretty loud on Saturdays and busy too but you still have to make it there by 12:00, much later and you’ll find the place empty. The distinctive smell of the meat market is a good one. One of fresh food, of honest hardworking people selling their product.

There’s a weight gym down the street from my house. It opens at 6:30pm and stays open until 8:00pm. Mon, Wed, and Fri, and those are the nights I go.

This gym is in an old building on the property of Vilkovo’s shipping port on the Danube River. I’m not sure what this building used to be, offices maybe, the gym is in a big open room with what used to be a tile floor. You have to walk through the gates of the shipping port to get there. The whole scene is a little bit less than ideal, a friend once described it as “Primitive.” Like many things in Ukraine it’s home made. Many of the weights are random pieces of steal with a hole drilled in them or welded together to make dumbbells. Most of the bench bars are just rods of steal or maybe even old axles you put these homemade weights onto. Most of the benches and machines have been welded out of scrap and modeled roughly off of weight machines you’d see in a gym in the seventies. There are a few light bulbs that keep the place looking only a slightly caveish. I pay upfront every night 5 hreven, about 60 cents. There is nobody trying to sell me on the 6 month discount plan with the free water bottle or making me sign the new waiver. I just go, give my money and now I’m a regular. Music usually plays from some ones phone, anything from Rammstein to the Ukrainian top 10 on repeat. When someone walks in the door they are greeted by everybody else in the place and shake everyones hand. It’s usually some of the older students at my school and a few other regulars.

It’s a really legitimate place the trainer-zal.

Where to even start. Istanbul was Ashe and I’s last stop on this trip we had been on for some three weeks. It wasn’t quite what we were expecting, it was very overwhelming at times but also really amazing.

We came in on an overnight bus from Sofia, leaving in the afternoon and arriving in the early hours of the morning. The amount of planning we’d done trickled off after Sofia and at this point we were well… “winging it.” The bus was full of college age Turkish kids coming back from some sort of break I would guess. This bus trip was a huge step up from the excruciating trips we had started out with. The bus was a huge touring type deal and there was a woman coming around every hour or so with hot tea. Ashe and I had brought some milk and honey in our little travel pack and were making some serious gourmet beverages.

Things had been going super smoothly until we arrived at the the Turkish border. At this point border crossings had become pretty routine, off the bus on the bus, “Passports…do you have any drugs or fruit?” , “No,” some menacing looks and on you go. Leaving Bulgaria was about like this but entering Turkey was to be a bit of an adventure. We’d had tons of conversations about how best to go about withdrawing, exchanging, etc to make the most of our money. This somehow left us at the border with enough Turkish “Lira” for… well it wasn’t enough.

Turkey requires travelers from the US to purchase a “Travel Visa” at the border. A small door fee if you will. It’s thirty Lira a person, about 15 bucks, we had about 45 Lira between us and some other random mix of currencies. Shit. So there we are the border guards window, the bus we’re traveling on is moving along through the system getting checked etc… We take a second to think we don’t have a lot of time, at this point Ashe is the only one with a way to get money out of an ATM. The guy points back to the “Duty Free” store a few hundred yards back that our youthful bus crew had stopped at for cigys and booze along the way. “Bank” the border guard says, pointing behind us. Ashe heads off, into the night, to try and get some money out of a possible ATM. I’m watching the bus trying to make sure we don’t get left at the border, and when Ashe doesn’t come back after a few minutes I start to get really worried. Time slows to a drooling crawl. For the first time in a long time after moving to a foreign country a strong feeling comes up into my gut. A realization of intense vulnerability, of being a foreigner and not knowing what could happen next. I was stuck between what to do, chase after Ashe, watch the bus, stay where I am so Ashe doesn’t freak if I’m not here when she comes back. I was not feeling good about being in this situation.

Ashe found an ATM. In the back of some liquor store between Bulgaria and Turkey, payed 8 bucks to take out some money, and made it back to the border office breathing hard. I was so glad to see her and decided then I wasn’t going to let her that far out of my site for the rest of our trip.

Istanbul was a bit of a struggle for us, an intense language barrier, the craziness of a big city, a city that wasn’t what we’d expected, a rented apartment that wasn’t quite up to par, it being our last few days together in who knows exactly how long, and us both wanting that time to go as well as possible, all made for some struggling. There were a few moments where Ashe just had to sit us down and kinda settle us down to avoid an explosion of emotions. But we managed to keep it together and ended up having a pretty good time.

Istanbul as a city has some really amazing contrasts. The call to prayer echoes from ancient mosques through busy streets full of women in burkas perusing mall type shopping areas full of consumer culture excess. In some areas it’s as modern feeling as New York and with a flat globalized feeling culture. In other ways it feels very Middle Eastern, and fresh from a revolution. Late walks back to the apartment getting lost on little crooked dirty streets and almost getting hit by cars at every corner were a constant. Tourists from the rest of the world with new cameras surrounding century old buildings and trying to recreate the photographs they saw in the travel guide.

By our fifth or so day we’d acclimated and things were running somewhat smoothly but it was time to go. Our trip had been amazing we’d seen parts of five countries, met some good people and had lots of interesting experiences along the way. The thought of leaving Ashe again had been on my mind for several of our last days. Being apart has been so hard and I knew it was going to be so hard saying goodbye again. We arranged a way to get to the airport in the morning where we’d go our separate ways. We packed, and I tried to prepare myself.

We had found a spot to grab a quick bite at the airport but time was dwindling, the moment I’d been fearing had come. We walked to the spot where we would have to part ways and both started crying. Tears ran down our faces as we kissed, “You have to be the one to walk away.” I said. Feeling Ashe leave the grasp of my arms brought a deep pain to my heart, I fought unsuccessfully to keep myself together as I watched her go. She looked back at me, we waved to each other meeting eyes before she turned the corner.

I stood in that spot as tears ran down my face for another minute or so. The sounds and feelings of the airport slowing bringing me back to reality. Ashe was on her way home to Portland. I readjusted my backpack turned around and began my journey back to my home for now, to Ukraine.

I love you Ashe and I miss you so much.

Ashe and I took a late night train from Brasov to Bucharest and made the transfer on to Sofia. After a long night on a trains full of chance meetings with strange people we were super tired. We found our way to home base for the night and took some time to relax. Our stop in Sofia was brief but we used our time there to explore the city, which was really nice, and prep for our next destination. Check back in to find out where we’re headed next.

Our next stop was Brasov. A medium sized city in the center of the Transylvania region of Romania. Brasov is a pretty dang old city, built by German Saxons in the early 1100s. It has the feel of a very ancient city too. I think it’s a combination of the architecture, layout of the streets and the unique look of the buildings that make up it’s old town. Ashe and I spotted a few places that we thought would make amazing apartments. A few in the pinnacles of old buildings or funky corner spots with plenty of windows. It was a very gorgeous place where we were able to spend several days. The weather was chilly but nice and we made good use of it getting around to see the city and touristy attractions. The Bran castle, known as Dracula’s Castle but having very little to do with Dracula, is a pretty short bus ride away. So are a few other pretty cool and historical places.

We had a great time wandering the city, a few fun nights out and were super glad to have made it there. But we’re on to the next place, check in again soon to find out where.

Our next stop was Suceava, Romania., a base for trips to the famous painted monasteries in the area. Suceava is located in the Bucovina area of Romania, the far north western region that borders Moldova. It is gorgeous to say the least. Suceava as a city, though pretty historical, was not… anything to blog about? But the Bucovina countryside scattered with sheep and all of the little villages that we drove through were very characteristic. It was pretty foggy, wet, and cold, adding to the mystical feel of our adventure.

The painted monasteries of Romania and western Moldova date back to early 1400′s to the time of Stephen the Great. The legend goes that Stephan would build one of these churches after winning a battle in his defense against the Ottoman Empire. Some 40 battles in all and thus 40 painted churches.

We visited Voroneț Monastery first, (pictures are in order) this monastery was built in 1488 and it was simply amazing to see the condition of the paintings on the exterior walls. The church is painted in the Byzantine Fresco style, it’s a unique style that to me feels very representative of this time in history. These Monasteries have been designated as Unesco World Heritage sites because of their historical representation.

During Ashe and I’s visits to these monasteries we saw only a few other tourists. The combination of non-tourist season and bad weather meant that for much of the time we had these places to ourselves. We watched a food blessing done by nuns and a priest in their traditional long black cloaks in a dark front room full of burning candles. It really felt like a journey back in time.

But our days of travel are numbered and we’ve got to be moving on to the next stop, check back in soon.