another week. this one better than usual.

The good news is that the mysterious illness I posted about in my last post wasn't physical--seems it was just archive-induced derangement. I've taken a few days off and caught up with real-life issues, and am feeling much better.

I had a nice week, full of funny occurences. First, I had been frustrated about my lack of success in dealing with professors here. On the one hand, I really need help with the secondary literature; on the other, they seem not to understand my project, or even worse, to find it imperialist. It is very un-PC to write the history of "non-independent"--that is, Imperial or Soviet--Ukraine at this point. Anyway, during a commute from hell, I ended up sitting next to a young historian who had done a Fulbright at Urbana-Champaign. She set me up with two wonderful profs, who have adopted me. One is herself a member of a notable local family, and is excited to tell me about what they were doing one hundred years ago. So that's a great step forward!

Now, to the silly: a huge, subterranean shopping mall winds through the center of Kiev. It's probably more than a mile long, with all kinds of exits and connections to three or four metro lines. You have to walk through this mall to cut across busy streets. I despise it (the products are shoddy, ugly, AND expensive), but I end up using it to cross the street several times a day anyway. The other night, I was crossing the street, heading toward my gym, through an entrace I'd never used before. There wasn't an exit where I expected, so I kept walking, looking for it. Before long, I'd walked a long way. I finally stopped someone and asked how to get out through the exit I wanted, and she said, "That's two kilometers away!" Turns out I had gotten turned around and walked back to the end of the mall where'd I'd come from. Which forced me to turn around and walk another 20 minutes through post-Soviet, post-modern hell.

The other story: yesterday, I attended a conference on Vasylkivska street. I'm familiar with a Velika (Big) Vasylkivska in the center, and I assumed it was there. I walk into 36 Vasylkivska and say, "I'm here to attend the conference at the Shevchenko Center for Post-Graduate Studies." The guy behind the desk cracks up and says, "Post-Graduate? Hardly. This is a pre-school." We then look at my invitation, and discover that Vasylkivska is a very different street, in an industrial ghetto on the outskirts of town. An hour later, I finally got there. :) I shared his amusement, though: I'm not always sure that there are as many differences between grad school and pre-school as we might think!

I've been undisciplined about dragging my camera around, but I'll take some more pictures soon.