Ukrainian Food

Merlin: Ukrainian food is heavy and interesting - it's fun to see the Russian and Romanian influences mix together here in the mountains. This is "banosh," which is a corn porridge similar to grits or watery polenta, made with a sour-cream based liquid. Sprinkled on top is the Hutsul cheese, "brynza." It's made from sheep's milk, is something like feta, and crumbles easily into gritty clumps.
Rebecca: Salads have not necessarily been any greener here than in the last few countries, but at least they've consisted of vegetables. We memorized the words for 'cabbage' and 'mayonnaise' early on and made a habit of ordering any salad with a description that included the first term and not the second.

Merlin: There is a surprising dearth of greenery here, which I can only partly attribute to the season. Almost all vegetables that have survived into February have been pickled, canned or are cabbage.
Rebecca: Some of the most impressive supermarket bread aisles and market stands have been in Ukraine. The variety seems never-ending. There's so much available bread, in fact, that we could not find a single box of crackers between Lviv and Kamyanets-Podilsky.

Merlin: The interesting thing about bread in Ukraine is that it's not all rye. In fact, while we still eat some brown bread, the majority of baked goods are made with white flour and have a lighter consistency than they did in more northern countries. It made us realize that we're getting into the south.
Merlin: Dried fish, hung outside at a market. They eat a good deal of river and lake fish, here, and we've seen a lot of ice fisherman.
Rebecca: As we sat eating a light lunch of soup and salad, a cook in hospital scrubs came in and began to grill three or four carp right in the little fireplace we'd been warming ourselves next to. I've had about seven or eight whole grilled trouts during my time in this country, but I can always have more. So, we returned for dinner just tonight, but my limited communication skills brought me a broiled salmon steak. Not necessarily a food-ordering error I'm going to complain about.

Merlin: These are "varenyky," which are the Ukrainian iteration of the ubiquitous, Slavic "pelmini." Essentially, dumplings. They have been on all the menus, but seem to be rarely available. I have to say, I wasn't excited about trying them, but I felt that I had to.
Rebecca: Merlin was kind enough to order the meatless variety, filled with tomatoey cabbage that reminded me of the outside of my mom's stuffed cabbage.

Castle Hunting: Kamyanets Podilsky

We are in the town of Kamyanets Podilsky, which is hard to sum up and difficult to describe. The old town is isolated on a rock island above a deep gorge, with two high bridges spanning the gap. Rebecca will have more on the town itself, eventually.

Guarding one of the bridges, and the little spit of land that originally connected the town with the bluffs around it, is the Kamyanets Podilsky fortress. I was able to get some great pictures of it on two separate afternoons, when the light was cooperative. It is dramatic, big, well preserved and situated in a particularly beautiful spot.
The original building dates to the 13th or 14th century, with major reconstruction beginning at the beginning of the 1400's - this whole period occurring during Lithuanian rule of the province. There is evidence, though, that earthen and wood walls existed here as early as the first century A.D., when the region was a roman territory. The current castle was designed by an Italian military architect, and is quite elaborate.
Some of the structure has been reconstructed, but it is largely whole. The inner defensive walls are remarkably low, in part because the cliffs surrounding the main defenses are so steep.
Though it is difficult to tell in this picture, the castle sits on the mainland side of the high "turkish bridge," which is essentially a rock isthmus with water on either side. During the 15th century, a system of locks and dams was put in place so that the canyon around the town could be flooded to a depth of 15 meters, cutting off the town from invasion from below. That left the bridge as the only means of reaching the buildings on the island, and put the castle in a key defensive position. The bridge is the wall of rock in the picture that looks like a hydro-electric dam.
While we were climbing around, we were joined by a friendly and silent dog, who trotted along beside us and did his best to get into the photos. A band was filming a music video on one of the walls, and we listened to the chorus of their song a few hundred times as they danced and pretended to play their instruments. They looked dramatic, perched up against the sky, and we think we might be making an appearance on Ukrainian MTV.
This is the view of the castle from the old town, across the bridge. We had a lot of fun scampering up and down the hills around it, trying to catch the sunlight between banks of oppressive clouds. There has been a constant, punishing wind that has nearly blown us off the cliffs a few times, but it's been worth it.

Kolomyia Walk

We broke out our hiking shoes for the first time since Germany to walk out to a lookout point over Kolomyia we were recommended. We were told to look out for a ruined bridge, destroyed last year by a flood. Near it would be "another way of getting across." We never found the bridge or the crossing, but were content to just continue on the water's edge.
We encountered a person or two here and there: a man cutting down a tree with an ax, another burning brush, someone driving in and out of shallow water with his truck, a woman in the distance pushing a stroller bumpily over the smooth newly washed up stones. But mostly we were alone, hearing nothing but the heightening wind.
Everyone seemed to be doing something to or with the land. We couldn't tell if it was for their benefit or the common good. This man loaded stones into his truck and seemed to be choosey in his selections.
These old men rode away from a small brush fire with a small hacking instrument tied to the front of their bikes. More than once, we held our breath through clouds of smoke and were always happy that it was earth and not garbage that was being burnt.
This person was sifting the water through a piece of cloth, we think looking for crayfish. The idea of it made us hungry and we stopped to eat the little picnic we'd packed. It was beginning to get colder and our salmon spread's expiration date had passed, so we ate some pieces of bread with slices of very sweet apple and clumps of imitation crab meat quickly and decided to start heading back.
We left our hiking shoes under the front of car back home, to let the mud dry. When I looked at all the beautiful pictures Merlin had taken the next day (my mittened hands would have made it hard to focus) I was amazed at how many of them, like the one above, reminded me of the Ukrainian flag.

Horses In Ukraine

More than any other place we've ever been, the Ukrainian countryside is full of working horses. They use the roads, they inhabit the barns, they are the muscle of the farming industry. Especially in the steep terrain of the Carpathians, where tractors would have a lot of difficulty operating, we saw horses and horsecarts. In some villages, there were literally as many horses on the road as cars.
In the high region around Podobovets, we saw these haystacks dotting all the open fields and sitting beside barns. They are built around evergreen poles with branches still attached. The branches hold the hay in place - they're stable enough to be lifted whole, moved down from the fields and set back down in a barnyard. Instead of keeping the hay inside, or in the limited space afforded to each family in a village, the horse's feed is kept right where it is mown and brought down when needed.
Around the ski resorts, locals with little to do in the winter earn money bringing skiers up the snowy roads to the lifts. The horses have spiked shoes to help them get a purchase on the icy roads, and the sleighs are softened with a bit of hay and a blanket.
As we were walking one day, we came across this team a few times. A man was driving a doctor on his rounds, and they stopped at a few houses that we passed. We knew he was a doctor because he was carrying a medical case and had a comforting but grave manner. He arrived at the ski area when we were eating lunch and was greeted fondly by all of the locals. He spoke with them for a minute, then set off again.

Thread Bare to Thread Full

Right near our guesthouse in Kolomyia was this market skeleton. We walked through it on a ramble. These outdoor shopping structures just never cease to draw us in, empty or full. The idea that markets still work this way, all over Europe - these supercentres that never get packed up on their days off. Real estate where vendors all pay their dues for a stall, drive or drag their goods in and stand out in any weather to sell is just so interesting. It's always such a vibrant scene when full and then such a tattered and desolate one when empty.
The big market happens here every Saturday, but we happened to be there right in time for the hush-hush use of the space. Every Thursday morning, starting at 3am, there is an embroidery market. Souvenir shops come to get their hutsul shirts, skirts, tablecloths. Residents come to find an embroiderer and a pattern they like so that they can put in an order for a specially made piece or two. It's the biggest market of its kind in Ukraine and customers come from all over. Naturally, we made it our mission to head over there as early as we could manage to sneak a peek and maybe snap some pics.
We weren't going to fool ourselves into thinking that we'd make it there when it opened at 3am, but thought that moseying on over at 7ish would be just fine. Well, as you can see, that was like showing up to the midnight showing of Twilight at 11:45pm or waltzing into the Mac store midday on the Ipad's release.
Four hours into their market day, it was sort of a mad house. From a block away we could see cars parked haphazardly. Vans were parked with men asleep in the driver's seat. A police officer weaved in and out of the cluster of women at the gate. We weren't sure if the group outside were selling or buying or if they were in line to enter and thought it best not to barrel our way inside. Though we never made it in, it was still amazing to see the market space go from this...
...to this in less than 24 hours.
Through the gates we saw barrels of threads, piles of linen, a sea of heads. It was quite the scene.

P.S. We learned about the embroidery market from Vitaliy, our host at On the Corner guesthouse. Apparently, their home has also welcomed Julie Powell a.k.a. Julie of Julie & Julia (the author, not the actress Amy Adams a.k.a. Purse Girl from The Office). She's pretty much blogger royalty, though Vitaliy and his family are "real people" royalty themselves. They've been featured in at least two Discovery Channel specials on Ukraine and Ukrainian families. Mama Pavliuk made a mean mushroom soup.

Mountain Churches

We haven't traveled very widely in Ukraine because it's a big country and the roads aren't always easy to drive on. For the most part, we've been in the south-western corner of the country, in the Carpathian mountains. In this remote, quiet part of the world, we've been amazed at the beautiful wooden churches that dot the hillsides and hamlets.
There are many shrines, too, often by themselves in a field or by a twist in a stream. They can be ornate or quite simple, like this one. Often, cars will be pulled to the side of the road near them, as people offer gifts or go inside to pray. It's a nice, intimate way of inhabiting a religious space, I imagine.
During one morning's drive, we crossed a region made up of a few valleys in the very inaccessible part of the country between Bukovel and Kolomyia. The houses in this area were adorned with elaborately stamped tin trim along their rooflines and dormer windows. We pulled over by this church, which I thought was amazing. The entire building is covered in tin, save for the wood at the bottom. If you can make it out, you'll see that there are designs in relief covering the entire surface.
This church was nearby - simpler, but still beautiful. I love the multi-tiered rooflines and the not quite symmetrical spires.
A small, fancy roadside shrine. Inside, a carved counter with images of grapes set below bright paintings of saints. The gaudiness of it was a little comedic, given its diminutive size.
In the more western part of the mountains, there were a number of spires like this one, which reminded me of New England steeples - but, of course, with the rounded top.
One characteristic of many Carpathian churches is a shiny, gold plated spire. Some of the larger churches had quite a bit of gleaming surface area, and they were visible from a great distance. This parish obviously wasn't as showy, though they were brave enough to choose such a great orange paint.
We saw a lot of larger, stone or cement houses of worship, but they weren't as endearing. I like the log construction at the base of many of these, and the compact, squareness of the design.

Hutsul and Pysanka Museums

We are in the city of Kolomyia (Коломия), in south-western Ukraine, just where the land begins to rise up into the Carpathian mountains. The region is the historic home of the Hutsul people, who still make up a large part of the population, and their influence can be felt in everything from the food to the style of dress. There are two interesting museums here in town - one very famous one, another more interesting one. The first is the Pysanka museum, shown above, which is dedicated to the art of egg-decorating. The second is the Hutsul folk-art museum, which we thought was much more engrossing.

"Pysanky" are eggs that are decorated by covering parts of the shell with wax, dipping the egg in dye, covering different parts, dipping again, then melting the wax off to reveal the colors (the technical term for this process is "wax resist" or "batik"). In America, they are often referred to simply as "Ukrainian eggs," and the technique is pretty popular around easter. The specific designs are associated with different regions and tribes, and some have changed very little over the past few centuries. The museum has eggs from all over the world, but its focus is on the Ukrainian pysanka, and its history. The iconic building was built in 2000, and looks itself like an egg - it's made the town quite famous in Ukraine, and it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country.
The museum is the largest of its type in the world, with over 10,000 examples in its permanent collection and eggs that date back to the late 19th century. We came because we felt we had to - several months ago, while on a skansen in Ciechanowiec, Poland, we were shown the second largest collection in the world. Perhaps because it was in a building on a deserted museum, because we didn't have any idea that it was there, because our guide had to unlock the building for us and because it was so uniquely surprising, the Ciechanowiec collection is still our favorite. The museum here in Kolomyia is interesting, but it isn't as amazing as we had jokingly hoped it would be. Quite a bit of the collection has been damaged by improper lighting, there are quite a few tourists and it feels a bit artificial.
Much more interesting was the museum of Hutsul folk art, a few steps away. The pieces in the collection are truly astounding, and they really illustrate how glorious a culture this region espoused. The museum has a large number of metal, wood, ceramic and woven artifacts, as well as some paintings and photographs done by or depicting Hutsul people. The metal-working was very intricate, with a lot of work done in brass and a focus put on inlay. This is a powder horn (how they described it, I don't see any actual horn) and it was one of my favorite pieces.
One of the characteristic belongings of a Hutsul man was a hand-ax, mostly in the form of a long ax-cane. Many of them were purely decorative, but there were more businesslike versions, apparently. This one was not sharp, and was inlaid with hundreds of tiny beads.
The ceramics are almost all decorated with green, yellow and brown glaze. Their purpose was less utilitarian, as most Hutsuls dined on and with wooden plates and utensils, and more decorative. It was a flourishing art until around the second world war, when it began to fade in the region. Today, Hutsul pottery is less known and less collected than the other arts, but it's still very unique.
Probably the best known and currently most practiced Hutsul crafts are weaving and embroidery. There are still a lot of people here who work with textiles, and collectors pay quite a bit of money for new pieces by skilled artists. This is a traditional wedding outfit, with many embroidered ribbons and a finely-decorated dress.

Alka-Seltzer for the Soul

On our drive down, out of the Carpathian Mountains to Ivano-Frankivsk, we were greeted with the first signs of Spring. The ground was brown, you could smell the Earth and our 50degree Fahrenheit dashboard thermometer reading gave us the confidence to open our windows a crack. It's just the first week of February and we didn't want to get too comfortable with what could have been a false alarm, but on our second day in "Ivano" the signs continued to show that we may just be done with our (former) Soviet winter.
We woke up, both feeling a little ill. We've been very good at avoiding the water, but were not as good at avoiding the gin the night before. We went out to walk it off, heading to a large man-made lake across town. The air had that electric chill that usually precedes a thunderstorm and it instantly rejuvenated us. Then, through the trees we saw this rusted high-dive sticking up. I mentioned something about Dirty Dancing and had to explain the setting, plot and relevance of the movie to one of the only people born in the 80s who has never seen it. But, back to the matter at hand. The lake was a time warp.
All around the perimeter there were retro signs like these, communicating safety rules and instructions on how to swim, sail, etc. A man in some serious biking gear rode passed us at least three times as we blurrily made our way around. It was quiet and crisp and the lighting was magnificent.
At least ten ice fishermen were out. You could see the water flow beneath the ice they sat on, which scared me a little. I wondered how many of them were sad that their season was coming to an end and how different it must be to go from sitting right there in the center of the world your fishing, to propping your stool up to the edge and casting your line in from afar.
Just a few feet past this boathouse, the only thing that had been blessed with a fresh coat of paint, there was an oval cut out in the ice. Standing on the edge of the freezing pool was a young man in a black and white striped sweater, stretching. He had already taken off his hat and jacket and was most likely waiting for his ice swimming companions to arrive before completely disrobing. There's really no point in doing something like that without an audience or accomplice. Unless, of course, it was simply his own hangover remedy.
In so many ways, it really felt like a forgotten playground or an abandoned town. So much of it had been left to fall into disrepair and on so many other days, it would have been bleak and depressing. But one has to stay positive when nursing a hangover. I saw this rundown truck and hole-y canoe parked in mud behind a twisted fence and saw green. (green!!!)
It was so much easier to see this bandstand and the futbol field across from it, the playground around the bend and the gymnastics training field with row upon row of balance beams and uneven bars and imagine it all full of people. In just a few months, we read, joggers wearing only speedos will circumvent the lake filled with swans. For the first time in a while, being somewhere 'summery' on the off-season didn't feel depressing. It felt hopeful and exciting and almost completely cured our nausea (helped in large part by the chinese food lunch we miraculously stumbled upon on the lake's edge).