Walking

My sister Elizabeth is the picture of fitness. She's a runner and is not the kind of person who can abide being sedentary for very long. Although I'm not in the kind of fantastic shape Elizabeth is in, I can't stand being still either, at least when I'm not writing. Or drinking. Or doing both at the same time. Once summoned to Lucy's apartment we often found ourselves lounging around for hours, eating watermelon, or drinking Kvas, or surfing the internet on Zach's laptop. When Liz announced to Irina one day that she wanted to go for a walk we found ourselves face to face with another cultural enigma. "Why do you want to walk?" asked Irina, with this puzzled, even incredulous look on her face. "Walk where?...I get Dima to drive you in the Lada. Don't walk Liza!" Apparently walking for the sake of walking, without a destination, was not something that Ukrainians do, or even a concept that they can wrap their heads around. (Unless there was danger in walking about the town, which we considered but dismissed after noting that they didn't have a problem with us walking home after midnight down dark alleyways and sidewalks with no streetlights...and friends I have to tell you sometimes those late night walks home felt creepy and dangerous. I mean those hollering drunks and shifty looking  Militsiya could just look at us and tell we were not just foreigners but seriously hard-core foreigners). To get around this awkward faux pas, I simply decided to provide our hosts with a destination to justify our walks. Usually it was the fact that I had forgotten to take my meds and they were back at our place. This worked like a charm and got us down the stairs and out the door to walk freely.

Our walks would take us through this park which was adjacent to the former Soviet Ministry of Culture, then into the streets of Kramatorsk

Shady and quiet, the town seemed sleepy and bucolic in the summer heat

I have no idea what this place with the strange English-style "Second Hand" sign was. We walked in one day and found a staircase leading upwards into the dark. We decided to just leave it a mystery.

                                       Here is the little 24 hour market. Sort of a Ukrainian 7-11

Notice the air conditioner attatched to this place. Air conditioning is a real luxury in Ukraine

                                                                                                                                                    

Sometimes we'd stop in to one of the little stores for a Fanta and check out the cheese and smoked fish

Here is the fountain in the park where kids would cool off from the heat. The water was sort of brownish-green. I would hate to imagine what varieties of bacteria these children were swimming with.

A broken down old Soviet bus

And a couple of phone booths

    

Kramatorsk has a kind of quiet but crumbling grandeur. You can feel what a special place it once was

This enormous building is the former Soviet Ministry of Culture. The sheer scale and opulance of it is breathtaking. It's a popular place for weddings these days. The big chap on the pedestal is of course Lenin.
Here I am with an old Russian tank