On Friday, I left the house a little before 10am to meet some friends. About a block from home, I passed an accident on our street. As the accident was blocking about 3/4 of a two-way street, traffic was pretty backed up. I returned home a little after noon, and what did I pass? The accident site, still in the same position. Apparently the police hadn’t arrived yet.

The really amazing thing is how drivers handle such a ridiculous situation. I have yet to see a driver yell at another driver. They calmly get out of their cars, look at the damage, pull out their cell phone, and start making calls. In fact, the woman in the red car was sitting in the driver’s seat reading a book both times I walked past. I guess they know that once they’re involved in an accident, their day is pretty much shot, so they might as well relax. It’s very strange, especially being from a country where road rage is the norm.

Luckily, there were 10 other people from the Embassy that were willing to get out there with the masses, so we went as a group. I’m pretty glad it turned out that way because I think it would have been a frustrating experience if we didn’t have others to laugh about it with. Shawn and I had scoped out the scene earlier in the day and noticed that large video screens to broadcast the concert had been set up along the major street leading to Maidan (Independence Square), where the stage was actually set up. Great, I thought, we’re going to end up standing closer to our apartment than the stage.

But never underestimate the persistence of American diplomats, or the inability of the majority of Ukrainians to show up early. In the US, people would have been camped out for weeks for a free concert of this magnitude. In fact, Shawn and I used to laugh at the people in Portland who would line up their lawn chairs days in advance for the Rose Festival Parade. But Ukrainians apparently have better things to do - sit in the park and drink cheap beer, mostly.

Anyway, we got to the general area of the concert around 8pm (the show was scheduled to start at 8:30), walked past all the the video screens and pushed our way through the “queue” to get through the first gate. We were closer than I expected, but not close enough. We continued pushing through a second gate and as close as we could physically get to the stage. Now at this point, it was so tight that we were all holding on to each other in order not to get pulled away and lost in the crowd and, to be quite honest, I couldn’t actually see the stage (although the taller people in our group said we were close). We were literally packed like sardines, it was over 80 degrees F, and Ukrainians are not fond of wearing deodorant. I declared the situation to be “too much Ukraine” and we retreated.

We still ended up standing relatively close to the stage considering there were about 200,000 people there. I could see Sir Elton when he stood up from the piano and if I stood on my toes - his head was about the size of the head of a pin from my perspective…

Oh, and remember how I said the show was supposed to start at 8:30? The first half hour turned out to be a series of PSAs about AIDS and HIV. Granted, that was the whole point of this free concert in the first place, but it was a lot of AIDS awareness in Ukrainian for those of us that don’t speak it. But Sir Elton finally made his grand entrance around 9 and got the party started.

The most interesting part of the evening was seeing which songs were Ukrainian hits. There was a guy behind me that kept yelling “Sacrifice” (of course with a Ukrainian accent). I was a little disturbed and afraid to turn around until Elton started playing “Sacrifice” and the crowd went absolutely crazy. Seriously. There was pretty much a group blank stare for “Rocket Man” and “Tiny Dancer,” but they were really excited about some song that nobody in our group had ever heard before. Someone joked that maybe it was only released in the Soviet Union.

So that was our brush with Sir Elton John and our even closer brush with half of the population of Kyiv. A good time, an exhausting evening, and when we got home (we left before the show was over), we realized we could have heard the whole thing from our balcony. But that story wouldn’t have been as interesting, right?

Our neighborhood has lots of cathedrals, as you can see, and we’re not too far from the river.

Our trip to Budapest:

And our newest addition, that I have not yet found time to write about. Probably because no one warned me exactly how hard it is to house-train a puppy. That’s right, about a week and a half ago, Shawn decided we needed to take another trip to the pet market “just to look.” And we came home with a 2-month-old Doberman, who we promptly named Laika.

Viewpoint 1: Last weekend we took a quick trip to Budapest, Hungary. It was wonderful…the sights, the amazing hotel we stayed in, the food, and American movies in English. (Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t all that great, but did I mention it was in English?) About an hour after arriving, I found myself saying, “now this is Europe.” It’s amazing how different a place can be only an hour and a half away by air. So I worked really hard to savor our time there. But a few hours before our flight back, I started feeling…let’s say “uneasy” about the fact that we were returning to Ukraine. I was thinking about the fact that we were probably going to have to attempt to bargain with a cab driver at the airport in Russian; that I needed to buy groceries, which would include not only a metro ride, but also a trip through the MegaMarket being pushed and shoved by people in a much bigger hurry than me (because I budget about 3 hours for an average grocery store trip here); and just the general isolation that one feels when living in a place where you are not fluent in the native language.

Viewpoint 2: We have friends from our Russian class at FSI that arrived here this week. They are posted to Moscow, but have come to Kyiv as a temporary assignment to help out with visa interviews. They are so excited to be here. I don’t know how many times they have commented on the friendliness of the people here and the fact that you can actually walk down the street without being trampled by crowds. Just today, my friend actually commented on how European the buildings look compared to the Soviet blocks in Moscow.

So my conclusion is that Ukraine, Kyiv at least, is somewhere in the middle of being European or Russian. My secondary conclusion is thank god we’re not in Moscow. And finally, I think our friends arrived at the perfect time to allow me to hold on to whatever bit of sanity I have left. Thanks, guys.