Ukraine is cold

Wrote this a while back. ¡Disfruta!

I knew what heat was. The thick, heavy, sticky heat of south Georgia, a constant part of my life for the first eighteen years of it, is both dreaded and welcomed, like an awkward but still-loved relative. In Key West, where I lived for two years, the heat is different, but just as oppressive, though the proximity of the Atlantic offers a quick cool-down to anyone with fifteen minutes to walk to the island's perimeter.

I knew heat, and my closet was packed with summer dresses, miniskirts, tank tops and flip flops. And I thought I knew cold. In Georgia, cold is a fashionable Gap peacoat over a long-sleeved henley, jeans and slightly flushed cheeks. In Georgia cold is negligible, a mild inconvenience like a particularly lengthy queue at the DMV or traffic on I-75.

Then I came face to face with the full, terrible, merciless fury of a Slavic winter. I arrived in Ukraine at the end of still-pretty-mild September and listened to my new colleagues and friends speak with resignation and gloom about the impending winter, and thought surely that they must be exaggerating somewhat. “Do you have a winter coat?” several of my students asked.

In fact, I did have a coat, one of the St. John's Bay variety from JC Penney, wool on the outside and insulated (the tag said) with down. As autumn drifted along and neared its close, I had settled in comfortably and was looking forward to the pretty, picturesque snow that native Georgians never get to experience. Fluffy white clouds would soon cover the ground. Perhaps we teachers would build snowmen on our days off, sled down nearby hills or just walk through the winter wonderland in downtown Marinsky Park.

When December descended upon the city of Kyiv, I became a convert. The fluffy white clouds I'd envisioned did not materialize; instead, two meters of grimy, dirty snow obstructed sidewalks and roads, the bottom six inches or so freezing permanently to the ground below.

This ice, the bane of every Kyivan winter, remains in place until late March, reducing the city's residents to slipping, sliding, knee-bruising (me), hip-breaking marionettes, their strings pulled by uncontrollable Mother Nature. There is no such thing as snow or ice removal in Kyiv, this and other aspects of the residents' well-being neglected as usual by the mayor, whose ineptitude and cocaine addiction are well-known and oft-ridiculed facts.

Among other things, winter is an especially good time to observe elements of Ukrainian culture that are often a combination of the bizarre and hilarious. The aforementioned absence of snow and ice removal make for entertaining (if you can see it that way) trips anywhere, especially with children in tow. The first time I saw a child-bearing sled dragged by the child's huffing, puffing, struggling parent, I was reminded of Santa Claus and his reindeer. I half-expected to hear the child, invariably bundled so tightly as to resemble a gingerbread man or starfish, cry out “Mush!” and brandish a whip.

On a similarly entertaining note, fashion in Ukraine is all-important, and not at all sacrificed to practicality during the winter months. Throughout October and November I made a passable attempt at stylish clothing and footwear, abandoning it altogether when the weather made it completely pointless and perhaps even life-threatening. Ukrainian women, known worldwide for their enviably sleek beauty and keen fashion sense, are not so deterred. Well into the freeze they can be seen shod in five- or six-inch stiletto heels, taking birdlike little steps and digging the point of the heel into the ice for a better grip. Perhaps it's taught at school, or simply inborn. At any rate, I never saw one of them fall.

Needless to say, winter in Ukraine is a strange time. The absence of the sun is total. There are no quick trips anywhere, not even to the kiosk twenty meters from your front door for a Coke. The cold is relentless, biting, cruel, harsh, even angry. You must cover every possible inch of flesh or risk illness or frostbite. The metro becomes a stinking, drafty hole filled with somehow-melted snow and ice that threatens one's balance at every yanking, jerking turn on the ride into downtown. A simple trip to the market becomes a two-hour epic adventure as you battle the wind, the crowds, the floodlike snowfall and of course the ice while you cling to your purchases through gloves so thick you'd think they would actually keep the cold out. Suicide, depression and alcoholism are common in the winter months and even considered normal reactions to a season that seems to go on interminably every single year.

And yet, most people – the ones who are not alcoholic, depressed or suicidal – seemed happy to me. I certainly was. Winter in Ukraine meant dangerous cold, snow, ice, heavy boots, mussed hair and blood-red cheeks, but it also meant constant house parties, nights with my best friend Jaemi after work at Puzata Hata (think Ryan's, but smaller and with beer) and one more opportunity to find out what I was really made of.

By the time I left in early June, I didn't have the wide Slavic features I'd come to know so well but I'd begun to feel more Ukrainian than American, fancying myself as tough and resilient as the people I'd lived among for nine months – people that fought through and survived centuries of hardship featuring a smorgasbord of poverty, war, foreign control and untold indignities preceding a decades-long nightmare under the suffocating and heavyhanded control of the Soviet Union. And I realized with surprise and pleasure that I now had more friends abroad than I'd ever had in the States. Even by mid-December, I knew that, in spite of the weather, I'd come to the right place.