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Cigarette smoke and body odors were a bad mix when taking the public transportation to school everyday. Katy buried her head in my arm pit. I was the only person in the city who wore deodorant and she was at an unfortunate height. The drivers were insane, they’d cut so close to the bus stops, within feet of taking out the crushing crowds waiting impatiently. People would run for the bus, silently and desperately. On good days, we’d almost literally get carried on the bus by the pushing. Once on, silence. No one would talk. Except for us loud Americans. They watched us. We’d not even have to hold on to the seats some days, (the days when they didn’t give us their seats because we were rock star Americans,) the crowds would hold us upright. It wasn’t uncommon to see people literally hanging out of a bus by the hand rails and the doors not able to shut on the Electric Trolley bus. The poorly made Electric Trolley Bus that came off it’s wires all the time which caused it to come to an abrupt halt that made us all fall into each other, but not actually fall because we were so squished. The little benefits. I remember not making it onto a bus one day because of the crowds and seeing a man holding on the ladder on the back of the bus, then loose his grip and fall to the ground and then narrowly missed by a car. Drew left my Ramona Quimby, age 8 on the bus one day.
Everyday while riding the bus to school we would go by the Sodat (a huge statue of a soviet soldier) where the “Wal-Mart” of Kharkov was. That is, an open air market with the disturbing heads of animals marking where to get what meat. Yummy. The rabbits had to have their fur still on their legs to show that they were indeed a rabbit and not a cat like what was sold during harder times under the pretense it was a rabbit. The place where they hung the bodies after they were executed for stealing food. The way they did stuff was so pointless, I’m sure that there was a reason initially for the fact that when we wanted bread from the bakery (“Ya hachoo cleb”) we would point and ask, after waiting in a long line, the person helping you would write it down on a slip of paper, then we would go wait in another line to pay for it, then, with our receipt clenched in our hands, we would go back to the other line, wait again, then finally get our bread. OK, on to the dairy store. If you think it takes a long time at Wal-Mart, you are incorrect. After haggling for some eggs, cheese, and some vegetables -if you were lucky- the day would be gone and you, the gullible foreigner, have spent 4x what the average Ukrainian paid for the same things. and they said capitalism was dead over there!!!
We eventually hired a cook, Olga, and she took care of this for us. The western stores were our favorite, but only mafia people shopped there. Well, the mafia and us. We got used to being put in that category. The western stores had CEREAL which none of our friends had ever had or seen and SHELF MILK, the like which Wal-Mart now carries and it’s still weird to me to see it there. A typical western store was small, maybe the size of a gas station, and had foods from Europe. The food made in Ukraine was labeled in real paper, the kind that peels really bad when it gets wet, and had nothing but the name of the product labeled on it. No cool designs or cheesy logos. Simple and basic. Weird. Ukrainian food was never sold in the western stores. That was ok, because without being able to read Ukrainian and without pictures, we didn’t know what we were buying anyways.
The flowers, though, were beautiful. Bright, cheerful splashes against the cracked concrete and gray skies. The old women bending over them, tending to them, with their heads covered modestly with scarfs and holes in their stockings. Their aged and wrinkled faces breaking out in toothless grins at the strangers. We were millionaires, or so they imagined us to be. We got a newspaper cone of sunflower seeds and browsed. The faces of the people. How their faces would light up when we stopped for a second to admire! Light up with hope, maybe we’d buy their flowers. They were so cheap! I loved this culture where taking someone flowers was a common thing. We picked some out, our translator quickly talking them down to a reasonable price. But they can afford more! No, this is all we will pay, perhaps we should go to another- OK, OK, take the roses.