Independent woman part I

 

Busy working pretty hard, earning dollah before my departure to Poland next week. No time for productive leisure activities.

Slutslobbing.

Photo courtesy of Jonny Cotton.

Part I. KIEV:LAND OF KEVIN KEEGANS

I've been terrible at posting lately due to being generally rubbish, but also through having exams and a thick fog of time to wade through to find my long lost friends once my three hour essay on the concept of masculinity in Catullus and weeks of library paranoia and nail biting was over.  Though I did get to write 'buggered' and 'erect phallis' several times in an academic context which was quite fun.

I've been trying to preciously preserve the memories of my time in the Ukraine, saving them for when my brain is at its least dim and hungover to do it justice, but in the process may have let them wither and die a little, which is why I wanted to post a taster so that I'll feel bad not completing it. Doing this might be comparable to an overzealous toddler squeazing a small animal to keep it safe but killing it in the process I guess. Or in of Mice and Men, when Lennie kills Curley's wife because her hairs so pretty he can't help but strangle her to death in order to stroke it, I feel that my literary skills cannot do justice to what I absorbed through my puny peepers, but I shall try my best. I'll put the whole thing up when I climb out of my post-revision hole of gluttony, endless Twin Peaks watching and hangover induced despair.

 Alex's eyes looked like those of a long abused dancing bear as he stared hollowly at the concrete punctured wilderness around us. Insane drivers occasionally clunked past us in their 1977 issue Soviet Ladas, shooting round the corner with time to pass a glare at the obvious tourist scum we had become. My frazzled brain snagged repeatedly on half-missing syrillic lettering, propped on the top of the building blocks. We wandered down the road to a graffitied and half-shuttered porta-cabin concrete block with cigarette cartons in the window. There was a woman with heavy make-up and an apron behind a plastic mock-marble bar and a variety of meaty, sweaty looking substances piled onto plates and litre bottles of £2 vodka. She couldn't speak English, but we purchased mineral water after reading that even brushing your teeth in the local tap-alade could cause a nasty bout of dsyentary. Also, with the entire of Ukraine's water supply running under the Chernobyl reactor we didn't fancy taking our chances on the involuntary ingestion of glowy stuff.

Eventually from under our layers of panic induced cold sweat we decided to consult my £3 guide book, which strictly advised us to not stray away from the centre of Kiev, a good ten miles away. This particularly cheery paragraph did nothing to soothe any feelings of apprehension; "As you get further from the city centre, the underlying poverty becomes more obvious, fewer and fewer people speak English and facilities that can help or cater for visiters become fewer and fewer." And fewer, and fewer, and fewer...said the voice in my head, along with "you're sacrafising revision time in the middle of exams to get lost and potentially chopped up in Eastern Europe and contaminate yourself with radiation and you didn't even remember to tell your parents you were going here."