Podil:

Kyiv Planetarium:

Kyiv is getting ready for Euro 2012:

A crowded marshrutka:



Drinking water:

Just learned of another cool person's death. She died in mid-February. Of cancer. Left two kids behind. Never met her in person, but spent three months in 2003 admiring her huge, wonderful portrait that hung in the kitchen of her awesome St. Pete apartment that we stayed in when we just moved there. Seven years. So terribly sad.

I wish I had a car. I'd drive around fast for the rest of the night. I'd play Victor Tsoi and Gogol Bordello real loud. But I don't have a car.

On May 23, when I learned of Henry's departure, I went on one of my aimless marathon walks, then took a cab home. The driver was a young guy from the Caucasus. He drove real fast, but touched the wheel and looked at the road only occasionally, as he had a cigarette in one hand and his cell phone in the other - and he was texting someone, not talking, as he drove. Normally, I would've barked at him, but I didn't really care then. When he was done with that message he was typing, he turned his car radio on: Victor Tsoi, Zvezda po imeni solntse. For the first time that evening, I somehow felt almost happy. But then his cell phone rang, he turned down the volume, and spent the next few minutes discussing the night before and other such stuff with some friend. When he hung up, I asked him a bit too timidly and a bit too politely to please turn Tsoi back on - I could hear the song was still playing. It turned out it wasn't his car radio, but a disc, and he put the song back on from the start, and, even though I didn't ask him to, he turned the volume all the way up, opened the windows and sped up some more. Man, was it great. I could ride like this forever. We played the same song twice before we reached my place, and in between I told him he had no idea how well-timed it all was - the song played this loud and the ride that was so recklessly fast. As I was getting out of his car, I asked him where he was from: Makhachkala, Dagestan. I said: Ah, unfortunately, I don't know how you guys say 'thanks' in your languages. He laughed. And then it hit me: Barkalla! I'm not even sure where I learned that word from or when. Must be those Terek football team fan forums that I used to read a long time ago. So I said to him: Barkalla? And he smiled awesomely and said: Hey, you do know it, why are you saying you don't? And we wished each other health and happiness, and I went home. And I was thinking of Tsoi, and of Henry, and those who die young, who live life to its fullest, then burn away, too fast. Henry wasn't all that young biologically, but I know only a couple people who love life as much as he did and who live their lives as if they were born yesterday.

How I wish I could ride fast now, with Tsoi blasting at full volume through the windows, instead of just sitting on the balcony, smoking and writing this.

Putin's chat with Yuri Shevchuk (RUS):



The transcript (RUS) is here.

And photos from the opposition rally on May 31 - here and here.

Two more spring days left. March was too wintry. April was too crazy, too sad. May was so good, so amazingly good. Up until the day Henry died.

Pictures of the flowers don't help at all.

These ones reflect my current mood better:

Just trying to get my mind off some things, trying real hard...

Had to listen to this half a dozen times before I finally stopped crying...

And the three men I admire the most
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died...

A dear friend died unexpectedly in Kyiv this weekend, and it's hard to think of anything but him right now. Henry... He was so full of love, so full of joie de vivre that it feels awkward to feel so sad thinking about him now...

But to know that he's not coming back, that we're never gonna see him again is unbearable.

Some of Henry's family and friends gathered tonight at the bar where we all used to hang out. One friend shared a picture with me. I wish he hadn't. On one of the tables, there was a framed photo of Henry. Not Henry, but a framed photo of him.

And I spent some time tonight searching for some of my pictures of Henry, and I did find a few, but I won't post any of them here. I just can't.

But, as a tribute to one of the most wonderful people I've ever known, here's an unrelated photo from St. Pete in 2004 that I ran into while looking for his pictures. It is so full of sunshine, love and joie de vivre that I hope Henry would've liked it.

Saw a "little blue bucket" (sineye vedyorko) on a car for the first time yesterday. Its location is a bit unorthodox, but it's still pretty conspicuous. (Underneath the Mitsubishi logo, this car also carries a V-Day Ribbon sticker that says "Remember.")



(GV roundups with various related links are here, here, here, and here.)

Via Taras of Ukrainiana, yet another video of our dolt of a president. In this episode, Yanukovych says 'demilitation' instead of 'delimitation':



Translation by Taras:

Yanukovych: Of course, we have issues of quite some principle that we’ll have to work on. For example: the demilitation of our...uh...of our sea borders.

Please note how Medvedev reacts by moving his index finger. He sure has a fun job: first, he gets to listen to the lovely performance of the Russian anthem by the Syrians, then he gets to watch the wreath attack Yanukovych, and finally he gets to hear our great defender of the Russian language actually speak this language.

To avoid repeated humiliation, Yanukovych minders should probably consider getting TV channels to dub the president's speeches, or do voiceovers. Because he really is hopeless.

The Syrian comrades' rendition of the Soviet/Russian anthem, performed during Medvedev's visit to Damascus last week:



Normally, I'm allergic to this tune, but it's so comically off-key here that I couldn't resist sharing it... :)

In 2008, I wrote about Metin, the bartender from the wonderful hotel at the Aegean Coast that we've been staying at for the past couple of years. Metin reminded me of my grandfather - and that's all I know about him. I'm not sure how I ended up writing a message mentioning Metin to one of my friends tonight, but I did, and this message is about something I like to talk a lot about in real life, so I'll re-post parts of it here, just because.

***

A few years before my father's death, I discovered that we had some Greek roots somewhere on my father's side. I discovered it accidentally - was looking at my grandfather's photo - my father's father who died in 1969, before I was born, before my parents were married - and it struck me suddenly that his face was so not Slavic. Funny, because I was used to his face and it had never occurred to me before that he looked too beautiful, too dark for a Russian that he officially was... :) So I asked papa an obvious question - obvious for Ukraine: "Papa, do we, by any chance, have some Jewish ancestors?" And he responded so untypically softly - and somewhat vaguely: "No, as far as I know, not. But we do have some Greeks down there somewhere." And that was it. I didn't pay much attention then, didn't really care. And then it was too late, no one left to ask for more information...

One year after papa's death, we were at the Aegean Coast, and there was a bartender at our hotel, Metin, and the moment I saw him, I told Misha: "He looks exactly like my grandfather." And I spent two weeks staring and smiling at him, and on the last day, I took a picture of him, and asked his name, and back in Moscow we compared his picture to the picture of my grandfather, and Misha - whose eye is perfect, you know - said it was almost scary how similar they looked. And that area of Turkey is very complex ethnically - all the "population exchanges" with Greece in 1923, and Lesbos is 6km away, etc. - so who knows what Metin's roots really were... And I took it as a sign, as a tiny message from papa...

Sometime around the second anniversary of papa's death, I was at a bookstore here in Moscow - and Charles Aznavour's book, a Russian translation, basically jumped right at me from the stand, and I bought it, because Aznavour was one of my papa's favorite singers - partly because he reminded papa of his father, my grandfather... Amazing, isn't it? I took it as another sign, another tiny message from papa... One of the first texts in that book was about being a grandfather - which only re-confirmed my feelings...

I don't really feel Greek because of this discovery - the little that I know of the Greek politics kind of scares me, actually - but I do feel that it explains something about me, about why I'm drawn to certain places, people, languages, and, above all, the spirit, why I could never resist it. And the fact that I hate our winters so much... Then again, on my mother's side, we have some mysterious French ancestors, too - as mythical as these Greeks, no info on them whatsoever, except for a few half-forgotten mentions and the dark, not-too-Slavic looks that two of my grandmothers had, something which my mama somehow hadn't inherited at all - obviously, due to her very blond Czech grandmother, my great-grandmother... :)

***

My grandfather, Sergei Andreyevich Khokhlov:



Metin, the bartender from Kanara Hotel:



My father:



And what I wrote in 2008:

I can see not just my grandfather in [Metin], but my father as well. His smiling eyes. It's crazy, because I could never really understand what my father and his father had in common. And now I do.

***

P.S. A soundtrack to this post - Artur Meschian's Yerkir Hnamya ("Ancient Land"), a beautiful Armenian song - some of you may not see the connection, but it's enough that I do:

I want to have quick access to these videos, so I'll post them here. This kind of comic relief is something many Ukrainians need right now. Can't be just me alone, right?

Yanukovych, Medvedev and the wreath:



As I wrote elsewhere, it reminds me of something out of a 1980s French comedy - I keep thinking of 'Nevezuchiye'/'La Chèvre' with Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu... :)

Also, I really liked how one of Kyiv friends put it on Facebook, "The little Big Brother comes to the rescue of the big little brother"...

***

Surkis picking his nose, then wiping his hand on Shufrych: