There's a little shop up the street from us, and its elderly owner is an unfriendly woman whose face is like a fist with unsmiling lips, unsmiling eyes and a potato of a nose on it. We were buying ice-cream from her a few days ago, and she tried to guess where we were from by the language we were speaking.

Czechs?

No. Well, not really. Ukrainians.

At some point, I told her how lovely Croatia was.

She spoke Croatian to us, but I understood her response: yes, it is beautiful, but it is hopeless here, no opportunities.

I tried to protest: but Komiza is such a wonder, a paradise on earth, raj na zemlji.

And she said, with muted anger: right, come here in winter and see - there is nothing.

And I said that I understood exactly what she meant. Because, somehow, I did. Though I would still prefer to spend my winters here, by the sea, than in our part of the world, no matter what.

And then I thought that perhaps it was winter, not all those idiotic politicians, that was actually to blame for so many of our problems.

And I also realized that I would've probably heard the same desperately gloomy opinions on winter from the locals of the Aegean Coast of Turkey - more than once, during the three or four of our wonderful summer visits there - had it not been for the impenetrable language barrier between us.

Too tired to write much now, but I really wanted to share these photos of the lovely place that we are staying at here in Komiža: Insulae Apartmani (the Facebook page is here). We spent the month of July here and have just returned after two weeks at another place for the rest of our time on Vis. It's the coziest and the friendliest place in the world!!!

For the first month in Komiža, we stayed at Insulae Apartmani, a wonderful place run by wonderful people. At the beginning of high season, we moved to another place, just a couple minutes away, and now we are about to move back to Insulae for the remaining three weeks here. Packing and moving isn't too much fun, but change is exciting, especially for Marta. Below are some pics from this second place, which is also very, very nice:

Keep forgetting to mention that Marta now has a photo blog - Marta on Otok Vis: photos she's taking here, selected and posted by me.

:)

We are still on the island, and I'm too far behind with posting photos.

To jump-start myself, I've compiled images of the island's lovely doors, windows and miscellaneous dwellings:

Misha and I got married on July 15, 2005 - and the last time I saw my father was on July 16, 2007.

July 15 is supposed to be a very happy day, and I was doing my best to feel happy yesterday, tried very hard to fend off the sadness, to postpone it for just one day.



Today, a swallow flew into one of our windows in the morning, crossed the room, nearly colliding with me, and flew out of the window on the other side of the room. It didn't seem to panic - maybe it wasn't the first for it here - and I thought it was a good sign, because birds are cool.

I went for a long walk in the afternoon, up a mostly narrow path high above the sea, where the hot air is filled with the amazing smell of rosemary and pine trees, and the views are incredible, and there are no people around.

The two-hour walk was both exhausting and invigorating. I wish I didn't hate hats and wore one on this walk. But I never do. That's my only regret.

I kept thinking about papa, about his long last walk somewhere in the forest and in the fields, in the summer heat, lost, four years ago.

I kept thinking of how good it was to know where I was and where I was going to and why, to know the way back, to know that Marta and Misha were waiting for me at the beach, to have my cell phone with me, just in case. It was good to remember that I had the keys to our apartment with me, and that I had to turn around and walk back eventually because of that. It was good to know exactly who I was, to remember my name, age and all, as well as today's date, despite some lightheadedness caused by the heat.

I felt grateful for all this routine knowledge that kept me safe during this walk.

And I hoped, the way I always do during my marathon walks, that my father was somehow there with me, in awe of all I was in awe of.

Komiža - July 5, 2011

Komiža, July 3, 2011:

The wonderful town of Vis, a 15-minute ride away from Komiža - no way to walk there, though, because of the mountains:

To get used to the language, I watch Croatian TV every now and then, and, also every now and then, I understand some things that are being said.

I've already seen two broadcasts from the Croatian Parliament (Hrvatski sabor), and, boring as it may be, I've still caught a few interesting things.

During today's session, for example, they were voting for something, and I really liked their procedure: the speaker (or his deputy or whatever) stood by the microphone, calling each MP's name - and each MP present then responded with a loud "za" or "protiv" (for/against). There was no sound from those who were absent, obviously - though when ex-PM Ivo Sanader's name was called, there was a cheerful, noisy reaction from some MPs (Sanader has been in an Austrian prison on corruption charges since Dec. 2010). After the vote was completed, the speaker read the names of those absent once again, to make sure they were actually not there. And then they counted the votes.

Such a lo-tech, uncool procedure, right? But so much more efficient than the relatively hi-tech one that we have in Ukraine, which allows our assholes to cheat like crazy (see this GV text by Tetyana Bohdanova on one really embarrassing episode of cheating, witnessed by a Polish delegation - and the video of it is below).



UPDATE: A local friend has just explained to me that this lo-tech voting system is normally used in special cases, while the routine voting is done electronically, just like everywhere else.

Yesterday's vote for changes in the war veterans' rights legislation failed - they needed 102 votes in favor of it, but only 101 MPs were present - and there was no space for them to cheat in, even if they wanted to. (An item about it in English is here, with a mention of the laughing caused by Ivo Sanader's name being called.)

Meanwhile in Ukraine, they've passed the pension reform, and the voting was done the usual, backasswards, way, of course. Here's what LEvko of Foreign Notes wrote about it:

Today, [Friday] laws on pension reforms which will directly affect the lives of every Ukrainian citizen, were passed in parliament. Now every Ukrainian will have to work several years longer before achieving retirement.

248 deputies voted in support of the motion even though it seems only 143 deputies were actually registered to vote in the parliament building.

Multiple voting by deputies is a blantant contravention of the country's Constitution, but takes place with numbing regularity. [...]

LEvko also wrote about Yanukovych's reaction to being told that his son had been caught voting for other MPs:

[...] Also today, President Yanukovych, who is 'Guarantor of the Constitution', was asked at a press conference why his younger, parliamentary deputy son, Viktor, had voted in the past in parliament for other deputies in their absence, thus contravening to the Constitution.

His reply? - "When children are picked on - this is something else. I assure you I am not ashamed of my children, my family....When children are dragged into this dirt into which you are trying to drag my children, my family. You could pick on my grandchildren, the oldest is 11 years old - come on, let's go after them too." [...]

Here's the video of Yanukovych's son doing the multiple voting thing:

A few bunches of last week's pictures, from Split and Komiža (no time to write anything):

We've made it to Split, Croatia, today!

It's a wonderful city, reminds Misha of Venice, but I've never been there, so it reminded me of Lviv - Lviv with the sea.

At first, I felt very disoriented: I'm too used to Turkey, haven't been anywhere but Turkey in the past decade, and here, before we got to the Old Town, the scenery was more or less like the Çanakkale area - and it's all South to me, of course, the awesome Mediterranean, the Promised Land! - but the language was so different, and I understood even less of it, because my ears, obviously, thought they'd be hearing Turkish once abroad...

Our first coherent conversation in Croatia was with a cab driver, in English - about football: the UEFA Euro 2012, which we are hosting with Poland - and which could've taken place in Croatia and Hungary instead, if we hadn't won the bid.

The driver also told us about last summer's wildfires here: on the way from the airport, it's hard not to notice the dead, black forest in the distance, at the feet of the mountains that wall off the seaside area. Very sad and scary.

The Old Town is, as I said, wonderful, but we were very upset to discover too many homophobic writings on the walls of the old buildings. I had read about the assault on the gay pride parade in Split just a few weeks ago, but seeing the hateful leftovers all around us was still very unsettling. I wish I didn't understand Croatian at all - the way I don't understand Turkish: I would've preferred to remain ignorant and more idealistic, and I feel terribly upset (though not surprised at all) that this amazingly beautiful place is suddenly so transparent - and that some of it looks so similar to our own part of the world, which is also filled with hateful schmucks.

I'm falling asleep as I type now, so here are the photos that I took today - both of the good things that we saw and of the bad:

Yulia Tymoshenko's trial has started with two rallies on Khreshchatyk today: her supporters were a lot more numerous than her opponents. The latter seemed piled together with the former somewhere on the other side of Khreshchatyk by the building of the court, and I have failed to identify them visually when I crossed the street, even though I knew they were there because of the peculiar music - the so-called chanson - that they played very loudly, to block the sound of the pro-Yulia rally.

Many elderly people were out there today, and Yulia's buddy Turchynov even tried to make a joke, saying that these pensioners were ready for a rebellion. I felt pity for them, because they had to stand for hours in the sun, and no one had thought of supplying them with free drinking water (I do think they should have, whoever organized this rally), and then there was a really wild thunderstorm, and they probably had nowhere to hide from it - or had to run for shelter, which isn't easy for people their age. Anyway, their lives are tough in general, this rally isn't a picnic either - but they are tough, too, so the rally continues, despite crazy weather.

Below are some photos - and maybe I'll have enough for Part 2 later today. It's been a long time for me since the last rally I took pictures at, so I find it really interesting.



***

Update:

I've added 15 more pictures and a tiny video to today's set.

The post-rain part of the pro-Yulia rally was a depressing sight.

Tons of garbage everywhere; some of the protesters who were still there looked exhausted and demoralized; a few, however, still oozed with naive enthusiasm.

Two old men from the opposing camps got into an argument, which later evolved into a very brief fight, but a man who looked like one of the rally's organizers got involved and had them calm down:



One of the protesters next to me talked to someone who had been inside the court building: it was terribly hot in there, he said, a small room with a hundred people in it, everyone sweating like crazy.

Someone praised the protesters from the stage, noting that they were heroes - and indeed, they were, for it was already 3 PM and they had been on Khreshchatyk for nine hours by then, since 6 AM. It's 4:30 PM now, and they're still playing music, chanting and making speeches out there, though I've no idea if anyone's still left. I guess they are waiting for Yulia to get out of the courthouse.

On my way to the other side of Khreshchatyk, I noticed these elderly women selling flowers and berries:



They had nothing to do with the rally, or with politics in general, they were the near-Besarabka regulars - but what struck me was that they could've easily been part of the rally crowd - they seemed to fit in perfectly, at least visually. And this observation is what I'll probably remember best from today.

This, and the drunk man asleep in the sandbox at our playground...

It was an insomnia-inspired walk that lasted from around 6 a.m. to around 9 a.m. An adventure, in a way, for I usually stay up much of the night, working or reading, and eventually fall asleep angry with myself for being such a vampire. In summertime I suffer the most: the sun is up and the birds are singing way too early, around 4 a.m., always catching me unprepared, still not sleepy enough. And I've always dreamed of being a morning person - because, I imagine, it's easier to be that way. But I'm not, and whenever I'm out early, I feel that the world is upside down, and the people who move around me with such ease are either aliens or robots.

For a long time, I've been very curious to see what Kyiv is like in the morning, so even though my last night's futile attempts to fall asleep had exhausted me, I was filled with some sort of a crazy enthusiasm when I set out on this walk. It turned out to be a pretty interesting, dreamlike experience, but I was upset to realize that taking pictures in the morning wasn't my thing at all somehow. All this endless walking and photographing that I normally do in late afternoons has always appealed to me because of its dreamy spontaneity; today (or should I call it yesterday already?) I've realized that my constant efforts to stay fully awake during this walk were taking all the fun out of the process. I ended up having more pictures in my mind than on my camera. Dreamlike pictures, some of them too subtle to describe in words.

Khreshchatyk was empty, with no one (or almost no one) driving on its sidewalks. If I still had a bicycle, I caught myself thinking, I'd go for an early-morning ride, the way I did once or twice in the late 1990s.

The air, unfortunately, had a really unpleasant smell - possibly, due to all the public toilets set up on Khreshchatyk, or because of all the drunks who populate the area at night, when the toilets are closed.

At 6 a.m., there were a few homeless people sitting on the benches, occasional bunches of tipsy young people returning from night clubs, and a water truck riding slowly along the sidewalk, stopping next to every tree and light pole with flowers hanging on it, and the driver, who was dispensing water from the hose right from his cabin, got into a fight with a cabbie at one point, because the cabbie didn't want to leave the spot he was parked at, right by a tree, and the driver didn't want to water him and his car together with that tree.



By 7 a.m., there were street cleaners everywhere, mostly the elderly local folks, unlike in Moscow, where a typical street cleaner is a young Central Asian male. An old woman was sweeping stuff from memorial plaques near the Unknown Soldier monument: she looked like a dedicated volunteer, with her ragged old broom and a white plastic bag to put the garbage in.



There were pigeons in almost every backyard I passed through: some were already being fed by compassionate elderly women, others were waiting for their guardian angels to wake up. In front of the Lavra, it was a man in a wheelchair who was feeding the pigeons. In the park, I saw people walking their dogs AND feeding a bunch of young black strays.



Around 7:30 a.m., buses and marshrutkas were already crowded as hell, and those mysterious morning people were marching in droves to their offices from the Arsenalna subway station, so very awake and energetic, so unlike me the somnambulist.



At 8:30 a.m., there was a minor traffic jam in the Presidential Administration neighborhood, the streetlights were off at the Bankova/Instytutska intersection, replaced by a cop in the middle of the street, which probably meant that Yanukovych was about to arrive to work. Two hours earlier and a few blocks away, when there were still only a few cars and a few people around, an extremely voluptuous middle-aged woman entered the huge Cabinet of Ministers building through its imposing front door: my guess is she was their head cook or something.

Serbia's arrest of Mladic "might be a very strong turning point" for the Serbia-EU thing, someone wrote in a comment on GV yesterday.

It usually horrifies me to imagine a similar scenario for Ukraine, but I do get carried away sometimes.

First, half a decade of war. Then, business as usual, sort of, and also catching some of the war criminals, at a rather leisurely pace, leaving the most odious ones for dessert - at which point everyone around is so tired of waiting that they let you in without even lifting their heads to look at you. Something like that. War as the EU's entrance fee, more or less.

(There's the Russia factor, of course: Russia may be happy or unhappy about Serbia joining the EU - or both - but who cares.)

I'm so happy Ukraine has managed to stay sane and peaceful over the past two decades, but I do wonder sometimes what we have to do to get to our own "strong turning point" - or at least to have them allow us to travel to Europe visa-free, the way they allowed Serbian citizens a year and a half ago...