🤝 Dates with Mikes

The date of dates

Soldiers on the front need food that's easy to eat, preserve and carry. As I know from my road trip, muesli bars are rather good to that end. Here they call them батончики (batonchyky).

Michael, my classmate from the previous summer school, still roams Lviv doing all sorts of volunteering. He wanted to catch up and invited me to join him on one of the volunteering activities: preparing batonchyky.

For an hour and a half, I was helping out preparing the ingredients for these bars. I started by halving dates, apricots and other fruits — removing pits and unappetising bits in the process.

After I exhausted all dates, I worked on extracting the walnuts from their shells, cracked open by another volunteer. That volunteer, interestingly, was a young non-Ukrainian guy volunteering in Ukraine and driving trucks to the front, because his non-Ukrainian brother decided to join the Ukrainian army.

One sad thing to hear this day was that the volunteers in this place used to be numerous but now there are fewer and fewer. Even among Ukrainians, the war seems to be "normalising" and the volunteering is more-and-more done by those who are predisposed to volunteering.

I reflected on this and considered that I'm also not "a volunteer" by heart. I'm willing to give stuff, give money, and give things a try — but to give time consistently to chores I don't particularly love? That's hard. I'm eager to learn what makes some people so willing to volunteer so consistently, though. Perhaps I'll learn something that would get the volunteering juices flowing — or some trick I can use to go to the gym consistently...

The market of markets

On another day, the very same Michael invited me to visit the local market — "наш ринок" (our market) and its interconnected better known "Краківський ринок" (krakow market). I also brought another current classmate (Nick).

This is a very crowded place with lots of small alleyways that open up into enormous market squares and hallways of stalls. You can easily get lost here, so I'm happy we had a tour guide!

Now, Michael is a proper do-gooder, as previously established, but I haven't told you he's also a linguist. Most people use the markets to buy goods — he uses markets to interact with the locals and learn Ukrainian. I applaud his confidence and eagerness to do so.

It seems Michael has become quite well-known with some of the locals these days. As we pass through the markets, he says hi to many people. And in fact, as we walked through the markets, he was eager to introduce Nick and me to almost every one of his local market acquaintances.

I didn't follow everything said in those introductions — the Ukrainian got too advanced at some point. Given Michael's eagerness to interact with every market person he knew and to introduce Nick and me, I was worried that Michael was actually selling us on the market. Nobody wanted to buy us, though...

After the disappointment of the umpteenth lost sale, we decided to fatten ourselves up a bit. So we ate something at a small market restaurant. The Уманський (umanskyy) lemonade was quite good.

To use the toilet afterwards, I had to go outside and take a few corners to find a public one. I was a bit shocked there were only squatting toilets — I've never used those before. Also, they were paid-for, mostly broken and rather dirty — not unlike most German highway toilets. These toilets were gender-neutral, though — very inclusive! Ukraine is already exceeding European standards.

I think this market has been the realest experience I've had so far in Lviv as a foreigner. I think I saw a lot of material poverty — with countless market stalls that I just couldn't imagine being profitable. Looking at the hollow facial expressions of some of the owners, I think I may not have been the only one thinking that. And yet, those who still have a spark in their eyes made sure it shines bright — many of the locals were very helpful and enthusiastic in their interactions with us.

The book of books

After we explored the market to our hearts' content, we decided to explore other parts of the city together — particularly, some book stores.

We first went to comic book store UAComix to check out some Ukrainian comics. I'm still looking for a place to buy Donald Ducks in Ukrainian, but I can't find anything of the sort. The whole notion of a weekly comic magazine in the supermarket just doesn't seem to exist here.

Secondly, we went to Te Amo — the little coffee shop where I bought the latest booklets that Solomiia offers for sale there.

I heard the other day Te Amo is known as the "expat cafe", as they have a lot of speaking clubs — English, Italian etc. And indeed, when fellow Dutch-man Daan and I went there, I'm pretty sure our chatter had enough volume to count as a Dutch-speaking club.

The game of games

After all these serious educational events, we wanted some lightweight enjoyment. And so we went to Octopus — the place where Danylo, Sofiia and I play-tested a game earlier.

We played the Ukrainian version of King of Tokyo Monsters. Nick knew the game so he could explain it to us. And the Ukrainian text on the cards provided just enough educational value to warrant an entry in this blog. In fact — I bought the game afterwards to bring home!

I played a futuristic dragon 🐉 in the two rounds we played. I won the first round, as to be expected. Michael volunteered to win the next round — which just isn't as good as winning the first round and still feels like "second place", don't you think? Nick decided to bide his time and win the third round that we decided to not play.

By the way, let me share the amazing led matrix free/occupied sign on the toilet in Octopus. The text toggles with the actual turning the door lock knob. I've just never seen this utter mastery of nerdmanship before.

Once we'd had enough of games and toilet door knobs, we decided to call it a day and head back to the UCU campus.

These two days show the amazing variety of places and things in Lviv: prepping muesli bars, scouring the market, buying booklets in expat coffee shops, playing games (and with toilet doors) in game shops. None of these experiences were part of the official language course — and yet none of them would have happened without it.