Ukraine...the e-mail
Ok guys here it is a play by play of the bloodbath that was my expedition into former soviet Russia. I will break it down by days: This is pretty long and boring actually, but it will explain a good bit.
Sunday: I arrive in Ukraine at 5:30 pm after spending the past 24 hours traveling from New Orleans, to Detroit, to Amsterdam, and finally into Kiev. Stefanie picks me up from the airport and first impressions are great. She looks amazing. She is a beautiful girl and has aged like a nice french wine. I pick her up and kiss her on the cheek and she is tells me how she had forgotten how handsome I was and we do the generally mushy first meeting bf/gf stuff. We take a cab to the apartment we are renting in the center of kiev. It is about a 20 minute ride there and the conversation goes really well on the way there. It is fun because the cab driver only speaks broken Ukranian and Russian and Stef and I are having a ball commenting about how much he smells like beer. Generally speaking it was good times. I settle in at the apartment and change clothes. I give Stef all of the things I brought to her, some food, some soaps, The Office DVDs and an external hard drive that she needed. She was so happy about all of this stuff I thought it was going to be a sure thing. That’s when the first red flag went up, she never said thank you. She expressed how happy she was to have all of these things, but never stopped and looked at me and said, hey thanks for brining this to me, it means a lot. I figured she was just saving the thanking for later and we decided to go out and eat. We ate at a Mexican food restaurant, (read this as Mexican food that tastes like italian food) in Kiev and at this is where things starting going south. We started talking about her family, bad move she hates her family, and how happy I was that she was nothing like them. Then she drops this bomb of a question on me. “Why didn’t you graduate college” I explained to her that I didn’t really like college and that at this point in my career, while I haven’t complete ruled out college, I was happy with not graduating because I have an amazing job and that within the IT industry being active in the field for 5 years is just as good as a degree most of the time. She then pretty much called me dumb and that she couldn’t imagine not being able to talk about Nietzsche or other philosophers, I told her that I read Nietzsche on my own and that if she felt the urge to talk about how god is dead and how we are all just part of a herd I was more than happy to oblige. Things went to awkward town after that and I was really looking forward to getting her to bed to end the first day after that. We climb into bed the first night and I lean over and give her a kiss and tell her that I was glad to be in Ukraine, she said she was glad too and then she went to sleep. My body thought it was still 2 in the afternoon so I didn’t sleep much.
Monday: I might have slept about 3 hours the night before and Monday morning Stef’s BFF comes in to meet me. This girl’s name is Shelly and she is actually pretty cool at first. Right off the bat Stef and Shelly start speaking Ukranian, which didn’t really bother me as I figured they were just talking about me and that was fine. 5 hours later they were still speaking Ukranian to each other and I might have actually said about four dozen words to them. Never once did this girl ask anything about me, not how I was enjoying the country, or what it was like seeing stef, nothing, I was a third wheel and this grew very frustrating for me. At dinner Stefanie turned to me and said, you know you are not being that funny, Shelly keeps telling me that she thought you would be funnier. Now I love being up-front and honest with people as much as the next guy, but this pissed me off. I turned to Shelly and said, sorry if I am not funny it is just that I don’t speak Ukranian and throughout this entire day that is all you and Stef have been speaking. Monday night was a bright spot for Stefanie and I because the day had been so rough without her really speaking to me much. We prank called some of her friends to freak them out and when we went to bed I thought we had gotten past the awkwardness between the two of us and that after her friend left things would be good between us.
Tuesday: Tuesday was the longest day of my life. We went to more churches and saw more statues and shit like that, which was cool, but I was tired and Stef and Shelly continued to basically ignore me. I hadn’t been drinking enough water since I arrived and I was pretty dehydrated. I could tell I needed water because when I would piss it pretty much looked like maple syrup. Shelly left at 6 and Stef and I’s train left at 10. Stef needed to buy our tickets for our trip back to Kiev so she stood in line for a while to buy that. I was standing in line talking to her when she turned to me and said, I just realized I don’t care about what you are talking about and you are speaking pretty loudly right now, so could you do me a favor and go somewhere else. Wow, this turned me on more than anything anyone has ever said to me. I told her I would be happy to and went and wondered around the train station by myself for the next hour and a half while she waited for her tickets. We went and sat at a cafe in silence when she go the tix and then boarded the train and went to sleep. The train was this post soviet monstrosity that smelled like a cross between old gym socks and a wet vagina, but not the good kind of wet vagina, the bad kind, the very very bad kind. We pull into her town around 4 in the morning and go to her apartment and fall asleep together.
Wednesday: We wake up Wednesday morning and I had pretty much had enough with the silent treatment and figured we could talk about what the deal was. This is when she turns to me and says. Honestly, I don’t like who you are, I don’t like the way that you act, and I think this trip was a huge mistake. She then proceeds to tell me that I am overly considerate and that she is insulted every time I open a door for her. I told her that it was a mistake for me to come and see her and that she was pretty much a liar just like the rest of her family. Things got pretty heated from there and she spent the rest of the day in her kitchen reading and I spent the rest of the day in her bedroom watching the office on DVD. There wasn’t any food in her town that day so I literally ate a tomato and cucumber the entire day. I was mentally and physically exhausted and was basically trying to get some water into my system so I didn’t have to die next to this bitch.
Thursday and Friday and Saturday: Basically after the break up things just went to hell. We traveled to Poltava together at which point we yelled at each other in the street. I had said something dumb, probably using the wrong tense of a verb or something like that, and she came back with some comment about me not graduating college. I immediately though of you guys and the pride that you would have for me if you were there about to witness the verbal lashing I was about to unleash on this girl. It went a little something like this, “Stef I understand the fact that you and I are not really getting along right now. I also understand how, you could have gotten the impression that I am a happy person. You see for the past 6 months I have generally enjoyed having you around, I have shared parts of my life with you that not everyone gets to see. You need to understand though that happiness is not one of my strong points, generally speaking, I am what most people refer to as an asshole. The things that make me happiest are the downfalls and short comings of others and up into this point I have not rejoiced in the presence of all of the things wrong with you. However, if you make another comment about this trip belittling me in anyway, I will call out your deepest darkest insecurities so quickly that you will have no choice but to realize the emptiness of that cold cavity you call a heart and send you crying back to America where you will realize that no one in this entire world wants to be with you.” Her faced dropped and she just turned away. I smiled for the first time in a week.
Yeah there are more things like that but you get the point.
I spent Saturday night in Amsterdam, where yes I did things that we will not talk about through my work e-mail. I also sent one of the best/worst e-mails in my life. I got home yesterday and couldn’t be happier.
