Substandards of Living

ALERT: The following is a humor piece. Please place tongue squarely in cheek before reading.


Recently I visited my daughter and her family in Switzerland. They live in a quaint house in a beautiful little village in the foothills above Lake Geneva. One evening I had finished washing dishes and was putting away freshly dried silverware. What struck me was how smoothly and perfectly the kitchen drawers rolled in and out.  Very nice!

I guess I noticed it so distinctly because of the contrast with the kitchen drawers in my Kharkiv apartment. My drawers don’t move smoothly on rails and rollers – they slide, grudgingly, along a couple of pieces of wood that keep each drawer from falling and spilling its contents all over the pots and pans below.

And usually when I open the drawer, it pulls open the doors to the lower cabinet.  When I close those doors, I have to be careful to close them together so that they will fit properly. If I try to close one door first, the other will not be able to close past it. My coat closet also operates this way. I suspect that the wardrobe in my bedroom would work the same way, but it is missing a center door, which gives the other two doors a lot more freedom to do what they want. It seems lately that the door on the left wants to fall off.

Of course I noticed a lot of other nice things in Switzerland. Everything is so clean! Either people don’t throw trash out their car windows or drop cigarette packs and beer bottles on the ground, or there is a secret army of cleaning fairies who immediately run out and pick them up. I remember noticing the same thing on my first trip to Belgium; it was cleaner even than most places in the U.S.

Here in Ukraine, unfortunately, it’s common for people to just drop their trash on the ground wherever it suits them. And sometimes people throw rubbish items out their apartment windows instead of bagging them and taking them to the dumpster. That’s why we like to see fresh snowfall: it hides all the trash underneath. 

But in Kharkiv, we do have a not-so-secret army of cleaning people (definitely not fairies) who saunter out eventually to pick up the garbage. So it’s not as bad as some places I’ve been, such as parts of Peru where garbage piles become part of the permanent landscape.

I think my Kharkiv neighbors are getting better. I mean, really. The city installed nifty new trash bins along many of the major roads and in the parks, and it does seem as though people make an effort to use them. But back at home many of my neighbors still throw crap out their windows. Oh well… winter is coming.

But back to Switzerland. They have really nice roads there – almost perfect. I think a typical Ukrainian driver would go crazy in Switzerland searching for that axel-breaking pothole that absolutely MUST be out there somewhere. Here in Ukraine, you don’t find pothole, pothole finds you… and swallows your car.

And they have clean water too. You can actually drink water straight from the tap, just like in most places in the United States that are not named Detroit. In Ukraine, tap water is for washing, operating the toilet, and similar functions. You only consume the bottled stuff. In Peru, however, you don't even brush your teeth with the tap water.

And in Switzerland (again like in the U.S.) you can always count on the right handle being the cold water, while the left is hot. In Ukraine it’s 50-50. 

It’s interesting to think about water at this moment because I don’t have any water today. We frequently have interruptions in our water service, but it’s usually the city-supplied hot water (more on that in a moment). Today, my neighborhood got an added bonus and lost water service completely. This means that I can’t wash anything and can’t flush my toilet. I heard it will be back tomorrow morning, but I am not holding my breath. Fortunately I had a few six-liter bottles filled with water for just such an occasion, but they won’t last long.

In Kharkiv, as in most Ukrainian cities, hot water is produced in a few central plants and distributed by an extensive piping system to buildings around the city. This is why you have to let your water run for 15 minutes in the morning if you want an early shower. They shut it down for a month (or longer) every summer for maintenance, so you either boil your own water or take cold showers. Many apartments and single-family homes have flash water heaters (kolonkas), and some have tank water heaters. But my apartment has neither, so I am at the mercy of the city’s diligent hot water service.

The city also produces steam for winter heating and distributes this via pipes to individual buildings. We usually don’t get heat until mid-October, but sometimes later. In the meantime, you can start freezing anytime from late September to mid-October. That’s when you start dressing like Nanook of the North or running your oven and leaving the door open. And they usually shut the system down in the middle of April, no matter if winter is stubbornly hanging on or not.

My apartment is not so bad, really. I mean, it’s better than the first apartment I had here, and most people say it’s above average. It’s in a “Krushchevka” building: a type of cheaply built, five-story apartment building constructed during the early 1960s (time of Krushchev). The walls, floors and ceilings are fairly thin, so you can be on intimate relations with your neighbors, like it or not. And many have a nice bench outside the entrance (podyest) to your section of the building, where old ladies can sit in the daytime to gossip about their neighbors and just about anyone else they can think of, and drunks and hip-hopping goth head-bangers can congregate at night to serenade you in the most vile ways.

Now I can’t sleep without earplugs and a fan (not for the air, but for the white noise).

Did I mention that in my daughter’s village in Switzerland the people stay off the streets and make no noise after 10 p.m. so that they won’t bother others who might be trying to sleep in their homes? What a contrast! Even my neighbors in Bailey, Colorado, were not that considerate. Then again, they were bears and coyotes, so you can’t expect much. But at least they didn’t leave broken vodka bottles behind.

I have no mice in my apartment. But I do have a small colony of cockroaches living in my microwave oven. They seem to be smart enough to stay in the control panel and not venture into the hotspot. Occasionally they do wander out on to the counter, after which they can find themselves toppled into the sink and then swirling down the drain. Except for tonight, of course.

I could go on… and on… and on. But I need to save material for future posts. 

So you’re probably asking yourself why I stay here if things are so bad. Good question. I ask myself that same question occasionally too. Maybe I just like a challenge.

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(Quick Update: The water service DID resume the next morning as promised.  Thank God it's an election year!)