My Borsch Recipe None Of You Asked For, Which Was Rude.

Eleventy hundred years ago I wrote a post sharing my borsch recipe and periodically people will email me to say that they used it to make borsch themselves and I get embarrassed about this because (A) that post is a big ol' mess and (B) WTF else are people finding on this site from 2007???

So, I decided to do a new borsch post that should be easier to follow. This takes a full seven eternities to make, but we all have at least that much time every day in our houses right now so you might as well fill it with garlic and beets and dill.

Also, about twice a year I get an angry email (usually from some Russian) about how my Ukrainian borsch recipe is incorrect and I should be ashamed of myself. Let me preempt your rage, if you plan to fall in this camp: this is how I learned to make Ukrainian borsch from a Ukrainian babucia in her Ukrainian kitchen in a tiny Ukrainian village in western Ukraine in 2003. If you have a problem with it, take it up with her (in heaven). I wouldn't recommend it though. She told me once she was literally on Stalin's enemy list, and well, you can piece together who lived five decades longer between those two.

Ingredients (This will fill a giant pot. You could easily cut everything in half and still feed an ugly family of six):

Woven Tarp Bags

A little while ago this thing, that's probably a drug front and is definitely run by the Utah Mafia called "The Beehive", was launched. Meg writes snarky content for it, and we are also running a weekly podcast through it called Hive Mind. In it, we complain about TV and movies. So if you've ever listened to Strangerville and thought, "I would like to hear even more of their thoughts on The Power Rangers," you are in luck.

Hive Mind is being produced under The Beehive's channel, so you can find it on any podcast app by searching for The Beehive and looking for Hive Mind episodes. You can also find Hive Mind here.

And in other news, after a few weeks of break, we are back with new episodes of Strangerville. Please enjoy the below, which includes a story from me about leaving Ukraine recently. For those who hate the sound of my voice, I've included the text of the story.

This time in Strangerville, Meg and Eli absolutely do not judge anyone for breastfeeding their adult children, and a grandmother nervously navigates the security area of an Eastern European airport.

Olena

I have several friends in L'viv Ukraine, all of whom I met when I lived there as a Mormon missionary in 2003 and 2004. Usually I try to see as many of these people as possible when I'm in the area, but for some reason it just happened to be really difficult this time around.

Some of them were out traveling near the Black Sea for summer vacation. A couple of them have disappeared from social media. Some have moved.

Olena was the first person I met in L'viv. I had been in the country for six weeks when I was sent out to that city from the outskirts of Kyiv. I felt like I had been moved to a fairy-tale land. L'viv's architecture was so far from anything familiar that it sort of felt like it was operating in its very own reality.

Olena was in her upper 40s and she had two youngish children. I went to her apartment and she welcomed us in. She was tall and very thin, with long black hair and an almost cheesily cliche Eastern European face.

She didn't speak a word of English and I spoke very little Ukrainian at the time. After I sat down in her kitchen she handed me a glass of something I described that night in my journal as tasting like "someone milked a tree."

To Become a Star

We had to vacate our Airbnb in Kyiv by 11:00, which was unfortunate because our train didn't leave for L'viv until about 12 hours later. Despite our best attempts to pack lightly, at least two out of the three of us decided to bring with them enough clothes to start a new life over here. I'll let you guess which two out of the three are guilty by smelling us.

I thought the best option might be to wander to the hostel down the street and ask them if we could just pay a little to store our bags for the day. I should have been deterred by the hundreds of google reviews that warned me of the five-flight stair climb and very average Eastern European customer service. But I wasn't. And when I entered the place and asked my simple question I was met with several eye rolls and half a dozen phone calls to Stalin-knows-where, during which the hostel employees attempted to negotiate an international peace treaty for the foreign travelers in front of them.

When homegirl got off the phone she informed me that we would have to rent a room for the day, which was $10, but then she warned me that she wouldn't dare leave anything whatsoever at that hostel because "it's more dangerous than prison in this place."

I asked her to repeat herself several times, sure that there had been a miscommunication. But each time she did, the warning became starker, finally ending with "I don't even bring my wallet to work."

Kyiv's Raccoon Man

We landed in Kyiv on Saturday afternoon and found a taxi to take us to our apartment. "She's Got It" by Venus was playing on the radio.

Taxi Driver: Vat zis mean, she got it?

Eli: It means she has something special.

Taxi Driver: Vy zey not just say "she have somezing special?"

Eli: It's just a saying in English.

Taxi Driver: Vat so special about zis voman?

Eli: I don't know.

Taxi Driver: Vy he sing about her if he don't say vat so special.

Eli: Look. I haven't slept in like 40 hours. I'm incapable of engaging in philosophy at the moment.

Grammar Book

I'm going to Ukraine on Friday.

And don't even try to break into my house, robbers. I've got house-sitters and they're all angry former cops with complicated pasts and uncertain futures. Go break into my sister's house. She's going with me and she has a much better collection of alabaster pots and sewing supplies.

The house-sitter situation is necessary because keeping things alive at my home in July is an unrelenting job. For the last four weeks I've just been engaged in a constant loop of pot watering where I start again from the beginning the moment I finish giving a drink to the last pot. I haven't had a single break in days. I'm typing this with my toes right now. (Yes, Tami is literate).

Finding a responsible house-sitter is a challenge because it requires you to make a list of all of the people you know who have nothing going on in their lives and can easily pick up and move into your place for as long as needed, and then identify one person on that list who is reliable.

Thank God for all of those former cops.

This is Strange

I wandered the city of 3 or 4 million people for a couple of hours, stopping in at an internet cafe for a moment to let my friends and family at home know that I had made it.

It was Kyiv Ukraine in 2010, before I had a smartphone and before wifi was ubiquitous. My plane had landed an hour or two before this. From the airport I had boarded an old marshrutka van that had a sign on the front, telling me that it was destined for the train station, which was in the city center.

The marshrutka ride lasted twice as long as it should have because Kyiv traffic is typical for a city of its size. The van was full. Several people had to stand in the aisle, holding onto the straps connected to the sides of the van. It was a hot day and there was no working air conditioner, and the two or three elderly ladies on board wouldn't allow the rest of us to open any of the windows.

There's an old Ukrainian belief that an open window on a moving vehicle will cause passengers to get sick. Having tried many times during the two years that I lived in Ukraine from 2003 to 2005 to talk elderly women out of this belief, I have learned that this isn't an argument worth having.

Pictures from my Phone & Weekly Distractions

I apparently didn't really take any pictures this week. DADDY WAS TIRED.

So, I randomly clicked on files in my computer and selected pictures from over the past few years to share with you today. And now I'm feeling all nostalgic.

We were so young back when we were so young.

And now, your Pictures & Distractions:

Mr. Scraps takes a nap.

10 Tips for Traveling on a Budget

Over the last few years I've received a lot of emails from people asking how I have been able to travel as much as I have and whether I have any tips for traveling on a budget. I decided finally to post on this topic and share with you ten tricks I use for traveling abroad as inexpensively as possible.

Throughout my 20s I was able to see a lot of the world. This was not because I had a lot of money. I was able to do this, in part, because rather than buy things I bought experiences. I never had nice stuff and usually lived pretty basically. I also worked a lot while going to school and every time I could scrape together some money, I would do what I could to see how far it could take me in the world, which got me to be pretty creative in my traveling.

Now that I'm no longer a poor college student, my lifestyle has changed, but I still generally travel on a pretty tight budget. Because CHEAP. Below are the main ways I save big bucks while out and about:

Shabesaur

This trip was sort of a spur of the moment deal for me. Well, only sort of. I ran into Kimberly and Tyler a few weeks ago after having not seen them in over a year. They told me they were going to Eastern Europe soon and invited me to join them.

This was probably one of those things where they were just being enthusiastic and polite but I took them seriously, marked my calendar, and bought a plane ticket that night during a stress work session. And then I texted them a picture of the Travelocity confirmation page with an excessive amount of emoticons.

I met Kimberly exactly six years ago. We lived in Moscow at the same time and worked down the hall from one another. We instantly became best friends. The kind of best friends who make terrible decisions together and almost get one another killed on a daily basis. Because of Kimberly, I climbed into many unmarked vehicles, followed strangers down dark alleys, and got stuck more than once in incredibly dangerous neighborhoods at 3:00 in the morning without a way to get home. Also, I think she's responsible for my parasite, Lohan, that I picked up that year.

Pictures from my Phone & Weekly Distractions

Today I went to a meeting where they planned to show 150 or so attorneys how to download their business cards onto their smart phones so we can all go "paperless" and share our contact information through texts. Whoever came up with this idea sorely overestimated the enthusiasm and ability of this group to embrace and understand this new fandangled technology. They had everyone pull out their phones so they could walk the group through the setup process.

You guys. You would have thought they asked us to build the phones from scratch using only objects found in the room. Within 10 minutes, people, mostly with their glasses pulled down to edge of their noses, were tapping their screens with excessive force, turning their phones around to examine the backs of them like they weren't quite sure which way to hold the device, and saying things like "how do you know when it's on?" Finally the woman started promising everyone one by one that she would come around to each office later and help folks individually. And THAT right there is how I know I chose the correct profession for myself.

And now, your Pictures and Distractions.

My friend, Olena, gave me this magnet several years ago when I was visiting Ukraine. She was so excited to find one in English. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was spelled incorrectly.

Pictures from my Phone & Weekly Distractions

You guys. Wednesday was garbage day and you forgot, AGAIN to remind me. This is getting really serious. In the four months I have lived in this house, I think the garbage bin has made it to the curb on time exactly three times. And the first time was two days after I moved in and there was basically nothing in it but I was just so excited to participate in the neighborhood activity so I rolled it out there anyway. Isn't reminding me on Tuesday night to take the garbage out to the curb one of your duties listed in our Stranger contract? I inform you about mole rats and satanic chickens and you make sure I take the garbage out, don't sign up for triathlons, and stop unnecessarily taking my clothes off at the dentist and pharmacy.

June Snapple wouldn't forget to remind me. Just sayin'.

And now, your Pictures and Distractions:

My new exceedingly heavy bar stools. NOT THAT I KNOW WHAT A BAR IS, CATHIE.

2014

Each year when I sit down to write the New Year wrap-up post, I begin the process by reviewing what I wrote the year before. It gets me in the mood to reflect. And it's always fascinating to me to review the emotions I expressed the prior year.

One of the best things about writing this blog, and writing so regularly, is that it's a really effective way for me to preserve my states of being and to track the evolution that comes with growing up. As I sat and read the 2013 post, the flood of 2013's emotions came back to me.

That was a hard year. In many ways, my very hardest. And when I reached its conclusion, I remember thinking that it was a miracle that I survived it. I know those words sound dramatic. But for me, at that time, they didn't even begin to capture how torn apart my soul felt after everything I had experienced in Palau and its aftermath.

I knew that 2014 was going to be a different story. It had to be. Because I felt like I began it at rock bottom. And true rock bottom is a firm boundary, comforting in its limits that at least appear to mean that things can't get worse.

The Top Ten Most Viewed Stranger Posts, 2014

Every time I get on Facebook right now there are a thousand posts that are like "check out Amy's year!" and then you can click on it and scroll through a thousand pictures to see what Amy ate in 2014. And I'm always like, WHY? And then I click on it and scroll through every picture.

Then I thought, why not do the same thing with Stranger?

I've been meaning to start this thing every year where I give you a list of the ten most viewed Stranger posts of the year. But I've just never gotten around to it in the craziness of the end-of-year holidays. And I don't even know if this will be a post anyone cares about. But at Stranger, YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!

It's been a wonderful year at Stranger. I'll have the full year recap post up next week. But let me just say now, as I've said before, thank you so much for your kindness, your humor, your friendship, and all of the strange parts of you. I appreciate you more than you'll ever know.

And now, without further ado, the 2014 Top Ten Most Viewed Stranger Posts:

Hospital Bokhdan

Happy Monday one and all. We had a great time at The Porch this weekend. It was great to see some of you there. A huge thanks to Kyle for recording and uploading it for us.

Some of you have heard parts of my Ukrainian appendectomy story. I decided this weekend to tell that story in full, with an update that I hadn't yet shared on Stranger. The update had to do with my return to Hospital Bokhdan in May of this year, ten years after I had my operation. I've been meaning to share the details of that experience from this year but hadn't gotten around to it. I thought that The Porch would be a good forum for it.


And now, below, is the full video of the story from The Porch.

Pictures from my Phone & Weekly Distractions

You guys. I've been working like a madman this week. One hundred million bagillion hours. I wish I could talk more about my job on Stranger because CRAZY. You guys. What I do is CRAZY. Sometimes rewarding. But always crazy. Maybe I'll give a little more detail soon. But I can't help but think that I might have the strangest lawyer job on the planet.

Because I was working one hundred million bagillion hours this week, I did very little picture-taking with my phone. So, I decided to take a number of Snuggie selfies for you. YOU'RE WELCOME.

And now, your NSFW!!! Pictures and Distractions:

With creepy Christian art in the background.

Pictures from my Phone & Weekly Distractions

I will forever and always be jet-lagged for as long as I live. I've been home now for about five days but I feel like I've been dead for about twenty years. What's scary is that since my birthday happened during the whole trip mess, I can't tell whether I'm tired because of what I just put myself through in Eastern Europe or if this is what it feels like to be thirty.

Someone please bring me some prune juice and a cane!

And now, your Pictures and Distractions:

My niece, Kate, who can always make me smile.

Krakow and Auschwitz

After spending a few wonderful days in L'viv, Brandt and I boarded the midnight train to Krakow, Poland. (A superstar, but he didn't get far). The train was mostly empty, and moments before it departed we wondered whether we were going to be completely alone.

I figured that the current crisis in Ukraine has probably diminished travel in the area generally, including train travel throughout the country and across its borders. I especially figured that western visitors would likely be totally absent, besides the ones who don't care about their lives, like us.

Then we heard the strong accent of a 70-year-old woman from Philadelphia, a transplant, we later discovered, in "Flarida."

"Beau! At least put some underwear on if you're going to sit in there with the door open!"

Candy from Strangers

You guys. Traveling from Krakow Poland to Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of God Bless America, was probably the most arduous journey anyone has ever taken. I'm including even the time the Mormon pioneers crossed the plains and had to eat doilies to stay alive. Did the Mormon pioneers have to take a train and then have THREE layovers before making it to Salt Lake City?

I DIDN'T THINK SO.

We had to fly out of Warsaw, which meant we had to frantically get ourselves, via a four-hour train ride, from Krakow to Warsaw to catch a 6:00 AM flight. Then we flew across the world and stopped in every country along the way. I'm pretty sure we even had a layover in Palau at one point. I could tell because when I got off the plane I immediately started sweating, I gained 30 pounds, and Leotrix attacked me.

A Walk Through Kyiv

We landed in Kyiv Ukraine on Friday afternoon after twenty or so hours of traveling. Brandt had never been to this part of the world before and didn't know what to expect. In a way, I didn't either. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we had been obsessively checking the news every day for updates on the unsettling situation in Ukraine, wondering whether going was really a good idea.

A few months ago I wrote about what has been going on in Ukraine this year. We've seen it on the news, day-in and day-out, since the beginning of 2014. The turmoil started when a few peaceful protesters in Kyiv's center square were brutally attacked at the orders of one of the world's most corrupt presidents. The response to those attacks was swift, and in the coming days, thousands, and at some points hundreds of thousands, stormed the streets.

The fighting between the protesters in Kyiv and the group hired to put an end to things turned the center of Kyiv into a horrific war zone, so dramatic that the photos we saw online looked like something out of a sensationalized Hollywood movie. Then, finally, just a couple of months ago, the president was forced to flee Ukraine or stay and answer for his crimes against humanity. He fled.