neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Remembering Chernobyl
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/02/remembering-chernobyl.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. April 26, 2004. Eventually, some three weeks after the explosion, Kiev school kids were moved to Crimea; I had been sent to Moscow a week earlier. That summer, my father wrote in a letter to me: ‘The most striking thing about Kiev now is that there is not a single child visible in the streets. Just imagine, not a single child in the city with a three million population.’. Filed away under 2004. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). 09/2002: Am I a Woman. 03/2004: A Day in the Life.
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Diary of a Protester
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/03/diary-of-protester.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. Diary of a Protester. November 25, 2004. This is an extract from the blog of Veronica Khokhlova. Wednesday November 24 3.15am. At 3am, the city's so loud you'd think it's daytime. In our backyard, there's always someone peeing - boys, not girls, of course, for it's too cold for a girl to pee outdoors now: cold and snowing. But tonight, somehow, I'm not mad at those who use us as a toilet. I'm sitting in my cosy, warm room, and they're out there in the cold. There was also a footba...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Farewell to Shevardnadze
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/02/farewell-to-shevardnadze.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. It's getting seriously cold here in St. Petersburg, and I am desperately trying to fight off the urge to hibernate. The past few weeks have been a success, for all the wrong reasons. Stuck so relatively close to the North Pole, I've been watching the news from all those blessed, warm localities - Israel, Iraq and Turkey: every single day, so much shock and pain, so much bloodshed. That's what he should be doing - retire and spend the rest of his life watching tennis! Shevardnadze ...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Am I a Woman or What?
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2006/11/am-i-woman-or-what.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. Am I a Woman or What? Last summer, someone at work called me 'cutie' - and only now, after taking this class, do I realize how offensive that was," announced a petite blonde sitting next to me in a classroom full of women. Some nodded with approval, others lowered their eyes sympathetically, but none smiled. In this class, which I took the first semester of my grad school, I felt and acted as a traitor to my gender. I reached the highest point of my infidelity when I stumbled ...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: New Kids on the Bloc
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-kids-on-bloc.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. New Kids on the Bloc. November 26, 2004. The New York Times. A family friend who has a 17-year-old son told me this last week: "Young people today are so different from what we used to be, or even from what your generation is. They don't have our fear - they don't know it. But they know their rights, and they know how to defend them. They aren't scared to.". Then, as we moved again, she and her friend started singing the Ukrainian national anthem. They didn't sound phony; they...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: The Demographic Crisis in Ukraine
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2006/11/lost-between-first-third-worlds.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. The Demographic Crisis in Ukraine. In 1995, my first journalistic mentor recommended that I try writing a piece on the demographic crisis in Ukraine. All I had to say then was, "What crisis? My best high school friend is about to give birth, and at least a dozen other acquaintances are also pregnant. We're gonna have plenty new babies real soon! I don't give up right away, though. I'm overwhelmed, and I haven't started reading yet. The only such country, it turns out, is my native...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Evil Trains
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2006/11/fables-of-reconstruction-evil-trains.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. March 1999: At work in a makeshift office on the Uzhgorod-Kyiv train. My friend and a former colleague was once asked to do a skit on our typical working day at one American NGO in Ukraine. She began by describing a typical morning, when a woman in railway uniform wakes us up at 7 am, barging into our compartment and blaring, "Get up, we're approaching the sanitary zone, I'm locking the restrooms in 15 minutes, hurry! Summer 1999: Relaxing after work, in Lviv. An hour later I deci...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Ali's Pictures
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/02/alis-pictures.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. But where we live. We speak only of death and think. She feels she uses too many words when she writes about a biology professor’s wife who, on the day a tornado hit town, was sucking gasoline out of her car through a tube connected to a plastic milk bottle and then ran upstairs to feed the generator that helped nurture the unique bacteria that were her husband’s decade-long work. The next morning I wake up at 7:00 to drive Ali to class. If I don’t give her a ride she ha...Two yea...
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Old Woman (St. Petersburg, Russia)
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/03/old-woman-st-petersburg-russia.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. Old Woman (St. Petersburg, Russia). September 21, 2004. BBC News: In Pictures. Photographer of the Year: Solitude. Filed away under 2004. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). 09/2002: Am I a Woman. 03/2004: A Day in the Life.
neeka-smetana.blogspot.com
Filed Away: Red Dusk
http://neeka-smetana.blogspot.com/2007/01/red-dusk.html
Pre-blog stuff, mostly. The train fly will never know any of such pleasures - but at least it's safe from the deadly glue strips hanging from the lamps in oh so many cramped kitchens all over this vast former Soviet Empire. If this particular fly is an average representative of its species, it'll live like this for about 20 days. Then it'll die. Like so many people here, he is too poor to pay $1.30 for the bedding, so he takes off his worn-out black socks, hangs them on the rack on the wall as if the...
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