Posts Tagged ‘ancestral town’
In Search of an Elusive Ancestral Town
Dripping blood, missing rental car, taxi careening through traffic—as I told the rental car agency guy (when we finally found him), “We’ve had a hard time leaving Warsaw this morning.” Once we were on the road though, things proceeded smoothly. Roads were clearly marked and matched my maps from Google. We drove straight to my…
Read MoreFaces of Ukraine: Where Is He Now?
I remember a trip to Ukraine in the spring of 2005, just months after the Orange Revolution shook the streets of Kyiv. Many thousands of peaceful protesters turned out during the cold winter nights of November and December, demonstrating against fraudulent elections that resulted in Viktor Yanukovych being elected president. New elections were held under…
Read MoreThe Faces of Ukraine: Why I Care
Visiting ancestral towns is bad. When you travel, you fall in love with some destinations for their natural beauty or wonderful food or interesting culture. When I went to Ukraine to see my ancestral towns, I fell in love with the people. And that’s why what is happening there now is breaking my heart. I’m…
Read MorePuddle-jumping to Christmas
I think it was the smallest commercial plane I’ve ever been on. Every seat was a window seat … and an aisle seat. Sitting in 1A, I could just about reach out and touch the pilot. None of that bothered me. I’ve been on small planes before. It was when I realized that the “flight…
Read MoreAncestral Village Homecoming
I’ve found a new reason to love Greece. Of course I love it because I lived there years ago. When you experience daily life somewhere—grocery shopping with a phrasebook in hand so you don’t create a dinner disaster or enduring a monthly bill paying ritual with your landlady because you don’t have time to stand…
Read More…and a Night in Teplitz
The hospitality was bounteous, if not terribly personalized. A short visit with the mayor and his wife, then they handed us over to the guesthouse where we’d be staying that night. As with every Ukrainian meal, plates of food covered every square inch of the table’s surface. But the guesthouse owner hovered over us like…
Read MoreA Day in Benkendorf…
The stout, kerchiefed woman took one look at the Americans appearing in her village and whisked herself away from the group gathering around our van. It couldn’t be something we’d said, because we hadn’t said a word. At least, not one she would have understood. The four of us stood by as Serge our interpreter…
Read MoreSnow Tourist
Traveling is all about visiting new locales and seeing interesting and unusual sights, isn’t it? When you think of exotic travel, the Taj Mahal or Great Wall or the Parthenon or Pompeii may come to mind. But for someone like me, from Seattle, where annual snowfall is only about 7 inches (according to NOAA), seeing…
Read MoreNo Way Out
If you’re stuck in a blizzard, there are worse places to be than a cozy house overlooking a snow-covered lake, with internet access, satellite TV, and a well-stocked freezer and pantry. My ancestors who settled on these prairies had a much tougher time when they encountered blizzard conditions—crammed together in a sod house, the sheet…
Read MoreConnoisseur? Or Crazed About Seeds?
I love road trips. There’s nothing that says summer to me more than the open road ahead of me and several days of driving. Growing up, travel was defined for me by our family trips to North Dakota and Minnesota to visit the aunts and uncles and cousins. That made for some long days of…
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