They're lining up: get your dibs on my Godfather blessing soon, before I'm booked!

Above, top to bottom: This man could be the godfather of your next child! Hurry, offer expires soon; Mike attacks sister Julie at computer; Mike gives excellent and memorable Best Man speech; Mike and best friend/roommate Brett eating BBQ in St. Louis, Missouri; Mike and college roommate Nate Dog ride a carousel made for children 1/3 their size; c'mon, you know you love me.
My good friend Amanda has deemed me the Godfather of her first child in her Leeds Blog. This makes me a best man, a soon-to-be Godfather(whenever you wanna start, Amanda), college graduate, Eucharistic Minister, Eagle Scout, handsome, and humble to boot. I'm just missing pimp, father of 9, a t-shirt with 'world's greatest Grandpa' on it, Scoutmaster, Polish Citizenship(which I'm applying for, FYI), and a Medal of Honor. Thanks, Amanda!

From the backyard

Walked to the top of a tall hill behind my house the other morning at sunrise, around 7:30 am. I finally gave up waiting for the sun to come out from behind the clouds for the perfect light and walked down the mountain. Murphy's Law still applies in Ukraine, and the sun came out.

Still, I got something interesting out of it.

Today in Lviv

Above, top to bottom: Roman reaches for another block of wood to lacquer for an icon the Faith and Light center will eventually sell to raise money for activities, like going to the circus later this month; Roman, a member of Faith and Light, a Catholic community for the mentally disabled, shows the icon he is working on at the moment; Brett, standing second from right, is introduced to the finer side of wood working and icon making by Natalia, the coordinator of the Faith and Light Center in Sihiv(Sih-heev), a suburb of Lviv, Ukraine on the morning of February 11th, 2009. In the bottom photo, from left to right: Bogdan, who asked me if I was shopping for women, Petro, who is very quiet and was in charge of the stretching exercises today; Roman, whose best friend is also a Faith and Light member and who is inappropriately and gratifyingly loud, Brett, and Natalia.

"Are you ready for this?" I whisper over my shoulder.

"I guess," Brett says, shrugging. 

I gently push the door open to the Faith and Light Center and peek my head in. 

"MISHA!" 

There are some 25 coordinators and members of Faith and Light, the university sponsored Catholic day program for the mentally disabled, gathered in a circle with chairs. Moments ago, I heard one of them, I guessed Anton or Roman, reading a book aloud in Ukrainian. Now everyone is looking at me.

Before Brett and I can find a seat, everyone breaks into the welcome song and soon the whole room is clapping. I don't really know what the song means, but I feel 6 years old again. 

FOUND: family in Poland HAPPY BIRTHDAY: To my sister, Carrie

This from my mother about their recent visit to Arizona to see friends and my great aunt and uncle, Janina and Julian, respectively: 

Mike-
Janina in AZ is a big fan of your blog- pretty faithful reader and enjoys reading your updates. Here is some info from Julian and Janina:

Grandpa's hometown was Zagorz which is northeast of Krakow, and south of Kielce, and south of Pinczow where Janina's family is from. Matgorzata Cedro is a niece of hers(so related to Grandpa) in Pinczow (phone #). Anna and Beata Korecko are other cousins living in Opole (phone #). These cousins have come to visit almost every year- have even bought cars in the US and shipped back to Poland- Janina plans to return to Poland when she is alone.
The cousins in Opole speak fairly good English- she says some of her relatives teach English in Poland, but she said they are not very fluent- she figures she can make a living tutoring over there.

View Larger Map

This is the area of Poland in question via Google Maps.

I need to confirm Zagorz is the city we are talking about(Janina, I hope you are reading this!). It fits the name, but does not fit with her description of northeast of Krakow. 

This is the town's website

Here's the irony of it all: I studied in Krakow in the summer of 2005, I now live in Lviv(where my grandmother is from and just a few hours from the area in question), have friends in Katowice(where my grandfather studied), I have hiked in Zakopane(south of Krakow and similar in terrain to Zagorz) and in Turka, Ukraine(look at the map, just south east of Zagorz and very similar area), and I've been passing through Przemysl to go to Lviv since I arrived in September, 2008. I've been in this area the whole time and this has all been under my nose.

If Zagorz really is the place, then I am just a few hours from the hometown of my grandfather and my family history. I'd type more, but I need a stiff drink.

Proof we(the world) don't know anything about Ukraine: the gas never went off and I'm still warm

"Do you know what my American friends asked me?" I said to the history students in 2nd period English. "They asked me if I still had heat, if we could cook or if anyone had gas."

"Really?" said Lubomyr.

"Yes," I said, "they think you are all freezing."

The class burst into laughter and giggles at the ridiculous notion. When I arrived in the United States for Christmas in late December, Russian gas giant GazProm shut the natural gas lines going through Ukraine to Europe. Russia accused Ukraine of stealing gas, Ukraine fired back saying Russia was blackmailing the country in order to build a new pipeline around Ukraine. I began getting emails saying "are you going to have heat?"

Standing in front of my students last Thursday, I realized I had been thinking the same thing for a while and I felt embarrassed. The heat never went off. Ukraine, the largest country in Europe, also has the largest gas reserves. During the reign of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was the principal natural gas reserve holding for everything under the Iron Curtain. Those tanks didn't disappear when the wall fell, and Ukraine has made good use of them. 

According the Kyiv Post, Ukraine had enough gas reserves to supply the entire country for 9 months without relief. Businesses and some individuals did suffer from lack of gas, but as one editorialist in the Post pointed out, shutting off the gas was never a real threat against Ukraine. Kiev has enough gas already. 

So why did we(Americans, The West, the world) think Ukrainians were burning their furniture?

In a nutshell: we don't get our news from Ukraine, we get it from Russia.

Unbeknownst to me, and anyone who's never traveled to this part of the world, the west has adopted all sorts of fun Russified words and names for Soviet satellite countries like Ukraine, George, Bulgaria, etc. "Lviv," where I live, is the Ukrainian name. But type that into Orbitz.com or United Airlines' website and it will draw a blank. You have to type in "LVO" or "Lvov," the Russian name in order to book a flight here.

It's the same for news. According to one of my students who is studying Journalism at Ivan Franko University in Lviv, her college is conducting a study on the western media and where they get their sources. According to Ivan Franko, most western journalists know Russian journalists or Russian news, so they call them first. Most of the coverage in the U.S. of the gas crisis came from Moscow, not from Kiev. 

As many Ukrainians will tell you, and as the Kyiv Post likes to point out on a weekly basis, Russia and Ukraine have strained relations to say the least. A very smart editorial from that online publication noted how countries surrounding Russia pay staggered prices for natural gas, depending on how loyal they have been to the Kremlin. Belarus(or Bielo-Russia meaning "White Russia") pays the least, less than $200 US. Ukraine pays closer to $500 US for the same type and quantity of gas.

The Best Cure for Jet Lag: not Vicodin and a bottle of wine

The conspicuous lack of posts in the past week is probably killing all of you(since there's nothing better to do than read my blog, right?). The suspended animation of a dysfunctional circadian rhythm(your sleep cycle) has left me dazed, drained and unable to concentrate all week. I finally fixed my jet lag problem today with a most unusual remedy: I stopped eating.

The first day I fell asleep at 10 am and slept till 4 pm, and then I fell into a strange cycle that would have made sense if I had been on Tokyo time. I was crashing at 6 pm and fully awake at 4 am. I felt like hell.

I finally looked it up on the internet when my sleeping pills had no effect and discovered that much of the sleep cycle is dependent on when you eat. Your first meal sets your morning cycle, so changing when you eat will determine how you sleep and when you crash. Twelve hours of fasting should do the trick. For example, if you want to change your waking time to 4 am, then stop eating at 4 pm. When you wake up to your alarm at 4 am(or if you haven't slept at all), eat right away.

After a week of terrible sleep, a single meal changed my whole day. 

Safely Back in Lviv

Above: Warsawians( Var-sha-vians) enjoy the ice rink outside the Galleria downtown near the Central Train station on January 31st, 2009 in Warsaw, Poland.
I arrived in Lviv this morning at 5:30 a.m. Ukrainian time, after a grueling trip that started in Chicago at 7:55 p.m. on Friday, January 30th. Twenty-seven hours later I was back in my old apartment, fixing something to eat. I found Brett still awake with the coffee pot and his computer, furiously typing away at grad school applications, and a strange flicker in the lights we still can't pinpoint. 

On the way I stopped in Warsaw to get on the bus, and snapped the above picture near the new Galleria mall. Winter is at it's best when there's ice skating and the snowfall is just enough to make the city almost silent and the air still.