I’m going to tell you a story.
First, I must confess, this blog is a little past due because, to be honest, I was kind of holding out and hoping that my cohort would write one so I could just repost hers, but she didn’t. Sorry this is late.
I also need to preface with, the Olmstead’s are not the best at passing down family history (sorry family, but it’s true) and so I may not get all of my facts right, but here goes.
This story starts before the World Race. In fact, it starts in 1944, in Kiev.
A beautiful young teenage girl and her family found themselves oppressed by the Soviet regime; so in an attempt to have a better life, they fled the USSR, leaving their friends and family behind. Due to the dominating imperical reign over the region, there was little-to-no communication in or out of the USSR, so the young girl and her family lost touch with everyone they left behind and settled down in America.
As the years rolled on, the young girl met a man and fell in love, and like most young lovebirds, they got married and had children. As time passed, the connection between the woman and her family she left in Eastern Europe became more and more non-existent.
A whole lot of history and a few wars later, their children grew up and they got married and had children, very beautiful children. And one of those beautiful children, as you may have guessed it, was me. That’s right, the young girl from Kiev, is my grandmother, shocking twist to the story, I know.
Anyways, in 1990, the Berlin Wall fell, re-opening communication between the once USSR (now Ukraine and Russia) and the rest of the world. I wish I knew the details, but basically, after a lot of investigation and despite the 40+ years of separation, some of the family was rediscovered and reconnected.
Fastforward to right before I left on the World Race. As any good grandchild would do, I went to visit my grandparents, who now reside in New Jersey, before I left. While I was there, my grandmother, who knew I would be going to Ukraine, handed me a slip of paper and, with the slight Russian accent that she has managed to hang on to, asks me to look up her cousin while I’m there. Being the butt-head I once was, I took the slip of paper with little intention to make the extra effort to find this woman. Then I left on the World Race and, after ten months of God transforming my heart, I suddenly got the urge to look up this long lost relative whom I had never met.
Which brings us to the present (or really, the very recent past because this blog is so late).
A week before camp ended, I worked up the nerve to call Tanya, the woman who’s address was on my slip of paper. I had never spoken to her before, I didn’t know if she knew about me at all, I didn’t even know if she spoke english (turns out she doesn’t, well, very little). So, through the interpreter I conveniently had sitting next to me, we made a date to meet the next weekend when I was going to be in Kiev.
This story is getting quite long and honestly, I’m tired of blogging (not just this one, all of them, I now hate blogging) so I’m going to do what I usually do and bullet point the rest of it:
-the day came to meet her and, with Tricia along for the ride, we managed to get to our meeting place
-she wasn’t there; she got the date wrong
-half on hour in McDonalds later, we met up with her and her nephew Misha who was our translator for the day
-in the first 30 seconds, she hugged and kissed both of us and then handed me a 20lb bouquet of flowers that I proceeded to carry around the city
-she took us back to her house where she immediately put Tricia and I took work cutting meat and cheese; at this point Misha had to go back to work for a short time, so we were without a translator
-Tricia, Tanya, Artur (her husband), and I sat down to eat all that we had cut and Tanya asked if we would rather have this weird Ukrainian fermented wheat drink or wine; of course we took the wine
-for the next 30 minutes, the four us tried to communicate, ate the Ukrainian finger foods, and toasted to our health until the bottle of wine was gone and I was almost asleep at the table
-unfortunately, it was about this time when Tanya pulled out heinous old photos of me that I’m assuming my grandmother sent to her; Tricia still hasn’t stopped making fun of them
-then Misha came back, with his girlfriend, and we left to go downtown
-like any good Olmstead though, we couldn’t leave without getting a huge bag of candy and souvenirs… each.
-on the way to our first stop on our sight-seeing tour, we picked up Misha’s mom
-for the next few hours, Tricia, me, and my long lost family members wandered around the historical parts of Kiev seeing old churches, the river, and, even cooler, all of my grandmother’s old hangout places from when she was a kid
-things were going great until Tanya saw my tattoo (which I thought I had hidden) peeking out from under me jeans… she wasn’t happy.
-after a few hours, Tanya and her sister called it a night, but Misha and his girlfriend were determined to keep on trucking
-having traveled 17 hours on a train the night before though, I admitted defeat somewhere around 11pm, luckily we had walked all the way back across the city to where our hostel was
-unfortunately, however, we realized that we had forgotten the hefty bouquet and goody bags back at Misha’s apartment
-so after trekking back, we finally grabbed our goods and Misha offered us a ride home, but not without one last stop at Sofia’s church (the oldest church in Kiev)
That day definitely goes down as one of my favorite days, if not one of those most ridiculous, on the World Race.
