My favourite gift from my trip to Ukraine last month is this Ukrainian alphabet stencil, a present from my cousin Victoria:

Here’s my name, in capital letters, rendered in Ukrainian (ПИТЕР) with the stencil.

Next logical step is to acquire some Ukrainian metal or wooden type.

I met mackt at Forskningsavdelningen in Sweden last summer. Now he’s part of a project making a film “about political hacking, world wide.” They’re looking to raise $80,000 in the next 40 days to fund a round-the-world trip interviewing people in the hacker world. I’ve supported them; I’d encourage you to do so too. Here’s their trailer:

Last fall I was on the selection committee for the City of Charlottetown’s micro-grant program, part of the city’s sustainability initiatives. One of the projects we selected was “Transforming a Street,” which proposed to take the portion of Richmond Street between Pownal and Queen and transform it into a more sustainable urban landscape.

Between the time the project was approved and the time it went ahead I moved my office three blocks south into The Guild, which afforded me a bird’s eye view of the selfsame stretch of the street.

Given that Richmond Street was now the spine of my daily life, this, in turn, inspired me to put together a sort of “unauthorized promotional campaign” for the project in the print shop, the evidence of which looked like this:

In the weeks leading up to the transformation, Oliver and I peppered many of the electric poles in the downtown core with these signs, making it hard to ignore the project (at least if you were willing to grok the subtle message of the sign):

When the actual transformation itself got underway, I was giddy with anticipation (well, perhaps not giddy, but at least eager). To be frank, I ended up the week disappointed by what seemed to amount to no more than some chalk drawings, some plants, a wobbly bicycle path and a fridge full of kids books. This wasn’t the transformed, sustainable urban landscape I pictured myself living in, it was more like arts and crafts day at summer camp.

One of the promised outcomes of the project was a documentary by filmmaker Millefiore Clarkes and last month this film was released online.

My reaction to the film, at first, was that it managed to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, presenting the project as something far more “transformative” than it actually was.

But I’ve watched it several more times since, and I’ve come to realize that I was, perhaps, wrong to concentrate on the infrastructural result of the week: the heart of the project was the community that came together for the transformation. I was disappointed by the nouns; the verbs, it turns out, were pretty interesting. And it took the documentary to get me there.

I still wish that the transformation project had been able to pull out more than just the usual suspects; surely one of the requirements of a truly sustainable city is that it engages even non-hippies. Given that a lot of Charlottetown residents, if asked, would see “more parking” (not “more chalk drawings”) as one of the things that downtown Charlottetown needs, skewing the project towards the “previously-engaged” set skirted around the real challenge at hand, which is convincing the broader community that sustainability doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in quality of life nor a switch to all-burlap clothing.

Net-net, though, I think the Transforming a Street project was a step in the right direction, especially looked at through the lens of the documentary: anything we can do to make the urban landscape seem malleable is a step in the direction toward sustainability, for it’s only when we see ourselves all as actors in the urban drama that we can begin to reshape the decidedly non-sustainably legacy systems that we’ve inherited from previous generations.

I hope the project happens again next year, and I hope that when it does it’s able to, dare I say, engage and empower a wider swatch of the community. And maybe rather than seeing myself as a passive, critical bystander of the transformation, next year I should help in the effort to make that happen.

If you’re not listening to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing podcast, you really should be. Baldwin’s interview style is pitch-perfect: he interviews people like Peter Frampton, Lorne Michaels and Erica Jong with an equal mix of fan, peer, and curious questioner. He is the anti-Lipton; his interviews sound like you would like a conversation between you and Peter Frampton in your kitchen to go.

My friend [[Olle]] has become a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the Put This On sensibility. Among other things (constant buying of interesting-looking ties on eBay, for example), this tends to make him an incredibly good subject for sepia-toned photos. Here is is, for example, near the windmill in the Slottsträdgården in Malmö:

And here are Olle and [[Luisa]] (no stranger to dressing well herself) in the garden at Fredriksdal in Helsingborg:

Olle’s commitment to dressing well is laudable and deliciously nerdy.

When I was crafting up the Is there a cruise ship in Charlottetown? site I inevitably came across MarineTraffic.com, a website that aggregates together ship’s position information from receiving stations around the world and displays them on a map. There wasn’t any data for the Port of Charlottetown because there was nobody in Charlottetown sending the data; but over in the left corner of the site I spotted a call to action:

I followed the link, and then followed the instructions to request a VHF receiver and antenna. And, to my surprise and delight, while I was away in Europe last month they both arrived in the mail. This morning I got things set up — really just a matter of attaching the antenna and power supply to the Ship Location Received (a SLR200N) and connecting the received to our office Internet router. And then, blamo, data started to flow to MarineTraffic.com showing all the yachts moored down at the Charlottetown Yacht Club.

Here’s what the gear looks like:

I’m Station No. 1218 at MarineTraffic.com and we’re on the air now streaming ship’s position information 24/7 for the curious.

While I might hold out myself to be an “adventurous” eater, my sense of adventure tends to be tempered by my borderline vegetarianism. I’m neither an ethical (“eating animals is bad for animals!”) nor a healthful (“eating animals is bad for you!”) vegetarian: I’ve simply never really enjoyed meat as a food. And so, most of the time, I don’t eat it.

In Ukraine it quickly became apparent that “vegetarian” was more of a witty anecdote — akin to “I’ve never liked the earlier Shakespearean works” — than a valid lifestyle choice, and, wishing to fit it to the Ukrainian milieu as much as possible, I resolved to be more liberal in my tastes, even if it did mean eating creatures I was unaccustomed to. Like:

I’m pretty sure I ate this fellow’s legs. Or, at the very least, the legs of a close relative. For breakfast. Like this:

And his legs were pretty tasty. Indeed, after the second or third meal of rabbit legs I sort of looked forward to it. Even if the family was hopping around their cages just outside my bedroom window.

As it turns out, contemporary Ukrainian food — and realize I’m speaking here not of “everyday” food but more of “food you serve to relatives from Canada who haven’t been heard from in over 100 years” food — is a mixture of the food I remember my grandmother cooking (perogies, cabbage rolls, potato pancakes) with an interesting mix of things I’d never had before (or only had when Sergey was here cooking for us last fall). Like tsvikli (a relish made of beets and horseradish; very, very good), jellied meats (like it sounds: various bits of meat, in jelly; less an “acquired taste” than an “acquired conceptual approach”), and lots and lots and lots of borscht (eaten for breakfast, lunch and supper and universally excellent).

The thing I learned early on in my Ukrainian visit was “if you think the meal is over, you are wrong.” There’s always another course.

The first meal — the one we had at 10:00 p.m. after I flew in from Copenhagen — we had a huge first course of borscht, salads, bread, vegetables and more. Which seemed more than enough to tide me over until morning. And, once it was cleared away, the actual supprt itself was brought out. Followed by desserts and tea.

All of this led to the need to immediately develop hacks like “don’t eat to quickly; otherwise your plate will be refilled.” And a realization that “I’m full” is treated as a sarcastic remark meaning “I’ve hardly eaten anything; please bring more.”

Food, in other words, is taken very seriously in Ukraine: almost everything I ate over 8 days was freshly prepared from a nearby garden or butcher or fish market, and it was prepared, presented and eaten with a sort of “this may be our last opportunity to eat to for many weeks, so let’s do it well” reverence.

This applied not only to food prepared and eaten at home, but also on the road: several times I witnessed the careful and thorough consideration of menus in restaurants, with significant intra-family negotiation about what would be ordered, extending over 10 or 15 minutes, before an actual order was presented to the server. Like I said, it’s serious business.

I ate well in Ukraine, and my conception of what to eat, and how much to eat, and when to eat, and with what attitude to eat may have been permanently altered.

On my last morning in Serafyntsi I took a walk from my cousin Maria’s house to the centre of the village. It took about 15 minutes. In the heart of the village I took a moment to drink everything in; it’s hard to imagine a more idyllic place. Cue the owl hooting.

I headed back home a few minutes later, only to be greeted by Sergey in his van, worried that I’d become lost and couldn’t find my way home.

While touring the centre of Serafyntsi, my great-grandfather’s village, we happened upon a wedding party on its way to church. If I ever get married, this is the way I’d want to do it: brothers carrying bread leading a small marching band and Catherine and I in formal attire ready to bow at everyone we meet.

A week ago Saturday I set off in a convoy with various of my Ukrainian family to visit the Carpathian Mountains, a few hours north of my great-grandfather’s home village of Serafyntsi. It was a chilly day, threatening rain but never raining, but we were all in good spirits. After a stop in the town Kolomyya to visit the excellent Pysanka Museum we headed ever-higher up the valley in search of lunch, a search made more difficult by a power outage that meant most restaurants were closed. We finally drove our way out of the electrical issue, enjoyed a tasty, albeit slowly and grudgingly-prepared meal, and after lunch we set out to tour Bukovel, a newly-constructed ski resort nearby.

Our convoy got separated on the way there, and so Andrii and Victoria and I arrived first, and it was decided that Victoria and I would ascend the mountain on the chair lift. So off we set. I’m only a little afraid of heights, so it was mostly an enjoyable ride up to the top, resulting in this view:

We walked around the mountain-top for a bit, but as the weather appeared to be closing in, with rain visible several mountains off and the rumbling of thunder in the distance, we decided we’d better get down the mountain sooner than later. As we made our way down the mountain we each shot a quick photo of each other, being careful both not to drop the camera and mindful of our impending death due to lightning. Oh how happy we were.

And then the rain came. This was what it looked like from ground-level:

It was a heavy, determined rain, with large half-cup-sized raindrops that were unrelenting. Fortunately both Victoria and I were able to approach the situation with a sense of humour, and laughed our way down the mountain. What else could we do? When we arrived we looked like this:

And this is what I looked like as I stumbled off the lift:

Fortunately by the time we emerged our advance team was in full force, whisking us off separately to gender-specific recovery operations. Sergey generously loaned me a pair of rain pants to replace my soaking-wet jeans (my recently-purchased German rain coat meant that the top-half of me was bone-dry, thankfully). Twenty minutes later we were enjoying a very satisfying cup of hot tea in the restaurant; as you can tell from the look on my face, it was all a great an enjoyable adventure:

If you’re going to get caught in a rainstorm on the side of a mountain, I heartily recommend Victoria as a partner in crime. And if you need team of dedicated recovery experts to surge into action when you’re soaking wet, there’s not better family than mine.