This one, The Wallet, is not science fiction. No aliens, ghosts, or magic potions. It’s a mystery. The publisher, Mysterical-E, runs only mysteries, so I’m flattered that they chose it. A 19-minute read.
A Ukrainian French Spring: Trying to Piece it All Together
I left our apartment and walked out into the day’s last light. We had been in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, for two days and I was still trying to get a sense of what the current political and economic crises were doing to everyday life. That wasn’t why I was going – I really wanted to see the show. But justifying the abandonment of my wife and children for an evening by calling it geo-political sociology research seemed like a good idea. Continue reading “A Ukrainian French Spring: Trying to Piece it All Together”
Zhytomyr: The Schnapps and Soviet-Style Architectural Capital of North-Central Ukraine
I studied the shot of clear liquor in front of me. It had a sharp fragrance that I couldn’t place, and no one at the table knew the English word for it. Our hostess made the first toast, and I downed 2 ounces of what turned out to be horseradish schnapps. Looking at the bottom of my shot glass I thought, it can’t possibly get any more Ukrainian than this. Continue reading “Zhytomyr: The Schnapps and Soviet-Style Architectural Capital of North-Central Ukraine”
It Takes a (Ukrainian) Village
There was something off about the style of the leather jackets the two men were wearing. At first I thought they were holdovers from the 1980’s, but that wasn’t quite right. They looked more like a reverse engineering effort where someone had described the 1980s to a designer who hadn’t lived through them, and those jackets were the result. Continue reading “It Takes a (Ukrainian) Village”