I would give my left arm for a metro map of Kyiv. Or a bus map. Or a trolley map. Or any map. Google maps-Kyiv reveals just a large grey expanse of nothing with a little star in the middle to signify that, oh yeah, I guess you're located somewhere in there. I have been kind of blindly wandering around the city, making use of my ever-so-helpful "how do I get there?" vocab, which is, of course, completely UNhelpful when I forget the response vocab. So I was puzzled and slightly offended when I saw an enormous map of the New York subway system on my co-worker's office door. I had traveled ten hours and an ocean away and all this city could provide me with was a NEW YORK subway map? I had just finished being completely lost in THAT city, and here was a map. Sorry, but too little too late, Kyiv. Nice try.

It's equally disorienting when my other co-worker admits to me that he and Olha and Bohdan and Olena and just about everyone else get together frequently to talk about "the States." And when the Ukrainian interpreter with the project-- born and raised and educated IN KYIV-- sheepishly calls himself a "California Boy." And my Ukrainian friends puzle over why I would ever come to Ukraine (one girl asked me if I was trying to be "extreme"), that is, when they're not talking about how they want to move to London or Germany or New York. I came to Kyiv to get the Ukrainian experience, and what I am finding is that I am learning more about the good side of the United States and Europe than I ever knew existed.

This West-philia is not rooted, however, in a hatred of Ukraine, at least not as far as I can tell. Ukraine has only existed as a nation since 1992, and while there is certainly a really strong sense of Ukrainian national identity (some guy yelled at me the other day to "learn Ukrainian" when i spoke in my pathetic broken Russian at the nationalist university that I attend), there isn't a really clear idea of what sort of shape that identity is going to take in terms of a nation. Ukraine has, in the past, been dominated by tsarist Russia, but Poland, and even by Nazi Germany. None of these regimes were particularly beneficial to Ukraine, and in fact, often really awful (Stalin orchestrated a nationwide famine to "put Ukrainians in its place" and Germany turned the population against itself). But the Ukrainian population and identity continued to develop, and was, in fact, even fortified by some of these experiences.

And now, Ukraine is pretty unique in the fact that it is a very "developed" nation with a highly educated population, some very modern cities, and no real state history to speak of. The big question in Ukraine is not about "bringing the country into the 21st century"-- it's already there-- but instead establishing some sort of paradigm for it to exist in. There is pressure from some of the country to re-align with Russia; many think that even though Putin is kind of a dictator, at least he is a strong leader with some vision for the country. However, much of the country wants nothing to do with Russia, and instead wants to join NATO or the EU, following the example of other ex-Soviet states such as Poland and Romania, but alienating Russia and Belarus. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has shut down for a few months post-election while each party either prepares a remix of the Orange Revolution or challenges the results. This uncertainty about where the country came from and where the hell it is going is the source of New York subway maps on walls and longing for Germany. It's not so much yearning for those PLACES as it is yearning for a model.

In the meantime, however, people go to work, raise families, and hold conversations where one party speaks in Russian and the other responds in Ukrainian. They watch Italian movies with English subtitles and a woman translating those subtitles into Ukrainian over a loud speaker. They complain about the government, the "Soviet attitude" of waitresses or guards, but they just sort of get on with their lives. In a way, it seems like Ukrainians are kind of used to being people who speak Russian, watch movies in Italian, wear clothes with English slogans, and plan to move to Europe or America, but are still very much Ukrainian.