I spoke with my wife last night — well, my wife, her sister Inna and her mother (sort of).  Their mood was very tense.  My wife kept assuring me that she was OK, but Inna said there was “much fear.”  (Inna also mentioned that my wife sometimes had to walk — to work, I’m guessing — in the dark, which is not comforting at all.  I’m going to suggest she take taxis if the buses aren’t running.)

Things have been relatively quiet in Mariupol over the past few days.  From news reports, it appears that the Russians are fortifying their positions at Novoazovsk, and working to gain a second front to the north of the city.  (If you think I’m being harsh by stating that the Russians are doing this, in the face of Putin’s/Moscow’s denials of any Russian army in Ukraine, I suggest you Google “putin denies troops crimea.”  You’ll see the pairing of articles with denials in March and acknowledgements in April.  You can’t trust Putin.)

My wife has been doing what she can to stock supplies at her son’s house.  They had already started to collect some things in advance of an expected hard winter, but now it seems there is a more urgent and immediate need.  Given the scarcity of some products in the stores, the prices are probably going up.  Fortunately, I send my wife some money each month, so she probably can still get the items she needs (assuming they are available).

Up until now, this blog has mostly been about my trips to Ukraine.  Unfortunately, given recent events, I think I need to modify the default purpose to include updates on events in Ukraine, and especially those around Mariupol.

Mariupol is my wife’s hometown, and a place I have visited multiple times.  With Russian troops and armor bearing down it — and have no doubt, it is most definitely the Russians — it seems quite likely that Mariupol will be attacked.

To say that these events concern me is an understatement.  Hundreds of people are fleeing Mariupol, but (so far, at least) my wife and her family are not among them.  I have urged them to go elsewhere, at least temporarily, but most people in Ukraine do not have the mobility that people in the US do.  You know Donetsk, where some of the most protracted and damaging fighting has been going on?  Only about 30% of that city of over 1 million was able to get out.  Most people just don’t have cars to hop into and drive away.

So I will continue to watch things, and I will post information I learn and messages from my wife.  I do this mostly to keep my family and friends up to date, but anyone else is welcome to the information as well.  Undoubtedly, politics will creep into some of my posts; given the situation, it is nearly unavoidable.  I’m sorry for that; I know that not everyone is an international political junkie.  (If I happen to write something that you disagree with, keep it to yourself.  When your wife is in danger, then you can have a say.)

From my wife, just this morning (translated and paraphrased as needed):  “My thoughts are constantly working in fear and I can not think of anything else … [I]n supermarkets are empty shelves, with the only products being ketchup and cream powder. … Maybe I was not lucky that I was not born in the country, but I’m close to my family in this difficult time and may be able to do something to help them. … I did not think of this before, that it could be so difficult and scary to live. … I feel your warmth around and it gives me a little strength to survive…”

The vast majority of the people in Mariupol have only wanted a peaceful city and a united Ukraine.  Even when the rebels were occupying some of the buildings and causing all sorts of strife, rallies for peace greatly outnumbered anything the DNR was able to scrape up.  Even this past week, a rally (or two) for Mariupol solidarity drew several thousand people.  But clearly peace is not part of Putin’s plan, so “dangerous” Mariupol will be made to suffer.

As I mentioned here, my wife took some video with her camera of one of the fountain shows.  She’s not always focused on the fountain, so you get a view of the surrounding buildings too.  It’s actually a nice little video, and it’s fun to hear the crowd reactions.

I usually wrap up my trips with some general thoughts and comments, which I hope aren’t (and won’t be) too boring for people.  A number of things have run though my head over the course of my trip and these past couple days back home.  I know I’ll never be able to get them all down, but I thought there were a few comments that kind of put a bow on all this.

This trip was kind of the end of an era and the start of a new one.  To my recollection, this is really the first time I’ve ever traveled with someone, at least by air.  With as much travel as I’ve done — especially these long flights over the past couple years — I’ve gotten really good at entertaining myself and otherwise passing the time.  My wife… not so much.  So this was really a different flying experience for me, and given that I’ll be traveling more as half of a couple going forward, I expect it is something I will need to get used to.  (Hopefully, at some point, my wife will become jaded by the window seat and I can get that back.  I really prefer the window — not so much for the looking, but because there’s a little additional shoulder space there for me.)

This was also a notable trip because it occurred to me that I’ll probably never again be the sort of tourist I have been in the past.  In this regard, I suppose the era actually changed during that week my wife and I spent in Kiev, but it wasn’t until this trip that I actually knew it.  In the past, I’ve never really liked hitting the tourist spots.  Some of them are nice, sure, but for me, the real fun in travel is understanding the people and lives of the places you visit.  I’m not adverse to going a bit off the beaten path and getting a better glimpse of how people live.  When I visited London years ago (my first “real” tourist trip), I remember how enjoyable it was riding the Tube and doing a load of laundry, just like a typical Londoner might have done.  Visiting the British Museum was great, but staring at mummies doesn’t tell you what it’s like to live there.

Much of the Dubai trip was hitting the traditional tourist spots and/or doing the traditional tourist things.  Had I been on my own — assuming that I would have even gone — I almost certainly wouldn’t have visited the beaches (well, maybe once, just to look out on the Persian Gulf), and I probably wouldn’t have wandered around the souks or souvenir shops as much.  I wouldn’t have shunned all the touristy things — the safari was fun, and it probably would have been cool to look out from the 125th floor of the Burj Khalifa — but I definitely would have tried to get a better sense of what life for people living there was like.

I had read beforehand that despite the significant wealth of the people of Dubai, there was also a wide disparity of wealth between richest and poorest.  I would have liked to understand that more.  I definitely didn’t see any homeless people and didn’t encounter any people begging for help, but maybe I wasn’t in the right parts of town.  Wealth was definitely evident (some of those private homes looked pretty nice), and from the trips on the Metro I did see what I would consider to be the more middle-class of Dubai.  Whizzing past a housing development with row after row of the exact same townhouses proved that not everyone could have a McMansion on The Palm, but was this as low as it went?  Is there a lower class to Dubai society?  I know that there is a lot of immigration to Dubai from Southeast Asia; where do these newly arrived citizens live and how do they get by?  I would have liked to find that out, but I probably won’t now, and similar questions for future destinations will probably also go unanswered.

The two big questions for most any trip are, did I have fun and would I go back?  For the “did I have fun” question, I refer you to my previous posts.  As I said at the outset, Dubai had never been on my list of places to see, and even if it had, I likely wouldn’t have picked a hot time of year.  Of course, it was great spending time with my wife, so that mitigated some of the non-fun of the trip, but I honestly don’t know if that would be enough to push it to the positive side of the scale.  Sunburn?  Not fun.  Silly jokes with the wife?  Fun.  So it’s hard to say.

The question of “would I go back” is actually a bit easier to answer.  It might surprise you, but I would consider a return trip.  There would be conditions and considerations for such a thing, but from some of the discussions I had with the natives, there are some things I wouldn’t mind seeing.  The winter months are supposed to be quite pleasant, temperature-wise — almost like summer in Portland, perhaps even a little cooler.  And apparently Spring arrives around February; I would like to see Dubai with greenery and blooming flowers everywhere.  I probably wouldn’t go for a full week; there’s only so much to do in Dubai if you’re not big on shopping or hanging out at the beach.  But it seems like it would be nice to see at least one.  So I might consider a return visit, for contrast and comparison.

Plus I never did ride the camel on our safari.  Gotta go do that…