Pictures! (1/24/2008)

Hello again everyone! Sorry I'm writing a day late, Elder Palsky and I had quite the adventure yesterday. Elder Palsky's ancestors, as it turns out, come from Ukraine, so he got special permission from President Davis to go and visit his great-great grandfather's home villages. We spent all day racing from small farming village to small farming village, searching through cemetaries and talking to town councils. We started by going out of the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast ("oblast" is like a state, or district of the country; they're all named after their principle cities) to the Ternopil oblast (not to be confused with Chernobyl), to the town of Chortkiv, the largest town in the area, by marshrutka (a three hour trip). From there, we went to Tovste, which in Ukrainian means "Fat." We spent some time there in the town, looking at a large beautiful church there and, most especially, getting a special tour through the Tovste town musuem (all four small rooms of it) by Jaroslav Pavlyk, an eighty-year-old town historian who knows everything about Tovste, and loves to tell it all to you. Tovste has a large Jewish cemetary that was really interesting to look through.

After Tovste, we went back to Chortkiv and spoke to the town council. From them we learned that a family with one of Elder Palsky's ancestral names, Sorokivsky, was still living in one of his ancestral towns, Zalissya. So, we got on a marshrutka until its route ended, then into a private car as close as he could take us (this is a very common practice in Ukraine, by the way), and then by foot for about 1 1/2 hours until we reached one of the smallest, oldest-fashioned towns I've ever seen. Tovste has paved roads, a movie theater, and marshrutkas. Zalissya has horse-drawn wagons, a one-room schoolhouse, and two trains that stop within three kilometers of it: one at noon, and one at midnight. The walk to Zalissya was beautiful, and one of my favorite pictures I've taken so far has come from there. There were absolutely no buildings or people--just fields, a small forest, and a large dirt road.

We hitched back to Chortkiv just in time to catch the last marshrutka back to Ivano; then, after a three-hour nap, we were home again. It was a really cool day.

So, here's what's on my pictures:

Walk on Water: I was feeling particularly faithful that day.












Icy Lake: All right, so the secret is, the lake near our apartment was frozen over with over a foot of ice, and after watching about thirty people walk out and go ice fishing, Elder Palsky and I decided to give it a try.








Ice Cross: Last Saturday we were in Verkhovina, a really cool little village in the Carpathians. It was the Pravoslavnic holiday of the baptism of Christ, so they made an ice sculpture cross that people came and prayed to.










Hill Shrine to Mary: This was in Tovste. They have little shrine things like this all over the place.










Polish Sword: In the Tovste museum. Jaroslav let us hold this sword and a Nazi bayonet.

















Jaroslav Pavlyk and I: There he is, the eighty-year-old town historian. (By the way, Elder Palsky didn't do too well photographing this one).
















Middle of Nowhere: There was a little while during our hour and a half hike where we wondered if there was even anything down that road at all.











Ukrainian Field: My favorite picture. Imagine walking past this in real life on a solitary dirt road in absolute silence except for you and the wind, without even buildings or farmhouses in sight.








All right, have a good week everyone!
--Elder Hurst