A Ukrainian Summer: where to go, what to do...
Top 22 things to do that do NOT involve a Ukrainian festival
by Lisa McDonald
1. Rent roller blades and skate around Balboa Park, San Diego, Calif. Pop in to the House of Ukraine.
2. Check out the unusually shaped Canadian flag holding bread and salt, three blocks from the Immigration Building in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
3. Break a Guinness World Record: try making the world's largest cabbage roll or doing most prysiadky in a row.
4. Wear your embroidered shirt into the hippie Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco. (Don't forget to wear flowers in your hair.)
5. On a rainy day watch the ER Ukrainian Christmas episode, the Martha Stewart pysanka show or rent "My Life," "Deer Hunter" or "Clan of the Cave Bear."
6. On the night of Ivana Kupala, July 6, go searching for the magical red flower that appears only on this night, the "tsvit paporoti" (fern flower).
7. Catch some rays, OK a lot of rays, at the Ukrainian-owned Glen Echo nudist camp in Pottageville, Ontario.
8. Speak Ukrainian in Quebec; see how long it takes before the language police get you.
9. Visit Kodiak, Ala., whose name is taken from a Ukrainian word, or the Orthodox Church in Anchorage.
10. Search for the Ukrainian internment site in Jasper National Park, Alberta. If you find it, great, if not, oh well, you're in the middle of the great Rocky Mountains!
11. Go to Ellenville (SUM resort) or Soyuzivka in the MIDDLE of the week.
12. Go to the EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, and make a stink about why there is no Ukrainian Pavilion.
13. Try to survive an entire summer without getting invited to a wedding. Spend any money saved on a present for yourself.
14. Whenever anyone asks you where you went to school say Harvard. You don't have to lie, you can take one of their Ukrainian summer courses.
15. Go Kalyna Berry Picking in "Kalyna Country," Alberta.
16. Go visit Mary Stefura at the Garlic Festival in Sudbury, Ontario.
17. Buy a Navajo rug and hang it in your living room. Whenever anyone asks, just tell them your family from Kosiv, Ukraine, sent it to you.
18. Write to Alex Trebek on "Jeopardy!" and use a good "not enough Ukrainian content" guilt trip to get on the game show.
19. Check out the World's Largest Pysanka, Mallard Duck, Pidpenky (mushrooms) or Varenyk on a Fork monuments - only in Alberta!
20. And don't forget the giant mosquito monument in Komarno, Manitoba.
21. Anytime you need a break, stop for a drink at Na Zdorovya in Edmonton, Black Sea in St. Catharine's, Future in Toronto, Lys Mykyta's in New York, Saks in Chicago or any Ukrainian center, a.k.a. "national home."
22. For those of you who just have to do the festival thing do it in North Dakota at the Ukrainian Festival in Dickinson. Betcha never heard of this place!
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 2, 1999, No. 18, Vol. LXVII
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