Howling at the Mooooooon!

On the combination of a whim and an invite from one Big Akula at the Prague 24th Anniversary/888/Red Dress Run I ventured into Kiev, Ukraine to attend the Kiev H3's first ever Full Moon Hash!
So, after the half-marathon in Budapest, I booked a train ticket and took the day and a half trip farther East than I have ever been.
Big Akula was delayed in Kosovo with work, so he set me up with the generous Beer King so I'd have a place to stay upon my arrival.
I was waiting outside of the train station, when a bear of a man (teddy? grizzly? Chicago?) walked up in my peripheral vision, stared intently at my Hash necklace and shook my hand. The one, the only, Beer King had found me!
After a quick beer, we took a marvelous Metro system (damn near half a mile underground and with lobby style areas that looked like the ceilings of some of the castles I have visited. Very impressive!
From there we took a shifty mini-bus outside of the main city to his apartment where he warned me beforehand that his place was a pretty standard 3rd world country place and I should be prepared mentally for what it looked like.
Now, I've stayed in some pretty touchy places, so I wasn't too concerned, but this was definitely held its own charm.
I'm going to take a(nother) moment here to state that this blog is more about observations than opinions. Sure I have my views on things (we all do), but my aim is certainly not to offend and I am grateful for every host I have had (and hopefully will have) and hope to repay in kind when the opportunity arises.
With that out of the way, I have to say that staying outside of Kiev has presented me the unique opportunity to see what it is like to live in a place with low economic income and a poor governmental infastructure. It kind of reminded me of Compton in the early 90's, replete with the music but minus the guns.
Tagging was highly present, the playgrounds were filled with either broken play structures or simply overgrown and EVERYONE smokes (except for Beer King, which was awesome since I don't smoke either!). Apparently cigarettes aren't really taxed like they are in the States, so they're extremely cheap and there's little to no monitoring by the government so stores just sell them to anyone. The result is that it's not uncommon to see eight year olds sitting in the playground puffing away.
In Beer King's apartment, the shower also doubled as a dishwasher, hand sink and well, pretty much anything that involved water except for the toilet. The building was clearly falling apart, but without Government involvement there is little anyone can do as it would cost Beer King close to $5000 to fix his place to standard, but like a lot of people, he's looking for work.
Speaking of which, he's an excellent Ukrainian/Russian to English (and vice versa) translator, so if you know anyone who needs those services and want to hook a hasher up, he's on Hashspace.
That night we had a traditional Ukrainian dinner of marinated herring, mashed potatoes and tomato with some local beer, then went to sleep with plans to meet up with Big Akula the next day to discuss the Full Moon trail.

We all met at the Golden Gate pub, an Irish bar owned by a former hasher named Hannibal the Cannibal (he looks almost exactly like the character played by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs!) and along with Unfinnished Symphony, we drove to the park where trail was to be held, walked around and planned out a fairly low key jaunt that basically went around the park, but a touch in the middle to give it some off pavement feel. I optioned to make it a tad more difficult, but Akula was afraid that the typical Kiev pack would get lost and not want to do more Full Moon trails in the future. Fair enough, it's not my trail. As it started to rain we met up again with Unfinnished Symphony and drove back to the pub where we had a couple more beers before departing in a lightly drizzling rain.

The next day we all arrived, chilled by the fall night air and eager to feel the damp grass under our swiftly moving feet from the rain which stopped falling mere hours before, leaving a break in the clouds, through which the white of the full moon shone down on us below.
The pack circled, names were called out and RA Flash Crash blessed the hares in a pope-esque outfit and sent them off with a wave of his toilet wand.
All of two minutes later the walkers followed and us runners (all 4 of us) waited another three before following a well laid trail of... get this, GLOWSTICK BRACELETS!
Nope, no flour for this full moon we were chasing dropped glowing rave favors, howling at the moon every couple of hundred feet or so as we jaunted along, much to the surprise and amazement of the Ukrainian students that we passed by!
As we neared the other end of the park, we sighted the hares, waiting patiently at the beer check as if we took too damn long and a few minutes later the walkers arrived at which point we all joined in on drinking and jabbering about who knows what.
The hares took off again and I led the group in a sing-a-long of Singin' in the Rain before we followed trail again, this time being made more difficult by passing students who kept picking up trail.
With a mad dash to the end, myself and Toto (visiting harriette from NYC) were FRB's followed closely by Atomic Fiddler and Flash Crash.
We had a grand circle in the cold where two hashers got named, Supersonic Leather and Dirty Knees (the latter being my suggestion-yay, I've named a hasher in another continent now!), then transported to the Golden Gate for more beer and a couple games of pool.
All in all it was a successful first Full Moon run, though trail could have been much longer and more difficult. But, that's for next time, right!?