Feb
10
Back in October I visited a group of coal miners in the eastern Ukrainian city of Torez who work at one of the area’s illicit coal mines, called “kopanki” in Russian.
These are photographs from that trip. The music is a 1951 song by Vladimir Bunchikov, titled “An Old Miner” (“Старинная шахтерская”).
You can see more of the photos in larger sizes over at Flickr.
Feb
10
This won’t come as much of a shock to anyone, especially those of us who live in Ukraine or who have visited, but the women of Kiev have just been rated the most beautiful in the world.
“Kiev is, without a doubt, home to the world’s most beautiful women. A visit to Kiev is truly awe-inducing, it’s almost hard to believe that women this beautiful even exist. They’re also less intimidating and more friendly than their Russian counterparts. Check out Kiev in the summertime, when the Hydropark Island on the Dnieper River becomes a hot spot for sunbathing Ukrainian beauties,” Traveler’s Digest wrote.
The rest of the top five looks like this:
2. Stockholm, Sweden
3. New York City, USA
4. Buenos Aires, Argentina
5. Varna, Bulgaria
Feb
10
In case you needed further proof of the extreme weather conditions in eastern Europe, there’s this video that shows the Black Sea near the port of Odessa frozen over. The last time this happened was back in 1977.
Oh, and that creaking sound you hear in the video… that’s the ice.
You can see photographs of the frozen sea here.
Feb
03
A ‘stiliaga’ – the Soviet Union hipster of the 1940s and 50s.
I came across two very interesting articles this week pertaining to elements of Ukraine’s past and present culture.
The first, “A foreign affair: On the great Ukrainian bride hunt,” published in Harper’s Magazine, follows a man who goes undercover to learn more about the men that come to Ukraine in search of women to wed.
The second, “The Western Brand: The socio-cultural revolution of soviet mods against boring clothes, music and behavior in the USSR,” from The Ukrainian Week, explores the subculture of the stiliagi, a group of young, fashion-forward, progressive-minded individuals in the 1940s and 50s who copied the lifestyles of young people in the west.
I recommend checking out both.
Feb
01
Too cool for school. I mean that quite literally. With the temperature hovering around -24 degrees Celsius (-10 degrees Fahrenheit) this morning, most schools cancelled lessons all together. My school, however, thought they’d give it a shot and see how many students would show up.
In my first lesson of the day, usually a rowdy bunch of 28 12-year-olds, just 5 girls showed up. The teacher I work with was running around like a mad woman trying to figure out where everyone was while also dealing with parents of children calling her mobile to explain that they were keeping they’re kids home from school today. “It’s too cold to be outside today,” my partner teacher explained. “And some of the students live on the edge of town and would have to walk in.” (What’s funny was the number of phone calls from mothers worried their boys would catch their death if they were to go outside. Contrastingly, only a few mothers called to explain they were keeping their daughters home. And like I said, the students that did brave the weather to come to class were, in fact, all girls. I’m seriously beginning to question who’s tougher in Ukraine.)
Proof to the severity of this eastern European cold snap can be found with a quick scan of the international news. A Reuters story published yesterday reported that already 30 people have died in the past week. Most of those were homeless people, but still. I tried running some errands yesterday afternoon, but quickly gave in, turned back and went home when my snot and mustache froze just five minutes after stepping outside.
Being from the Pacific Northwest, I’m not used to this type of weather. We get rain, fog, and at worst maybe some sleet. But the temperature rarely drops below freezing, except for maybe a few times and during the night. Having spent the previous winter in Ukraine, though, you’d think I’d be prepared. But nothing prepares you for this extreme chill.
I’m home now, curled up in a blanket a few feet from my radiator. This is where I plan to stay for the remainder of the day. Maybe this afternoon I’ll make some mulled wine. Here’s to hoping it warms up soon.
Jan
31
“Flora of Ukraine” by Interesni Kazki, The Wynwood Walls Project, Miami, 2011.
While I’ve never considered myself to an expert on the subject of graffiti art, or even a huge fan of it for that matter, I’ve been fascinated with the Ukrainian graffiti art duo Interesni Kazki (Interesting Fairytales) since I stumbled upon their work on a building near the Kiev Pechersk Lavra grounds. In the typically drab country of Ukraine, it’s hard not to notice their work when you stumble upon it. The vibrant and colorful surrealist pieces are typically large and emblazoned on the side of a building. After finding that first one, I made it a personally mission of mine to track down as many as I could while running around Kiev on errands or while killing time with friends.
But Interesni Kazki isn’t just local; the guys have done pieces in India, Spain, Slovakia as well as many other places. Recently they visited the states to work on a project in Miami (pictured above) and exhibit their art at a gallery in Los Angeles.
If you like what you see here, and you have some time to kill, I highly recommend checking out the Interesni Kazki blog.
Interesni Kazki, Kiev, 2010.
Waone of Interesni Kazki next to one of his pieces in Kiev.
Aec of Interesni Kazki next to one of his pieces in Kiev.
Jan
27
If there’s something Ukrainians born in the U.S.S.R. pride themselves on more than their mosaics, it’s their cosmonauts. So I wasn’t so shocked during a visit to Konstantinovka to find the sides of bloc apartments along aptly named Cosmonaut Blvd. adorned with mosaic images of Soviet cosmonauts, including the renowned Yury Gagarin – the first human in space.
The buildings, built sometime during the 1960s, have seen better days. Many of the tiles surrounding the mosaic images have fallen off, leaving the building with a sort of scarred look. But the mosaics themselves remain mostly intact, if a bit faded.
After nearly two years here, I’m afraid a lot of the novelty I felt upon my arrival has worn off. Few things surprise me anymore. I’ve slipped into a life of routine similar to the life I had back in Portland. I think this would happen if you stayed anywhere long enough. But when I come across things like these images, remnants of a strange past – in this case, a Soviet past – that sleeping part of my mind that was once awed by everything around him is awakened.
“I live in the former Soviet Union,” I thought to myself when I saw the mosaics. “Wild.”
Jan
24
In Ukraine, sometimes arriving to your flat in one piece is the ultimate survival.
I’ve dabbled in off-roading, tried my hand at cliff jumping and grew up attempting an array of precarious tricks behind a speed boat on multiple apparatuses. But none of these things have raised my anxiety level and forced me to clench my teeth like riding in a Ukrainian taxi during winter has. Why I still opt to do it, I have no idea. I guess they still get me from point A to point B quicker than a bus, and I value my time more than my safety.
Winter in Ukraine means tremendous amounts of ice and snow, much more than this Pacific Northwesterner is used to experiencing. But it’s still not enough to halt traffic. Back in Portland, with any amount of snow on the ground, cars cease to move, sometimes right in the middle of the road. People opt to stay home, working remotely, or they call in sick. The media labels a storm that brings two inches Snowpocalypse. School is cancelled and the fun begins. Here, though, life continues on as normal. Children go to school, people commute to work and taxis rage on the pockmarked streets, despite the facts that the roads aren’t visible and that they’re covered in ice and snow.
After spending a weekend away, tired, hungry and with a large pack strapped to my back, I chose not to wait an hour and a half to cram into a small bus that would take another hour and a half to get me home, and instead asked a taxi driver if he’d mind giving me a lift. “Of course,” he said. “No problem. This is my job.”
My first indication that this might have been a bad idea came just moments after we pulled out of the bus station parking lot, when slowing for a red light our breaks locked up and we nearly slid into the gas truck in front of us. As the light turned green I took a deep breath and wrapped my hand tightly around what a friend of mine likes to call the “oh shit” bar, or that handle just about the window of the front passenger seat.
We turned onto the highway, slightly fish-tailing, and the Lada began to make a chugging sound. Had this been my first cab ride in a Lada, I would have asked, “Is this normal?” But I knew that it was. A series of hills, dips and turns followed, each one more frightening than the last. At one point the snow was coming down so hard I couldn’t make out anything more than a few meters in front of us. I wondered how my driver could see where he was going. Was it simply reflex? Had he ridden these roads so many times he could navigate them in his sleep – in this? I hoped so.
The wind didn’t help. It blew like it would be the last time it would blow, with ferocity. My passenger side window kept getting smacked with drifts of snow and every so often the car would swerve, not because of the ice – though it did that, too – but because of the gusts.
I ran possible scenarios in my mind. We spin out, lose control and smack into a tree. I’d be OK, because I opted to wear my seatbelt. The driver, however, would go straight through the windshield. In another, I imagined an oncoming car losing control and crashing head on into the Lada, sending us flipping and rolling into an embankment. No one would have lived.
As we came over the last hill there was a small break in the storm, enough to make out the lights of a small village, which I recognized as Krasne. I knew that if we could make it to Krasne we’d make it home, to Artemovsk. We were just about there when another Lada pulled out in front of us.
There wasn’t much the driver could have done. If he’d have hit the brakes, we’d spin out and lose control, like in the first scenario. There would also have been a good chance of smashing into the rear of the other Lada. So what he did do was probably the best decision, though it scared me so much my entire body stiffened, and in that moment I think my heart may have skipped a beat. Instead of the brakes, he used the gas, accelerating and riding the shoulder of a road so densely covered in snow that I was uncertain where the road ended and the field began. Nonetheless, it worked, and we zoomed on by with no problem, except for a minor fish-tail the moment he hit the gas.
With my apartment in sight, I breathed a sigh of relief. When asked how much the ride cost, he answered more than what he’d originally said. “Because of the snow,” he explained. I felt like I should have gotten a discount. But there was no talking him down.
Sometimes the ultimate survival can be making it off a sinking ship, or living to tell about a harrowing adventure to the peak of a mountain. And sometimes it can simply be a cab ride home.
Jan
18
Nescafe 3 in 1 TURBO, for when you need a little something extra.
Before March of 2010 I’d never drunk instant coffee, never even had a taste. Sure, I’d had the cheap stuff. Folgers was a mainstay in my suburban childhood home. The garage was lined with the empty cans. My father used them to store nuts, bolts, nails and screws. As I got older, about high school age, I developed a taste for slightly better coffee, although I should say that it was my younger brother at age 10 who first asked for a French press for his birthday. It was rare for us then to drink coffee before school, but on the weekends we’d open a fresh bag of beans, grind them down for the press and enjoy a pitch black cup with our eggs and bacon.
By the time I entered college I was drinking two cups a day, sometimes more. Coffee was a necessary evil. Luckily, living in Portland, it was easy to get my hands on the really good stuff. I was a regular at Stumptown’s S.E. Division location, and from time to time I’d make it into the S.W. 3rd shop. My love affair with it continued a few years later when I moved downtown and got a job at Oregon Business Magazine. The office on S.W. Broadway wasn’t far from the Ace Hotel location, where I spent many a lunch hour sipping freshly pressed Hair Bender and preparing for interviews.
My palate used to quality java, I panicked when I arrived in Ukraine almost two years ago to begin my Peace Corps service and found my only coffee options to be Nescafe and Jacobs Original or 3 in 1. I knew that any coffee sold in small, one-serving packets at the check-out counter would never compare to the organic, dark-roasted grinds I had back home.
But you’d be surprised how well your palate adapts when your choices are shit and shit. Now, every morning with my two eggs over easy on toast, I drink a tall mug of it – and without cringing.
That said, there have been care packages from my parents over the past couple years that came with some of Portland’s finest coffee. And when they do, I make it last, saving it for those slow, heavy-eyed mornings when the snow drifts come up to my knees and the thermometer reads just 10 degrees.
Jan
17
My uncle on a train from Kiev to Donetsk after our excursion of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in June 2011.
Besides being an affordable and comfortable alternative to buses and planes, trains are a great way to travel in Ukraine. Routes traverse the country in all directions – and often. The landscapes passing outside the windows, too – rolling steppes, seemingly endless fields of sunflowers – aren’t bad.
What’s tricky is purchasing tickets as a non-Russian or non-Ukrainian speaker.
Hiring a translator is a possibility (www.kiev-interpreter.net, www.handy.com.ua). Most have daily fixed rates, but some will offer hourly rates, which typically run about $25 per hour. They’ll help you purchase tickets, show you around the city, and pretty much help with whatever arrangements that you might otherwise have difficulty making.
A cheaper alternative is purchasing train tickets online (www.e-kvytok.com.ua). The site requires you to register (it’s free), but after that it’s fairly easy to navigate. It also has an English language option.
When you are ready to plan that train trip, there are some other things to consider.
Tips:
Three days before I was expected by a group of friends to be in Crimea, I marched into the ticket office and asked politely for round-trip tickets to Dzhankoi. The woman working behind the counter insinuated that I must be crazy. “You leave in just three days – in August – and you think there will be tickets?”
Perhaps because I was an American who didn’t know better, having only been in Ukraine for a few months then, she humored me by showing screen after screen of full trains. At about the fourth screen, a late-night train she said would certainly be booked, though it could have something available, she found an empty seat.
“You won’t want this one,” she said. “It’s very bad. A top bunk, and next to the toilet.” Desperate to meet my friends at the Black Sea, I told her it would be fine, and booked it.
Three day’s later I wished I’d taken her advice. Stuck on a cramped top bunk in 100-degree heat, mere feet away from the toilet, I thought about what could be worse and came up with nothing.
I did make it to Crimea, though it was by far the most uncomfortable train ride I’ve had here.
1. Purchase tickets well in advance. You can do this online or at any train station in Ukraine. Tickets aren’t so difficult to come by in winter, except on weekends. But come May, everything through till October books up quickly. Also, it’s widely known here that the mafia buys up tickets to destinations like Lvov, Odessa, Kiev and everywhere in Crimea to later resell on the black market at higher prices. So keep this in mind when planning your summer trips.
*
As I mentioned before, I once got stuck with a seat near the toilet. Throughout the night the slamming of the door and the stench of stale piss constantly awakened me. Toilets are awful everywhere, true. But the train toilets here are made of steel, which in winter makes them cold as ice and in summer hot as hell. What’s more is that instead of sitting down on them they’re meant to be squatted over, as if you were using a proper squat toilet. Except these aren’t squat toilets, but normal looking bowls.
On a trip from Kiev to Donetsk, after eating a doner kebab that didn’t agree with my stomach, I spent 12 grueling hours hovering above one of these. With the train bouncing to and fro, many people miss their mark while doing their business, resulting in a festering mess around the bowl and on the floor. This is what you smell if your seat is too near. I wish I could tell you that my aim, unlike many others, is true. But that wouldn’t be the truth.
2. When purchasing train tickets you can choose your seat, so purchase tickets away from the toilets. Lower numbered seats are toward the front of the car. I suggest seats between one and 24 to ensure a better smelling experience.
*
After a daylong excursion through the Chernobyl exclusion zone all I wanted to do was board my train, make my bed and pass out. Unfortunately, I’d stayed in the zone longer than expected and had to rush back to Kiev in order to make my train, sprinting all the way to the wagon. When I made it to my seat I was greeted by a family who’d arrived first and taken the liberty to spread their dinner out on the table. More than that, they’d filled the lower compartments meant for my luggage with theirs and occupied part of my seat, preventing me from making up my bed. They spent almost two hours eating and playing cards before resigning to their respective bunks. Only then was I able to catch some shut-eye.
3. Arrive early to your train. If you’re cathing a train from its originating city wagon attendants will often allow you to board 30 minutes or more in advance. This will allow you time to settle in and stow away your belongings before everyone else boards.
*
Only once did I board a train without anything to entertain me. I was leaving Donetsk for Kiev, a 13-hour ride, and I didn’t realize my mistake until it was too later. Luckily, I had some talkative bunkmates. An older woman and her daughter were traveling together to Kiev to see some relatives and, after hearing me speak to the conductor about a cup of tea, asked me where I was from.
“You’re not ours, are you?” the older woman asked.
“No,” I said. “American.”
“Opa!” she exclaimed. And for the three hours before lights out, as well as the three hours after waking the next morning, we spoke about life, culture, traveling and more. She even offered up a relative’s time to show me around. I politely thanked her and her daughter for their company when the train arrived. This time around, I thought, I got lucky.
4. Bring something to help pass the time. Crossword puzzles, an iPod loaded with podcasts (my favorites include Radiolab, This American Life, The Moth, Slate’s Culture Gabfest, NPR’s Fresh Air and Foreign Dispatch Podcast, Real Time with Bill Mahr and the BBC World Service Documentary Archive) or a book.
*
Ukraine’s trains are mostly old and dirty. On top of that, they’re poorly cleaned. On a trip to Kharkov from Artemovsk I was removing my shoes before getting in bed. After doing so, I slid them beneath my bunk, like usual. But I’d forgotten a pillow, which was situated atop an empty bunk across the aisle. Without putting my shoes back on, I walked over to fetch it. That’s when a babushka reprimanded me.
“Young man,” she said. “This floor is dirty, and you could catch disease walking around like that.”
I told her I’d be fine, that I wouldn’t do it again. She responded to that by waving her finger at me and telling me I needed some slippers. “Like these,” she said, gesturing to hers.
5. Bring slippers or flip-flops, footwear easy to slide on and off. That’s what Ukrainians do. Best to fit in. Also, hand sanitizer. Pack it.
*
On a train from Kiev to Konstantinovka I watched as two women unpacked a plastic sack filled with sausages, cheese, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, apples, varenyky and fried chicken onto the kupe table. They dined together for over an hour, washing everything down with a bottle of vodka and some juice. Staring at my Snickers bar and bottle of water, I wished I’d done the same.
6. Bring something to eat. Trains don’t offer much in the way of food. Wagon attendents do pass by, but not with much more than overpriced chips and nuts. You’re expected to bring your own.
*
On a train from Konstantinovka to Kiev I shared a kupe with a man who told me about his time in prison. Arrested for hooliganism, he spent nearly three years incarcerated in an eastern Ukrainian jail. Our conversation included a fascinating lesson on prison tattoos, culminating in a sort of show and tell. Before turning in we shared some bread and vodka. He even wished me goodnight.
7. Don’t be afraid to converse with fellow passengers. Some of the most fascinating conversations and lessons on Ukrainian culture I’ve had occurred while riding the rails. Plus, Ukrainians are great conversationalists.
*
A friend visiting from New York was on the train with me for the first time in Ukraine. We had no intention of drinking alcohol while aboard, having spent most of the previous night out doing just that. But three English-speaking Ukrainian men had other plans for us. They pulled bottles of beer from their packs to share with us, and we chatted well past lights out about cultural traditions, keeping one eye on the wagon door in case the police passed by.
8. Drinking aboard the train is great fun and an essential part of the experience. The secret is not to make it too obivous. Ukrainians often times hide vodka in flasks or juice bottles. You could also keep your beer at your side rather than on the table in plain view. Technically, it’s illegal to drink aboard the trains. But many people do it, and almost everyone tolerates it. Just don’t be an obnoxious tourist and all will be well.
*
In August of 2010, I had some friends over for the weekend at my apartment in Artemovsk. Over dinner and drinks, my pal Walter told me a funny story about a train he’d taken from Djankoi to Lugansk.
“It’s hot, right, because it’s summer and the trains are crammed full of people,” he said. “So I take off my pants, fold them and set them on top of my shoes next to the bed. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up in the morning, they’re gone. No idea where they ran off. I made it to Lugansk, but without any shoes and pants.”
9. Keep your bags tucked away and your valuables on your person. Having a bottom berth is best, since you can stow your luggage directly beneath you. Riding the trains in Ukraine isn’t particularly dangerous, nor is there a great risk of having your posessions stolen while you’re sleeping. But these things do happen from time to time. When it comes down to it, just use common sense.