Traveling to київ (Kyiv)
The capital of україн (Ukraine) is київ (Kyiv). Like львів (L’viv), київ has both a Ukrainian spelling and a Russian spelling. київ is Ukrainian, кїев (Kiev) is Russian (For those of you not paying attention in earlier postings, львів is львов in Russian and that sometimes becomes Lvov and Lwow in transliterations). This weekend I also learned another difference in the languages. Juice is сік in Ukrainian and сок in Russian. Aren’t you glad that you too know this? I thought so. The word for beer in Ukrainian is пиво. If you’re learning to read cyrillic, like me, this is pronounced sort of like “pee-vo.” This is apparently the Russian pronunciation. Don’t do that. It’s pronounced with a slight “ey” in the “ee.” So try “pey-vo”. But it’s more pee than pey. This picture is of a church. I don’t know what it’s name is but I do know where it is: it’s on the long street that has all of the little tents to buy tourist stuff at. One of you lucky readers may even get a gift that I bought on this very street. Most won’t 
.
We took the overnight train to Kyiv. The train left at 10:55PM on Friday night and was to arrive at 7:15 on Saturday morning. The trains in Ukraine are remarkably well on time. Accurate to within 2 minutes I’d say. We were ~30 minutes early and walked up to a conductor with our tickets in hand. I gave the international signal for “where am I supposed to go with this ticket?” and the condutor replied, in Ukrainian “something something сім something something.” Notice I caught сім (sim)? That’s the number 7. So I repeated back сім? and pointed. I was wrong. The “something” words were important. Eventually she wrote down 18 on the paper and pointed. Got it.
We went down to our car, showed the conductor our tickets with confidence we were in the right place and were admitted aboard. Now where do we go? I looked back at the conductor and without saying anything he held up 5 fingers. Room 5 it is.
Heather and I began making our beds. We had the two top bunks in the room. Making the bed involves unrolling a mattress of sorts on top of your pleather cot-like bed. Then put a sheet down. Then put the other sheet down. Then put your pillow case on your pillow. Ok you’re done.
After an interesting evening with bursts of sleep separated by jarring movements on the train or waking up from being too hot (it was HOT in this little room) we arrived in Kyiv. We walked out to the street and saw the first McDonalds of the day, called our resident tourguide Olga (Did you know that Olga is the english way of saying олга (olha) and that a very common nickname is оля (olya)) and began our day. It was 7:30am.
I should warn you that Olga isn’t actually a tour guide. She’s one of my friends from Lohika that was relocated to Kyiv just a week ago. She too had never toured Kyiv and so we were on a mission to see some tourist sites. As proof she’s not a real tour guide: would a real tour guide be looking at a map like this? Anyway. Olga is also the person that did the brunt of the work in helping me find an apartment on my first trip here. She is one of the people that made the difference between me going home 2 weeks into this journey and me surviving and eventually coming to like this country.
We walked around for a bit and spotted this HUGE McDonalds. Ok it’s not all McDonalds, but they put McDonalds signs all over it. We went down (underground) into a little mall in front of this McDonalds for breakfast. I picked out some “point” food from a vendor down there. Heather and Olga got food you had to order from a different food-court restaurant. My food was awful. It was cooked yesterday for sure. It was disgusting. I stopped eating. Olga later asked me what I was expecting. It was 8:30 in the morning, when did I think they cooked the food? Hmm. Interesting point she makes.
Kyiv is much much different from L’viv. The city has tall buildings that are more or less new. Kyiv is a terribly old city but because much of it was destroyed in the war they had the opportunity to rebuild. L’viv was not as (un)fortunate and is an incredibly old city. In addition most of the cars you see driving around Kyiv are reasonably new. Most of the cars you see in L’viv are from the ’70s or so. Our hotel was just a block away from a Maserati dealership. On Sunday I saw a Ferrari hauling down a road. Which should lead you to think, rightfully so, that the roads in Kyiv are paved with asphault and only in a few rare places are there cobblestone. All in all it’s a much more modern city that feels much more wealthy than L’viv.
For those of you that weren’t paying attention Ukraine had its fair share of fun in the news lately. Immediately after that there were “huge” political protests being held by supporters of each side of the debate. They all camped out in front of various political buildings throughout the city and staged protests and all sorts of political crap. I say crap, and I mean it, because this was total BS. The two sides involved in this whole thing were going to colleges and offering college students 100hra/day ($20) to come to Kyiv and protest on their side. Take the weekends off and you’re making $400/mon, more than enough for a college student to survive in Ukraine. This is awful. The vast majority of these protesters cared not about what was going on, they were just there to make a buck. How corrupt can you get? Plus they’re ruining the grass in this park.
Here we have half of the escalator trip up from the metro (the subway). You can’t get a picture of the whole thing because it stops in the middle, you walk 30 yards and then get back on another escalator. Suffice it to say this subway is very “sub.”
On Sunday afternoon we headed back to the Kyiv train station to catch the express train at 5:15 pm back to L’viv. It’s express because it’s a 6-hour ride instead of the more-usual 8. This was also our chance to give our first good byes. This was our second to last weekend in Ukraine and so we won’t be seeing Olga nor her husband Yuriy again. I’m trying to convince them to come visit us in California some day though.
The train ride home was mostly uneventful. Or at least that’s how I remember it. As I said in my first post of today we’re pretty numb to Ukraine now and the things that were funny and odd and stuck out are hardly noticeable anymore.
Add comment May 16th, 2007
