There are a few more pictures from these buried in blog posts, but these are all of the image galleries I’ve posted since I’ve been here. Enjoy.
Kyoto and Osaka, Japan
North Island, New Zealand
East Coast, Australia
Kumarakom, Kerala, India
Mysore, Karnataka, India
Sweden and Ireland
Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India
Tokyo, Japan
Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India
South Indian Hindu Wedding, Bangalore, Karanata, India
Favorite pictures from throughout Ukraine
Add comment April 15th, 2008
I went through the thousands of pictures I took while in Ukraine and edited down to 42 photos. I put lengthy captions on each and turned it into a little web-based slideshow. The captions will be in the bottom left corner and they’re probably worth reading so that you know what you’re looking at.
Slideshow of pictures from Ukraine
3 comments July 5th, 2007
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
Last Wednesday was a holiday in Ukraine. On the calendar it says “Victory Day” and this apparently has something to do with WWII. I’m no historian, I’m just a stereotypical stupid American that knows absolutely nothing about the history or values of other countries. Anyway. In doing a bit of research about Shashlyk this evening I’ve discovered it is actually a food; a food that we ate LOTS of on this very day. It’s basically just lamb kebabs. But the marinade and seasoning and extra helping of fat make it AWEsome. Anyway. The guys from Lohika cooked up a storm and fed Heather and I like king and queen.
Markiyan picked us up for this BBQ. It was being held at some privately-owned park outside of town. I have no idea what the name of the park was but it was several miles outside of town and cost something like 10hra per car to enter in addition to, I think, 160hra to reserve our little booth. All in all the place was nice. When Markiyan picked us up we got to meet his wife and his baby. Markiyan is a complete workaholic. So much so that most people didn’t even know he had a baby, the munchkin pictured here. Isn’t that the cutest picture you’ve ever seen? Yeah I thought so too.
Here, I’ve got one more of him and then two of Ivan’s baby to share with you.
This was one of the funniest things I saw on this day. Throughout the forest where our little setup was there were these little signs that say… Well I have no idea what they say but it’s pretty obvious what they mean. 500 hryvna is approximately $100. I walked to the actual bathroom.
Oh look it’s big bad Heather! This isn’t terribly relevant to the post but she was there, and I took this picture there, and it’s a nice picture. So you get it.
One other important piece of Shashlyk day is that you drink lots of горілка (pronounced: hor-eel-ka; translation: vodka). We pretty much drank that all day. When we got home around 8:30 that evening I was definitely under the influence. All-in-all it was fantastic to get to take part in this tradition. The food was really really good and we had an all-around good time.
1 comment May 16th, 2007
It has happened. We’ve been here long enough. We went to Kyiv (київ) last weekend, the capital of Ukraine. We took the overnight train (sleeper car) on the way there and the express on the way back. When we got home I was thinking about what funny things happened on that trip and none came to mind. I thought about it some more and came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing normal about that trip; I have just grown immune to the former-oddities of Ukraine.
This morning we lost hot water again. The water pressure has been tapering off over the last week, indicating with near certainty that the water filter is clogged. This morning it was cold shower or no shower. I opted to clean the filter myself. I turned off the water main, pulled the filter, cleaned the sand and chunks of rust out of it and put it all back together. Nice hot shower.
Though I didn’t learn nearly as much of the language as I wanted to I think I can safely say that I’ve assimilated into this country as far as I need to. It was -a lot- of fun. I’ve got a few more things to write about and pictures to share before I officially declare us departed from Ukraine. We fly home in 6 days on Tuesday, May 22.
Add comment May 16th, 2007
This morning a wonderful thing happened: Sashko from L’viv Offroad messaged me and asked me if I wanted to go 4 wheeling. You bet I wanted to go. Ever since seeing their photo gallery I wanted to head out to the trails with them. The picture here was taken from the truck as we sped along one of the trails.
One of the reasons I made up to my boss for coming to Ukraine was that I could improve communication between Ukraine and San Bruno. Today I should have taken a taste of my own medicine but I goofed. Sashko speaks english. Perfectly adequate actually, but there’s always room for misunderstanding. He told me to be at the end of lychakivska street at 2:00. I looked at my map, found the end of the street, I was good to go. Around 1:00 he called me and said he was going to call me a half hour before our meeting time. This seemed odd to me but I thought nothing of it. At 2:40 I called him and asked him where he was. He said that the Polish people we were going to wheel with were out and about and wouldn’t be ready until closer to 5 or 6. After explaining to him I was already at the end of lychakivska street he said “ok, I’ll be there in 10 minutes.” Weird.
15 minutes later he called and asked “where are you?” “Umm, I’m at the end of lychakivska street, near the big wall, and they’re selling beer here and…” “Oh you’re at the -beginning- of lychakivska street.” D’oh! I love this place!
After finally meeting up with Sashko we hung out in his truck at the park I met him at for a bit and looked at pictures from his last wheeling trip. The club had spent 2 whole weeks cruising through the Carpathian mountains. The pictures were great and it was a trip I wish I could have attended. Halfway through the pictures a random guy walked up to the truck and started talking shop to Sashko. This is pretty similar to California: nerds at gas stations will come up to you and start pretending they know something about 4 wheeling. But this guy was persistent. After a few minutes he walked away. Not more than 3 minutes later he came back, with 3 ice cream bars in hand, one for himself, one for Sashko and one for me. At some point Sashko grew tired of this guy and basically just drove off, ice cream in hand. Random wannabe truck dudes never buy me ice cream back home.
Unfortunately most of the snow around here is long gone and we only had a few hours in the late afternoon to get any wheeling in. But it was worth it. It’s spring time in L’viv and that means that all of the formerly-leafless trees around here are completely green. The trees only seem to have leaves near the tops and so when you’re underneath them you get the feeling you’re under a roof of sorts. Compared to the rest of L’viv, the airports we’ve been at lately and the bustling city of Bangalore this was a sight I truly enjoyed
The main difference between 4 wheeling in Ukraine and 4 wheeling in California is that in Ukraine you can truly go wherever you want. In California venturing off the trails will (rightfully) leave you with a fine at a minimum. Here it’s how you get from where you are to where you want to be. The other difference is that the rigs here are a little closer to mild compared to what, for example, NorCal TTORA is used to. But this seems to be related to the fact that the trails (and land in between trails) here are much different. There aren’t any boulders to climb over, just ruts to stay out of.
The trails we were running weren’t all that far from the beaten path. In the bay area you need to drive for around 90 minutes to get somewhere where you can drive off-road. Here in L’viv you need to drive about 5 minutes from the center and you’re in this completely different world. There are little, I guess they’re villages, out here and one of the houses had this car parked out front. It’s a pretty sweet ride.
The last stop on our wheelin’ journey was a place to BBQ up some grub. We had grabbed some sausages from a local shop on the way in. It’s weird to buy meat that isn’t refrigerated. And milk that isn’t refrigerated. I stuck to the meat, the milk has messed with me before. So far so good on the meat front, and it was good. Quite good. Yummy sausages. Anyway. We stopped to eat in front of this really big rock. People slightly younger than me come up here to do rock climbing. There were some guys trying really challenging routes but there wasn’t a good photo op. This guy was trying a route not much more difficult than climbing a ladder but he yielded some neat pictures, this one being my favorite.
1 comment May 5th, 2007
We boarded our flight to India at around 9:00AM this morning in L’viv. We were let on the plane after a large group of special needs children boarded. I mumbled to Heather that when I registered this domain name, wackytravels.com, I hadn’t ever imagined travels this wacky.
In general all of the children on the plane were well behaved. I had an aisle seat on the left side of the plane. To my right and one row back was a young girl from the aforementioned group, in the aisle seat. Maybe 10 seconds after our wheels left the ground I heard coughing. No, it was choking. Then I heard, yes, she was throwing up. Luckily she brought her own bag, the little barf bag in the seat back in front of her probably wouldn’t have held this in. Around 5 minutes after we finished our in-flight meal. Yep. And the second the pilot began putting down the flaps to land; you guessed it. This poor little girl vomitted 3 times in one 2 hour airplane ride.
Our transfer through Frankfurt was without incident. We were packed into cattle class on our Lufthansa flight and didn’t really enjoy any of it.
We arrived in India and found that the baggage claim area was roughly large enough to fit the luggage from a small, single-engine Cessna. We flew in on a 747. But. Our bags flew with us! Wahoo! This is mostly due to my insistence that the Ukraine airport people make sure our bags were checked through to Bangalore. They wanted us to go pull them out of the baggage claim in Frankfurt and then re-check them in for our second leg of the flight.
Our driver from the park hotel met us where he should have and we began cruising to the hotel. I thought driving was bad in Ukraine. Here are a few of the lessons I learned for driving in Bangalore:
1 comment April 17th, 2007
We leave tomorrow morning for the second part of my expat journey. First we spend 2 hours on the flight to Frankfurt. If our plane lands on time we’ll have an hour to go through security, twice, on our switch from terminal 2 to terminal 1. Then we board a plane for our 8 hour journey to Bangalore, India. While here we’ll be visiting the city a little bit, searching for apartments slightly more and I’ll be interviewing engineering candidates for IronPort Bangalore the most.
On April 29th we return to Ukraine to live out the remaining ~24 days we have here. I think I can safely say that we’ll both miss this place; it’s awesome people and memorable scenery are hard not to love. This picture here is of Ivan and his wife; awesome people.
Add comment April 16th, 2007
This past Sunday Heather and I took advantage of the warm weather and toured the city, tourist style. Heather had her SF State sweater on and I my UCSC sweater. Two people correctly guessed, the first time, that they were better off speaking english to us than anything else.
This was one of the guys that guessed English as the primary language to try to communicate with me. His name was Dima and he let me take his picture. He was pretty good on the bike. The lousy photographer (me) isn’t showing you that that ledge is a good 4′ tall and that he hopped not only down it but up it.
This is a little tiny window in the side of a rather large tower. More pictures from the top of the tower in the next paragraph. In the mean time let’s play where’s the Mc Donald’s. I promise there’s one in there.
I promised a view from the top and I’m a man of my word. This is like 3 or 4 pictures “stitched” together to make a rather large panoramic view of this portion of the city, taken from the top of the tower. I don’t know the names of most of the buildings below so I won’t try to make them up here. I do know that the red roof to the left is a fire station. The big green dome near the center is a church. In this image I encourage you to play “Count the churches.” I counted 4.
A top high castle you can rent binoculars for 50 kopecks (That’s like 50 cents but really only 10 cents). These two girls, believed to be tourists from some other portion of Ukraine or perhaps Poland, decided to rent them. And look at the same thing. At the same time. And I thought that was funny.
This is a statue you can find roughly halfway up the hill to high castle. There are lots of stories and folklore and history surrounding high castle. I remember only pieces of some of the stories. The story I remember (here comes folklore) says that Leo (Gosh I hope I at least got the name right) helped to conquer the city of L’viv (then called something else) from some other group. Then the city was named after Leo, which I guess translates to L’viv, and all revolves around a Lion. Recall, of course, that the ‘ in L’viv is not an apostrophe. It means to make the ‘L’ sound soft. The actual spelling of L’viv, in Cyrillic, is: львів. The little ‘b’ there means, again, to make the ‘L’ soft.
Today they were apparently filming an episode of world’s strongest group of men. That or the bus really broke down on this small hill near city center. Either way this was one of those sights you don’t see at home.
After wandering through all of the places I’ve already shown pictures of we walked to the “bottom” of the center (furthest from the opera house) where they had a live concert going on. This little guy was rocking out to the tunes. He had cleared this whole row on the stairs where people were sitting as he danced about. To make this a truly multimedia experience I’ve even got
some music for you.
Sometime between this picture and the next one we went to dinner at the worst restaurant in L’viv. I point this out only because it’s also the most expensive restaurant we’ve found in L’viv. It’s at the Grand Hotel’s Sophia Club (софія) and it’s called Alpaca. They advertise Latin American food. I have been craving burritos like you wouldn’t believe since coming here so we decided to try this out. I knew it would be upscale but I didn’t know -how- upscale. We started with $10 nachos. The presentation was great. There were like 15 chips, partially melted cheese and pieces of beans. They were cold in the middle. Think freezer cold; far beyond room temperature. The beer was Stella Artois; yep, the same stuff they sell at home. They didn’t have a single Ukrainian beer in the house. We ordered the “Fajitas for Two” as our entree. I chose the Chicken ones since they were the cheapest at a cool $15, one of the most expensive things I’ve bought in this country. They were awful. Heather spent the next morning on the toilet.
After a fantastic day just being tourists we headed home. The clouds overhead were looking rather nifty and with my camera all set for nighttime “shooting from the hip” (Heather calls these stalker photos) I snapped this photo of one of the streets we walk on to get home from the center.
1 comment April 16th, 2007
While working here in Ukraine I’ve made it a goal of mine to teach these guys some english that they wouldn’t otherwise ever hear in their english lessons. Today Evgen let me know he found some krufty code by saying:
This crap be borked, yo
How awesome is that?
4 comments April 3rd, 2007
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