Posts filed under 'Ukraine'
Yesterday afternoon Bohdan came over and we walked to a nearby soccer field where I got to fly my helicopter for the first time in Ukraine and for the first time over snow. The flight went well. I got inverted a few times and flew out of a couple of nasty situations without crashing. A few folks stopped to watch but nothing more than I normally get back home (this is a good thing).
Then we went to pizza. This is one of the many “New York” pizza places called Pizza Verona. They actually spell pizza піца and that’s pronounced “pea-cha”. The pizza was pretty good but its not a whole lot like any new york pizza I’ve ever had before. It’s round. And it has thin crust. But they use a different cheese, and sauce, and their salami ain’t any salami I’ve ever seen before. So it’s different, but it’s good, добрий (d’oh-bray, don’t forget to trill your ‘r’).
From pizza we raced against the setting sun up to a place they call “high castle”. It’s the highest point in the city, around 400m above the pizza place, Bohdan tells me. They have a huge antenna up on top of the hill. We walk briskly through some very old neighborhoods, past a ~300 year old church and through another neighborhood, past a fancy restaurant and then, up ~500 stairs. At the top of the stairs it levels off and you see the base of the antenna. Then you can also see the high castle, 300m ahead and at least 100m above you. We continue walking briskly past many couples; this is obviously the hot spot to take your woman for a nice night out. Don’t worry, Heather, I can find it again, it’s hard to miss. Once atop the high castle you can see all of downtown L’viv as well as the outlying areas. From the old Austrian-era buildings to the newer Russian-era buildings (the difference is stark).
After that (I’m telling you, they’re keeping me busy here) we went over to Roman’s house to watch some movies. Bohdan said we’d watch, I think I’m remembering this correctly, “Leon the Killer” since that movie they had english audio for. It turns out that this is actually the movie “The Professional” with Natalie Portman from when she was a little girl. After that we watched a movie that was in english but was dubbed over in Ukrainian. I mostly just watched the pictures.
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Today went well. The walk to work this morning, though cold as always, was under blue skies. At lunch time Markiyan and I went to a place nearby that he apparently goes to quite often. I’m not sure exactly what I ate. It had meat in it, I think pork, some cheese and tomato slices. I had mashed potatoes on the side. They were both pretty darn good. The rest of the day went as usual. I had hoped to take advantage of my lack of evening meetings to leave work during daylight and walk home. Instead the sun set faster than I expected (i.e. I lost track of time) and it was dark. Yuriy came by and asked if I was leaving soon and I decided to leave then so I could walk down the “scary” street with him. I don’t find it particularly scary myself, but I’ve been warned not to walk it alone after dark.
After arriving at home I had to decide whether to cook the three potato pancakes I still had in the freezer (I nearly ruined the pan the last time I tried), find a place to buy groceries at 9pm or go buy dinner. I opted to go buy dinner. I went in search of an ATM and came up empty handed. I found a nice looking cafe (кафе I think that is pronounced more like kaffy than cafe) with stickers for credit cards in the window and decided to eat there. Remembering my last experience at a restaurant here by myself I went in with a different attitude. I was screwed and I knew it.
The folks in L’viv (at least near my apt) are apparently so not used to having tourists come in that the completely glazed over look in my eyes and constant shaking of my head doesn’t trigger any alarms. Usually the first few english words I say “english?” don’t even tip them off. I sat down at a table and was given a menu, in Ukrainian. I looked it over, beginning to recognize a few words like coca cola (кока кола), but still completely unable to find food. I could tell based on the menu that there was definitely food there. I grabbed my Ukrainian phrase book out of my pocket and pointed, while we both laughed, to “dinner” in the book. She said they didn’t have dinner. So I pointed to “food?”. No, no food here. What the? I can see food! She left and another came running over. She yapped off something in Ukrainian. Or maybe she tried Polish or Russian on me. I couldn’t tell the difference. Then she said “you speak english?” “YES!” the whole cafe heard me say. Ahh. Thank god, she spoke english. She told me that have only pizza. Pizza!? Fantastic. добрий. She picked the first pizza in the menu and translated the ingredients for me. Sounded great. I ordered a pizza and a beer. This pizza was good. Quite good. They use mozzarella here and the crust is pretty good. The chicken, red bell peppers, olives and mushrooms were all fine. The pizza was good. I ate what I could leaving only one slice behind.
She brought me my check and I showed her my Visa. No dice. Despite the Visa stickers on the window they don’t take cards. Yikes, I only have 5 Hra and I owe 18. I had $5 USD in my pocket, worth around 25 Hra. She asked someone something and said I could pay with that and they’d give me change. Nice. So I had pizza and a beer for $5, including the large 25% tip I left for her speaking english. I’ll be back.
February 19th, 2007
Yuriy has put up a nice collection of our photos from the competition. The little filmstrips show the work in progress while the singular pictures in the second half show our submissions.
Collection of Photos
February 19th, 2007
On Thursday night I finally slept through an entire night and woke up Friday morning to snow falling from the sky. This was, as most Californians think, neat to see. Then I remembered Ivan asking the night before if I wanted a ride to work on Friday. I told him no and that I’d just walk. 1.5mi in the snow. But this walk was nothing compared to the walking I’d do on Saturday.
Friday panned out as a typical day at the office. At lunch I mistakenly chose an entree of liver from the food that is catered daily to the office. Liver. Liver seems quite popular here with many people enjoying its unique flavor. I’m not a fan of liver. I felt bad not finishing my food.
Friday evening a few of the guys took me out to a local restaurant where they have live music. The place was called култ and for the rest of you non-cyrillic reading americans that’s pronounced like the english word “cult.” They had live music. It was basically a soloing violinist with a guitar, keyboard and someone else playing something I can’t remember. The violin player was quite good and even had people up dancing a few times. The first couple to attempt to dance had, as Roman put it, “started drinking long before us.” 
Saturday I got up at the crack of dawn, 8:30 AM. Yuriy and Pavlo were at my place at 9:00 to get over to the start of a photo competition we were doing that day. It was like 19 degrees when we walked out the door and I don’t think it got any warmer all day. It was ka-ka-ka-cold. We met at the top of some park in L’viv and got our instructions for the rest of the day. There were 5 titles for pictures and we were to take pictures that met each of those 5 titles. I can’t remember them all but there was something like a Yin-Yang, “Something Soft”, “There was snow”, “Mobile Love”, “The World has no Love”. In addition to that there was a clue for where to meet someone at 1:00. When we met that guy he gave us a 6th picture to take: “Nude.”
So we left the meeting area to start the competition. Yuriy knew I was freezing so we went straight to a shop to have some tea and talk about what we were going to take pictures of. We headed down to the city center (downtown) and while standing around I snapped this shot of a bus going by. The first few times I saw these buses I couldn’t help but laugh. How many people did they smash into that thing?
Notice where they’ve wiped off the condensation on the inside so that they can actually see out. Not doing this would surely result in your riding the bus all day. There are no scheduled stops for the buses. They stop either when you ask the driver to stop or when someone wanting to get on flags him down. It costs 1 Hryvna to ride the bus, about $0.20.
Then we made it to a large, old church. The inside was absolutely beautiful, but far too dark to take any decent pictures. On the outside of the church were birds… fat birds, like these ones:
It didn’t take long to see why they’re so fat, this not-so-skinny woman came out and fed them:
The other thing to notice from this picture is the blackened wall in the background. That’s the beautiful church I was telling you about. In typical Ukrainian fashion the outside of the building is filthy and the inside is simply magnificent.
Here’s a graffiti-decorated wall.
And finally, here’s another picture of the street I live on. I can actually, sort of, pronounce the street name now. I stand a chance at getting home via taxi
February 18th, 2007
It’s my third day here in Ukraine. After going to bed at 8:00PM local time I woke up around 3AM this morning. With nothing much to do I pulled out the laptop and watched a movie. And then I pulled out bittorrent and downloaded the latest episode of American Idol. And then I watched that. And then I stared at the dark wall wondering why the street light never came back on outside. And then… you see, it was more boring than reading this blog.
The two mornings I’ve been here I’ve woken up very early. On both days, before the sun rises but I’m not sure exactly what time, you can hear someone scraping or shoveling the sidewalk. It appears that they (the government?) clean the sidewalk daily in an attempt to keep the city clean. While walking in this morning I think I’ve discovered that this is very important. Were they not to do this the sidewalks would be littered with dog shit. I shit you not Apparently they don’t have the laws that require leashed dogs nor that whole pooper scooper thing.
When the sun finally rose I called Heather and talked to her for a bit before eating breakfast and showering. I walked into the office today and logged my journey with the GPS. You can see the trip here in Google maps. Unfortunately the satelite pictures suck and the roads aren’t listed at all there. According to the GPS stats its a 1.5mi walk and it took me right around 30 minutes, door to door, to do it (I turned the GPS on “near” my apt and off “near” lohika). It’s not that I walk slow but I think there are many times where you have to stop to not get killed by the crazy drivers here.
At lunch Yuriy took me to the local grocery store. From the outside the place is a huge, modern building; it looks like a 4-story mall. Turns out the grocery store is only the bottom floor and, though nice inside, its about the size of a Trader Joe’s. I picked up some food for dinner and this should help me to avoid feeling like a worthless slob trying to order dinner from a local restaurant.
The weather was pretty warm today and the sun even showed itself through broken clouds at one point today. I’d guess it got into the 40s. However, 40 degrees in CA just feels much warmer than 40 degrees in Ukraine. It just pierces through your clothes somehow.
I gave an english lesson to the UI dev team today. I defined the words “chit chat”, “dude”, “dude-ette” and “she-dude.” Engaging in casual conversation with a lot of these guys I can see their eyes glaze over just as mine do when folks start talking in Ukrainian. Talking slow and using common words seems to help.
February 15th, 2007
Imagine walking down an unlit cobblestone sidewalk to a not-entirely-known destination where you think you’ll find dinner. You took a wrong turn, try the other way. Wrong turn again, try the -other- way? Ok, you’ve found the restaurant to eat at, order what you want. None of the waitstaff speak english, maybe the person next to you does? He does, he can translate an order for you. Just pay and sit down. The restaurant is busy, people sit down next to you at your table but you can’t understand a word they’re saying to each other. Your food comes, you eat, the food is good, you leave. You walk back down an unlit cobbstone sidewalk to your apartment, in the rain.
In the world of expats they talk about the “honeymoon” phase where new expats are usually very excited and happy to be in an entirely new place for the first few weeks. After that they usually enter some sort of period where they’re unhappy, perhaps even depressed. They realize all of the home-comforts that they’re now missing and its as though reality sets in.
It’s different here.
February 14th, 2007
I’ve been pretty careful to make sure that all of the things I’m plugging into my 1 little power adapter are 220V safe. Last night I tried plugging in a power strip. I figured this way I could use my 1 power adapter to get 6 sockets with american plugs @ 220V. Sounds like a great idea, no?
Apparently my power strip is only rated for 110V and this, for some reason, matters. When I flipped it on sparks flew to celebrate the lights going out. After a few phone calls (thanks, Ivan) I found the circuit breaker. However, I was unable to actually flip the breaker back. Everytime I clicked it over it would immediately break again. Thankfully Ivan called the landlord and the husband-wife combo strolled out to my place around 9pm to fix the breaker. I have no idea what he did differently from me but I have internet again. Thank goodness for such nice people.
This morning I decided I needed breakfast. I walked around a few nearby blocks looking for places to eat. I found a few bars but none of your typical breakfast eateries. Then I found a little tiny grocery store. I looked all over before finding a few (literally) boxes of cereal on a top shelf. I grabbed one and then asked for “milk.” The woman knew what I wanted (I found later that the word in Ukrainian is pronounced mi-lo-ko). It cost me 14 Hryvna, roughly $3, for a liter of milk and a box of cereal. Not bad.
February 14th, 2007
A mostly uneventful pair of flights has dropped me here in L’viv, Ukraine. I’ve now mastered the run from where United flights arrive and Ukraine International Airline flights depart. It took me no more than ~15 minutes to navigate through the poorly marked terminals. Getting to the departure gate quickly is important: by the time you get off of the flight from SFO in Frankfurt you have no more than 45 minutes until your scheduled departure to LWO (L’viv). The most amazing part of this transfer was that my 4 checked bags actually made it as well. Fantastic. The trip here couldn’t have been any smoother.
It’s cold out but not terribly cold. Somewhere between 35 and 40 degrees I’d guess. There are a few inches of snow on the ground everywhere but it has been light rain since I arrived. I imagine it will snow tonight.
I do have internet at the apartment. Between the folks at Lohika and the landlords (two incredibly nice people, feels like grandparents) the internet was all setup including a wireless access point just for me. Talk about awesome. The apartment furniture has been moved around a bit since the last set of pictures I sent around but its more or less the same. I now know how the themostat works (just turn up the water heater), how to reset the water heater after a power outage and that someone will come once a month to read the electricity and water meters (the meters are inside the apt). I even know where to take the garbage (about a block down the road there’s a massive row of garbage cans for the neighborhood). It’s different here.
I purposely didn’t sleep on any of the flights over and now having been up for more than 24 hours straight I’m feeling pretty damn tired. My goal is to push myself to near exhaustion so that I can sleep an entire night my first night here. I’m not exactly a seasoned world traveler yet so we’ll see how this pans out.
February 13th, 2007
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