Grave concern

On the list of surreal things I've seen in my life, this one is right up there.

One of the company classes I teach is at a fairly swish, new office block in town. It's a somewhat incongruous glass and steel building in amongst the charming brick buildings in this part of town, but unfortunately very much par for the course in this part of the world. Anyway, when I was there on Monday I noticed large, dark shiney blue and purple curtains being hung up. A bit dark and foreboding but not much in itself. However, when I arrived for my class yesterday morning I had to double take as I walked-"isn't that . . . a coffin". The first split-second was spent ascertaining that there was no one in it, and it turned out that the entire lobby has been handed over to become an undertaker's showroom selling what looks to be fairly expensive hardware, complete with a tall and scary looking dark-suited gentleman. The staff of TNK-BP now have to walk through this every day on their way in. Perhaps it doesn't hurt to have a daily reminder of the inevitable. The thing is, my students are at least as shocked as I am about it all. Apparently the building has been bought by a tycoon who wants TNK-BP to relocate. Is this his strategy one wonders?

Ukraine is not dull

Protestants

On Friday someone said to me "there's going to be another revolution on Saturday". However, when Saturday came it was more of a political rally, or rather two political rallies. Pro-Russian prime minister Yanukovich had bussed in 80 busloads of 'protesters' from Eastern Ukraine. The pro-western opposition supporters gathered during the afternoon in the now infamous independence square. Bizarrely, it seemed that most of these people had in some way been paid to attend these events. You never know if this is true or just cynical sniping from the other side, although there was a fairly convincing story of a guy who came up from Donetsk and was promised 20 dollars for protesting and, as you can imagine, was then not paid. As a friend said to me "they'll vote for him anyway-they're like sheep!" The pro-Russian brigade have continued to protest throughout the week following President Yushchenko's decree that parliament be dissolved, on the grounds that Yanukovich is illegally strengthening his majority in parliament through defections. In Ukraine, under the constitution, MPs are not free to switch sides as they are in, say, the UK. This is almost certainly because MPs here can be easily 'bought' by various means. The President says he had no choice. On the one hand I thought he shouldn't be steamrollering a democratically-elected government just because it's one we don't like. On the other hand, when you look into it you pretty soon find gross distortion of a fragile and vulnerable system. If the President doesn't act soon, another chance might not come. So let's hope the constitutional court rules in his favour. New elections would take place at the end of May.

Dodgy textbook

I challenged my teenage advanced class to come up with the dodgiest local textbook they could find, and they have not disappointed me. Here are some of my favourite extracts so far:

"You can get ahead start".

For fellow teachers/grammarians:
"On June 28, 1996 the Supreme Rada of Ukraine has adopted the Constitution of Ukraine". (ouch!)

Whilst reading a book:
"I idly turned the leaves".*
*in Russian leaves and pages is the same word.

A typical Soviet English conversation:

Customer: One loaf of white bread, please.
Shop-assistant: Sorry, but it isn't fresh.
Customer: What is fresh?
Shop-assistant: Only buns are.
Customer: Two buns, please.
Shop-assistant: Here you are. 10 copecks, please.

:)

Winterreise

I've written very little on here for some time, so I thought I'd give a quick rundown of a very short Ukrainian winter

"Don't think he knows about Second Christmas . . ."

It was a rare treat to enjoy not just one, but two Christmases, on the 25th (the 'real' one) and the Orthodox one. Not only that, but a week later I was told it was 'Old New Year'. This has something to do with the change of the calendar. By now I was getting really quite confused. A friend of mine in Belarus told me "don't be surprised if there's a third Christmas and New Year".

Journey into the unknown (and potentially uninteresting)

Another friend of mine was visiting at the time and we travelled on the suburban train to Nizhin (НІЖИН). It's only about as far as Peterborough is from London but it took a good two and a half hours both ways. It turned out to be a good place to visit, and someone we met on the train gave up their afternoon to show us around the town, university and churches. The Greeks were here apparently and it had given the place a bit of a Greek feel, particularly in the architecture of the churches. I was pleased to be able to convert a visitor to the delights of Mister Snek and, in particular, the Chicken Deluxe.

When winter finally came . . .

Around February the temperatures finally plunged below zero and the really winter had begun. I had thought that Ukraine, which has experienced such temperatures annually from the dawn of time, would be well-prepared for the winter. How wrong I was. When it's really icy just getting home can seem like running the gauntlet. How could they have chosen such unsuitable materials (smooth marble) for steps outside metro stations, and how does no one know about salt or grit, when even England's winter-ineptness still allows for gritting of pavements and the like? The basic mentality seems to be 'it won't happen to me'. The most treacherous night was when the temperature had warmed up just enough for rain to fall onto snow, which then froze and became like a shiny, slippery film of ice over everything, as if a tribe of giant snails had left their mark. The snow boots I'd bought (or rather had bought for me) in England were by no means a luxury, although most people seem to struggle along with normal footwear, slipping and sliding along and riding their luck as ever.

Feel Being Ukrainian!

If you examine the picture more closely you'll see that the sign previously said "Fill Yourself Ukrainian", so I suppose this is an improvement.

Good morning

Just to prove that romance is not dead as such (although struggling to express itself somewhat).

Graffiti from the front door of the block where I'm currently staying.

The best pop star ever

Ok, while I can still just about get away with this . . .



YES, Tina Karol surely has to be the best pop star ever!



With only one small problem . . .

The songs are rubbish (bless her).

But, I don't mind this one (courtesy of youtube):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE3tN0Oh8Uc


Cool!

Border Junkie

Ever since I started traveling around continental Europe I've been fascinated by the concept of overland borders. I mean, when you're from England (excluding the borders with the other home nations) you basically grow up with the view of the world that there is us, the sea, and after that other countries, foreigners etc. My most recent journey, a return trip to England for my sister's wedding, included several crossings, and took me to one or two slightly unusual places. I probably won't put loads of wedding stuff on a blog about Ukraine, but I will happily put a link to some photos and stuff when they appear. Anyway, it was fab. I'm afraid I have indulged my trainspotter instincts with the attached map (well, this is a blog afterall). Click on it to enlarge and fully appreciate its greatness.

Dual gauge track at Chop. I find that good.

Chop and change
First stop after Kiev (17 hours after Kiev) was Chop (variously Чоп, Csop or Čop-depending on whether you are Ukrainian/Russian, Hungarian or Slovak). The place is crawling with mafia and, apart from that, there's not too much to say. That is, until you actually want to leave the place. Just before trying to board the train to Záhony (which turns out to be the equivalent dirgy border town on the Hungarian side) I was hauled up by passport control. The reason was that the Ukrainians themselves had not stamped the passport clearly when I entered the country at Kiev's Borispil airport. There then followed an endless stream of questions about what I had been doing in Ukraine, all completely unecessary as a much clearer version of the exact same stamp was on the immigration card right in front of them! I looked certain to miss my train but, with little more than a minute left, they handed me back my passport as if there had been no problem! Once you're on the train it rumbles along on a piece of track that more resembles an old goods siding than a major international rail route! At times the train dared not go a lot more than 5mph. But eventually I was back in Hungary and ready to board an intercity to the capital. Civilisation had arrived? Unfortunately no. The Nyíregyháza to Budapest intercity was running 90 minutes late!

Impressive station building at Chop . . .

. . . but that one's just for local trains. This is the serious one.

Bilingual street name in Chop.

Pipes across the street, whilst unsightly, do provide useful advertising space.

Wien there, done that (eventually)
The next overland border was the easily crossable one from Bratislava to Vienna. My new employers had requested that I pick up a work visa before re-entering the country. "But we don't need visas now", I said naively? "No, but if you don't have one you're working illegally", they replied. So, the orginal idea was to pick one up in the UK. Apparently the Ukrainian Consulate in Edinburgh accepts faxed copies of the employer's invitation. I salivated at the idea of a trip to Scotland thrown in at my company's expense, but alas the procedure would've been simply to despatch the visa to me via DHL. Anyway, I had already booked a flight back from England to Slovakia so we thought 'ok, we can do it there'. Turns out the Ukrainian Embassy in Slovakia never answers the telephone and is generally useless so, I thought, why don't I just go to Vienna? It's an easy one hour journey these days from Bratislava. As I made the journey early on the morning of 9th November I reflected that this border crossing, having been the iron curtain, just a decade and a half ago probably much closer resembled the Chop experience. How times change. Anyway eventually I found my way to the affluent suburb where the Ukrainian embassy is located, some walk away from the nearest S-Bahn station. Many countries have large embassies here because of the various international organisations located in Vienna with their manifold abbreviations. So I arived half an hour into the consular opening hours (9-12) and enquired about the fax from Ukraine. The person whose name I'd been given seemed to know nothing at all about me, and they insisted they had no fax, so I walked away dejected, and trying to send an email via my wap phone (internet cafés in Vienna are few and far between) to IH (my language school) along the lines of 'where is this fax???' Eventually I went back to the consulate and hunga round, hoping that my presence would at the very least distract them from their sudoku enought that they might actually look for this thing. There was a fax that was eventually picked up and examined, although it was so dark as to be unreadable. Eventually it was resent, and readable, and I had a pleasant few hours to kill before collecting my pasport/visa in the afternoon.

New place where we pich our tents
On the journey back from Bratislava to Kiev I took in both the Tatras and the Ukrainian Carpathians. I took the morning intercity train Kriváň from Bratislava to Košice and had a couple of hours to spare in the centre of Košice, which from previous visits I knew is never a bad thing. I was able to visit one of the unique Slovak baguette shops that have sprung up in recent times and are actually rather good. However I was already getting tired by this time and feared that my objective of getting to Uzhgorod (Ужгород, Ungvár, Užhorod etc. etc.) was a little too optimistic. Its delights would have to wait for another time. So I thought about where else I could stop for the night, and the answer was soon clear to me. If I left the train from Košice to Chop at Slovenské Nové Mesto, I could either find a guesthouse of somekind or other there or wander just over the border (a border crossing is barely 100 metres from Nové Mesto station) and pop over to Sátoraljaújhely in Hungary. Of course I did the latter, and fell decisively on my feet. A couple of locals mistook my examination of a building flying the Ukrainian flag for a look of confusion. They asked what I was looking for and fortunately, when it counted, my dormant ability to communicate in semi-reasonable Hungarian did not desert me. I was directed to a small 3-room panzió which suited my needs perfectly. Of course they were delighted that I could speak Hungarian and the following day made me the biggest breakfast I have ever seen, including a fantastic omlette with gratuitous amounts of szalonna (bacon fat) in it. It did the trick. And, it tunred out the Slovak station is actually closer to the centre of the town than the official Hungarian one, so it was an easy ten minute walk to the station the next morning, including passport checks.

Čierna nad Tisou
There really is nothing to say about Čierna nad Tisou.

Закарпатя (Trans-Carpathia)
So just over the border from Čierna nad Tisou I was back in Chop and more aggrivations at the border. Definitely guilty until proven innocent here. The ticket for the 17 hours back to Kiev in a four-bed compartment was rather fun, and absurdly cheap (around 6 pund 50 nto cross half the country!). I was travelling with a lady who was a scientist of some kind, and who had been doing some lab work in Bratislava. At Mukacheve (Мукачеве, Мукачів-the Rusyn name!, or Munkács) we were joined by two Russian-speaking locals, a father and son. The son was of to make some money in Russia.Anyway the Carpathians were impressive, as I already knew of course from many trips to Romania. My friends and I had been discussing what Zakarpattya would have been called historically (by the Hungarians). Maybe Felvidék (meaning 'high country'-an old name for Slovakia, upheld by more patriotic Hungarians)? As we travelled through the mountains, it seemed a great deal more like Transylvania. When I said this to my Russian-speaking fellow traveller he replied very firmly "this is Transylvania". He had lived at one time in the northern part of Maramureş/Máramaros, the northern half of a historical county of the Hungarian kingdom that ended up partitioned between Ukraine and Romania after World War I. He and his mother told us about the flooding of the Tisza a few years ago (doubtless a scene repeated in 2006) which effectively removed the Ukraine-Romania border for several days!A journey with Ukrainians is always interesting. I can't imagine being asked about my salary and personal life on any train journey in England. Eventually as we approached Lviv the Carpathians disappeared into the night and people got themselves into bed. It was finally explained to me that the large heavy duvet was in fact a mattress designed to be placed over the bunk. Somehow I had survived three previous trips on Ukrainian trains without realising this! So I arrived at Kiev-Pass station at 5:23 the next morning, was met by the school handy man from International House, and so begins Chapter 2 of my Ukrainian adventure.

Crazy months

Ukrainian follows Czech and Lithuanian in deciding to ditch the commonly-known pagan names for the months used in the vast majority of European languages (including English) in favour of quirky names that refer to the time of year. A couple of them are very similar to the Czech ones actually, and my own suspicion is that they thought of this idea first.

січень-sichen'-'rod/pole' (??) is January

лютий-lyutii-'very cold' (also very original!) is, not surprisingly, February

березень -berezen'-'the birch month'-known to you and I as March-is pretty similar to the Czech 'březen'

квітень-kviten'-flowers-is April (Czech waits until May for this)

травень-tvaren'-May-grass (great . . . maybe it loses something in translation)

червень-cherven'-June-worms (I may look at taking my holiday around this time)

липень-lipen'--lime trees-July

серпень-serpen'-sickle-August

вересень-veresen'-heather-September (I like this one)

жовтень-zhovten'-October means 'turning yellow' (which can't be healthy at all)

листопад-listopad-November-which means 'falling leaves' (but sounds more like a type of sanitary towel) is exactly the same as in Czech.

грудень-gruden'-December-is 'frozen ground'

Well, you have to love the quirkiness anyway. Just hope, looking at these, that I somehow make it through the year . . .

Surely the funkiest building in Kiev

Today, with the help of a friend, I stumbled upon a very cool buliding in Kiev. Будинок з химерами (House with Chimaeras) is a building a few hundred yards up the hill from the city's main square. It dates from around the beginning of the 20th century and the messrs responsible were architect Vladimir Gorodetsky and Italian sculptor Emilio Sala. It was divided into floor flats-one on each floor-the top one of which was of course Gorodetsky's own. Anyway, it's cool. I particularly liked the frogs!

Why Ukrainian locks are crap

I don't count myself as superstitous at all, but it hadn't escaped my notice that, after the day's events, that it is indeed Friday 13th. I got home around half midnight this morning after a few drinks with my colleagues. So anway I walk home from Arsenalna metro station as usual, walk into my block of flats, past the 'concierge' (no I don't live in a hotel-he's more like a kind of doorman), up to my flat and . . . ah . . . why won't this damn thing open? So I try for about 20 minutes or so to unlock the door, but no luck. Then I get the doorman (who was fast asleep) up to help me. He gives it a damn good go for a good half an hour (it seems like). I suggest we call either the Landlord or my boss (moy direkter). He suggests, as I understand it, that we bring in a guy who, for about 40 US dollars, will gladly break down the door. I panic a bit at this suggestion and decide I should go out, find a phonebox, and call the boss. The doorman sees my distress and suggests I go into his flat to make the call. Several calls later the best thing I can do is book myself a space on the floor of my colleague Mark's flat, and so get a taxi across the city to унхіверситет (university) metro station, where, after a short walk, I'm really pleased to see Mark come round the corner. We have a brief but pleasant chat before settling down. I manage to get precious little sleep, maybe 2 hours or so in a very cold room, before having to rouse myself to get to the school and teach my 9.30 class, still wearing the previous day's clothes. Tnakfully at 11 I am informed that Yura, the handyman, has gone over there and sorted it out. I'm now quite liking the idea of a change of clothes. When I get over there he explains that a redundant extra lock on the door, to which I don't have a key, had somehow locked itself. The Landlord told him "oh, that happens sometimes". Yura said, "well he could have mentioned it". I'm too exhausted and relieved at this point to care too much. Somehow I got through the other four and a half hours of teaching and, as I write, hope I managed to get in tonight.

Tartan invasion

An unexpected and rather surreal sight from around the beginning of the week was what was at first a trickle of kilted men wandering aimlessly up and down Kreshchatik (Kiev's main thoroughfare). It swelled somewhat as the week went on and, despite being layed into nastily by a gang of Ukrainian thugs on Tuesday night, the Tartan army was out in force on the day of the match on Wednesday (as evidenced by the photos below). In the event their presence was not able to prevent the Scots losing out to the mighty Ukraine by 2 goals to nil.

Clans occupy Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the city's main square

Random observations

It's a Czechoslovakian tram, but not as we know it . . .



















View at dusk from the window of my current flat in Pechersk. The lights you can see in the distance are the floodlights at Dinamo Kyiv!




Another view of the surroundings.






My local church. :)




















Mister DABL KAPUCCHIN!!!

I'm a very big frequenter of КОФЕ ХАУЗ -or, if you don't read cyrillic, 'kofe hxhouse' (with plenty of flem on the 'h'!). Or if you prefer there's КОФЕ ТАЙМ (kofe taiym). Choices choices.




Meanwhile my flags obsession continues to get out tof hand.