Søren's Ukraine Blog

Kiev vibrations

2008-02-19T23:19:00.003-08:00

I decided to spend my Orthodox Christian Christmas in Kiev so I took the train January 6 in the morning, before flying back to Denmark on January 7. That was my third time in Kiev, but my impression of the city did not change so much for the better.

I came directly from the gay club to the train station and I thought I could just have a rest in the train, but I was wrong. Next to where I was sitting there was a sort of restaurant where three Russian guys where listening to reggae on a cell phone, drinking vodka and talking very loudly. So I gave up on sleeping and ended up drinking with them. They did not speak English but there was a Danish guy from Herning and his Ukrainian - but danish speaking - wife who translated what the guys had to say.

These are two of the Russian guys. I did not notice at first but the guy to the left was actually a real rastaman, with the sun tattooed on his back and a pocket full of marijuana. They were going to enjoy that in a special club in Kiev and they invited me to come and meet their families and celebrate Christmas the Russian way. The rasta promised to pay everything for us and he was throwing his hands up in the air to illustrate the way he would be treating his money. But when we left the train and came to the metro entrance we were stopped by some policemen and they took us to a small room and started going through all our luggage. I think the room was about 6 m^2 and besides the three of us there were 6 policemen, a desk and a small cage. They took the marijuana from the rasta and put him into the cage to enjoy his Christmas, and when they let me go that was the last place I saw him. It was the first time I saw him not smiling.

It was also about the same time that I lost my good vibrations. I have to say I am still not very fond of Kiev. I feel funny walking in the pompous streets of the centre, and I don't like the looks given by people who hang out by the metro entrances and, generally, what capitalism seems to have done to the city and it's people.

The centre of Kiev seems to be void of any real life. Like in certain areas of Copenhagen I guess the prices there have become so high that only big companies and institutions can afford to use the space. And on that Ukrainian Christmas night - when there were not even people shopping or hurrying home from work - Kiev was quiet as the grave. That night I walked passed the J-Lo flagship store to a place which a German speaking guy had recommended to me. He told me that you can determine which places have good people by how many big cars are parked outside. And that place he would give a five star rating. So I went there but was completely ignored and had to wait for more than half an hour before someone would serve me. I suspect it was because I don't look wealthy and that that was also the reason why they would not even let me in at another place. Anyway I had a lot of time to study a Jennifer Lopez 'concert' on the restaurant's T.V. screens, and the food was not so bad.

As a foreigner in Kiev I kind of feel that I am seen primarily as someone to be hustled for money. I guess I don't even have to mention the beggars/police. Here some policemen have optimized their business by learning a few English words. Late at night I met two of them and they were so insisting and kept embarrassing themselves to a point where the only polite way to end the situation was for me to give in. After paying them I felt like an idiot, but they probably felt clever.

The point where I finally had enough of Kiev was when I met a guy who very insistingly offered me to drink vodka with him and his friend. I have experienced that many times in Kharkov but never in Kharkov has someone then expected me to pay for it. This person even kept ordering, thinking I would pay. But I did not, I went home to the hotel and ate the muraveynik which I brought from Kharkov.

They say business in Kharkov is not going so well. You can see that by the number of International flights to the city. I think even Donetsk have 5 flights every day, yet Kharkov has one per day. They once planned to bring Kharkov airport up to international standards, but it is said that the project failed because the people in charge of hiring a company to do the construction was mainly concerned with how to get the money into their own pockets, and so chose a some incompetent local company. Somehow I kind of hope these egoistic capitalists of Kharkov will keep ruining it for themselves.

I decided to try out an old Soviet hotel in the suburbs of Kiev. This was were the guy from Herning stayed when he came to Kiev to meet his new wife for the first time, and the manager is actually related to his wife. The price of the room was about the same as a similarly situated room in Denmark, but the standard was more like some student dorm.

In the area of the hotel most of the metro stations have a McDonalds and some ugly casinos.

The suburbs of Kiev are different from the suburbs of Kharkov and, to me, less charming. The buildings don't have the personality that comes with the many homemade balconies you see in Kharkov. There also are no cozy back yards between the buildings. Instead buildings are placed like such tall silos which - as you can also experience in some sad new areas of Copenhagen - creates perfect conditions for the wind to blow freely, and in turn discourages natural human outside life. Besides the wind blowing there was just the sound of a lonely crow (seriously).

I met one nice person but he was an Afghan. He is studying building engineering in Kiev and when he finishes his studies he will go back to Afghanistan and start an NGO with his father and cousin. They want to be around a hundred people working in construction and health security. He told me a lot about the political stuff down there, and until I forgot it all again I was quite well-informed. But I remember he told me that very unlike in Ukraine around 80 - soon close to a hundred - percent of the people in Afghanistan speak English, and they like foreign countries.

Kiev does actually have a bit of the stuff I like about Ukraine, such as insane architects and rich people with no sense of aesthetics and a lack of regulations to stop them. I just wish Copenhagen could have a building like this right on Christianshavn.

I had a nice walk on the water which was frozen. There were many people sitting with their bags to the wind, fishing. That made me feel good, and cold.

New Year party

2008-02-19T23:19:00.001-08:00

For New Year's eve we were invited to a party with some people who had rented a quite big two floor apartment.I was personally very excited about that because I thought Ukrainians are usually too anarchistic to actually plan something. But the girls who invited us were very busy because of that party and were discussing secretively a lot of time.

Party time. It turned out that the concept of planning a party is in fact more of a Danish thing. I think what must have kept the girls busy was mainly the concern of how to dress themselves up. At 8 in the evening we arrived at the apartment with our 'hostess presents' (another Danish-only concept, apparently) and besides that t.v., the sofa and three non-English speaking guys there was nothing. Of course we knew that in Ukraine 8 o'clock usually means 9 but we thought that on this special night special rules might apply. Actually we were right because there were no people until 10.

Like in Denmark girls are usually the last to arrive at a party, but in Ukraine they still have to make the food. Jeppe does not seem to have a problem with that.

Ukrainian delights. With a bit of cooperation you can make all that in a snap.

I kind of fish sandwich.

This is the room which later functioned as a dance floor. I have noticed that Ukrainian girls very much like to have their pictures taken next to flowers, apparently a plastic tree can also be used.

At 11 all the people were listening to Putin's New Year speech and there was the Ukrainian speech at 12.

At 12 we lit the 'kransekage' which I had brought from Denmark.

All the food was eaten.

Later many people went to Misto but I went to see Roman and Marina who had also arranged a small party. This is the University metro station early in the morning where people were waiting for the first metro.

New Year/Christmas

2008-02-19T23:18:00.002-08:00

Ukrainians don't seem to distinguish so much between New Year and Christmas. I think that must be because during the Soviet times they were not allowed to celebrate Christmas, and to keep some of the traditions they relabeled them as 'New Year traditions'.

On the square there was this enormous 'New Year tree' with an ever changing light show going round the surface of the tree. There were also a lot of ice sculptures on which children where playing.

Andrey brought a New Year tree for the office.

They don't have such decorations at Illums Bolighus.

Santa cake. The Ukrainian/Russian Santa Clause is actually called Father Frost, who is a guy from an old Russian fairy tale. During Stalin they had to make his clothes blue, but now it seems red is back in.

On the balcony of that building DJ Santa was spinning records and in the front these grown up men dressed as mice were making a kind of entertainment.

There were actually not a lot of fireworks around, I guess it is hard to compete with what they show at the square. But anyway you could buy yourself a 'widow maker' (the box with a scull on it).

Sassy New Year's dress, has a lock with a key hole on the front.

3 months later

2008-02-19T23:18:00.001-08:00

I went to Ukraine for ten days around New Year. In the three months since I left a few things changed and I also got to see some new stuff.

I landed in Kiev and met my friend who had bought us some train tickets for Kharkov the same night. We had to go by metro to her place and there were extremely many people there because of New Year/Christmas. One place a lot of people had to get through a single small door and the crowd was like a 'mosh pit' at a heavy concert and the women were screaming.

For all the time I was in Kharkov the construction of the 'Platinum Plaza' next to our office in Sumskaya did not seem to move forward, but now the cold probably encouraged the workers to put up some walls and windows.

The University metro station got new electronic signs.

Jacob and I discovered a new restaurant near one of the suburban metro stations.

Restaurant had a cossack theme going on, the pillar was made like a big drinking cup (notice the handle). In Denmark I really miss these surreal dining experiences.

I went to visit Sasha and Vika who had bought a new cat and their own apartment (2 rooms for $60k). Officially Sasha does not earn as much as he really does so at first he was not able to make the loan. But the apartment company had a procedure for such, he just had to pay something extra to get some fake documents. Roman and Marina also bought an apartment but they still live with Marina's grandmother because the building of the apartment is still under construction. I think also Alex from the office bought an apartment. And they all want to make their apartment interiors 'Euro style', which is probably something like the apartment in Kharkov I rented.

This was also the first time I visited Kharkov's gay club where this drag queen was making a small performance. I was not allowed to make pictures there because being gay in Ukraine is still a bit of a taboo. Jeppe and I had to kiss before they would open the steel gates and let us in, and then we were going 'atrivaitsa' all night.

The End

2007-09-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

This is the end. On Monday I will go back to Denmark. I hope you have not been too embarrassed for me or offended by the things I write. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.

Wrap up

2007-09-27T05:55:00.001-07:00

These are some miscellaneous pictures which I did not find a good reason to post.

The drinking building. Probably not the most safe place to be waltzing about drunk, but if you survive all the way to the top there is a beautiful view of Kharkov's city lights.

A party at Misto. Martin is rapping and no-one has an idea what he is rapping about.

Kyryl walking on dead people. The Youth Park used to be a cemetery but the Soviet people - who were not too fond of religious stuff - decided to make a park instead and they left the grave stones of some famous people. This park is not very popular.

Russian Jeep, Lada Niva. If I needed a car I would buy one of these.

In the back you can see a half naked man with a baseball bat. He parked his big car across the track of the tram and he was somehow infuriated by the fact that some people would like to have the tram pass. Maybe it was some strange way for him to show off for his girlfriend in the car.

The Shevchenko theater where I went to see a play of Kharkovian Andrey Zholdak. He makes some very modern sort of 'picturesque' theater without speech (but a lot of screaming and strange sounds), quite cool actually and theater itself is also nice.

This is the equipment they use to fix the pavements, no wonder they are so uneven.

The old Soviet 'shopping universe', has a quite special atmosphere.

"Napoleon called me one day and said that he's missing Kharkov. So I invited him, of course, for a couple cups of tea." This is part of a very long wall with some graffiti which was probably requested, they also painted pictures from post cards showing tourist attractions of European cities. Of the more technically advanced graffiti in Kharkov I think all of it was requested, with so many police men around you online have time to write your name illegally.

The Hi-Fi Club which has good loud speakers but no guests.

The children's institute of puppet theater..

One more demonstration beneath my apartment, when they are not making noise there are some loud speakers constantly playing Russian chanson (the equivalent of American gangsta rap, one popular chanson singer is Michael Klug). All the people around the edges are police people.

Gorky park in the evening, a cosy place to go roller skating.

Some buses, a church and a meat commercial.

This is a cool old Soviet lunch cafe which Semen showed me.

One of my favorite pictures, from the meat hall at the central market. I use it as a wallpaper on my computer desktop.

At one super market you can buy various sorts of weapons.

The market of used books, it is open every weekend. I was told that this street is packed with homeless people in the night, but I never normally see homeless people, I think.

This is a sort of sports center, the front of the building looks very good.

Here the circuses don't travel around with their tents, every city has a building like this and so they just travel between buildings. Very convenient I guess. I regret that I did not go to see a circus performance there. I also regret that I did not go see a match at the football stadium.

You don't have to go far from the center before houses start looking like this, actually it reminds me of many back yards in the center.

Some old arcade machines in the gaming hall at the zoo.

This is close to where Roman and Marina live, at that time there were these tents with people selling water melons everywhere.

Water delivery service. This is a place next to our new office where they sometimes also sell vegetables, delivered by Lada directly from some one's dacha.

Ice cream. In Ukraine you can use as a sales argument that something contains 19 percents of fat, in Denmark that would be like saying "don't buy this".

One weekend I was playing basket with Sasha and his friends near the place where he and Vika lives.

Sasha and Vika also got married recently.

This is from the giant Barabashova 'clothes-and-everything-else market'.

Barabashova also.

This is where the very important people go.

Kyryl going for water. This was the day of Ivan and Natasha's wedding.

Lots of drunk teenagers. Jakob made this picture from the big square on one of the many celebration days. Several meters behind him there were even more people and then the stage where I think a guy from Talking Heads was performing.

The big square after a celebration. They always start cleaning right away.

When going to a sauna here you have to wear funny hats (I also did that at the dacha with Roman and Marina).

That's the opera again. I am still wondering what these architects where thinking/drinking.

One of the omnipresent shooting tents. At this tent you are shooting at a screen showing a movie with a lightly dressed woman.

Scary children mannequins at the very big children's accessories store in the center of Kharkov.

The military school near our new office. Every day we can here them marching by, shouting 'one, to, three'.

One typical, very cosy back yard.

Bottle hunters.

Pimped up Lada.

Beautiful cakes, I am going to miss you.

Funny little car.

A weekend at the cascade, meaning lots of wedding photo sessions.

This building also looks pretty from the front.

Scruffy little dogs, never touch them.

Stargorod. Yet another place where the entertainment is provided by lightly dressed women. It is a cool place because you can get Czech knödel and home brewn beer.

This weekend they have a new election and so for some days these kids have been standing all the way up Sumskaya promoting one of the parties. I wonder if this is a good picture for the voters, to show how many people they can buy to do stupid work for a cause they really don't seem to care about.

Ukrainian girls

2007-09-26T23:07:00.003-07:00

For many people who come to Ukraine the girls are actually one of the main attractions. I admit the subject has also caught my attention a few times. I know a girl who gets in contact with many of the (few) Americans and Italians who visit Kharkov for pleasure and they tell her that they come for 'cheap prices and beautiful girls'. I am not to judge what is beautiful but many girls in the streets are definitely dressing in a very feminine way. Even though Kharkov's sidewalks can be quite 'uneven' - not to say full of holes - and even though surprisingly many girls work with computers (keyboards), the standard outfit of these girls include high heels and long nails, and often also a very short skirt and a lot of make up. To an American like Tom this is especially unusual, he says that some clothes which are normal here no-one in America would be wearing but prostitutes. So for some foreigners it may seem that Ukrainian girls are very promiscuous but for what I can judge it is not the case, like many things in Ukraine the way girls are treated and act is in fact a bit old fashioned. Like in Denmark some years ago men and women have each their specific roles. I guess women have to be good cooks because practically none of the Ukrainian guys I have met have any idea about cooking (which especially shows when I am discussing with my colleagues the quality of cooking in the various cafes we are visiting). However, all money issues are for the guys to handle. I remember one time we were in a taxi with a girl in front and (old) Jeppe handed the girl some money to pay the driver, the Ukrainians found this quite peculiar.

One thing I found hard to get used to is that even though Ukrainian guys are very fond of shaking hands you will usually never shake hands with a girl. And some times I have seen Ukrainian guys almost blush if someone mistakenly (or some dumb foreigner) is swearing when a woman is overhearing. One other thing I find somewhat old fashioned is the way that many guys and even girls are often talking/dreaming about cars. I think a nice car and some flowers from one of Kharkov's very numerous flower shops can considerably increase one's popularity with some Ukrainian girls.

As for the way Ukrainian girls dress I guess it is also somewhat similar to the way girls used to be dressing in Denmark 30-40 years ago. However I don't think it has ever been so sexually explicit as here. I think only ever will it be normal in Ukraine to have half naked girls dancing on the stages in regular clubs. And I think it could only be here that I would work in an IT company where several of the female employees practise strip tease as a hobby. I wonder why that is, if it has anything to do with the main Western cultural influence on Ukraine being soft porn R&B music videos.

There is one girl with an interesting outfit.

I would have liked to show more pictures of Ukrainian girls, but it is rude to make pictures of strangers. So instead this is a picture from the giant Barabashova 'clothes-and-everything-else market', it shows the different lengths of skirts the girls can choose from, not much of a selection really.

Shoes seem to be a good place to apply some bling bling.

Fine dining

2007-09-26T23:07:00.001-07:00

As I have told Kharkov is not rich on more refined culture, as goes for the more artistic forms of cooking. I once made a small survey and found that terms like 'haute cuisine', the Michelin guide and even the word 'gourmet' are completely unknown to my colleagues. The terms even seem to be more or less unknown in places where they pretend to know. One funny place is an allegedly French restaurant in Kharkov. The menu states that the chef has been making food for several unspecified foreign movie stars and that the food he is making is 'exactly like in France, except the portions are bigger and prices smaller'. At this place we ordered foie gras as the main dish. I did wonder how come they served foie gras as a 300 grams main dish but I wondered more when they brought the actual dish. What they called foie gras was actually the usual flat steak with cheese on top and a lot of ketchup based sauce around it. The final artistic touch came from some croutons which they lit on fire. One time later I did actually find a restaurant with real foie gras, but the chef did not seem to know which wonders ought to be created from that.

This is the best restaurant in Kharkov, or at least the most expensive, Italian of course. As in all other of Kharkov's restaurants (literally) we could not avoid big TV screens showing music videos and fashion shows, but they were so kind as to turn it off. The service in that restaurant was actually good. As for the food I was surprised to find a bit of (misunderstood) 'molecular gastronomy' on the menu, I had a celery soup which was made to look like a big cup of cappuccino. The soup however was not particularly tasty and since I knew that I had ordered a soup the dish really lacked the element of surprise and wonder, the 'foie gras' actually gave me more of that.

While I have been here I have seen quite a few new restaurants pop up. They look very fancy but there are never any people at all. They say these places are used for money laundering.

The Russian language

2007-09-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

As I have told in Kharkov they don't speak Ukrainian, but Russian. Even though all signs and university lectures are in Ukrainian I don't think this part of Ukraine ever spoke Ukrainian. They say Russian is a rich language, that there are about 50.000 words compared to 25.000 in English, and for sure I know there are a lot of cuss words. But I wonder how many are actively used, the few Russian words I have learned tend to pop up extremely often. And actually the way they construct sentences in Russian often reminds me of the way Tarzan is speaking. They don't use a lot of filling words, like 'is/am/are' or 'the/a'. In Russian you wouldn't say 'my name is Tarzan' or 'I am Tarzan', but rather something like 'me Tarzan'. If you mean to say 'how do I get to the metro' you simply say 'how get to metro' (kak braidji k'metro). When my colleagues mean to suggest that we go to lunch, they would never say 'hey! shall we maybe go for lunch now, or something..?', but more likely 'go, eat!' ('paidjum yiest'). And when we have had our lunch and want the waiter to take the money we have put, I have heard them say 'girl, take!' ('diervoschka vaizmi'). I don't think they mean to be rude, I guess they just like to cut to the chase.

I regret a bit that I have not had time to study some more Russian because it can teach you a lot about the country and culture. For example I find it interesting that people here most often don't ask 'how are you doing?' and when they do the standard answer is not 'fine' or 'good', but rather 'normal'. I guess it is more honest because if you are always 'good', 'good' becomes 'normal'. To me it is also interesting the way all Russians like to use short forms of each others' names. If for example your name is Alexander, people will more often call you names like Sasha, Sania, Sucha, Ljosha, Ljolik or numerous others. Some times the short forms aren't really shorter, girls called Olga are often called 'Ole' which is funny for me because my brother Ole has also been called Olga for fun. What has also caught my Danishly vain interest is that people here - when something goes wrong - like to use a quote from Shakespeare, 'not everything is good in the kingdom of Denmark'.

Brand new office

2007-09-26T23:05:00.000-07:00

This is actually old news, we moved to the new office about two months ago. But when it was new news it was also old news because for three months before moving we were promised that we would be moving 'next week'. But I guess the workers hadn't finished just yet and in fact they still really haven't.

Our office is in the 'second' floor (in Denmark first) of this building where they added three extra floors. I don't know what is up with the tape on the windows. They started putting mortar on the sides of the window holes and over the sides of the tape and they removed the scaffolds so I assume the tape is never going to be taken off. I guess now we are just waiting for the tape to dry up and start falling off to create that special Ukrainian half run-down/half built-up look.

Every now and then some guys will come by and fix some of the things they forgot in the first rounds. First some of the air condition machines, then some curtains, then a hand dryer in the toilet, then the rest of the tables, and so on. When they are not drilling wholes on a ladder above my head I don't mind so much.

They hired some old people to look after the building and create a homely atmosphere. I think they sort of live here, I came by late one evening and the man let me in but he did not look to pleased to be woken up.

Now we also have a peace of professional gym gear. One time when our female colleague had left Max 'gave it the whole arm', as we say in Denmark.

Morality

2007-09-10T23:56:00.003-07:00

Semen told me an interesting story about what happened to his girlfriend. She works in one of the biggest banks in Ukraine and recently she mistakenly took some fake money from a customer. Then she had a serious talk with the director of the bank and the idiot made her buy back the fake money from the bank, using her own real money. I don't know what she did with her fake money.

I am beginning to understand why Ukrainians can have a hard time trusting each other. Morality does not seem to be a major concern here. I have now met several people who have either cheated or helped someone cheat with their university assignments. One time it was even a student's supervisor who advised the student to pay a friend of mine to make her assignment.

I also heard some rumours about strange stuff happening around government people. Some time ago some official was killed while on a wolf hunt with his colleagues, the strange thing being that in the area in which they where hunting no one has seen wolves for the past fifteen years. Alex also told me about strange stuff such as when the Ukrainian government were privatizing and everyone were allowed to have a piece of land for free, but the government people made sure to get the good pieces of land for themselves and their friends. They say many of the rich people here got rich that way.

Wednesday camp

2007-09-10T23:56:00.001-07:00

Last Wednesday I went camping/shashliking with Andrey and Max and their friend and Max' girlfriend. We came directly from work and had to get back there the next morning, so it was quite hard for this old guy. Andrey and Max decided to pretend that Wednesday was a day for having a rest because they used all they vacation days to prepare for exams. They are working full time and studying full time at the same time, and they even get straight 'A's.

I borrowed Jakob's new mountain bike and we drove to a place a bit outside of town. Max thought we drove 20 kilometers but I am sure it was only around 5, which was lucky for me. From the place we had a view of a big part of the city, in the evening it was quite beautiful with all the lights. We had our camp just to the right.

I am always amazed at how easily all Ukrainians can make a fire from branches they find lying around. The shashlik spears they put between two big pieces of wood.

This is a video! Not much to see though, but you can hear Andrey playing guitar and singing with the other guys. Andrey is one of the best camp fire guitarists I know.

That's me waking up. Andrey made the photo. Actually I was the only one sleeping in a tent, the other guys were sleeping under the open sky.

Recently Andrey bought an extremely fancy camera and ever since he has been making a million photos. On the trip he brought all his hobbies, which are mountain bike, guitar and the camera.

The ghetto

2007-09-10T23:55:00.002-07:00

By now we are four Danish people living in Kharkov and together with Tom we are forming a little foreigner ghetto.

One Saturday we all met at Tom's apartment. From the right is Rasmus who is working for another Danish company who has a team in our offices, then Jeppe and Jacob who came to replace me and the old Jeppe, who already went back to Denmark. Tom also invited Vika and Elena who work at our offices.

Tom rented this very cheap apartment far out of town. It is functional but the owners would have done good to watch some of our Danish DIY TV shows. Even I know that you should always clean a surface before painting it but I could see that they had not because the doors were quite sticky.

One thing Americans have in common with Ukrainians is a love of party games. Tom showed us a game which even involved a lot of Vodka.

Other place, same scheme. That time we were only Danish people so we did not have to play with the food.

Jeppe and Jacob took over old Jeppe's apartment, which is big enough for many people.

This is Rasmus' apartment which also has some interesting decorations.

The metro

2007-09-10T23:55:00.001-07:00

It is about time I post some pictures of Kharkov's metro, which is quite excellent. Unlike the toy metro of Copenhagen this metro really makes a difference for the city. It is extremely cheap (about twenty to thirty times cheaper than the Danish) and for one price you can quickly get to any part of the city. That way the city really feels smaller, it makes no difference in which part of the city you are. Besides that the metro stations have some very interesting architecture.

Many of the stations have cool space age retro chandeliers like this one.

This is one of the main stations, close to our old office.

Close-up on the chandelier.

The passage ways remind me of something from Star Wars.

This is where the metro trains take off, also very retro futuristic I think. At the end there is a digital clock telling you how much time has passed since the last train - unlike in Denmark where they try to make some hopeless guess about when the next train will arrive.

In the rush hours there are a lot of people. With some Kharkov people the metro is actually not so popular, I guess the crowds can be too much sometimes.

On a higher level of the station there are small shops selling practically everything. There are even pharmacists selling 'entertainment medicine' without a prescription, I was told.

This is another of my favorite stations.

This station has special torch lamps.

And another of the central stations, like in some kind of castle.

The further you get away from the centre the less fancy the stations get but this one is still quite interesting I think.

Ivan and Natasha's wedding

2007-09-07T06:44:00.001-07:00

In Ukraine it is normal to get married in your early twenties and so did Ivan and Natasha. Ivan I know through Kyryl. Like Kyryl and many people at the wedding party they are both system developers. The wedding was held at the house of Ivan's parents which is a lot like the dachas I visited, but it is situated almost at the city centre.

Wedding band rehearsals at the house of Ivan's parents. For some Sundays we had entertained the neighbours, trying to get some songs together. It was quite hard to organize anything and a week before the wedding the group I played with did not have a drummer or even some songs that we could all play. They all took it very calmly though, I guess stuff like this is not enough to worry Ukrainians.

Preparations. To the left is Alex who told me a lot of interesting stuff. He is a games designer and he has been working for big distributors like EA and Infogrames and he also writes books and drinks a lot. To the right is his wife Olga and just behind him Natasha, Ivan's wife-to-be.

The big day. Ivan and Natasha are not religious so they got married at the Palace of Wedding to the music of Elvis Presley, played by two violins and a piano. The palace has four rooms which work like a sort of assembly line, every time one company goes to the next room a new company will fill the room they left. Very efficient, actually, but the palace people messed up the wedding contract and wrote the wrong year. Then they made a new contract and wrote the wrong month.

After the ceremony the couple and some other unlucky people had to drive around the city for five hours in the baking heat and make photos by all Kharkov's war monuments. This is when they got home and we 'surprised' them with some champagne and some bread.

Some bread. According to tradition the bride and groom will take a piece each, dip it in the salt and eat.

Ivan's sister and two other girls were dressed up as angels when they walked around to all the guests. People had to make a speech about their presents and I let Kyryl use his lyrical skills. We came with some knives and according to some traditional illogic they had to give us one 1 grivna, something about presenting a weapon and not being enemies.

One more toast. After each toast some people would start shouting GORKY, GORKY, GORKY, .. and the couple would be tongue kissing until they stopped, or maybe opposite. 'Gorky' means bitter and it refers to the vodka that a lot of people were drinking, the point being that sweet kisses should be able to take away the bitterness. I am sure they could not taste anything after an hour of toasting and kissing. The people to the right are Ivan's parents and best man Alex.

When the music started the couple had the first dance alone, a very beautiful moment. Ann was screaming 'Still got the blues'. That 'scene' I saw Ivan's father build some weeks before.

After that all other people started dancing, including many elderly people. We played some terrible music but it was just perfect. They were dancing through some sloppy jams and even when we were not playing anything.

This is the tradition of kidnapping the bride and/or her shoes. To get her back the groom usually has to make some bribes, but I don't think Ivan gave in to their enormous demands. Instead the best man and best woman had to do 'something extraordinary'.

Unfortunately it was the best man who had to make a strip tease, the best woman sang an extraordinary song.

Wedding cake with smoked prunes. Ivan told us to play 'Rape me' by Nirvana, I guess he also does not like smoked prunes.

The party continued the day after at the 'Hydro Park'. We had some shashlik and went swimming in the river. I think collectively we must have had around 300 mosquito bites, I got at least 20.

At the shashlik party I also got to talk with Ivan's uncle who had a big scar around the top of his head because someone tried to take his scalp. He told me that 15 years ago Kharkov had two gangs of around 300 teenagers who used to try to kill each other every weekend. He said it started in the Soviet times because they thought they had nothing to do because they were not allowed to drink alcohol or have sex.

The elite

2007-08-28T22:27:00.003-07:00

I think usually 'the elite' means people who are good at something but in Ukraine it just means 'the rich'. For these 'elite' people they sell 'elite houses', 'elite jeans', 'elite tea' and so on. There is one street in Kharkov where some extremely 'elite' people are living and it is quite a bizarre place.

Just around the corner to the left is the street of the elite.

I think this must be one of the biggest house in Kharkov, still under construction.

Another big house. I was told that in one of these houses the chief of police lives. He actually does not have a very big salary so he must have a good deal of 'unofficial income'.

A house just across the street.

On that balcony you can enjoy the view of your neighbour's grass which in this case is not greener than yours.

In Sumskaya they have been working on some big buildings for a long time. For this one they found a very exclusive name. They say these building are funded by the Kharkov's richest man who is Jewish, not that I have anything against that.

Club Misto, where the elite and some scruffy Danish people like to go.

Other side of the street.

By a casino. Sometimes they need to demark the line between regular people and the elite.

Poor people

2007-08-28T22:27:00.001-07:00

Ukraine is a poor country but generally people do have roofs over their heads and stuff to eat. And even though many things are very old and primitive there are also a lot of expensive cars - probably even more than in Denmark - and some somewhat extravagant places. But it seems the price of these things may be partly paid by some other extremely poor people. My Ukrainian colleagues are not the ones driving Mercedes cars but I guess they are relatively well off, yet they pay practically no taxes. This is a trick they pull off in cooperation with the outsourcing company with which my Danish company cooperates, which I think also does not put any tax money into Ukraine. Given some government people who are said to make a lot of personal benefit from the few taxes which are actually paid it leaves very little means to support people who cannot support themselves.

Ukrainian beer companies have a bottle recycling system which works in a bit unusual way. The deposit you pay is so small that no normal people would ever consider returning bottles. So instead they just throw bottles into the trash and then homeless people will take the bottles and return them. That way the system supports both the nature and the homeless - sort of clever, but I am not sure if I should like the system or not.

The last resort before bottle hunting I guess are these walls. If you have good physics you can get some very hard yet very badly paid job.

In Denmark we also have beggars but seeing beggars in Ukraine just make Danish people seem even more like some spoiled babies. Here it is only people who are really completely unable to support themselves, like some old ladies. I was told that old people here get around 300 dollars each month which is not quite enough to live for but actually more than what is earned by Kyryl's mother who has a PhD and teaches German. If you don't have a well-paid husband or some position where you are able to make some 'unofficial income' you are in trouble.

No tax money also means bad pavements, they are often even worse than this one. Another way the governments seems to try to save money is by cutting street lights and the supply of warm water for about one third of the city. I have met some people who have had no warm water for the whole summer. I wonder how much is really saved by that, because people will just heat the water themselves.

These 'Dadesi' sneakers also taught me some things about what poor people must go through. At first I thought it was cool that I could get a pair of sneakers for about 4 dollars but they ended up causing me quite some trouble. The first time I wore them playing football the inlay sole somehow crumbled up which caused my feet to get some big blisters torturing me for a week. And as the shoes are made completely from plastic my feet quickly get extremely warm and smelly. And often when I have been walking along asphalt paving for some time they have contributed to some big headaches, because the soles are completely non-absorbing. Anyway, I still think these sneakers are sort of cool and I wear them all the time. I guess you can say I am suffering for beauty.

Apart from the extremely poor people I would not say that people here live a poor life. A normal monthly salary of about 400 or 500 dollars (maybe including some 'unofficial income') may seem crazy but considering what you spend to live here it does make a kind of sense. Many people own their apartments and so do not have to pay rent and they pay practically nothing for electricity and gas. And most food products cost at least half of what they cost in Denmark, and often even less than one tenth. I once thought that if everything costs half you will only need half the money to live. But using my mathematical skills I soon saw that if I buy two things at half the price I will actually only have used one fourth of the money, and similarly when I buy the hundred things I need every month. So actually in Ukraine you need exponentially less money to live, or something.

In some aspects I also find the quality of normal Ukrainian living quite better than in many so called rich countries I have visited. For example, in Japan an apartment like the one Kyryl owns would be a place for a whole family to rent. And I don't think many Ukrainians would believe some of the lousy food people in Northern countries eat. Especially in a country like Iceland you can get stuff which just should not be called 'pizza', 'sausages', 'jam' or whatever they call it. And even in Denmark going to a bakery is usually a very depressing experience. In the name of efficiency and profit maximization the beautiful cakes we might also once have had have been reduced to some 98% prefabricated quite sad stuff.

This is what cakes should look like. In Denmark no one would bother to make such cakes for other people without taking some exorbitant pay, but Ukrainians can eat these cakes all the time.

What makes Ukraine appear more poor - apart from the broken pavements - I think may be the relative lack of some more refined culture. Kharkov does have it's old theaters and the opera where you can watch classic plays, ballet and concerts for less than 2 dollars a ticket. But this is culture 'for the people', not 'by the people'. When it comes to more current art which should reflect how people are living right now I have come across very few things that I find interesting and yet nothing truly original. Compared even to Copenhagen there is really a lot less happening. And I guess this somehow just reflects the taste of many Ukrainians who seem to be more interested in whatever is flashy and (looks) expensive, I guess nothing can makes a country seem poor like this glamour and materialism.

But still, I think Ukraine has something which is a more valuable than all the fancy junk Danish people like to drag into their designer homes, which is a sort of warmth between people. Of course people may treat me welcoming because I am foreigner, but it is also a fact that many foreigners who come to Denmark find the Danish people to be cold, or even self-absorbed. There are some cliche sayings about these things and I guess they are true.

Nationalism

2007-08-23T01:20:00.001-07:00

There is sort of a global counterculture were people are against anything popular, whether wrong or right. In most European countries these people are strongly against nationalism but interestingly in Ukraine these same people usually seem very nationalist. If you go to Churchill's or meet Kyryl and his friends you will see people using Ukrainian words and occasionally wearing traditional Ukrainian clothing.

This is Kharkov's House of Ukrainian Culture. There was a concert where this young guy was singing and playing his 'bandura' very nicely. It is a quite geeky place and besides lectures on Ukrainian culture they have courses where you can learn how to use Linux, which will really teach those Microsoft bastards.

This guy we met at the Ukrainian house. He grew up in Kharkov speaking only Russian, but one day he decided to only speak Ukrainian. So when he goes around Kharkov he uses Ukrainian and actually it is not problem because everybody learn it in school and it is also quite similar to Russian.

In Kiev they have this place which looks and works pretty much exactly like a McDonald's but they only sell traditional Ukrainian food, Borsch, Variniki, etc. I think this may be the one place in Ukraine where they do not sell Coca Cola.

Trip to Lviv

2007-08-23T01:19:00.000-07:00

One long weekend I went with Kyryl on a trip to Lviv. Lviv is in the western part of Ukraine which is a lot different than the Eastern part. As I have told that part was somehow more influenced by western countries. So in Lviv all people speak Ukrainian and the architecture is more like in old cities like Prague. As in Prague they also have a lot of tourists who are attracted by this 'history romanticism' and you can buy all the tourist knick knack you need.

The train was a bit more comfortable than the one I were in to Crimea but still very intimate. It takes about 20 hours to Lviv so we split the trip in two and spent one day in Kiev.

In Kiev we spent some time for finding presents because after Lviv Kyryl would go to Prague to meet his girlfriend, she is a photo model and lives in Denmark and he brought her many gifts. Kyryl is always very generous and one time he spent his entire salary to buy her some bling-bling. I guess I could be glad that this stuff is not modern in Denmark (his girlfriend is actually Russian).

This is Lviv, the road from the station. All the streets have this brick paving. A bit like in Prague but still with a particular Ukrainian touch.

We stayed with Kyryl's friends. They were not at home when we came so Kyryl picked the lock. This guy owns the apartment which used to be his mother's atelier and I think he is kind of a slacker, but he was nice.

One typical street in Lviv, but this is actually the Armenian quarter where they have an Armenian church. Lviv has more than 1 million people but it does not have a metro, they say they did not build a metro out of fear from ruining the architecture. One effect of this I think is that people are not as afraid of walking as in Kharkov, at least Kyryl's Lvivian friends did not mind dragging us several kilometers through the city.

In Lviv there are also geeks who dress up in glamourized historical outfits and pound away on each other. In the battle we watched later they where using these big metal swords (not sharp though) so I guess the armour was quite justified. They call it 'historical recreations' and it also seemsto be popular in Kharkov. I once went to a 'backyard party' in Kharkov where all the people were this kind of people and they invited me to come to Moscow next year to watch thousands of people reenact a battle from Lord Of The Rings. I don't know what is so historical about that though.

We met up with Kyryl's ex-girlfriend, bought some chocolate and cognac (but no cigars) and went to this nice view point. Then we had a crazy night. We went deep inside a dark forest to met a group of girls who were making pearls by a fire and smoking Kalian and then we went to a strange apartment of one of their friends and her parents rented us an apartment for 10 dollars. Then we went for several kilometers to that other apartment to find out that there were already some people there who had rented it. So in the early morning we ended up eating variniki in yet another apartment of one of the kalian girls.

This is the last place we ended up. She is an artist painter and her father is a carpenter and he made all the funny decorations.

The second day we were in Lviv my legs were quite sore (we had also been walking a lot in Kiev) and it was raining a lot so we were also just slacking. Then I caught the train alone all the way back to Kharkov and had time to read a nice book by Henry James.

Dacha weekend

2007-07-27T00:52:00.002-07:00

These pictures are actually some weeks old. They are from a weekend when I went to the dacha of Marina's grandmother. Her grandmother lives there alone with her two big dogs all summer and then Roman and Marina has her apartment in the city alone. I think in the winter time they all live in the apartment together with the dogs.

Marina's grandfather built this whole dacha in 5 years and there actually is a third building. In this small field Marina's grandmother grows vegetables.

Lovely little cucumbers. Actually they never use the big tasteless ones we have in Denmark.

Chilling in the garden, eating cherries and Karakul and drinking tea. The guy is Marina's friend Dmitri, he is a softare engineer in a former Soviet hydro-energy tech company which sells stuff for China and Korea and countries like that.

That is the third house which they primarily use as a kitchen. Marina's grandmother is sitting in front of it.

Preparing the shashlik.

Preparing the fire for shashlik.

There was also a little sauna which we used. The technique they use is to go in and out three times or more. First you sit there for some time then you take a cold shower and then you go to the kitchen and drink some tea, and this is just repeated.

Post card

2007-07-27T00:52:00.001-07:00

When my parents were here they bought some quite nice post cards. I guess the pictures on the post cards were quite old because the places look a lot different today.

This is the post card. The yellow bus is actually an old Danish HT bus. I assume the picture is from the Soviet period because there a no commercials.

Today there are some big commercial signs. The buildings look quite old now and the sun beams went away but the trees do not seem to have grown much. Today the area has both buses - though not the old Danish ones - and trolley buses (note the wires in the air). I guess the trolley buses are only here still to serve very poor people because they are quite trashed but they are even cheaper to use than the buses. I don't know if the metro had reached this area at the time of the post card, but today there is a metro station under the crossroad.

Whistling

2007-07-27T00:51:00.004-07:00

It was not until recently I noticed that people here never whistle. They actually don't know how to do it. I asked what people here then do when they are happy but I did not really get an answer.

The market, part 3

2007-07-27T00:51:00.003-07:00

I can never stop making pictures at the markets, I keep discovering new stuff.

This is a flea market section of the central market.

I love this picture. He is selling food for animals but actually one of the buckets contain the same kind of Ukrainian snacks they sell for people, I guess that is not wise marketing.

At the central market you can also buy yourself a wedding dress.

These people are selling pets and if you don't want a whole pet you can buy just the skin. The building in the back is actually where our offices used to be situated, but that was before my company joined.

She is selling 'Kvas', the special beer-like beverage which is sometimes used in Okroshka.

The Pimp

2007-07-27T00:51:00.001-07:00

Last week I met a real pimp. I was going home from a club early in the morning and I needed a taxi. Already when I met the driver it was a bit strange because he said the price was 'whatever I wanted to pay him' and he had an unusually big and nice car. When I got into the car he started driving slowly in the wrong direction and when I notified him of that he said something like 'just a minute' and 'we will turn around soon'. All the time he was laughing in a kind of nasty way and he was asking me personal questions using some quite rude language. And in between laughing he was calling someone on the phone many times and shouting like a madman. Then he stopped in front of an apartment and a young quite good looking girl came out and into the back seat. She asked me if I liked her and she told me she was a student of economics. The driver had told me that she was not a prostitute but when we finally arrived at my apartment he asked for a lot more money than the usual taxi ride. At that time I thought it would be interesting to talk with a real prostitute so I gave him some money but then they just drove away. I guess that makes me quite a big sucker. What is more dumb though is that he somehow got my number and now he calls me every day and asks if I 'need a lady'. I have to say that this is the first time I met a really unpleasant person and I think I may be sort of happy that he was not actually Ukrainian.

The driver showed me these pictures of him together with a lot of different lightly dressed women.

Secrets of Kharkov

2007-07-27T00:45:00.000-07:00

There are some things only known to the people of Kharkov, for example the whereabouts of some bus stops. When I first came to Kharkov I often wondered why there where a lot of people standing in the streets for no apparent reason. Only later did I found out that those people are actually waiting for the buses. But you have to know where to wait because most often there are no signs. Similarly a lot of shops have very minimal advertising, you have to know that these shops exist. In a city where practically no people speak English it also is not so convenient for me when they keep the stuff I need under the counter.

You may wonder why these people are just standing there.

I was told that somewhere behind those doors you can buy instruments.

Behind the door to the right is a nice little cafe.

When you don't know Russian even stuff like this is a small mystery. I have no idea what these people are doing except I can see that they are filling out some paper forms and on the building there are pictures of a train accident. Actually, I guess this might be somehow connected to the recent accident in Lviv.

Soup and borsch

2007-07-24T22:52:00.003-07:00

To Ukrainians Borsch is something special. I think you might insult someone if you just call it a soup. Alex told me 'there is soup and there is Borsch and Borsch is not a soup'. Logic does not apply if you suggest that both are some kind of liquid stuff that you eat with a spoon. I think Borsch is originally Ukrainian and the stuff they traditionally eat in Russia is actually called 'Shchi'. Actually eating both Borsch and soup in general is a big tradition here, I think most Ukrainians eat soup every day and they eat it as a 'starter dish' for some other dish. At lunch time we often eat Borsch but just as often we eat two other kinds of soup (oops, sorry) which I actually sometimes enjoy even more, they are called 'Okroshka' and 'Solyanka'. These soups are quite unique and not like any soup I tried before in Denmark. Okroshka is unique to me because it is a cold soup which is based on the yellowish liquid which is left from the milk when you make cheese (when making cheese you put a drop of a special substance into the milk and it then separates into cottage cheese and the yellowish stuff) - 'сыворотка' in Russian, 'whey' in English. I read that in Russia it is sometimes based on 'Kvas', a special beer-like but non-alcoholic beverage, and sometimes here they cheat and use kefir instead. I think this recipe: http://www.ruscuisine.com/cooking-recipes/index.php/Appetizers/?recipe=487&offset=0 must be quite close to the Okroshka we eat in Kharkov, except it uses buttermilk instead of whey. Solyanka is also quite special to me because it has four or five different kinds of meat among which are kidney and tongue, which I would normally never eat. But in this dish - mixed with the nice combination of olives, fresh lemon, salty pickled cucumber, dill and sour cream - I will gladly eat it.

Malasiva

2007-07-24T22:52:00.001-07:00

Another very interesting Ukrainian/Russian only (?) dairy product is something they call 'Malasiva'. Kyryl told me it's only ingredient is milk from a cow which has just had a 'baby'. That milk is quite sweet and very different from normal milk. When they put it into an oven for some time it turns into a very delicious cake the consistency of which is a bit like the kind of egg cake where you mix the eggs with milk. This 'baby milk' should also be extremely healthy. Actually I never knew about that kind of milk before and I wonder what they do with it in Denmark.

Malasiva. I reckon it may not look so delicious but it is, actually.

Sirkova Masa

2007-07-24T22:51:00.003-07:00

I have mentioned the ladies selling dairy products on the old markets. They actually have some very unique stuff, something I have not seen in any other country. One thing I am very glad to have discovered is what they call 'Sirkova Masa', a special kind of desert based on cottage cheese. You can buy it homemade from the old markets or you can buy it factory made from the supermarket. The following recipe tastes more like the homemade, but I guess it is primarily because it is hard to make the cottage cheese smooth without some special equipment. I found this recipe by searching Google for 'сырковая масса', the Russian spelling of Sirkova Masa, and used Google translator to try to understand it. I actually think this might be the first time the recipe has ever been written in English.

To make Sirkova Masa you mix 100 grams of soft (room temperature) butter with 1 cup of sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla/vanillin, 3 tablespoons (remember that those are big in Ukraine) of sour cream and - if the sugar and cottage cheese is not already salted - a pinch of salt. Then add 500 grams of cottage cheese and try to make the mix as smooth and uncrumbly as possible. Finally, add raisins. I used cottage cheese from the old market with great success, I think that kind may contain relatively much fat and it is also dry (there is no kind of liquid by the cheese). I guess it may be hard to make a smooth substance of the rubbery low fat cottage cheese we have in Denmark. As for the raisins it may be a good idea to soak them a little while before mixing.

This is from a place where you can buy both homemade and factory made Sirkova Masa. The homemade is in the big bowl with raisins on top, the factory made is in the small colored cups to the right. In the front cup there is something called Krem Sirkovuy which has a similar taste but it is more sweet and the consistensy is more like thick yogurt. I also really enjoy the small cheese deserts in the little basket to the right.

Muraveynik and Karakul

2007-07-24T22:51:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite Ukrainian cakes is called 'Muraveynik', which means 'ant hill'. I used to buy it in a shop in the underground station near our office but ever since the weather became warmer they have not sold it - Muraveynik contains a lot of butter and it would just melt away. After missing the cake for some time I had asked Semen to find me the recipe and he did. However when I used it the result was nothing like the real Muraveynik, I can't really recommend it. What I can recommend though is a similar recipe of a cake which they call 'Karakul', meaning 'Astrakhan' - a special kind of wool. I got acquainted with this cake one time I went to the country side with Roman and Marina. To make Karakul you have to make a hard dough which you shred into small pieces and fry on a dry (no oil or butter) pan, and this fried dough you mix with a kind of caramel. The caramel is made by boiling a can (400 grams) of condensed milk for 2 hours and mixing it with 100 grams of butter and 100 grams of chopped hazel nuts. For the dough you mix the following ingredients.

6 tablespoons whole milk
6 tablespoons melted butter
1/2 teaspoon soda with some vinegar added (the soda will become a kind of foam)
2 eggs
3-4 glasses of flour

Although the recipe is quite simple there are some things you should note. 1) Ukrainian spoons are quite big. 2) When making the dough you should mix the ingredients in the same order as shown above - the milk will cool down the butter so that eggs will not coagulate and by adding flour little by little the dough will be easier to kneed and you will not add too much. 3) The condensed milk should be boiled in the can - just put the can in a pot of boiling water. Make sure there is always some water, otherwise the can can explode. Also note that the glue from the sticker on the can will be very hard to get off the pot after boiling, so I guess it should be somehow removed completely before boiling. 4) When mixing the boiled condensed milk with butter both should be room temperature, i.e. the butter will be very soft. Don't melt the butter in a pot before mixing, it will not mix properly then. 5) To make shredding the dough possible it should be about 5 degrees or maybe a bit colder - store it in the refrigerator for some hours and then some minutes in the fridge before shredding.

Marina taught me how to cook Karakul. She is an excellent cook, her food is always tasty.

Shredding the dough before frying. In the bowl is some dough which has already been shredded and fried. The cans are with boiled condensed milk, it turns into a kind of caramel when boiled.

The finished karakul. It has a lot of beautiful brown colors. Like Muraveynik it should be kept cold, but this Karakul actually did stick together quite well in room temperature. I guess this more firm structure might have something to do with the way Marina chopped the nuts, she used an electric blender so some of the nuts turned into a kind of flour.

Making karakul is a lengthy process so I had to stay over. Marina got up at 5 o'clock to finish some very urgent work, I guess that is what it is like to be working for an American company. Roman had a problem with a hole in his trousers.

Middle class model of life

2007-06-25T22:47:00.004-07:00

In general economy is not one of my big interests but there is one particular difference which I have noticed between Denmark and Ukraine. I have noticed that the prices of apartments here are very low, also for Ukraine. Usually things here cost about half of what it costs in Denmark, but the apartments are maybe less than one fifth of the price. However many Ukrainians find these prices completely insane. I heard about one guy at the office who pays half his salary to live in a place he bought, but that is something very unusual here I think.

What many Ukrainians probably do not know is that in Denmark it is common that a person pays his entire salary to live in a place he bought, that is if he is living with someone as a couple. This is the middle class model of living, where you make this one big investment and spend the rest of your life slaving to pay it off. In fact I think this may be one of the main 'pillars' of an economy like the Danish, all these people making investments must give the economy some kind of big potential.

If Ukraine is to have a big middle class as the Danish I think they must learn this model of living. But of course the government will then also have to provide the people some kind of social security. As some people at the office told me they are already very dependent on keeping they current jobs.

Orthodox christians

2007-06-25T22:47:00.003-07:00

The religion of Ukraine as well as Armenia is 'Orthodox Christianity'. I already told about the Easter ceremony, in Armenia I got to learn some more about the history and rituals.

Armenia was actually the first country in the world (300 A.D.) to adopt Christianity as a state religion. I think this church - 'Etchmiadzin' - was somehow based on one very early church.

This is inside a church in a big church complex in the mountains and this church they dug out of the mountain from a hole in the top and down.

This is a pagan temple. What is often not mentioned are the ruins to the right, they are from a christian temple which was built after and which was made a bit taller than the pagan temple. Both collapsed during an earthquake but the christian church was not rebuilt because of the rude spirit in which it was designed, christian or not.

But what is more interesting is that I saw a dead person. Near to the place where I was staying in Yerevan an old woman had died. All her friends and family, maybe 60-70 persons, had gathered in front of the apartment. Then they came out with her in an an open coffin. That was kind of creepy. But it was also beautiful because they formed a long procession with her coffin in the middle. Children in the front were carrying her portrait and some big flower decorations, and in the back some musicians were playing quiet music on 'duduk', a traditional Armenian instrument. That was actually the first time I heard a duduk, it is a very nice wooden wind instrument, kind of nasal sounding but very expressive. I was told that the ritual is used every time someone dies, but I am pretty sure they don't use the ritual in Ukraine. Actually I think in general Ukrainians must be less religious, this can also be seen in how the Ukrainian girls dress.

Coca Cola land

2007-06-25T22:47:00.001-07:00

There is no Disney Land in Armenia but there is something which resembles a 'Coca Cola Land'.

Using a lot of Coca Cola merchandise they did a good job of making this old amusement park less charming.

All the kiosks had Coca Cola fridges and The Coca Cola Company seem to have made a very efficient job of ensuring that the fridges only contain their products. Actually it is like that in all of Yerevan, the city is practically flooded with Coca Cola. It is quite sad because soon you will probably not be able to get funny stuff like the tarragon soda. Kyryl told me that they also used to have tarragon sodas in Kharkov.

This commercial is actually quite nice. They must have had a lot of fun decorating that old Soviet Ferris wheel with the symbols of capitalism.

Another hand painted Coca Cola commercial. I am pretty sure that the Coca Cola Company did not pay for having that commercial. I guess like there are people in western countries who have romantic ideas about the monsters of communism there are people who have warm thoughts about the monsters of capitalism.

They did not bother to maintain this Coca Cola commercial. Maybe they eventually had enough Coca Cola.

Yerevan houses

2007-06-25T22:46:00.002-07:00

When you are a tourist somewhere you always get to study a lot of buildings, I also did that in Yerevan.

This building was very near the city center. I don't think I ever saw buildings this trashed in Kharkov.

The center was one big construction area. When standing on the balcony on top of a tall building like the national gallery the sounds from construction work was even louder than the traffic.

More new apartments which no Armenian can afford to buy, but in all the tourist brochures there were ads telling capitalist pigs like me to buy an apartment.

It looks like they just stopped working on this building but some people must have prepaid an apartment and had to move in.

This is kind of a slum area also very near the city centre. There was actually a lot of life in these streets. There were some kids cutting some wood and I tried talking with a man who was watching them. He told me that one kid was Japanese and another aboriginal. I guess he was joking but the one kid actually had an aboriginal style tattoo, though the symbol itself was christian they said.

The same slum area. I know it is the stupidest kind of romanticism but sometimes I think I would be nice to live in a place like that. There is something very human about it. It was not the product of some architects twisted idealism, those people built their own houses based on their own needs and creativity.

Ukraine vs. Armenia

2007-06-25T22:46:00.001-07:00

When I had a week off from work I decided to go to Armenia, the capital of which is Yerevan. I originally intended to go to Russia but I was turned off by the uncertainty of some strange and time consuming visa procedures, for example there is a rule about getting a special 'voucher' which proves nothing as it can be bought at a tourist agency by anyone with 70 dollars. Then I thought Armenia might be more interesting anyway because I knew absolutely nothing about the country.

Kharkov and Yerevan both being similar sized cities - 1.2/1.5 million people - in former Soviet republics there are a lot of similarities. There is the metro for which I think all Soviet cities with more than 1 million people were entitled. There are the market buildings, stadiums and amusement parks, and there are some impressive university buildings and some not-so-impressive suburban residential buildings. I think they also have a bit of the same anti social behaviour as seen when people should be making way for each other or holding a queue instead of just forcing ahead, or when they should be taking care of common facilities or the elderly people who are now begging everywhere in the streets.

What is different between the cities, I think, is the more 'southern' feel of Yerevan. The people of Yerevan are more dark-colored and pretty and they smile a lot more. They walk very slowly in the streets or they sit in one of the city's thousand park cafes, and some of the old people are playing board games together. I think they may also be a bit more positive and proud about their own country. I met a Canadian girl who lived four years in Armenia as a child and who was visiting Yerevan for the fourth time. When she was showing me around she repeatedly used the word 'we' when she was talking about Armenians. Then I met an American girl who was born and lived for 10 years in Odessa (Ukraine), but when someone asked she was very quick to tell that she had 'lived all here life' in US.

If the Armenians to me seem more aware of their culture and history than Ukrainians it may be because Kharkov is in the Russian speaking part of Ukraine. Anyway it was also striking to me how aware Armenians are about their genocide compared to how many times I have heard about the Ukrainian genocide from Ukrainians - zero times exactly. But I would hear about the Armenian genocide many times when I went on a guided tour, when reading a magazine or listening to the lyrics of music, or when just talking to someone the subject would come up.

This is the airport in Kharkov. When I was waiting for my flight I met a very kind policeman who showed me his little office. He told me about a Ukrainian tradition where you give policemen gifts in the form of money. I told him that in Denmark we don't use that tradition.

The airport in Yerevan is more fancy (or at least more modern) than the ones in both Kharkov and Kiev. Getting a visa to Armenia was also a very modern procedure, I filled in an online form and the next day I received my 'electronic visa' by email. In that airport they also have a more efficient way of extorting people. When I was leaving they told me that I had to pay some extra special 'exit tax', or they could not check me in. The woman was not asking nicely like the police man in Kharkov she just said 'sorry, there is nothing I can do'.

The airport of Yerevan is just a facade, true Soviet style. The suburbs of Yerevan looked as poor - or maybe even poorer - than some places in Ukraine.

The buses of Armenia are just as uncomfortable as in Ukraine. One difference though is that in Yerevan you pay the driver after leaving the bus and not while he is driving the bus with his other hand/eye. A bit more clever I think.

The drivers in Yerevan are maybe even more crazy than in Kharkov, as a pedestrian you are completely outlawed. It makes no difference if you are crossing a red or a green light, except when it is red the driver might not honk the horn to let you know when to jump for your life. The car smoke in Yerevan is also really bad. I thought I had gotten used to smelly old cars in Kharkov but after two days in Yerevan my throat felt like sand paper.

In the Armenian cuisine they have a repertoire of herbs which is quite larger than the Kharkovian 'parsley and dill'. I was wondering if anise was the popular spice that they often use but when I had this soda I realized what it was, this tarragon soda was actually very good. What was not so good is the drink they call 'Tan', it is sort of like a Camembert flavoured soda. About the Armenian food itself I was quite impressed, in several restaurants I had food which was both perfectly prepared and perfectly served. As I have told, good service in Kharkov is quite rare and even though they have some good food, the more sophisticated stuff I had in Yerevan simply does not exist in Kharkov.

Armenian sofas are less colorful than in Kharkov.

Some Armenians definitely have an aesthetic sense.

In Yerevan I don't think I saw any Lenin or Stalin statues at all. I only saw statues like this, all of them some kinds of caricatures. I don't know if they have removed Soviet statues but I know that they renamed their 'Lenina Avenue' after the guy who invented the Armenian alphabet. In Kharkov 'Lenina Avenue' is still called that, and they still have some old Lenin statues.

Trashed old Ferris wheel. I saw several wheels in this same design, in Kharkov also, I guess they all came from some big Soviet factory producing happy fun for the people. The wheels must be hard to disassemble because they always just put them out in the country side like this.

Abandoned Soviet swimming pool. I guess this is true modernism, they thought one model would fit all environments. As for much of the suburban residential constructions I know it did not match the Armenian earthquake of 1988. As for this swimming pool it must have been a problem with Armenia's shortage of water.

This kind of nature I never saw in Ukraine, but of course I also have not been to the mountainous western part of Ukraine yet.

The Armenian dachas look different than in Ukraine. This is a dacha area near lake Sevan.

Jeppe told me that in Ukraine they will not say 'good bye' when someone goes away from the country, they will say 'congratulations'. In Yerevan they have a project where they are building big houses for Armenians who are returning home. I also saw a T-shirt which I guess also was made for foreign Armenians (or some crazy non-Armenians), it said '100% ARMENIAN'.

Maybe Armenia is a bit more 'outward minded' than Ukraine. I saw similar European certificates other places also, and I read that one of the squares in Yerevan had recently been renamed as 'France Square'. I think USA are also quite involved in developing the country, I know they have some long running program for developing the Armenian tourism industry. I read that Armenia is actually the most 'economically free' CIS country meaning that they have rules for business and investment which are open and clear enough to make it easy for foreign ventures to operate in the country. I guess this is one more example that Armenians have a better concept of service. You may wonder which of the countries to bet on - Ukraine vs. Armenia - when considering which will develop faster, they do seem to have some different odds.

Semen's birthday

2007-06-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

When it was Semen's birthday we went to his family's 'dacha' for the weekend.

This is the dacha, Sunday morning, the day after our first shashlik. I remember we talked about a recent gay parade in Moscow which was ruined by some people. I am a bit surprised that gay people also are not very popular with Ukrainians. Even Semen think that they were not born that way, that they were just badly influenced. But of course he could be right, my 'knowledge' about the subject is also just the dogmas of my culture.

We had cake right after midnight and it was also good for breakfast.

Preparing another round of shashlik. Semen has a special technique for cutting the wood. The axe was one of his presents. One of my presents for him was some wine from Crimea. We drank it after the shashlik and made toasts like they always do here, I also tried saying some frank words for Semen.

For the shashlik they had made a special marinade from onion, sour cream, mayonnaise and some spices.

Girls making salad.

No birthday without some rounds of charades. I gave Semen the word 'ambiguity' which was very hard. Next time I will give him 'membership provider'.

Going to the beach.

Going home. Around the dacha area there were a lot of people working in small fields like this. For many of these people it is actually their main source of income.

Basement jam

2007-06-05T23:06:00.001-07:00

These are some pictures from a place where I went jamming with Kyryl. Loscha was also going to come but when his company got a big order of metal doors he was too busy.

It was in this basement and the air was very strange, I guess we were breathing a lot of Radon.

A lot of pipes and a big tank where some water was running into.

The room with the instruments. Pretty good gear actually.

We were there for three hours and at one point we wanted to get up to have some fresh air but it turned out the owner had locked the door from the outside. Actually we had prepaid for using the place but I guess he also did not trust us not to steal his gear.

Crimea, day 3

2007-05-30T22:26:00.000-07:00

Our last day in Crimea we also went swimming in the morning and then we went directly to Yalta.

This is a McDonald's in Yalta which was worth visiting because of the good view. To the left of the picture is the harbour and the yellow building up in the mountains is a Danish JYSK shop.

We sat down by the harbour side.

In Yalta we decided to take a bus to a small town called Balaklava. The climate changed near this area. I guess it is a more rainy area, it was more green and there were clouds around the mountain tops.

The harbour in Balaklava was something like a small lake. On the opposite side of the town there was this entrance to a former Soviet submarine factory which was once top secret.

This is inside the submarine factory. Down to the left is the end of a long canal where they would take the submarines, and they would pump out the water and throw away the fish so that they could work.

There were some strange devices which we never figured out what was for, but Pavel thought this would be a good dance floor if they turned the whole place into a night club. Roman told me that Pavel is 'strongly typified' by which he meant that Pavel mainly has two things on his mind, which is eating meat and meeting women.

We went back to Simferopol to catch the train back home and then we had time to have a small guided tour around the harbour.

There were a lot of big military ships. There was also a monument for a Crimean fleet of ships which the Crimeans allegedly sunk themselves in order to block the harbour and thereby keep an enemy away from the city. Like the story with the wine, I guess this is a very typical Russian myth about great sacrifices.

While hanging in the park waiting for our train we saw these cool old people who were playing music and singing together. Later I sneaked by to listen some more and there were a lot more people and some of the old ladies were dancing.

On the other side of the park there were scratching loudspeakers and karaoke-like sounds, it was some young people from the Crimean University of Arts giving a concert. This girl was making a very funny Tina Turner impression, but she was actually dead serious.

In the train, on the way back. Again we were trying to sleep in the train and the following morning we all had to go to our work places.

That Tuesday morning in Kharkov I decided that I would quickly go to my apartment to have a shower, and then I had a bit of a surprise. When I came to my apartment I found that one of the locks was open and inside the apartment I saw some stuff which was not mine. I thought that my cleaning lady might have decided to come early, but then a naked woman came out from my bedroom. She pointed to the bathroom and said something in Russian. I thought she might want a towel, but when I opened the door to my bathroom I found the owner of my apartment sitting on the loo. I decided to go out and wait and when eventually they left I went in to have my shower.

Crimea, day 2

2007-05-30T22:25:00.002-07:00

Sunday morning Roman woke us up quite early.

We went to the top of this big rock and we also went swimming at the beach in front of it.

This is the top of the big rock.

Some of the steps were a bit scary, especially where the balustrade was broken.

This is the beach where we were swimming and eating strawberries. In think in the high season it will be impossible to find a place to lie here. In the high season the hotel prices are also three times higher.

This is the center of Semeiz, we went eating at the pink building in the back.

Eating. I had some juice which was somehow made from birch trees. I also had some excellent 'Okroshka', I shall tell more about that dish some other time.

In Yalta I went with Roman and Marina to the Massandra wine factory.

We had a guide which told a lot of stories about the wine. She told us that these wine bottles had been transported to Georgia during the second world war and that they had poured a lot of other wine into the sea so that the Germans would not have the pleasure of drinking it.

We tasted a lot of different wines. It was something like syrup with alcohol, it was quite good. We brought some bottles home for the evening.

Trip to Crimea

2007-05-30T22:25:00.001-07:00

Crimea is the southern peninsula of Ukraine where all Ukrainians and Russians go on holiday. When we had a long weekend I went there with my colleagues Roman and Pavel and some of their friends. Roman had arranged everything for us so even though we saw a lot of stuff it was very relaxing for me.

We caught the train Friday after work and drove the whole night. The train was very long and packed with people. Once I would have considered this a nightmare but now I thought it was quite cosy.

This is Alexander and Victoria, aka Sasha and Vika. Sasha works at Roman's former company which is a big American software company. In September Sasha and Vika will get married.

This is the balcony of the hotel where we arrived Saturday morning. The hotel is situated in a sneaky little town called Semeiz, some kilometers from Yalta which is the biggest city in Crimea.

I was sleeping in this humid room with a very small window.

Some of the other guys were staying in this room which had air condition and also quite a better view against mountains and the sea. However, they had no door to the bathroom. The owner of the hotel had a very big Toyota jeep and I was thinking that if he had bought a not so big car instead he might have been able to provide his costumers all the basic necessities.

Between Semeiz and Yalta there was the 'Skt. Peter's mountain' and we went to the top by a rope way.

From the top of the mountain I found it quite amazing how the sky and sea completely blended together, it was not possible to see the horizon line.

There was some commercial stuff on top of the mountain, like camel riding, places to eat and a show where they demonstrated how to kill a person in many inventive ways. At one place we had an Arabian rice dish along with some home brew wine.

There we are, still on top of the mountain. To the right of me is another Vika who is working as a QA engineer at that American company. The guy is my new colleague Pavel and to the right of him is Roman's girlfriend Marina who is also working as a kind of developer.

After the mountain we went chilling in this park which had a lot of nice big trees.

In the park there was also a strange castle which was built completely from one type of stones. Again this is sort of Arabian I think. I guess the culture in Crimea must be somehow very related to Arabian culture. In Crimea I also saw a lot of the kind of people who have dark hair and skin and bright bluish eyes at the same time.

After some night swimming we had beer along with some dried fish. Roman taught me how to make the whole smelly operation. At that point I was tired because in the train I had only had about 2 hours of sleep.

Emergency

2007-05-21T23:57:00.000-07:00

I usually never go out without my phone, so that in case of an emergency I can always call someone who understands me. Yesterday was the first day I ever went out without my phone and it also was the first time I ever had sort of an emergency. I had been playing football all night and when I came home I realized that I had lost the key to my apartment. My neighbours were not at home and the old ladies guarding the entrance to my building still didn't understand English. They also did not understand what I thought was some universal body language. So I went outside in the park to find a comfortable place to spend the night (I also did not bring enough money for a hotel). But then I actually had a bit of luck. Just outside my apartment I met Jeppe's new girlfriend and I brought her in to talk with the old ladies. As many things here do, it took a lot of discussion. I think she must have discussed with them for around 40 minutes, and still it brought us absolutely nowhere. But then I had some luck for the second time, because while we were in the yard discussing a friend of the owner of my apartment came by and it turned out he actually had a key for the apartment. So this night I got some good sleep and this morning I went back to the football court to look for the key. There I met the slowest man in the whole world, but he opened the court for me and there the key was. I am so lucky.

House on fire

2007-05-18T00:24:00.001-07:00

Yesterday in the city center there was a building on fire. It is already very warm here now but I don't know if that had anything to do with it.

When I had looked out our office window I thought it was just very foggy, but when we got closer we could see that the 'fog' came from a building.

I lot of people found this interesting.

The police were performing in their new outfits and the firemen had brought out all their equipment, i guess it is better to have too much than too little.

Shashlik

2007-05-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

Shashlik is the Russian/Georgian version of shish kebab. People here always talk about going to shashliks and I have been invited to several but last weekend I finally got to go with some people from the office.

We almost fit into this van. Some of the pictures here I got from Andrey who is making the V sign. He works in the office next to mine along with Denis who is wearing sunglasses inside.

We came to this place in the country side. There is a car, a donkey and a sort of cabin where you can enjoy the shashlik. There were a few cabins like this beside eachother and we had rented one of them but the people who ran the place were very clever to rent our place to some other people also. That way they make more money.

Instead we made the shashlik freestyle, between the trees. It was actually quite windy there but unlike in Denmark the wind here is not cold so it was fine.

The girls made some 'sandwiches'. A sandwich here is actually just a piece of bread with one or two things on top.

The guys prepared the shashlik. You can even do that lying down.

Shashlik! It get's some extra taste from beer and ashes. There was pork and chicken and the chicken actually was the best (sorry Menfolk).

There's the donkey again. I guess Andrey figured it would also like some vodka.

The place was near a small lake and a kind of playground. That tall thing is a toy.

You just have to run around and then suddenly you are hanging in the air. We did that for a long time.

In the end we were hanging by the water.

In the van, on the way home.

Victory in Europe Day

2007-05-09T23:47:00.000-07:00

May 8 was the day when the Allies during World War II formally defeated Nazi Germany. I didn't know that before because I realize that in Denmark we don't ever make celebrations about war, but here they do. The celebration was yesterday and I had actually decided to lay low, but it was hard to sleep because of all the loud music and fireworks and people screaming.

Many people had a day off but we were in office and from there we saw this parade.

They were wearing old war outfits and they were looking very clean. I actually don't understand how they can wear that stuff and think about war and be happy at the same time.

In the big square there was a concert and in the end they had some enormous fireworks.

When the fireworks ended I realized how big that square really is because there was a never ending stream of people coming from the square. All of them were screaming and whistling and yelling together, it was sort of scary and I don't even think they were thinking about my sleep. But I thought about how they would ever fit all these people into mini buses or even the metro.

Hunger coordination

2007-05-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

I think our office lunch situation very well illustrates some differences between Denmark and Ukraine. In my Danish office we always eat at 12 o'clock precisely. Everybody knows that that is the time we eat and so everybody will be hungry at that time. This is different in Ukraine because every day we have to negotiate about when to go eating. Every day everybody arrives at the office at different times and so every day everybody will be hungry at different times. Sometimes we will go eating at 2 o'clock, sometimes half past 12. But every day the timing will be wrong for some of us. And on average I think each person must waste about half an hour every day because he is too hungry to think about anything but food. And then we also waste some time because we have to negotiate and interrupt each others' work to talk about when to go eating. And then someone will say 'let's go eating in 10 minutes' and you decide that this is too little time to start a new task, but then actually 10 minutes often turn into 45.

Even though my team often go out to eat it is actually possible to get lunch at the office. Every day, also at different times, a company will bring us some food that we can have cheap and eat by our computers. Usually there was a guy called Max who brought us some pretty OK stuff, but our office manager wasn't quite pleased with the service, he sent us a mail where he wrote the following.

"We will change our lunches provider in the nearest time. The reason is obvious J Quality of food. And the main thing that I can not accept is when Lunches provider react on the claims as thou as he is making great favour to us. Explanation that making something other “ will bother me” also is not acceptable."

Then for the last few weeks we had been trying out some different other providers and now someone decided that we all should settle with the provider which was absolutely the worst. Now there are not a lot of people eating lunch at the office anymore.

The well and a ropeway

2007-05-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

I told about the well that I went to with Kyryl. These are some pictures from one day when I went to that park in daylight.

People here don't drink water from the taps because it tastes funny or it is unhealthy, or something. So we have to buy it from a shop or go to a well like this. Here the water is more fresh and it is also free.

I think here maybe you can buy bottles but the shop is closed. I guess it is not very good business because most people already have bottles.

I went from the park through this place which sort of fascinated me.

Then I came to this place with a ropeway. It goes back near the city center so I decided to try it.

In the beginning it is not very high up.

Towards the end the ropeway goes very high above the trees. I actually do not like heights so I was glad that it was only later that I learned that this thing often breaks and then firemen have to help people get out. At one point it actually stopped for a while and then started moving again unsteadily.

A traditional dinner

2007-05-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

Sunday I went to Kyryl's place and he showed me how to cook some traditional Ukrainian dishes. Most Ukrainian guys actually don't ever cook but Kyryl told me his mother taught it to him because he was often home alone.

First we caught some beers and went shopping at the central market. We needed some meat with bones to make a fond, because for real borsch you would never just use a bouillon cube.

We also got some different pickled stuff. All the pickled stuff here is salty, never sour like in Denmark. When I made this picture I forgot to turn off the flash and the woman got quite angry, but I didn't understand her curses.

I never thought about buying that oil myself but it is actually excellent. It is made from sun flower seeds and I have never before had oil this tasty.

Kyryl went crazy and bought five kilos of these dried fruits. He says he does not eat a lot of sweets but buying this much every two weeks I would say he does.

This is Kyryl's apartment (actually it is his father's). It is a very nice place but Kyryl is not so much into cleaning.

View from the apartment. I really like this area. It feels like we are in the country side but actually it is 10 minutes from the city center by tram.

Our dinner. Our first dish was 'variniki' with potato filling. Variniki is similar to ravioli but the shape and feeling (it is often quite firm) is more like Chinese dumplings. The main difference is that we eat it with sour cream. They also have a variant which we had for dessert, it has a sweet cheese filling. Here we are having borsch and Kyryl is waving a piece of 'salo'. Salo is basically salted (sometimes also smoked) pork fat which they eat with brown bread and cloves of fresh garlic. The borsch is, unlike in Denmark, not a puree and it actually does not have a lot of red beets in it, the color is more orange than red and it mostly came from some tomato paste. We also had the pickled cabbage together with pickled mushrooms and some of the sun flower oil we bought. The Georgian style pickled tomatoes (with a herb filling) were good with vodka. My favorite of it all may be the cabbage salad, because of that oil.

For dessert we also had this 'usvar'. This we made from a mixture of dried fruits which we just boiled in water and so the fruits became big and soft like that. We chilled it a little and drank the water like a sweet tea/soup with some of the soaked fruits in it.

After all that food I could hardly walk but we went to a well close by to fill some big bottles with water. Then I went to my friend Peter's birthday party. We were actually going to meet him at a Shashlik (Georgian style barbecue) he was having but we were too late because of all the eating, and so I just met Peter at Churchill's.

1st of May

2007-05-04T08:47:00.000-07:00

The 1st of May was my birthday and in Ukraine they treat this big day with the proper respect, we had three days off from work. The following pictures are from that day and most of them are courtesy Andrey (the ones in good quality).

That day it was the commies demonstrating. They were mostly old people.

I wanted to invite some people for my birthday so I had made this very funny invitation.

The funny invitation paid off and so I got some very nice presents. I got a spoon and a flute and one of these traditional shirts which I always wanted. I also got some Ukrainian chocolates and some vodka from Poltava.

At the party we played a lot of games which Max brought. This one is called Twister and even though I cheated I also lost. The girl in brown is Eugenia who also works at the office (the others have been on my blog before).

We also played charades (gæt og grimasser). This one is a tough one.

Later we were just chilling with some drinks and music. I thought I had bought too much vodka but they finished it all and also some beers. The guy in stripes is one of my new colleagues Roman and the girl is his girlfriend.

More chilling and more music.

I wanted people to know what we call borsch in Denmark which is something quite different than in Ukraine. I guess Andrey was quite surprised.

Then there was another game which was also fun. To the left is Tom from California. I met him when I was strolling last Saturday and it turns out that he actually teaches English at our offices. He works for a local teaching company so I think is having a very authentic Ukrainian experience.

After the party we went by bus to a club.

The next morning it was hailing!

Saturday strolling

2007-05-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

I was on my way home from Jeppe with a big bunch of DVDs which I was borrowing. Then I met Dvorskiy who I knew from Churchill's and I ended up strolling together with him and his friends for the rest of the day and the night also.

Martin is an African and he knew how to 'stroll'. That guy from Donetsk thought it was fun to have his picture taken with an African. The guy in front is Dvorskiy. He likes Jimi Hendrix and next month he will be giving a concert together with Martin who will be rapping on top of Dvorskiy's guitar.

Extreme pizza

2007-05-02T23:17:00.003-07:00

As I wrote before, they have some very good pizza in Kharkov. And unlike in Denmark they have many very different kinds. Some of them are extremely good, others are just extreme. For example, they have pizzas where the base is is made from the kind of dough which is used in Danish pastries, and as a dressing they offer garlic oil or mayonnaise (sometimes it even isn't optional). Together with rich amounts of cheese and peperoni it makes for some serious bad health. Then there is a pizza where they use a sort of marinade instead of tomato sauce and which is completely covered with a special Ukrainian kind of dried salted meat which is put inside a hard barbecue-like substance. Eating this pizza is like eating a giant bouillon cube. I ate half of one of these and I had a heart burn for the rest of the day.

Sumskaya traffic

2007-05-02T23:17:00.001-07:00

Sumskaya is the street where I live and work and it has a lot of traffic.

I was home ill one day and so I had some time to study the traffic. Very often some idiot is honking his horn but at one point there were really a lot of cars doing it simultaneously so I went to see what was going on. Apparently that trolley bus had stopped working in the middle of the street and just across the street that green cap was conveniently parked. The red car also seemed to have stopped but then it started moving.

Later there were these three noisy people announcing the next Sexy 'Something' Party at Misto.

This is outside our office. Often the traffic lights stop working and then a police man comes to help out. This puts a damper to the honking but we still have to deal with the commercials which have recently become a bit louder.

One time some Hare Krishna people where walking up Sumskaya every evening. I guess now they gave up.

Ukrainian 'service'

2007-05-02T23:08:00.000-07:00

If you want to be a customer anywhere in Ukraine you have to learn how to accommodate the people you are paying your money. This is very notable when you are renting an apartment but also when you go somewhere like a restaurant. In a restaurant you and your company will often have to eat in shifts, because the food will only arrive when the cook feels like it. And if the cook wants you to have your dessert together with the main meal you will just have to eat melted ice cream (or a cold main meal). You may also have to accustom yourself to warm beer. Generally, if you go to a shop or some other service provider you can expect 'no' as the default answer and you may also expect a bit of rudeness.

I guess this lack of service (or empathy) may stem from a former government system where it did not really matter whether you where doing a good job or not, and where people did not expect any strangers to want them any good. But I think it cannot continue like this. My colleagues also seem somewhat aware that the service here could be better. For example, when Alex went on his skiing holiday he decided to go to Poland instead of somewhere in Ukraine because, as he said, the prices are now the same but the service in Poland is better.

This is a picture from the day when Pavel and I where helping Jeppe move to his new apartment, it is Pavel to the left. Jeppe could by no means get the keys for his new apartment before 14:00 and he also absolutely had to leave the old one before 12:00. So we got a cap to transport his stuff to the office. Due to a small misunderstanding however the driver thought we were going to the new apartment and not the office. He started yelling at us when we told him to go to the office instead and in the end he just dropped us off at the new apartment. Then we had to get a new cap to take Jeppe's stuff to the office, and after that yet another cap to bring it back to the new apartment again.

Jeppes apartment. Everything is made of gold so of course it is more expensive than mine. In the months after moving in Jeppe had a lot of fun with things such as his bed and a shower head. For three weeks he could not take a shower because the shower head was broken and the apartment owners had to look at it and consider it several times. If they had just let him buy a new shower head it could have been fixed in a few hours but for some strange reasons they did not allow him to do that.

This looks like good service. I counted twelve people behind that counter but still it took me quite a while to get eye contact with someone willing to help me. At least she was nice enough to point at her nose to let me know that the thing a had picked out had gone bad. In that same shop a had some problems trying to buy a cooking pot, she simply would not sell it to me. Then I had myself to go back into the shop, find a guy who spoke English and let hem explain to her my reason for bringing that pot to the counter.

Russian pop concert

2007-05-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

I went with Semen and his girlfriend to see a concert with an old Russian pop group called DDT. They were playing in the opera and the big hall was completely packed.

For Ukraine the tickets where extremely expensive, up to 60$ a piece. We got the second worst seats for around 20$.

Someone had actually taken our seats but then the authorities stepped in.

This is the third time someone brought the singer some flowers. The first time they even did it while he was trying to sing.

After the last song the audience was screaming louder than any crowd I have ever heard. Then after maybe 15 minutes of screaming the band came back and played their old songs which were what the crowd really wanted to hear.

I got to see some more corners of this strange opera building. Here they are selling vases.

Here they are exhibiting wax sculptures, but it's kind of hard to see them all the way over there.

Some days later I saw this guy who had 'DDT' written on his back with shiny buttons.

A matter of trust

2007-05-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

Before coming here I had a picture of Ukraine as being sort of a wild west country with a lot of criminals and bad people. This was even strengthened when I came here. Numerous times local people have warned me about going some places and trusting some people. They told me it was dangerous to go to some markets or suburbs, that I could be robbed or beaten up. They told me that I should not trust any business people to be honest and that a contract here is 'only a piece of paper'. And they told me to expect the police ask for bribes and that I should never bring any strangers to my apartment. Because, as they say, 'this is not Denmark'.

The feeling of being surrounded by criminals was strengthened even more by the security systems and security people which are here everywhere present. If you go to any kind of market or half public area there are people in uniforms who will deny you to do a lot of things. Even by the entrance to my apartment there are people keeping an eye on people going in and out, and to get into the apartment I have to go through 3 locked doors.

In the beginning I was affected by all that, everywhere I saw people trying to cheat me. But I think it may mostly have been something I imagined. I am starting to wonder if there is really a reason to be so mistrusting because all of the people I have met so far have been very kind and good people. And I wonder if the reason for all the security staff is not just that they want to keep some people employed. Maybe Ukrainians are generally just very mistrusting of each other. And maybe they think Denmark has a lot less crime, but I think not. I have to check some statistics.

Ususally an old lady is sitting here, keeping an eye on people coming in and out of the building of my apartment. They look quite bored and the expression on their faces would be perfect for poker (but it doesn't really make you feel welcomed).

Zoo, part 2

2007-04-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Zoo entrance is so cheap that you can just pass through whenever you are going in that direction.

The weather is more light now and the decorations make me feel like I am back in Sydhavnen.

I guess I ought to know the name of this animal. It looks very kind and I was tempted to pat it on the nose.

This is either a camel or a dromedary.

Crazy people making photos of everything.

Large parts of the zoo are still under construction, or maybe it is always like that.

Feeding the animals here apparently is not disallowed, it is even encouraged.

Easter

2007-04-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

In Ukraine you will know that it is Easter when you are not able to get your favorite cake, because all bakeries are filled with just one type of cakes.

This is the cake that they will bring to church and bless. I think it is cool that they are using cakes instead of dry crackers like in Denmark. Sunday afternoon I went to a church to see them bless the cakes but I was told later that they do it around 4 o'clock in the morning.

These cakes are everywhere.

This is one big Easter cake.

On Sunday I went out to see why there were so few people on the streets. It turned out that a lot of people had gone to this concert hall. I didn't really know what I was going into but it ended like a religious meeting with people doing manic hand gestures and clapping. They did not allow me to make anymore photos but I can tell that the show was sort of like an American gospel concert though the music and dancers had a very distinct Russian flavour.

Smoked prunes

2007-04-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

In Ukraine they have a sort of smoked prunes which I guess they really like, because they are everywhere. The first time I experienced it was inside a big fat chocolate cake. I thought the cake had gone bad and I threw it out. Then I had smoked prunes ruin my yogurt and the other day I even accidentally drank the juice of smoked prunes. One time though these prunes really made sense to me. They have a so called 'Forest salad' in which smoked prunes are mixed with roasted walnuts, chicken and mayonnaise. That is actually quite good.

Country side trip

2007-04-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

My parents visited me for a week. We wanted to rent a car and go to the country side and see some old villages but none of us were very fond of driving here. But then my parents met some very helpful people at a party and the guy Victor arranged the grand Ukrainian tour for us. He also lent us his driver who came to pick us up in a black Chevy.

I sent my parents to a party at Stargorod and they brought back this sing-a-long book. I guess I should have known that entertainment in Ukraine means naked women. But my father did not seem to mind and when the six o'clock strip show was well over my mother also ended up dancing on the tables.

Traffic. I think the only rule here is that you should try to avoid pot holes and other slaloming cars.

These are my parents. They were also very fascinated by Ukraine.

The country side here is very brown. In Denmark farmers always at least keep some grass on the fields to keep the fertilizers from polluting the ground water but environmental issues are not a first concern here.

We stopped at this 'Kolkhoz', a collective farm, there were around 15-20 buildings similar to this one. In the 1930s the Soviet forced all Ukrainian farmers together in these places to work for the government. They wanted to make a quick industrialization of the Ukrainian cities so they took a lot of grain from the farmers and exported it to get money for machines. But the farms were not functioning so they did not produce enough and that way around 5 to 10 million people died from starvation during the early thirties. I think this is maybe even more scary than Holocaust, not just because even more people may have been killed, but also because it was not based on hatred but on what some people thought was a good idea.

The collective farmers were practically working as slaves but they were allowed to have small personal fields like this. These fields were functioning a lot better than the collective fields and from that they got their main income.

Here the kids are still using physical violence. This boy got his ass kicked and now he is trying some stone throwing instead.

This is one typical village. All the places have big fences and dogs barking.

I guess the dogs and fences are there to protect their vegetables. History probably has had a role in creating that protective mentality but I think home food production also is important for some families to survive.

Here old people are also selling pickles.

Our driver was a very religious man and he also liked flowers, when he saw this place he immediately stopped. But then the green Lada pulled up and a man in a matching military outfit came out to explain us the 'no-no rule'.

I find this quite aesthetic. It is for watering plants at a small botanical garden.

This is a church yard inside a forest. Many of the graves have tables and benches by them. I wonder if they are there for family picnics or if they are imagining that the ghosts of dead people will use it.

We ended up at a sort of resort area near a small river. There were cottages for rent and in the front there was this restaurant. As always when things get a little fancy in Ukraine it has to have some silly theme.

This is another restaurant nearby where we ate 'true Ukrainian' style. Victor told the waitress by phone what he thought we should eat.

Victor thought some different sorts of sweet vodka would suit the food. The one with almond flavour was quite good, a bit like Dr. Pepper. We also tried different sorts of pickled mushrooms and borsch and some rösti which Ukrainians think they invented.

Ukrainian Design

2007-04-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

Coming from a land where many people are obsessing with minimalistic interior design it is quite entertaining to go to a Ukrainian furniture store. The sofa designs especially are quite inventive.

Lots of sofas, lots of colours, lots of patterns.

I think this one can even be turned into a bed of roses.

This one is sort of classy.

Comfy chairs accompanying a sofa.

I need to get a sofa animal.

Office life

2007-04-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

I go to the office almost every day.

One day a guy carried a computer to our office and sat down and started to work. Nobody said a word until Jeppe asked him if he was new on our team, and apparently he was. My new collegue's name is Vladimir.

All the teams in our offices work for Danish companies and this other team celebrates that with a big Danish flag. I like that in Ukraine I am able to see a Danish flag without it having some right-wing connotations.

Every day we make some exercise, or that is at least intention. Max and Andrey can make more than 50 of these push ups, I am still at 25.

One day Denis had his birthday. We got him a very convenient device for his aquarium which will automatically feed the fish at given intervals, then he will not waste anymore time on doing that.

Denis brought us this cake. It looks common but it has a quite interesting composition. There are layers made from a sort of hard meringue and there is a layer of caramelized condensed milk with raisins. Then there is a layer of a stiff white substance which I assume is somehow based on egg whites, and on the outside there is a orange tasting frosting which is very light and meringue-like. Like most cakes here it is actually not very rich, I guess they are more French than American inspired.

This is the first day we ate lunch outsite a cafe. Alex just returned from a short trip to Denmark and he is explaining about a strange kind of bread which Danes call 'rugbrød'.

Every monday we go to play football.

We play my company against the others and this day we were winning by 10 goals.

WikiMapia

2007-03-26T00:17:00.000-07:00

Max showed me this (you can see where I live).

Russian music television

2007-03-20T00:17:00.000-07:00

Of all the 1400 channels I have it is only the music channels that I can make some sense of.

This channel shows American music but in between there are a lot of videos I have never seen and that I assume are Russian. They look completely like American R&B videos in that they have the same glamour styling. But there is something funny about the lyrics. This woman is singing 'I am not a piece of meat' and the refrain, 'we don't have to take our clothes off just to have a good time'. There is also the song 'Jetsetter' where the woman is singing 'you are so exciting and inviting'. And then there is a song with a woman sitting in a glamour snow setting, she is making fake tears, staring at the camera and singing 'let me be you silence'.

There was a break and they showed one commercial. It was for the movie 'Direktøren for det hele' by Danish director Lars Von Trier. I am surprised that Russian movie theaters are showing this movie and also that it is advertised in this pop channel. The movie almost wasn't shown anywhere in Denmark, it is very low key and something I assume Trier mainly made to have a laugh with his friends. But maybe Russians can relate to it because it is about a big swindle.

This is a VJ from another music channel, I like her outfit.

Demonstrations

2007-03-20T00:08:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of complicated political stuff going on in Ukraine. Last Friday Max and Alex took me to a demonstration against the sitting government.

This is the main square of Kharkov where the demonstration was going to be. But the government somehow hindered that and instead they had these people make a demonstration for the government. Max told me that most of the people probably were paid to show up. He also told me that when he was in University they once told him to show up at a similar demonstration and because he did not he wasn't given a mark that he needed.

We took a bus to the real demonstration. The bus was actually a van and we were sitting 12 people crammed together. Max insisted that we had another passenger take a photo of us, I think it is because he likes my blog and he wants me to have some pictures I can post.

The demonstration, lights and loud music and banners with clenched fist logos. There was a famous journalist speaking, he is writing articles about swindles like when large Ukrainian companies are privatized and sold very cheap to friends of the government. The former chief of police was also speaking. He was fired because he had promised to go after all the corrupt people of the government. When he started speaking there was a group of young people who started making loud noises so that we could not hear him. They were stopped by some angry old ladies and the police. Max told me that the young people may also have been paid to make the noise.

This is from another demonstration some weeks before. It is the police demonstrating because they are getting paid to little. I think someone told me they get around 200$ per month.

The markets

2007-03-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about being in Kharkov is that you can go to the big old markets.

The old markets are actually the only places where you can get vegetables, the new super markets only have very few and very bad vegetables.

You can buy all kinds and parts of animals, brains, spines, furry ears, and some other things I just can't tell what is (for example what is that on top of the scale?!). Something very popular here also is the big peaces of smoked lard - 'Salo' - which they eat with garlic.

The fish is absolutely fresh. I pointed out one from the water and she killed it for me, and in a matter of two minutes she had also cleaned it out, removed the scales and hammered it into 10 steaks. She gave it to me in a plastic bag with blood and scales on it and it only cost me 3$, what I could have paid for one fish steak in Denmark. I don't know if it was so cheap because they caught it near to Chernobyl though.

These ladies are selling homemade dairy products. They are selling cottage cheese (in the front), sour cream (in the back) and a kind of sweet cheese spread with fruits, which is very good (second from the front). You can get one kilo of delicious sour cream for 1$.

Egg Alley. There are maybe 40 containers from which you can only buy eggs.

There is also a big part of the market where they are only selling tools, a part with shoes and a part with kitchen/bathroom stuff.

Around the official markets there are always some old women selling homemade pickles.

Around the official markets there are also people selling pirated movies. You can get 8 to 12 different movies on one DVD for 2$. I got one which had English speech. Then I bought 6 more but they were all in Russian, even though the package said differently. Now I will only buy my pirated movies from the big, respectable electronic stores.

After a long day at the market you will appreciate some of this greasy stuff.

Going to the 'hyper market' is quite a different experience. I counted 10 security people guarding the exit from the market. Every third time someone went between the electronic sensors they would make a sound and attract the guards. One guard made us empty all the bags we had just packed and when he had studied a pack of crackers he let us pack the bags one more time.

The police

2007-03-13T00:06:00.001-07:00

Last Saturday I had my first encounter with the Ukrainian police. Everybody seem to hate the police here and I was told a lot about how crazy they can be, so it was a bit scary. Also, the place and timing was perhaps the worst possible, I was literally taken with my pants open. I had been walking around for a long time so I really had to pea. I had found a secluded area with many trees and I thought I was completely alone until I turned around and there were three policemen, they had truncheons and one of them had a big scar across his cheek. I don't know if it was luck or because I was trying not to be prejudice with them, but they did not do anything bad to me. They took quite a lot of my time though. They asked me a lot of questions and were talking about drugs and espionage. They also had me empty all of my pockets and one policeman insisted on seeing all 500 pictures in my camera. I think I should have been fined for peeing in public but in the end they just told me that I should not do that, and I said 'sorry'.

Women's day

2007-03-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday was Ukrainian women's day.

The evening before women's day we had another party at the office, and this time it was the guys who arranged the party. That way it actually was made more of a men's day.

There was a contest to see which of the girls at office would make the best house wife. They had to peel potatoes and use tools and things like that. The blond one is a guy dressed up as a woman, don't worry.

I helped in playing a small concert and after that there were sing-alongs all night long and here Andrey is also playing something. We were using a computer with speakers as a sound system for the vocal.

The next morning it suddenly seemed like spring. Everybody had a day off and in the park in front of my house there were a lot of people enjoying some leisure.

In the evening I went to see a concert with this band who play American pop songs like they were traditional Ukrainian folk songs, Selo 'n' Ludy - Village and People. I liked their double tempo version of 'You can leave your hat on'.

I met Loscha (that is Alex' nick) and his friends. To the right is Olga who speaks English very well. She is on a mission to teach all Ukrainians English so she is working seven days a week and even this evening she was working overtime to help me speak with the Ukrainian people. All the people were extremely nice and the owner of the pub - Churchill's Pub - invited me to come and see a lot of concerts. There was also a girl who I did not talk to but she gave me her number and said 'auf wiedersehen'.

A Ukrainian home + office

2007-03-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday was the first time I saw a real Ukrainian home from the inside. I was meeting Kyryl, a Ukrainian guy, and his friend Alex in the morning and we were going to play some music. Alex and I joined the waiting people at one metro station and somehow I was not too surprised to see Kyryl 45 minutes late, he also did not seem surprised that we were still waiting for him.

This is the street of the house where we were going to play, the house is on the right. When we arrived there it was too late though, the owner had let some other band get the place.

Instead we went to Alex' place, and I got a small tour. This is the kitchen. The fire on the stove is always turned on because they have to pay the same no matter how much gas they use. Also they need it very often to heat water which is not warm directly from the tap.

We had to use a flash light in the hall between the rooms. In the Soviet days the apartment used to be owned by an extremely rich family but now it is shared between a lot of people. The old guy also lives there.

We had a lot of port wine Georgian style. We also had some ice cream which he kept in the place between the windows so it was not very hard.

Alex collects old stuff. These are old Russian perfumes. The tall yellow one smells like Chloé and the one in the middle like Old Spice. He also had a lot of old bank notes, like 500000 ruble notes.

They knew I thought this place was very funny so they encouraged me to have a lot of dumb pictures taken and here we are wearing old Russian police clothes. Actually Alex' place was not so unusual to me because when I go on tour with my band we often stay in similar places.

Later we went to have fun at Alex' work place. Alex works together with his father and brother in the family's company which produces big steel doors.

View from the office. Like the swimming pool in Poltava that building in the background has the Olympic logo. I think they are very strict about where this logo can be used but I guess in Ukraine it is hard to enforce regulations.

The opera

2007-03-04T23:26:00.000-08:00

Like a lot of things in Ukraine the opera is Italian. We went to see an opera by Puccini. Unlike in Denmark the opera here is really for the people. You can get a ticket for 1$ and it cost us 6$ for the best seats. There were all kinds of people there, young and old, and some people had crisps and soda as if it were a movie theater.

The opera.

The hall inside the opera. I don't know the name of that style of architecture.

Ukraine, breadbasket of Europe

2007-03-04T22:55:00.000-08:00

According to my guide book Ukraine should have a rich tradition for baking bread. That is however not my experience. Wherever we go there are always only the same two types of bread, maybe in different shapes but always extremely boring. No matter if you go to a bakery or a supermarket the bread always seems to come from the same factory. Only once did I visit a 'real' bakery with fresh bread and many different kinds. That was really good, but sadly it was in Poltava. I think the sad bread situation is somehow connected with a policy that the government enforced some time ago, but I don't know the details about that.

This is a typical 'bakery'. The architecture is unusual compared to other buildings in Kharkov, seems kind of Austrian to me. The bakeries have the kind of pastries that are completely stuffed with poppy seed, which is also something very Austrian to me. I read that the western part of Ukraine has a very different architecture because of an historical Austro-Hungarian influence and I wonder if there is some connection.

Semen helped me find a baking machine and I invited him and his girlfriend to have some fresh baked bread. Like I guessed, they had never tasted anything like it. In the pictures we are having some cakes that Semen brought. The wine is normal Ukrainian red wine and it is extremely sweet.

Poltava

2007-03-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

Poltava is sort of a 'big village' between Kharkov and Kiev but it has some interesting history. For some reason there were a lot of Swedes down here in 1709 and they were fighting the Russians together with the Cossacks. In Poltava they lost a big battle and after that Sweden was no longer a great power.

This is a 4 star hotel room in Ukraine. Italian style. When we had breakfast we were thrown out of the restaurant because they found out that the president's wife was arriving. On every corner outside there were suddenly policemen.

A cap took us to the museum of the Poltava battle but it was closed. For one moment we thought he had left us completely alone 7 km outside of town, but he came back shortly after.

On the way back we walked around in the outskirts of Poltava.

Downtown.

There was this shooting 'tent' in the middle of the streets. As it turns out, I am pretty good with a gun.

We saw some very bad 'spiritual art'. The interesting thing was that in all the exhibitions we went to they would only light the room that we were in, and in this place they would turn the lights from one end of the room to the other every time we crossed the middle. I wonder if they do this to save energy or to keep people employed, or if it is another example of the efficient spirit that you will also see in restaurants when they take your plate the same second that you put the last piece of food on your fork.

We saw this very photogenic old swimming pool. It is steaming because the air is very cold.

Fun is over.

Many places there was garbage lying on the ground and like in Kharkov there were dogs running around freely.

This restaurant is kind of fancy. Still has decorations from Valentine's day. We had some good borsch and the people over there are frying a fondue dinner.

His name is Atu and he works at this second hand shop. He studies at the technical university, has a wife and a kid and lives in a one room apartment. He does not have a car and he does not like Ukraine. But he thinks Italy is good. We were they first foreigners he ever spoke to.

Anna got this beautiful dress very cheap. When she is wearing it everybody is staring and they don't even mind that we can see them staring. Another thing Ukrainian people seem to find very funny is the fact that Anna likes to wear gloves.

Drum and bass

2007-03-04T22:29:00.000-08:00

It turns out Kharkov also has an excellent drum and bass club. It is called sjivot, meaning stomach, and the interior is completely red.

The dance floor. Unlike how it can be in drum and bass clubs it was not only guys getting down. I think the DJs were Russian and they where quite good.

Kharkov Zoo

2007-03-02T00:53:00.000-08:00

Kharkov Zoo was a fascinating experience. Going there in the winter time it felt like going to an abandoned playground and you would somehow be surprised every time you saw an animal.

Birds in a rusty cage. We liked that there were no information signs so we did not have to learn anything, we could just stand and stare at the creatures.

Hippo smells bad. It was lying there, rolling from side to side and once it would stick it's head up for air.

You could get really close to the animals and this guy really enjoyed that. He was teasing the animal, pulling it's hair and the animal was frothing with anger.

Sad buffalo.

Men's day

2007-03-02T00:50:00.000-08:00

Last Friday was Ukrainian 'Men's Day'.

The girls at the office arranged a party. There were beer, layered cakes and some contests where the theme was relationships between men and women. I think I won one of the contests.

For some reason all the clubs had military theme parties. Jeppe took us once again to the #1 show off place in Kharkov, Misto. They also had a big military party and put up a big show. Outside the club there were soldiers and war machines and inside there were military go-go dancers and entertainers and they put fire on the bar and threw confetti. They also started some fireworks inside, or maybe it was tear gas because everybody had to flee outside.

Hallways and broken elevators

2007-03-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

Like many common areas in Ukraine the hallways in apartments buildings are not very well taken care of. I guess some money is paid to make some people take care of these areas but nothing much happens. This maybe explains Ukrainian mentality towards paying taxes.

One typical hallway. Looks like a squatted place but Jeppe actually paid a lot to live there.

Elevator of the building of my apartment. One day the doors would not open and Anna was stuck in there. She was shouting for help to the people outside but the idiots would not do anything to get her out. Luckily she had her phone on her and could call me, and I had Semen call the elevator repair man. Semen tells me that he has been stuck in elevators two times.

Weekend in Kiev

2007-02-20T00:32:00.000-08:00

I went to Kiev for the weekend to pick up my girlfriend Anna who will stay with me for two weeks. I did not like Kiev as much as Kharkov because people there were not as pleasant. In Kiev I could feel how it is to be in a place were there is a big difference between rich and poor. Often people would try to 'cheat' us and three times we were followed through the streets by some very insistent beggars who would tell us strange stories.

On the train, from the window. Many small villages with no paving on the roads. I thought they looked amazing and one day I would like to make a trip to one of them.

This is the main street in Kiev and Anna is standing in the middle of it. On weekends they close that street for cars. That is a good idea because like most other streets in Kiev it is very broad and often when you need to cross a street you have to go underground. Going underground though could also be a surprising experience, occasionally we would run into a guy with a guitar and some kids and some flower-selling ladies having a party.

A building. Chandeliers in plastic cages. More married people outside in the cold. Behind that building is a similar building which is the 'water information center'. The center apparently is sponsored by the Danish Government Institute of Something and you have to pay 10 grivnas to get your water information.

Tourist stuff.

International art in Kiev. We saw this exact same piece in Newcastle some months ago. It shows some famous places in Newcastle.

We had breakfast at this theme restaurant with servants dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothes. I would think mostly tourists would go to a place like this but many locals also seemed to enjoy it. I can understand why because the food was excellent and cheap.

Tuborg 'own' this metro station.

One typical market.

Luckily we got lost and ended up in this place. It was a quite big part of the city where there were no people living yet but they were restoring all the building in this magnificent old Ukrainian style.

Valentine's day

2007-02-14T23:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went through the metro station to get some cakes. There are usually a lot of people waiting around for eachother at the entrances. However, yesterday there were really a lot of people. I did not know what was going on until I saw that all the guys had roses in their hands and there were people selling heart shaped ballons. Ukrainians apparently are very romantic people. Or they are very susceptible to American marketing.

Streets of Kharkov

2007-02-13T23:48:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday I was making a long walk around the city.

I think I may have gone to some places where no westerner has ever gone before.

The river, people fishing.

I wonder what the creative people were thinking.

Blackout

2007-02-13T23:46:00.000-08:00

One day when we came back from lunch there was a blackout. This happens sometimes in Ukraine.

This was actually when we were still in the old office.

Analog gaming.

My apartment

2007-02-13T23:33:00.000-08:00

Even though I had a lot of trouble getting a place to stay it was worth it because I found an excellent apartment in the middle of Kharkov. It is very unusual because it has western decorations and some facilities not normally seen here. I have to pay 1200$ a month everything included but it is a lot better than some apartments for which they would charge 1000. It is also a lot better than something I would be able to afford back in Copenhagen.

When I came to take over the apartment the owner was walking around half naked, making holes and fixing the pipes. I could see that many of his decorations originate from Germany, and his friend who I met one day spoke some German words. That is why I figure that he is a craftsman who went to Germany to work in construction. He may have made a lot of these apartments for German people and thought that he would make one for himself too. And somehow he managed to get the building materials to Ukraine. But I am only guessing, we couldn't really speak together. He was nice though. He gave me a beer and showed me the porn channel.

This is the living room. To the left is the kitchen, through the right door is the bedroom. There is a big T.V. with more than 1400 channels!

Same room from the other end. Through the left door is a closet room, through the right the bath room. There are a lot of light switches, I will never be bored.

This is the bath room. There is heating in the walls and in the thing that I hang my towels on. There is also 'air suction'.

This is a nice kitchen.

The bedroom. Through the doors is the balcony. Notice the heating system. This is one of few buildings where you can regulate the heating yourself. I also have air condition and a broadband Internet connection. Most other places here still use dial up connections.

This is the best part, the view from the balcony. To the left of the picture is the big opera. One evening they had fireworks.

Danish/Ukrainian music evening

2007-02-13T23:24:00.000-08:00

Last friday after work we went to Jeppe's place to drink beers and enjoy music. Jeppe played Kim Larsen and other Danish stuff and our colleagues brought instruments to play Russian/Ukrainian songs.

There we all are. Semen came later.

Max and his girlfriend.

Andrey and me.

Now they are singing like crazy and Andrey plays the guitar very energetically. Max' girlfriend is also a developer but she is very lively. Later I played the drum and they told me I was the best.

Alex has a very beautiful voice and he expresses well the pain in some old Russian songs.

Jeppe is explaining that he is very good at everything. They misunderstood and thought he said he was good because he is Danish. But really there is no reason. Though, it could be because his grand father was the King of Denmark. I think many of the Danish kings were insane.

There Semen is and he is enjoying some dried calamari. They love that stuff but is smells kind of bad. In the middle is Era, she is an old friend of Andrey and she is going to be a doctor. Potato is her favorite vegetable.

Some of us ended up at the Alpha Club, dancing for a long time. Every third or fourth song would be a slow song and Era told me that many Ukrainian boys only want to do the slow dances. In the club there were a lot of big security guys and they felt worried for my security when I leaned against a table. In Ukraine clubs like this still use flouroscent light.

Finding an apartment

2007-02-13T23:23:00.001-08:00

I was a bit worried if I could find a place to stay where I could feel comfortable. The apartment standards here are different from Denmark. For example there are usually no regulators on the heating system because the heating is distributed equally to everybody. Many apartments are not very well isolated either and a thing like warm water directly from the tap should not be taken for granted. I usually feel cold very easily so that could be a problem. Another sort of luxury problem is that people here have a different sense of aesthetics. No matter how much you pay it may be impossible to find something appealing to a western taste.

Making all the necessary arrangements also was a bit stressing. For one, I was crashing at Jeppes place and I could not do that forever. Communicating with Ukrainian people who do not speak English very well also let to many misunderstandings and unsuccessful phone calls. I ended up writing a lot of mobile text messages instead, I think I must have written about 40 text messages with one of the agencies. I also made a lot of wrong turns until I understood some of the special banking rules concerning credit card limitations, all sorts of different fees and things like that.

The banking stuff would have been a lot easier though if the apartment people did not insist on being paid in Dollars and in cash. Dealing with these people was actually the most stressing part. It did not feel comfortable giving them 1500$ in hand, because I thought they were running a quite untrustworthy business. For one, the reason they want to be paid in cash is that they do not pay taxes. But that is the norm in Ukraine I was told. Though, it is not the norm in Ukraine to demand a deposit, which they did. Another thing was that I would never meet the administrator I was communication with, only some of her people who came to me in the street. I was told it was not possible to meet her and I couldn't find an address an the website either. It also felt a bit strange sometimes when they were showing me an apartment and some people would come home, maybe people who lived there. I was told that one guy was there to fix the bell, but clearly he was not.

I wonder how it works when foreigners like me rent an apartment in Ukraine. The people I was dealing with were not from an agency owning a lot of apartments, but actually from an association of a lot of apartment owners. So I would be paying the rent to one owner of an apartment with some percentages going to the association. I would pay around 1000 to 1500 Dollars which is actually an insane amount of money in Ukraine. I take it that when I rent an apartment from someone I actually drive them out of their homes. But for them it is such good business that they are willing to move away for me. It makes me feel kind of strange that they will feel lucky when I do that to them.

Office trouble

2007-02-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

When Christian, the manager from my company was here he complained that our office was too small, so they moved us to a smaller office.

Our new office. Maybe in cubic meters it is bigger, because the ceiling is very high.

In the room right beside the crowded one there is this room with lots of space. Semen and I sit here.

Our office manager is a strange person. Semen and I told him that we would like to sit in the middle of the room and not stare into the wall as we do now. But he told us that we should sit that way because that was 'the way it was designed', and then he left. He also told Jeppe that we could not sit all together in the big room because some people in another team disapproved of that. Jeppe spoke to these people though and they said they did not mind.

Double date + 1

2007-02-13T23:08:00.000-08:00

The Sunday after we went out again with one of the bowling girls and her friend. They actually did not speak English very well so it was good that Alex could translate the more difficult communications.

Ukrainians are usually late so Jeppe and I went to this place to have a beer. Then Alex came, he was not as late as the girls. You may notice the Christmas decorations. I don't know what is up with Christmas here but the girls who came later claimed that it was just a normal decoration.

Jeppe and Erina. We are at a pretty good Italian restaurant.

Alex with Erina's friend. She loves everything Italian, even opera.

In the taxi on our way to an ice skating disco.

That night I played the role of fifth wheel/paparazzi.

Skiing and marriages in the forests

2007-02-13T23:07:00.000-08:00

After last night's bowling I was still a bit hung over but I was going skiing with Semen and some of his friends.

Semen and his girlfriend. We were going to meet his friends at this big Russian monument for people who died in the second world war. I would have made some more pictures but my new camera apparently does not to work very well in the cold. It was a very Russian monument, large stone thingies and loudspeakers playing music for pathos.

One interesting thing it was to see a sort of marriage parade walking up this path. I have seen something similar in the middle of Kharkov, married people in the park, freezing and drinking champagne. Apparently it is custom for married people to go to these places and have their pictures taken.

Me in the very same place. Underneath the jacket I am wearing two sweaters, a sweatshirt, two shirts, a thermo-shirt and a T-shirt.

Skiing was also fun. I fell only once and I made a small hill inside the forest. This was my first time skiing. If the snow is not going away I will go to some hills which should be near by Kharkov.

The Ukrainian connection

2007-02-13T22:56:00.000-08:00

My company cooperates with a Ukrainian company which facilitates the Ukrainian office, my Ukrainian collegues are actually hired with that company. The company is run by Danish people and one day the manager came from Kiev to inspect our office and find a better location that we can move to. When he came to the office he did not say 'hello' or anything and I think my Ukrainian collegues were a bit offended by that. Usually every morning we even shake hands and also in the afternoon when leaving. But he invited Jeppe and me out for dinner.

The manager to the right and another Danish guy working in Kiev for another Danish company. The only thing they talked about was prostitutes, which were all women according to them. Maybe it was meant as a kind of joke.

I do not have more pictures of that night but we went on to a big club which had a casino, a bowling alley and a disco with strippers (most discos have that here I think). Jeppe picked up some girls and after the Danish guys left we all went bowling for four hours, until five in the morning.

Lunch time at the office

2007-02-12T01:25:00.000-08:00

Every day at lunch time we go out to eat. I know people in Denmark must envy us.

Often we go to this place not far from the office.

Max, Semen, Andrey, Jeppe and Alex. Notice the pizzas. I did not expect to find some of the best pizza in the world in Ukraine, but there it is. Jeppe is having his usual salyanka soup. I don't know exactly what it is but it has some whole olives, sour cream and a slice of lemon in it, and it is good.

After lunch and a snow fight, on the way back to the office. The square is 'pl Svobody' and it is the largest in Europe, or at least so my collegues say.

Going out with my new collegues

2007-02-12T00:44:00.000-08:00

The second day I was here Christian took us all to an Indian restaurant which Alex had been recommended.

Max and Semen.

Semen and Andrey. Sometimes the restaurant would start playing loud Indian music and a dancer would make a sort of bollywood movie dance between the tables.

One dancer took Christian to the floor and made him do stuff with a stick. She also hit him in the head.

Jeppe enjoying a warm beer.

Alex and Max.

The office

2007-02-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

Coming to the office was not a big shock to me as I had already seen Jeppe's photos. I guess I could have also expected some very thick air and a not so good smell. Felt like I was back at University.

Small room with a low ceiling.

View from the office. To the left of the picture there is a big T.V. screen playing commercials with sound. There are three songs we can hear all day and one of them is a christmas song. They say it has been running since last summer.

It works allright actually. I don't know if we have to drink warm water in the summer though.

Arriving in Kharkov

2007-02-11T23:50:00.000-08:00

My very first day in Kharkov was actually two weeks ago. I came here with one of the managers from my company, Christian.

Airport office. I usually never pack more luggage than I can carry myself because every time I trust it with the airline company they blow it. I had to use the same clothes for five days until I got my luggage. Christian was clever to make them buy him a new suit as compensation but we could not find him a single suit that he liked in all of Kharkov.

We got some beers and went to Jeppe's place.

They had a long discussion.

They are talking about suits. Christian knows a lot about that.

Later we cought a Lada cap and went to a place I thought I would never go. The driver played a sort of disco music very loud.

First post

2007-02-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

Hello. This is my first post.