The smell in the corridor is a familiar mixture of boiled cabbage and cheap cigarettes. A brown carpet in the bedroom is fixed to one of the walls instead of the floor. In the bathroom half of the bathtub sits under a chimney and the lock on the toilet door is on the outside. The kitchen is decorated in eight shades of beige - a flat so infuriatingly fragile could only be Ukrainian. I was staying with Ana and her roommate Alisa, while I searched for a new job and a place of my own. As uncomfortable as the living situation was, I had missed the country’s eccentricity after two months at home. I had arrived back in Kyiv after two weeks travelling through Ukraine. On the way between Lviv and Luhansk provinces I had taken
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