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As soon as it became light after 6 in the evenings there was no need to take the metro home straight after work. Instead I met Ana on Khreshchatik (between the ice cream stall and the breakdancers) and we walked up the hill from Besarrabskii market - past the statue of Lenin - to sit on the benches in Taras Shevchenko park. We sipped apple juice bought from a kiosk, and relaxed as the sun went down behind the trees. Every day a chess tournament would take place under the pagodas in the corner of the park. Dozens of old men in dark grey felt caps observed the boards in front of them, oblivious to the rain, concentration etched onto their faces.
We spent one Saturday with Lyuda in Lisova, a district at the very easternmost edge of the city. It is home to Kyiv's largest market - a sprawling, haphazard settlement with separate sections for clothes, food and second-hand books and CDs.
The market is a picture of chaos: shoppers rub shoulders in the narrow aisles between stalls; colourful signs are written in crooked Russian or Ukrainian; tomatoes, eggs, beer and cucumbers are sold from the backs of
lorries. The thick smell of fish hangs in the air in the meat section, from trout caught in the Dnieper that morning which flap around in just a few inches of water. The market's only dull parts are the sellers themselves, who sit in low chairs at the back of each stall and greet each question with an indifferent grunt or a lazy nod.
Azeri and Georgian men tend kiosks selling
shaurma kebabs. They hack generous strips of chicken or lamb from a rotating spit with sharp knives, then place the meat in the middle of round pieces of thin
lavash bread, before folding it into a parcel together with a sticky mixture of pepper, sour cream and onions.
In the very centre of the market is a large, indoor clothes bazaar. It is a warehouse-type building, with a high ceiling and separate halls for each type of garment. Inside, the market is even more crowded than outside: in the narrow corridors of the shoe hall shoppers were literally tripping over themselves, such was the demand for spring footwear after a winter spent in boots. The corridor doubles up as a changing room where ladies lose their balance,
or their patience, or both at the same time. I soon lost Ana and Lyuda to the hundred square yards of high-heeled bedlam, and went to look for somewhere calmer.
The jeans section is a similar hall but its corridors are wider, and there are larger stalls on either side. Sellers patiently lean on their counters in front of a background of dozens of shades of blue denim. To try a pair on I would slip behind the counter to stand next to the seller, so that only the top half of me was visible to passers-by. After half an hour standing in my underwear we agreed on a pair with the right number of sequins and pockets, for the right number of
hryvnya.
On other days we walked around the centre of Kyiv, and stopped at our favourite cafés whenever it started to rain. We spent hours in
Videnski Bulochki, a European-style bakery on
vulytsya Pushkinska which has tables on the street and the former USSR's second best coffee, and the cheerfully-named
Mister Snek opposite St. Sophia's cathedral, where we perched in high chairs next to the window with a pot of scalding hot jasmine tea,
and listened to the expensive crunching of Mercedes wheels on the cobbled streets of
vulytsya Volodymyrska. Omnipresent on each
kafeishka's television set was Ruslana's latest song,
Vidlunnya Mriy (Moon of Dreams), that seemed to always shake away lethargy and improve my mood.
A short walk down the hill from St. Sophia's Square is Podil, the oldest part of town. The area beside the right bank of the river Dnieper is a place where the new buildings and ruthless
reklama of the post-Soviet era haven't managed to pull rank over classicism. There are no grey housing blocks; instead
vulytsya Sagaidachnoho, which runs from Kontaktova Ploshcha to Poshtova Ploshcha, is made up of low, baroque buildings and attractive churches.
Evenings at the church hall in Lybidska have become a comforting constant at the end of each working week. It through the coffee house, set up by Jared as a meeting place for the congregation of the Golosiivska church as well as for some well-meaning misfits like myself, that I have met many good people. Two new friends are Mickey and Ella.
Ella invited me and Ana to her parents' apartment one evening. The flat is an hour's trolleybus journey
from our own neighbourhood, in a soulless housing block in the heart of the Troyeshchina district. The people of Kyiv pronounce the word in a sinister way - Tro-
ye-schina - as if it is home to witches from a children's fairytale. In reality it contains nothing apart from hundreds of ugly concrete buildings and a few small, ragged
Produkty stores. It is one of the bleakest and, it is said, most dangerous corners of Europe. We hurried inside.
From the outside it is a daunting place, but Ella's parents had decorated the inside of the apartment beautifully. The four of us sat in their cosy kitchen and swapped stories, with a fruit torte and Fluffy the rabbit between us.
Mickey has crammed more adventures into his twenty four years than most people manage in a lifetime. He grew up in California, where a love for surfing led to him taking various jobs on ships. He spent four years travelling the world - West Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean - with a Bible for company, before arriving in Ukraine in 2006. Since then he has worked closely with Kyiv's street children and, lately, for a charity involved with the rehabilitation
of drug addicts. He and Ella got married a year ago, and he now tells his impressive (and enviable) stories in fluent Russian.
At 10 they walked us to the bus stop opposite their building - even Fluffy, peering out of a blanket in Ella's arms.
At the end of my first half-year in Ukraine, I went home for two weeks in a reflective mood. I have lived in three places - the first a small rented room in the middle of the Vinohradar's concrete hell, the second a spare room belonging to two American missionaries, Jared and Joel, in Livoberezhna, and since November home has been a small but cosy flat to the north of the Golden Gates, in a neighbourhood full of tall trees and dachshunds.
Even after six months, Ukraine is still as much of an enigma as it was on my first evening. Kievan society contradicts itself in many ways - its people are either agonisingly rude or idiosynchratically polite, unashamedly selfish or incredibly generous. Since the fall of Communism in 1991 a shocking divide has appeared between rich and poor. But it is natural to pay more attention to the highs and
lows of a culture that is not your own, and for all the complicated hierarchy and superstitions which set Ukraine apart from the rest of Europe, it is similar in many ways; my Ukrainian colleagues love football and hate Mondays as much as anyone.
But Ukraine's ugly side runs deeper than most. There are many, many cruel people, who undermine everything that is good about the country. The murder in April of an African student from the medical academy in Lybidska, with his Ukrainian wife and small child, is one of a series of horror stories that happen with sickening regularity. People will do abysmal things to each other for the sake of money, and all that is ever mustered is a shrug. It is a place with no justice flowing through its veins.
It had been a colourful six months: I spent the autumn taking pictures of golden church spires and listless grey blocks of flats; a winter walking through white snow and lining up pitch black espressos beside piles of translations; spring nights shuffling home under dull yellow street lights.
Life in Ukraine has created different types of memories. I have become fond of the
ordinary things that punctuate each day at work: the sixteen lifts or escalators that I have to take to travel the half an hour from my flat to the office and back again; the apple and cinnamon pancakes at my favourite
stolovaya canteen; double episodes of the Russian sitcom [url=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sl1bcMfdf68
"Schastlivy Vmeste" which we rush home to watch every evening.
I have explored as much as possible in my spare time, and have experienced some of the best parts of life in Kyiv - like an afternoon at the Shulyavska ice rink, metro rides over the frozen river Dnieper, or shopping in Lukyanivska market for a New Year's party.
The unforgettable moments have happened by chance - I was in the right place at the right time to go to to two Champions League football matches at the Olimpiiskiy stadium, and with Ana to a concert by Zemfira, my favourite singer. Others, like a trip to a Soviet collective farm, happened thanks to the Ukrainian friends I have made.
I will find a lot more to do in the next six months.
Next diary: Love and the Lavra.
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Cat
non-member comment
You know... the way you write about it the majority of the time, I bet most of your readers wonder why you would ever want to leave there. Hope everything is going well at the moment for you. Take care. xx