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Published: July 17th 2008
The most entertaining moments in Ukraine are the ones that come around when you least expect them - like a conversation I had in the chemist in my neighbourhood late one night with a man and his dog. They had been chased away from the local market earlier in the day, the man explained with mischievous pride, after the dog had tipped over a stall and stolen a lady's carrots.
When they arrived home for dinner the man had treated it to a little bit too much cognac, and they had come to the chemist to find some medicine to calm it down. The tipsy terrier - black and handsomely scruffy - was panting uncontrollably by his master's side, its bright pink tongue flapping around the sides of its mouth; in fact it was in a similar state to the one that most humans find themselves in after a couple of sips of Ukrainian cognac.
It didn't seem right that I was celebrating my birthday while my friends each had a reason to be unhappy. We met in the Irish bar on
vulytsya Zhytomyrska, and a round of sad stories was shared even before the first round of drinks
arrived.
Jared announced that he would be leaving Kyiv at the end of July, to take up a new career as a film producer in Los Angeles. After two and a half years in Ukraine he will be leaving a lot behind - but if his films are as original as his career moves, he will have plenty of success.
Joel had been attacked three nights earlier by a member of the
militsiya (the Ukrainian police), a baton struck across his forehead and 800
hryvnya taken from his wallet as punishment for speaking in English on the street. Joel has received more abuse than all of us put together; his American clothes (and voice) draw unwanted attention, and it seems that no number of glass bottles smashed over his head will make him want to fit in.
No foreigner is safe, but those with dark skin are targeted: we learned of the murder of another African student - one more act of
sickening racism that undermines a culture built on hospitality and respect. Only a minority of Ukraine's no small number of uneducated lowlifes go to the lengths of thuggery, but in Kyiv the
skinhead movement - which terrorises
the Georgian and Azeri communities in Moscow - is growing, not shrinking.
Ruvimbo was troubled by violence elsewhere: she wasn't able to go home to Zimbabwe to see her family after her exams finished because of the chaos there. So, the medical student needed to be prayed for, the missionary needed medical attention, and all that Ana and I could do was sip our cider and say "what is the world coming to?"
Once the negativity was cast aside the conversation took a turn for the better. Joel (as I already knew from the days when we lived together) specialises in cheering up those who have a lot on their mind. The chat in English was as much of an indulgence as the 70
hryvnya burgers - you only turn 23 once - that we ordered to go with it.
A television screen in the corner of the room was showing the Turkey vs. Portugal match in the European football championships. The commentator stumbled across the foreign surnames in a cheerfully tipsy fashion, as if he had just left the Irish bar to go to the studio the minute that we all walked in.
By the
time the second half began he didn't seem to know which sport he was talking about, let alone which teams and tournament. My colleagues sheepishly told me that the drunken commentary wasn't a one-off; as the championship continued, the performances of Mr. Direpa were analysed around the office water cooler almost as much as those of the players.
At closing time we walked together to Maidan Nezalezhnosti metro, and were about to shuffle on to our respective trains when we were accosted. The man introduced himself as Aiden, from Swaziland - a ragged reddish ponytail arranged on top of his head, freckles peeking out of his suntan, a broad smile and gangster hand gestures loosened by vodka.
He reeled off stories of his first day in Ukraine with a hyperactive south-east African drawl. He explained that he worked in London, and had been drafted in as a sound engineer for the Sir Paul McCartney concert that would be taking place the following weekend. By his side were a cute young Ukrainian couple, who by all accounts had saved him from a gang of thugs earlier in the evening, and who weren't going to let him out of their
sight until they found someone trustworthy to leave him with. The unlikely group of us chatted for a while, then pointed him in the direction of a bar where he could spend the rest of the night.
The next morning I remembered what it felt like to wake up on my birthday and not be obliged to spend three hours of it panicking in an exam hall. So many of my birthdays have been ruined by questions on German grammar, French literature or Russian history that the date has been overtaken by Eurovision in the list of days of the year which I most look forward to. Ana and I celebrated with Videnski Bulochki cappuccinos and Khreshchatik ice-creams, then took the metro over to the left bank of the river Dnieper and spent the rest of the afternoon on Hydropark beach.
The beach is in a lovely setting, beside a river the same colour as my recently unwrapped swimming trunks and with a view of the Lavra monastery across the water. The sticky sand is far from tropical, but the people of Kyiv travel to it
en masse at weekends, to escape the strains of the city without
having to leave it altogether.
But the route to the sand is bedlam: a scrum of beach bags and
babushki thrusts through the heavy metro doors, and the path to the water leads through a fairground and a gauntlet of
shaurma stalls. The smell of barbecued meat and the sound of pop music - that most Ukrainian of combinations - fills the air.
There are two areas: a main beach populated mostly by men drinking beer, and the children's beach, where everyone else had moved to in hope of avoiding the drunks. We took one of the last remaining spaces on the children's beach and covered our faces with our shirts - mainly to keep the hot summer sun out of our eyes, but partly due to the sight of sixty-something women in fluorescent green bikinis, who each proudly display more fat around their protruding midriffs than there is on all the young ladies on the beach put together.
We lay there until the evening, then went for another stroll around the centre at dusk. It was an excellent birthday.
One night I met Jared after work to go to
Himalaya, Kyiv's best known Indian restaurant.
It is a cosy and exotically decorated place, on the top of a hidden staircase behind Khreshchatik. The menu is a hotch-potch of styles rather than purely Indian, which made choosing a dish all the more enthralling. The staff are Georgian or Central Asian, and the food was milder than in the curry houses I was used to.
The cat balancing on the windowsill outside had good reason to lick her lips: I ordered a spicy vindaloo made with a whole chicken breast, served along with the bone in a sizzling clay pot, to go with a crispy, fist-sized vegetable samosa, hot triangular pieces of naan bread, and a bowl of rice so large that a single portion may have overfaced both of us.
After finishing my meal I felt truly relaxed for the first time in weeks. The bill came to five times more than for
kolbasa and
blinchiki in the canteen further down the street, but I didn't regret spending a day's wages on such special food and company. After dinner we watched the breakdancers on Khreshchatik enthusiastically popping and locking in time to 1980s rap music, in front of a confused but impressed crowd.
On the way to the peaceful botanic gardens to spend a world class Saturday with Ana, I stopped to stock up on new shorts for my summer holiday. I found them in the shopping centre next to the Druzhby Narodiv ("International Friendship") metro - which is fitting, as I will be wearing them on my
platzkart sleeper train adventure across Europe. They are trendy long ones that stop a few inches below my knees; they look as though they have been fashioned from half a dozen different patches of denim fabric, that have been snipped off from several pairs of old jeans while a girl was turning them into pairs of hotpants. The discarded patches look as if they could have been sewn back together for a school project; the shorts would look just as much at home in a textiles classroom as in a boutique.
The denim hotpants are one of many fashion statements by Kyiv's girls who, in Ana's words, "dress as if it's their last day on earth". The world is their catwalk as they walk nowhere in particular, high heels clicking importantly on the street, their lips fixed in seductive pink pouts, and their breasts
squeezed together in tight tops that make nonsense of gravity and perverts out of the most respectable of men. Droplets of summer rain run between them like silver bullets, blowing every passer-by's self-control to smithereens.
The city's gas supplies were cut off for two weeks for repair work, when half of Kyiv was in need of a cold shower.
Next diary: "Waiter, could you take the pish out of my pizza?"
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Olga Pritula
non-member comment
ouch!!!
Hey Jon, the pics are amazing!!! I love the fountain and the handle and the Street Scene especially!!! you are good!!! I loved it that you added the signiture to your pics - great protection! we are all learning hard way!! well - you should have invited the rest of the people for the birthday party - then it would not be full of sad stories - the saddest one i had - was that i was not there!!!! anyway! Great story - great pictures - you are awesome!!! keep on the good work!