Journal cyan's Journal: Kiev, Part 1
Aside from my trip to Chernobyl, the whole trip to the Ukraine was exceptional all unto itself. In fact, if I had to pick a single country to return to, it would probably be the Ukraine. (I also apologize for putting 'the' in front of 'Ukraine', I know that the nomenclature is now to call the country simply 'Ukraine', but old habits die hard. I realize that someone calling Canada 'the Canada' would piss me off, too.) Italy and the United Kingdom come in a close second place, but the Ukraine wins simply because it's so damn expensive to do anything in either the UK or Italy, but so, so very cheap to do those same things in the Ukraine.
Of course, the Ukraine isn't exactly at the top of anyone's travel list except for my own. The fact that it used to be part of the Soviet Union was the biggest draw for me to go. I wanted to get as close as I could to the whole Soviet *experience*, just to get a feel for what it must've been like. Communism is the opposite of capitalism after all, so, to my mind it would be interesting to see some of these inverses in the flesh.
Remember those movies that show a room full of people waiting in a single mass, not organized at all, everyone all sweaty and not seeming to move at all as they wait to clear passport control of some foreign, hostile country? That's what it was like stepping off of the Lufthansa flight from Munich. The American couple ahead of me were simply aghast to have to put up with such a nightmare, but I found it absolutely fascinating.
Guards walked around the room in soviet-style uniforms, big communist-style caps and all, trying to look as important as they could. A television screen advertised where luggage could be claimed after you cleared the control point, cycling city names in English, then Ukrainian, and finally Russian before starting over. A Russian passenger at one counter is actually yelling at a passport control agent. I can only smile -- he wouldn't be able to get away with *that* back in the Soviet days.
It took me an hour to finally make my way up to a passport control agent, and they looked positively meek compared to how their Soviet counterparts must've composed themselves back in the day. I greeted him with a "hello" in English, and presented him my Canadian passport along with my filled out entry/exit card. The agent's photo, registration number, and name (in cyrillic, of course) were all on display in front of me on an identification card -- a method to combat corruption. He flipped through the pages of the passport, didn't say a word, and promptly stamped both my passport and the exit card, having retained the entry card for the government records. I knew that if I should lose this exit card, leaving the country would pose some serious problems that would involve a trip to the Canadian Embassy.
My luggage had to be scanned through a security screening device on my way out, not for safety reasons, but so that customs could keep their eye out for anything suspicious making its way into the country. The customs agent half asleep in the chair could care less about the contents, though, other than to ensure that you follow proper procedure by feeding your luggage through the device. No doubt Soviet customs agents would have been all over everyone's luggage back in the day. Now, the westernization of the country has seriously crippled the old way of doing things. All that remains are these vestigial reminders of a once totalitarian society.
I was surprised when the hotel driver was still waiting for me, half expecting him to have long gone given the hour wait. He barely speaks any English, which isn't a big surprise in a country where everyone speaks Ukrainian, most people speak Russian, but very few speak English. It takes him a couple of tries to start his car. Even after he manages to make the thing roar to life, it fills the interior with exhaust, forcing us to roll down all of the windows. I look back at the airport and the huge letters above the airport, in cyrillic, announcing "Boryspil." It strikes me as being something from the 60's.
We're then roaring down the freeway to Kiev, where huge, modern LED signs are suspended above the highway every kilometer. The signs announce the current date, time, weather conditions, and speed limit for each lane. My driver is in the far left lane, of course, where the advertised speed limit is 130kph, compared to the 70kph speed limit of the far right lane. Since the corrupt traffic police were disbanded years ago, everyone drives at what I would later refer to as "Ukrainian speeds." There's no longer a fear of receiving so much as a speeding ticket. As bright LED sign after sign flies by, it strikes me as a quite quaint way of modernizing the road system; even Germany isn't that adamant about keeping you informed every kilometer.
The Soviet-era bus stops fly by on both sides of the eight-lane highway, some of them large enough to drive a train through, with huge cyrillic letters announcing the stop name atop of each one. The Soviet obsession with branding things in big letters was not lost on me.
Soon we enter the Kiev city limits, where one tall concrete apartment building after another passes by. They're all alike: bland, utilitarian buildings built to house the maximum number of people possible. They stand next to one another in perfect rows, sometimes half a dozen or more, all looking the same. It's like a concrete jungle growing all over the city, or a scene from the latest dystopian flick.
Before long, I'm checked into my hotel room where I'm paying 500 grivna per night, or about $100 Canadian. The average Ukrainian salary works out to $500 Canadian per month, which means that my hotel stay alone will burn through three fifths of a typical Ukrainian salary. My room has a great view of a wide boulevard, some kind of Soviet-era monument complete with communist star atop, the train station to the south, and the never-ending Kiev cityscape along with all of its uniform buildings.
What stands out is the NATO flag. It's everywhere. The Ukrainian government has been pushing to become a member of NATO for some time now, and the fact that they're proud of their gradual westernization of the country shows. Who would've thought that the NATO flag would fly in the streets of Kiev?
I turn on the television for a brief moment to see what Ukrainian broadcasts are like. Unsurprisingly, it's full of Ukrainian-dubbed versions of western favourites: The Simpsons and Family Guy among others. I watch the weather forecast on the all-news channel, fascinated by how once-familiar city names from around the world look obscure in cyrillic. After turning off the TV, it doesn't take long for me to fall asleep
