In Ukraine Toilet Uses You
So I realize it’s been quite a while since I last updated, sorry but internet has been pretty limited these past days as I’ve been in Ukraine staying with Dasha and her family.
The end of the time in Hungary was pretty fun; we had to leave on the 5th though, due to issues with extending the visas of my friends. It was alright though, good news is that when paying for my extra bit of stay in the flat, my agent forgot to charge for anything other than utilities.. meaning the 125 Euro that I was supposed to pay was neglected (I wasn’t going to mention it). The bad news is I forgot a few things in the flat, one being my medal that I bought (I really wish there was a way to get it back, but Dasha said they have many things like that here and I should be able to find the same one in good condition along with many others for really cheap). I had to leave behind a few things that I didn’t really need to bring with me to France because I couldn’t fit them in the bags without them being too heavy to ship or take on the plane with me. All that is ok though.
Speaking of planes…this is just my luck lately. I got to Odessa, Ukraine and was going through my things to make sure that I had everything I needed for my trip. I remembered packing my plane ticket in one of the bags I brought with me, but couldn’t find it. Yes, I managed to loose a plane ticket… probably packed in one of the other bags, keep in mind I was packing in the dark because the power in the flat went out except for in the bathroom and kitchen. That made it a lot of fun packing, trust me on this one.
OK so what have I been doing you might ask? Here’s the rundown.
Eger: While driving through Hungary we decided to stop off in Eger for a few hours to see the city. Being how I’d already been there, nothing really new but it was fun anyway. We wound up spending the better part of the day on the 5th here.
Random City: We stopped the night in some small city in Ukraine just after the Hungarian border because we were tired and needed sleep. Hungarian hotel toilet paper is 10 times better than Ukrainian hotel toilet paper. They both are horrible, but at least Hungarian toilet paper has a hole in the middle of it and perforations for easier ripping, Ukrainian has neither.
Lviv:
We stopped in Lviv on the 7th to spend the night and see the city. Dasha and Igor had already been there and said it was nice. There was a really good pastry, dessert place that we had dinner at (dinner was all desserts and insanely thick hot chocolate). Lviv was actually a pretty cool old city. Surprisingly there are not many streetlights, that’s my only gripe about Ukraine in general so far.
On the drive to Odessa we had to stop at a gas station to use the toilets. Here, some toilets are a simple hole in the ground inside a cement structure. This was one such toilet. I’d never seen such a thing before. Surprisingly it is more difficult to use a hole in the ground than it is to use a regular toilet… may also be because there was no light inside the “water closet” and it was dark out so no light was coming in.
Odessa: It is quite a nice city and the Black Sea is only about a ten-minute walk from Dasha’s parent’s flat. I am staying there with her mom and her sister. Her dad is taking care of his sick mother for the time being so I haven’t met him yet. Her mom does not speak much English at all, but is a very nice lady…seems she is quite crazy too, just like Dasha and Nastya.
Jan 8:
Went for a walk with Nastya to the sea and around that area for a couple of hours. Got home and had lunch before Dasha came to get me and take me around the city some more. It was quite a nice little tour of Odessa, quite an old city, but beautiful in the downtown area. The day ended a little early, and I went to a netcafe to try to figure out what to do with my plane ticket.
Jan 9:
The weather was quite bad the night of the 8th and there was a lot of ice around on the sidewalks and streets, fortunately most of it melted partway through the day when Dasha came to show me around the city since we didn’t make it all the way yet. This time we saw the area down by the sea more and the city hall and a hotel out in the harbor, it was quite nice and we had dessert on the top floor and got a great view of the city.
Jan 10:
At 3 Dasha came to take me to a show at the Dolphinarium, we went but found the show was sold out, so we bought tickets for the 11th instead. We continued the tour of Odessa and went to the old city and saw the most ridiculous bank ever. Seriously, it was their marine bank, it looked like a newly renovated castle though…complete with a gate and rounded watch tours at the top. After the tour, we went to a café and to a cd store. CDs here are insanely priced; I bought 5 of them for $20. All new, all Ukrainian bands…5 cds for $20 ridiculous. After the cd store we headed off to the theater to see a French movie, which was supposed to have Russian subtitles. Turns out it was dubbed, so I really couldn’t understand any of the talking scenes (there fortunately weren’t too many though). Seems like it was a good movie though and I wish I could have understood more of it.
Jan 11:
Dasha and I went to the Dolphinarium since we had our tickets. It was actually a really good show; they even had seals doing things in addition to the 4 dolphins. The show was around 40 minutes, but was definitely worth seeing; it was a small stadium so we were quite close to the water and the dolphins. After the show we decided to go to the Philharmonic Orchestra because some performers were putting on a free show. The show wasn’t that great, the clothes people were wearing made us laugh so much that even after the show we were still laughing. For dinner we went to the mall where there is a good and cheap pizza place. The make the pizza for you in about 5 minutes and its quite good… only costs around $2 or $3, my pizza and a Vanilla Coke (yes they actually had it and I was happy) only cost $4. The pizza was quite large too and I was very full after it. That concluded Wednesday.
Jan 12:
Went around the city with Nastya and took some pictures. It was actually a really sunny day out, lately it had been cloudy, and so it was good to get pictures with the sun out. Later we met up with Dasha and went to a market and to see about selling my broken phone. I found and bought a new pair of leather gloves (70 Hrivnas-- $14) and they have a very nice lining in them. I was shocked at how cheap they were. We didn’t find a place to buy my phone, seems that the LCD is worth the most and since it is busted the phone has virtually no value…no big surprise to me. The three of us went to the theater where there was a ballet being put on for really cheap and saw that. It was Giselle, and was quite good…the no talking really helped since everyone had as good of idea as to what was going on as I did. After the play, we went to a restaurant and got some chicken and ridiculously thick hot chocolate, almost as thick as the stuff we had in Lviv. I think they just melt dark chocolate and put it in a cup, you really do need a spoon to drink it.
Jan 13:
Friday the 13th, also known as New Year’s Eve. That’s right I celebrated the New Year again. This year I had two Christmases and two New Years. You may be thinking to yourself what is he talking about? Well according to the old Slavic Calendar the 13th of January is New Year’s Eve Day. To celebrate we went to Dasha and Igor’s flat for dinner (cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue for desert). It was quite fun and I got to use their internet to catch up on some e-mails. Coming back to the flat was an adventure, my second time ever in a “Mashrutka”. This is the main form of public transport here and costs a whole 30 cents to use. They are essentially large vans or small busses, which have a pre-determined route but no set stops. This causes the mashrutka to be constantly stopping to let one person on or one off. How much more inefficient could it get? It was really crowded and for a while I could barely breathe due to the woman next to me giving me very little room. The day ended with a sore throat, perhaps due to the low quality of air in the mashrutka. Earlier Nastya and I went to the place I got my gloves and I picked up a new wallet since the $4 one I bought in Budapest was too large and bulky. $30 later I have a very nice wallet which has a mini-wallet in it. The change holder detaches from the main wallet and has 6 credit card slots and a pocket for money. In essence I got two wallets, one that is very small and will be good for times I don’t want to take my whole wallet. The size of the main wallet is perfect and is exactly what I was looking for.
Jan 14:
Didn’t really do much. I found a way to show different keyboard layouts on my computer so I began copying my new cds to the computer. Previously I had no way to know where the Cyrillic characters were and that made it incredibly difficult and I was going to wait until I had internet so that it would automatically download the information. I finished editing the Odeskabel website for English, Igor asked me to take a look and edit where needed. He said I will be paid for the work, but he wasn’t sure how much yet because he needed to talk to his boss. I also edited their Annual Report the other day and the pay will include my having done that. Around 12 we decided to go to a club that played 80s music; we got there to find it was full and we couldn’t get in, so we tried another club out by Dasha and Igor’s flat, around half hour away and got in to that one. It wasn’t bad, but all they played was techno (no surprise) people kept bumping into me and I didn’t really know how to respond other than by moving away. Had it been a ska show I’d have just given them a little elbow but I don’t think people at the club would have responded the same way so I didn’t want to press my luck. Nastya and I got back home around 2:30, she was really tired and I don’t think she was having too much fun.
Jan 15:
Woke up late, around 12:30 but was still up an hour before Nastya so it’s not so bad. Finished putting song names and cover art into the computer. Went to see a show at the same theater the ballet was at. This time the stage was also the place people sat, so we watched a show being performed on stage while sitting on the stage if that makes any sense. I am sure the previous sentence made much more sense than the show made to me. I don’t think it helped that it was in Ukrainian and I couldn’t even recognize the story. Nastya explained a very little to me after it had ended, seems it was about Death and her daughter. Through the show I was thinking maybe it was about some cult or something since it was just people acting really strange and the music was cult like sounding.
Jan 16:
Left Odessa at night for Kiev. The train was the best I’ve been on and there were beds to sleep on. We decided to try the restaurant cart and actually found good prices and good food…miracle. The trip was not bad at all and I arrived in Kiev at around 7:30 in the morning the next day.
Jan 17:
Lugged the luggage to a hotel and then went exploring Kiev with Dasha and Igor, it is a really nice and large city. I really did like it here too, odd how everyone was worried about Ukraine and I turned out to like it.
Jan 18:
Here I am sitting in the Kiev airport using the airport’s free Wifi finishing the updates and answering your emails. Quite a nice trip and I will be in Angers before the day is out with internet connected once I arrive. Talk to you all soon, probably before you even read this.
The end of the time in Hungary was pretty fun; we had to leave on the 5th though, due to issues with extending the visas of my friends. It was alright though, good news is that when paying for my extra bit of stay in the flat, my agent forgot to charge for anything other than utilities.. meaning the 125 Euro that I was supposed to pay was neglected (I wasn’t going to mention it). The bad news is I forgot a few things in the flat, one being my medal that I bought (I really wish there was a way to get it back, but Dasha said they have many things like that here and I should be able to find the same one in good condition along with many others for really cheap). I had to leave behind a few things that I didn’t really need to bring with me to France because I couldn’t fit them in the bags without them being too heavy to ship or take on the plane with me. All that is ok though.
Speaking of planes…this is just my luck lately. I got to Odessa, Ukraine and was going through my things to make sure that I had everything I needed for my trip. I remembered packing my plane ticket in one of the bags I brought with me, but couldn’t find it. Yes, I managed to loose a plane ticket… probably packed in one of the other bags, keep in mind I was packing in the dark because the power in the flat went out except for in the bathroom and kitchen. That made it a lot of fun packing, trust me on this one.
OK so what have I been doing you might ask? Here’s the rundown.
Eger: While driving through Hungary we decided to stop off in Eger for a few hours to see the city. Being how I’d already been there, nothing really new but it was fun anyway. We wound up spending the better part of the day on the 5th here.
Random City: We stopped the night in some small city in Ukraine just after the Hungarian border because we were tired and needed sleep. Hungarian hotel toilet paper is 10 times better than Ukrainian hotel toilet paper. They both are horrible, but at least Hungarian toilet paper has a hole in the middle of it and perforations for easier ripping, Ukrainian has neither.
Lviv:
We stopped in Lviv on the 7th to spend the night and see the city. Dasha and Igor had already been there and said it was nice. There was a really good pastry, dessert place that we had dinner at (dinner was all desserts and insanely thick hot chocolate). Lviv was actually a pretty cool old city. Surprisingly there are not many streetlights, that’s my only gripe about Ukraine in general so far.
On the drive to Odessa we had to stop at a gas station to use the toilets. Here, some toilets are a simple hole in the ground inside a cement structure. This was one such toilet. I’d never seen such a thing before. Surprisingly it is more difficult to use a hole in the ground than it is to use a regular toilet… may also be because there was no light inside the “water closet” and it was dark out so no light was coming in.
Odessa: It is quite a nice city and the Black Sea is only about a ten-minute walk from Dasha’s parent’s flat. I am staying there with her mom and her sister. Her dad is taking care of his sick mother for the time being so I haven’t met him yet. Her mom does not speak much English at all, but is a very nice lady…seems she is quite crazy too, just like Dasha and Nastya.
Jan 8:
Went for a walk with Nastya to the sea and around that area for a couple of hours. Got home and had lunch before Dasha came to get me and take me around the city some more. It was quite a nice little tour of Odessa, quite an old city, but beautiful in the downtown area. The day ended a little early, and I went to a netcafe to try to figure out what to do with my plane ticket.
Jan 9:
The weather was quite bad the night of the 8th and there was a lot of ice around on the sidewalks and streets, fortunately most of it melted partway through the day when Dasha came to show me around the city since we didn’t make it all the way yet. This time we saw the area down by the sea more and the city hall and a hotel out in the harbor, it was quite nice and we had dessert on the top floor and got a great view of the city.
Jan 10:
At 3 Dasha came to take me to a show at the Dolphinarium, we went but found the show was sold out, so we bought tickets for the 11th instead. We continued the tour of Odessa and went to the old city and saw the most ridiculous bank ever. Seriously, it was their marine bank, it looked like a newly renovated castle though…complete with a gate and rounded watch tours at the top. After the tour, we went to a café and to a cd store. CDs here are insanely priced; I bought 5 of them for $20. All new, all Ukrainian bands…5 cds for $20 ridiculous. After the cd store we headed off to the theater to see a French movie, which was supposed to have Russian subtitles. Turns out it was dubbed, so I really couldn’t understand any of the talking scenes (there fortunately weren’t too many though). Seems like it was a good movie though and I wish I could have understood more of it.
Jan 11:
Dasha and I went to the Dolphinarium since we had our tickets. It was actually a really good show; they even had seals doing things in addition to the 4 dolphins. The show was around 40 minutes, but was definitely worth seeing; it was a small stadium so we were quite close to the water and the dolphins. After the show we decided to go to the Philharmonic Orchestra because some performers were putting on a free show. The show wasn’t that great, the clothes people were wearing made us laugh so much that even after the show we were still laughing. For dinner we went to the mall where there is a good and cheap pizza place. The make the pizza for you in about 5 minutes and its quite good… only costs around $2 or $3, my pizza and a Vanilla Coke (yes they actually had it and I was happy) only cost $4. The pizza was quite large too and I was very full after it. That concluded Wednesday.
Jan 12:
Went around the city with Nastya and took some pictures. It was actually a really sunny day out, lately it had been cloudy, and so it was good to get pictures with the sun out. Later we met up with Dasha and went to a market and to see about selling my broken phone. I found and bought a new pair of leather gloves (70 Hrivnas-- $14) and they have a very nice lining in them. I was shocked at how cheap they were. We didn’t find a place to buy my phone, seems that the LCD is worth the most and since it is busted the phone has virtually no value…no big surprise to me. The three of us went to the theater where there was a ballet being put on for really cheap and saw that. It was Giselle, and was quite good…the no talking really helped since everyone had as good of idea as to what was going on as I did. After the play, we went to a restaurant and got some chicken and ridiculously thick hot chocolate, almost as thick as the stuff we had in Lviv. I think they just melt dark chocolate and put it in a cup, you really do need a spoon to drink it.
Jan 13:
Friday the 13th, also known as New Year’s Eve. That’s right I celebrated the New Year again. This year I had two Christmases and two New Years. You may be thinking to yourself what is he talking about? Well according to the old Slavic Calendar the 13th of January is New Year’s Eve Day. To celebrate we went to Dasha and Igor’s flat for dinner (cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue for desert). It was quite fun and I got to use their internet to catch up on some e-mails. Coming back to the flat was an adventure, my second time ever in a “Mashrutka”. This is the main form of public transport here and costs a whole 30 cents to use. They are essentially large vans or small busses, which have a pre-determined route but no set stops. This causes the mashrutka to be constantly stopping to let one person on or one off. How much more inefficient could it get? It was really crowded and for a while I could barely breathe due to the woman next to me giving me very little room. The day ended with a sore throat, perhaps due to the low quality of air in the mashrutka. Earlier Nastya and I went to the place I got my gloves and I picked up a new wallet since the $4 one I bought in Budapest was too large and bulky. $30 later I have a very nice wallet which has a mini-wallet in it. The change holder detaches from the main wallet and has 6 credit card slots and a pocket for money. In essence I got two wallets, one that is very small and will be good for times I don’t want to take my whole wallet. The size of the main wallet is perfect and is exactly what I was looking for.
Jan 14:
Didn’t really do much. I found a way to show different keyboard layouts on my computer so I began copying my new cds to the computer. Previously I had no way to know where the Cyrillic characters were and that made it incredibly difficult and I was going to wait until I had internet so that it would automatically download the information. I finished editing the Odeskabel website for English, Igor asked me to take a look and edit where needed. He said I will be paid for the work, but he wasn’t sure how much yet because he needed to talk to his boss. I also edited their Annual Report the other day and the pay will include my having done that. Around 12 we decided to go to a club that played 80s music; we got there to find it was full and we couldn’t get in, so we tried another club out by Dasha and Igor’s flat, around half hour away and got in to that one. It wasn’t bad, but all they played was techno (no surprise) people kept bumping into me and I didn’t really know how to respond other than by moving away. Had it been a ska show I’d have just given them a little elbow but I don’t think people at the club would have responded the same way so I didn’t want to press my luck. Nastya and I got back home around 2:30, she was really tired and I don’t think she was having too much fun.
Jan 15:
Woke up late, around 12:30 but was still up an hour before Nastya so it’s not so bad. Finished putting song names and cover art into the computer. Went to see a show at the same theater the ballet was at. This time the stage was also the place people sat, so we watched a show being performed on stage while sitting on the stage if that makes any sense. I am sure the previous sentence made much more sense than the show made to me. I don’t think it helped that it was in Ukrainian and I couldn’t even recognize the story. Nastya explained a very little to me after it had ended, seems it was about Death and her daughter. Through the show I was thinking maybe it was about some cult or something since it was just people acting really strange and the music was cult like sounding.
Jan 16:
Left Odessa at night for Kiev. The train was the best I’ve been on and there were beds to sleep on. We decided to try the restaurant cart and actually found good prices and good food…miracle. The trip was not bad at all and I arrived in Kiev at around 7:30 in the morning the next day.
Jan 17:
Lugged the luggage to a hotel and then went exploring Kiev with Dasha and Igor, it is a really nice and large city. I really did like it here too, odd how everyone was worried about Ukraine and I turned out to like it.
Jan 18:
Here I am sitting in the Kiev airport using the airport’s free Wifi finishing the updates and answering your emails. Quite a nice trip and I will be in Angers before the day is out with internet connected once I arrive. Talk to you all soon, probably before you even read this.