Installment #2 about Ukraine.....
2. Transportation experiences. We may not have quite done it all, but I think we came close: airplanes, taxis (small cars and large vans for short trips and long trips), the metro, long distance bus (that can be more like a big van), city buses, country buses, personal vehicle, and even the night train. We did NOT get to ride in a horse-drawn cart, although we did see one. We were told that we did not get the whole experience because we didn't get to see the worst roads Ukraine has to offer. We did use the oldest form of transportation as well: our feet.
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| Nerd alert! Watching the airline's media system re-booting because it was having issues. Some of this was actually meaningful to me. |
The Kiev
metro is notable in that one of its stations is currently the deepest metro/subway stop in the world. There is a station in Switzerland that, when finished, will be deeper. In Kiev it only costs 2.5 hryvnia to ride the metro, which is less than $0.25. You can ride as far as you want for each metro trip - it's a flat rate. Because the metro is so deep, it could double as a bomb shelter if necessary. Lucky for us it was not necessary.
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| Kiev metro (above ground as it crosses the river). |
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| Riding the long escalator into the bowels of the metro. |
The long distance bus is a whole 'nother experience. It probably seated 15 or 20 people total and was kind of like a giant van with two seats on one side of the aisle and one seat on the other side of the aisle. And lucky us, we got to ride in it for more than 5 hours as the Russian TV shows blared away and the air flow was moderate to small. Like many Europeans, Ukrainians do not like drafts, so sometimes things can get slightly stuffy in taxis, buses, and other places. The long bus ride did give us a good excuse to go to a grocery store and buy some LaVosh bread, Nutella, sausages, crackers, and cheese to sustain us during the ride. The ride included one short bathroom stop as well. With the "squat trough" style of toilets, not the usual sit-down ones you might be used to.
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| The bus station in Kiev. We rode in a van about the size of the white vans near the upper left corner. |
The night train wasn't as bad as you might imagine, but the night was still a bit short. I managed to fall asleep for several hours, but it's not the most restful mode of transportation. And we were thankful to have a place to go to in Kiev after disembarking where we could eat a hearty American breakfast, take a real shower, and take a nap.
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| The Lutsk train station around 10:00 PM. |
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| In the night train compartment - it sleeps 4. Thankfully we all knew each other. Sometimes people aren't that lucky. |
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| The Kiev train station. The world's 2nd busiest McDonald's is just to the right off-camera. But you can see the billboard for it in this picture. :-) |
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| Mosaics in the Kiev train station. From my own observation, it seemed like mosaics are kind of a traditional craft for Ukrainians too. |
The city buses were fairly standard. People would pass their fare money from passenger to passenger if they get on in the back and couldn't easily make it up front to pay the driver. On one bus ride we took, a guy boarded with a bag of live chicks that we could hear peeping. We weren't on the bus for this event, but Bert was telling us that he got to ride on the bus one day when a child puked and the bus was really crowded. That would be an experience, huh?
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| Seeing some people off on the country bus that goes into Lutsk. |
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| Bex on the country bus going to Lutsk. |
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| A very patriotic Ukrainian van |
3. Stomach being fed. Boy oh boy, was it fed with many delicious things and some "interesting" things. Our hosts for most of the two weeks live on a farm with a large garden, so we ate tons of fresh food there. New potatoes, sweet cherries, apricots, tart cherries, blueberries, eggs from the chickens, milk fresh from the cow that day, fresh sour cream (kind of an oxymoron), black currants, cucumbers, zucchini, beet sugar from the farm, flour ground from their wheat, homemade jams, homemade peanut butter, etc.
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| The "usual" fruit salad at morning break. They told us this is not a typical Ukrainian snack - this is more of an American thing. The Ukrainians would just put some whole fruits out on the table, and you'd eat them is what one person told me. I was happy there were some Americans in the kitchen to mike this. :-) |
Our hosts made homemade cabbage rolls twice, blueberry and cherry
varenyky (similar to perogies) twice, and a green borsch (zelany borsch) once. Green borsch is made with sorrel and potatoes and does not contain beets. Since I always thought borsch had beets, I asked about it. They said usually borsch implies that the soup is slightly "sour" with vinegar or lemon juice, and is not required to have beets although it quite often does. In general we were told that Ukrainians like to eat a lot of soup. We truly ate like kings and queens. Incidentally, peanut butter is not usually sold in stores there, so nearly all peanut butter you ever eat there will be homemade. We also ate a lot of cabbage slaw that usually included quite a bit of dill and a vinegary dressing. It was pretty good. We didn't eat any beets because they weren't in season.
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| Making varenyky (blueberry I think). Here they were rolling out the dough and making little dough pockets filled with fresh fruit. |
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| They are then boiled in a pot for a couple minutes and removed to cool. |
Meat can be expensive there, so we did not eat large amounts of meat. They raise almost no beef cattle in Ukraine, so most beef is either veal or old milk cows. Thus, the usual meats were chicken or pork.
Ukrainians appear to drink a lot of compote, which is made by boiling dried fruit in water and perhaps adding some sugar if needed. All the compote we drank did not contain any fruit chunks after the boiling - it was purely a liquid. We had some very good homemade cherry compote, and we had some very interesting smoked plum compote at a restaurant. At one restaurant I also ordered fresh squeezed carrot juice. It came out with a good layer of foam still on it. And, we must not forget the
kvas. I would describe the taste of kvas as something similar to taking a pop and fermenting it with yeast. It has the carbonation and color of pop, but then has a very earthy/yeasty taste to it. Methinks it's definitely an acquired taste.
And they have some very tasty Ukrainian chocolate. Ukrainians are fond of rye bread as well, which most Americans appear not to be. Ukrainians also drink a lot of tea. Possibly in many places because they have to boil their water before they drink it. Lucky for us, most of the time we stayed at one of the few places in Ukraine where we could drink out of the tap because they had their own, very pure well.
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| When we were browsing a store once, we found this interesting shape in which ice cream was packaged. |
4. Silliness. Yes, there was some of this. Including quotations of the
bulbous bouffant skit. And taking of pictures with copious of amounts of eggs and dairy. Good-natured volleyball. Speaking of which, I learned a new game to play with a volleyball that involves standing in a circle with people kneeling in the middle. And hitting the people in the middle with the volleyball. We had at least one chin-up competition. And played some "jail". And jumped some rope. And tried to hula hoop (some were successful). And had some laughs about life in general.
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| Quite possibly one of my most favorite pictures of the trip because it captures some of the silliness perfectly. The actual picture taken was kind of an accident, but the thought bubbles were added very purposefully. |
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| Bex and I just "hanging out". |
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| Bex being a rebel in our sleeping area. Why is it always so tempting to do this with skinny cylindrical objects? |
