Ukraine- 2004
(Note:  I’m writing this in April, 2016 or twelve years after our visit to Ukraine)

Not many Americans, or Europeans or Asians for that matter, visit Ukraine (not “the” Ukraine, just Ukraine).  It’s the largest country in Europe by land mass and has a population of more than forty million. It’s bordered by seven countries: Russia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova.

Why did we go there?  I guess the main reason is that my maternal grandfather, Sam, emigrated from Ukraine in the late nineteenth century, and I wanted to see that part of my heritage.  He came from a small village in the west bordering Poland. 

In June, 2004 we decided to explore that part of the world.  Misti booked a flight on Air France to Helsinki, Finland by way of Paris.  From Helsinki we took a two hour ferry, across the Gulf of Finland, to Tallinn, Estonia where we spent two nights.  In Tallinn we rented a car, took a week to drive across Estonia, Latvia and into Lithuania, and then a short flight from Vilnius to Kyiv, Ukraine.  We wanted to drive the car directly to Kyiv, through Belarus, but in 2004 Avis and the other car rental companies felt Belarus was dangerous, which meant we had to return the car in Vilnius and fly to Kiev.

Before planning this trip, we thought we’d see Ukraine on a river boat down the Dnieper river, similar to a trip in Russia we took in year 2000, from St. Petersburg to Moscow.  But we couldn’t make a satisfactory booking so decided we’d drive instead; a good decision.  We anticipated that driving through a country where everything is written in Russian, and nothing in English, might be a challenge, but that’s part of the adventure and fun of many of our trips.  We also knew we’d see few tourists and it would be inexpensive, both of which were true.

Before leaving, we thought it would be a good idea to find someone in the Bay Area who was from Ukraine, and learn what we might expect driving through the country.  I posted a listing on Craig’s List and a young woman in San Francisco responded.  We spoke on the phone and never met, but she gave us the telephone number of a friend who was a student in Kyiv, which was where we’d be starting our Ukraine journey.  The evening that Misti and I arrived in Kyiv, we telephoned her friend and arranged to meet for dinner the following night.  She was a delightful young woman, and provided us with a wealth of information and advice.  She also helped us decide on a route.

Perhaps her best advice was about the police, which she said were called “garbage” in Ukrainian.  She said the police would recognize from our rental car that we were tourists, most likely from Russia, since Russians were the only tourists traveling through Ukraine, to the Black Sea resorts.  She said we could expect to be waved over by the police, at least several times a day, and this was all about getting a bribe. She said give them the equivalent of about a dollar and then just leave.   She suggested not showing a passport, since they might take it and hold it for a bigger bribe. She said if we were involved in a serious accident, it was best to just run away from the scene, but if the police did show up, just give them the equivalent of about ten dollars and that was fine.  Good to know. But then again, that was years ago, and I suspect this may no longer be the case and the stakes now may be much higher.

Driving from Kyiv toward the western city of Lviv, which was our first destination, and then later to Odessa, we were often waved over by the police.  As expected, not a word of English from them, other than the word “passport,” and of course my Russian was limited to a few words and phrases.  I would play dumb, speak to them in English, knowing they had no idea what I was saying, and I’d show them my California drivers license, which they could not read.  No way would I give them my passport.  I could have, and perhaps should have, given them some money, but each time I was being so entertained by the experience, that I didn’t give them anything and they just waved and told me to leave.

After this happened several times, I told Misti it was a waste of our time, and I wasn’t going to stop when they waved us over.  That worked fine until finally two of them, who were standing by their car, a small Russian Lada, took off after us.  Was I worried, not really.   

It was actually sort of fun to be running away from the police and, from what the young woman in Kiev told us, I knew this could easily be resolved with a bribe.  I pulled into a gas station and started putting gas, while they pulled their car in front of mine, to block it.  Two, what looked like seven foot tall cops, got out of the car and tapped their nightstick on our roof.  Clearly, they were pissed and not used to people running from them.  Not to worry.  I knew that I had enough money in my pocket to not only buy them off, but probably enough to buy their entire police station.   I motioned to them to go to the side of the gas station, reached into my pocket, and took out the equivalent of five dollars in hryvnia (pronounced greevna), which is Ukrainian currency.  When I gave them each the money they smiled, said spaciba (thank you in Russian), and left.

Because I thought it was so much fun to run from the cops, I thought perhaps I should start a business bringing guys from the US to Ukraine, and having them get a thrill by doing something they couldn’t do anywhere else.

Driving through a country where all the signs are in Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet, does present some challenges.  We had three road maps, one in English which was great but essentially useless, one in Russian and one in Ukrainian, which is used in the western part of the country.  We weren’t about to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, so we read only the first three letters of road signs for cities, converting them in our minds to something we could understand.  For example, backward b, backward n, etc.  While this was crude, it enabled us to find the city on a map, and thus locate where we were.  It worked.

Getting into and out of large Ukrainian cities, like Odessa and Sebastopol, presented a different challenge, which we met by using what we call “taxi navigation”.   On the outskirts of a city, we’d pull over, look in Lonely Planet for the name of a hotel which was in the center of town, and which always was printed in both English and Russian, and then find a taxi.  We had three by five cards, written in Russian that I had prepared at home, which I’d show to the taxi driver.  The first card said we wanted to follow the driver to the hotel, and the second asked him to write down what the cost would be.  Ukraine is the land of small money, so the cost was usually a dollar or less, in Ukrainian money, of course.  We’d then reverse the procedure to get back to a highway, which would take us to our next destination.  Sounds a bit strange, but works amazingly well, and since there was no GPS it was the only way we could get into and out of these large cities.  This is a system we’ve used in other countries, and we have cards in many different languages for our “taxi navigation.”

Eating in restaurants also required some innovation.  At first we were eating a lot of borscht, since we could recognize that word on the menu.  But then we learned the magic word “etta.” which means “that one” in Russian.  We’d go into a restaurant, look around at what others were eating, get a waitress and point to the dish we wanted, and say “adeen etta pozhaluista” which means “one of those please.”  They would always smile and bring us the dishes we wanted.  We also quickly learned to recognize the word for “restaurant,” which in Cyrillic is written as“pectopah.”

Much of the food was quite simple and basic, but in the larger cities we found a number of restaurants that had excellent food.  One we remember in particular was in Lviv, around the corner from the Grand Hotel, where they had someone singing Sinatra songs and waiters who carried multiple dishes on both their outstretched arms, something I had never seen before and haven’t seen since.

Now about where we went in Ukraine. In Kyiv, we rented a small Honda sedan which, because it was new and foreign, was one of the nicest, and fastest, car on the road. While we didn’t have a set itinerary, the routes we took included these cities: Kyiv, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Uman, Odessa, Kherson, Sevastolpol, Yalta, Simferopol, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava and back to Kyiv.

Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine,  is a large and modern metropolis, founded in 482 AD, one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe.  With a population of almost three million, and a mostly younger population due to the number of people killed in WWII, it’s a hustle bustle place.

We spent our first two nights in Kyiv in the Hotel Kosatsky, on Independence Square, an old and very Soviet hotel with babushkas, older women who didn’t speak a word of English, on each floor near the elevator.  Even though Ukraine had declared its independence from the USSR in 1991, there were still many remnants of their Soviet affiliation and this “guard” on each floor was an example.  We liked the feeling, didn’t feel threatened at all, and looked around every corner for a KGB agent, but never found one.  The old ladies always smiled at us as we got to the elevator, and I’m sure they wondered what the hell we were doing in Kyiv.  In the “good old days” of the USSR, I suspect they had power to give us a hard time for whatever reason, but those days are long gone.

When we were checking in to the Hotel Kosatsky, there were four Italian men also checking in but they did not speak any English and, of course, no Russian. I’m certainly not fluent in Italian but I had enough words to help them get their rooms. With some very basic conversation I learned they had come to Ukraine looking for wives.

While we were in Kyiv we visited the Chernobyl Museum, which depicts everything about the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster.  The entrance is most stirring; as you walk up the stairs the names of all the Ukrainian and Belarusian towns and cities affected by the nuclear meltdown are listed.  We learned from, very detailed dioramas, how the first responders were sent in without any protective clothing, often resulting in fatal radiation burns and poisoning.  We also learned that just after the meltdown, the USSR did not announce what had happened, and the first evidence came from Sweden as a radioactive cloud swept toward that country.

When we left Kyiv we had two weeks to wander through Ukraine, so we were able to make a circuit of the entire country.  We began by leaving Kyiv headed west toward Lviv, near the Polish border.  Lonely Planet showed the Grand Hotel downtown; we headed there and got a lovely room overlooking the opera house at a ridiculously low rate.

Because Lviv is so close to the Polish border, and has shifted over the years from Ukrainian to Polish to Austro-Hungarian control, it has an interesting mixture of architecture and people.  There was a beautiful opera house across from our hotel and we attended a ballet performance of Swan Lake, with tickets for excellent seats easily available for just a few dollars and parking right in front.

After a night in Lviv, we headed south toward Ivano Frankivsk, in the Carpathian Mountains, and then a two day trip to Odessa on the Black Sea.  Our plan was to go to Sevastopol (Americans pronounce it “Sebastopol”), around the Crimean Peninsula, up to Zaporizhzhya, to Poltava and then back to Kyiv, which would take us around most of Ukraine.

A word about the storks in Ukraine.  As we drove through the Baltic countries we would sometimes see stork nests high in trees or on telephone poles.  Ukraine, however, is serious stork country.  These are large, magnificent, white birds with long necks that winter in Africa but breed in Europe.  Ukrainians believe storks have magical powers that protect humans, and that a family with a stork’s nest on its property will live in peace and prosperity.  You can see them all over Ukrainian roads with huge nests at the top of telephone poles.  On some buildings people have set up wagon wheels for them to use for a nest.

Tourism in Ukraine, outside of the Black Sea resorts, is pretty much non-existent, at least that was the case when we visited in 2004.  Few Europeans visit the country, and of course, no Americans.  The exception is wealthy Russians who zoom down from Moscow, or other major Russian cities, on their way to Yalta and other towns in Crimea along the Black Sea.  They zip along in their new black (always black) Toyota Land cruisers, which seemed to be their vehicle of choice.  They travel at high speeds, and the police recognize the cars and leave them alone.  Misti and I decided they must be Russian mafia, especially the men dressed all in black.

After leaving Odessa we headed toward Sevastopol, where we got a room in the elegant Hotel Sevastopol for twenty five dollars a night - as I said previously,, this is the land of small money.  An interesting and friendly city on the Black Sea, it provides access to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, and as such has been under the control of Russia (and before that the USSR) for years.  When we were there in 2004 we were surprised to see so many Russian Federation flags flying on many buildings in a Ukrainian city.  When we inquired about that, we were told that Ukraine had a “special arrangement” with Russia allowing them unrestricted access to the sea.  All of this, of course, changed in 2014 when Mr. Putin decided it was time to have total control of Crimea, and sent in Russian troops to stake his claim.  Who knows what else he’d like to take.

Sevastopol was where we had our first encounter with Ukrainian women seeking “friendships” with western men.  Ukrainian women are exceptionally beautiful, and  many agencies exist to find matches for women, and men who come to Ukraine seeking a wife.  Several times I was stopped on the street, with Misti at my side, and given a sales pitch as well as brochures.  Even after telling them I was married, they still insisted in giving me information on how I could find a bride to take back to America.

We spent several days on the Crimean Peninsula, finding small Black Sea resort towns that were unique, at least to us.  At one we stayed in what might be called a sanitarium, a place where Ukrainians and Russians went for “the cure,” with “doctors and nurses” walking around in dated white gowns.   All this was like going back in a time machine.  We’d walk along the boardwalk and see games and rides from American amusement parks from the 1920’s.  Very different than anything you’d see now in the US or Europe.  All fun and fascinating: families with kids having a great time and all very non-threatening.

On this trip I found a new friend: vodka.  Ever since college days, when I guzzled warm vodka from the bottle with friends just to get drunk, I haven’t had much interest in the beverage.  But in Ukraine vodka is the beverage of choice – and when in Rome, etc.  At restaurants I watched how others ordered and drank vodka, and then imitated what they did.  It’s always served ice cold and, being straight vodka, has much more of a kick than beer or wine.  I must say I got to like it and I only imbibed in the evening, after the car was parked for the night. 

We continued along the Crimea Peninsula, and then headed north along the Sea of Azov, where we bought caviar from some local fishermen, which we eventually had to toss because we couldn’t keep it refrigerated.  We spent a night in Zaporizhzhya on the Dnieper River, at the Ukraine Hotel, and visited the Regional Lore Museum there.  The next day we drove further north to Poltava, where we spent a night, and then on to Kyiv for another night and then began our long trip home the next day.

I would recommend Ukraine as a country to visit for something different than the usual European experience.  It has lots to offer, is safe, easy to get around (if you are adventurous and learn at least a few words in Russian), the food is good, the people are friendly and, perhaps best of all, it’s not crowded with tourists and wasn’t expensive. At least that was our experience in 2004.

Art Faibisch

April, 2016