December 19: Arrival in Kyiv
At 3:30 in the morning, I caught a taxi to the train station to get the train to Kyiv. When I lived in Khmelnytsky, I could take a very comfortable overnight train that left at 11:00 p.m.and arrived in the morning. Now it’s considered more convenient to get up before the sun and spend 4 hours sitting upright. Ah well.
Tina and Victor had tried to warn me about how much prices in Kyiv had risen since the Orange Revolution brought the Western-leaning president Victor Yushchenko to power, but I still wasn’t ready for it. I needed a taxi from the train station to the apartment I’d be staying in for the next three days, since I knew I would never find an unknown apartment on my own. Based on past experience, I thought it would cost 15-20 gryvnias (3-4 dollars). The first driver asked me for 30 gryvnias, and I stormed past him in a huff. The second driver asked for 40 gryvnias. I can’t remember what excuse he offered for why that was a reasonable deal, but I went ahead and took the second driver. Later my Ukrainian embassy friend and vital contact, Lilia, told me that that I was charged double the normal price. This is what one former colleague called the “foreign discount”. On the upside, I did feel I got extra value for the money; we had a nice long chat in Russian. He suggested many worthwhile sights in the city (most of which I’d seen already). More importantly, he talked with me about Ukraine since the revolution, and the rising prices. He said the problem is many Westerners come in to Kyiv and are able to pay high prices for apartments and restaurants; locals can’t compete.
I felt guilty enough to feel sorry for him, but not guilty enough to not take the apartment where I’d be paying $50 a night with a grant from the embassy. It was a beautiful apartment that had been renovated in the past few years. It had two rooms (a living room and a bedroom), a kitchen, a huge bathroom, a washing machine, modern lighting, satellite television, a large cabinet with books and dishes, and a kalonka (hot water heater) that could be kept on all the time.
Despite these conveniences, there were still a few irritating reminders that I was not in Kansas. First and foremost is the heating problem. With all the amenities, it was still necessary to turn on the gas stove and oven (with the burners lit of course) to keep the apartment warm. That helped keep the kitchen warm, but it didn’t do much for the bedroom.
The beautiful new bathtub with the modern shower head still had Ukrainian plumbing, a system in which it seems to be impossible for hot and cold water to mix. One gets only scalding hot or burning cold. (To be fair to Ukraine though, sometimes I think my mental wiring works the same way.)
Then there was the television. It had over 300 channels, but every other one was a sex channel. Most of the rest were sports channels or channels in foreign languages other than English. Don’t get me wrong, I love flipping back and forth between an Arabic sitcom and a Polish game show, and Arirang (a Korean channel to teach foreigners about Korea) is excellent. Nevertheless, it would have been nice if out of 300 channels there had been more English than 4 news channels.
Not everything about the apartment was negative. Out two windows I could see the onion domes of an Orthodox Church lightly covered with snow. It was not as fancy as some of the other churches in Kyiv, but they were a sight to behold nonetheless.
Tags: Kyiv, taxi, Train, Travel, Ukraine
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