About the people I met in Ukraine.

Written in august 2010.

I studied and travelled one and a half months in Ukraine summer of 2010. Here are some impressions of the people I met there.

Ukraine is not like Spain where you practically make friends with people on the street, you have to work for it a little bit, and people are bad in English. However, most young people are very friendly.

  Everyone says that Ukraine is a divided country, and they themselves say that too. Odessa is a very Russian place while Lviv is the the center of Ukrainian patriotism. I have been told that the most proper Ukrainian should be spoken in the middle-east of the country around Poltava. In Lviv – according to my Russian teacher -  the language should be heavily influenced by Polish.  

  I was in Odessa, in Uman (a small town in the middle of the country) and in Kiev. And the people I met in Odessa differs a lot from the ones in Kiev. I talked to 3 women at bars during my stay in Kiev. One was from Lviv, maybe 28-29, working with network systems or something, ambitious and clever. Funny in – what I think can be a western Slavic way, lets say Polish (I have been meeting few enough to generalise). I was with a friend and she constantly told him to speak more quiet, she was very confident in herself.

About the other women I met in Kiev one was 29 and she sincerely tried to convince me that there was some huge sea monster à la Loch-Ness living in the lakes nearby Chernobyl. She looked at me with big eyes and said: “Its TRUE you know, everyone talks about it.” This is VERY Russian. All the guys I met in Stockholm from Russia has been like this. They believe in all kinds of crazy stories a Western kid of 12 would laugh at. A clever American student at school were telling me what he thought about Russians characteristics. His mother was Romanian and he meant that he could spot some similar characteristics in the Russians he met in Odessa and in her. He said something like this: “Its incredible how they choose to believe in something no matter of the source. If one Russian lady stands in a supermarket and overhears from a conversation nearby ‘a fact’ about something she might take it as the purest of truths, and in every debate thereafter she is involved in she will defend this “truth” as if she witnessed it herself.”

  I met a very original fellow in Odessa, Sergei, 25 who I was hanging around with. He was very often wearing military-uniform. Most of the time he was talking about war: “The Anglosaxons have already written the scripture for the Third World War and we better get prepared”. All the wrongs in the world could be blamed on the Anglosaxons. The 11 September was made by rich Americans. He made me see this conspiracy movie Zeitgeist (afterwards I found out its  quite famous). Practically the idea of the “documentary” is the same as Sergei’s, everything is a big conspiracy, more or less everything around us are lies. Sergei sat like a small child watching the documentary, every word that was said he took for the purest of truths. He looked at me and spread out his arms: “You see! Hah? Do you now understand all the propaganda we are under?”

  He was a crazy fellow but I had some fun with him. He told me about his views about politics and all other stuff. He was very “Russian”. Very hospitable, offered me food at his home and so forth. A huge man, maybe 110 kg, beard, he looked much older than 25. And he had a lot of humour. He had some crazy idea to become an emperor of a united world, “The Empire of The Sun”. He told me: “When I become Emperor I will not leave you without privileges, you will become my first clerk!” He had the most obvious signs of megalomania I have ever seen in a man.  When he was offended by an attractive young woman, he grumbled sourly to himself: “It doesn’t matter, when I am Emperor she will work in my harem!”

But I kind of enjoyed his company. He had loads of sayings, like:

  “There is this English saying: ‘don’t jump inside the but hole’. Have you heard about it? Well maybe it was something else…”

  And this he said about Slavic people:

   “No one rest like Russians or Slavic People” and (again while spreading his hands) “We are a people of a large soul. We will greet new friends and destroy the ones that will try to destroy us.”

   I am considering although the destroying part more of a Sergei-than-Slavic-kind-of-thing.

   I am quite sure Sergei wasn’t representative for Ukrainians. He was even expelled from the army after three independent psychologists considered him a fanatic. And he WAS a fanatic. Everyting was about war, war and again war, fighting, honour, struggle… “The most precious thing a man can offer is his life” etc etc. Most of the time he talked like this. But not seldom he got personal. He was very open.

  My teacher was clever, 55. Kind of a babushka. She had some Polish blood in her, but I think she considered herself a Russian of Ukrainian nationality, and she looked Russian. She was a member of a party in the Odessa-region that wants to reunite the Soviet Union. It seems this party mostly has support of elder ones. She was an old school woman, raised of course in the Soviet era. This is her view on Stalin:

  “You cannot really say that he was a bad man. He was a fascinating man: intelligent and complex. There are no good or bad people – there are only good and bad ACTIONS.” Me myself I guess had considered that there wouldn’t have been TOO much of an overstatement to call Stalin ‘quite a bad guy’…

  She was actually the only Ukrainian person I didn’t become fond of, but more of chemistry than of political views. There were also a young woman screaming at me at a hotel because I spoke so bad Russian. I found her anger quite unnecessary considering the fact that she later spoke very good English. This I met a few times in Ukraina. A kind of unnecessary unfriendliness in shops etc… But that was in the margin. It is anyhow surprising how fast you get used to this behaviour. People in shops that at first hand can seem sour may later turn up to be enormous friendly. During my stay in Odessa I often bought ready made food in the counter by two women. After some time they got used to me and tried to match me with one of their daughters.

  I perhaps should mention that the people of Ukraine are the most beautiful I have ever seen. And that counts for the men too. They are not too tall, but well-proportioned, some are blond like the sun, in Odessa all the guys are in great shape, but not too-big, more of the gymnastic type. There can hardly be any coincidence that so many Americans go to Ukraine to find some girls there. Most of them go to Odessa. I was at a disco only once, I was there with some guys from school, according to one of them ( a 45-year old computer guy from Switzerland) many of the girls on the dance floor were prostitutes. He was very frank: “they are hookers.” I believe him. You could see 45-year old fat Americans and British dancing with blonde girls in their 20’s. But maybe not all of them were prostitutes. The only girl I met in Ukraine who said she really much wanted to go away from the country was from Odessa. The women I met in Kiev where quite different, much more independent. Maybe it was only age though. On the whole I have only scraped the surface, I really met to few people so far to say any concluding.