Final Ukrainian bits and questions

Final Ukrainian Bits and Questions

wine tasting
Sunday November 1, 2009
Yalta to Simferopol
Gosh, I missed Halloween. Hadn't even thought about it much until I saw my Face book page yesterday and realized I have skipped another great American Holiday. And I’ll miss Thanksgiving too but I will be in Australia for that holiday and with my husband so we’ll celebrate on our own.
I think Yalta was my favorite place in the Ukraine. I did love the forests outside of Kharkov and good that I did since I was stuck in them for 5 hours but Kiev is another big capital city and Kharkov – well, just didn’t get to see much of it as I don’t have night vision. Sevastopol does have a lot to offer and I’m sure I would have enjoyed it with more time there but Yalta just calls to me. I think in the summer I might not be so enchanted with hordes of visitors, both national and foreign, but this brief visit in the later fall was pretty nice.

fall colors
Yesterday I was only able to visit two spots, the former Romanov Palace where the Yalta Conference took place and then up into the hills to the Massandra Winery for a short tour into the tunnels to see old dusty bottles and huge oak casks and then wine tasting of some very sweet dessert wines. It was good. It would be nice to take some with me but too much traveling yet to do. I will look for Ukrainian Black Doctor wine when I get home.
So another country finished and another "notch in my belt" as I am up to 126 countries if you go by the Century Traveler’s Club country count which obviously I do. Now I am moving out of the cold so I can ship my long underwear home and my husband will return with my summer clothes for Australia and the Pacific.

Livadiysky Palace
I have many musings about the Ukraine and I can relate many of them to other countries as well as my own. There is a lot of money here because there are homes being built all over the hills outside Sevastopol. Not just small dachas either but large three story homes. My guide would shake his head when we would pass and say, why do people need such large homes? I hesitated to tell him that I also live in a home of that size, albeit a rented one but still that big and it is full, no empty spaces(in our defense, our stuff and our daughter’s stuff). I stayed in apartments throughout my visit to the Ukraine so some people are clearly owning two or more apartments as well and renting them for income. And the Church! I have never understood the church of any religion. The churches here are magnificent, many icons, a lot of gold, fancy decorations, lovely shawls, huge domes and cupolas and on and on. But almost every church I visited had 3 or more beggars sitting outside of it asking for money. Why doesn’t the church take them in and feed them and house them somewhere? That’s just something that I will never understand from organized religion that they seem so rich in some aspects and yet have parishioners that are so poor. Maybe I just don’t get the whole concept. And I am certainly not used to a religion where everyone stands and comes and goes during a service and wanders around the interior to different saints and icons. I grew up where you went and sat down and stayed there for an hour or more and that was it. Well, I travel to see different cultures and traditions. I never said I traveled to understand them but I do like to ponder and think about these things a lot.

view of Black Sea From Livadivsky Palace
Everywhere I went in the Ukraine was many, many, MANY cats. In some cases, it was obvious that the cat was attached to certain people but often there are whole families of cats living outside of apartment buildings. There must be hundreds of thousands of homeless cats in the country that are anywhere from super friendly to anyone walking by to completely feral. People seem to love animals though. Most of the cats I saw were well fed and I saw numerous people putting out food for the cats and the pigeons. But I did see one dead kitten and three sick cats. This has got to be a big problem. What if the cat population comes up with rabies? This is going to cause a huge crisis in the Ukraine because you can’t walk around the street without crossing the path of half dozen cats at least. I think it drove my guides crazy as they would be explaining something historic and suddenly I would veer towards some cute fuzzy kitten. Next time I come, I’m getting a bag of cat food and carrying it with me everywhere.

signing table-Roosevelt, Stalin & Churchill
I’m really curious about the heating system. In Kiev and Kharkov, the heat was turned on for the city on October 15 so I had heat in my apartments. There’s no regulating the heat though. It was full blast through the radiators and I had to keep windows open to keep the temperature under 30C. But Sevastopol and Yalta are in the southern Crimea so their heat is not turned on until November 15. Who decides these things? Everyone is bundled up to their eyebrows when outside. It’s freaking cold in the apartment. I remember being in Ulan Ude, Russia with my husband in June after the heat had been turned off and we had to go to bed at 6:30 at night to stay warm under the covers. It hasn’t been that bad here as both apartments where I stayed had wall units good for heating or air conditioning. I had these running the entire time I was there but they just heat one room so I had to do everything in that room. Going into the other part of the apartment meant getting cold again. Running to the bathroom was a sprint there and a sprint back to accomplish my intent before I got cold.
Most people still live in apartments in this country. They buy the apartments and own them but they are still in a building with other families. That means hearing your neighbor at all times of the day and night. And there is also a secure system for each building of some sort. Yalta had the most secure system I thought but also the least used. Kiev had a door code to punch to get into the apartment building. It seemed to work for everyone but me. It would take me about 10 tries to get into the building. Finally on my last day, I was down to 4 tries to get into the building. Another two days and I might have been successful every time. All the doors have complicated double throw locks. That means you turn the key in the lock at least two times and listen to the tumblers roll back the dead bolts out of the frame. Usually then you must lock the door from the inside with the key as well. And often there is another lock that you can throw with your hand to triple lock the door from the inside. I was thinking that if there was ever a need to exit in a hurry, I’d just take the window.
In Kharkov, the door to the building had a magnetic lock that opened it. That one was cool. Then the same double lock with the key on the front door. In Sevastopol, there was a key for the front door where I had to twist the key then grab the door and pull it open with my other hand when the key clicked. And the double lock on the door. Yalta takes the cake. The door to the apartment has a code to punch in but this time you must hold down the buttons together. This works great but so far, I have only had to do it once as the door is always open. The apartment has two doors. The outer door is a steel construction covered with something that looks and feels like faux leather. It is a double turn lock to open the steel door. The inner door is a solid wood door with a double turn key lock on it as well. So it’s open the outer door, open the inner door, go inside, close the outer door and lock it, close the inner door and lock it then turn the additional inner lock. It never takes me less than 3 or 4 minutes to work these doors. Like I said, in an emergency, I’ll go out the window.
The diversity of the Ukraine is a dichotomy. In Kiev and Kharkov, I was told that people were speaking Ukrainian. In Sevastopol and Yalta, they speak Russian. There are pockets of Crimean Tartars left around the country and some Cossacks although I didn’t see anyone that I could obviously tell as a Cossack. And there are still a lot of Russian citizens living here. It is a very young country as it has only been out from underneath “foreign” domination or control for a few decades. As in all countries that have been part of a larger union, how do they become a country on their own with their own national pride and own heritage and own culture. I’m not sure the Ukraine knows yet what they want to be. Their presidential election is next January, I was told. There are campaign billboards up on the roadways and also there are green election tents around where workers hand out flyers for their candidates. I am told there will be about 40 candidates. I wish them luck in this.
Most of my visit to the Ukraine concentrated on visiting churches and cathedrals, and also visiting Crimean War sites and memorials and WWII sites and memorials. I think the Ukraine does have more to offer but I am not sure exactly what. I have to admit that I didn’t have as much time to research this country as I would have liked because it was not in my original plan to come here at this time. So I went with the tour company suggestions rather than come up with my own. As time passes, will people still be interested in coming to see these sites? Will they just fade away? This week was a school holiday for the Ukrainian children of all ages. I was very happy to see that every place I went for the historical and national memorials and monuments there were groups of school children on tour. I am glad that they are learning their history. Of course, the teenagers where much more interested in taking each other’s photos and talking on their cell phones but they will remember some of it and maybe be interested enough later to go have another look or research it on line. I guess that’s the most you can hope for with the younger generation, that they will remember and care.