The weekend, Part 2

Gena, another friend of D's, invited us on a city tour on Saturday afternoon. This was massively exciting news since he has wheels. I've only been inside a car 2 or 3 times here and the city is definitely different when viewed from a car. Gena turned out to be a great tour guide- he knew something about everything!

We started with a drive through downtown.

church

Kharkov mural

              

video:

Then we parked near the hippodrome and walked around the outside of it. Briefly around the inside too, until we got hustled out.

The hippodrome is only a short walk from Gorky Park, a large park near a movie theater and lots of name brand shops. Gorky Park is undergoing massive construction right now. Everything is ripped up and covered in debris. The deadline? Euro 2012, 2 months and counting! It looks like they have a long way to go in just 60 days.... but as we all know, there's nothing Ukrainians love more than remodeling :P
[If you're interested, I've stashed a couple more photos over on Facebook.] 

The goal

The reality

After bidding farewell to Gena at Pizza Felice, I went home to tidy up the apartment before my friend Tanya arrived for dinner.

Wait for it

As a teacher, the sound of silence can feel criminal to your ears. If you ask a perfectly good question and no eager student rushes to answer.... what do you do? Often you start thinking "this must not be a good question, no one understands, etc." or WORSE, you rush to fill the silence and end up answering the question yourself. If you do that, you're merely an amusement act. The students learn they can just sit back and wait for you to act.

So, remember this:

Pizza Felice

Pizza Felice must attract a lot of expats; they've got a bilingual menu (English/Russian) and delivery. The kitchen offers a variety of Italian food and exotic-sounding pizzas with ingredients like asparagus, spinach, smoked sausage, goat cheese, etc. Because the pizzas are baked on a thin crust, they end up more elegant than hearty.... so if you arrive hungry I'd suggest ordering extra.

"SOCCER on the big screen"

The inside of the restaurant has a rustic feel: vines, brickwork, shortened street lamps, fabric-covered windows, a ceiling of blue sky and fluffy clouds... and then there's the gigantic TV in the corner. You can get a 360 view of the interior by clicking on this link or this link. One major drawback about the seating arrangement is that the smoking section is right next to the non-smoking section. Oh well, welcome to Ukraine!

Look for this building

The restaurant is at Pushskinskaya Street, 21/23 (street view here), not far from both the Исторический музей and Архитектора Бекетова metro stops. The phone is 751-82-70 and website is www.felice.kh.ua. Hours are from 10 or 11 AM to 11 PM. They bill themselves as the "factory of delicious pizza"...and did I mention that the pizzas are cooked in a wood-burning stove? If you're in Kharkov, give this restaurant a chance! I think you'll go home happy :)

Update June 11th: I've now had 3 visits to the restaurant and am not quite as impressed as I was before. The pizza is fancy, true, but it's also rather dry and the toppings aren't very generous. The atmosphere and decor make it a nice place for a date but I like the food at Pizza Maranello better.

Update July 30th: Er, make that 4 visits. Wanted to try a pasta dish. We went all out this time and got bacon-wrapped asparagus (bonus points for actually having asparagus!), a salad of shredded veggies, two pastas, and apple strudel. The food was tasty and well-presented but there's still something about this place... it's not quite for me. Maybe it was the bill- almost 500 uah! :p

The weekend, Part 1

Okay, WOW. This is the kind of weekend I want to have every weekend! To begin.... you know I've been feeling tired of work lately, so I made up my mind to explore around the маршала жукова metro stop on Friday. Why this stop? Who knows?! Sometimes fate just nudges you. We hopped on the metro and got off here, the furthest I'd ever been on the metro's red line. My secretive snapshots of the metro stations continue, especially now that the city is doing away with the old wall-lettering and putting up new plastic signs for Euro 2012. The city hasn't gotten to this stop yet, ha!

Marshal Zhukov was a famous Soviet general. He was one of the heroes of the Red Army back in WWII and is still a name that everyone here knows.

The entrance to Marshala Zhukova

It turns out that this metro stop is next to Target, a gigantic superstore. We'd just been talking about the lack of parking spaces in Ukraine (except for makeshift let's-park-on-the-sidewalk spots) and then lo and behold, Target appears, surrounded by a gigantic underground parking lot. I was able to resist the temptation to go in... this time. Most shops here carry identical stuff so I always like to explore new shops, just in case they have something like cheddar cheese or chai tea. *sigh* Someday.

We veered off to the left, crossed train tracks, and explored a residential area with a village-like feel.

See the ремонт (remodeling) piles?

Cow manure for sale

D didn't enjoy this part of the walk much, because everyone was burning garbage.







We made it past several dog packs, back to the city streets.

We found this big yellow landmark. Does anyone know what it is?

Coming soon: "on this spot there will be a monument in honor of those who suffered at Cheronobyl- defenders of the Motherland."

a city park

Sports mural near the "Palace of Sport"

At this point we'd been wandering for about 3 hours and were walking back toward the metro when we ran into Dima, one of D's friends. He offered to take us on a spontaneous tour and show us all kinds of cool things. Who can resist that?!

Peacocks and chickens kept by a church, because "they are God's creations."

A factory. One day Dima saw a man lying on the ground here. The temperature was dropping and everyone walked past the man except for Dima, who stopped to make sure the man was okay.  The man was intoxicated but okay, and as a reward showed Dima a shortcut that Dima then showed to us.

Taking the shortcut.

Based on several pieces of evidence, it appears that many people have lost their shoes while taking this shortcut. They also lost a lot of beer bottles (but that's another picture!)

The sign says ""Warning: vicious dogs." If you click on the picture to enlarge, you'll see a dog hidden in the little cave on the right. There were a lot of dogs here but luckily none of them were vicious.

I think they're clearing scrub off the ground? For spring?

Man + child, nice car, smoldering fires, litter. No one ever said Ukraine wasn't a land of of contradictions.

Another dog pack. This one was bark-y.

Leaf buds! Spring!!!

We finished our excursion with a walk through the Alley of Glory. I've written that experience up here. Finally it was time to part ways with Dima, after a couple awesome hours of hanging out and speaking Russian. Thank you, Dima! :)
And that was just Friday...

[If you're interested, I've stashed a couple more photos over on Facebook.]

Ремонт (Remont)

Case in point-

This can go on for hours. You'd think that 15 minutes of drilling would solve whatever problem you have, or at least you'd remodel once and get it over with (aka finish!), but this has been going on for the whole time I've been here. It's so loud that whenever it starts, it's a cue for us to find something to do outside. Inclement weather be damned. Occasionally, just for variety, we'll get some hammering. Again, what earthly item needs to be hammered for two hours? Weekly? For 8 months??

Items like this pop up in the hallway landings randomly and then vanish after a couple of days...

...but the drilling continues!!! As best as I can figure, they must be constructing a spaceship up there.

I'm ready for the launch date.

Alley of Glory

Welcome to the Alley of Glory.

This is a large park near the Moscow Prospect metro station. It's dedicated to the memory of those involved in WWII, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and Chernobyl.

"To those from Cheronobyl, from the people of this neighborhood."

Memorial to the Soviets who fought in the Afghan war.

See the red stars?

A number is cleverly built into the back of each: 41, 42, 43, 44, 45- the war years.

More photos from the park (click to enlarge):

Picture 3 shows the results of a broken water pipe. The pipe got fixed but the path didn't.

Jazzoff jazz cafe

English: do re mi fa so la ti.
Russian: do re mi fa sol la si. до, ре, ме, фа, соль, ля, си. These are also the names of the notes, instead of C, D, E, F, G, A, B.

Weird, huh? How did I stumble across this oddity?

Jazzoff is a little café in Xolodna Gora that we've been to several times. It just opened last fall so it's never crowded and as a bonus, everything is still shiny new inside. The jazz theme is throughout the restaurant: in the decor, in the background music, and in the menu (hence my discovery of the words of the musical scale).

Dinner at Jazzoff:

From left to right: Cheese cream soup with salmon. Wrap with ham, Korean-style carrots, and mayonnaise. Cheese-laden lasagna.

Green tea with real whole strawberries.                        An ambitious mountain of dessert.

The meal pictured above (plus another soup) cost $20. The café is open until 11 PM most nights. It's located near the metro, directly across from the supermarket Про-Запас.

PS: If you're still interested in the musical scale in Russian, there's a 10 minute Soviet children's cartoon about it here.

June 2012 update: They've set up outdoor tables and a gelato stand for the summer!