Ukrainian housing

An average apartment building in Kharkov. Imagine rows and rows of similar buildings and you'll see why the premise of this famous Soviet movie is entirely believable!

 The fantastic article How To Decorate Like A Russian inspired me to jot down what I've noticed about Ukrainian apartments. Oh, and we're also (fingers crossed) moving soon or as I like to think, moving up!

• A one-bedroom apartment is not a studio nor is it exactly a western one-bedroom. A one-bedroom in Ukraine means one sleeping/living/everything room plus a separate kitchen and corridor. People expect to open the front door and step into a corridor, never directly into a living space. 

• Most apartments here are smaller than US apartments... and sometimes contain more people living in them (parents, grandparents, children). But to balance that situation out, nearly everyone has a дача (dacha, a summer house in the countryside) and people frequently escape to their dachas for fresh air on the weekends.

• Built-in closets are rare; a stand-alone wardrobe or gigantic wall unit is the standard. On a related note, I remember helping resettle a Ukrainian family with 2 teenage daughters in an apartment in Alaska. When the girls saw the (regular old) closet in their room they started crying, saying they had always dreamed of having a closet like that. I didn't really get it until moving here. Now I dream of a built-in closet too. The gigantic and looming wall unit that takes up 1/3 of our room drives me nuts! But D says he remembers his family proudly getting one in the 1990s so I try to remember that it's just a part of the culture. (Check out the decorating article for a picture of said wall unit...and yes, there's always a tea set on display in there!)

Behold, the wall unit. (Filled with the landlady's stuff.)

• Wallpaper, wallpaper, wallpaper. Maybe paint was not available back in the day? But the things people can do with wallpaper in Ukraine...let me tell you! The old Soviet pre-remodel wallpaper = not so great (plus there's usually a big Persian carpet on at least one wall.) The remodeled apartments, though, tend to have really cool fancy wallpaper: textures and elegant designs even.  

• Though you may see a big rug on the floor or on the wall, people don't have wall-to-wall carpeting. Паркет is popular instead of carpeting. Don't know what parquet is? It's flooring composed of wooden blocks arranged in a geometric pattern.

•  Lace curtains, lace curtains, lace curtains. I still don't get it.

• ALL BUILDINGS ARE BUILT OUT OF BRICK. As mentioned before, this often leads to locals asking you why your country uses inferior building materials ("Tsk tsk, it's no wonder hurricanes are always blowing down your houses!")

So, be careful of crumbling and falling bricks... you'll see protective fencing like this to protect people's heads from dangerous debris.

СушиЯ (SushiYa)

It surprises me when Ukrainians say that they've never tried sushi. Practically every third restaurant here is a sushi restaurant (or random sushi/Italian venture) and I'd assumed that therefore eating sushi is a popular pastime. Turns out that is not the case. This is actually good news, because it's a lot of fun to introduce such a cuisine to the uninitiated!

Case in point: while visiting Kiev this spring, we talked our friend Lena into trying lunch at the restaurant СушиЯ. The meal started with miso soup and then we had a blast trying different items from a sample platter. The restaurant looked shiny and new and had classy touches like bonsai trees, a small fountain, and a wall-size fish tank filled with lazy golden fish.

Easy Russian 2 : the letters З and С

(Click here if you missed Lesson 1: Р, П, and Н)
(To hear the audio files, click on the title to view the entire post)

Here's a very easy letter: З
Yes, it looks an awful lot like the number three but it's actually a Z.
З = Z

You remember маркет , right? (market)
If you have pets you'll need to shop here as well:

 зоомаркет = pet store






On a beautiful summer day it's always nice to visit a парк (park).
The more adventurous may spend an afternoon here!

зоопарк = zoo

Snapshots of Ukrainian Life, Part 10

Free medicine and education for all! We will return the social guarantees that have been taken from the people. The Communist Party demands: return the country to the people! (For more explanation of this, keep reading...)

☼

Summer Picnic Supplies:

• tablecloth ✔
• cutlery ✔
• food ✔
• disposable plastic shot glasses ✔ (complete with a very serious picture of two men and one woman at a business meeting!) 

During a recent picnic I tried to explain why it would be weird to bring vodka to a picnic in America. Wine, maybe. But vodka? Although picnics would probably be a lot more fun that way...

☞Movie theaters in Ukraine sell tickets by seat. When you pay for the tickets you also pick out the seat you want to sit in. A little color-coded screen shows you the seats still available. Cool idea, huh?

☞Next to the tongues and hearts in the local butcher shop, there is a cow udder for sale. How exactly does one cook a cow udder? Or cow lungs? Please explain!

Summer's hottest toothpaste flavor

Break week

Kharkov's famous thermometer @ the Історичний музей metro stop

It's HOT.

Yesterday it was 80 F... at 11 PM at night. Now it's 6 PM the following day and almost 88 F. I guess if there were ever a perfect time for the city to turn off the hot water for repairs, this would be it. No AC and no fans in the apartment so for the past four days it's been either cold-shower-induced hypothermia or dazed heatstroke. Ah, summer in Ukraine :p

This is my week off from work. It was supposed to be super-productive but with the heat I can't work up enough energy to actually do much. I did manage to download about 200 book samples onto my Kindle (never too lazy too click!) and have been reading, reading, reading. To escape the heat momentarily we had another river picnic with Timur and his family.

The evening was great: just the group of us, the river, frogs croaking, badminton. At one point a strange car/truck drove up and unloaded a very pregnant wife, an intoxicated and shirtless husband, a silent thin older woman, a young boy, and a quiet industrious man who washed the car while the drunk guy waded around in the river and the pregnant wife smoked cigarette after cigarette. As the sun set a vicious army of mosquitoes emerged and lay waste to our unprotected arms and legs. I have 18 bites on my left foot and ankle. D got a couple scary-looking bites by something much hungrier than a mosquito. But still, the picnic was worth it!!

By the way, this keeps coming up and people can never seem to get enough of it-

• what frogs say in English
• what frogs say in Russian

Life

Vendors selling their goods outside a metro station

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity. - Mark Twain

Easy Russian 1 : the letters Р, П, Н

(To hear the audio files, click on the title to view the entire post)

It's true- the Russian alphabet has a whopping 33 letters. One for each tooth and one for the tongue : ) How many do you know? Can you read these words?

Hint: the Russian letter Р = the r sound in English.

That's right,

• Тор = Thor
• маркет = market
• метро = metro
• and марка = postage stamp, brand name