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It started raining on the third day and hasn’t stopped for two weeks with temperatures in mid-40’s. And we didn’t really packed anything warm enough. My brave shoes tried to hold up for the whole week. Then they started to leak. Sigh.

Cars. Cars everywhere. Driving with no rules, even on sidewalks. Said sidewalks are packed with parked cars too. Having a car is a status symbol and the more expensive the car the better. But what an irony—Toyota Camry is considered prestigious there! We’ve developed a phobia, turning around every time we hear a sound—maybe there’s a car behind us.

Lines. Lines everywhere. The post-Soviet habit is hard to get rid of. Well, in reality lines come from major inefficiencies: out of three check out stands only one will work and the girl there doesn’t know her job well. Or customers in the same meat department in the grocery store will be divided into three lines, where salesperson on the left will not help you because you picked meat from the right and that’s apparently different department although they are inches away.

Line to the notary, line to pay your bills at the local post-office. And everybody tries to butt in in front of you!

When we were flying back and landed in JFK, this grumpy bunch of Ukrainians poured out of the plane and New Yorkers met their match:) People tried to butt in the line to the passport control, tried to pick fight in Ukrainian with English-speaking staff… Oh, it was wonderful to watch!:)

Customer service. Level zero. Yes, people are still rude and in many cases simply unwilling to work. In fact we saw a job opening posted in the subway, and one of the requirements was : “desire to work”.
Nothing is opened before ten. We went to seek breakfast in one of the restaurants that was supposed to be open at 9 am only to find it closed with a little handwritten note attached to original number “9″. It said “10″.
Or in a major coffee shop that carries quite a big selection of exotic teas our friends and Andrew ordered mate tea that comes in special teapot with special aluminum sipping straw that has a strainer on the end. Without the strainer it is very hard to drink this kind of tea. The waitress brings three teapots and one aluminum straw. And a bunch of plastic ones. My friend inquires about two other straws and gets a reply: “They’re all broken”. My friend calmly tries to explain to the waitress that maybe if they all broken she should have warned them so they would order something else. Waitress, no apology in the eye, says: “Well, we are a coffee house we’re not specialists in the tea”.

Speaking about coffee. Good coffee is hard to find in Kiev. It is understandable, people are mostly black tea-drinkers. If you’re drinking coffee at home your option will be instant coffee that is wildly popular. It’s not nasty but it ain’t good. In the coffee shop your choices are espresso-based. Espresso is ok, but everything else… The difference between American way to drink coffee and Ukrainian: Americans add milk to their coffee, Ukrainians vise versa. I couldn’t detect coffee in most cappuccinos and lattes. Drip coffee is non-existent. I only tried it once and couldn’t find it anymore. It was my happy day.

Young people on the streets look like they’ve just stepped out from pages of a fashion magazine. Everyone who’s below 35 years of age dresses well. And everybody possesses a designer bag. When I saw a Fendi bag the starting price of which would be around $3000 here in the US I started to wonder how an average working girl with minimal wage salary of $400 a month would be able to afford that? You know the answer. They’re all fakes. But people don’t care. It is sad really, Ukrainian designers offer their beautiful and unique work for a fraction of the price it would cost, but no one buys it because nobody cares about their work. Everyone wants fake Versace.

Speaking about style, although the taste in clothes is generally pretty good, the overall taste is what I like to call “Disastrous Clusterfuck”. I saw some furniture in boutique stores: massive, painted gold clash of styles with drapes on top. In the major department store downtown Kiev I saw patterns I wish I never see again. And the huge (and wildly successful) market “Darynok” that sells clothes made me wonder who dresses there: surely I haven’t seen anything they sell on those fashionable people on the streets.

…Some areas of the city did change dramatically. There are new “elite” neighborhoods, where apartments are being sold for more than they would cost here in US. There are new additions to downtown, specifically Independence Square. But where my mom lives it is still the same. Old Soviet 5-story brick buildings that are slowly falling apart. And yet new people are moving in and raising families. I saw my mom’s new neighbor with a 2-year old boy. It feels so unreal, somebody’s childhood will be where my childhood was, in that old crumbling building…