Final posting from Ukraine

Well, with this post, I bid goodbye to Ukraine and my many loyal blog followers as I leave Poltava via train tomorrow, and depart Ukraine on Monday afternoon from Kyiv. Again, I must give a HUGE thank you (or spassiva) to my colleague, translator, and friend, Larissa Ischenko, without whom my entire stay in Poltava and Ukraine would have been incredibly difficult. Lara facilitated pretty much EVERYTHING I was involved in during my four months here, from translating my presentations to helping me purchase train tickets and shopping for various items I needed but had no idea where to find here. She also insured that my stay here included interesting excursions to museums, parks, and the wonderful shashlik outing last weekend.

All in all, this has been a very good experience, particularly in an academic sense; however I feel that I should remark upon a few items that I will list as peeves, or perhaps best described as personal frustrations; these were, in no particular order:

• The lack of winter weather remediation for roads and sidewalks: Although the main thoroughfare boulevard (Zhovtneva) was fairly well-maintained, most side streets and sidewalks were covered with six inches (or more) of snow and ice until the temperature for day-time highs remained in the 40s consistently for several days; this did not occur until mid-to-late March. To me, this lack of basic service at the city level seemed to project a very bad image to display for anyone thinking of investing here from the outside.
• Infrastructure problems: Aside from the streets, I had no hot water for over two weeks in late-April early-May. Fortunately, during that time I traveled to Western Ukraine and I had hoped that, upon my return, I would be greeted with hot, or at least warm, water; not to be. Finally, after repeatedly contacting the agency through which I rented my apartment, the building’s hot water returned (after three days). However, the faucet in the bathroom provides only a trickle now, but thankfully the shower and kitchen water pressure are fine. Also, the electricty intermittently goes off, mostly in the morning. I have no idea how/why any of this happens lately, as during the winter, all seemed fine.
• Here I will be blunt: For the most part, and with a few exceptions, people in the stores were quite cold and unfriendly. Even after repeatedly going to stores near my apartment, I was never greeted with so much as a nod of recognition, much less a smile, and I often felt hostility towards me as a non-native and non-speaker of Russian (the locals mostly speak Russian here). Occasionally the women at the store would provide a degree of assistance with placing groceries in a bag, but for the most part everyone seemed hurried and ill-tempered. I stopped greeting any of them when I saw that they never returned the greeting.
• Little respect for personal space: I noticed almost immediately that, while walking down the sidewalk  and attempting to move to one side or another to avoid colliding with another pedestrian, they would often change in the same direction, forcing me to change again. Either such people are completely oblivious to the implication of colliding with a 200+ lb. man, or they enjoy deliberately playing “sidewalk chicken”. Which brings me to another point: Many here are into competitive speed-walking. Often while attempting to pass another pedestrian, they will speed up, insuring that I either drop back and let them take the lead (where they inevitably slow down again and restart the competition), or I have to semi-run to out-distance them and eliminate myself from the competition by “winning” - whatever that means. Also, especially when I was in Western Ukraine, I found that people routinely jostle and bump into you without so much as a word of apology. I must note that this is not the case with EVERYONE here – but the instances that do occur can lead to a visitor such as myself to judge a population as a whole on the rudeness of the few.

Again, ultimately, this has been an extremely positive experience, thanks to the direct assistance of many here, so I do not wish to appear ungrateful nor wish to stereotype the local population. These are just observations that I want to include as a form of summative addressing of my four month experience here.

Farewell, Ukraina!