Where to find foreigners in Kyiv

The French: in the French restaurants

The Italians: in the discos/nightclubs

The English: in an Irish Pub
The Germans: anywhere there's beer

Get your slow dance on

Having been a 'freelancer' or 'contract worker' for as long as I can remember, I'm not normally invited to corporate Christmas parties. In fact, I think the last one I went to was while on my work placement at Nominet when I was at University, and that's a seriously long time ago.

However, whatever I've missed out on over the years was all made up for last night at the MIG/JN1 Corporate party for Christmas/New Year/Hanukkah/Old New Year/Arsenal Kyiv football club's birthday.

Yeah, I know its a bit late for most of those things, but what can I say? logic doesn't always apply here in Ukraine.

Anyway, let me try to describe...

Held in a large nightclub, the place was kitted out with all the usual 'corporate party stuff' but with the addition of loud nighclub speakers and lots of disco lights.  On each table was wine (two bottles), Champagne, soft-drinks, food, water and two litres of the amusingly-named 'Status' vodka. One litre of 'Platinum' and one bottle of 'Black Diamond', but there was some disagreement over which one was the bestest.

I don't know what 'status' the vodka gives you other than 'drunk as hell' but still, you get the idea. The party was, like many thinks in Ukraine, big, loud, colourful and lots of booze was involved.  And, if this wasn't enough - we had a stage show. No, we had a stage extravaganza! and as everyone around me threw-back more and more vodka, I sat and watched some sadomasochistic Ukrainian girls in skimpy leather leotards wiggling and singing about being 'Oligarch girls' - complete with a Janet Jackson nipple-slip incident.

The singing underwear

This was followed by some relatively normal singing until normality went back out the window when some almost-naked g-string wearing 'dancers' arrived to dance around, under, over and on-top of a pole.

ouch

ermmm...

It was quite a show and it was all interspersed by some bizarrely random comparing and party games which included a showdown between a man with a mullet who had to make a loud horse noise, my colleague Larisa who had to laugh out loud like a demented baby, and Vasya (Woody) the sound engineer who had to make a noise like a Donkey.  After some serious looking mental preparation, Woody won with the loudest human-donkey-orgasm noise I've ever heard.

Horse-noise mullet man

Oh, and there was a guy who looked like a chubby David Baddiel who sang loud songs and made everyone do the conga around the tables.

On the screen above the stage, we were treated to a weird selection of Nirvana videos, fish swimming, men playing drums, and occasional English language texts that said stuff like "I'm very bored".

This wasn't a dream. Its all 100% true.  ...and then the dancing began!

Woody going at it

Now, if you don't know any Ukrainians, there's one thing you should know - they love to dance! and, while a singing Gypsy (yes I'm serious) sang a funky bunch of pop songs, his sexy backing dancers and most of my company bounced the night away on the dance floor.

The whole thing was, as my colleague described it 'relentless'.

But, it was relentless in an entertaining way and also a lot of fun to watch. The food was good and its really nice to see everyone outside of the relative calm of our office.  It was also brilliant to see some good-old-fashioned slow dancing.  I haven't seen slow dancing since I was at a school disco, but the Ukrainians never gave it up. The UK really needs to bring back slow dancing.

Happy New Year

No prizes for guessing what's excited Dan and Rahim

JN1 people after too much Status

More 'official' photos here

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The tube

The ...?

Ukrainians will pose next to anything

Ghost town, somewhere in Podil 

Pub Rock 

Kiev looks naked

Having completely shed its autumn clothes ready to be wrapped in winter snow, Kiev is currently standing almost embarrassingly naked.

OK, so it is kind of novel to be here in December and not be freezing one's tits off, but its doesn't feel right. The city trees look like they've just emerged from some skinny dipping, only to find that the bushes have run off with their clothes.

However, the absence of -30C temperatures does mean I can still enjoy the city on my days off. 

Kiev hides a fascinating world behind the main streets and tacky shop-fronts, so I went exploring yesterday to see what I could find near my apartment. I've been here on Artema street for more than 6 months, but hardly know the area. I found all of this within less than a kilometer from my door...

Oh, and finally, there's Kiev's much ridiculed and highly ridiculous Christmas cone, point, tree. 

Complete with LCD televisions as decorations! It is impossible to to admire such unashamed kitsch.  

Sing while you're winning

At the gym this afternoon, I sat in the changing rooms and watched an angry dad shouting at his three year-old kid. The little boy (Bogdan) was completely unmoved by his dad yelling "Богдан давай!" and he sat there defiantly singing a happy song. As dad got louder, Bogdan kept smiling and singing.

Amused, I turned around to leave reflecting on the need for more 'little revolutionaries' like this in Ukraine. As I stood up, a man was standing right in front of me wearing nothing but a thong.

Ukraine needs a lot less of these.

God created Polish by dropping his scrabble box

I've never wanted to go to Warsaw. I don't know why, I've been to pretty much every other capital city on the continent but never to Warsaw. Maybe this is because I have read way-too-many descriptions of the city that start with lines such as: 'Warsaw is not as pretty as Cracow, but...' and perhaps this put me off, but given my disturbingly-passionate admiration for depressed looking housing estates and Soviet concrete 'art' - I doubt it. I think its just in an awkward location and not 'between' any other places like, for example, Budapest is. You can't really move in Europe without going through Budapest but to pass through Warsaw you'd have to be taking an unlikely journey from somewhere like Belgium to Belarus. Who does that?  Besides, I've never had a reason to visit Warsaw.

All this changed this summer when two very good reasons (Kasia and Justa) arrived in Kiev. They found me on CouchSurfing, I found them at the Metro, and the rest is история.

The flight from Kiev to Warsaw (Varshava in Polish and Russian) is just one hour, so getting there is easy and as the airport in Warsaw is very close to the center, getting into the city is also easy - especially if you have detailed instructions, bus numbers and a map provided by Kasia.

The place really won me over. OK, it's not Ljubljana and it is more similar to Brussels than I would wish on any city, but it is very cool and boy does it have a history.  You feel it.

I'll save the gory details, but I had a great time. The Poles I met were all, without exception; friendly, hospitable, talkative, optimistic and more than anything - extremely likable.  The only crazy thing is the language. In fact, its no so much the language but the spelling.  For the first time in my life, I was wishing things were written in Russian.

While I was there, I bought a copy of Norman Davies epic Rising '44, in an attempt to understand both Warsaw and Poland and on page five he hits on some of the problems this language craziness creates.    

"From hard experience, I know that foreign names and places can create havoc in the psyche of English-speaking readers. Indeed, in the case of some languages like Polish, I believe they constitute a near insurmountable barrier to a full understanding of the country's affairs. For it is not just a problem of unfamiliarity. It is unfamiliarity compounded by an incomprehensible system of orthography and by the unique, jaw-breaking combinations of consonants and syllables that are uniquely disturbing. Charles Dickens, who met a number of Polish emigres in London after the rising of 1863 had a wonderful ear for this problem: 'A gentleman called on me this morning,' he once remarked, 'with two thirds of all the English consonants in his name ,and none of the vowels.'  The joke is that God created Polish by dropping his scrabble box.  But this is not just a laughing matter. If readers cannot retain the names in a narrative, they cannot be expected to analyse or to understand it."

So true, and so true of Ukraine too.

Anyway, thanks Kasia and dziękuję to everyone I met this weekend.

The pictures are here

These are crazy days, but they make me shine

The postman delivered a parcel this week. It was sent from Wales with a book and six chocolate bars inside. It arrived with no book and no chocolate. The postman posted me an envelope. Thanks postman.

This morning a small street-dog walked onto the bus. He sat down and waited 5 stops and then got-off at Lukianivka metro. He didn't pay. 

This afternoon I provided a voice-overs for the Russian President Dimitry Medvedev and the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

The girl who comes to my gym with no bra and a see-thru top has returned. 

Artema Street last night 

Fall off the table, get swept under

Hot on the heels of my professional TV début, I made another début this week in print in Kyiv's 'What's On' magazine.

This isn't the first time I've appeared in print because I edited text for the European Business Associations weekly adverts for almost a year (not to mention my full page spread in Slovenia's Anja magazine) but as far as I can remember this is the 1st time I have willingly contributed directly to the creative content of a publication.

It's a modest start, but still I wanted to find a copy to keep as a souvenir, so I used this as an excuse for an expensive breakfast in Vernisage.  Of course they had a copy and as I thumbed through the magazine over breakfast, I came across an interview by a guy called Martin Nunn - a PR executive and long-time immigrant here in Kyiv. I liked it for two reasons:

Firstly because it is hard not to agree with many of his observations about Ukraine, Ukrainians and Russians. Such as:

"Russians, particularly Moscow-based Russians, tend to have a glorified opinion of their own superiority."

and

"...the roads [in Ukraine] are in a terrible state, but instead of fixing them people buy bigger jeeps. If you go into the tower blocks, the apartments themselves are beautiful, but the communal areas are in a terrible state. It’s this crazy mentality. You have people wearing very expensive clothes, and very expensive shoes, with very expensive cars, walking through some of the worst states of decay I’ve ever seen, into these mini-palaces. Nobody’s doing anything about the gap in between because nobody thinks it’s their responsibility. Until people realise it is their responsibility, nothing will change. The only people going to save the country is the people themselves."

Secondly, because he picks up on the shockingly bad state of the countries PR industry, or more specifically political relations.

"The PR people in government have done more damage to the image of the President than anyone else. There’s a supreme arrogance in the way they work, and it’s probably been one of the most deplorable cases of non-PR I’ve ever experienced"

If you have any doubt how bad it is, read their 'newsletter' here. It embarrasses me and I'm not even Ukrainian.

Anyway, I 'Googled' him and found another interesting article from Mr Nunn here http://www.ipra.org/archivefrontlinedetail.asp?articleid=879. If you're curious and have nothing better to do, I recommend it.

As for me and my media fame, I'm currently working on a plan to move from free magazines to Hollywood film stardom.

I'll keep you posted.

Eddy 

Can you save me from the borrowed cloud I'm on?

Today:сегодня

Lippy Kids

Hurmah, or 'Date-Plums' I've never seen, or heard of them then before but they are good. Thanks to Yulia for introducing them :-)

The 'Dutch Oven' Jerom, his wife and a Pumkin coloured Englishman

A pumpkin

Kiev city administration