"Touch My Monkey" and Other Stories from the Land of Ukraine (Part Two)

The Second Part in a Series of Stories About Ukraine

"Touch My Monkey"
After the experience with the cab driver the night before, we needed to get more money. This meant that we needed to find an ATM, which should have been an easy task. However, the ATMs we found would not accept our cards Eventually, we found ourselves in an underground mall. I was attempting to pull money out of the machine when my two friends were accosted by two men; each man had a monkey on his shoulder--not a stuffed monkey, but a living, breathing, scurrying monkey. One of the men looked at Ethan and said, "Touch my monkey" (hence the name of the title of the story...see what I did there). Now, having been in Europe for long enough, the three of us knew that guys like this like to offer some novelty, acting really friendly, and then demand a ton of money for it. That being the case, Ethan said, "No thank you." However, after an exchange that was essentially just various re-phrasings of, "No really, touch my monkey," and "No, I really do not want to touch your monkey," the two men just put the monkeys on Ethan. Nick then pulled out his camera (after-all, it is not everyday you get to take a picture of Ethan with monkeys crawling all over him), which was exactly what the two men wanted: "Oh yes, take a picture, take a picture." At this point, there was no way to really back out of it, so Nick took the picture. The two men then put the monkeys on Nick and Ethan took a picture. Right on queue, the two men took back their monkeys and started demanding money. "You have pictures of our monkeys. You must pay." However, Nick and Ethan were broke. The two men then turned to me (I had just finished not getting anything from the ATM) and told me that I had to pay them for my friends pictures. I respectfully declined, as the ATM had not worked (not that I would have given them anything even if I had received money). They did not seem to understand (or they were just jack-wagons--likely the latter of the two) and continued to tell me that I owed them money. We were making our way out of the mall, but the two men continued to follow us. One of them pulled out his phone and said, "I am going to call security."

* * * 

Now here is the lesson for anyone who will be travelling to Europe in the future: people such as these two, or the "gladiators" (they are dressed as Roman legionaries, actually--how they could not know that is beyond me) outside the Colosseum, or the men who give bird seed to people to attract pigeons to them for a picture (why anyone would want those disgusting birds anywhere near them is a mystery--unless it is to kick them) are often doing "business" illegally. I have seen a number of the pigeon feeders kicked out of the area that they are "working" in by police, and our professor said that most people have been wanting to make it illegal (rather than just frowned upon) for the "gladiators" to "work" outside the Colosseum and other historical sites. Essentially, what I am trying to say is, if you are somehow goaded into taking a picture with someone like the "gladiators", or someone puts bracelets and weird charm things on your wrist, or someone covers you with monkeys, you do not have to pay them, even if they demand money (or another one of their tricks, say they need money for food (they will take back whatever "free" stuff they gave you if you do not pay them)).

* * *

What I was thinking in my head when the guy said he was going to call security was, "Oh, you'll call security. And then get arrested or at least kicked out of the mall." What I said was, "Sorry, I have no money," and kept walking. Of course, these guys could not actually do anything to us, so they stopped following us as we came out of the underground mall and back to the surface of the Earth.

But wait, there's more.

Upon emerging into the world,within a minute actually, we were approached by a man in a panda suit (not a man with a living panda, just a man in a suit). He said to us (this to be read in a Barney voice), "Hey guys, come take a picture with me." Obviously, after dealing with the monkey men, we were not having any of it; Nick looked at the guy and said, "I don't speak English" (in perfect English, I might add). The panda man yelled an expletive at Nick, and we continued on our merry way.

The Monastery
Most of the first day (after dealing with monkeys and a panda) was spent at a Ukrainian Orthodox Monastery. It was massive, had a half-dozen or more churches, and some of the most beautiful religious art I have seen. We were also able to visit the crypt, which was very dark, aside from the candles people lit in honor of the deceased monks. It was very interesting.

We were at the monastery for the beginning of the Good Friday service and heard some incredible chanting. Ethan enjoyed this tremendously.

On a less holy note (although more holey), the bathrooms were very fitting for a monastery; similar to the monastic toilets in Bulgaria, the toilets were just holes in the ground without a seat. Very simple and monkish.

"Cheer Up, Smile, Nertz"
Ukraine's economy is not the best (but that is to be expected when recovering from occupation by the Soviet Union and being saddled with all the debts from cleaning up a huge nuclear disaster (Chernobyl)). This means that their currency is incredibly devalued. One dollar is worth 27 Ukrainian whatchamacallits. This took some getting used to ("A BigMac for 90 things?! Oh, that is just over 3 dollars. That's a good deal.) I have a Ukrainian penny, which is a little piece of metal that is worth .00037 dollars or three hundredths of an American penny. It is probably worth more to scrap it, but I will keep it as a souvenir.

KFC (Kyev Fried Chicken)
While in Ukraine, we stuck mostly to fast food restaurants to make getting food easier. One of the places we (meaning Ethan and I) went to was KFC (usually referred to as Kentucky Fried Chicken, but we decided that this was Kyev Fried Chicken). At Kyev Fried Chicken, we ordered tacos (because why not got tacos at a KFC in Ukraine); they came in at a whopping buck-and-a-half for two of them. They were small, but good, and they gave us another funny story.

A side-note: Nick could not have KFC, because he is gluten-free (or gluten-intolerant as he likes to say it (although, is he not technically gluten-free if he does not consume gluten?)). Now, why anyone would be intolerant of gluten is beyond me; it is just inconsiderate. To quote Ethan quoting something else, "there are two things I cannot stand: those people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch."

Other Interesting Notes
Three other interesting things that do not really fit in anywhere else:
1. Ukraine uses an entirely different alphabet: the Cyrillic alphabet.
2. All three of us agreed that the best wine we had was in Ukraine and made in Crimea. Sadly, we cannot give a name, as it was spelled in a different alphabet.
3. The Eastern Church celebrates Holy Week the week after the Western Church (I do not know the reason for this), so we actually celebrated Holy Week twice. In Ukraine, we had their Easter Bread, which is pretty much just bread with icing and sprinkles (they even served it to us on the plane ride back to Rome).

Coming Soon...Chernobyl

"Touch My Monkey" and Other Stories from the Land of Ukraine (Part One)

A series of stories from the trip to Ukraine with Nick and Ethan.

Getting There

Ukraine was the second part of Spring Break for Nick, Ethan, and I. We travelled there from Krakow Poland via a bus and two trains, totaling about 12 hours of travel. Originally, we were supposed to travel to Ukraine by two trains, but we were emailed a few weeks before Spring Break and told that there was work on the first train's line, so we had to take a bus first. On the day of travel, we were waiting at the bus station (it seemed like the appropriate place to wait for a bus), but we were not seeing any buses that were going to the city we were headed to. With about fifteen minutes until we were supposed to leave, we went up to the ladies at the ticket counter and were told to go to the train station. That did not make sense, but we rushed there to see if they could help. On the way there, I saw a sign that said "Rail Replacement Bus Service." That sounded right, so we started following signs in that direction. With about five minutes until our departure time, we ended up outside with a bunch of buses. The first one in line was headed to the correct city, thank goodness. But, as we approached, the driver pointed us down the line. Sure enough, down towards the end of the row of buses was another bus going to our city. We rushed over and showed the driver our ticket. He said (or rather communicated) that we were not supposed to be on his bus. Now we were panicking. We had minutes until we were supposed to leave and had been turned down by both drivers. We were about to rush back to the train station, when we saw two buses lined up in the street. We ran up to the first one, showed the driver the ticket, and were welcomed aboard with two minutes to spare.

The rest of the trip went smoothly, with one other funny incident. When we were on the train that would actually take us to Kyev, we had to go through Polish border security and Ukrainian border security. The Ukrainians were very kind to us, but, when they were leaving us, one of them called out, "Good luck," over his shoulder. Good luck. That is not what we wanted to hear, however, we decided that it was more of a 'break a leg' than a 'you have no chance;' he probably just did not know the connotation that 'good luck' can have in English. That was what we told ourselves anyways.

"50 Dollars"

Upon arriving in Kyev at about midnight, we left the train station. We wanted to find a taxi to take us to the place where we would meet our AirBnb host. That was no hard task, for as soon as we left the station, we were bombarded by cab drivers who wanted us (and everyone else) to ride with them. We found a place to look around, wanting a taxi that looked like an actual taxi, rather than some random guy with a car from the 90s. We found one, approached the driver, and showed him where we wanted to go. He said, "50 dollars," which we took to mean 50 Ukrainian dollars (I never actually learned how to pronounce the name of their currency--you can try if you'd like: Ukrainian hryvnia (rihv-nee-uh?) (I have no idea if what I am doing with these parentheses is grammatically legal, but it works in math)). We took the cab, and, upon arrival, discovered that he meant 50 US dollars (the equivalent of over 1300 rye-vin-ai-ay). This was an absolute rip-off (it was less than a ten minute cab ride and it would end up costing us less when we went to the airport almost an hour away), but we did not really have an argument against him. It was also late, we had been travelling for 12 hours, and none of us were in the mood to argue with a frustrated Ukrainian taxi driver. So we paid the 50 dollars worth of hurry-vee-nee-a and went on our way, although not entirely happy. (I am still confused as to why the driver would have assumed that we had 50 US dollars on us when we had just arrived in Ukraine via train. If it had been by plane, I could maybe understand, but we arrived by train--which means that we travelled from somewhere in Europe--so the chances of us having euros was pretty good, but the chances of us having dollars, not so much.

A Late Night Walk

After our taxi experience, we walked through a sketchy looking iron gate and past a guy (probably a little older than us) smoking a cigarette by a set of spiral stairs. The company we were renting our AirBnb from had a sign that said to go up the stairs, so we proceeded up them. The young guy followed us up and introduced himself (I do not recall his name, we will call him Yaroslav) and said that he would check us in. Yaroslav was very friendly and helpful, even going so far as to walk us to our AirBnb to make sure we found it and got in alright. He seemed somewhat confused as to why three American college students were in Ukraine, but he offered us advice and made small talk the whole way to the apartment.

It was a good thing that Yaroslav came with us. It was a somewhat confusing walk, involving a wall to climb (via stairs that were built in to the side) and another sketchy iron gate. The streets were also somewhat creepy, as it was not well lit and there was a lot of construction going on. However, we eventually made it to our room, ready to sleep.

Welcome to the Soviet Union (title to be read in a thick, Eastern European accent)

A few brief comments on our room. It was perfectly livable, but it was certainly an apartment from when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. It was very plain, had several spots on the wooden floor that were soft, a TV from the 90s at the earliest, and a washing machine that appeared to run on water from a filled bathtub. All-in-all, it was a wonderfully queer little place that we enjoyed staying in.

To Be Continued