IF YOU SMILE AT SOMEONE, THEY MIGHT SMILE BACK

My sister Sylvia had to be in Kiev for a few days for work and me, always up for seeing her and new places, thought this was the right combination. Still running around between work and too many social engagements, I arrived utterly unprepared in Ukraine on Friday the 30th of April. Sylvia had already had a day or two to acclimatise and I let her do all the dealings; she picked me up from the airport, had organised a local contact and was able to get us to places by using some improvised Russian words. Within the first half an hour it was clear that the only useful alphabet and language was going to be Russian (or Ukranian-which is closer to Polish). The other thing I noticed immediately was that smiling was not a common activity and none of my smiles were acknowledged in any way. (It made me realise how much I do smile in a day- and how much I like them!).

Our local contact was Victoria, who had arranged a cheap apartment for us and was very helpful in giving us advice on all types of matters and kept following us with the local phone she had lend to us. After having settled the apartment, Victoria took us to her friends. We were unexpected guests, and we got quite a lot of stares; generally westerners don't find any reason to visit.. We then ended up going to one of the houses with the whole group, where they continued their discussions.
I found two little girls more of my level (around 5yrs old) and played the whole evening with them- as they required less of a language effort. Even though they did all the jumping, I was the one worn down at the end of that!
Saturday we took our time and walked around all day, with as high point the Lavra, a monastery set on 28 hectares; a tight cluster of gold-domed churches and underground caves with mummified monks.

This part of Eastern-Europe is of course the cradle of some profoundly talented musicians and other artists, which we saw expressed in the Swan lake performance we attended in the National Opera. I had deprived myself for about three weeks of any cultural enjoyment and this was a true outburst of it; both the orchestra as the dancers were supreme.
Generally I found the people friendly, even if it was hard to tell sometimes-smileless-as people would generally try to answer our questions and further left us alone; we felt safe overall. People are well-dressed, even not necessarily with the latest fashion, women seem to have a strong preference for very very high heels, very very short skirts/very very tight trousers and the mullet's still having its heydey here.

My sister left on Sunday. I utilised the rest of the day to visit the St Sofia, have lunch with Victoria and I took the nighttrain to Lviv/Lvov, thanks to a note written in Russian by V, which I could show to the ticketseller.
I arrived early, found my way to the hostel, which was filled with Poles, who had clearly done an allnighter, as the kitchen table was literally covered with empty wodka bottles. I did not want to lose too much time, so found my way to the Jewish centre. A not so appealing man kept on talking to me in either Russian or Ukranian, I eventually understood he was calling Tanya, who could help me. The centre had clearly not changed since the seventies, the radio, the green telephone and orange lamp were testimony to that. It probably also had not been cleaned since then, judging by the dusty smell. Eventually Tanya arrived, who spoke a good English, who offered to take me round the next day. I used the rest of the day to walk around; Lviv, like Kiev could do with a great deal of paint and renovation; however the main square is beautiful. In the evening I tried my luck by going to see a classical concert; a local orchestra, but yet again of a very high standard.
Kiev feels fairly Russian (not that I have ever been there), while in West-Ukraine, where I was now, the feel was much more Ukranian, and so was the preferred language.

The most beautiful building in Lviv was certainly what used to be known as the ‘Jewish hospital’-now a maternity ward. Set up and run by the local community before the war- one third of the population was Jewish-. However, when I asked in the souvenir shop, which was filled with pictures from the town, for a picture depicting the ‘Jewish hospital’, the lady made clear there was not such a thing. When I then was able to clarify which building I meant, she simply claimed ‘it was not that beautiful’.

In this building, the bullet holes were still visible in the wall, where the Jewish doctors and nurses were shot in the early fourties. This was clearly the start of my Jewish tour, full of destruction and past history. Not even out of town was the concentration camp Janowska placed (demolished and a prison now), then there were cemeteries and monuments. A little interesting fact was, that some houses still had Yiddish writing on the wall of what it used to sell and some courtyards had a few meters of rails, which were used to transport goods to be sold from the house onto the street.

In the evening, overwhelmed still by all this information I decided to stay in the hostel, where I found myself in a long winded conversation with the local girl who was running the hostel that evening and who had studied German in college. It was shocking to discover she had never heard of the concentration camp, being born and raised in Lviv. She summarised it: “ in this town we are proudly Ukranian, so in general we don’t care what happened to the Russians, Poles and Jews”.

She also explained to me that in Ukraine people get married when they are twenty, which has its perks, as then you can have your home and children before it comes in the way of your career (and indeed I had noticed the vast amount of teenage couples)-so in her eyes, I was an oddity (not to use the words 'old spinster'). She also told me that the phenomenon of ‘Ukranian brides’ was quite known and this way the evening proceeded fairly quickly. Later my ‘friend’ in the hostel arrived, a man from Georgia, with whom I could not communicate through language, but we managed through food.

The next day I woke up early to catch the train back to Kiev, which was a long and boring journey, in which I felt increasingly ready to embrace the ‘west’ (and non-smelly toilets) again. In Kiev I visited another monument, wandered through a park, had a few ‘blinis’ (pancakes) thanks to my little dictionary and made my way to the airport. Again I met a girl, who, like the others, at first seemed not so responsive (both in expression and in words) and aloof and eventually did open up and we had a nice chat about (guess what!) cultural differences....and that ladies and gentlemen, pretty much concluded my trip to the East