Tourism

Eating for a westerner in the Ukraine is a real challenge. Few menus are in English and the Cyrillic alphabet makes it very difficult to translate Ukrainian or Russian into English.  Very few waiters speak any English so communicating is a huge challenge.  Yet, we manage by patience, trial and error, much hand waving and good humor.  Meat is rather fatty and carbohydrates abound.  By healthy US standards, this is not the place to be.    Yet, people are not terribly overweight.  Fish is available but several people warn us to stay away from it because of toxicity that  exists in many rivers and lakes. Nevertheless, caviar with blinis (pancakes) with vodka followed by chicken shashlik (barbequed chicken) becomes my staple dinner.   Every restaurant seems to have two sections in the restaurants – smoking and chain smoking. 

Sanitary conditions in public toilets are appalling by western standards even though these are run, typically, as private enterprises.  Hotel values are all over the place.  $90 buys us a magnificent room in a 4-star hotel in Yalta and a Motel-6 style hostelry in Nikolaev.  The same is true in Kiev and Odessa.  There is clearly a two-tier economy at work here; one price for locals and another for western tourists.

The End

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