"You are entering a whole different world"

These were the words spoken by the driver who met me at Kiev airport upon hearing that this was my first time in Ukraine.  While the forboding tone put me off a bit, I was already getting such a feeling after going through one of the most chaotic immigration processes yet (7 lines, no direction, and many scary men with large guns in camo).   Driving the road into the city, I was not very impressed by the surroundings....desolate houses, gray sky, and an overall gloom over the area.   Not much improvement as we arrived at the hotel....nice place, but the surrounding "down town" Kiev was a grey, dreary place that was not inviting.

My co-worker dragged me out for dinner, and we walked the short way towards the main street of the city centre.  Here is where we started to go wrong.  We based our flightplan off the directions my taxi driver had given me ("See the building with the MTC on top?  Go there, then turn right").  Wladek had a map, however when we attempted to match up the Metro station in front of the TGI Fridays (yup...seriously...it was written in Ukrainian, but there was no doubting it), we realized that a) the map was in Latin alphabet --aka"translated" Ukrainian, b) the street signs were in Cyrilliac-based alphabet and c) we had no idea where we were.  Well....it seemed that most of the cars were coming from THAT direction, and logic says that at the end of the day, most cars leave the city centre.....so we went THAT direction.   Luckily, our faulty logic paid off, and we ended up on the main shopping street in Kiev.  Here, the buildings were obviously constructed during the post WWII communist period, with the box shape dotted with equally spaced, uniform windows in rigid grids.   But instead of the dish-water gray of the outer city, here the buildings were painted in welcoming pastels.  What struck me the most was that seemed to be a basement invasion of capitalism in these otherwise severe buildings, as we passed shop fronts of Tiffany's, Bvlgari, Dolce &Gabbana.  It was like the city was struggling with a new identity.

We strolled the streets a bit longer, going from a dreary stone alley to a colorful tree-lined avenue in a single turn.  Finally, we popped into a grill for dinner and enjoyed a nice light salad with a crisp glass of wine.  Not "typical" Ukrainian cuisine, but I am sure that will come in the coming days, as we leave Kiev tomorrow for Dnipropetrovsk.