canadians and dirty hippies

At the hostel, I met two French Canadians from Montreal, Leon and Marc. When I walked into the common room, I heard Leon talking, with a heavy – what I thought was French – accent. I sat down. I heard Marc talking then, who didn't speak with much of an accent at all. “You're not French then,” I said. “Quebecois?” I was right.  Leon was still living in Montreal, working as a chef in a bistro in the suburbs, while Marc had moved off to Lithuania to follow his Lithuanian girlfriend, where he worked as a French teacher. Marc had long been living in Europe though, living also in France, where there he had worked as an English teacher. They often chatted back and forth with each other in French, though with a high nasally sound that made it notably Quebecois. To me, it sounded a bit like the chatter called “Simlish” from the game, The Sims – a series of Charlie Brown sounds going up and down the tongue. Their plan was first to just wander the city. I had a few hours and was intending to go and see St. Sophia, so I invited them along. I had seen the outside of St. Sophia before, when I was first walking the city with Pavlos and others from his hostel, but I hadn't gone inside with them, opting instead to go on to a coffee shop. 

St. Sophia was built around the turn of the first millennium. It was a built as a small scale model of the Hagia Sophia – indeed, the floor plan almost exactly matched the church in Istanbul, except for the fact that it was maybe eight times smaller, which still made it a large church. For a thousand years and various destructions and reconstructions, it stood as the hallmark church to the Ukrainian Orthodox people, the seat of the Kievan Rus's power and the center of religion and culture of the Ukrainian people during the later years under the Russian Empire. Inside, the walls were entirely covered in religious murals, scenes of Christ and the saints performing miracles and the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. It was how, I imagined, the Hagia Sophia once was, before the Muslims had taken it and covered all of the religious murals with white wash, leaving the walls bare of art and gold, decorating the interior with only four large green placards, emblazoned with verses of the Quran in Arabic.

The next church we went to and walked through was St. Michael's, standing opposite down the road from St. Sophia. It's not hard to say that downtown Kiev is littered with great, golden domed churches, glittering in the sun – at least, I imagined them to glitter in the sun, but the sun was something I hadn't seen since the day Pavlos left. Though with that thick blanket of clouds that hung over us, the weather stayed remarkably warm, though with the occasional drizzles. After that, I left the Canadians so I could go meet with another friend and then see about my next apartment. The apartment was near the Kharkivska metro station, in one of a thousand towering Soviet block apartments that crowded the streets on the Left Bank of the Dnieper River. 

the Left Bank of Kiev

I waited at the McDonald's there for about an hour to meet my possible new roommate. I would have chosen anything else but McDonald's, if anything else didn't look like dark, dirt floored pubs filled with slot machines and prostitutes. Back in the former Soviet world I definitely was! It was more what I had originally imagined Kiev to be, not what I had found it to be, with its sprawling and clean old town with its mix of various architectural styles. Here were the block apartments that characterized the Soviet world from the outside, though they served mainly as a source of cheap overflow apartments for workers, with easy access to factories and downtown alike. The Soviet block apartments, first being constructed under Khruschev, were a temporary solution to housing shortages. The idea was to build them up quickly, so all the people who were living in apartments with three or more families as a result of the Soviet expansion or World War II, could be given their own quarters.  But the idea was never finished out, and like Hoover in the United States, Khruschev was in a sense ridiculed, as the alternate name for Soviet block apartments is "khrushobki". 

I finally was able to meet with Sasha as he, his girlfriend and a French couchsurfer were on their way out of the apartment to do some pre-New Years shopping. They decided to show me the place very quickly before they left. However, Sasha and I got to talking about hockey, soccer, English teaching and any other number of topics when Sasha's girlfriend came in and said, “I've been cooking dinner and it's almost ready. Will you join us?” So I sat down with them and broke some bread. We agree on the price and I left the apartment, glad that I could finally have a place to live.

When I got back into downtown, the Canadians had wandered off somewhere and were without phone credits, which meant that I couldn't call them. I at first decided to take a quiet night, hanging out with two other couchsurfers who were hanging out at the hostel. They were two American girls who  frequented Ukraine and Kiev and they were their for the couchsurfing New Years Eve party. I was almost on the edge of deciding to go to that for New Years. Leonid, the hostel worker, came in. “Come on downstairs to the other hostel, Why Not,” he said. “They've got drinks!”

Down I went to join him and hang out with the other people. The Why Not? hostel was situated right on the main road of Saksaganskogo Street. Each room had its own them – including a Communist room, all red with Lenin heads painted on the wall – plus there was a large kitchen, patio, common room and a small movie room in the basement. They were throwing a New Years Eve party as well, which was open to everyone coming. Suddenly, people were being rounded up to go to a club in the Podil district, Xlib.

Xlib was another club situated in the basement of some office complex, though since it was completely dark when our taxis pulled up, I could have mistaken the office complex for some run down slab of empty concrete, towering high above the trees. There was a 50 grivna cover, a security check giving a pat down and a coat check to hang up your stuff. The club had two main rooms and a chillout room. In the main room, and had something of the look of an empty warehouse, reminding me of my old raver days in Dallas. There was a reggae band playing on the stage while in the smaller room they had a DJ playing dubstep, a strangely popular style in Kiev. Drinks were on the pricey side since they only stocked import beers, but the usual cheap shots of vodka found through Ukraine were still present. I drank it up and did the best I could at the frenetic dub step and the more lackadaisical reggae hippy dancing, trying to fit in with all the Ukrainian hippies in their dirty clothing and dread locked hair. It was clear that the girls their must have smelled my clean, shampoo washed hair, because they made a large ring around me, staying clear of anything perceived as an advance. Not that I cared, what did I want with those dirty hippy girls anyway?