Prices

[johnstruthers]

People who come to Ukraine should try to get the heck out of Kiev. It's a great capital city, of course, but it's been so westernized that it ain't hardly Ukrainian no more.

Take a train to Odessa, or L'viv, or our great city of Nikolaev. We need your tourist hryven more than the people in Kiev, and you'll have a more "unique" experience. Your money goes further, you don't have to put up with pseudo "Irish" bars as we don't have even one of those. You can get the best hotel room in town for 170 hryven (about $35)a night overlooking our Western Oddity, the McDonald's, but actually with a great view of real old downtown buildings and a park. You can get two blinchiki filled with meat with sour cream on the side for 5 hryven (under a dollar), a hundred grams of decent vodka is 1.60 hryven (about 30 cents), a great salad a mere 2 hryven (38 cents or so). By the way, we call them rubles here. Who the hell cares.

And besides the cost of living here being half or less what it is in Kiev, maybe the best part is you won't have to compete for barstools with know-it-all ex-pat twits who only associate with each other and won't eat salo.