In Kiev Only the Rich Drive Cars

The thing about capitalism is that is creates winners and losers. When countries change from planned economies to laissez faire societies, the difference between the winners and the losers tends to be huge.

The thing about driving in Kiev is that it’s aggressive. People brake late, run red lights, lanes are more suggestive than directive, indicating an undesirable affectation. Crossings only seem to have meaning for young and female pedestrians. The cars are almost all new and flashy: German, Japanese, and American, with the occasional cheaper Korean model sneaking around the edges. Ladas and Volgas are rare.

Private transport in a country with a per capita GDP of US$4,000 is clearly only for the free market's winners. Winners are those that act fast, take opportunities and risks, adapt to new ideas and see the passage of time as an obstacle. These are people who are not blessed with patience. When this type of people is the only kind at the wheel, driving becomes creative. Consumption, like the driving, is conspicuous and the arrogance of the nouveau riche is the over riding emotional presence in the city.

I’m not sure this connection between driving and personality can be ever tested empirically but as a metaphor I think it is apt. There is something distinctly Russian about Kiev too. It took me a couple of days to realise that the language of the city was Russian rather than Ukrainian. My antipodean senses were not able to distinguish the languages or the cultures. Our guide to the missile base told me that he only used Ukraine with his family. “If you speak Ukrainian in Kiev you sound like you come from a village.” The English speaking newspaper reported on a female small town city council member who was advocating the expulsion of Russian speakers from the country. Oh, that and the Kiev Zoo was a ‘depressing place for animals and visitors alike.’

About half way through my stay at the hostel a new girl started working at the hostel. She spoke only Ukrainian and German. Her smiling face and charming disposition was so unusual in Kiev, I initially thought she was German. Our conversations were either hand gestures or the translator in Stacey’s iPod. She hadn’t seen an iPod before and I started to realise she probably wasn’t German. She went out of her way to help and wasn’t bothered by our communication break downs. She was exactly unlike everyone else we met in Ukraine. Had a strong suspicion she was fresh from a small village.

When I was in Moscow in 2001 I had contacts and met people who were introduced to me formally. This is exactly how you’re supposed to meet people in Russian culture. It’s not a society where you can get chatting to people in the line at the post office. If you’re a non-Russian speaking tourist you have almost no show of getting to know anybody. People will be cold and distant. My friend and Ukraine travelling companion Stacey has a passport almost full of stamps and she said Kiev was one of the hardest places she’d traveled. I'm just glad I didn't go alone. There’s a Russian saying that goes, ‘only a fool smiles for no reason’. It’s an expression that offends my Kiwi sensibilities. I used to think that people are the same but cultures are different; you can’t blame people for operating under the norms that they are raised under. I still feel that’s true but I’m also learning that to respect a culture I don’t have to like it.

Flying Out.

The thing about me and flying is that it involves a reasonable risk of going hungry. There seems to be something about ordering an egg-free meal that is beyond the airline industry. Sure they can move millions of people each year at a cost which is, frankly, a modern marvel. Despite security, safety and fuel costs, they sometimes even make a profit. Yet ask them to feed me anything other than French toast or pancakes and things fall apart. They either forget or misinterpret the request. Once I got an omelette. I wish I were kidding.

In recent years I've given up and become an airborne vegan. They seem to be able to cope with that. This time my very lovely Dunedin-based travel agent did a lot of emailing and negotiating to get my meals organised. Thai (bless their Buddhist hearts) got it right. They tend to. The downside is that with Thai the regular food would have been fine anyway, and probably pretty tasty.

Lufthansa always manage to balls it up with Teutonic efficiency. This time they actually gave me the right meal, but no one told the cabin crew. They had a freak out when I told them my "Asian vegetarian" meal was meant to be egg-free and insisted on checking it first. I imagined some kind of corpulent official food taster or perhaps an egg sniffing dog. I actually suspect no checking went on at all. My meal arrived only after my prompting: a veggie curry. This was exactly what my travel agent told me I was getting in thee first place. It was fine, although the side dishes were varying degrees of unnatural disaster. The vegetable salad tasted like what I'm sure Iago would have tasted like if Shakespeare had been a chef instead of the bard. The melon salad tasted like the same villain but played by Steven Seagal.

Lufthansa would have been forgiven if their 747s weren't so old that they're made of spruce. The seats are exactly the same as the narrow bastards I sat in back in 2001. Air New Zealand is putting in their second change of seating since then. No TVs in the seats and only small purplely CRTs in the ceiling. The movies were Valentines Day, It's Complicated and an episode of Golden Girls. Explosive decompression would have been a more entertaining option.

Still there was possibility that I may be flying on an A380 on my leg from Frankfurt to Tokyo. That would almost be worth some swollen eyes.