Ukraine in the Membrane! Ukraine in the Brain!

A lot happened for me in Ukraine, unfortunately, nothing ended up being a Supercross08 project.

So instead of writing about my lack of cultural exchange activities, I will present photodocumentation of a beautiful and exciting place!

I stayed with a guy named Robert Jackson. I met Robert in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria - we were from different groups, but lived in the same city. Robert teaches photography in Kiev and has a few development projects going on.This is a picture of the Arsenal factory in Kiev - one of the last strongholds of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Every weekend in Kiev, the town closes this main strip of the center, near Maidan, to traffic and opens it to pedestrians!
This picture is after a full day of people walking through town with their beers and vodkas listening to different street music, and a couple live concerts!

I got to see the campaign for the mayoral elections of Kiev and compare them to our own election processes. There were 76 candidates but the incumbent mayor managed to maintain his seat.
All over the city, the candidates put up booths like these and hired people to hand out propaganda. One popular trick empolyed by these candidates was to find a "friend" with the same name as an opposing candidate and pay them to run in the race! Clever!

Ukrainian fashion reminded me of a magical place called Bulgaria.
Hooray for Eastern Europe!

We spent five hours at a junk market searching for random camera things and just taking in the experience.
It was interesting to see what kinds of things would sell in Ukraine.

Robert took me to a village 70 kilometers outside of Kiev. We spent the day there hanging out with Robert's photography friend, Igor.
We hiked through the countryside to a resevoir and tried to get the perfect picture of the oncoming storm that almost took us over!

Spent a day checking out the Lavra - a religious site with lots of caves and orthodox churches and such.


Also checked out the war museum, topped with a monument of a towering metal woman holding a shield bearing the Soviet symbol of a hammer and sickle.










Here's a picture of a bit of discord in a place of unity!That was Ukraine according to me. There's more, of course. But if you want to know about it, you'll just have to go there and see it yourself.

More to come about my unending adventure called, "Trying to get into Russia!"