Chapter 3 - Arrival in Snowbound Dnipro

Hello Dnipro - Life in Ukraine Before the War

When I left home in early January to live in Ukraine, I was prepared for the full icy blast of a Ukrainian winter; I had packed enough warm clothes to see me through until the snow started to melt in March. 

But winter clothes are bulky and it was clear that even the largest suitcase in the loft was not going to be big enough to carry all my needs for three months away.  A week before I left I bought a new suitcase.  It was maroon and shiny and was the largest suitcase I had ever owned.  But when I started to pack, it quickly became apparent that even this was not going to be big enough.  Two days after I bought it and ripped all the labels off, I returned it to the shop and replaced it with an even larger one.  This one was blue and a lot less shiny but more importantly, it was roomier - with enough space to store a small adult, not that I had anyone particular in mind.  Even so, it came as no surprise that I had more than enough stuff to fill this one too and in the end I had to leave behind a lot of things.

By the time I arrived at Dnipro Airport in the middle of a snowstorm after a long-delayed flight from Kiev (I later learned that it seemed almost all of my flights from Kiev to Dnipro were long-delayed, Ukraine Air apparently didn't need a snowstorm or any other particular reason to delay flights), my former language partner/friend was the only person I really knew, not only in the city, but in the whole of Ukraine, although on a brief visit to the city a couple of months earlier I had met two representatives from the charity I would be working for. 

Before leaving home, I had planned carefully which bus to catch from the airport to the city centre (bus number 60 if you ever need to know) rather than getting ripped off by a taxi driver who understandably see foreigners who can’t speak the language as rich pickings.  However, the snowstorm and the long-delayed flight had killed any chance of catching a bus.  Ukraine is used to snow and freezing conditions and in the main, public transport keeps running come what may, but there are limits to everything and so bad were the conditions that even the buses would have not have bothered on a night like that.  Not only that but the flight had been delayed for several hours and at nearly midnight, even on a normal night, a bus out here would have been a rarity and even I realised that a taxi was my only option of reaching the city.

There is never a shortage of taxi drivers at any time, day or night, especially at airports where naive, hapless foreigners struggling with huge cases are welcomed with willing arms and open doors by eager drivers.  They cannot wait to get their hands on your case and deposit it inside the boot of their car.

Vladimir reached me first.  Stranded at midnight in a dark, near-empty airport car park, in the middle of a snowstorm, knowing that my hotel is 12 miles away, pulling a case that weighed half of my own weight and a rucksack that I could hardly lift, is not the strongest of bargaining positions.  But I tried.  I asked the price to the city centre in my best Russian.  Vladimir replied in English with an extortionate price.  "Nyet!" I said in mock horror trying to bluff out my feeble position.  I looked around at the emptying car park; I couldn't see another spare taxi.  My fellow passengers all seemed to have people to meet them and were throwing cases in cars, banging doors and driving off.  I suggested a slightly smaller figure.  He looked sad and shrugged, "ok".  He'd got me.

The car park was thick with snow and after a bit of patient wheel-spinning Vladimir managed ease the car across the snow and onto the main road where conditions were a little better, where at least some tarmac was visible below the dull orange glow of the street lamps.  I soon realised that although Vladimir was pretty hot on his English numbers, especially the larger ones, when negotiating a price, he knew very few English words, so conversation was difficult.  At the end of the journey he gave me his card, took my huge case into the hotel reception area and bid me goodbye without even waiting for a tip.  Proof if I needed it that I had overpaid but then hey, I thought, what would I prefer - my case dumped down in the snow and a disgruntled driver hovering for his tip?  I had a twinge of remorse.  I had forgotten where I was.  Vladimir probably had a family to feed and probably earned less in one month than I had (when I was working) in a whole day - even if he did manage to pick off a few vulnerable foreigners like me every month.  In any case, the fare was still a lot cheaper than an equivalent ride in Britain.

I used Vladimir for most of my enforced trips by taxi and he was always reliable and helpful.  On one occasion the hotel called a taxi for me (not Vladimir) and I began to realise how much more Vlad the Accumulator was charging me over and above the standard fare, but I didn't mind, I always used him.  Once when I was haggling over a price, I realised with embarrassment that the difference we were arguing over in real money was something like a paltry 30 pence.

When I needed a taxi and the instructions were not that simple, I would get my friend to ring him.  When it was simple (very rarely), I would use my (equally simple) Russian to call him.  This backfired one lunchtime when I asked if he could collect me in one hour.  There was a misunderstanding, due no doubt to my bad Russian, and Vladimir arrived at one o'clock instead.  But this was not a problem for Vladimir and nor was the fact that I once left my gloves in his car.  A few days later when he was in the area where I was living, he delivered them to me.  And it must be noted, he refused to accept any gratuity for his kind action.  I found these little acts of kindness both surprising and endearing.  They are surprising because occasionally you come up against the harsher side of Ukrainian life and it's easy to assume that human behaviour mirrors its environment, but flowers do bloom in deserts.  Kindness, humour and generosity can be surprising because of the general demeanour Ukrainians - they don't go around smiling needlessly at strangers.

I had an early experience of Ukrainian generosity on the first day I arrived at the flat I had agreed to rent.  I arrived with my Ukrainian friend and we expected to meet the agent and the landlady.  Flat rentals are usually made through agents who will take a fee of 50% of the first month's rental from the person who is going to rent it.  However, when we arrived at the flat at the appointed time it seemed like a roomful of people had turned up to see this crazy Englishman who wanted to live in Ukraine.  I was introduced to several people, most of them women and all of them were reluctant to shake my hand.  Normally in Britain when two people meet for the first time, whether male or female, both usually offer a hand.  I learned that in Ukraine women are less likely to shake hands.  The only one who did so, somewhat half-heartedly, was a lady who was an English teacher at a local school. 

I pulled out of an inner pocket of my coat two thick bundles of notes freshly minted from the bank and still in the bank's official looking paper-band.  Despite this I had checked the amounts just in case.  The letting agent sat back quietly and counted her wad of notes.  The landlady took hers and popped it confidently into her handbag without checking.  I felt there was a silent implication that, "I don't need to count it, you're English, I trust you", but no doubt it would be carefully checked later.  I was pleased that I had double-checked the amount earlier.  My friend took the contract, read it (a little too hastily I thought) and declared it ok.  I quickly glanced at the unintelligible words and signed at the bottom.  I hadn't a clue what the contract said or even what the address was but the deal was done. 

My main concern was that the rental was for 6 months and I almost certainly only wanted it for a couple of months - as a foreigner without a work permit, I was only allowed to stay for 90 days in any 180-day period and I had already been there over a week.  In Britain, if you sign a six-month rental, most landlords will make you pay for those six months whether you actually live there or not, subject to any notice clauses; it's a legal commitment.   Rentals in Ukraine however are more flexible and when I decided to leave there was no problem at all.  No problem that is until I returned to Ukraine and enquired about renting the same flat again.  Realising that I would be gone in a couple of months the price suddenly shot up, which of course I fully understood and accepted.  At least I didn't have to pay the agents' introduction fee for the second rental.

My friend told me that the landlady, a slim, motherly looking woman in her 50s, had expressed concern about whether my clothes would be warm enough for the Ukrainian winter.  The next day she brought to my flat, a bag of second-hand clothes to keep the cold out - a coat, a scarf and a hat.  In truth, the coat was too awful to wear and thinner than my own jacket and I already had a scarf, but the hat I still have and wear it today.  But more importantly, it was an early indication of the friendliness and generosity that many Ukrainians show to strangers and was repeated many times in many different forms during my time there.

There was no one single reason why I came to feel so passionate about Ukraine.  Yes, I can cite the kindness, generosity and humour of its people, but part of the fascination were the elements that I couldn't understand - the way of life and those attitudes that were different to those in Britain.  The country had one foot in Europe, the other was rooted in Russia and neither wanted to let go.

Politically too, Ukraine was tied to Russia in such a way that appeared to make it inseparable from its "big brother", in much the same way that many people in Britain saw the UK's future bound inextricably with that of Europe.  Britain had its Brexit day and Ukraine had its 2013/14 Maidan revolution.  Ukrainians had a vision for a better life and fought for it, ousting President Yanukovich and forcing a change that has had lasting repercussions. 

The opportunistic Russian annexation of Crimea and the Russian-backed war in the eastern Ukraine shortly after the revolution not only reminded the world of the ruthlessness of President Putin, but had nearly pushed Ukraine back into Russia's clutches.  It is widely thought that in 2014 Moscow expected other cities in Ukraine to fall into Russian-backed hands:  Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk (now renamed Dnipro), Poltava, Sumy and Odessa could have all fallen into pro-Russian hands at one stage and if they had done, there was the potential to link up with the so called "self-declared" independent regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in the east with Russian-held Crimea in the south which would have created a vast area of Ukraine effectively under Moscow's control.  It didn't happen because the people in the large eastern cities fought back with determination via their own local revolutions, and after some initial bad losses, the much-depleted Ukrainian army fought back against the Russian-backed separatists and prevented further loss of territory.

Many times in recent history, ordinary Ukrainian people have stood up to corrupt politicians and they have fought against the Russian-led occupation of their country but their stance in 2013/14 was one of the most significant events in the recent history of Ukraine.