Back from Kyiv

My trip to Kyiv was quite fun, although getting out was harrowing.

We (my boss and I) flew Austin-DFW-Frankfurt-Kyiv, which worked out well. I upgraded to business class, and it was great. I arrived in Europe able to function the rest of the day. This was my 6th trip to Europe, and the first time I was able to stay up past 5:30 local time when I got there. Being able to catch four hours of sleep was key here. American Airlines also provided Bose noise-canceling headphones, which work really well on airplanes.

We arrived, and our partners in Kyiv had contracted a driver to take us to our apartments. The car was about 10 years old and had been through a lot. The seats had been recovered with red tiger striped covers. Going through town to the apartments was fun; we drove by all of the new apartments in the suburbs, over a nice bridge, and then through downtown.

We had heard from multiple sources that hotels were overpriced and not very nice in Kyiv, and had apartments recommended to us. However, we were not encouraged when we got to the front door. The building was Soviet era, and there was a gray stone wall with a shabby wooden door that we were supposed to go through. We went in, and found out that only one apartment had been rented to us. We called the admin at the office, and were told that we could pick up the other key at 7.

The entry hall was concrete and smelled bad, and the elevator was downright frightening. It was about two by three feet, and the doors did not actually close all of the way. Scary. However, the apartment was very nice.

Went to the office and was shown around. Had dinner at Club Miami. Not the first restaurant that had an American theme; the food was pretty good.

Got back, and retrieved the key to the second apartment from the gostinitza. However, we did not know what floor the apartment was on, and there was no mapping from number to floor. With my fledgling Russian, I asked her "four? five? six?" while moving my hand up and down. She responded "Six", and we went to the sixth floor. When the elevator opened, it was pitch black. Only after I stepped forward did the motion-triggered light come on. Once again, however, the apartment itself was very nice. This was to be mine. No high speed Internet, but what can you do?

Slept well. Our hosts, Oleksey and Anton, would not let us navigate the city by ourselves, so Anton met us the next morning, and we all took the taxi to the office. Taxis are unregulated, so you have to negotiate with the driver, and they fleece foreigners regularly. However, the office negotiated our taxis, so we did not have this problem. That morning, we had introductions and meetings, and then went out to an American-themed steakhouse. However, on the way, we saw some kind of police action. It looked like a bunch of people were protesting a construction site with all kinds of sit-ins. The police were picking them up one at a time, and packing them into paddy wagons. Ukraine is sometimes disconcerting that way.

Worked in the afternoon. That evening, we walked with Oleksey down to yet another American themed restaurant near our apartment. Got to see some of the architecture at that point; it was a good night. The live band at the joint was doing a lot of eighties covers of Sting, Police, Gabriel, etc.

Saturday, we had the Java Users' Group meeting where my boss was giving his two talks (goodwill/recruiting gestures). The projector was dead, and the organization was hopeless, but they served beer while everybody waited. The talks started an hour late, but they were very well received.

That night, I had to do a server migration, and I needed high-speed Internet, so Matt and I swapped apartments.

Sunday, we got a city tour. At some point, I will post pictures to my website at www.baritoneconsulting.com. There are a lot of interesting landmarks in Kyiv. The coolest thing for me is tying Pictures at an Exhibition with Shevchenko, the national poet/artist of the Ukraine. The pictures that Mussoursky were writing about were by Shevchenko, and going by the Great Gate of Kyiv connected the dots for me. Wonderful sightseeing in this city.

That night, we actually had dinner at a modern Ukrainian restaurant. I found out, much to my surprise, that borshch is really really good.

Monday was a work day, but mid-afternoon, we took a tour of the Monastery of the Caves. It's a big place, and took most of the afternoon. Along the way, we saw the outdoor military museum, stuffed with Soviet arms. Cool in a creepy kind of way. That night, Matt and I were on our own for dinner. I went up to the apartment and found three people in it, a woman talking on her phone, and two men tearing up the bathroom.

The men did not speak to me. The woman knew about as much English as I knew Russian. Through pantomime and some fast lookups in my Russian dictionary, I managed to ask her to write down her cell phone number, and I texted it to Anton, who called her. Turns out, she was the apartment owner, and the two men were plumbers, and they were fixing a leak. They would be about another twenty minutes; I went out and shopped and found food.

The plan was supposed to leave Tuesday morning about 6:10. We had been told to get to the airport two hours early, so our driver picked us up about 3:30. Oy. Got to the airport, and the fun started.

There was no Kyiv-Frankfurt flight listed at all. It's as if it did not exist. The Lufthansa counter was closed. We were told we would have to talk to the people at the counter past the entry point, but we could not go to it because it was more than two hours ahead of the only outgoing Lufthansa flight, to Munich. Matt and I got on our Blackberries, and managed to get our flights rerouted to Kyiv-Munich-Frankfurt-Chicago-Austin.

However, it was electronic. We were the first in the boarding pass line, past the entry point, but they told us, "Could you place wait over here for a few minutes?" That few minutes turned into about 90, and during that time, we were aghast at just how bad this particular ticket line was. They only had two agents working, and with no electronic, curbside, advanced, or any previous checkins, every single person had to get a boarding pass from these devotchkas, and it was taking about five minutes per person. We were getting worried; our flight time was approaching, and the only other Lufthansa flight was 2:30 that afternoon.

Finally, a supervisor came along, and we flagged him down. He managed to get our tickets straightened out, and put us back in line. The person in front of me had luggage that was too heavy, and was getting ready to repack in front of us, when said supervisor overrode his devotchka and let the guy board. We basically got to the boarding area about five minutes before the doors opened.

Got to Munich and Frankfurt fine, and noticed that our original Frankfurt-DFW leg was still on the ground. We decided to hook back up with it, as we might get home earlier than the Chicago flight.

Bad miscalculation. The DFW plane had a part failure, and was stuck waiting for the part to come in from Heathrow. They put us on the plane, and we were there for about three hours. Oy. One cool thing, however, is that we got to see the Airbus A380, which had made its first flight to New York and back the previous day, and was parked at the gate in Frankfurt.

We finally got off of the ground, but were informed that we were going to have to stop at JFK to get another crew, since the delays were going to cause them to go over their legally-alloted time.

At least it went smoothly from there. We landed in NY, got another crew and went on to Dallas. The flight attendant we had had then sat with us and joked and gabbed the entire way to Dallas. She was a hoot; part society-woman, ditzball, insightful, outgoing, kind of crazy.

Caught the last connection to Austin, and made it home. What a trip.