Thursday, August 24, 2006

Independance day postponed

Today is Ukraines independance day. I was hoping to witness a huge "Soviet style" military parade, and a lot of activity in the city center.

The event has been overshadowed by a plane crash earlier this week killing 170 people. Therefore all independance day related activites has been postponed untill Saturday, and today is used as a national day of mourning to honour the victims. That's what I heard anyway.

I'll try to get some pictures from the military parade this Saturday.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Cutest pirate in the world

 Posted by Picasa

Killing time Saturday afternoon


Yesterday I went to a Ukrainian shooting range with a couple of friends. I never really tried shooting before, but this really was fun! AK-47 (Kalashnikov), 9mm pistol, semi-automatic assault rifle, shot gun, sniper rifle and an authentic German rifle manufactored in 1939 with bullets from 1936, that's what I tried shooting with.

The only time I got nervous, was when I pulled the trigger with a 1936 bullet in the chamber - I'll never do that again!

Posted by Picasa

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Watch out!

This picture is taken from the train to Lviv. I wonder what happend to the guy in front of the other train?

By the way, there's about 600km from Kiev to Lviv - the train ride was 14 hours!

Posted by Picasa

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Kiev pictures

I've added some pictures of Kiev for you to look at, although the picture below probably illustrates the currently most important tourist attraction in Kiev.
Posted by Picasa

Thursday, August 03, 2006

The family

This is my family. It's hard to be pessimistic when you live under the same roof with them. Miss them very much right now – they been visiting family in Denmark for the last couple of weeks, and left me in Kiev.
Posted by Picasa

Kiev ZOO

Never EVER play the trumpet or hurt your finger near the horse!!! Posted by Picasa

First language

A couple of months ago, there was a lot of debate in Ukraine about which language should be the primary; Ukrainian or Russian. The difference between those two is not that significant in my opinion. But in Ukraine this question, as almost every other question, divides the country in two.

The fact is that everybody speaks Russian, more than half speaks both Russian and Ukrainian and very few speak English.

In my opinion, the most important question is not what the first language should be – just vote for it and get it over with – the question is what the second language should be: English or Chinese?

With the global economy and all, I think Ukraine should start figuring out how the world is going to communicate with them. We Danes have known the importance of that for centuries. I mean, we are doing pretty good even with limited resources and a language nobody knows or cares about (except for us Danes of course).

Ukrainian road repairmen

I recently witnessed a fantastic attitude among Ukrainian road repairmen. I guess the task was to fill some of the holes in the sidewalk in an attempt to even it out a bit.
These guys had to glue the sidewalk together using tar. But they didn’t have the equipment; they just had dry blocks of tar. But they didn’t give up. They just put the tar in a zinc bucket and built a bonfire next to the sidewalk. Then they put the zinc bucket on top of the bonfire, and after a few minutes they had hot tar ready to be poured into the cracks in the sidewalk. Job done!

I don’t know why I took a picture of the project and the three guys involved in it, but I guess I just never saw something like that back in Denmark. I mean five different laws would probably be violated if Danish road repairmen decided to start a fire like that.
Posted by Picasa

OK, first post...

This is my daughter. She's almost two now, and the guy holding her hand is Calem, her boyfriend from Atlanta.

It's actually not her first boyfriend. Back in Copenhagen she dated a little charmer named Karl. But he moved to Boston with his parents, the doctors, and then we moved to Kiev.

I think she's getting to old for dating. In fact, she's also getting dangerously close to the age group that some of my expat friends in Kiev are targeting Saturday nights. Posted by Picasa