A Ukrainian home + office

Last Sunday was the first time I saw a real Ukrainian home from the inside. I was meeting Kyryl, a Ukrainian guy, and his friend Alex in the morning and we were going to play some music. Alex and I joined the waiting people at one metro station and somehow I was not too surprised to see Kyryl 45 minutes late, he also did not seem surprised that we were still waiting for him.



This is the street of the house where we were going to play, the house is on the right. When we arrived there it was too late though, the owner had let some other band get the place.




Instead we went to Alex' place, and I got a small tour. This is the kitchen. The fire on the stove is always turned on because they have to pay the same no matter how much gas they use. Also they need it very often to heat water which is not warm directly from the tap.




We had to use a flash light in the hall between the rooms. In the Soviet days the apartment used to be owned by an extremely rich family but now it is shared between a lot of people. The old guy also lives there.




We had a lot of port wine Georgian style. We also had some ice cream which he kept in the place between the windows so it was not very hard.




Alex collects old stuff. These are old Russian perfumes. The tall yellow one smells like Chloé and the one in the middle like Old Spice. He also had a lot of old bank notes, like 500000 ruble notes.




They knew I thought this place was very funny so they encouraged me to have a lot of dumb pictures taken and here we are wearing old Russian police clothes. Actually Alex' place was not so unusual to me because when I go on tour with my band we often stay in similar places.




Later we went to have fun at Alex' work place. Alex works together with his father and brother in the family's company which produces big steel doors.




View from the office. Like the swimming pool in Poltava that building in the background has the Olympic logo. I think they are very strict about where this logo can be used but I guess in Ukraine it is hard to enforce regulations.