Donetsk, Soledar, Artemovsk
November 2830, 2007
A short tour around edible production facilities went hand in hand with a trip through the cities where the said facilities are located.
In this wholly Russian-speaking part of Urkaine the electricity is the only thing that pretends to be Ukrainian.
Donetsk
Map
Donetsk is the city of triumphant billboard holders. Nowhere else will you see such systemic diversity.
This is the most basic support frame:
This is the regular kind:
Sometimes you also see ones like this:
And these aren’t a rarity either:
The entire city centre is one big advertising surface. All kinds of well- known trademarks can be spotted along the side of the road — from “Mango” to “Vertu”.
Those who don’t have the money for proper outdoor advertising simply stick their notices on the corners of buildings.
Since they don’t yet have any naturally occurring sights worth seeing in Donetsk, the local authorities resort to all sorts of ruses. For example, they’ve put up a statue of the still-living singer Iosif Kobzon.
The centre isn’t every big; immediately beyond it, the mining villages begin. Spoil tips right there in the city.
As for the architecture, the most surprising thing was a buildling erected at the turn of an era — part Stalinist Classicism, part Khruschev-era bricks.
Soledar
Map
Here everything is made of salt. And the town is called Soledar, although the actual production plant is called “Artemsol” for some strange reason.
Salt
This is where they extract that salt that you see in packets with a flower made up of hexagons, the kind which has always been, is, and will always be a staple seen on the shelves of rural cooperative stores. Some 300 metres below the surface the mine working is absolutely astounding — a cave roughly 20 metres high. Everything is made of pure salt. The machine has been sent to gnaw salt in neighbouring caves, whilst in this one they put on classical music concerts.
Artemovsk
Map
Here it’s customary to see off those departing for the army with a big mesage on a wall.
Vitakha, safe trip, we’ll be waiting for you in 2006. Your boys.
Concrete trunks are standing in for utility poles.
The local champagne wines plant has renamed its production (it’s now called “sparkling wine”), but left its own name unchanged.
Here they make champagne the traditional way — the bottles are left to mature in gypsum adits for several years.
Each one of the hundreds of thousands of bottles is rotated by hand a specific number of degrees. This needs to be done several times throughout the fermentation process to ensure that the sediment collects around the cork just so. White marks are applied to bottle bottoms in order to control the angle of rotation.
Then it’s time for what’s called the disgorgement process. Each bottle needs to be opened in such a way so as to get rid of the sediment whilst letting as little product as posible pour out. Specialised women open several hundreds of bottles everyday, firing the corks into dedicated cork-catching buckets to avoid thumping the colleague standing in front of them on the back of the head.
Given that the champagne pours out differently from each bottle, there’s another specialised woman at the ready with a backup bottle used to even out the amount of product before the final corking.
All in all, this place is awesome.
If wine were poison, humanity wouldn’t need four thousand years to figure this out
The local ten-year-old extra brut in particular comes highly recommended.
Here in Artemovsk they sure know how to uphold tradition.
Khima, serve just like your grandfather served before you.
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