Kiev

June 17—July 2, 2009

Many people think a flea market is little more than a glorified dump.

Needless to say, they couldn’t be more wrong. A flea market can reveal the secrets to making anything out of nothing.

How to make ANYTHING out of nothing at home

Kiev’s largest flea market is located within a one-kilometer radius around the Kurenevskiy Market (aka the “Ptichka,” or bird market). People, cars, trams and junk are closely intertwined here every weekend from early morning until lunch.

Every shopping trip should always have some sort of supreme goal, otherwise it’s just no fun. For trips to a flea market, the ultimate sport is to try and find something neat for less than 50 rubles ($1.50, or a dozen hryvnias).

It’s always interesting to see the kinds of things people once bought for themselves. For example, here’s a magnificent bottle holder with two candleholders. The Everest of Soviet romance. Any woman invited to a table with something so fabulous on it would immediately know she was dealing with a true gentleman. Then again, it’s also hard to imagine anyone using this thing more than once in their life.

The vendor asked me what I was photographing. I said it was the doll. She got very excited and told me she also has a hat for the doll at home, and that she likes to take pictures of it too. If I wanted, she could bring those photos the following weekend, and also give me the negatives.

The ultimate Soviet cultural artifact: a metal light switch plate to protect the wall around the switch from finger grease.

Many people here are selling Soviet Lokon-8 hair curlers (in the orange box). Their mint condition is due to their phenomenal uselessness. To the left of the curlers is a nice ceramic souvenir in the form of briefcase with a bottle sticking out of it—the subtle humor of research workers of the 1990s.

Although there wasn’t that much stuff in the USSR, sometimes something surprising would appear. For example, it’s impossible to explain why so many people owned a tacky bronze monkey holding salt and pepper shakers. The plastic bathroom signs (a boy pissing into a pot and a girl in a bubble bath) are a completely different story. Another such object is the dog coat hanger. The feet are for hanging coats, and the ears are for hats. Every third family had one.

Fortune smiled upon me today. I came across a set of six soldiers from my childhood. They’re 13-15 cm tall and very detailed and well made. The set includes Vikings, a Wild West frontiersman who just got shot, and a Soviet Army soldier with a telescopic-sight rifle. The soldier was always great to use with the dude who got shot, for a more complete story. The others would get placed in a circle so that each one was whacking the next.

After some haggling, I managed to get the whole set for 12 hryvnias. That’s 48.7 rubles, and within our game’s limit. An extra reason to celebrate.

I also bought several faceted tumblers of varying degrees of facetedness for one hryvnia (4 rubles) each. The woman selling them gave me a free tip: “If you’re drinking horilka, you have to pour it up to the top of the faceted part.”

All in all, Kiev is an excellent place.

Looking for a husband

Everything about it is wonderful.

Fuck

Lots of parks and trees. Lots of excellent views.

A vendor at the food market told me she found the image of Jesus in the trash and put him up on the column because she felt bad for him.

Another vendor put up an octopus in the same spot.

You see all sorts of crazy things at the market.

With wild strawberry aroma

I went to a monthly antiques fair.

There, I bought a plate that says “Public Food Services” (in Russian) and a sign that says “Comrades, dispose of your food waste,” with an image of a pig holding a slop bucket and an arm in a suit jacket scraping said food waste off a plate and into the bucket.

I went to the Kraina Mriy world music festival and heard some Bregović-like music.

I took a trip to the Strategic Missile Forces Museum, which is situated in the middle of a bunch of farm fields, on the site of a former missile launch base. The most interesting thing there is the command center, which is located 40 meters below ground. There’s a top-secret underground toilet underneath the command center.

In the center itself, visitors can push the nuclear launch button. The button is grey. They lied to us.

Everything in the city is covered with a fairly thick layer of flyers.

There are terracotta gutters running across the sidewalk from underneath many of the rainwater downpipes.

One bus stop already has a digital information display (I’d only seen something like this in Perm until now).

Information lightboxes have been hung up outside every residential building downtown. In addition to advertising space, which isn’t being used so far, they also contain a list of important municipal service numbers.

The “men at work” sign has a yellow background (the last time I saw something like this was in Greece, but all warning signs have yellow backgrounds there).

The lane direction signs are wonderfully designed. The arrows get shorter towards the edges so that they don’t crowd one another.

You don’t have to show your passport to buy a SIM card in Ukraine. Local wireless carriers don’t have different rate zones within Ukraine—the rates are the same in every city, and there are no in-country roaming charges.

You can get vanity license plates with whatever you want here, like in the US.

Generally speaking, people in Ukraine treat one another with a lot more care and respect than people in Russia (although Ukrainians themselves don’t notice this). For instance, all the marshrutkas (fixed-run taxis) have tall passenger cabins, so that people don’t have to crouch when walking through them. It might seem like a little thing, but it makes a big difference.

The only thing that isn’t being done with the people in mind here is the crackdown on the Russian language, which is taking place even though Kiev is an entirely Russian-speaking city. All the movies in theatres have Ukrainian dubbing. But all the DVDs are in Russian only. The market has spoken.