UKRAINE 2014 --What Is It Like Today?

[AkMike]

  Well for a bit of an up date from me. During the summer I bought a wonderful home in the Cherkassy area!  280 sq. meters, 3 story and 4 bedrooms on a 27 sotok plot. (that's 2700 sq.meters) on a slough leading to the Dnieper. There's even a MIL house with it, but since neither she nor I like that old battleaxe, she'll never see it.
 I'm going to be going a lot of fishing and gardening to keep me busy during retirement.

[ML]

Congratulations.
Looks good.
But isn't 100 square meters called a sotka?
Never heard of sotok.

[AkMike]

I've been told it's a sotok.

 I found this on Google,   Every family had in its possession, 50 acres under Tsarist rule; 37 sotok [a traditional Russian measure of land, equalling 100 square meters] under the Bolsheviks; 15 sotok under the Communists; 7 sotok under the democrats; and a ? (questionable) amount “Today.”
http://www.tenant.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=7008

Then Wiki shows Sotka,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare

I'll clarify it with SWMBO and post the results.

[AkMike]

The neck says sotka! 

[JayH]

While on the tourist promotion trail-- some more of interest.

Ukraine sights and attractions

 Ukraine top 100 best sights and attractions - Full-HD Presentation. What to see in Ukraine? Why travel to Ukraine? Pictures of top sights and attractions of West, East and South Ukraine with short description. Ukraine tours from Ukraine Kiev Tour

[JayH]

Published on 4 Dec 2015
Ukraine is the largest country in Europe. We have a unique mixture of attractions - the seaside, mountains, kilometers of rivers and lakes, marvelous cities and authentic countryside. Ukraine is beautiful and safe to visit. Every year we host thousands of festivals, sporting events, and music performances. Visit us and find magnificent culture, delicious cuisine and our famous hospitality. Ukraine is the most accessible country in Europe to engage in ecotourism, sports tourism, cultural tourism, winter tourism, food tourism, festival tourism, sea tourism. Experience Ukraine and find what it means for U.


Experience Ukraine! We are open for Tourism




 

[JayH]

Some of the comments say it all.

Ukraine War 2014 - National Anthem of Ukraine translated into English




And a reminder of the passion--

[JayH]

Nine of the most famous castles and fortresses of Ukraine, nine Ukrainian real gems from different periods of history - just a slice of what we would like to withdraw from the bird's flight. 2015 we traveled thousands of kilometers to see this beauty from another angle and show it to all those interested in the past of Ukraine.

UKRAINE Fortresses and castles.

[AkMike]

The flu season is hitting Ukraine pretty hard this year. More than 240 deaths have been reported by the Ukrainian Health Ministry. More than 540 have been reported in the occupied areas of Donbas. Some of the problem seems to be from a bad batch of serum from Poland as it was reported earlier last year.

[JayH]

Informative look at Ukraine today

[Darth_Budda]

Ukraine reminds me if central New York...

[JayH]

Excellent insight.

[JayH]

For much of the 20th century, Europe was filled with capital cities at war. As recently as the 1990s, places like Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb all fell into this tragic category. But today there is only one: Kiev in Ukraine.

Ukraine is a great European state. Lest we forget, it is still at war

Thanks to the predatory ambitions of Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is the sole European country that is waging war on its own soil. And Kiev has a very 20th century ritual: the daily announcement of the communiqué from the front. At 12.30 precisely, Colonel Andriy Lysenko, a lantern-jawed military spokesman, reads out the latest news from the east, where Ukrainian troops are fighting battles of attrition with Russian forces and their local allies, who occupy about half of the neighbouring regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/11/ukraine-is-a-great-european-state-lest-we-forget-it-is-still-at/

[treadmilldude]

  Well for a bit of an up date from me. During the summer I bought a wonderful home in the Cherkassy area!  280 sq. meters, 3 story and 4 bedrooms on a 27 sotok plot. (that's 2700 sq.meters) on a slough leading to the Dnieper. There's even a MIL house with it, but since neither she nor I like that old battleaxe, she'll never see it.
 I'm going to be going a lot of fishing and gardening to keep me busy during retirement.

Mike, that is a beautiful home! It's obviously not Soviet architecture. Looks pretty similar to a lot of the architecture here in the US. Did you have it custom built for your Wife and you, or did you buy it pre-built?

Argghhh I forget where Cherkassy is on a map. I believe it is North of Odessa and south of Kiev, but how much closer to Kiev or Odessa it is, I forget, my memory of the Ukrainian map is rusty. The last 3 months, I completely stopped my search in Ukraine and moved it to Belarus, so I am learning and learning about Belarus....and forgetting some things I used to know like the back of my hand about Ukraine. There is so much more to learn and know about Ukraine though than Belarus... a country of 44.5 Million versus a country of 9.45 Million people, plus Ukraine is much larger geographical-wise.

I will say that of all the cities on ADate, Cherkassy might be the most honest of them all. I do not remember encountering a single scammer girl from Cherkassy. I actually had a few girls from Cherkassy, on ADate, apparently like me so much when we were on the webcam for only a few minutes (webcam is crazily expensive) that they got a piece of paper and held it up to their webcam with their skype and email address. So we were able to get off of ADate almost immediately and get on skype and email very quickly. Those 4 or 5 girls from Cherkassy on ADate were all very nice. Complete antithesis to the nightmare, wretched women from Odessa and Nikolaev. I still have nightmares about those witches from Odessa and Nikolaev from ADate.   

I'll send you a PM Mike, as you were telling me some stuff about this home through PM you wanted to remain confidential between us. I promise I do not gossip, I'll shoot you a PM.

I hope you and your very pretty Wife are both doing well there in Alaska. Alaska is so beautiful. I would love to travel there some day. Have a feeling we would be doing an awful lot of fishing there in the great white north. I just hope I do not see Sarah Palin while we are there. Yikes!! If I see that moron, I will turn around and run from her as fast as I can. I don't wanna be anywhere near her, she makes me puke. (LOL and I am a life-long conservative.)

[AkMike]

During the Soviet times Cherkassy was known as the 'City of Brides'. They came into the ci9ty to work in the textile mills and other industries. IMO there's still a large percentage of beautiful ladies there. There's a couple of us on the forums that I have met in UA and elsewhere that have met their brides there.
 Cherkasy is a couple of hundred kms. south of Kyiv on the Dniepr River.

[Boethius]

My Soviet born and raised husband says you are incorrect. Ivanovo in Russia was known as the city of brides.  Cherkassy is the historical Cossack capital.

[JayH]

My Soviet born and raised husband says you are incorrect. Ivanovo in Russia was known as the city of brides.  Cherkassy is the historical Cossack capital.

"Ivanovo Oblast has long had the most distorted gender distribution anywhere in Russia: 1247 women per 1000 men. But this figure is, in fact, not hugely divergent from the national average. Therefore, the situation is not as tragic as it seems, and weddings in the city of brides occur just as frequently as anywhere else. Well, almost."

In Ukraine-- Nikolaev lays claims to The City of Brides" title-- as does nearby Kherson.

[Boethius]

Ivanovo had a disproportionate number of women in Soviet times because the city, not the oblast, was the centre of the textile industry in the USSR. Textiles was a highly developed industry, located around Moscow, before the Revolution, and that continued in the region after 1917.

There were no "city of brides" in Ukraine in the Soviet period.

[AkMike]

My Soviet born and raised husband says you are incorrect. Ivanovo in Russia was known as the city of brides.  Cherkassy is the historical Cossack capital.

My Ukrainian also Soviet born bride from Cherkassy says your better half is incorrect. Ivanovo may have been the City of Brides for Russia but Cherkasy was the one for Ukraine.

But we agree about it being the Cossack Capitol.     The old HQ is a nice park now where we did a TV interview last year.

[AkMike]

Cherkasy

[Boethius]

My Ukrainian also Soviet born bride from Cherkassy says your better half is incorrect. Ivanovo may have been the City of Brides for Russia but Cherkasy was the one for Ukraine.

But we agree about it being the Cossack Capitol.     The old HQ is a nice park now where we did a TV interview last year.

Please ask for the link to one source of that information, in either Russian or Ukrainian.

I assume if it was the Ukrainian corollary to Ivanovo, most, or even a fair number of Ukrainians outside of Cherkasy would know this?  I will also ask relatives I will be speaking to in a few minutes, when I do my rounds of calls across the country, and will report back.

I lived in Kyiv for over half a decade in Soviet times, both before and after so called perestroika.  During that time, I did hear of Ivanovo, I heard of the reputations and nicknames of Uzhorod, Ivano Frankivsk, Ternopil, L'viv, Chernivtsi, Vinnitsya, Bela Tserkva, Uman, Berdychiv, Kherson, Odesa, and Donetsk, but not once did I hear of Cherkassy being referred to as the Ukrainian "city of brides".

We used to go fishing almost every weekend in Cherkasy oblast, about 40 km from the city of Cherkassy.

[treadmilldude]

For what it is worth, I have read where Poltava calls itself "The City of Brides" as well in various travel literature, I am assuming trying to get tourists to come visit Poltava.

I think the term "City of Brides" can pretty much be claimed by any Slavic City, and that designation should really be taken with a grain of salt. I have seen extremely beautiful women in EVERY city in Ukraine, EVERY city in Belarus, EVERY city in Moldova and EVERY city in Russia.

I think EVERY FSU city can claim to be "The City of Brides" because....well......there are a LOT of gorgeous women in every FSU City that I have seen on Mamba and VK. If I had a penny for every gorgeous Slavic woman I have seen on VK in every city I have looked in, I would have about a million dollars. Slavic women are simply more attractive than US women, and they probably always will be. Or maybe I just have a thing for Slavic women? I dunno.

AKMike, I looked on google maps and I was way off on where I remembered Cherkassy was in my head. I was thinking it was about midway between Kiev and Odessa. My memory is very bad, it is just southeast of Kiev, not far from Kiev yet very far from Odessa.  Sometimes my memory is excellent, sometimes it is lousy.

[Boethius]

I am referring to Soviet times, treadmill, when relatively few Westerners traveled to the USSR.  The post Soviet designation is mostly marketing, which did not exist in the USSR (at least, not until the dying days of so called perestroika).

[Boethius]

Slavic women are simply more attractive than US women, and they probably always will be. Or maybe I just have a thing for Slavic women? I dunno.

They're thinner, but I don't think they are more attractive.

The most beautiful women I have ever seen were the women of Paris.  Second is Moscow.  The most attractive men I have ever seen were in Paris as well.  Hands down, no comparison to anywhere else.  Second is a tie between Kyiv and Honolulu.

[treadmilldude]

Good call Boethius.

My case is a little different. The most attractive woman I have ever seen was my Mom. The second most attractive woman I have ever seen was my Grandmother. (I was told I must say this, or else no inheritance for me.  )