IGNORE THE PRESS - HERE IS WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON
UKRAINE AFFAIRS 24/2/2014
Well, it looks like the president of Ukraine has fled. In accordance with the custom of many of the more corrupt countries, it was with a couple suitcases stuffed with cash.
The protests are done and I was informed of this a mere seven hours after it happened.
Hurrah for Ukraine.
Note that fleeing with a lot of money is normal for the presidents of many countries.
To me as perhaps to a lot of Ukrainians, this came as a bit of an 'anti-climax'.
Many people would have rather had the 'storm the Bastille!' moment.
Seriously though I'm glad the violence and killing is over.
Well, for now. In a couple months they are going to have a new election where they will get a choice of a couple different corrupt scumbags and we'll see which one gets into power and if they try to tear the country apart while looting a few hundred million.
UKRAINIAN MOOD AND WILD SPECULATION 27/2/2014
Most of the difficulty is going on in parts of the country I'm not. Odessa seems to be all about money. So long as the money continues to be made, everyone is happy.
The news media has to really make things seem a lot more gritty than they actually are. Now make no mistake, there may be some gritty shit where I'm not. I totally accept that.
Walking around the town daily (for my British habit of a 'daily constitutional') I keep an eye on people. They don't seem particularly more 'wary' than normal. However, this is the time that the country could go a lot of ways. They may get a breakaway state in the Crimea like Moldova has with Transnistria (yes, I was there before, very clean). The country could be torn apart by some lady politician (forgot her name) who was just released from jail. Ukraine is amazingly divided on a lot of stuff anyway. Some want to join the EU. Some want to join Russia. Some want to just be Ukraine and not go either way. Some people speak Ukrainian, some Russian and only Russian, some speak both. Some politicians try to force Ukrainian down the throats (pun intended) of the Russian only speakers making them linguistically foreigners in their own country. Has the storm finished or is it a lull in the action? Nobody knows - but the media will speculate as wildly as I in this paragraph because we both need content.
DIFFERENT DRINKING CUSTOMS
USA
Go get drunk. There may be some dubious nuts on the bar but if you want anything else you have to order it. Most don't. After getting extremely drunk, you go to any of the various places that serve breakfast twenty four hours a day. Order way too much food, don't eat much of it. Next day, suffer colossal hangover.
British
Go get drunk at a pub. After getting extremely drunk, go buy regretable food such as a greasy shawarma from a place you'd never eat at sober. Next day, suffer colossal hangover.
Eastern European
While drinking, dinner is served. You eat a little, drink a little. Order more dishes as required. Next day, rarely get hangover.
Getting people to change their mode because it feels so 'foreign' is amazingly hard.
STRANGE TV
What kind of bizarre TV show is this?
I didn't catch the entire set up but from what I gathered some very strange sexually deviant woman had a patient delivered from the hospital to her house to have sex with. The patient had some sort of disease which caused significant parts of her body to be discolored in disgusting ways.
Despite the disease not being communicable, the patient even wore a hospital mask as she lay in a stretcher.
The woman stood over the patient and just gazed down at her for a long time. Their eyes met. The woman saw fear but also hope in the patients eyes. But not lust. A sort of desperation. She began to remove the mask.
"Don't - I'm hideous!" the patient cried.
Then the woman understood. She removed the mask, smiled at the patient and just hugged her. She instantly knew what the patient needed and discarded her perversion to have this tremendous mutual outpouring of emotion with the patient. Or maybe that's how she got her freak on.
Some questions popped in to my mind as I watched this frigging weird scene:
Did the stretcher bearers wait outside or did they have the woman just sign for the patient like a UPS parcel and leave?
What kind of hospital normally delivers their terminal patients to people who want to have sex with them? Is it a subscription service? Flavor of the week?
Who is using my brain to watch this sort of shit while I am asleep? It makes no sense to me. I don't recognize any of the people and remember it way too clearly. I don't find it creepy, I find it irritating.
WHO LIVES AT THE HOSTEL?
It's always interesting living with a bunch of different people for a while. You get to know them a bit. When you are talking about a hostel in a foreign country, the people tend to be a bit more interesting than usual.
After a time, everyone gets a nickname. Since I am respecting their privacy, I am not posting any actual names.
Boss, aka 'Evil Cat'. That's the person who puts up pictures of naked men with my head attached and such.
'Dancing Queen' aka 'The Irishman who teaches English but none of us can understand'.
'Nipples the town drunk'. I'm not sure how he got the nickname 'nipples' but he does get drunk fairly quickly and has epic hangovers.
'Lord Byron'. He isn't a poet and the actual LB had MUCH shorter hair than he does.
My nickname is the 'huge fat pain in the ass for christsakes stop bitching' - I think. That's what 'evil cat' calls me anyway.
There are also a couple ladies that live here. Since they don't really speak much English, they haven't gotten colorful nicknames yet. One is called 'the girl with red hair' and the other 'the singer' because she is actually a professional singer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
If you haven't seen this video, I'd suggest watching it. May change your outlook on the muppets entirely. Do I even need to say that it's NSFW?
Much like this picture:
MEMES
Often, I've felt like this...
THANKS TO EVIL CAT
The little people are in pursuit! (Yes, it's photoshopped. Sadly, I am fatter.)
PRICES
Giant shopping market, per bag of groceries approximately 100 grivna (10 euros)
UKRAINE AFFAIRS 24/2/2014
Well, it looks like the president of Ukraine has fled. In accordance with the custom of many of the more corrupt countries, it was with a couple suitcases stuffed with cash.
The protests are done and I was informed of this a mere seven hours after it happened.
Hurrah for Ukraine.
Note that fleeing with a lot of money is normal for the presidents of many countries.
To me as perhaps to a lot of Ukrainians, this came as a bit of an 'anti-climax'.
Many people would have rather had the 'storm the Bastille!' moment.
Seriously though I'm glad the violence and killing is over.
Well, for now. In a couple months they are going to have a new election where they will get a choice of a couple different corrupt scumbags and we'll see which one gets into power and if they try to tear the country apart while looting a few hundred million.
UKRAINIAN MOOD AND WILD SPECULATION 27/2/2014
Most of the difficulty is going on in parts of the country I'm not. Odessa seems to be all about money. So long as the money continues to be made, everyone is happy.
The news media has to really make things seem a lot more gritty than they actually are. Now make no mistake, there may be some gritty shit where I'm not. I totally accept that.
Walking around the town daily (for my British habit of a 'daily constitutional') I keep an eye on people. They don't seem particularly more 'wary' than normal. However, this is the time that the country could go a lot of ways. They may get a breakaway state in the Crimea like Moldova has with Transnistria (yes, I was there before, very clean). The country could be torn apart by some lady politician (forgot her name) who was just released from jail. Ukraine is amazingly divided on a lot of stuff anyway. Some want to join the EU. Some want to join Russia. Some want to just be Ukraine and not go either way. Some people speak Ukrainian, some Russian and only Russian, some speak both. Some politicians try to force Ukrainian down the throats (pun intended) of the Russian only speakers making them linguistically foreigners in their own country. Has the storm finished or is it a lull in the action? Nobody knows - but the media will speculate as wildly as I in this paragraph because we both need content.
DIFFERENT DRINKING CUSTOMS
USA
Go get drunk. There may be some dubious nuts on the bar but if you want anything else you have to order it. Most don't. After getting extremely drunk, you go to any of the various places that serve breakfast twenty four hours a day. Order way too much food, don't eat much of it. Next day, suffer colossal hangover.
British
Go get drunk at a pub. After getting extremely drunk, go buy regretable food such as a greasy shawarma from a place you'd never eat at sober. Next day, suffer colossal hangover.
Eastern European
While drinking, dinner is served. You eat a little, drink a little. Order more dishes as required. Next day, rarely get hangover.
Getting people to change their mode because it feels so 'foreign' is amazingly hard.
STRANGE TV
What kind of bizarre TV show is this?
I didn't catch the entire set up but from what I gathered some very strange sexually deviant woman had a patient delivered from the hospital to her house to have sex with. The patient had some sort of disease which caused significant parts of her body to be discolored in disgusting ways.
Despite the disease not being communicable, the patient even wore a hospital mask as she lay in a stretcher.
The woman stood over the patient and just gazed down at her for a long time. Their eyes met. The woman saw fear but also hope in the patients eyes. But not lust. A sort of desperation. She began to remove the mask.
"Don't - I'm hideous!" the patient cried.
Then the woman understood. She removed the mask, smiled at the patient and just hugged her. She instantly knew what the patient needed and discarded her perversion to have this tremendous mutual outpouring of emotion with the patient. Or maybe that's how she got her freak on.
Some questions popped in to my mind as I watched this frigging weird scene:
Did the stretcher bearers wait outside or did they have the woman just sign for the patient like a UPS parcel and leave?
What kind of hospital normally delivers their terminal patients to people who want to have sex with them? Is it a subscription service? Flavor of the week?
Who is using my brain to watch this sort of shit while I am asleep? It makes no sense to me. I don't recognize any of the people and remember it way too clearly. I don't find it creepy, I find it irritating.
WHO LIVES AT THE HOSTEL?
It's always interesting living with a bunch of different people for a while. You get to know them a bit. When you are talking about a hostel in a foreign country, the people tend to be a bit more interesting than usual.
After a time, everyone gets a nickname. Since I am respecting their privacy, I am not posting any actual names.
Boss, aka 'Evil Cat'. That's the person who puts up pictures of naked men with my head attached and such.
'Dancing Queen' aka 'The Irishman who teaches English but none of us can understand'.
'Nipples the town drunk'. I'm not sure how he got the nickname 'nipples' but he does get drunk fairly quickly and has epic hangovers.
'Lord Byron'. He isn't a poet and the actual LB had MUCH shorter hair than he does.
My nickname is the 'huge fat pain in the ass for christsakes stop bitching' - I think. That's what 'evil cat' calls me anyway.
There are also a couple ladies that live here. Since they don't really speak much English, they haven't gotten colorful nicknames yet. One is called 'the girl with red hair' and the other 'the singer' because she is actually a professional singer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
If you haven't seen this video, I'd suggest watching it. May change your outlook on the muppets entirely. Do I even need to say that it's NSFW?
Much like this picture:
MEMES
THANKS TO EVIL CAT
PRICES
Giant shopping market, per bag of groceries approximately 100 grivna (10 euros)
