Twelve Black Code Monkeys

We made our way down to the Kiev from our Moscow trip, I believe, but it’s a bit hazy. We had been planning on going down as far as Armenia but at the time the area was unsafe due to fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

I don’t remember a whole lot about Kiev. We were only there for a day, I think, and a bit too much Armenian wine (20% alcohol and 20% sugar) killed a sufficient amount of brain cells to make the visit somewhat hazy. What I do remember is separating from the group with a fellow participant in my program, Matt, and exploring a bit of Kiev. We started to see crowds of people and banners but not knowing Ukrainian, we could only make out so much.

Ukrainian is not that far from Russian, but for a non-native speaker it probably takes a good while to start to divine some of the Ukrainian words. It’s just different enough in other words, so that a non-native speaker of Russian would still have a very hard time understanding. Kind of the same as if someone learning English but without a mastery of it was all of a sudden faced with a really extreme Cockney Accent, or one from the hood, or something similarly distant from standard English. Maybe even a little worse then that since Ukrainian is actually considered its own language whereas Cockney et al are simply “dialects.”

Anyway, we tried asking some of the locals what was going on, but again, the language barrier made it difficult. We got to the hub of the excitement that was in front of some official building. We waited around for a bit and then what everyone was waiting for happened – Boris Yeltsin arrived in a limo, got out and started shaking hands in the crowd before going into the building. People were clapping and cheering (this was of course way before he became president and so his reputation was generally as a progressive and not as a drunk). My friend Matt was actually able to get through the crowd and actually shake Yeltsin’s hand. I was a bit more timid. I may have tried to get some pictures, but I can’t remember if I had my camera there. If I did try to get some of Yeltsin, I wasn’t able to due to the swarming crowd… I at least caught a glimpse of him – my only brush with fame while in the Former Soviet Union…