Travels with Yuri

After I breezed through customs, I passed up a nondescript staircase and hallway into a large lobby packed with people thronging a long roped off walkway, waiting for friends or family to get through customs. I ran the gamut of several hundred people, and presently saw a pleasant looking and very slender man in a leather jacket holding up a sign which read, "Dan Gibbons."

He introduced himself as Yuri Dregolas, (it rhymes with "Legolas," and actually now that I think about it, he kind of looks like a Russian battle elf) and lead me to his late model five speed car in which he drove me the twenty or thirty kilometers into downtown Kyiv, all the while keeping up a cheerful chatter in very good English. He is the son of a scientist, and attended an advanced English speaking school from a very young age, being trained to be a translator. He now works frequently for the property manager from whom the Institute has rented our apartment. On the card he left me, he wrote, "Taxi Driver."

The traffic in Kyiv is OUT OF CONTROL. The flow from the airport was easily 130 to 140 kilometers per hour. In town the traffic was horrendous, and most remarkable by the apparent disregard of all traffic regulations by all drivers. Constant merging, tailgating, driving on the wrong side of the road, driving up and over curbs, driving on sidewalks. But everyone seemed pleasant and amazingly courteous.

On the way into town Yuri played the accomodating tour guide, commenting on Soviet era cars and brand new Lexuses, on the landscape, on the tax laws, on the recent elections, and on the wide variety of buildings. He pointed with especial pride at the "skyscrapers" under construction.

Kyiv is much larger and busier than I ever imagined. Having lived in Europe during my mission, its older neighborhood have a strong European feeling, but there is also a dilapidated, Soviet style decreptitude about other neighborhoods that is very striking. The people appear to be very attractive, happy and positive.

Yuri took me right to our apartment, and upstairs, where we met a girl who had just finished cleaning. (More about the apartment later). I have already arranged for Yuri to drive me back to the airport on November 24th.

From the balcony of the apartment I can see Leo Tolstoy square, one of the main traffic intersections of the city. There is a large, and beautifully renovated building directly across the street, the bottom two floors of which house a glassed-in McDonalds. In front of this building I count this evening easily 40 cars parked on the sidewalk, and there has been a constant din of honking horns (not annoying, but rather oddly pleasant--like Gershwin's "An American in Paris," Annie) all evening.