Uman 17 November
Now in Uman, located in the middle of Ukaraine so to say, on the axis of the highway from Kiev to Odessa North South and on the main road from East to West.
I reached Uman via an eight hour bus tour. Of course there is no food on the bus, and I didn't know if there would be food stops so I bought food in Kamyanets. I think I have written about food shops before. Most of them are very small and sell the liqour, beer, bread and a few preserved, meat and cheese. Some fresh fruit and vegetables, but they are often sold in outdoor stands.
The bigger shops seem to have a system om "shop in the shop" where there are different parts managed by different people - and with no clear indication for which part is managed by whom - but the ladies will tell you when you make a mistake and can assure you. Below you see a picture from the nuts/raisins/sweets departments. She is cutting baklavah for me.
Here is the liquid department. The woman is tapping beer from the fat into 2 liter plastic bottles, which the guys bring with them. This was at nine in the morning, and already quite a beer business. I am actully surprised that beer seem to be more popular than vodka (horilka as it is called in Ukrainian). Of course many do both........
Going by long distance bus
So the trip from Kamyanets to Uman is some 450/500 km, but the bus goes into the centre of some five places along the road, so despite quite good speed the trip is like eight hours. The cost was 12 Euro, so prices are very low. It is a bit of a problem to find out which bus to take and where it will stop, but generally it is easier with the long distance ones, as they are not many big buses in the station (the local tours are mainly with these kinds of buses that take around 20). The bus driver simply refused to take on my bike. In the end I loosened the steer and took away the front wheel to make it easier to load and just put it into the luggage hold.
The trip was OK, the bus was in reasonable shape and they did not run action movies or music videos on screens for which I was very grateful. The stops at the stations were very short and as I could not communicate with the driver I could never get clarity if there was enough time to "take a leak", so in the end my bladder was quite hard when arriving Uman. I am happy that I had just eight hours to travel, the bus was proceeding to Sevastopol which was another 15 hours away (Ukraine is huge - I told you).
When we were in Uman, I got a shock when opening the luggage hold. I could not see my bicycle any more. But it was there, it was just covered by other pieces of luggage heaped on it!. At least 200 kg of potatoes, onions, cabbage, books etc. was loaded on top of my bicycle. I tried to get the bike together in shape, but it had gone skewed and the front wheel wouldn't run. I was quite convinced that it wasn't so serious, but I still had to find a hotel and food so I decided to ask a taxt to take me and the bicycle to a hotel. The third taxi agreed - under protests and by ripping me off. Anyway, we reached hotel Uman. And if you want to have a real retro trip and want to know how a real communist hotel during Soviet time was, hurry up and go to Uman. It was very cheap, like 10 Euro, but the bed was too short, the pillow was like a baseball, there was not enough blankets, the plumbing in the bathroom looked like a painting of Salvador Dali, and there was of course no hot water in any of all those tubes, and even if there were there was no shower. In the reception, you got a metal token, which you had to present to the warden of the first floor, an impressive woman that controlled all movements from her strategic position. Breakfast, forget about it. Towel - yes the size of my pocket handkerchiefs. and so forth. It is actually hard to make a place like that justice!
Next morning I ate some cold food I bought the day before. I think I mentioned it before that it is very hard to get any kind of breakfast in Ukraine. The bars are open all around the clock I think excepf for like between six and ten in the morning.....Then I fixed the bike, nothing dramatic. On my list then was to find the Sofiyivka Park (the reason to go to Uman in the first place), another hotel (not one more night in that place), the bus schedule for Kiev and an internet cafe. And I find everything in just half an hour. I tell you about the Park itself in another posting.
Below you see the hotel I ended up staying in. It is like a castle. it is INSIDE the park and 200 m from the bus station, so better location is not possible. It smells nicely from all the plants of the part. The room was normal good hotel standard, a room that would cost 100 -200 Euro in most European countries. It cost 14 Euro per night, and then as it is inside the park you don't pay the park entrance fee of 4 Euro so if your reason to stay there is to visit the park (and to be honest with the risk of insulting Umanites, there are very few other reasons to visit Uman....) the net cost is 10 Euro. This hotel and the other awful place show that there is still very little correlation between price and what you get in Ukraine. All combinations are possible. You pay a fortune and you get good things, you pay a fortune and you get crap, you pay nothing and you get nothing or you pay nothing and you get a palace. What you normally get when you pay the fortune is that some staff knows a bit of English.
By the way, I don't carry a real camera, all the pictures are taken with my Sony Ericsson K800i. Therefore I don't take soi much landscape shots, the optics of a cell phone is just not the rigtht for that. But for buildings and people I think it is quite fine.
I reached Uman via an eight hour bus tour. Of course there is no food on the bus, and I didn't know if there would be food stops so I bought food in Kamyanets. I think I have written about food shops before. Most of them are very small and sell the liqour, beer, bread and a few preserved, meat and cheese. Some fresh fruit and vegetables, but they are often sold in outdoor stands.
The bigger shops seem to have a system om "shop in the shop" where there are different parts managed by different people - and with no clear indication for which part is managed by whom - but the ladies will tell you when you make a mistake and can assure you. Below you see a picture from the nuts/raisins/sweets departments. She is cutting baklavah for me.
Here is the liquid department. The woman is tapping beer from the fat into 2 liter plastic bottles, which the guys bring with them. This was at nine in the morning, and already quite a beer business. I am actully surprised that beer seem to be more popular than vodka (horilka as it is called in Ukrainian). Of course many do both........
Going by long distance bus
So the trip from Kamyanets to Uman is some 450/500 km, but the bus goes into the centre of some five places along the road, so despite quite good speed the trip is like eight hours. The cost was 12 Euro, so prices are very low. It is a bit of a problem to find out which bus to take and where it will stop, but generally it is easier with the long distance ones, as they are not many big buses in the station (the local tours are mainly with these kinds of buses that take around 20). The bus driver simply refused to take on my bike. In the end I loosened the steer and took away the front wheel to make it easier to load and just put it into the luggage hold.
The trip was OK, the bus was in reasonable shape and they did not run action movies or music videos on screens for which I was very grateful. The stops at the stations were very short and as I could not communicate with the driver I could never get clarity if there was enough time to "take a leak", so in the end my bladder was quite hard when arriving Uman. I am happy that I had just eight hours to travel, the bus was proceeding to Sevastopol which was another 15 hours away (Ukraine is huge - I told you).
When we were in Uman, I got a shock when opening the luggage hold. I could not see my bicycle any more. But it was there, it was just covered by other pieces of luggage heaped on it!. At least 200 kg of potatoes, onions, cabbage, books etc. was loaded on top of my bicycle. I tried to get the bike together in shape, but it had gone skewed and the front wheel wouldn't run. I was quite convinced that it wasn't so serious, but I still had to find a hotel and food so I decided to ask a taxt to take me and the bicycle to a hotel. The third taxi agreed - under protests and by ripping me off. Anyway, we reached hotel Uman. And if you want to have a real retro trip and want to know how a real communist hotel during Soviet time was, hurry up and go to Uman. It was very cheap, like 10 Euro, but the bed was too short, the pillow was like a baseball, there was not enough blankets, the plumbing in the bathroom looked like a painting of Salvador Dali, and there was of course no hot water in any of all those tubes, and even if there were there was no shower. In the reception, you got a metal token, which you had to present to the warden of the first floor, an impressive woman that controlled all movements from her strategic position. Breakfast, forget about it. Towel - yes the size of my pocket handkerchiefs. and so forth. It is actually hard to make a place like that justice!
Next morning I ate some cold food I bought the day before. I think I mentioned it before that it is very hard to get any kind of breakfast in Ukraine. The bars are open all around the clock I think excepf for like between six and ten in the morning.....Then I fixed the bike, nothing dramatic. On my list then was to find the Sofiyivka Park (the reason to go to Uman in the first place), another hotel (not one more night in that place), the bus schedule for Kiev and an internet cafe. And I find everything in just half an hour. I tell you about the Park itself in another posting.
Below you see the hotel I ended up staying in. It is like a castle. it is INSIDE the park and 200 m from the bus station, so better location is not possible. It smells nicely from all the plants of the part. The room was normal good hotel standard, a room that would cost 100 -200 Euro in most European countries. It cost 14 Euro per night, and then as it is inside the park you don't pay the park entrance fee of 4 Euro so if your reason to stay there is to visit the park (and to be honest with the risk of insulting Umanites, there are very few other reasons to visit Uman....) the net cost is 10 Euro. This hotel and the other awful place show that there is still very little correlation between price and what you get in Ukraine. All combinations are possible. You pay a fortune and you get good things, you pay a fortune and you get crap, you pay nothing and you get nothing or you pay nothing and you get a palace. What you normally get when you pay the fortune is that some staff knows a bit of English.
By the way, I don't carry a real camera, all the pictures are taken with my Sony Ericsson K800i. Therefore I don't take soi much landscape shots, the optics of a cell phone is just not the rigtht for that. But for buildings and people I think it is quite fine.
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