The 527 is up to 2 hryvnias now
So, I suppose it is about time for a personal update while I wait for my laundry to finish up.
First, Happy Birthday Mom!
And Happy belated Independence Day. Unfortunately, being a Fulbright doesn’t get you an invitation to the fancy Embassy 4th of July Party and it looks like the American Chamber of Commerce Picnic is going to be rained out today. Oh well. To be honest, I see fireworks from my apartment almost every night so they’ve sadly lost their charm.
Here are some pictures of Kyiv I took the other day while wandering near Universitet metro:
A Ministry building of some sort:
Lovely fountain:
Well, I have officially moved on to my extension project. The focus has significantly narrowed. At first, I had planned to do more review of research than original research by collecting and drawing connections between existing material (the little there is) on the rise of xenophobic violence and attitudes in Ukraine. Now, I will be concentrating on the experience of foreign students in Kyiv. There is only one pre-existing study that we know of, so it is going to be more original research than I had intended to collect, but I think it will be worth it. Over the next two months, we will be gathering focus groups of students from a selection of Kyiv’s universities to find out what the process has been like from the beginning (in their home country) to the point they are at now, and how their experiences in Ukraine have affected them. Just from collecting background information and making initial student contacts, I think this is going to be a really interesting project and it will say a lot not only about the life of international students in Ukraine, but also about the larger situation facing foreigners in Kyiv and the Ukrainian higher educational system.
I spent a semester of my own in an Ukrainian university in Chernivtsi (voted, by the way, to be the best city in Ukraine to live in. Sorry, available in Russian only) I never had to deal directly with the administration of the university, but I also never feared for my safety the way my African student friends here do. Just from reports from students who have attempted to talk to their administrators to address their concerns and improve safety on campuses, it seems the administrations are fairly inaccessible and lack a serious attitude about the threatening situation facing their students.
I should probably explain the title of the post at some point, right? From my apartment in Kyiv, I can either walk or take buses or marshrutkas to wherever I need to go. The 527 is one of those marshrutkas, and yesterday, I passed up my 2 hryvnia bill and patiently waited for my change. As I noticed the driver was not making any effort to pass the change back to me, I looked above the windshield to see that the price had jumped up to 2 hryvnias a ride from it’s original 1.75. To put it into perspective, it’s not that big of a jump. 2 hryvnias is roughly 44 cents. But still! Inflation is taking its toll and the dollar is slowly, but surely dropping in value in Ukraine. I guess the hryvnia couldn’t stay at 5 to the dollar forever. It has since 2005.
Inflation, however, is definitely making life harder with an overall rate somewhere between 25 and 31%. Everything from rent prices to taxis to the price of meat and fruit is going up, up, up. When (if) I leave to come back to Buffalo on September 10th, I may be getting out just in time to save a few bucks.
Speaking of coming back to Buffalo, I’m going to need a job. Anybody have any ideas? After seeing that the U.S. lost another 62,000 jobs, I’m feeling a little nervous.