Following the museum, we made our way back to the train station to catch the overnight train to Warsaw. With time at a premium and having already had Ukrainian food earlier in the trip, we opted for some of the more mundane and fast foods available. Just prior to the Great Patriotic War museum, we grabbed some hot dogs from a vendor with the deluxe version of the hot dog featuring toppings of cabbage, mayonnaise and ketchup. Interesting.
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| Lunch. | Two statues adorn the bridge over the Dnieper River, the man with what looks like Sputnik in his arms, and the woman with doves. |
For an early dinner we decided to eat something close to the train station since our train left relatively early, around 4:30 PM. Right outside the train station is McDonald’s and a similar-looking restaurant, McFoxy. It seems that McFoxy is like McDonald’s except with chicken (not foxes, though that would definitely be unique… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmoSTohilyg is a rather unorthodox McFoxy commercial; the Travel Channel has a three minute video on the chain at http://www.travelchannel.com/Video/foxy-balls-and-foxy-fries-15698).
The McDonalds was unlike any McDonald’s I’d ever been in. Having eating at Korean McDonald’s I can say that McDonalds’s overseas are different from in the States – the quality and service is better and they usually have a few unique selections catered to the local customer base (such as Bulgogi burgers in Korea). The McDonald’s here was the most crowded fast food restaurant I’ve seen in my life!
They had ten cashiers with a constant line in all of them, and it was hard to find a seat in the two-story restaurant. Probably due to the popularity of the place, they employed a number of techniques I hadn’t seen before to improve efficiency. You place your order with one of the free-roaming employees, who jot it down on a smart device which prints your receipt and wirelessly puts your order in the system. Then you take the receipt and line up behind one of the cashiers to pay for your meal, so by the time you’ve paid your meal is ready and you can pick it up and go find a seat. It seems like a good way to speed up the order process and you don’t need to worry about holding up the line if you haven’t figured out what you want to eat.
Despite a relatively short, nine-hour stay in Kiev, it was definitely a different atmosphere than in Moscow or St. Petersburg. As I said earlier, the most apparent thing to me was the presence of bilingual English/Ukrainian signs or advertisements, compared to the almost exclusively Cyrillic Russia. The Ukrainians are definitely very proud of their national heritage and culture and want to distinguish themselves from Russia (though if I traveled to Kharkov in eastern Ukraine I’d imagine those feelings aren’t as strong).
I don’t have a particularly strong desire to go back to the Ukraine unless its convenient with another trip in the area. I would like to see Chernobyl (though I don’t like to glow in the dark and there’s a lot of paperwork you’ve got to fill out) and perhaps do a staff ride for some of the major battlefields, but nothing too pressing. And if anyone has a good idea about what to do with 643 Ukranian Hryvinas, short of a hedge against possible hyperinflation of the dollar, I’m open to suggestions.
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| Latte or tea anyone? | Я Бетмен. |
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