A Little Bit o’ Life in Mariupol

We have been in Mariupol almost a week now and we’d like to think of ourselves as on our way to becoming “Mariupoleans”. We have our apartment. Our “job”—the best one in the world right now—is to go and spend time with the kids a couple of times each day, in between their meals and other routines. We spend our day otherwise doing the normal things of life like getting groceries, going to the market, doing the laundry and finishing the day with an episode of West Wing on DVD on the computer. (OK, maybe the last item isn’t that common with our neighbours.) There always seems to be much to do and, because of travel and the adopting excitement, we can’t really say we are getting the sleep we expected.

Mariupol is certainly more of a working class town than Kyiv. A lot more steelworkers than office workers. A lot more Ladas and Fiats than Mercedis, Hummers and Lexus’s. It certainly has its “steeltown” air pollution. It’s on the Sea of Azov and also is a bit of a tourist/beach destination in the summer for those from northern Ukraine. Right outside of town there are fields of wheat that look no different than what’s on the “home quarter” or the “Marr place”, except that some of it is already in the swath and being harvested.

Being in the eastern part of Ukraine, Mariupol is much more Soviet/Russian influenced than western Ukraine. Most people here tend to speak Russian. I would have liked to see how things were 25 years ago prior to Gorbachev, Perestroika and Ukrainian Independence. The main remnants of those days are now the housing and the attitudes. People live in the same apartment blocks with concrete stairs and small elevators, thankfully as our apartment is on the 7th floor. But people do a lot of work on the inside of their apartments to fix them up. So our place is quite comfortable on the inside. Right now as I type this, I have the air conditioning on and am watching cable TV. (actually one of those fishing shows…yeah I’m sick… but I just noticed I’ve been watching for 15 minutes and the guy hasn’t caught a thing…whaddyaknow a “real life” fishing show!!...) The only problem is you have to know Russian or Ukrainian to understand it.

The attitudes? Well, we saw one bread seller in the market, even with a line up 5-6 deep, saying: “I’m taking my break now and you’ll have to wait”. Customer service is not a big thing in the markets. But, in the new “bigbox” stores there are attendants here, there and everywhere, but you certainly pay for it. We like to buy our vegetables and fruit in the open market where people come in and sell their produce from their gardens/farms right along the sidewalk. (I want to talk about Donna in the markets, but stay tuned for that as another posting…)

There are certainly other remnants of the Soviet era around: beaches with the big steel mills in the background; street names like “Lenin Avenue” and “50 Years of USSR Street”, and monuments to “fighting machine” and “victims of facism”. Perhaps the most memorable image is our picture of the monument to Lenin with a big box store in the background. What would ol’ Vlad think? I can’t remember what CCCP stood for 25 years ago (and am not sure if many here do now either), but I’m convinced it now it stands for Corporatism, Capitalism, Consumerism and Pevo (i.e. beer which goes for 75 cents for a 500 ml bottle). I’m not sure about the benefits of the first three. The last one is a definite benefit. I think the jury is still out on whether a strong “middle class” will establish itself in Ukraine, or if the rich will continue to get richer and the poor, poorer. This is a question we still debate in North America too.

Lenin stands guard over a Ukraine's equivalent of a "big box"