The Ukrainian Coat of Arms

This morning I left Lutsk in Ukraine. The weather has been exactly as predicted, rain and quite a lot of it. So I’ve done some shopping, seen yet another castle and been to a spa. A nice end of a splendid trip.

Lutsk Castle

I have divided the last ride in two parts so right now I’m not far from Warsaw. I’ll have to be in Gdansk tomorrow at 4.30 pm to get on my ferry to Stockholm. It’s less than 400 km to go so I am not in a hurry.

Lutsk Old Town

I left the Ukraine this morning convinced of that I’ll be back. I also had that feeling last year, but that was mostly because I had missed Gammelsvenskby and Crimea. I’m not sure how to point out what makes me feel this way, but one thing is the Ukrainian people. I understand that I’m some kind of UFO with my big bike and so, and that makes it interesting to contact me. But after first contact I still have been treated extremely friendly. It is easy to find good accommodation and it’s cheap. You can allow yourself that little extra without ruin yourself. For instance, my back massage yesterday was 6 € for 40 minutes. I have made contacts with people here and thank to Internet I hope to be able to stay in touch.

On the other side this country has mostly very little experience with tourists, that don’t speak any Slavic language. But my impression is that it is about to change. In the west it’s a smaller problem than in the south and in the east. One thing you should do is learn to read Cyrillic letters. It took me 10 days, but now I can. In that way you easily can understand what the signs say and more easily follow directions. And it’s quite fun. I feel like seven again going letter for letter when I read something, but it is getting better every day. For me it was the names of all the villages that I could practice while riding that was the clue. In the west they are written in both roman and Cyrillic, which made a good start for practice. I kind of missed the Cyrillic signs as I came to Poland so I instead translated the Polish ones on to Cyrillic. Then I realized how close Ukrainian and Polish are. Languages are fun and very interesting.

Sign in both roman and Cyrillic in L’viv

I will post a collection of pictures and movies, which I missed out of different reasons. But then there will not be that much more. I will as always publish some statistics.

Statistics

• Total length 5023 km
• Highest peak 1 158 m (By Yalta)
• Longest ride/day 730 km Sevastopol – Uman
• Incidents, hardly any. Two times I was close to lay down the bike. On one occasion because of oil track, on the other because of sand on the street. On both times I was able to get a grip again. I would probably not have happened too much either; I was driving slowly in serpentine.

In the Castle of Kamyanets Podildkyy there was an exhibition of the Ukrainian history. I found the story if the different uniforms very interesting.

Can someone tell me why they paint the trees white. A long the street I understand, but why they do it in parks as well I can’t understand.

The really look forward to Euro 2012. There are count downs in many places.

One UAH Hryvnia is about 0.85 kr. You do the math.

They place a lot of flowers on all kind of religious monuments, war monuments, or other kind of sites. And the cemeteries are extremely colourful, every stone or cross has a lot of flowers.

But I have never seen any flowers at a Lenin statue!