6/16/2005

UnUkrainain

The weather is nice, the city is green, and it doesn't get dark until around 10. Summer is here in Kiev. So what's the natural response? I finally got cable! Yes, after seeing the local cable demonstrated on another ex-pat's TV last week I caved and signed up for it. The most amazing thing about it was how painless it all turned out to be. I was expecting a multiple week battle with filling out forms, getting stamps, "paying" people, fruitlessly waiting for technicians to show up...but that didn't happen at all. The call was placed to order it on Tuesday. A technician came out to flip a switch and give us our prepayment bill on Wednesday. After the bill was paid Wednesday afternoon, the cable company called back to say technicians would be by with our box on Thursday between 2 and 7. Then Thursday at 4, four guys showed up and finished setting it up. Amazing. No problems, no hassles, just delivering prompt and friendly customer service. Volia Cable, keep it up. You get a hearty endorsement from Blog de Connard.

Anyway, while the cable comes with a lot of English language channels, one of the things I'm most looking forward to is a channel called Ностальгия (nostalgia) that seems to show nothing but rebroadcasts of old Soviet television programs, including the news. Awsome. I'm honestly excited to get television channels that broadcast consistently in Russian. Should help with the language learning a little bit. The bulk Ukrianian language stuff I was previously subjected to was just really confusing.

I also need to be careful to not spend so much time in front of the TV while the weather is actually nice here. Come winter though...

UPDATE: I'm currently watching the 1982 Supreme Soviet Meeting that elected Yuriy Andropov General Secretary of the USSR. I think I have problems.

UPDATE II: Yes, I'm aware I spelled "Ukrainian" wrong in the title of the post. I was about to fix it, but found that that busted the link to this post. Normally that's wouldn't be a big deal...except that someone else found "Nostalgia" interesting and was sending some traffic this way. For the record, right now they're showing a concert of some guy reading poetry. It's not nearly as interesting as listening to Andropov.

Scratch that, the poet is now singing a Russian version of the Ray Charles/Johnny Cash (I don't know who wrote it) tune, "Busted." It's just got quite interesting.