There are so many people on Khreshchatyk these days that there's a pile of shit and some TP on our staircase and urine in our elevator.

This is one area of Ukrainian life where the president - good or bad - is totally irrelevant. (By 'Ukrainian' I, of course, mean this part of the world, which includes Russia, too...)

Somehow, I expected this Eurovision thing to be something like a mini-summer in St. Pete: the city drowns in tourists then - all those foreigners who know how to smile and be carefree, and who don't have enough imagination to use other people's staircases as toilets.