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On Khreshchatyk, they must've made an attempt to make it look less messy, but ended up creating more chaos: there is now officially marked parking on the sidewalk in the Besarabka-Khmelnytskogo segment, and a thick white line in the middle that's probably there to point where we can walk and where they can drive; some asshole nearly drove over me today; it reminds me of what someone wrote of Belgrade parking a while ago: how all those village newcomers have brought their customs with them - it's true, isn't it, that in a village you can park wherever you feel like, there are no rules there, no sidewalks, no nothing, and this is what Khreshchatyk seems to be turning into.
maybe the villages near to pidhajtsi are an exception, but people don't park their cars in just whatever kind of fashion, wherever. they park on sides of roads, or in "driveways," etc. and in the small, provincial town that is a rajon center called pidhajtsi, there are sidewalks, but people don't park on them.
ReplyDeletenot to say that what you write isn't true of other villages, though. . .
on another note, the scariest thing about cars and villagers is the way many young men--especially the cool or kruti guys--drive. they manage to turn the pothole-ridden, crowded with geese and babas and didos and walking cows and bikes and firy and all kinds of other slow-moving pedestrian as well as motor traffic into a frickin' autobahn.
but maybe young male city dwellers drive outside the cities like maniacs as well. i dunno, since i have never lived in and gotten close to folks from any of ukraine's big cities for long enough to find out. . .