5-12-2017
Hello Everyone,
This is my first blog so I am learning how to edit this site and make it look better as I get the time to figure out this site. You would think an engineer would know how to edit websites right? Na not me I am a Civil Engineer and cannot stand using computer programs for the most part. My passion lays with tinkering with Traffic signals and Freeways (or Motorways to my UK mates) and Construction.
Who AM I?
I am a PhD candidate at University of California, Irvine studying in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems as a Civil Engineer. I have had an history of travelling the world since I was 18. Being from urban Ohio I was not really exposed to much different cultures or much of anything, because things in the Midwest are really slow and homogeneous unless you’re in Chicago. I was itching to leave and turned down a full ride to The Ohio State University for a full ride at Arizona State University. That was my first big move of my life being a 17 year old me 2000 miles away in a totally different environment. It all started back in my undergraduate days at Arizona State University where I took my first Engineering exchange program during my 2nd year in University in China. I was 17 when I started my University career and by the time I was in China I was 18. There was a lot along the way that I learned that helped transformed into this global person that I am today which can be up for discussion in another post.
Why make a blog? I started this blog because many people told me that I should write down my life experiences and world travels but I always half listened and shrugged their suggestions off until now. I have written diaries for certain days but they were not consistent but I plan to use this site as a projector of my thoughts and experiences from my life which will be out of order but I will have it labelled and dated so it can be easily be pieced together if someone has that interested of linking my travel histories.
FYI these blogs are not in order of the countries I have been to or lived in. It’s kindoff starting like the Star-wars series all out of order and might confuse people. So I will put in the approximate dates so you guys can get an Idea and not be completely lost in my travel logs.
I had the opportunity to travel to Ukraine from the UK (At the time I was residing in the UK) in May 08-22th 2017. Or to say I travelled to Kyiv from Budapest by Lufthansa. I remember the flight being relatively fast like 1.5 hours which at this point I was so used to long drawn out flights they drove me crazy. Another thing I could not fathom was why people would applause when we landed in Ukraine, it scared me because I was thinking like were they expecting us not to survive the flight like flipping a coin on survival? I also remembered that a plane was shot down in Ukraine a couple years ago. Why Ukraine? Well I have a tenacity to like to visit unpopular places. One of my friends from London took a trip to Ukraine the year before and I asked him if we could go to Chernobyl and once I found out that we could join tour to gain access there I planned my trip to Ukraine. Being from the USA in Ukraine I only ever heard about Ukraine from Russia occupying Crimea and that there was a lot of conflict and violence in the country. I have also heard a lot of stories about Eastern Europe not being very welcoming to African Decent groups of people. I was somewhat worried about my safety when I first arrived to Kyiv Airport. I remember the first thing I did was get a SIM CARD with 10 Gigabytes of data for ₴270 or $10 USD or £7 with Vodaphone and you did not even have to register your personal information for the service. I was shocked how cheap it was for data after spending like £30/month for Vodaphone service in the UK with only 4 GB of Data per cycle which I constantly ran out before the cycle ended.
Back to the story the airport is far from the city of Kyiv so I seen these buses lined up at the airport and was trying to ask how to get to the city centre but they couldn’t understand English. I also had to take out enough cash because American Cards do not work out there for some reason so I had to use my UK bank card. I took this bus not knowing where it was going and just hoped it went somewhere to the city centre where my hostel was. The bus luckily had a terminal stop which happened to be at a central rail station in Kviv so I was able to navigate from there to the train line I needed to take to my hostel.
To my surprise the railway system in Kyiv is very pretty and old looking like in historic type of old. It is so old that you still use the colourful tokens to get through the turngates. The metro was very cheap probably like 30 cents per ride. Going down the endless escalator was an interesting experience. These metro trains were placed like 350 metres underground because they used those tunnels as a bomb shelter just in cased they are nuked or bombed. Also the underground was bombarded with posters that were advertising for people to get tested for HIV which made me ask why were they advertising so much. It was interesting because I learned that Ukraine has the highest amount of new HIV infections rates out the European countries. I ended up at some hostel called Veselka. It was right on top of a metro stop,”Zoloti Vorota”. It was a cozy hostel it had a lounge room and a kitchen to cook. I had a bed that somebody was sleep in when I checked in and that caused an issue because the person was on the wrong bed. I had to wait for them to clean another bed for me and I was tired at that point. I put my bag down and went to a local food store and ate. I found a Georgian restaurant that served me and this was the best breakfast that I have ever ate. I do not remember the name of it it was like a sweet dough with raisins inside of it. I remember it was cold one day and I went to a coffee shop and asked for hot chocolate, let me tell you they gave me a cup of melted chocolate. I was so confused like what is this?! So they did not speak English and I did not know Russian or Ukrainian, also which made it more difficult so I had to play charades and asked him to put milk in it to make it more like a hot milk chocolate drink. So one thing I learned from travelling is that us Americans make our own terminology up for almost everything. When the world goes left we go right.
I met these two Americans that were travelling together at the hostel and we were chatting about things to see in Ukraine and we decided to travel around Kyiv together. We went to a park and saw the Motherland Monument Which was an amazing sighting. There are lots of tanks and weapons that are left around the parks from the Soviet days in Kyiv. I was surprised how the kids could play on and in the tanks in public. It was pretty common to see old tanks just sitting on the road throughout the city.
I had made some other friends at the hostel also one was from Germany and the other was from Slovenia which was really interesting. We talked and of course I asked him isn’t that where our first Lady is from? Apparently he gets that a lot since Trump been president. Another ironic thing he told me was that he lived in the USA as some type of guest working program that Slovenians can do in the USA and he told me he lived in Ohio up on lake Erie, which is where I was born and Raised. I was shocked and was in disbelief like why would you move to Ohio of all of the places to live in the USA? I am not knocking Ohio, I say it with pride that I am from there, but I never will live there again. Also he did not even get to experience the few fun things to do in the state in the summer time like Cedar Point in Sandusky and Kings Island in Cincinnati (Mason for the technical people in the 513). I was upset that he was there and the people he was around did not even show him these attractions or even show him the haunted Prison in Mansfield or the Haunted Houchie. Usually the stat is boring and the weather is always bipolar, it brings me back to the memories of walking to school in feet of snow and freezing my butt off in the winter or sweating like a pig in the summers with humidity or hiding in the basement when the tornado sirens would go off which happened somewhat often depending on the season. Come to find out it was not really his free will of choice to pick where to locate, but it happened. He was staying on a Lake Erie island that apparently has a lot of Eastern European immigrants that reside there which is something I never knew and I grew up out there.
We ended up going to some Soviet museum which had all of their fighter planes which was amazing. It was also an airport that was not active but my flight told me that my flight would leave there. I was confused like what type of airport is this with no flights? So I am glad that we went there and realized that I would have missed my flight the next few days if I haven’t realized that they gave me the wrong flight information. We were able to get into the aircraft and look around in them it was awesome. There is the soviet truck tank thaw was used I believe when the Ukraine/Russia conflict started in 2014. As you can see it is fully armored. We went to this island park called Hiddrodome which was very cool. It pretty was a outdoor gym as you can see in the pictures and they used parts of cars like rotors, and tires as the weights for benching and other activities. The whole facility is essentially a junk yard used for working out which is a very sustainable concept.
Now for the climax of my trip I went on a tour trip to Chernobyl (I hope you guys know about the Chernobyl Incident). That was an interesting trip for starters I had a Geiger counter to keep track of how much radioactivity exposure I was facing. So we had to pass through a 30 Km radius check point to enter into the area where the Nuclear material spilled and then we went closer to the centre and had to pass another security check point at 10 Km. It was an interesting trip as we approached buildings and stuctures the Geiger counter would frantically screech which meant the radiation levels were off the charts I think the units were either measured in Bequels (Bq) (US) or Currie (SI). Actually they were measured in μSv/h (Micro-Sievals/hour). So in the air there is a general average of radiation rate of 0.12 μSv/h. The max yearly dosage a person can have is 5.7 μSv/h. At 1Sv you will probably be seriously ill and die. They limited our time there to 2 hours inside the radiation zone. As I got closer to the core the rate fluctuated greatly from 0.15-10μSv/h . There were some hot spots that the radiation readings were so high it went off of the scale and an alarm would sound on the Geiger counter.
So I got to see some crazy sites like being inside a school building where all of the materials are completely melted away. You would be shocked of how structurally sound the buildings are also. We were able to walk throughout them without much problems the floors were completely eaten away. We also saw some mutated animals I am not sure if it was a fox or whatever it was.
We went into numerous buildings as you can see in the pictures below that these structures looked very nice before the incident and now all they are are concrete jungles literally. Trees have grown inside of the buildings. the picture below shows a movie theater that is totally melted down. The silver dome building is the encapsulation of the Chernobyl reactor. We got very close to it but it is covered now to reduce the radiation effects in the area since reactors endless emit radiation for hundreds of years. I also made a German friend while in Chernobyl which I will have plenty of travel stories to talk about that we took in my future travel blogs. So you can see the iconic Ferris wheel in Chernobyl and the bumper cars those probably were the most radioactive out of everything there because they tend to retain water in them which increases the radiation levels when it rains and it happened to rain very hard while I was there.
After we left we had to get scanned to make sure that we were not contaminated because if we were they would make us remove our clothing and might of kept us there until the radiation levels lowered.
Overall my Ukraine experience was really unique and I enjoyed myself and people were generally nice to me even thought I got stared at a lot which brings back memories of me living in China which is for a future blog also. I made quite a number of friends while being there and also I got to experience the Euro-vision 2017 which happened coincidentally at the same time as me being out in Ukraine. I had no idea what Eurovision was and all of my friends in Europe would go on and on about it and I watched it and was like oh this is like an European american Idol, but my European friends strongly disagree with my observations and say it is some type of political flexing zone. I think Portugal won it that year and it will be hosted in Lisbon in 2018. I remember the morning that I had to fly out of Kyiv and my friend left before me and told me that the taxi drivers were crazy drivers. He missed the exit for the airport on the motorway and decided to hit a full reverse on the freeway to get back to the exit. The driver I had was not much better he was crossing all over the medians to get through traffic. I held on to my cross on my neck and I was glad to have made it alive to the airport that was the first and last taxi that I will take in Ukraine. I ended up flying out using Wizz Air to London Luton Airport. Don’t get me started on London’s six different airports. I swear that each time I fly out and into London it is always at a different airport. Then I would have to find my way to Euston Station from which ever airport I came out of in London. I lived in Birmingham so I would have to take the train up to the West Midlands from Euston Station. I will discuss my life in England in another post. I would love to travel more in Ukraine next time to Odessa and other places and enjoy their great and low priced food.