Pricing Puzzle

One of the strange aspects of Kyiv is the cost of living. It is very hard to quickly say whether this is a cheap or an expensive place. In the same way, it is hard to describe this place as Third World or First World. Ukraine seems to be in both places at once.

Restaurants range from cheap and decent to expensive and decent to ridiculously expensive and pretty good. If you stick to cafeteria-style places then you can eat cheaply indeed. Jennifer and I regularly go out to a local cafeteria where the two of us can get soup, main dish, desert, and beer for both of us for about $10. We can also go to one of a hundred different places in our neighborhood and pay $15 for a few hunks of chicken on a wooden skewer. So food can really go both ways.

On the other hand, hotels are incredibly expensive. The new Hyatt charges over $600 for a basic room. The Radisson isn’t much cheaper. True, there are some local Soviet-style hotels that are probably cheaper, but I can’t vouch for the quality.

A trip on the metro or a bus costs 10 cents no matter the destination, but a gallon of gas is about $5 a gallon. I just got a few suits back from the dry cleaners, that cost $60. A bottle of decent vodka is $8-10 (the bad stuff is much, much less.) Tickets to a high quality opera production are about $20, but a local show of a jazz musician I’d never heard of went for $250 for standing room and $1000 for a seat up close.

You never quite know what to expect. This would be a hard place to spend time cheaply if you didn’t know which places to hit and which to avoid. If you’re ever coming this way, let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.