Odessa
William Vernola
WverZhger at aol.com
Mon Jul 6 14:25:03 UTC 1998
My wife and I spent a year in Kharkov teaching on a USIA/ACTR sponsored
program in a Ukrainian school K-11. I don't know about conditions in Odessa
(we never even made it there to visit. My wife is a native speaker of Russian
and my Russian is functional.
With dollars your standard of living should improve greatly. We rented a
really decent 2 bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city for $100/mo.
Other people had cheaper but not as nice.
Even thought the official language was Ukrainian, hardly anyone spoke it -
only Russian. In Kiev you could get along in russian fine. I don't know
about Odessa. Certainly they are probably less nationalistic there than in
Lviv.
A flood of western food products and other goods are coming in regularly from
Poland, Germany, and in the south - Turkey.
If you're adventurous your friend should be able to do nicely - especially in
Ukrainian. It's close to Polish at times, although never tell a nationalist
this.
William Vernola
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