One of the teachers here told me once that Kharkovites are the proudest city inhabitants in Ukraine, meaning that they above all others are most patriotic to their city. From what I’ve seen and experienced I believe this to be true. For instance when I accidentally offended the students of one class when I said Kharkov is a nice little city. “Little!” they all gasped. How could I dare to call the second largest city in the Ukraine a ‘little city’? However I was neither talking about the geographical size nor the population that made it seem like a quaint city. Kharkov has a population of about 2 million people much the same as Denver, the largest city in Colorado. The biggest difference between my hometown and my new adopted town is the public transportation. Having elaborated on the metro above I’d just like to add that it is this feature that makes Kharkov feel smaller than it really is.
One of the first weeks I was here, the day that a Julia and I walked around the city, I ran into one of the students from the school on the street. Not so strange considering Julia and I were in the central part of the city, however a few weeks after that I ran into the same Julia with one of her students in the metro and not just on the platform but in the same carriage. Again a couple weeks later I ran into the husband of a different Julia as we were in the same carriage. I’ve seen this phenomenon happen with many other people on the metro. Friends see each other from across the train car and then are reunited. In London this rarely if ever happens. I attribute this to the fact that Soviet built metropolitans are very simplistic, so much so that you can stand in the same spot everyday and get onto the same carriage, exit from the same turnstile, and so on. Therefore everyone has their own particular place on the platform and when you are given directions they usually include the phrase “Get on the last carriage and exit immediately to your left,” or something similar.
Another reason for the small town feel is the fact that when you’re not riding the metro then you’re walking down the main streets with everyone and their mother (quite literally as babushki here make up a large majority of the pedestrians). So you see pretty much the same people each day, either in the metro or on Sumskaya Street (the main thoroughfare here) or in Svboda Ploschad (Freedom Square). I’m thoroughly convinced that if more Denverites were forced into taking our sad little version of a tram system (a.k.a. Light Rail) rather than our usual gas guzzling SUVs or walking around Downtown (they do so now but still not quite as much as here) then more people would meet by chance and it would create of sense of community that seems to be more pronounced in cities like Kharkov with frequently used public transport. At the very least it will help to reduce pollution and thus Denver’s Brown Cloud as well as the inescapable rush hours and road rage. Having utterly exhausted my soapbox and thus proclaimed my support of all public transport initiatives in Denver, it is now time for me to charge up the ol’ water boiler (another story for another time!) and attempt to shower and do my laundry.
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