>>2000344Nope. How about this one?
>>2000347>Did you worry about smelling bad when you stopped at cafes?Not at all. I'm a paying customer after all.
>What language did you use to communicate?Mediocre Russian with a little Ukrainian vocabulary. I cycled to Naryan-Mar in Russia a few years back and learned Russian specifically for that trip. Highly recommend doing that if you're going to Russia. I also know some Czech, which also helped. Picked it up while living in a German-Czech border town for a few years. There's a surprising amount of vocabulary overlap with Ukrainian.
Russian is widely understood in Ukraine but contrary to popular belief not everybody speaks it. Most people would respond in Ukrainian to me, garnished with some Russian words when I struggled to understand them. I met a whopping three people on the entire trip who were able to speak a modicum of English. Two of them were staff at a 4* hotel in Kyiv. 20 Euros a night including buffet style breakfast, pretty epic.
Russian is still commonly spoken in Odesa, Budjak and far Eastern Ukraine. But even cities as far East as Poltava are almost exclusively Ukrainian-speaking these days. Historically the industrial centers of Central and Southern Ukraine (Dnipro, Kamyanske, Kryvih Rih, Zaporizhia etc.) had a Russian-speaking majority but the Russian language is losing ground fast, for obvious reasons. Kryvih Rih was about equally split between Ukrainian and Russian I'd say.
