I just have to talk about the mess that is the Eurovision song contest, and which the Kyiv Post rightly excoriates here. My wife, working in the tourist business, has been reeling in horror from the madness.
On the day the tickets went on sale, March 21, (after twice being put off), neither the official Eurovision site, nor the official Ukrainian site
was working. She, and everyone else in the business she knows, tried to
access the sites and failed. A message released the next day on the
official site that all the tickets were sold in four hours, but no
response came to any of the many notices Lesya or her acquaintences
sent about the faulty site. Nor were her or their requests regarding
tickets.
A few days later, the First Transnational Tourist Company of
Ukraine, a previously unknown organization, shows up with the tickets,
for sale at a markup of 500 griven ($100 or 50% on the $200 tickets).
To make matters worse, when going to a football match yesterday, we
got to walk by the building where the event will be held. Right next to
it is an enormous excavated hole which will eventually be a building,
but will, as I understand it, just be filled with tents for the event.
The venue, Ukraine's Sports Palace, is a decent venue for a concert.
But it it was way too bleak and gray for Eurovision. To my dismay, none
of the renovations that are supposed to be going on inside are visible
from through the windows. Maybe they are renovating the inner hall, but
if so, they were doing so rather quietly.
Lesya's organization called the FTTCU to see if they were selling the tickets. The response: "Well, we've received orders from many foreign companies interested to buy the tickets, so what can YOU offer to us?" And the original $30 for booking they charged has already gone up. (don't bother looking for their website in English, they don't have one, don't bother looking for it in Ukrainian, they don't appear to have a site at all. Their phone number is... XXX scratch that, I'm deleting their phone number because I don't want them getting any more business from me. But trust me, even with their name you won't be able to find them)
I hadn't paid much attention to this until this week. The first
reason was that I didn't feel I was interested enough in Eurovision to
pitch in, and the second was that I thought the problems ended with the
whining about political content in Grindzholy's song, which was of
little interest to me. (see the discussion in the comments to Razom Nas Bahato if you're interested)
But now I'm just infuriated and stunned. I don't care about
Eurovision, but a heck of a lot of Europeans do, and ruining this
tourist moment so thoroughly as this is just about the worst thing
Ukraine could do to its tourist industry. How in the world did the
Yushchenko government just miss when the entire stock of tickets to an
event of this magnitude was bought up by a scalper organization?
Actually, the biggest question is: Why, oh why, are the opportunists
from First Transnational Tourist Company of Ukraine not in jail along
with whomever on the planning crew was complicit with them?