On Saturday, Feb. 23rd the choice was made regarding song which Ani Lorak will sing in Serbia, in May, for Eurovision 2008 and it was "Shady Lady".

Also on the same night on Ukrainian television was televised the WBO and IBF heavyweight unification bout between Klitschko and Ibragimov. (Video round 10 to 12, video of post-fight press session) Klitschko won the bout. (Articles from ESPN AP Forbes Telegraph) Will this mean in future a bout between the Klitschko brothers who so far have refused to box each other?

While on Sunday, Feb. 24th, the women from Ukraine won gold in the 4x6 km relay on the last day of the European Biathlon championships.

Congratulations to all! 

Ani Lorak is the chosen Ukrainian entry for 2008 Eurovision. Yipee! (esctoday)

Moby has an interesting story to tell about a stay in a Kyiv hotel. (M&C People) 

And what is the vote for fav. Tymoshenko outfit of this week? The white dress which she wore when the vote for her candidacy did not pass for PM(side view)? The white dress which she wore when she was elected PM? The white outfit for first day of Cabinet meeting? The black outfit while giving first PM televised address to the nation?

And watch out Ludmila outfits are worth watching - here and here and here. Business but feminine with flattering colors. While new deputy Olesia is sticking to safety while new deputy Volodymyr is striking a blow against the tie and suited majority.

Herman on Dec. 12th also wore an all-white dress with a gold sparkly net cardigan that just looked silly when compared to Tymoshenko's now signature color and outfits. And the fur trimmed puff sleeves also did not work out though the outfit is a very flattering color. While Bohatyriova's outfits are usu. office oriented this futuristic number looked odd - here. Lykash continues to be the PoR babe esp. with her flawless complexion.

And Ukrayinska Pravda has Yulia in pictures here through the years from childhood to now.

But top prize over all went to the Parliament cleaning lady for best outfit and providing an interesting perspective at ukr politics! 

Eurovision 2005 (theme “Awakening”) is over.

Cliff and John, Eurovision Advocates

Fortunately, Lesya and I got a chance to meet a couple Eurovision fans who’d come out from the UK for the event: Cliff from Lancaster and John from Manchester. The two had gotten in touch somehow (Eurofan site?) and risked wild Ukraine to see the event. This was Cliff’s third time coming to see it live and John’s first.

We called on their expertise to help convince Lesya and I that the event was less gaudy and ridiculous and more interesting and enthralling than we expected.

Dan and Lesya: So why see Eurovision? What’s the big deal? And do you care about the political games? (vote for your neighbor tendencies, frequent political messages getting past the “no politics” rule)

Cliff: Well, the politics is definitely part of the fun, along with the crazy costumes and things. It’s interesting to see how some countries tend to vote for one another [the votes are cast by any citizen of any member country by mobile phone] and some don’t. At the semifinals, there were real crazy Eurovision fans behind us analyzing each song and where the person made a mistake and what that was going to do to their rating. You know, based on clothes, or a wrong move, or bad lyrics.

And it’s also great to come and see fans coming from all sorts of countries.

John: In that way it really is a truly European event. I mean I love Europe, I think it’s the best place on earth… no offense intended, really. [Ed.: how nice and polite he was! It was cute, like he expected me to pull out my six-shooter at the offense to our Yankee pride. I didn't even pull it out of the holster.] But I love the idea of Europe and the European Union and that 's the stuff that brings people together at Eurovision.

Cliff: And it really is nice to see people waving their flags and rooting for their team. It’s a little bit like a major soccer match in that way. Except here, I feel no qualms about rooting for other teams than my own, and people are more relaxed about it. This year I like Moldova. They are really trying for this Eurovision.

Lesya: Oh, and the Moldovan band is Zdob Zhi Zdub.

Dan: Really? They’re a lot of fun, do they still use a folk-song style?

John: Yeah, and they bring out the singer’s grandma, too. [they’ve been accompanied by old grandma folk singers at their concerts for ages. I’m not sure if it actually is the guy’s grandma.]

John: Croatia’s good, too. [Cliff nods in agreement] And you can see with them what you see each year, where you say to yourself, “last year they showed up, but this year these guys look like they want to win.”

The Croatian band, they got up and sang and started getting the crowd into it; clapping along with them. Then the drummer did and handstand and started clapping with his feat. It was a fun stunt.

But mostly I come for the music. I know it sounds silly, but I do. I love all the different bands and languages and songs.

…

And the night continued.

Bawdy Art

Unfortunately for Cliff and John, Lesya and I ended up getting free tickets to the dress rehearsal for the final. The flashing lights and screeching, twiggy models onstage managed between them to blast out of our heads all the interest and respect the two fans had so carefully nurtured in us.

As an opener, let me just say that Eurovision involved more thoroughly unnecessary fire, sparks, and glowing things than any musical performance I’ve ever heard of, with the possible exception of The Starlight Express.

Ruslana opened with a team of partially clad dancers and a big marching band baton that caught fire. The Romania model went for an “industrial look” by having her backups tromp around beating metal barrels and weild hand-operated rotary saws. The Brits (sorry guys) won “most sticklike singer” and not much else, the Germans got “most screechy”, and Serbia and Motenegro (improbably) fielded a boy band too saccharine even for the States. The stadium was nearly packed, and this was just the warm-up.

The only fat person to get on the stage (I’d call the Grinzholy lead singer husky rather than truly fat) was a Maltese opera singer. By virtue of actually having a voice, she took second place, despite breaking the rules by not having any dancing in her routine.

Come on, baby, light my... oh, too late

Eurovision was yet more confirmation of my friend Pastor Mel’s linguistic principle: “If English is truly the international language, it’s only just barely.” Even songs which might have been decent in their original languages (like Ruslana or Zdob Zi Zdub) managed to increase the triteness factor fourfold in translation. At least 85% didn’t even bother to understand the language, just hack together catchphrases to create songs covering the Top Five Pop Topics: 1) I’m sexy, 2) You're sexy, 3) I love you, 4) I’m leaving you, 5) I’m too sexy for you, anyway.

At least two different bands included the lines “touch me, ‘cause I’m HOT!” (Here: 1, 2) I got so sick of the foolishness, I breathed a sigh of relief that the Swedish song was not about love or sexiness, but rather about the much less trite topic “You can make it in Vegas”. Thank goodness the French would never sing in English, so I have no idea what their lyrics were about. (but I bet I could get it in five guesses)

The Greek model not only sang these lyrics, but won the damn contest with them:

My Number One

You’re my lover
undercover
You’re my secret passion and I have no other

You’re Delicious
So Capricious
If I find out you don’t want me I’ll be vicious

Say you love me
and you’ll have me
In your arms forever and I won’t forget it

Say you miss me
Come and kiss me
Take me up to heaven and you won’t regret it

...and more like that. If you dare, you can see them all here.

This pretty much proves that Eurovision is the result of voting by an army 14 year olds who speak English as a second language and own mobile phones.

Together We Are Many, Together We Make Grindzholy Look Good

To give credit where credit is due, Cliff and John were right about the low-key flag waving. It was nice to see people getting excited and having fun without being at each other’s throats about it. It was also heartwarming to see the Cypriots come up alongside the Greeks and all get excited for both the Greek and Cypriot entry. There are far worse channels for nationalism that frivolous pop extravaganzas. The fans at the event were fine, but I can’t give the contest much credit for that.

The one thing I can really thank Eurovision for is dismissing my fears about Grindzholy. Before the contest started, I was really worried they were not only going to waste a perfectly good protest song by associating it with candy-coated pop, but they were also going to make the nation look foolish on Euro-wide television. Their lyrics were better off not translated, wouldn’t they look pathetic next to Euro-wide pop champions?

Nope. Take another look at the song that won and compare. Advantage: Grindzholy. For the handful of cranks that came on the site and whined about the political content of the original Razom Nas Bahato (removed for the event), please compare the song with Russia’s  griping about US foreign policy.  Again, Grindzholy looked decent by comparison.

I hope all of you that came out had a good time. I’m grateful to Ruslana for winning, and the event was good for the tourist industry.

But I think I’m going to pass on Eurovision 2006 (theme “Touch me, I’m Hot!”)

[My source for the lyrics links is the BBC Eurovision page here]

Hah! I thought this might happen. Back when I was fulminating at the YuGov for the incredibly convoluted game of "Who's Got the Eurovision tickets?" I said (in this post):

So as I am now, finally, convinced that the entire nation is on a schedule that resembles the studying-for-finals schedule of your typical college student, I refuse to get taken again. Even though I seem to hear more bad news about Eurovision each day [in addition to the stuff I've already heard], I will not be taken by surprise again if Ukraine manages to host the event without embarrassing itself.

And sure enough, it's happened again. Eurovision seems to be going along swimmingly. Among other things this good article in the Guardian says that everything is teched-out and spiffy in the hastily refurbished Sports Palace (The writer also joked about how nobody is asking any tough questions about Belarus, and Greenjolly's participation annoyed the Eurovision planning commissioner, but how everyone else was having fun.)

They had a great free Ruslana concert and fireworks show the first day (May 18) that apparently was a hit. All our friends that watched (we were socked in with the flu) said the fireworks were even better than New Year's (which was quite a display, see my pictures). They got a firework up that blasted out that Eurovision heart-shape thing, even. Really dynamite.

So Ukraine has pulled off another one. I could really have wished for a little less panicked running around at the last minute, but at the very least it will not be the embarrassment we'd feared.

Welcome to Kyiv, all you Eurovision fans!

Just Desserts

And for those of us who love watching people eat there just desserts, there is an epilogue to the story. I remember hearing about the big hotels in Kyiv greedily tripling their prices for Eurovision, then having "no vacancies" while they held out longer to see if they could get a few more guests.

Well, the jerks have overestimated the willingness of Europeans to plan things at the last minute. Apparently, despite catering mostly to foreigners, these hotels have forgotten that Western Europe and other developed countries like planning in advance, something that hasn't quite caught on here.

So for the last week before the event, six hotels a day were calling Lesya's small tour business alone. A couple of non-risk averse teenagers flew here from Britain with nothing. They showed up and got tickets to both the semifinals and finals from Lesya's company, and got hotel rooms for significantly less than the highest asking price.

Serves those hotels right, the jerks. I hope all the ones trying to bilk the tourists lost money and get pilloried.

So the biggest political news from me recently has been mostly positive, but now it appears to be time to take the Yushchenko government to task.

Why, oh why, does the YuGov continue to make huge policy decisions without consulting anyone, then decide to have the discussion afterwards?

First there was the way the budget was tossed together. I thought it was a decent budget, as did Zerkalo Nedeli. But  Zerkalo did criticize the Cabinet for trotting it in front of Parliament without sufficient discussion.

Then the Kyiv Post marveled at the hastiness with which they changed the tax policy. My fellow employees of Celenia, along with all the other folks in Ukraine actually trying to pay their taxes properly, spent a few weeks of extreme axiety just trying to figure out if all of them will have to reregister in a different way just to be able to continue working as they have. They haven't stopped worrying because things have been cleared up, there simply hasn't been any news since the big announcement and so they don't know what to think.

[Update: I forgot to even mention the Eurovision contest, which has been a mess from the beginning. I have mentioned what a big mess it is earlier. The Kyiv Post is telling us to calm down and cut the country some slack, but this has definitely been another instance of everything getting done at the last minute.]

Actually, before  even the budget, there was Tymoshenko's poorly thought-out statement that the government would be reprivatizing as many as 3,000 businesses privatized under Kuchma. That has scared off, and will continue to scare off, many business who might otherwise be interested in investing in Ukraine, even though Yushchenko said the number would only be 30 shortly thereafter.

Overnight Paycuts

Now there is the problem with the interest rates. The whole problem began when the National Bank of Ukraine, working with Yuliya Tymoshenko, dramatically increased the strength of the Ukrainian currency, relative to the US dollar. The Eurasia Daliy Monitor explains the move here. According to them, in the beginning, Russian oil companies, which represent 80% of Ukraine's supply, kept the price of oil flowing to Ukraine low at the end of last year while the rest of the world was paying more. The reason for this move was that in doing so, they hoped to support Yanukovych, as the incumbent candidate, over Yushchenko, who, as the opposition candidate, would natuarally get protest votes from people angry about fuel hikes.

Once Yanukovych lost, there was no further reason for them to hold the rates here artificially low, so they started hiking them back up and there was precious little Tymoshenko could do to stop them. One thing she could do, though, was raise the power of the hryvnia against the dollar, making the dollar-denominated gas purchases less pricey. That is what the government did.

The IMF said bravo, a strong currency can help Ukraine ward off inflation worries, which will be particularly acute considering the general social spending in the new budget. Other banking folks also applauded, as this Zerkalo Nedeli article points out. Sounds great?

Unfortunately, while a good idea for the long term finacial outlook of the country, the move was also a huge blow to anyone who has dollar-denominated income in Ukraine. That happens to include pretty much everyone in the emerging middle class. For this reason, Yushchenko felt he needed to criticize his own government (without mentioning Tymoshenko, but directly criticizing the NBU Governor) for raising the rates so quickly without warning.

And this cuts to the heart of the matter. If the NBU had taken perhaps 3-4 months to raise the rates, or even 2 months, but bothered to tell everyone in advance what was going to happen, huge numbers of people wouldn't have lost a major chunk of their earnings (and savings if they've got them squirreled away in dollars) overnight, without warning.

Of course the same problem has occurred with the Melnychenko tapes. The YuGov didn't say much about Melnychenko until the end of March; when they pretty much said everything was wrapped up all in a couple weeks. Then Kravchenko [originally said Kirpa, please excuse me] died, and it's been almost dead silence ever since, with the exception of Berezovsky's claim to have handed over all the tapes to the YuGov [update: I gave up trying to keep up with this thing and here's a good explanation why. It's not exiled Russian tycoon Berezovsky who has the tapes now, according to this Kyiv Post article a Czech businessman named Boldanyuk claims to have them. What, are half the seedy characters in Europe just passing these things around like a hot potato?] Yu and his ministers have seemed pretty quiet themselves.

It is as if the Yushchenko government has no speeds but stopped and full throttle. They are silent for long stretches of time on a subject, then all of a sudden the current policy is jerked in a new direction, and people are scrambling desperately to figure out where the new policy is and running to catch up.

All these hasty moves that leave everyone here pretty jittery and give Russian news sources more real stuff to bitch about.

Transparency

Now, on the positive side, I am greatly encouraged by the fight with corruption. (I'm not entirely sure about the solidity of this material, because it is coming from Ukrainskaya Pravda, but they have a two part series, part one here, part two here, on massive embezzlment of oil and gas money under Kuchma. That should give you an idea of the scale of the problem.)

I trust this government to want to reform, fight corruption, and, most importantly here, be transparent. Increased transparency is one of Yushchenko's campaign promises (as are the other two).

Well, part of being transparent is not just telling people what you are doing, but also what you are going to do, and doing so well in advance.

This is a national problem, in a nation with no really good translation of the words "Mission Statement". Not just the government, but many, many organizations here change things without warning, leaving people scrabbling to catch up. It would be fine display of transparency if the government took the lead in fixing this problem.

[Credit where credit is due: I was planning to harp on this anyway, but Igor Sobolyev, writing in Korrespondent, beat me to this, mentioning the Yushchenko government's problems with hasty decisions in the April 30 issue of Korrespondent]

Ukraine's doing it to me again. I have repeatedly watched events here get solved at the last minute, and repeatedly given up just a little too early. This happened with some events and things I participated in as a Peace Corps volunteer, it's happened on construction projects I've seen, it happened when I was looking for an apartment, it's even happened when I've been waiting for a good deal on cab ride home.

And of course, most dramatically, it happened in the Orange Revolution.

So as I am now, finally, convinced that the entire nation is on a schedule that resembles the studying-for-finals schedule of your typical college student, I refuse to get taken again. Even though I seem to hear more bad news about Eurovision each day [in addition to the stuff I've already heard], I will not be taken by surprise again if Ukraine manages to host the event without embarrassing itself.

But the bad news does keep coming in. Check out what one reader of Orange Ukraine has gone through:

I wanted to simply say that things aren't any easier for journalists: I am supposed to write an article about the contest in Kiev for [an American monthly magazine], and it's been surreal. The website where we're supposed to apply for a press pass keeps deleting information from my application; nobody seems to know what's going on; and getting a press accreditation does not guarantee a ticket to the event. Meanwhile like your friends I have booked flights and a hotel room--the price of which has been raised twice since we made our initial reservation in February. I wouldn't be surprised if the price went up again!

then when we exchanged emails later, she had more:

There's even a new wrinkle: We asked a Ukrainian-speaking contact we have in Kiev to double-check our hotel reservations, as we were suspicious. Lo and behold, she was told that our reservation--which we had made back in February--had been cancelled on March 19. And they didn't even bother to notify us! Had we not checked, we would have showed up at Hotel Rus (for that's the one) and found out we didn't have a room. I'm sure they did it to rebook the room at a much higher rate. Originally we booked at $125 a day; they raised us to $165 (via a dodgy-looking email devoid of any official hotel identification), then cancelled our booking without warning.

Meanwhile, Lesya and I have been trying to figure out what's been going on with the tickets, as is Lesya's tour company. Lesya has now heard that officially Olvia is still selling tickets (though their site says they don't have any) as is the First Transnational Tourist Company of Ukraine and a new company called Bytsko. I don't currently have any other information on the new company.

Eurovision is well on its way to becoming a disaster, with the venue a mess and the tickets all in the hands of a scalper organization

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?