Dereks’ Neighborhood

Since my last post wa

s basically just and excuse to post some photos that i have uploaded, and wasn't particularily aimed to agitate excitement or anything, I thought that I need to write a more or less positive post about my trip, as there were some foreign English-speaking visitors in the fortresses, I thought that this crap I am writing might be of use to somebody.
The two castles I am talking about are in the western part of ukraine, but not in the mountains, however the landscape is pretty different from the ordinary 1m high flat horizon line in the central parts of ukraine. Out there, water from the rivers carved the stone the flow on for centuries and produced some fantastic scenery.
 It's a pity that the people that live in these unbelievable places have severe mental retardation. You can find wikipedia articles on Kamianets-Podilskyi and Khotyn by clicking on the names, respectively. 

The castle is standing on some kind of a tabletop hill with steep cliffs on the sides, a high 13th century bridge connects it to the Old Town, the centre of Kamyanets. Basically, it's like Krakow or Lviv, like any other old town with polish heritage.

The fortress is  almost totally renovated inside,  you can enter almost any dungeon and  gallery in the castle walls.  The  awesome part is that in the first tower on the right  after the entrance (it's the little square tower in the middle of the upper photo) there is a 40 meter deep well that is carved through stone and the underground river flows beneath it. The long galleries in the walls are also impressive. Ordinary entrance fee without a tour is $1. However, we just went cheap, I guess the english tour might be awesome, even if the guides totally suck at english. There are night time tours but only through the tour agencies, with prices starting from $50. I guess that this might be cool, maybe they use this money to dress some homeless in ghost costumes. It's important to stay in a good hotel, unlike us. Xenia seems to be a good place, prices from $10 to $100. There are some pizza places with moderately crappy pizza with a check that amounts to $10-20 for two people. The 'best' restaraunt in the city that's just around form where the last photo on the right was taken "Pid bramoyu" (Beneath the gate) has a check that amounts for $40 for four people, however you should know that two of aforementioned people are 50kg girls that dont eat too much.
Personally, I'd use a car if I had one for transportation, with all GPS and shit, but we took the train from Kyiv. The train is probably the most modern in Ukraine, as far as I've seen it just may be better than Dutch trains. It's number 177 from Kyiv, 178 back. The ride is 6 hours, the second class ticket is around $13, first class- $17, the difference is that first class has walled compartments.
However, the car option might be more useful for visiting Khotyn, as the only way to get there without a car is by bus, and I seriously doubt that the ticket lady, that has seen her best days already, may understand a single english word, and because Khotyn doesn't have any public transportation or any tourist signs at all that may point visitors to the fortress (remember that retardation I was talking about?). The fortress is a  lot better preserved than  the Kamyanets fortress, with  almost none damage from the ages and WW2 at all.
The entrance to the fortress is $1 as well, however it's a lot more fun to look at since when I was there we werent allowed to access the galleries on top of the towers and the said towers at all.
It's simply magnificent outside, the walls are standing as tall as a 10 story building, just unbelievable, and it's also standing just on the bank of Dniester, second widest river in Ukraine.

for a long time i felt kind of left out because i have never seen the castles in kamyanets podilskyy or hotyn and we (me and alla, and our friends lera and misha) went to see them this weekend. the castles were great, and i would definitely recommend visiting them to foreigners, however it's a known fact that all people who live in areas of ukraine outside of kyiv have severe retardation. those cities have no infrastructure whatsoever. when kamyanets podilskyy at least had a system of marshrutkas (post soviet invention, privately owned small buses), hotyn didnt had shit. it was very diffcult to access the historical sites without a car. but the castles were great, i dont really understand how is it possible for the people who live there not to care about the awesomeness they live next to and live their retarded lives like they do.
anyway
here are some photos

basically, since I now own a digicam, i basically snap pictures all day. yesterday our two nice frinds misha and lera came along to bring me a graphics tablet i need to use with one photoshop thingie. anyway, we had some fun and i made some nice pictures.

and here are some photos. I took them with my new Sony camera, I think they look pretty cool. I'm very satisfied with the huge touch screen, and almost no shutter lag, certainly a big difference from olympus.

xKuchmAx is a corruptioncore band from Koncha-Zaspa, Ukraine. It consists of Kuchma on vocals, Medvedchuk on lead guitar, Volkov on bass guitar and Tigipko on drums. Their past names include "x_kravcheko_is_dead_x" and "i_kill_for_kolchyuga_x". They play straight no shit beatdown corruptioncore with lyrics primarily focused on hunting, mercedez benz cars and tape recorders

At last the uploader works, so i posted up some pictures from our trip to the sea :) check them out!

Since i continue to be totally pissed off by vox not doing something with their photo uploader, ill blaber about various shit that doesnt even interest you at all. basically, this weekend, taras Dereks was here with me and Alla, and apart from smoking the blowpipe we watched 4 great movies!!!

1.Robot Monster. I kinda missed the beginning, but hell.
This movie features these valuable assets:

• the billion bubble machine

• a guy in a gorilla suit and a fishtank on the head
• people hiding in a bunker with no roof
• a horrible depiction of something like sexy time
• a stupid family
• a half-naked guy
  

2.The Crawling Eye!!!

Not only has this cult classic been immortalised for the second time by misfits , but it features the one and only crawling eye appearing AN HOUR after the film starts.

седня. я. был. на южной борщаговке. в 21. fuck. its not even kiev1!!

это пидец.  туда добираться 1:15!!!