Valeria's Blog: My hometown! YAY!

Hi guys~

I want to introduce my hometown to you, Charkow (or Charkiw, depends on the language).
Charkow is located in the north-eastern part of Ukraine. The official language is Ukrainian but most of the people speak Russian better. It is a literally huge city and often referred to as the biggest industrial city of Ukraine. It even was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1934. 1 730 000 people reside in this city so you can imagine how immensely huge it actually is (even I never saw all of it).

The town itself is beautiful, with lots of pretty parks, zoos, museums and theatres. It is also known as the "student city" because of the amount of universities available to visit. The most buildings are not so much skyscrapers but still a house with 10 floors is completely normal and even a bit low in the resident's opinion (believe me, I know). As Ukrainians are very religious there are lots of curches and a few cathedrals in the city, which are stunningly beautiful and I'd really recommend to visit some of them even if you're not a firm believer.

As you can see, the Ukrainians love beautiful lights and they also love to show off their money even if they don't have any. The town is very pretty and it seems that the people are doing well too but it's more complicated than it looks like. The people often complain about the low wages and the low state budget. The subway trains, busses, trams and cars in the city didn't change for minimum 20 - 30 years. Sometimes when I visit my family I wonder how there aren't more accidents with all the old stuff in town. The streets are a mess, if you drive for a longer period of time you feel like you've been to a roller coaster because of all the holes in them.
The gap between rich and poor is really big and there's nothing in between. The rich people invest into the beauty of the city and the poor ones complain that the rich ones spend too much money the city actually needs on unimportant stuff. But I guess every city is like this.

Nevertheless Charkow is beautiful and has a great meaning for Ukraine. Every time I go there I enjoy my stay because I always discover new stuff in it. It is really hard to know all of it because, as I said, it's immensely huge!!!

And now I show you some beautiful pictures to impress you and maybe, sometimes, you'd like to visit this city and experience all the beautiful (and not so beautiful) stuff yourself. If you're interested.