New Trip Planned Next Week

It's been 14 months since we returned from Chernivtsi and I plan to take my vacation there next week. It will be part vacation and part preparation for next year's mission trip in the summer of 2008.

It's neat to see how much technology as grown over the last few years. In 2006 we had cell phones and this blog. Now I can find Chernivtsi videos on YouTube.

Here are a few. The first is scenery and street scenes from what appears to be a Russian native as he uses the Russian spelling of Chernovtsy.



Here's another one of street scenes posted this June with better music and more interesting comments. It's titled Chernivtsi (the Ukrainian spelling) but check out the spellings used in the comments. They really show the history of the city. There's the Russia "Chernovtsy", the German/Austrian "Czernowitz", as well as the Romanian "Cernauti".



A third video focuses on historic photographs and postcards of the city.



Another video posted a couple of months ago shows the city's more recent history in 2004 during the pro-democracy Orange Revolution.



One of the churches that we've visited in the past has been Church 4 which was originally built as a Jewish synagogue and later turned into a Communist Youth Hall after the Holocaust.

The city once had a large minority population of Jews in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. This clip posted in July by a German appears to be a retrospective of part of the lost Jewish history of the city.



On a lighter note this one shows how much American culture - particularly Californian pop culture - has found its way back to the homeland of many Ukrainian immigrants. This one is break dancing, and yes, white boys can dance, particularly if they were raised on soccer and gymnastics. These guys are impressive.



Here's another one.



And finally, the drivers are somewhat wild in Ukraine, but at least not all of them are as bad as this Chernivtsi driver.



I hoping that the presence of these and other videos on YouTube means there's more high speed internet now in the city. The dial-up connection at the Cheremosh Hotel is extremely slow and the internet cafe we visited in 2004 wasn't much better.