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Week One
The first week of the program for me started with the flights and train to L'viv, followed by 4 days of teaching at the L'viv Institute of Management (LIM). LIM had three sites with LEADER this year, one "normal" site consisting of undergraduate students, one Corporate Training class, and one class of Executive MBA students. I was going to teach the Executive MBA students, along with Gary Kooznetsoff, one of my Entrepreneurial team members.
Day 3 - First Day in L'viv
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After arriving in L'viv and settling into our apartment, Gary and I stepped out for lunch and a quick walk around the neighbourhood. The city streets are dirtier and dustier than any I've seen - even in India. But the city itself is actually very pretty. We had a great lunch of greek salad (the real kind) pizza and beer at a street-side cafe and watched the people streaming by. And I do mean streaming - there are far more people on the streets here than you'll see in any North American city (except maybe New York at rush hour). And the people themselves are really interesting. The women all dress up - all the time. They look great - many of them are absolutely beautiful - but their sense of style is quite different from North American women's. They seem to like stilettos very much, and short skirts of interesting patterns; and they like leopard prints a lot, too. Nonetheless, very attractive. The men all look like they smoke and drink FAR too much, which they probably do.
 Statue to Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet. He wrote political poems about the oppression of the Ukrainian people, and the big thing on the left represent a wave sweeping up the oppressed people and taking them to freedom. (High-Res) |
English is almost unknown here; very few people on the street or in stores and restaurants speak it. Lviv is also unique in that it is the only major city in Ukraine in which Russian is not widely spoken or understood. Unfortunately, I only know a few words in Russian and I couldn't find a Ukrainian phrasebook, so it's been rather difficult to get my point across to people. Even asking for water was difficult at first, but I learned - slowly.
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After a nap, we met the rest of the gang for dinner, which was at a restaurant called Cactus. Great place, great food - the dinner took three and a half hours! Like I said, nothing happens quickly in Ukraine. Later in the evening, a few of us went to a nightclub called Millenium for a few drinks. It turned out to be a large dance floor with a couple of bars around it. More beautiful Ukrainian women - a few of them skimpily dressed and dancing in cages suspended above the dance floor. But with nobody speaking English, it was difficult to strike up a conversation with anyone. After a couple of drinks, most of us went home for (finally) a full night's rest. The poor executive directors didn't have an apartment of their own, so they were going to crash with the others - Jon in our apartment and Sarah at the girls' place. Unfortunately, Sarah couldn't get into the girls' place because the girls were out partying and the one who had stayed behind didn't have a key and couldn't open the door from the inside! So Sarah had to stay at our place as well, where she was thrilled about having to store her contact lenses in bottle caps overnight.
©2004-2005 Kamal Gautam