Graffitti

In case you were not aware, this is election season in Ukraine. The actual day of the election coincides with our offical move out date, now less than two weeks away. Since about mid-February, its been political campaign madness about town with at least a dozen different parties setting up camp all over the place. Colorful tents pop up basically everywhere supporting one party or bloc or candidate. Yulia Timaschenko has probably done the best in marketing--beautiful air brushed photographs of her wearing white and an all white background. Her logo is a red heart. Orange is taken for Yuschenko's party and all blue for Yanocovich. There are many other groups including the Не Так bloc, which promotes some sort of union with Russia, Kazakstan, and Belarus; saying no to NATO; and 'yes' to Russian language (Ukrainian is now offical language, but depending on where you live it's either widely spoken or not at all, like where I live).

So with all this politics in the air, I have within a week come across some rather amusing graffitti. One was on a party Regionov poster that only has Yanocovich's face on it. Across his face was written Козел, which means goat, the derogatory term for Russians. Considering where Yanokovich support lies, the comment definitely made me laugh to myself.

Then today, on my way to work, I saw that someone had written on an awning, "FUKC OF RUSSIA." This also made me laugh, mostly because it took me a second to realize that the author probably meant "off" not "of," who cares about the other misspelling, you get the idea.

We will see how gets to tell who to "fukc" off in a few weeks. It's an interesting election and definitely will be a very foretelling one for the futures of not only Ukraine, but Russia, other FSU countries, America, and Europe.