If you have ever been in a non EU country you sure know the problem with roaming. The prices are really exagerated! As we have been in Ukraine the passive roaming would have been 1,50 Euro! 1 Euro fifty just for receiving a call. I really don’t understand these prices.
Well, I am not writing this to complain about roaming costs, I want to help you save money
So, what can be done to save some bucks and not give the GSM providers a CENT!
My solutions works by using a asterisk server, a local SIP number from the country I have my GSM contract and a local SIM in the country I am in (in this case Ukraine).
What I have done is to forward all calls to the local SIP number I have (free), this SIP number is picked up by my asterisk server which then called my on my Ukranian mobile phone (about 0.09 Euro) so I get the same result for 1,41 Euro less, per minute!

So, if you are in the same situation as I was and don’t have time to set up your own asterisk server and find some cheap VoIP routes to your destination, just contact me and I will help you

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This is pretty long story, don’t know quite where I should start.

Let’s start with monday. It started as a normal monday and then some minor issues appeared, a bit of stress but all in all rather a normal Monday. Ok, Tuesday already started a bit worse and then … Internet connection is gone. We try to call the Provider (Optima in Kiev, hands of this provider! Really! but this is a different story). As usual no answer from Optima.
Then it came to my mind that there where some road works around the corner and said “can it be that they destroyed the phone lines?” Well, unfortunately I was right! They destroyed ALL phone lines and Internet lines, a gas pipe and also electricity, although I don’t understand how they did that since I was expecting that electricity lines are above the ground, but I don’t have to understand everything.
Now without internet of course I had so many things where I just needed a quick patch or something I could only get via internet. This went like this all week and each day brought new problems and I needed Internet more and more. But for larger things I could still download them at home and bring them to work with me.

Weekend, finally weekend. After a quite stressful week it was time to relax a bit, watch a movie and half way into the movie my MacBook just froze.
WTF? What is happening, no way to get my MacBook to react so I shut it down and tried to start it again. Well … I didn’t really expect any problems but as it seems my bad luck wasn’t over since my MacBook refused to start. I tried a second time and then … this noise …. this “clack - clack - clack”.
Well, what do you think, my hard drive is dead! I hear you say Backup? Well, I do have a good backup (thanks to Time Machine) but the problem is that my backup was made on my fileserver at home, in Vienna and we are currently still in Kiev, so copying 47 Gig over the internet is quite the best solution.
I tried! Really, the download was very fast, 1.2MB/s but unfortunately I have a download limit, what I didn’t know and this resulted in no internet at home! So now, no Internet at home, no Internet at work and a dead hard disk. What I did manage to download though was my Leopard Disk Image (from my purchased Leopard DVD). So what now? The fastest solution was to buy a external hard disk but I didn’t find one with firewire so I got a USB version, with a bad feeling since I wasn’t 100% sure it would boot from USB. Apple never claimed officially that it does (at least that’s what I read) but … it works! It works great actually.

So now I have a naked Mac OS Leopard and no internet, still not quite optimal, but after one day, the internet in the apartment was payed and stupid me tried to download the backup again, since I still didn’t know about my limit and initially though the company owning the apartment just forgot to pay. Well the result was once again no internet, for one day so I had to give up the idea of downloading my backup, I have to restore when we are back home, which is pretty soon.

But, this isn’t the end of my story, meanwhile a week has passed and we still had no internet at work! It is really incredible what “I don’t give a shit” mentality Optima has!
Finally, after 1 week and one day we had internet again, but only for about an hour, since after that hour they blocked our internet, because we had to “charge” our account! Incredible, after leaving us offline for over a week they have the guts to block our access because of payment.
This is pretty complicated in Ukraine as I have noticed. Almost everything is prepaid here. It’s pretty strange to get used to it, especially if you are working with big companies (Kyivstar, Volia Cable, Optima etc) and pay them monthly huge amounts, that you still have to prepay the use their service.

So in conclusion, get yourself some small external disks where you can do your backups, and have the backup on the fileserver as second backup, in case your laptop gets stolen which probably means that they have also stolen your external disk!

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This was one of the worst movies I have seen in my life! But I had to ask myself this question about one hour ago.
As usual I park my car in front of the apartment, a normal street where you can also park, no sign of parking not allowed.
I park the car there since 2 weeks and I am not the only one parking there.
During office hours the street is full with parked cars but in the evening it gets better and I find a place to park my car when I come back from work. Yesterday I came home, found the last free place to park my car, parked and went in the apartment.
This morning I come out, want to get in my car to drive to work but … where the f*** is my car?
All cars from the street where gone and the street was closed by the police. Now the noises we heard the evening before made sense! It was no construction noise, it was the truck that picked up all the cars from the street.
Great! How much will this cost and how will I get my car back?
I went to a policeman and tried to talk to him but no luck, didn’t understand english and also wasn’t willing to understand my sign language. Then his colleague came and helped me out. Some phone calls and 10 minutes later, he told me the car was moved on the next street at number 12 and he pointed in the direction I have to go. Well after 20 minutes walking and looking I found nothing!
I then came across the next policeman, this time again one that didn’t speak english but with some few russian words I piked up since I am here in combination with sign language (imagine me showing how my car was picked up and then showing him that I don’t know where it is). One phone call later he sends me back in the direction where I cam from and told me to pass the street where my car was and then I should find it.
So finally after some walking I found my car just around the corner from where it was initially parked, hidden by the terrace of the restaurant at the corner of the street. Thanks to the policeman that sent me in the wrong direction. Maybe that’s why he wished me “good luck” after he told me where to go.
I didn’t find out from the police why it was towed away but I didn’t have to pay any fine so this means I didn’t do anything wrong.
At work I asked if there is something important happening in the city today and then I found out that today is the 1020th anniversary of the regions conversion to Christianity. (read more about it in Kyiv Post). With this occasion Bartholomew is visiting the city. Not sure if its Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople or some other, I am really not up to date with this religious stuff. Anyway, I still don’t understand why they had to remove all cars from that street. If I am not mistaking, the Presidential Secretariat should be on Bankovska Street, that’s where the apartment is.

Technorati Tags: Kiev, pissed

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I think it is time to write something about the hotel Opera in Kiev. After 4 weeks in a hotel there is always something to complaint about.
But let’s start with the good things.
The hotel looks good, staff was helpful on arrival and the room looked also good. Bathroom was clean, bed was clean so everything seemed to be great.
Also you get to use the sauna and jacuzzi for free. Well at the rate of 460 Euro a night I don’t know how “free” that is.
Most of the time the staff was really friendly, concierge was also very helpful with taxi orders and other things wee needed.
The breakfast could have been better though. After some while it just gets boring, every day the same food.
Ok let’s start the complaints, first of all for this price I would expect a bigger TV in the room, especially when the room is so big like the one we had, then it’s just to hard to see something on that small screen.
The lifts, they drive you mad. They never seem to work properly. Either one is broken completely or they are all together behaving very strange. Like when the lift is on your floor and the stupid door just doesn’t want to open.
Then there is the thing with room cleaning. It seems like changing bed sheets and towels is everything they know about room cleaning.
This could be that most people don’t stay 4 weeks and they usually do everything else after checkout.
The thing that pissed me off the most was the fact that they got confused with the credit cards.
On checkin they requested my credit card as guarantee until I bring a authorization letter from the company. Ok, no problem with that, but just to be 100% sure I asked if my credit card will be billed and they assured me that it won’t be billed if the company sends the authorization letter.
Well two days later, they had the authorization letter and everything was fine. After aprox 1 Month I checked my credit card bill and saw that the idiots from the hotel charged over 2000 Euro from my personal credit card.
If they had all they needed from the company and they also did charge most of the amount from the company card, why did they have to touch my card?
So besides this, there was the biggest problem of the hotel. They where building a terrace that should be finished in September.
They noise was very disturbing during the day, but OK it is understandable that they have to work, but on the other hand, they are charging 469 a night (which was reduced to 328 due to the long stay) so I don’t really care when they do their work. Sounds selfish, but for that price I do expect silence. Anyway, the really big problem appeared in the last days, when they started to work also at night.
Oh how I love the sound of drilling at 1am in the morning. I called the reception, if this is going to last all night. At the reception I got a rather surprised voice as if he didn’t knew there was any drilling. Yeah, right! Finally he said he will contact the workers.
The only thing that happened was that after some minutes the reception called, just to wake me up one more time. I don’t know what they wanted to tell me since I didn’t get the phone on time. Probably he wanted to tell me that they don’t give a shit about their customers and the drilling will last all night, and yes the drilling did last some more hours.

Ok and there is one more issue that bugged me. During checkout the lady at the reception looked at us as if we hit her or I don’t know …. not even a greeting, nothing. I gave one key back and told her that I will give her the second key in five minutes since I have to get the rest of the luggage from the room. Put luggage in the car, went back up to get the rest and guess what? The key was not working anymore. She locked the key! They have this fancy credit card like keys where they can lock it whenever they want and enable it for any room they like.
After asking her to reactivate a key so I can get my stuff she had the same pissed off look on her face, no sorry no nothing. Gave me a new key and that was the end of our hotel Opera experience.

All in all, it is a nice hotel, the staff (most of them) is really friendly and the rooms are clean. Never the less, for a five star hotel I somehow expected more. A better management of their accounting and not bill my card for example. and there where some other minor issues that I just can’t remember now. So I could recommend the hotel, but I wouldn’t go there anymore just because of the credit card issue. This really pissed me off.

Technorati Tags: Kiev, travel

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So we finally have 4 wheels to move around again
Last week I went to sixt to pick up the car, it’s a Skoda Fabia 1.2L. This is not quite the best car for Kiev. The size is OK but the 1.2 engine is really really lazy when going up hill (which you have to do really often in Kiev). Nevertheless, it brings me from A to B and when going up hill it just takes a bit longer. I can live with that.
Driving in Kiev isn’t that bad as expected. I actually kind of like it, at least when there are no traffic jams. The only thing that really pisses me of is that it’s sometimes hard to find out where you are. On some streets you have the street names written somewhere but quite often it’s not written anywhere or very hard visible. What makes it a bit harder is that it’s written in Cyrillic. I can read now but I’m not the fastest in reading cyrillic which makes it even more complicated when I have to drive.
But I did finally manage to get to a point yesterday that was familiar and so I managed to get home. This morning I missed a right turn which ended up in a 10km drive trough Kiev since I didn’t find any possibility to turn. This is another bad thing when on driving on large streets trough Kiev, if you miss a turn it might take some time to find a possibility to turn.
So after turning I was back on track. I got to a big intersection which I already know from last month while going by taxi to work.

It’s the intersection where Бульв. Дружбы Народов, Просп. 40-Летя Октября and Краснозвездный просп. meet. This is a point that you really want to avoid! Don’t go there if there is a way to go around it. It takes about 30 min to get out of there.
There are 3 lanes coming from one direction, 2 more lanes are added, so you have 5 lanes on Бульв. Дружбы Народов which after the intersection with Краснозвездный просп. end up on Просп. 40-Летя Октября as 2 lanes (or rather 1.5 lanes at the beginning) due to the huge construction site that blocked most of the road. That is a real bottleneck which I will avoid from now on.
But the city transforms itself in drivers paradise in the weekend. It’s like 70% of the cars disappear over the weekend. In some regions, for example where the apartment is, you have the feeling like you are alone on the streets. In most cities I have been to weekends you have less traffic but not like this. It’s like Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde.
So until now I can’t really complain to much about the traffic. If they had better street signs so that I could see where I am, this would make life a bit easier.
But after all we still found our way around the city, so we will also get over this small barrier
Oh yes, what I forgot, there are all kind of ways drivers here try to avoid to get stuck in traffic. Things that include driving on the sidewalk, going trough the construction site to get near the traffic light and many other things. It’s nothing that surprises me, but one thing did surprise me yesterday, a public transport bus cutting traffic by driving on the sidewalk. This was new, didn’t see that anywhere else until now.

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Well since we have to stay a bit longer in Kiev we have to move to an apartment which is cheaper and more convenient (kitchen, washing machine, a big fridge for Ukrainian beer…) and I will also rent a car to move around.
It looks like I am used to much to the digital world and doing everything online, which isn’t always simple as it seems.
Lets start with the car. I checked out the big companies (Europcar, Avis, Sixt). The first frustrations where with Avis, their site sucks big time! After filling in all the data it complains that you can’t rent online for a longer period then 31 days. Ok I changed the date and submitted again. This time it complained about not being able to rent a car so soon if you order online. So once again I changed the date. I think there was one ore error which I don’t remember. Nevertheless the result was that they don’t have a car for that period. This wasted about 30 in of my precious time. Next one was sixt. Everything worked as expected, the first query gave me a result, 750 Euro. Doesn’t sound that bad but I wanted to compare to Europcar .. well, I don’t know what Europcar is renting but they offered me something for 2800 Euro. Yeah right …
This seems to have worked quite fine online, but I wanted to be sure, got the number from Sixt and gave them a call. The guy on the phone made me an offer for 2900 Euro. wtf? I was quite pissed of already because of the problem with the apartment, which brings me to the next story. I got a link from a friend where I could look for apartments. The problem with that site is that you can not enter a period and see only the apartments that are available, you always see ALL apartments. If you book one that you like you will receive a reply if it’s available or not and only then you will receive some offer for different apartments that are available.
This task takes some time.
I tried a different way, I let someone that speaks Russian call the agency and ask what apartments are available. They promised a call in 5 min. Some hours later there was still no call. We called again. Still no result. Then I booked one apartment online and got an automatic reply that someone will contact me within 12-24 hours.
Some hours later, after calling them again, they told us that the apartment isn’t available for the complete period I requested and that they will send me an offer with some other apartments.
Very frustrating. In modern times where you can look up everything on a computer this is a task of some minutes and not days.
Well, back to the rent a car. After sixt pissed me of with that stupid offer, we found (with a helping hand since I was busy finishing some work) an offer at budget, for the same price. I called them and the price was confirmed.
Meanwhile, my helping hand, found a new agency to look for an apartment.
I sent them an email and received quite a quick answer with two apartments, checked them out, decided which one to take had some more mail conversation with that guy and everything seems to be OK now with the apartment.
But I will only be sure of that after we are in the apartment (which should be tomorrow to see the apartment and sign the papers).
So what happened to the car? I had someone call them again, this time someone who speaks Russian, and got the same offer as I received with budget, a bit more expensive then online but still much better then 2700 Euro!
Tomorrow I will pick up the car and hope everything is OK, they should have everything they need and just should check my ID and drivers license and I am ready to go …. in a VW Polo or a Skoda Fabia

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Somehow I didn’t manage to stick to my plan to write more about Kiev, so I will just throw everything in one big blog.
Where should I start? There is so much to write about and my memory really doesn’t want to help me right now. But I have to start somewhere …

Driving in Kiev:

No, I’m not with my car here, but I go everyday by taxi. First of all, if you use the seatbelt you are a looser! Seatbelt is something for the weak, the strong don’t need seatbelts. At least that is the impression you get here. I have been counting one day on the way to work and I saw about 3-4 people wearing a seatbelt. Not that I looked in every car since most of them have tainted windows (will discuss that in a second) but the ones I could see into where most without seatbelts. From all the taxis I was in there was none (zero) drivers that used the seatbelt.
Ok now to the tainted windows. No matter what car you have, if it’s a taxi, a private car, a Public transport Bus or even a police car, you have to taint your windows to be authentic! Could it be some late effects of communism? Where everybody is scared that “big brother” is watching them? I have no idea. In most cases tainted windows are used for tuning cars, which indeed looks nice on some cars. But why a public transport bus would need tainted windows? I don’t really know. Ok it is a bit exaggerated how I wrote it, there are still enough without tainted windows, but that rather is the exception.
Speed, well this is something that is really not considered as law. Drive pas the police with to much speed, no problem in Kiev.
Go with over 100km/h trough the city with a beautiful R8 … also nothing impossible in Kiev. Actually even simple cars go over 100, especially taxis.
Crossing red light is also something used here by taxis. You are allowed to turn right when it’s red in most cases, but taxi drivers also go straight over the red light, no problem here.
Heavy traffic and in a hurry? Well why not use your SUV and climb on the sidewalk. Where you can drive your car without breaking it … do it. Traffic signs and other things like this don’t really matter here.
Driving here is similar with other eastern countries, not much difference.

Lifestyle:
To put it short … “High” no, I don’t mean high on drugs, I mean high …. the opposite of low. High prices, high cars, high heels … If you are a women in Kiev, you have to wear high heels, the higher … the better. Without high heels you don’t exist.
High cars, Jeeps, SUV are very popular. Although the roads aren’t that bad people still love Jeeps and SUV. But if we go by road quality, I don’t think anybody in Austria would need a SUV.

Spare time:

So, what can you do on weekends? There is plenty to see but I won’t write to much about that now. For now I will just concentrate on what to do on hot sunny days. The Beach! Well, it’s not a beach on the see, the black see is a bit to far for just a weekend trip but you could take the Metro to Hidropark instead. Hidropark (Water Park) is a nice place with lot’s of places to lay in the sun and take cool of with some cold beer and in the cool water. The entrance is free, but if you go to a private beach where they offer you something to sit on you do have to pay. It’s 20 UAH for a seat and 10 UAH for an umbrella. The nice thing about this is that it is not so crowded and that you have the Bar behind you where you can get a cold beer.
Locals also like playing chess or using the equipment for bodybuilding or just to train your body a bit. I kind of like the idea, to provide tools to keep yourself in shape for free. The tools might look pretty old, which they actually are but they are for free and also do the job.

Metro:

The Metro in Kiev is really cheap, it’s only 0.50 UAH, which is only 6 Euro cent. But be prepared that it really is crowded. We only used it during the weekend and still it was quite crowded. I really don’t want to know how it is during rush hour. We have also been at the deepest metro station in the world, Arsenalna. It takes you 4 minutes to get to the sufrface. I measured only the time we where standing on the escalator, walking is not inkluded in this time. The pictures from the Metro are not from Arsenalna, was a bit to tired for that. Pictures of from Arsenalna will follow, still have about 3 weeks to go till we get back home.



And here a final picture, found this quite amusing.

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This is the beginning of our 5 weeks in Kiev and already there are so many thing to write about. The day started early, what isn’t really nice for a weekend. We arrived quite early at the Airport in Vienna, which was a very good thing as we found out later. The Airport in Vienna was packed full, total chaos. I have no idea where everyone was leaving, but I never saw something like that on Vienna Airport. Well, before the waiting for the security check began, we still had one little problem. The luggage! We did have a bit of luggage, let’s say a bit much more and of course I was blamed. Well… I won’t say anything without my lawyer
So, we did manage to board the plane with all our luggage and without paying anything extra. After a quite pleasant flight, except for the bit after takeoff where the pilot flew the plane like he was drunk, we arrived in Kiev. Now the fun begins. Immigration, I love this … waiting in along queue, with some immigration forms, and waiting … and waiting. After about half an hour we changed to a different queue. Some guy had some problems and was arguing with the guy from immigration. So we got out of immigration, we got our luggage , let’s get a taxi. Once outside in the main hall we where surrounded by a dozen of taxi drivers. We did finally get to some taxi counter that looked somehow official and of we went towards the hotel. about 30 min drive and the driver didn’t thing going under 100km/h.
What really made a good impression was the roads. I was expecting something similar to Romania, no freeway, pit holes and traffic. But I was surprised to see a freeway with 4 lanes in each direction after leaving the freeway, the street continued to have 4 lanes and there was no sign of traffic, at least in our direction.
There is much more to write about, but we are both to exhausted to do anything anymore.

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It’s late december, winter and I am sitting on the terrace only with a sweater on and it’s already getting to hot for the sweater and this at only 11:00. If this is not enough to call it paradise then it’s view, after each hill a new stunning view of the wonderful region is waiting to be seen. Just the view from the terrace is enough to make me consider this place as a place I would like to live. But let’s not forget the food, the excellent food you find in this region. Great cheese, ham, wine, olives in each size, shape and color, lot’s of great seafood and much much more. What else is so fascinating about this region? The oriental influence in houses, food, tradition. It is a wonderful combination of europe and orient, the fascinating little shops in the small streets in Granda where you can find heaps of nice things to buy without everyone jumping on you trying to drag you in to their shop or bugging you with other things like a tour trough the city, as it happened in Morocco but a separate review on our short travel to Morocco will follow.
All in all … in these 9 days we where here (3 days to go till our holiday is over) one thing is clear, we will come again, 12 days are not enough to discover all of the beauty Andalusia has to offer.
Now it’s almost noon, and it’s now so hot that I have to sit outside in a T-Shirt. What are you wearing now outside, in Romania, Austria?

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O veste proasta pentru toti care sau bucurat de zborurile ieftine Timisoara - Viena - Timisoara. Acu cateva zile am primit mail de la Skyeurope ca biletele mele, incepand din 19. Decembrie, au fost toate anulate.
Mailu care mi la trimis Skyeurope nu zice nimica despre motivele. Dupa putine discutii prin mail am putut doar sa aflu ca Skyeurope nu va mai zbura spre Timisoara din 23. Decembrie. Dece mi-au anulat si biletu de pe Data de 19. Decembrie inca nu mia raspuns nimeni. Pacat …
“It was fun while it lasted” Se pare ca iara trebe sa bag kilometri cu masina

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