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UKR dark tourism (1)

I did not know the term, but I am part of it a little: dark tourism. It’s about a day trip to Auschwitz. Or Westerbork. Or as they do here: Chernobyl.

I am trying to fit in this day in my schedule, but when I was checking on internet how to organize it, I also found a website for a tourist military trip. Play soldier for a weekend. Drive a tank. Learn how to shoot. Fun for the whole family. If only there were lions here…
https://www.tripadvisor.nl/Attraction_Review-g294474-d4379418-Reviews-Military_Tours_in_Ukraine_Day_Tours-Kiev.html

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moga

For the last couple of years I made small step preparation for a project of rebuilding Mogadishu in Somalia. I am in Ukraine for three weeks now and in that period there have been three hotels blown away in Mogadishu by terrorist group El Shabaab. It is quite relaxed here, in Ukraine.
A good day to be cynical…

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AU1

Spatial Codes is a blog analysing the correlation between graphic design and urban space. By analyzing the process of cognition, memory and perception, space and its societal structures and dynamics can be recognized. To understand cities, urban spaces and their dynamics we have to learn to see how these entities receive and use their environment. This is what we think is the visual language of space.

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UKR Diplomacy

You cannot escape it. Talking to soldiers. Talking to people from OSCE who are monitoring safety in the area of Mariupol. You start talking about the war and about military strategies. And I hear myself talking in a conversation, even though I really have no expertise on it. I parrot some people, and I listen and ask questions.

I remember playing the game of Risk with friends. And another board game  called Diplomacy was our favourite. Back then we always were arguing about the Black See as well…

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(me as an emerging consumer in the early 1990s in my father’s trabant)

(me as an emerging consumer in the early 1990s in my father’s trabant)

I always identified as “east european”, more than anything else, including my nationality or the pretentious “Budapest citizen” used by my fellow Budapest intellectuals to distinguish themselves from the general hungarian reality which they regarded as “racist” and generally backward (arguably with some truth in it). What this east europeanness meant for me precisely, would be the object of another post, but coming to ukraine with a group of international experts meant the first case when i started to feel as someone “from the west”, with the allures and assumptions i associated with this position. Besides my freshly acquired status as an “expert” (which i still find hilariously exaggerated), this feeling arised from the huge and unmistakeable difference between the europeanized, polished misery of my central european homeland and the authentic and real stagnation of this abandoned borderland of Europe.

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