Anna Rambouskova came to Kyiv with high hopes of landing a job and after a futile search she's started her own career in tourism - a Web site called www.go2kiev.com.
inian student in English when she was struck by a passage in the textbook.
The article, on psychology, described how the first child in a family tends to feel ignored and worried about succeeding, and that he likes things his own way. As the older child in her family, the Prague native thinks the description, especially the latter part, fits her perfectly.
“I prefer to learn and do things directly, on my own,” Rambouskova says, lighting a cigarette in a small corner booth of her favorite Kyiv restaurant, the Cave. “I generally hated school,” she adds of growing up. She has a gift for languages – she speaks German and English fluently, as well as her native Czech – and learns “what I need to at the moment I need it.”
She didn’t go university after high school because she thinks too many young people are “obsessed” with it, and she didn’t feel university would teach her anything she really needed to know. Instead, Rambouskova, 23, sets her mind to something, like she did this past spring with Go2Kiev.com, and attacks it head on.
Artsy Interests
The waitress is pleasant and takes our orders for black tea (Hr 9), a glass of Coca Cola (Hr 6) and the Cave’s business lunch of an Olivier salad, vegetable soup and spaghetti carbonara (Hr 25). We talk of Rambouskova’s career in the Czech film industry; her two years spent perfecting her English in Limerick, Ireland; and what she’s done with her time since arriving in Kyiv this past February.
It wasn’t so hard for Rambouskova to get her start in the film industry back home (mind, she always worked behind the camera). Her mother is a script supervisor, her maternal grandfather works as a theater director, and her grandmother was an animation artist. Rambouskova was always around movie sets and studios while growing up, and by the age of 15 she was working after school and on weekends making money. She says the life wasn’t for her, but she nevertheless made good work contacts as a second assistant director and as an assistant casting director. Once someone realized she was fluent in German, she was translating potential scripts sent by writers in Germany, too.
After graduating from high school, Rambouskova found the Prague job market tough. She tried to use her language skills to get work in the film industries of various countries, but to no avail. Within a few months, German friends of her parents (also involved in the film industry) put her in touch with an employment agency that landed her an interview with Thomson Financial in Limerick, Ireland.
“I paid a lot of my own money to go to Ireland to do this interview, so I said to myself, ‘I’m not going home without this job!’” she says. “I essentially told them everything they wanted to hear, and by the time I got back to my hotel the phone was already ringing. I had gotten the job!”
For two years Rambouskova did translations and other work as a corporate analyst for Thomson, an American e-business solutions provider, but the job just wasn’t for her – and neither was Ireland. She was fed up after six months.
“The pay at my job was decent, but Ireland is expensive,” Rambouskova says. “It was six euros for smokes, five for a beer in a pub… I mean, [Limerick] is not Dublin; this is a tiny little city of 100,000 people that has one cinema and not much in the way of any real arts or culture, and it is 15 degrees Celsius all the time.” By comparison, she says, Kyiv is “alive” with the arts and has far nicer weather.
In Ireland, however, she met her boyfriend of the last two years, Oskar, a Swedish native who now works in Kyiv for the Swedish Trade Association. She came to live with him here in Kyiv, where, to keep herself busy when she’s not attending her Web site, she teaches English and German.
“I’d never lived away from home for my entire life before going to Ireland, and then after Oskar got the job in Kyiv I stopped in Prague for two days on the way over to wave ‘Hi’ to my mom, then left,” Rambouskova says after having some salad. “She wasn’t too happy.”
What Now?
She got busy with the Web site within a week of arriving in Ukraine, as Rambouskova realized that finding work here would be a problem. She had no Russian (or Ukrainian) language skills: She was part of the first graduating class of Czech high school students to study German as a foreign language instead of Russian.
Oskar came up with the idea for www.go2kiev.com, and she soon noticed that the Web lacked serious tourist information about Kyiv and Ukraine. Also motivating her to build the site was that she was soon in a full-leg cast thanks to an old knee problem that flared up on her. For several weeks she could only sit around – doctor’s orders.
So she started surfing the Internet, looking for information about Kyiv: restaurants, night clubs, airlines, car rental and real estate agencies, and lots of other stuff useful for tourists. She linked it all, and created her own site. Even now that the site is up and running she’s constantly on the lookout for more or updated information for her project. She got support from her friends, collected materials at the July 4th American Independence Day celebrations at Spartak Stadium and drew on her own experiences to put it all together.
Go 2 Kiev
Though she acknowledges Oskar’s initial input, Rambouskova says the content of www.go2kiev is her own doing. She didn’t meet with anyone specifically to talk about what to include, and since it first went up on the Internet she’s redesigned it five or six times.
As for the site itself, it’s easy to navigate and there are lots of useful fields and links, such as to the Babel Fish online translation service for those who don’t know Russian and a downloadable PDF version of the Ukrainian visa application form. She’s looking for sponsors for the site, and has already secured LOT Polish Airlines. Her meetings with various Kyiv businesses and business owners have been positive, she says, and so from here the only way to go is up.
“[The site] can always be better,” she says after finishing her spaghetti. “I want to make it more interactive – more than just an esthetic thing with lots of phone numbers.”
In time, Rambouskova hopes to imprint upon Kyiv her sense of Czech identity – staunchly independent; solitary, even. Her experiences at Kyiv’s so-called Czech pub, the Pilsner Bar on Pushkinska, have left her disappointed, so she wants to see about organizing Czech cultural events in the city, too.
“Here in Kyiv it seems that there are so many possibilities,” she says in a burst. “At first I was unhappy here, but now life is just so much fun.
“What I’m doing now, you can’t do it in London because everything has already been done there. But here it’s the complete opposite.”
Peshera (The Cave) 10A Tarasivska, 244-3372.
Open daily from 11 a.m. till midnight.
English menu: Yes.
English-speaking staff: Yes.
