I enjoy traveling. It’s one of the biggest thrills of my life. I would rather visit a new country than buy a car, even if I had money for it, or a pair of designer shoes.
The most popular way of traveling in the world is backpacking. Students from Europe and Asia, America and Australia explore other countries and cultures while living in cheap hostels, hitchhiking, flying budget airlines and hospitality clubbing.
Backpacking is usually not what a Ukrainian would do. The usual destination for a Ukrainian tourist in the summer is Turkey, or maybe Budapest or Prague, for a change of pace. But that gets harder as Hungary and the Czech Republic are Schengen states now, and it’s still hard for Ukrainians to get visas to European Union nations.
A prepaid 3-star hotel room in Egypt, Bulgaria or Turkey is about as far as an average Ukrainian will get. Of course, there are exceptions. Some people have enough money to travel to Bali or Maldives, but I’m talking about young people, who don’t earn enough to travel to a five-star resort on the Indian Ocean.
So are Ukrainians just boring, or are there other reasons why they don’t do much traveling? It might be about money. But most backpackers in the world are students who try to find the cheapest way to explore the world – from volunteering to hitchhiking. This is not the case with the average Ukrainian student.
There is no “gap year” in the timetable of a Ukrainian student. People don’t take a break after graduating from high school. It’s normal to enter the university at age 17, or even earlier, and after finishing college to get a job and stick to it until your dying day. That’s normal. That’s prestigious. That’s what other people respect. If you’re not admitted to a university straight after you finish school, everybody pities you. Nobody expects you to make any other choice than college, even though the quality of higher education in Ukraine is questionable – 700 so-called universities in comparison to 11 in Poland.
I haven’t seen many Ukrainian people abroad who are there for fun and not for work, both legal and illegal. I’m not talking about five-day long group tours to some well-known destinations, which are usually organized by Ukrainian agencies. I don’t want to be organized and let other people decide where I’m traveling, which hotel I’m staying in and how much time I have to drink my coffee. I don’t like to stick to plans of other Ukrainian tourists.
To get to know a city better, you need to live through all the seasons in it, not just take a quick glance over Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
So I found my own way to travel abroad. I studied. There are many scholarships for Ukrainian students in different countries, so I decided to benefit as much from them as I could.
I never really wanted to get my master’s in political science but did I have any other opportunity to live in Budapest for a year? And I’m not really into classic literature or German philosophy, but how else would I get an opportunity to live in Berlin and travel around EU countries without problems? So I finished this liberal arts program in Germany too. And while studying, I visited Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary and Czech Republic. I would need to buy a separate tour to each of these countries and stand in long queues in front of the embassies for days if I stayed in Ukraine. But my student visa allowed me to do that fast, legally and in a fun way. I met different people, I visited unusual places, stayed in cheap hostels and flew budget airlines. I finally felt like a normal student.
And then I participated in a media program in Oslo for 6 weeks. What I remember most were my trips around Norway and Denmark. Bergen and Stavanger were exciting. Rafting in a national park not far from Lillehammer was an unforgettable experience, as well as my ferry trip to Copenhagen. Unfortunately, I don’t remember most of the lectures I had to attend every day, because I had other reasons to come to Oslo.
I’ve been to Sweden as well. Beautiful country, I must say. And I studied there too. In a small town of Jonkoping, where the Cardigans started their music career. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what I was studying. Joking, of course. But I managed to travel all around southern Sweden, see the cities of Gothenburg, Lund and Stockholm, which is still one of my favorite sights in Europe.
I guess all these programs are made specifically for people like me. They don’t give you much, but they don’t take much time from you as well. It’s not that I didn’t learn anything from them. It’s just that I learn much more from my travels.
For most of my friends from abroad my methods seem too complicated – getting two master’s degrees just because I wanted to see other countries. But to be honest, for a Ukrainian, it’s probably the easiest method except for getting married. It simplifies your travel life even more if your husband or wife is the happy owner of a nice European Union passport. An American identification will also do.
What I wrote above is called irony, bitter irony with a taste of exaggeration. Unfortunately, what is irony for others is reality for some of us.People might say that a Ukrainian can easily get a visa abroad when they are trained professionals. I know many people who work abroad for huge companies. But these are people who are working, not getting new experiences, like my friend Julian from Australia is. He graduated as a journalist in Sydney and now he’s working as a bartender in the White Trash bar in Berlin. He is totally satisfied with what he’s doing and he told me that he doesn’t want a more qualified job. Yet. He travels Europe, meets people, learns new languages. He owns a British passport by the way. And his friend Astrid, also an Aussie who is a pub-crawl guide, owns a French ID (thanks to her French mom) – even though she doesn’t speak a word of French.
Now I’m getting to the most depressing part of my story. Finally, I decided to get an education I really wanted – not for the sake of traveling, but for my own good. Other than traveling, my passion is photography. And Ukrainian schools and institutes don’t offer any really professional photography courses. So I applied to one of the oldest European photography schools – Lette-Verein, which is in Berlin. I was lucky (and hopefully talented enough) to be one of 28 students who were chosen to study among 470 people who applied. The day I got the letter of acceptance, I was in seventh heaven.
But then I didn’t get my visa. Simply like that. Germans told me that Lette is not a university and I cannot study in a higher education institute if I’m a foreigner. Ironically, there were Japanese and American students who were also accepted to my program. And even more ironically they got their study visas because they were from privileged countries.
I understand this all might be politics. But how can we speak about human rights after this? I’m a student, an artist, a human being. Why cannot I be judged for who I am and not for the country I am from?
So, as I said, I like traveling. Now I’m considering a Ph.D. I might apply to some European or American program next year, after I finish my third master’s degree. And, believe me, nobody’s more interested in the process of studying than in the result in my case.
Alina Rudya is a Kyiv Post staff writer and photographer.
