It doesn't take long to figure out which people you encounter are locals and which ones aren't. Ukrainians have a pretty distinctive way of dressing, and their standing in society is easily reflected by how they do so. The lower class men tend to dress in "gopnik" gear, which I had detailed before. Track suits and pointy-tipped dress shoes are all the rage with them. The higher class people tend to like to show off that fact, by walking around with headless phone pieces and dressed in a sports coat. I'd tell you how the middle class dresses, but honestly, there's not much of a middle class here.
The women, on the other hand, all dress the same. In winter weather, they're sporting fur-lined winter coats, and high heels. In fact, it's ALL high heels. I don't think any self-respecting Ukrainian woman would be caught dead wearing any other type of footwear.
Foreigners, though, stick out like a sore thumb. There's really no shortage of foreign men to be encountered in this town. This city is one of the capitals for the online marriage agency business, so naturally this place tends to get a lot of foreign men looking for either love, sex, or some combination of both. And it only takes a second to figure out who isn't from here. For one, if they're not as sharply dressed as the locals, they're also not wearing a track suit. They also tend to walk around looking completely lost, speaking loudly in English (or another language), and almost all of them are north of 40.
I can't say I've fully integrated, although I've been learning the lay of the land a bit better. But I'm sure I still stick out like a sore thumb here.
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