| As the last underground trains one late evening in March 2012 run through a Kyiv/Kiev metro station, workers prepare new bi-alphabetic signs to replace the old single alphabet Cyrillic signs hanging on the walls of the underground station. The new signs are easy readable but the totally lack the beauty and patina of the industrial era Soviet they replace, a shame really. On the new signs, the names of the stations are merely transliterated from Ukrainian Cyrillic into English Latin. Frustrating, the lack of translation (eg. Zoloty Vorota translates into Golden Gate) leaves visitors without command of Ukrainian without any hint of the meaning of the names. With no real help from this awkward Ukrainian-English, transparency is supposedly provided by a unique hotel room style 3 digit code number assigned to each station with big ugly numbers on the signs. But no one can explain where to obtain the code breaker! Minus 3 stars for yet another typical "solution" in Ukraine, where the workers struggle to find the right drill for the rawplugs to fit the signs. |
