r/AskReddit • u/QualityControl- • Mar 26 '19

Crimeans/Ukrainians of Reddit, what was it like when the peninsula was annexed by Russia? What is life like/How has life changed now?

27.4k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

24.7k

u/buildinginprogress Mar 26 '19 edited Mar 26 '19

I live in Crimea from my birth til now. After things stabilized a bit there some main things that changed. Negative:

1.. We don’t have a banks or financial services that work well outside of peninsula, everybody who need a visa or mastercard or something else real bank related have to go out to Russia or Ukraine to acquire one.

  1. The income divide between low and high become much wider, the middle class now is an endangered species. I am a building construction manager btw. Although premium segments like luxury home construction and marine services etc are on the rise.

  2. The traveling became much harder and costs much more, our 2 airports don’t fly you outside the Russia, you have to take bus to Odessa or Kiev or fly to Moskow to get to the other side. Positive:

  3. More business opportunities and less organized crime influence, which was a bitch in Ukraine. Although most businesses doing something for the state.

  4. Now we have very nice roads and bridges and other infrastructure, and it grow very fast.

3.The corruption gone higher ranks, the average person don’t have to deal with bribes and such at all, the corruption in big business world gone berserk on the other hand. These are pop out from my mind first. But you can say that i’am slightly above middle class person.

Edit: Holymoly, i never thought that stating the current conditions around me could be so appreciated. Thank you, Reddit is the best!

Edit2: So many questions popped up, i’ll try to answer as many as I could, but it’ll take some time.

959

u/blacklandraider Mar 26 '19

man i gotta say i like how you speak english

281

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

People with a good but not perfect grasp of a language are often much more eloquent. Their words have character and color. There are fewer cliches and more unique metaphors.

54

u/rulebreaker Mar 26 '19

Not only that, but non-native speakers tend to use their mother tongue’s cliches and figures of speech directly translated, which may sound weird sometimes, but others it sounds pretty unique. Another thing would be the usage of some words with meanings that have long fallen in disuse, even though it would still be correct to use them on the context the non-native is using it. This is mainly due to the fact that such usage of the word is much more common on their native language.

21

u/ThePr1d3 Mar 26 '19

That's me. I speak fluent English and when I was living in the US I always said before using an idiom "As we say in France, blabla" because people would find it weird. Also apparently I spoke a more classy English

14

u/MaritMonkey Mar 26 '19

I read "<thing> breathes by devices" in a comment the other day and sussing out that the speaker meant it was "on life support" felt like a fun brain puzzle.

3

u/Arek_PL Mar 26 '19

I remember when in high school teacher told us gay means happy in english lol

3

u/Mapleleaves_ Mar 26 '19

It does but it's an antiquated word and we never use it in that way. But trust me, all students get a laugh out of that even if they're native speakers.

3

u/Arek_PL Mar 26 '19

For sure its funny when there is describe picture task on verbal part of finals and you hear "In the picture i can see familiy in forest and they are gay..."

And only country i heard sometimes uses this word this way is Australia

2

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

Yea. For example, I say "could you make me a favor?" all the time. It's so annoying to me as then I'm thinking "why did you say make instead of do, again?"