Thanks for posting a thread on my hometown, sorry to hear about you having a little bit of a rough time. I would imagine that Kiev is pretty rough to get your bearings as a non-native speaker, very, very few people speak English. As far as the architecture, the older part of town is quite beautiful with Kreshchatic, Andreevski Spusk (which I see you spent some time on) and Podol. The parts of the city where the majority of the residents live (novostroyki), are pretty much as drab and depressing as you would imagine. Did you get a chance to grab some food at Puzata Hata? My favorite fast food chain of all time
@pallo: By Ukrainian standards, Kiev is wealthy and has low unemployment. By western standards....well, not so much. Extreme wealth inequality (don't think I saw so many supercars even in LA), the middle class is barely hanging on.