Overseas Memoir
The McDonald’s on Khreshchatyk Street
Life as an exchange student in Ukraine in the 90's
When I was sixteen, I lived in Kyiv, Ukraine, for a semester on an exchange program. There were four of us Americans, and we lived in different host families but went to the same high school — Klovsky Liceum Seventy-Seven. It was in the oldest, most romantic part of the city on Klovsky Spusk.
It was 1996, and the Soviet Union had only been done and gone for a few years. Mcdonald’s was relatively new. The first one was situated at the bottom of the hill from the school on the colossal Kreshchatyk Street, the main street of Kyiv. It was nearly a delicacy, as fast food wasn’t really a thing in the country yet, and the menu was quite pricey for the average Ukrainian.
We were the “Americanskies” of the school, very well known. In fact, it took us two whole weeks at the beginning of the school year to tour each and every homeroom class, introducing ourselves and explaining life in America. Our culture was a great topic of interest to the students and teachers, not just because it was an international language school, but because it was a fantasy land far across seas that seemed like a dream even to us as we sat in the front of cold classrooms far away from our hometowns and families.
