Internet Cards

If you are visiting Ukraine and are trying to connect to the internet, be aware that most Internet Cards that you buy for hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly service for internet connectivity, DO NOT WORK. Our company has purchased just about every available card including those from Lucky Net, Global, UkrNet, Epsilon, Zeos, Adamant, etc and at best, the connection will keep you on line for about 10 - 20 minutes at a time, and at worse you will not ever get connected at all . We have tried for 20 days to get connected to Lucky Net on a monthly card and were connected for a total of about 15 minutes (just enough to get the card registered so that our monthly time started running).

The best advice we can give for Internet connectivity is to use a friend's or an associate's computer and connection, or visit an Internet Café. Luckily, there appears to be more and more Internet café's opening up in Kyiv every week so finding one is becoming easier. Visit the "Services" section of www.Ukraine-Today.com for current listings of Internet Cafe's in Kyiv.

Exchange Rates

Be careful when exchanging your dollars, marks, franks, or rubles into Hryvnyas. Banks tend to give you the worst possible rates, while exchange places still try to fool you into believing you are getting a higher rate when you are actually getting swindled. For example, if the going rate is 5.45 UAH to the dollar, a favorite ploy is to post rates showing 5.054 so that the unwary traveler can taken.

Weekends are the worst time to exchange money. Rates tend to worsen on weekends and get better on Monday's. Also since the rates do fluctuate rapidly, don't try to guess the moves. Change what you need, when you need it, with some reserve.

Telephones (International calls)

Ukraine still has some of the highest phone rates for international calls in the world. Although the days of paying $5-6.00 per minute for international calls seems to have passed, $2-3.00 call charges are still not uncommon. Callback systems worked for a while, but services were erratic and the

call quality was always poor. Monthly service fees were also required. At present there seems to be only one "callback" company working but even they have stopped advertising.

We were surprised to learn from the managers at the new UMC center in the Passage, that UMC does not support their dealers. Thus if you bought

or plan to buy a phone from a UMC dealer because of a better price, be aware that you may have great difficulty in getting connected. We recently bought 2 phones with UMC connections from a UMC dealer and after promising us 2 day hook-up they still could not get hooked up after 6 days. We then switched to another dealer and the situation was even worse. After 2 weeks, we were still not connected.

When we visited the UMC center in the Passage (due to our inability to get any response whatsoever by phone), we were rudely asked: "Why didn't you buy the phone from us?". Upon responding that UMC did not carry the particular model, we were informed that this is our bad luck since dealers have to resolve all their own problems including those of connections to UMC.