Here is another funny story about my last trip. Ok not funny at the time.

I was to get a flight from Odessa to Donetsk at 22:30. I was in Nikolaev at the time, so I took a Taxi from Nikolaev to my hotel back in Odessa.
However when we got to Odessa they had closed the main part of Odessa down due to a Soccer game. I guess 2 Rivals where playing so it was tough for me to get to my hotel. Then I could not get a taxi to pick me up at the hotel because the roads were blocked.
I had to carry all my luggage about 10 blocks(on wheels but still hard) until I could find a police man to get me a taxi. Of course he knew no English, so I called the Hotel back and asked them to tell the Officer what I needed. He flagged one down, I got to the airport around 22:00 and it looked closed. There were people in it watching the game.
I thought I missed my flight, I could not get into any gates. One lady(pretty cute I may add) told me to go stand over there and they will open the door. Well what I learned later, is that they closed the whole Airport because of this game. Everyone watching the game in the general area were workers at the airport. LOL
I could not believe they closed an Airport to watch Soccer, that goes to show you how important Soccer was to these folks. My flight left around 00:30 and got into Donetsk about 02:30 that morning. I then needed a taxi to Mariupol. I decided to get a hotel in Donetsk, we went to a couple of Hotels but the Power was out in the city. LOL Just my luck.
I was able to get one of the hotel workers that knew english to ask the driver if he would take me to Mariupol, sure enough to my surprise he drove me all the way to Mariupol. I got my hotel, in which they were very nice to check me in around 5 in the morning, and they DID NOT charge me for that day. Here in the states, they would have charged me for that night regardless of what time it was.
Oh and it was the first time I had been in a country/city, with NO hot water. Yes this American was not used to cold showers.
Oh well, visiting the Ukraine was all worth it.