7 KM

This past weekend I left site to meet with other people that live in my oblast (an oblast is equivalent to a large county or a state). If I were to have gone straight to the meeting site, it would have taken me 9 hours. From what I've experienced, traveling in Ukraine takes a lot of time because it is a big country and the road infrastructure is in desperate need of repair.

On the way to the gathering, I stopped in Odessa and at 7 KM. 7 KM is an open-air bazaar 7 kilometers from Odessa and roughly 7 kilometers in size. I love how some things here have very literal names. 7 KM is probably the largest bazaar in the former Soviet Union. It is a city of stacked shipping container storefronts that typically sell cheap goods from the east. A large percentage of goods found in stores anywhere in this country first entered Ukraine through this bazaar. In fact, when I was shopping and I finally found something I had on my list, I was often told I could only buy in bulk. Here is a decent description of the place.


Describing this place in writing doesn't do it justice, and I'm guessing while you are reading this you're wondering why I bothered. I assume I'm mentioning it because of its ethnographic potential. In college I came across a lot of research about how (cheap) goods travel through the former Soviet Union to main cities in Eastern Europe much in the way it has for thousands of years along the Silk Road. Walking around the bazaar I felt some sort of liberal arts college gratification because so much of what is studied in the humanities is studied/beaten to a pulp of obscurity. 7 KM is much alive and an evolving societal organism.