Shabbat shalom from Dnipro so that you can see is the Menorah Center here in Dnipro
and that is the biggest Jewish cultural building in the world now you might be asking yourself
why would it be in Dnipro why it's not in New York or Buenos Aires or Israel itself well it's here
because they have a significant Jewish population and they built this center to promote the culture
I guess or to give them a place obviously in history Ukraine had a lot of jews especially
before the Second World War it's obviously a very tragic history what happened in this region with
the holocaust and in some of the cities in Ukraine it would have been like you know 30 to 40% the
population pre-war same in Belarus would have been Jewish and today that's obviously dramatically
less but here in Dnipro it is the most Jewish city per capita in the country it's about seven seven
eight percent of population is Jewish here so it's about 70 to 80 000 Jews live here so that's
very significant in terms of not just the number of Jews but also their political influence a lot
of the politicians from Dnipro are Jewish as well so you have a little bit of a Jewish cultural
thing going on something a little bit different than you're going to see obviously in Kyiv,
Odesa which most people think is the most Jewish city but in fact it's not it's actually here in Dnipro
maybe about half that in Odesa today in reality so obviously there's some Jewish restaurants
around here where you can get your forshmak or your shakshuka which I love in the morning
and good hummus I'm a big fan of that as well so something a little bit different here
in Dnipro nowadays that you're not going to see in other Ukrainian cities
So Dnipro is named after the River Dnipro it's the biggest river in Ukraine it dissects the country
the city was formerly known as the Dnipropetrovsk and
it took me a long long time to be able to say to Dnipropetrovsk I don't know why it took me so long
and then when I finally learned how to say it they simplified the name and changed it to Dnipro so
you have that easy task of just remember it's called Dnipro but the oblast is still called
Dnipropetrovsk and you will see the name Dnipropetrovsk a little bit across the city
there's a hotel Dnipropetrovsk there that I just saw on the waterfront the city has a population
about a million people so it's not small it's not Kyiv it's not massive but it's a good size
city so I'm super pumped to get out and explore it on this absolutely fantastic late March afternoon
So this monstrosity behind me is the Parus Hotel it's basically today a testament to
the decay of Dnipro after the fall of the Soviet Union this hotel was built
in Soviet times it was never actually opened up to the public and some Ukrainians have now put
some Dniprans probably put a Ukrainian trident to give it a little bit of color
to make it a little bit nicer and less of an eyesore but this is pretty common because the
population of Dnipro in the 90s 2000s has fallen from about 1.3 million to less than a million
it's now around 1 million inhabitants and as a result there's just lots of abandoned buildings
here and that contrasts a lot with the city center which is being rejuvenated has a lot of
modern buildings actually some of the most modern I've seen in Ukraine definitely outside of Kyiv
but then you have this which is kind of I guess become a little bit of a monument to the
fall of the Soviet Union and it reminds me a lot of in Kaliningrad in Russia that Russian exclave between
Lithuania and Poland there you have a building in the center that was also never opened built
in Soviet times and the locals refer to it as the monster so I guess this is the Dnipro monster
I think the big question is after my time here in Dnipro do I love Dnipro or not and whether you
should consider coming here if you are planning a trip to Eastern Europe or maybe even moving to Ukraine
itself for a longer period say three months or plus so I had a great time here the
city definitely has some particular charm and style there are a lot of places to go out in the
city center it's quite compact so definitely cool for me but I think it's definitely not
the city for a newbie to traveling in Eastern Europe and particularly if you haven't traveled
around Ukraine definitely not for a first trip and the city feels a bit more old-school it's old
school post-Soviet space so like you know early 2000s feel to it like you would have seen saying
Odesa or in Kyiv at that stage so what I mean by that it's definitely got a little bit more of a
rougher feel to it as a city if you've watched Bald and Bankrupt, Ben's videos you know with the gopniks
you'll probably understand understand there's also a meme on the internet gopniks just a word
for a guy is a little bit of a petty criminal or chancer I think we would use in Ireland for that
so just that bear in mind that if you are haven't got you're not street wise and traveling in Eastern
Europe this is probably this is definitely not the city to start in and also English is that is going
to be less spoken than in the other cities if you don't speak Russian it's probably not the city for you
like I would take clients here who have traveled a good bit around Ukraine have already been to say
Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv and then come to Dnipro for that kind of more old school experience