Now that autumn is peeking at us from around the corner it’s time to…plan what to do next summer, at least if you’re a local student who would like to head abroad to the US the next time the hot weather rolls around. What’s On looks into Ukraine’s work-and-travel complex.
Work, save money and travel - play your cards right and you can do all of that at the same time, if you get yourself in with the right work and travel company that will take you across the pond to the United States. All you have to do is apply for a three-month work abroad programme, which will also give you the chance to travel around the country. Two companies that have been working in this area for more than eight years are Coliseum and TM Studentland, both specialising in cultural exchange.

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Coming up is the sporting and international event of the year: the Beijing Olympic Games. What are the Ukrainian team’s perspectives for Olympic glory this August? We looked into it  and into the politicisation that mars this country’s Olympic scene.
Those familiar with Ukraine’s Olympic team say that viewers should keep their eyes on five athletes: swimmers Oleg Lisogor and Yana Klochkova, gymnast Anna Bezsonova, shot-putter Yuriy Bilonog andfemale wrestler Iryna Merleni. Lisogor, from the Kyiv region, is a multiple world and European champion and the world record-holder in the 50 metre breast-stroke. He’s considered Ukraine’s best swimmer at the moment and will be participating in his third Olympic Games.

Ukrainians have long been a people in motion and no country has been as welcoming to them as Canada, especially in the last century. Ksenia Karpenko talked with a diaspora couple from Edmonton.
Immigration has always been an idea that has seized the imaginations of Ukrainians: from the nineteenth century, when the first waves of Ukrainians helped settle the Canadian prairies, to the present day, when the idea of finding a better life elsewhere still seduces young Ukrainians. Just when I was thinking of writing an article about how the Ukrainian identity is still bound up with leaving Ukraine – for Italy, for Portugal, for Poland, for Canada –I got a phone call from Yaroslaw Skrypnyk, a Ukrainian-born Canadian who was visiting Kyiv with his wife Sofia, who is also Ukrainian-born.

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Dazzle Dreams is a Ukrainian electro-pop project that’s gaining popularity outside Ukraine. Their style is world music mixed with an electro-dance sound, but they also throw in some classical symphonic orchestra touches and ethno samples from all over the world. Recently they got back from Nepal. Viktoria Vasilchenko gets the story.

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“This is really interesting for us since we’re still young,” says Kyiv Polytechnic Institute student Oleg Donets, sitting last week at the first-floor bar in the palatial beer-hall Chateau, on Kreschatyk. “We still have a lot of energy, we have a lot of ideas, we want to try them all out and show them to other people.”

It’s official: the ‘Bond girl’ in the next installment of the James Bond movie franchise will be top Ukrainian model Olga Kurylenko. Besides her Paris- New York-Milan catwalk experience, the twice-married 28-year-old Berdyansk bombshell has made a splash in the movies ‘Hitman’ and ‘Paris, I Love You’. Kurylenko certainly has come very far, very fast. Born in the small city of Berdyansk on the Azov Sea, Kurylenko had a childhood of typical Soviet poverty, living in an overcrowded communal flat and wearing patched-up clothes.  Her break came when, as a 13-year-old on holiday with her mother in Moscow, she was spotted by a model scout on the metro.