Leisure & entertainment

The ways to chill and have fun have hardly changed within the last thirty years in Ukraine. But  if the essence remains, the form has still evolved.    

For instance, just like in the ‘90s, watching videos  now is the most popular way to relax. Only back  then, we watched TV and VCRs, while now we  surf the Internet.    

Music fans listened to the radio and cassettes in  the 1990s. But from the mid-2000s, we hardly  turn on the radio, except while driving. Listening to  music now is an individual experience. We select  tracks and albums via the Internet or use gadgets  and headphones.    

Within the last thirty years, many nightclubs have  emerged and disappeared in Ukraine. But the  youth has always wanted to hang out and dance.  And if you really look at them, the 90s club life  and the current one intensely alike, apart from  Social Media Marketing.    

Today, we read as much as we ever did in Ukraine.  Not less. However, the readers of the ‘90s chose  magazines and fiction. Now, we consume online  content through social networks.    

What has changed within the last three decades  in our country is that we visit each other less.  Unlike in the 1990s, now we catch up and hang  out on neutral territory or rely on something  unthinkable in the ‘90s — virtual meetings.    

We are not so keen on a holiday in the countryside  as we were once. And another change deserves  a mention: in the brutal ‘90s, dacha (a country  house) meant gardening and potato harvesting.  Now it’s more about switching off from the hustle  and bustle of city life.    

Young X’s in the ’90s were confined to domestic  tourism and generally didn’t see much of the world.  However, the millennials are lucky enough to spend  holidays in Egypt and Turkey. Lucky Zoomers enjoy  visa-free European travel now and have been doing  so since the days of their childhood. Cheap airline  tickets and hostel accommodation made “breakfast  in Paris” an ordinary thing for them.  

Bonus from millennials: how to play bucks The millennials’ cult game Bucks raged at the end  of the ‘90s. The players collected plastic coin-  sized bucks with various pictures on them. While  collecting, images of Pokemon (Pocket Monsters)  topped their wish list.    

The Millennials borrowed the rules from the  well-known “claps,” chewing gum inserts  game popular in the early ‘90s. Back then, the  participants clapped over a stack of colourful  picture-liners, trying to flip them over. This idea  passed down to the newly invented game.    

The bucks players each staked an equal amount  of bucks; a buck’s rarity determined its value.  Players struck a stack of plastic bucks with a metal  club (of a buck’s size). The pieces that turned over  went to the winner.    

And experienced gamers hid a few tricks up their  sleeve. For instance, aiming at the side or the bot-  tom of the stack could flip almost half the bucks.    

In a lighter version of the game, the players  tossed their bucks over the table, trying to re-  verse their faces. The winner was the one who  shifted the highest amount of bucks.    Almost everyone played this game of change.  

Those who hadn’t got any bucks to play with felt  like outsiders. However, in the 2000s, bucks died  out, and children began to amuse themselves  with other things, like chewing gum stickers.