Don't speak

We'd just gotten off the train after our 25 hour train ride (4th class) from Moscow to Yvpratoria, Ukraine - a little beach city from which we would head over in a taxi to a little village to stay in because it's cheaper/cleaner/less crowded.  We were walking down the street and saw a little stand with probably 30 different little barrels of wine.  Ukraine prides itself on its wine, and I must say, it's really good.  So we try a couple different styles, and decide on a glass to get.  We say thank you, "spaciba" in Russian, then ask the young kid, about our age or a few years younger, "Oh wait, how do you say thank you in Ukrainian?"  Ukraine was of course part of the USSR, and so everyone speaks Russian, and I think everything had to be officially in Russian, but some Ukrainians speak Ukrainian between each other and many of the signs are in Ukrainian - the instructions we got when buying a SIM card for our cell phone was in Ukrainian, so indecipherable to Ira (and of course me).  I think the language "battle" is interesting as these people decide on an identity to adopt - there are a lot more signs in English around here than I saw in Russia.

So he tells us how to say thank you in Ukrainian, and we say to him, "(whatever that word was)."  His reply, good-naturedly, "Don't speak that dirty language to me, I'm not Ukrainian."

Weird.

Update - on talking to some locals of Crimea (our 24-year old hotel managers), we were told that basically, Ukrainian people speak to each other in Ukrainian only if they are from tiny villages.  Anyone who is from or wants to appear to be from a city of any decent size (like 10,000 people plus) speaks Russian amongst themselves.