Ukrainian vs. Russian

I've been trying to learn some Ukrainian but have inadvertently learned some Russian. Ukrainian is the official language but Russian is still the "language of the marketplace," at least here in Kyiv. The first week I was here, I thanked somebody in Ukrainian, saying "dyakuyu." The clerk corrected me: "spaseeba!"

That trained me to always say "spaseeba!" And now I'm stuck with it---I was saying "spaseeba!" in Germany over the fall break, despite years of saying "danke!"

I can understand and say numbers in Ukrainian, but when I ask "skeelky" (Ukrainian for "how much"), the response is in Russian. Numbers in Russian sound something like numbers in Ukrainian, but are different enough that by the time I process it, the clerk has given up and punched out the price on a calculator and shown it to me, the poor dumb monolingual westerner.

And then I pay the equivalent of sixty cents for two pounds of carrots at the rEEOOHnok (can't even try to reproduce the sound of that Cyrillic letter, a backwards N), the giant covered market, five minutes from my apartment, with dozens of stalls where local merchants sell fresh fruits and vegetables. A vegetarian's paradise.