Kyiv on Monopoly board!

The Ukrainian community is all abuzz over the latest delightful news that Kyiv is on the board of the new world edition of the popular boardgame, Monopoly. (Official announcement here.)

Congratulations and thanks to all those who helped make it happen by responding to the many calls (including mine) to vote for their favourite city. It was a fun experience, and a great exercise in online democracy!

I only had to Google one city – Gdynia. Geography has never been my forté, and apparently I'm not alone. Hopefully the new world edition will serve to educate other geographically-challenged folk as well.

Altho to be fair, a lot of cities have been changing their names and/or the spelling of them in recent years, so keeping up on all the changes can be quite the challenge.

I've been pretty hard on people who are slow to use the proper English spelling of Ukraine's capital (it's Kyiv, dammit!) and other Ukrainian cities in these post-soviet times. But here I was myself oblivious to the fact that Gydnia is in Poland and is in fact the new name of the former Gdansk.

So, I guess, as an anonymous commenter suggested on my latest harangue, I could maybe cut folks a bit of slack now and again :-)

Anyway, getting back to the new world Monopoly gameboard... All three Canadian cities also made the cut – Montreal, my home town of Vancouver, and Toronto (oh well, nothing in life is perfect).

These are the cities (in alphabetical order) on the board of the World Edition of Monopoly:

Athens
Barcelona
Beijing
Belgrade
Capetown

Gdynia

Hong Kong
Istanbul
Jerusalem
Kyiv
London
Montreal
New York
Paris
Riga
Rome
Shanghai
Sydney
Taipei
Tokyo
Toronto
Vancouver

H/T to Roman at Ukemonde .... and also to Vasyl who circulated the Ukrainian-language announcement by email when it was just hot off the press!