Ukraine - July 2007

Keeling Over in Kiev

The Guinness

Having spent the day wandering the streets in 35°C heat I thought we deserved a Guinness. I had the address of two Irish bars, the closest being O’Brien’s. It took a little tracking down but there it was, smartly painted and looking very welcoming. After the first Guinness I explained my mission to the barman Vova. He cottoned on to his task and picked a straw out of the box unravelled the piece of paper and gave a little smile. It was Cardiff, my home town. There should be little trouble finding accommodation for that weekend as my parents live there. The O’Brien’s bar even had a Welsh flag hanging up as if it knew what was going to happen.

A Ukrainian Guinness

 Vova picking out the next destination - Cardiff next

Why does this picture make me look 12 foot tall?

Getting There and around

I had chosen to fly with Lufthansa once again, changing in Munich. There are direct flights from London but that would mean driving there and leaving the car. Kevin had never flown Lufthansa and was impressed with the leather seats, generous leg room and pristine Munich airport with its free coffee. Less impressive was the aborted take off we had at Munich. An impressively calm pilot came on a few minutes later to explain in technical language that if we hadn’t got out of the way we would have got flattened by an incoming aircraft. Those people sitting near the windows who had seen the incoming aircraft were not so calm.

Another Kiew church - this time a blue one.

Ukraine removed its visitor visa requirements a few years ago in an attempt to encourage more tourists. The immigration guards evidently hadn’t got the same message as the queue inched slowly forward. The first person to speak to me had an accent I could barely understand though he turned out to be Glaswegian and wanted to push ahead of me in the immigration queue. He’d already had three attempts at filling in the form correctly and repeatedly turned back. He was here to get married on Saturday, hopefully to a Ukrainian girl good at filling in forms.

On our first day we caught the metro a few stops into town and alighted at Arsenaina, the world’s deepest underground station. It takes two escalators and more than five minutes to reach ground level from the platform. People even sit down on the escalators as they take so long and I swear I saw one man proposing to his girlfriend.

The skyline in Independence Square

Team Makeup

Intrepid Kevin, (Kevski) joined me again on another trip. He was becoming a regular companion of mine on these trips having already joined me in Albania, Russia and Poland. He must like the East or be some sort of MI5 agent sent along to keep an eye on me.

Accommodation

Thirteen long hours after leaving Coventry we arrived weary at the front desk of the twenty-two storey Tourist Hotel in Kiev. Another twenty minutes later and we had at last arrived at last the front of the queue to check in. The receptionist looked rather surprised that we offered to pay for all four nights as if implying that people rarely stay more than a couple of nights. It was very difficult to refund monies once paid we were told and with that we paid for just two nights and headed up to our sixteenth floor oven.

Hot room with a view

Just as the temperatures in Warsaw dipped ten degrees as we arrived, here in Kiev they soared ten extra degrees to make us feel welcome. The outside temperature was 35°C but our room must have been more like 45°C when we opened the door. We flung open the window and then wondered how on earth it could be so noisy when we were sixteen floors up. The concertina-like architecture of the building and the metro station next door with trains just over a minute apart meant we were in for a noisy stay

Food

The hotel was a couple of kilometres outside the centre and given our rather thwart journey here it didn’t take much persuasion to convince me that heading back into town for dinner wasn’t necessarily a good idea. We walked around the local area to look for food but only found a McDonalds and a Ukrainian style cafeteria restaurant that was closing up for the evening.  In the end we resorted to buying a selection of snacks, high in salt, cholesterol and saturated fats, from the local supermarket and took them back to the room. It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight to anyone peering in the window (which was itself unlikely given we were on the 16th floor), two perspiring middle-aged pot-bellied men with an array of artery-clogging snacks and a cold beer laid out in front of us.  Cutting the cheese without a knife was the next challenge, ably solved by Kevin who used the metal top he’d just peeled off the tin of peanuts. As we tucked into our ‘meal’ looking at the flat city topography we had a momentary panic as a pyrotechnical display began in the night sky to the north, in the same direction as Chernobyl.  My first thought was ‘Drat, my last meal on earth was bread, cheese, peanuts, crisps and Heinz spicy tomato pickle’. We turned on the TV briefly. It was disappointing to see that the nasty habit of needing two people to read out the news had even reached as far East as the Ukraine.  Next thing they’ll be sitting on the desk rather than behind it.  Even worse, all their weather girls will be eight months pregnant as they always appear to be back home.

Kev enjoying a slap-up meal in Kiev

Sightseeing highlights

We walked the couple of kilometres south down to the Percherska Lavra monastery complex and spent much of the day there wandering around the complex of churches and caves. It was reminiscent of a smaller version of the Kremlin with its churches and fine architecture, although the Ukrainians may not like me making that comparison. The blue topped onion domes decorated in gold stars glistened in the strong sunshine. Despite what the books said, the place was far from crowded and it was most relaxing.

Another dome with old tintits in the background

Quirky moments

After leaving immigration there were some other people very keen to talk to us – the taxi touts. They were the most annoyingly persistent, difficult to shake off, not taking no for an answer touts I had ever encountered.  I told them I’d get my Dad onto them if they didn’t bog off.  Only afterwards did I read that it’s thought they are run by the Ukrainian mafia.

After getting some local currency out of the ATM we made a break for the outside still pursued by a line of touts. With no Ukrainian to our name, all signage in Cyrillic, searing heat and hassling touts, it wasn’t easy to work out which bus we should catch. A large bosomed bleached-haired lady shouted officiously and claimed to be the bus attendant and I sure as hell wasn’t going to argue with her. The bus, which was scheduled to run every 20 minutes into town, eventually left after an hour, where the departure criteria seemingly being fullness of the bus rather than adherence to the timetable. The driver had plastered the inside with pictures of the Madonna and child, that is the Virgin Mary one rather than the one recently returned from an adoption spree in Africa. The pictures appeared to indicate we should all utter a small prayer for our 40km transfer into town.

A few new domes ready for installation

Lasting Memories

By late afternoon we got to have our first look at Independence Square , scene of the Orange Revolution in 2004. A gold-leafed statue on a giant pillar has since been erected at one end of the square to commemorate the push towards democracy. The turbulent nature of politics here means that the square is often still the scene of demonstrations. Dominating the square this weekend however was a giant stage still being constructed as we looked on. We initially imagined it would be a Ukrainian festival of some sort but it transpired it was being set up for Elton John. He was giving a free concert to raise awareness of the problem of AIDS.

Our view of Elton in Independence Square

A professional's view of the concert   (© Koshtu)

Out of the City

There was no going out of the capital this time. Kiev seemed such an enormous city we thought it best to concentrate on the capital itself.

There's still some austere sculpture on display