But anyway, my first ever adventure into the former Soviet bloc has been a really fun time, although a lot of hard work as well, being a couple of full days of concrete committee meetings in which I was both an active participant/arguer and also the official scribe – so I now have about 40 pages of handwritten scrawl that needs to be transcribed and turned into actual English at some point. But work things aside (and frankly the work things are probably interesting to me and absolutely nobody else, so I will leave them reasonably well aside), I also had about 1 ½ days of touristing around the city, which has been a really interesting experience.
The first challenge is the alphabet – it’s the Ukrainian version of Cyrillic script, which is apparently only marginally different from the Russian version, but since I’ve never been to Russia and never learnt Russian, that little piece of information is of remarkably little value to me. On the upside, a lot of words are phonetically very similar to English, so knowing 90% of the letters helps guess what the rest are – a bit of memorisation of the alphabet charts in the back of my Lonely Planet guide on the flight in from London helped out there. The main ones are: the Cyrillic H is English N, B is V, P is R, C is S, the backwards N (И) is Y or I, the backwards R (Я) is ‘Ya’. A few of the others are similar to Greek, which I learnt doing maths – something similar to the Greek capital gamma (Г) and capital pi (П) characters also turn up to represent the G (or sometimes H) and P sounds. So, putting some of this together: PECTOPAH (and yes, I’m writing all in capitals because I didn’t learn the lowercase forms…) is ‘restaurant’ (or phonetically ‘restoran’, CTOП is ‘stop’, and one of the local food chains is MICTEP CHEK, or ‘mister snek’ (i.e. snack). See, it’s not all that scary!
My amateur attempts at linguistics aside, Kyiv is a really cool place – it’s been here for over 1000 years, used to be the capital of a major empire (‘Kyivan Rus’), has a bunch of cathedrals and classic old buildings (in addition to the anticipated Soviet-era grey concrete), and a really outrageously stylish Metro system with some of the deepest stations in the world. Yes, 102 metres down is really quite deep for a Metro station – the escalators, running at about the same speed as most others around the world, take so long to get down to the bottom of the station that people actually sit on the steps and read a book on the way down. And there is actually a good reason for it being so deep – Kyiv is really quite hilly, so the stations in the low-lying areas aren’t all that far underground – 5-10m only for some of the ones I went to), but to have the lines running all on one level, the stations up on top of the ridge where the city centre sits have to be dug down a long way. And not only is it a really deep Metro system, it’s also got some very stylish and immaculately maintained art deco-style stations, trains that run every 1-2 minutes during the day, and a fare set at 1.7 hryvnia – or ~20c Australian – to ride as far as you want to go. I’m very jealous.
The food here is also quite an interesting experience – one of the local delicacies is a strip of spiced pork fat, served cold as an appetiser. Yep, that’s right, they get the fat from just under the skin of the pig, and serve it in cold clammy white chunks as a key part of a formal dinner. And actually, it’s really quite nice – you have to intentionally not think about what it is as you eat it, but it’s very pleasantly spiced and the preparation process apparently also helps the texture so it’s not greasy or slimy at all. Of course it’s probably horrendously bad for you, but calories eaten in foreign countries officially don’t count.
A few other random observations:
- There was some sort of street party going on in the city centre last night, with the usual array of street performers, carnies ripping people off in the throw-tennis-balls-at-milk-bottles game, hippies in drum circles, Hare Krishnas chanting, gypsy pickpockets, buskers dressed as pirates, local celebrities singing 80s pop songs in slightly erratic English and without always knowing all the lyrics, and dance troupes performing the traditional Ukrainian art of combined hip-hop/Irish (Riverdance) dancing… Provided me with a couple of hours of very enjoyable entertainment. And helped build my skills in dodging pickpockets – no, I didn’t lose anything to them.
- The young people of Kyiv seem to have taken very vigorously to western culture, which is leaving some of the more conservative older folks who have lived through the Soviet era basically standing around looking a little bemused at all the mobile phones and miniskirts. Well, the seedy-looking old dudes looking more leeringly rather than bemused at the miniskirts, but it’s difficult to hold that against them…
- There’s also a pretty dramatic divide between the ultra-rich and the rest of the people – I think pretty effectively highlighted by the fact that we were sitting this afternoon in a little Romanian car driven by one of our local hosts - a middle-aged gentleman with a brilliant sense of generosity, the regulation eastern European mustache, and something of a tendency towards wearing black fishnet t-shirts to work (at a university) – while being passed by a half-million-dollar Bentley coupe being driven by a 30-something guy drinking a cup of service station take-away coffee.
- Ukrainian Orthodox churches don’t have chairs or pews in them, everyone has to stand up. This could be a good incentive for the preacher to keep it brief… and may therefore be a good idea.
- I've used quite a lot of official tourist maps found in hotel rooms over the years, and they've all got all sorts of different ads for local attractions on them -but never before have I seen one that's more than 50% sponsored by what are clearly prostitution services ("exotic massage", "lady guides for your visit to Kyiv", "international introduction and marriage agency", and so on...).
But anyway, enough of my wafflings, and on to the photos:
The view from my hotel room window:
The little yellow church just up the street from the hotel (no idea what it's called):
The Universitat Metro station:
The river Dnipro, and the suburbs of Kyiv - it's a spectacularly green city, which really surprised me, there are probably more parks and trees here as a percentage of the city area than any other city I've ever been to:
2535 The belltower of Pecherska Lavra monastery
The monastery cathedral:
Some domes (in the monastery complex) & the river:
A huge Soviet-era rocket truck (I think - couldn't read the sign, but it's in a military museum full of tanks and stuff, and the think on top looks like it could have something to do with rockets?):
A couple of shots of the rodina mat statue:
The old (11th century, but reconstructed fairly recently) "golden gate" - apparently not the same one as the 'Great gate of Kiev' in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which was never actually built - but a different, real one:
A nice-looking random old building near the gate:
St Sofia’s cathedral belltower
Me proving that I've actually been here, not just downloaded photos from other people's websites while sitting at home in my apartment:
2631 – St Michael’s cathedral, which was demolished by the Soviets in the 1930s in a 'modernisation' campaign, but rebuilt again recently:
One of the buildings (a hotel?) in the city centre, on the main boulevard where the street party was:
Another really ornate building:
Independence square in the city centre:
One of the ambulances from the Chornobyl evacuation - the writing on the side says Chornobyl in Cyrillic script; and again, Chernobyl (the spelling we see more often) is the Russian not the Ukrainan version:
And finally, the really really classic Soviet-era bus that we were transported around in for most of the week - with the grating over the engine at the side held open by a piece of string and a stick to enhance airflow through the engine:
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