There is much to enjoy about early mornings in Kyiv: the cool air and peaceful blue tint in the sky (or whimsical snow in winter); the purposeful stomp of expensive shoes on the street as its businesspeople make their way to work; the unflustered rhythms of the metro before it becomes crowded; the melodious whirr of the coffee machine in the kitchen in my office, churning out triple espressos to be sipped before the working day starts. Unfortunately - due to my body’s own unflustered rhythms - ninety-nine times out of a hundred while all this is going on I am [View Full Entry]

---

---

Thinking of ways to spend my birthday, I remembered having read an article about the number 12 tram, whose route takes its passengers out of Kyiv and through a pine forest to a small town called Pushcha Voditsa. Exhausted by the city, desperate to explore somewhere beyond it, and intrigued by journey that the writer of the article described as “one of the most remarkable tram journeys in the world”, Ana and I set off with a picnic of bottled water and bars of chocolate toward the tram stop in the Podil district. We were leaving behind a hot summer day [View Full Entry]

---

---

Pok - pok - pok - pok - pok - pok - pok! - the sounds drifting through the chestnut trees outside my new building from games of tennis on the clay courts nearby are a soft Saturday morning wake-up call. The new neighbourhood is a refined one: sometimes a red squirrel appears in the tree opposite our balcony, or a husband and wife step into the courtyard below and help their toddler to practice walking. More often than not the bells of the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra chime loudly; the place is a calm village in the centre of a thrusting city. [View Full Entry]

---

---

In March I moved with Ana to Kyiv's Arsenal'na district, between Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and the right bank of the river Dnieper. It is one of the city's most attractive areas, scattered with lush, sweet-smelling chestnut trees and punctuated by dozens of landmarks. It is home to the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra (The Kyiv Cave Monastery, completed in 1015), a guardian of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, behind which stands the Rodina - Mat' (Motherland) statue, her thick, silver arms and thick, silver sword thrusting defiantly - and symbolically - at the sky, on top of the Museum [View Full Entry]

---

---

The smell in the corridor is a familiar mixture of boiled cabbage and cheap cigarettes. A brown carpet in the bedroom is fixed to one of the walls instead of the floor. In the bathroom half of the bathtub sits under a chimney and the lock on the toilet door is on the outside. The kitchen is decorated in eight shades of beige - a flat so infuriatingly fragile could only be Ukrainian. I was staying with Ana and her roommate Alisa, while I searched for a new job and a place of my own. As uncomfortable as the living situation [View Full Entry]

---

---

Pitching up at the apartment in Lviv - which I had rented for Ana and me to spend three days in over New Year - gave me an improbable sense of déjà vu. As we entered the cosy flat on vulytsya Fedorova I felt as though I was not stepping into the home of a rotund lady called Marianna, but of my imagined thirty-five year old self. It was clean, light, and decorated in a comfortable style that, subconsciously, I had aspired to wrapping myself in ever since being punched and kicked out of a Stalin-era ghetto the year before. My [View Full Entry]

---

---

Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner, that I love London so. I grew up in Sussex just an hour away from the capital, but the journey on the train was always so expensive that the only opportunities I had to experience life in the big city were when my parents would take me to watch sport. My Dad and I used to lose our voices singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" at the Twickenham rugby 'Sevens' each spring, and bring fleeces and flasks to watch cricket at Lord's or the Oval every summer. My Mum took me to the Olympia horse [View Full Entry]

---

---

The best answer to why I haven't written anything since August is "I've just been too busy": when the law firm where I was working finalised a merger I found myself doing three jobs - translating, editing and proofreading - for two companies. I worked late most nights before going straight home to bed. It was a stressful autumn, but there were good moments: sipping hot chocolate with Ana on Saturday evenings in the Shokoladnitsa café on vulytsya Chervonoarmiyska; finding a homeless puppy at the entrance to our building one Friday night and taking care of it for a few days; [View Full Entry]

---

---

I'll write up the diaries from the first part of my summer trip when I have the time. In the meantime, here are some holiday snaps of Yalta, the Southern Crimean port next to the Black Sea, where..... * Ana and I rented a room in an uncomfortable, small stone cottage that belonged to a tiny Armenian woman named Anna Vakhrudinovna, her two sons and their fiancées. * We bought an inflatable green hoop and swam every day in the Black Sea - which was warmer than anything I had showered under during the rest of July. * You can see [View Full Entry]

---

---

I haven't got around to writing much since my trip to Hungary last summer. I would be lying if I said I haven't had the time - it's more a case of me having lost my mojo, now I'm not able to scribble my ideas down in lunch-hour long bursts and without Mr. Volkov's coffee machine to boost my imagination. Perhaps one day an article about Budapest will materialise; I still have my notes, and some of them even make sense. The Hungarian word for 'flowers', virag - written on florists' windows across Budapest - sounds like the Russian word for [View Full Entry]

---

---