Blogs from Kyiv, Ukraine, Europe

When in Kiev… have Chicken Kiev What a great city. It is kept very clean by old women with brooms made of sticks sweeping the streets and scrapping gum off the pavement at 6am and 6pm. It was a very walkable city with 3 of its main attractions being orthodox churches with gold domes. Jim and I went one day on the metro 3 or 4 stops away from anything touristy what so ever. It was not as clean as the city center, and the architecture was a soviet block style apartment houses. What is very interesting about this city are the stalls to sell things. They are everywhere. They pop up on city streets (both in city center and away) and under the street, which I will get to later. The nightlife was great. Somewhat ... read more

With less than 2 weeks until we return to Washington DC, the place where our adventure began, we find ourselves again in Moscow ready to head to our large apple, aka New York City. We split our time between Kiev and Odessa. Our Ukrainian friend from DC Anna set us up with a home stay with her parents. We stayed in her old room even. The food they prepared was amazing. Everything maybe except the sala, which is the top layer of pig fat with spices. I tried a bite. Its like chewing gum with an aftertaste. I hope it won't remain in my stomach for 7 years. We also had nalishniki, a favorite. It is a bit like a crepe with some cheese inside. This cheese is hard to find in the US and I ... read more

When planning the trip, we decided to fly to Kiev from Vilnius because it was the cheapest place to fly to in order to get to Asia. We also thought that it would be a good opportunity to spend an afternoon and night in another European capital city. It's fair to say that the reality didn't quite live up to what we hoped for and was a big change from the homely comfort of the winding cobbled streets of Vilnius. We had to take two flights to get to Kiev: Vilnius-Riga and Riga- Kiev. The flights were uneventful other than for our extreme hunger in Riga airport (we had had to get up at 4 in the morning to get to Vilnius airport and then we flew to Riga and realised that we had no local ... read more

After Hannah left us for the airport in Warsaw, Clay and I headed to the bus station for our night bus across the border to Ukraine. As expected, it was a horrible journey and we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep as we were off and on the bus quite regularly and arrived into Lvov exhausted. So a train station in peak hour also filled with gypsies with 10 kids each who don’t understand how queues work was not exactly what I was after. Thankfully I found a woman who spoke English and we managed to book first class tickets for our night train to Kiev. We definitely needed the luxury! After that, we escaped the station and set out to explore Lvov. It was a nice enough city but honestly there wasn’t a lot ... read more

When Ukraine decides to get on your nerves, it's your ears that suffer first. A day might start with the metallic whistle of a leaky shower, or by switching on the television to silly pop music, or going to work on a grumbling metro train and buses that screech and hiss. Rush hour is at its best a monotonous urban hum, at its worst - a collective grunt. But all of this can be forgiven when Ukraine makes music. Needing to clear my head, I took a Sunday stroll along the most illogical route I could think of: I walked from Pechersky market to the Kyivska Rus cinema, via Bessarabska square, Khreshchatik, Evropeiska square, St. Michael’s cathedral, the outdoor gift and souvenir market on Andriyvskiy Uzviz, Velyka Zhytomyrska and Reitarska streets, Lvivska square and Artema street. ... read more

November is Ukraine's most melancholic month. The temperature falls below freezing, and the orange and yellow leaves that make October so picturesque fall on to the street and are trodden into dirty puddles (the Ukrainian word for November, Listopad, means "fall of leaves"). The plain, snowless clouds feel low enough to touch. People discard their colourful autumn clothes and clamber into black and dark grey coats. A cold wind blows stern looks onto our faces - autumn forgotten, the country settles in for an attritional winter. It isn't just the weather that gnaws at the nation's mood. Political graffiti is smeared across the walls of an underground passageway near my office, a mark of Ukrainians' frustration at the repugnant choices available to them for the approaching general elections. Whether Yulia Tymoshenko or Viktor Yanukovich becomes president ... read more