Blogs from Ukraine, Europe
April 9th 2012
Turkey to Odessa, Ukraine We left Malta and continued sailing to Kusadasi, Turkey, the port to go to Ephesus. We docked right in the downtown area and it is an easy walk to shops and restaurants, although the streets are very crowded and the merchants bombard you with merchandise all with a “special price just for you”. We had walked around Ephesus before, so we decided to take a tour to an outlying village of Sirance. Here we walked through the small village and then went to a private home for a typical Turkish lunch. We had to remove our shoes before entering the home. To the right was a living room with TV and chairs. We were directed up some wooden stairs to the next level where they had a bench on all four sides ... read more
March 18th 2012
From the northernmost limits of the former Soviet Union to the westernmost, from the Siberian Arctic to the tranquil, warm, historical European town of Lviv, was 3.5 days of train travel and a temperature rise of more than 40°C. People came and went, the train's denizens morphing from one sort to another as surely as did the landscape through which we traveled. At Moscow I changed trains, the oil and gas workers returning from months-long stints in the north who had made up the majority of the passengers on the way south now dispersing on various trains to their respective corners of the former USSR. They were replaced by Ukrainians returning home from months-long stints in Moscow who brought with them bags full of chicken, eggs, little boxes of salt, salami, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers and vodka ... read more
December 8th 2011
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October 23rd 2011
Pe 21.10. Jetlag painanut pari päivää aika hyvin ja nyt perjantaina klo 17 lähtö 5hlön voimin Kiovaan viikonlopuksi. Air Balticin lennolla ja Riiassa on ruhtinaalliset 30min vaihtoaikaa. Onneksi ei ole mukana kuin käsimatkatavarat, joten ei pitäisi olla kuitenkaan ongelmaa. Kiovasta on varattu ihan ytimestä Hotel Ukraine, jonka omalta parvekkeelta on ihan huikeat näkymät itsenäisyyden aukiolle.Lähdettiin kävelemään ympäri keskustaa ja hakemaan jotain safkaa. Löydettiin aika kiva bistrotyyppinen paikka, jossa otettiin borschia ja pelmeneitä.Hyvää oli ja sen jälkeen alkoi unikin maistua. Maistettiin myös jotain paikallista paloviinaa, johon on sotkettu hunajaa ja chiliä – aika tiukkaa tavaraa. La 22.10. Brekkarin jälkeen mentiin suoraan oopperalle ostamaan illan näytökseen, Tsaikovskin Jolanta, liput. Sieltä jatkettiin Golden Gaten kautta St.Sophien kir... read more
October 18th 2011
Everything in Kiev is Grand Our start in Kiev wasn’t the best we could hope for. We did not get the overnight express we counted on and we had to settle down for a different, less 'luxurious' one. Later on we learnt that train number can tell a lot. Any small number, preferably with double zero in front is the best. The one we wanted was 092N so not bad at all and we came to Kiev on the 134 one. It was not bad at all as for 3rd class, we slept through out the night with no problems at all. The only negative point about this train was that it arrived in the afternoon and we had to hang around until we were able to head to our Couch Surfing place for the next ... read more
Are we in Ukraine yet?? This place looks like Krakow !
Published: October 26th 2011Europe » Ukraine » Lviv
October 15th 2011
We crossed the border in Medyka – on the main road from Przemysl to Lviv. There is a lot of information available on the crossing process and timing but it really depends on the day and hour. We have heard stories that some people were stranded for more than 20h only because they refused to pay 'a little benefit to the guard' . Unfortunately this ways have not changed since Soviet Time. Initially we were supposed to drive with our parents to Lviv but after reading about these hours of ques we decided to take a direct bus (5 GBP each) as this way crossing is smooth and short. Planned journey time was 3h we made it in 4h so not that bad at all. Another way is to take an Intercity train (15-20GBP each) as ... read more
October 15th 2011
The Jewish restaurant wasn’t far at all but it was hidden in the maze of small streets around Stary Rynok. It is located very close to the Arsenal building however you cannot reach it from there. We saw people passing by and taking photos of it but we were not sure if they had known about this place from somewhere and came to see it or just happened to pass by. We have not found information about this place in any of the guides we read, nor we have heard about it from the Polish guys we met (they had an advantage when it comes to sights and local places as their friend has been living in Lviv for 6 years now). Maybe just local people know about it?? Never the less, the exterior of the ... read more
October 11th 2011
Sentencing day. Apparently the Constitutional Court had falsified enough evidence to pass a verdict. Tymoshenko was faced with seven years in prison and that's exactly what she got. Accompanied by her husband and daughter (and her rather fancy iPAD) she was merely waiting for the inevitable. I made it down to Kreschatik about an hour before the verdict was read. My immediate reaction was one of sheer disappointment. I estimated at most 2000 people were taking part in the protest, and many of them were pensioners, mostly women. I can't say that I was very surprised though, for two reasons. First, many Ukrainians have become entirely jaded after the failed Orange Revolution in 2004 and see no value in taking to the streets once again. Second, Tymoshenko is not exactly an innocent lamb and many people, ... read more
September 9th 2011
There were gloves and a scarf in it, not to mention a woolly hat, the day Val took me to their family apartment to her mother. Donetsk in Ukraine is a city of about two million people and four full seasons. It has forty-plus summers and minus-twenty winters and we’d not reached the summer yet. It took me a while to come across her name these years later. It’s Tanya. I suppose it’s a peculiar habit to get about renaming people quite independently of whatever arrangement of letters the rest of the world has granted them, but I often do. It’s why her regular name didn’t come easily, because I never used it. It may be my mother’s inheritance, because in her family several of the names in use have no correspondence to birth certificates. As ... read more
September 9th 2011
Before I forget, video diary 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwptSSazQg&feature=youtube_gdata And video diary 4 (which is my personal favourite!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCFLUGeW6U&feature=youtube_gdata So yes, St Petersburg was beautiful. We wandered around the city to see all the famous churches etc and went round the Hermitage. We managed to see quite a lot of it I think. By the end we had very sore feet and felt all cultured out. I particularly enjoyed the State Rooms and the 19th & 20th Century art. We also met some guys who had bought a bus from an old people's home and taken out the seats and put in bunk beds and a sofa and were driving it from London to Bankok! Which is pretty darn cool. We then got a train at 2:40 am back to Moscow, because we couldn't go straight from St ... read more
