Kiev, 28 April–30 April

This is part 1 in an unordered and sporadic series about my trip to eastern Europe. Pictures are mostly taken by Marge, some by Sergey, very few by me until Budapest.

I remember being in Kiev fondly. It is nice to visit a city with somebody local, and in our travel group we have Sergey who lived in Kiev for many years. Kiev, like many of the capitals (not to mention cities) of the former Soviet bloc countries, is not amongst the top European destinations. The only exception I can think of now would be Prague. I knew very little about Kiev and Ukraine before I left other than that it is a former Soviet republic, that they had the Orange Revolution (thanks to Sergey's t-shirt and Yulia Tymoshenko), and that they make pysanky during Easter. There does not seem to be a lot for a tourist to do in Kiev.

We traveled to Kiev from Moscow on the train "Ukraina", painted blue and yellow. They are the Ukrainian national colors and as I would soon find out the Ukrainians really are fond of those colors, maybe partially due to the upcoming ninth of May celebrations and partially due to nationalism. Even now I still associate the color combination with Ukraine. Anyway, not only was the train painted blue and yellow there was a blue and yellow rug in the WC. This immediately put this train above the St. Petersburg–Moscow train because the Ukrainian colored rug absorbs the water or piss or something that always cover the floor of the train WCs... However the toilet paper was still of the state-issued variety.

The Russian tiredness continued. The train left at 2000 and within 30 minutes of departure Sergey and Marge fell asleep. Luke and I decided to sample the Ukrainian beer that might or might not be free that was sitting in our compartment and I must say that beer is one of the most disgusting things I have ever tried. Luckily I had an... accident with the beer some time later and spilt most of it, soaking Luke's backpack and also Sergey's socks. Good for them I say. I was also very sleepy and all I remember of the train ride was disgusting Ukrainian beer, spilling disgusting Ukrainian beer, sleep, Russians grabbing my passport at the border crossing, sleep, Russians returning with my passport (now stamped!), sleep, Ukrainians coming onboard to stamp my passport four hours later, sleep, woken up by the conductor, paying for the food and drink (an incredibly low amount), and we had arrived in Kiev on schedule.

We stayed at Sergey's grandparents' apartment. Sergey's grandfather picked us up from the train in "the limo". The sight that greeted us outside of the train station was a McDonald's and I noted that in Kiev, McDonald's was not in Cyrillic.

The first shower in Kiev felt absolutely wonderful. We slept on trains for the last three nights and so we could not shower. We walked around sightseeing every day, and it was warm in Russia. Luke continued to claim that his feet and socks smelled like a coniferous forest..,

Our days in Kiev passed as follows: wake up mid-morning, eat a leisurely lunch at home, walk around for a few hours, come home to eat dinner, maybe take a walk again afterwards, go home and sleep. We ate kielbasa (which Sergey's grandmother kept telling us that Sergey liked very much) and other sausages, cheese, tasty soups, bread, cheesecake, fruits, so on and so forth. One evening we had dinner at Sergey's other grandmother's apartment and she served meatballs, some kind of small fish that's apparently something Ukrainians must have, varenyky with and without meat, Easter cake, and generally a lot of food. Sergey had to evacuate the apartment because two cats lived there and since he forgot his allergy medicine he was starting to turn red.

My feelings of Ukrainian food are the same as my feelings of European food in general: not something I would eat everyday. I find the food too heavy for my Asian Pacific Rim palate. I did develop a fondness for the soups. I like brothy soups (thick cream soups are not my thing) and the soups Sergey's grandmother made (a borsht and a meatball soup) were wonderful.

The area Sergey's other grandmother lived was what was known as a "bedroom community". All the buildings were the same (literally the same) and people only live there, not work or anything else. I lived in one in California last term too... Because everything looked similar we got lost trying to find the metro after walking along the waterfront for a bit. The manly sense of direction failed and we had to seek help from a minibus.

What did we see in Kiev? We saw some monuments and architecture, squares, statues of the founders of Kiev and of the symbol of Kiev, museums, the forest, the cave monastery. We really just wandered around the city that was built on seven hills, walked down the kashtan tree-lined streets, strolled along the shore of the Dnieper (where there was fish and where Luke dipped his feet), walked about a million steps up the hill, with Sergey and his friend in Kiev Paul leading the way. For some reason we attended a get-together of people from Sergey's high school at a bar that served no Ukrainian beers (we were keen on trying a non-disgusting Ukrainian beer) and Luke and I received the wrong beer (Staropramen instead of Stella). For some other reason I decided that trying to speak French (I took French in grade eight only) would be funny and since one thing led to another I started learning random Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian phrases. Walking around at night practising insulting and not insulting phrases that the Ukrainians may or may not understand was quite something... I was a little annoyed at Sergey for ignoring us at the time (but I understand) and liberally sprinkled his name in the insulting phrases. He was really focused on something else though and didn't notice at all. Oh well, I didn't mind.

The Kiev metro system was very good. Obviously it was not as big or old as the one in Moscow but it passed all my criteria for a good metro system. We never had to wait more than a few minutes for the metro. Because Kiev was very hilly, the stations were built deep underground. In one station we had to take two very very long escalators before we got to the surface. The trains of course had a blue and yellow paint job. At one point we took a tram. According to Sergey the trams and maybe also the trolley buses were being replaced by buses. I love things that run on rails and I felt this was a shame.

In the true tradition of our trip we could not visit Chernobyl. Sergey did not particularly want to go when we were planning the trip but Luke and I convinced him, or maybe he just went along with our enthusiasm for Chernobyl. However the time we were in Kiev coincided with the 20th anniversary of the disaster and the site was only open to official people. Paul did a bit of running around for us before he was told of the situation.

The forest we visited with Sergey's grandfather was planted after WW2, over the front line of Kiev. There were trees, birch trees especially, and leftover pillboxes, barbed wire, and trenches. Sergey's grandfather explained that there was never a big battle in Kiev, and the pillboxes were used for cover fire for the retreating troops. From the empty bottles it looked like the pillboxes were prime locations for vodka consumption. We found the blown-up pillbox. Apparently the people inside blew themselves up to avoid being captured (or something?). How much explosives was necessary to blow up one of those things and they had that much stored inside? There were also monuments and graves to the soldiers who died defending Kiev. Sergey's grandfather told us (and Sergey translated) about Chernobyl as we were walking in the forest. We drove to another area by a lake in the limo afterwards, saw a gecko, and skipped stones.

Marge fell sick on the second day. She probably caught something in Russia. That was one vicious virus and all of us caught it eventually, with varying degrees of severity. In my case the virus stayed with me all the way to Budapest three weeks later.

Sergey's grandparents were great. Sergey's grandmother was especially amusing. She was as equally enthusiastic in communicating with us in English as she was in seeing her grandson. I guess Sergey felt a little funny about this and I found his reactions ("Babushka!") really, really funny. It was like what I expected non-Asian grandmothers to be like. They really were wonderful people, trying to make our stay as good as possible. They took good care of Marge when she was sick and stayed in bed all day, fed us, did our laundry, woke up at 430 so they could drive us to the airport when we flew to Warsaw, and so many other things.

Speaking of the grandparents they had a giant (but still spoon-sized) Nazi trophy spoon from the war that Sergey ate soup from. We saw the same spoon on display in the war museum that we walked a billion steps up to. Paul's friend who worked in the museum told him that there was a corner dedicated to Paul's grandfather and so we tried to find it but failed. It was too bad that the plaques and signs in the museum were all in Russian or Ukrainian because I would really like to be able to read them. Outside there was a little display of military equipment and for a couple of hryvnias we could go inside some helicopter that Sergey and Luke were very excited about. We had already looked at tanks and airplanes in Moscow though.

In our last evening in Kiev Sergey's grandparents asked us if we would like wine. We drank sweet wine in small glasses and toasted to Sergey's grandparents for their hospitality. They proposed a toast to the four of us travelers, that we will always keep in touch, even when we are in different parts of the world, and beware if one of us run off... My closest friends from four years and eight months in Waterloo, the last four months, working on ECE427, playing badminton on Wednesdays and Fridays, talking until sunrise, playing Munchkin and Risk, everything converged in the moment I raised the glass and downed the wine. I am now sitting on the flight to Vancouver, having said goodbye to my friends and to Ontario, soon I will bid Canada farewell, and I sincerely hope that we will keep the promise because these people have made my time in Ontario memorable despite me being on a different stream and despite Luke being the only person in the group whom I knew for more than four months. It was only the first week of our trip but in my mind the goodbyes had already been said, in Kiev.