Kiev is a beautiful city. I wasn't expecting it to like Kiev as much as I did; I figured it would look like any big Soviet city, filled with lots of big, boxy buildings, threaded with overly wide avenues, and congested with junky Ladas and old KAMAZ trucks. My expectations, however, were totally off base. Kiev (at least the central part of the city) is really beautiful. The architecture is also fairly European, and it is well maintained. Kiev is a lot cleaner than Moscow, although it is only a fraction of the size.
We were in Kiev for the day on Monday and Thursday: Our trains arrived in the morning on those days, and we had night trains to different cities that left in the evening. So we had to fill a lot of time (from like 5am to 10 or 11pm) in Kiev on those days, and so we saw a lot of the city's attractions. On Christmas Eve, we explored the central part of the city. Then we visited the enormous Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, a monastery that is famous for its cave-like catacombs. We explored the catacombs, which was a pretty intense experience. The catacombs consist of a very narrow, twisting passage that connects chambers filled with the coffins of Orthodox monks. I barely fit in the tunnel--it is definitely not a place if you suffer from claustrophobia. Also, there are no electric lights, so everyone holds candles to light their way. Imagine wending your way along a twisting passage, passing coffins from the 15th century, watching bearded Orthodox monks kiss the coffins, and the whole experience happens in feeble, flickering candlelight and amid the kind of heavy, reverent silence that you are afraid to penetrate with even a whisper.
We then visited the Chernobyl museum, which was very powerful, although everything was in Ukrainian. We understood enough to comprehend the exhibit, and we definitely understood more than the clueless Americans who came in just as we were leaving (they didn't know enough Russian to buy a ticket--we had to help them with that). The museum gave a good picture of how the recovery operation worked, where the radiation spread, how the officials in Moscow handled the disaster, and what has happened in the 25 years after the accident. I've heard that people in St. Petersburg still get regular thyroid checkups because of the radiation from Chernobyl. After our visit to the museum, we walked around the center of Kiev for a while and explored. It was snowing hard, which made the whole city even more beautiful. We caught our train to Lviv later that evening. Here are some pictures of our first day in Kiev:
We were in Kiev for the day on Monday and Thursday: Our trains arrived in the morning on those days, and we had night trains to different cities that left in the evening. So we had to fill a lot of time (from like 5am to 10 or 11pm) in Kiev on those days, and so we saw a lot of the city's attractions. On Christmas Eve, we explored the central part of the city. Then we visited the enormous Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, a monastery that is famous for its cave-like catacombs. We explored the catacombs, which was a pretty intense experience. The catacombs consist of a very narrow, twisting passage that connects chambers filled with the coffins of Orthodox monks. I barely fit in the tunnel--it is definitely not a place if you suffer from claustrophobia. Also, there are no electric lights, so everyone holds candles to light their way. Imagine wending your way along a twisting passage, passing coffins from the 15th century, watching bearded Orthodox monks kiss the coffins, and the whole experience happens in feeble, flickering candlelight and amid the kind of heavy, reverent silence that you are afraid to penetrate with even a whisper.
We then visited the Chernobyl museum, which was very powerful, although everything was in Ukrainian. We understood enough to comprehend the exhibit, and we definitely understood more than the clueless Americans who came in just as we were leaving (they didn't know enough Russian to buy a ticket--we had to help them with that). The museum gave a good picture of how the recovery operation worked, where the radiation spread, how the officials in Moscow handled the disaster, and what has happened in the 25 years after the accident. I've heard that people in St. Petersburg still get regular thyroid checkups because of the radiation from Chernobyl. After our visit to the museum, we walked around the center of Kiev for a while and explored. It was snowing hard, which made the whole city even more beautiful. We caught our train to Lviv later that evening. Here are some pictures of our first day in Kiev:
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