Kiev and Back

10/06/2010

This last week has been insane. I guess I’ll just start with my trip to Kiev. For anyone who thinks train is the way to go, you’re wrong. Maybe it’s because we got the cheap seats, but still holy crap I hated it. Twelve hours in a cramp smelly cart with smelly Russians is no good. It was set up so there were four beds on the left side, vertical with the wall of the train, and two horizontal on the right side. On the way there I was on the lower left bed, and across from us was a much too friendly Russian. If you’ve seen Eurotrip he was kind of like the guy who kept bugging them in that, just less hands-on. He kept calling us his “America friends,” and told us not to sleep. Well he decided to leave and was trying to ask us to watch his stuff. He said watch my luggage, then pointed to his coat. We said it was a jacket, and he said “Nonono, soopere jzhacket!” That’s how super jacket sounds with a think Russian accent. That got us all laughing for a bit, and then we decided to go to bed.

Ardo was up later when he came back and said that he was looking lovingly down at me. It’s the hair, I know. The bad thing about traveling by train is that you have to cross the border. So they wake you up 2-3 times throughout the night and it sucks. I felt like I had no sleep the next day. Oh and some dip was trying to sell really loud toys and woke us all up about two hours away from Kiev. Eventually we got there, and the Ukrainian money is worth more than the Ruble so it was a bummer to exchange it. We met the ILP native coordinator outside the train station and she took us to our apartment.

So the day we got there was Friday, and for that day we did most of the tourist stuff. The thing that is super boring now is seeing all the churches/monasteries/cathedrals. Saturday. Two of the girls got lost as well. One of them lost their wallet, she thought she may have left it back at the temple, so her and another girl stayed behind. Well the whole group didn’t wait for them, and our cell phones don’t work out there, so we had no idea where they were. Ardo and I stayed at the apartment instead of going to the temple and we met up with the rest of the group outside of the statue to the Motherland, or something like that. Then we went to a a place called Lavra that had mummified monks. We were thinking it would be like Indian Jones style caves and the mummified monks sitting on stone blocks. Nope. They were in glass cases covered with cloth and you couldn’t take pictures. At least it was free. That was what we did during the day on Saturday.

Saturday nights in Kiev they shut down the main road for a concert/party thing. A few of us didn’t want to be lame so we went out to see Friendship Bridge. Friendship Bridge was given to Kiev after the USSR was disbanded. They call it the Bridge of Oppression for obvious reasons. Ardo, Jennifer, and I were at the bridge and we heard a louder concert. So we decided to go to it. We had to walk through a really dark forest path that was kind of intimidating looking back at it, but we were in the moment and didn’t care. We got to the bottom, crossed the bridge to a cool island thing, and right as we got to the concert it was over. Oh, it was on a beach, so I’ve been on a beach in Ukraine.

On our way back we kept hearing people say “angliski,” which is Russian/Ukrainian for English. We assumed they were talking about us, so instead of going back the way we knew, we went with the crowd to the city. We got lost. We wouldn’t admit it at the time, but we were REALLY lost. We walked for about 2 hours thinking we knew where we were going. We had no idea. We knew we had to go up (the city is sprawling over a small valley) to get to our apartment. The street we went up was spooky. Dark, speeding cars, lots of places for muggers to hide. Yeah it was really stupid. We got to the top and still had no idea, so just kept walking.

We always remember one building, and that building is McDonald’s. We saw one and headed in that direction. When we got closer we realized we had walked all the way back to the train station. I think the total miles we walked was about eight, I’ll get on Google maps and find out for sure. So we, being very tired, hired a cab to take us back.

Sunday came and we were exhausted. We had to vacate the apartment by noon so we left early to stash all of our luggage in the train station lockers. Then we went to the Chernobyl museum, which was unfortunately closed, but we found a Mexican restaurant. So we went back and go the rest of the group and headed back to get some Russian Mexican food. It was pretty good. My teaching group was pretty tired, so we decided to just go back and look around the souvenir place. That got boring fast and we decided to hang out in McDonald’s. We sat in McDonald’s for four hours. They had wireless and we were tired, don’t judge. It was pretty fun thought. After the four hours we went back to the station, met up with the rest of the group, and headed to the train.

They told us that most train stations still had squatters. In case you don’t know what that is I’ll describe it to you. It’s a small platform you squat on to poop. I didn’t know at the time that was all they had, so I had to go. I got a hole in one! I’m soooo proud of myself! The train ride back was less fun, we were all very worn out. The only woke us up two times this ride, so I slept a lot better. 12 hours later we got back to Russia and back to teaching. That’s my trip to Kiev!