After a painless flight to Moscow, an extremely long and uncomfortable wait in the disgusting Moscow airport and a short flight, we finally arrived in Kiev a full day after we left Beijing. Our welcome to the country was both amusing and annoying: we had booked a cab to meet us at the airport but when we got through customs there was no one holding a sign with our name on it. After peering at everyone holding a sign at least three times we rang the hotel to find out what had happened. It transpired that the cab driver had come to the airport, not found us, and left. I was gobsmacked. It's an airport. Surely it's obvious that you check the arrivals board, see that the plane is delayed and wait????? No. Apparently not. And then our hostel appeared to be more like someone's house than a hostel. It was weird. I'm pretty sure that two dodgy Ukrainians just opened their house to foreigners because they didn't feel like working. But whatever, it was clean and they were fairly friendly.
I love Ukraine. I have liked it a lot for a long time and have always enjoyed my visits with WJR. However, Kiev is not representative of Ukraine in any way. It's much richer and happier and definitely a more fun place to be than Dnepropetrovsk or Zaparozhye. It probably rivals Odessa for fun factor. We didn't do much while we were waiting for our Chernobyl tour. We ate well (running theme, really), wondered around the city, took a very long walk to a park in the boiling sun, to look at a communist museum (who needs English translations on signs?) and some remaining communist statues. We both much preferred the Ukrainian statues to North Korean. Despite being more 'rough and ready' they actually looked like they were more skilfully designed. It was interesting to watch people climbing over statues that had presumably been created to instil fear and awe in them just twenty years ago.
We also visited the caves we didn't get a chance to see last time we were in Kiev. They're under the Lavra, which is a huge monastery complex, and are visited by millions of pilgrims who want to see dudes under flags in glass boxes. Interesting. Even better than the caves was the miniature museum. Some guy had devoted his life to carving teeny weeny sculptures. They're so small they're all behind extremely powerful microscopes. Some examples of his work are: 'long live peace' engraved on a human hair; a golden chess set sitting on a pin head and a portrait etched into half a poppy seed. Wow. Incredible.
And then Chernobyl day came. It was ok. I'm not sure it was much more than that for me. We saw the reactor, we wandered around a village that was evacuated after the explosion and we ate a truly disgusting meal. We couldn't really hear the commentary as the guide wouldn't/couldn't turn up his microphone so I didn't learn as much as I might have liked to.
That's it. We're done. We're home now. The eagles have landed. Five months of travelling over. Time to rejoin the real world.
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