Weekend in Kiev

Having been in Kiev, Ukraine for the weekend, I didn't get a chance to update my blog until now. So this will be a long one :) Also, it's kind of late because I'm working on my final for the intensive language portion of the program.

View down the train

Group with Kate (purple jacket) -
(Grace's photo)

On Friday after we got out of our classes, we headed over to the train station with tons of food for the 13-hour train ride. While we were sitting outside waiting for the train, we were all talking and joking around when a guy came up to us to ask us in a Texan accent where we were all from. It was a little funny to hear someone speak English without a Russian accent for a change. He said that he heard me first and knew we were American. I guess I'm loud :P He was very nice, though. After boarding the train, we were waiting and waiting for Sam. When the train started moving, we knew he had missed the train. Luckily, he speaks Russian and wasn't too thrown off by missing it. Sam was supposed to be in my little compartment area on the train (they weren't true compartments because we were in third class, which doesn't have walls) so I decided to make friends with the other two Russian people in my compartment, Kate and Sergei. When they realized I was with a group and that we were split up, they offered to switch places so we could be closer together. It was so nice of them to offer their seats to us so we told them to come back to hang out with us during the train ride. Mistake. Sergei didn't come back - I think he just wanted to sleep or something. But, Kate came back and turned out to be a little crazy. She kept waking up Mikael and saying she was going to sleep in his bed with him, grabbing Eric, crying to Taylor, and speaking really quietly to us in Russian so we didn't understand. She was really strange. She made some of the group nervous when she started obsessively talking about customs and even telling us to tell them that we were her friends. We, of course, did not do that and tried our best to ignore her.

In the middle of all the Kate craziness, the train stopped in the strangest place. It was dark outside but not too late when we stopped at a station in rural Russia. While that doesn't sound that strange, the number of people selling giant stuffed animals strapped to their bodies made it a little weirder. We got off the train and walked through the people, but it was overwhelming to be yelled at in Russian and knocked into by people holding giant crocodile stuffed toys. We got back on the train and "slept" until customs came by to wake us up. I didn't sleep well because they kept the lights on the whole time and the bed was too short to keep my feet from hanging over the people walking by. We made it into Kiev at around 5:30 am and started walking to the hostel. After a bit of an adventure trying to follow the directions, the really nice people at the hostel let us in to put our stuff down, take showers, and hang out in the common room until we were ready to explore the city.

Group in front of St. Michael's

After we left the hostel, we walked down to Independence Square. On the way we passed by a movie filming by what we learned were the Golden Gates of Kiev - the historic gateway into the city. It wasn't open at the time, but we got to peek through the gates and see inside.

Movie set with fake snow

One of the first things I noticed about Kiev was that it seemed much cleaner (especially the air) and friendlier than Moscow.

Once we got to Independence Square, we were able to meet up with Sam, who caught the later train and arrived at 8ish. We ate breakfast and then walked over to Saint Michael's Cathedral, which is apparently properly called "Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery". It was a beautiful group of buildings. The original was built in the Middle Ages but it was demolished by Soviet authorities in the 1930s and rebuilt after Ukraine gained independence. Outside of the church, there was a little structure that people went inside and tried to balance coins on a fountain-looking thing. I have no idea what they were doing, but we tried to do the same thing. It didn't work very well.

 After we left St. Michael's, we walked over to St. Sophia's Cathedral, which was originally built in the mid-1000s AD (obviously a lot of it has been rebuilt/restored, but it still has some original things). We got to climb the bell tower, which gave a beautiful view of the city and the church.

After we left the church, we went over to Andrew's Descent, walked down it, and walked to the Chernobyl Museum. We got a guided a tour of the museum and it was interesting to hear about the Chernobyl disaster, since I didn't know much about it. At that point, we got really hungry and went to dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant, which was absolutely delicious. It was probably the best food I've eaten since I left the United States. It definitely beats out Russian food. We had our own room for dinner and had a great time. We were really tired after doing everything during the day, but we really wanted to check out the Ukranian National Opera, so we walked to the opera house and saw Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, which was great and extremely affordable (~$1.25 USD!!). After the opera was over we walked back to the hostel where we watched Indiana Jones and talked to some of the other people staying there before we passed out.

On Sunday morning, we woke up and got ready for another busy day. We ate two breakfasts: one at a Ukrainian cafe and one at a French cafe. The French cafe was absolutely delicious. I could eat everything in there for the rest of my life and be happy. After breakfast, we went to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra<, a monastery that had caves with bodies of monks in them. We had to rent skirts at the front because women weren't allowed to wear pants. We didn't know that before, but we had been warned that we should bring headscarves to wear when we went in churches or the caves. After we went to the caves, we walked over to a WWII memorial park. They had some cool statues and tanks, but I just sat and looked at it all from one place because I was so tired from walking around and not sleeping well. Then, we walked over to the metro and rode it back to Independence Square. We went back to Andrew's Descent to buy souvenirs again. Things were soooooooo cheap in Kiev! It was much, much more affordable than Moscow. Even the souvenirs that were targeted at tourists who knew nothing about prices were ridiculously cheap. We had planned to go to a Georgian food place for dinner, but when we got there, we found out that it had closed down. We discussed where to go after that and ended up deciding on an Indian restaurant. It was decent - not as good as the Ukrainian place, but I enjoyed it anyway. We went back to the hostel to pick up our stuff and headed back to the train station to catch our 9:30 train. We stayed up pretty late into the night having a great time, laughing and talking, and then slept until we got into Moscow at 10:30, in time for our morning class!

I completely fell in love with Kiev and had an amazing time. This is what being abroad is about. I put more pictures up at http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=HeidiGT&target=ALBUM&id=5519405336678094657&authkey=Gv1sRgCOfKlZGgkMqG5wE&feat=email so feel free to check them out!