10 best moments, in no particular order:
1. Having a personal walking tour drawn on our map for us. --When we asked the guy running the desk at our hostel if there were any free walking tours of Kiev he said "Ah, walking tours, yes!" and proceeded to draw a line through the city of where we should go, giving a running commentary and circling important things. It turned out to be a great little tour, I think we completed the whole thing in pieces during the time we were there.
2. Kievo Pecharsky Lavra --The Cave Monastery. It was amazingly beautiful, and gave us a great view of the city too. We walked through the catacombs where there were some bodies from the 11th century that didn't decompose. That part was really creepy.
3. Seeing the Ukrainian President drive by, twice --Okay so maybe it wasn't the president, but when we were walking from the Presidential palace to a nearby park there were police directing traffic and then a black car drove by with a police escort. We kept walking and on the next road it drove by again, pulling up to the parliament building a few blocks from us. So perhaps the president was being escorted to parliament? It was the middle of the day.
4. Puzata Hata --The buffet-style restaurant that became our regular lunch (and sometimes dinner) spot. So delicious and so cheap. Perogies with cherries, cottage cheese or poppyseed stuffed crepes, apple-filled things that were somewhere between a pastry and crepe, and these great little pancakes called "oladke." I always left there in a great mood.
5. Being able to read menus in cyrillic! --Okay, this is just my moment to be proud because the little bit of Russian I've learned came in handy. Luckily, Ukrainian names for different types of food aren't too different. And for words I didn't know, I could just read them out to Gab who speaks fluent Slovak and she could translate if they were similar words. It was a pretty good system!
6. Taking the metro --We didn't do it very often, we walked most of Kiev, but it was an experience! Everything moved really really fast, from the escalator that whisked us away to the platform, to the metro trains which produced massive gusts of wind as they blasted by, to the people running from one train to the next. I know metros are supposed to be fast, but everything about this one really was. I also loved how there were chandeliers in the metro stations, and almost no handles in the trains so every time it stopped and started I fell over.
7. Seeing a group of old men sitting by the water playing chess. --Well, this explains itself.
8. Randomly coming across a group of older Ukrainians doing some kind of circle dance in the entrance to the metro -- To get back to our hostel we had walk through a few underground passageways (instead of crosswalks) and a lot of them connected to the metro. One night we descended the stairs and found a little band set up and people dancing, directly under the street! An old man came up and asked me something in Ukrainian, I told him I didn't speak Ukrainian. He said "Deutsch?" and I said no, English or French. Then he said "Ah! Frantzuski!" and continued to speak in Ukrainian. I continued to speak in English, telling him I didn't know what he was saying, and the conversation continued on like this for quite some time. I think he might've be asking me to dance, and I tried to explain I don't know the dance. Of course I could be completely wrong, we were really having two entirely different conversations.
9. Andriivsky uzviz --This was a steep, winding street topped by the gorgeous turquoise St. Andrew's church. The streets were lined with the only tourist stands in Kiev, where Gab and I bought what seemed like the last two patches in all of Kiev, and there were also a lot of stands and stores for local artisans selling jewelry and paintings and things.
10. St. Sophia's --This was really cool because the church was set up like a bit of an archaeology museum. The outside showed some of what the church looked like when it was first built, and inside there were sections of the floor which showed uncovered mosaics.
Having enjoyed ourselves immensely in Kiev, we headed off to get our flight to Berlin via Riga, Latvia. So I can say I've had an aerial view of Latvia, and that the airport in Riga was really nice!
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