Kiev, Ukraine (Part 2)

Kiev was SO visually interesting that I had to break this blog into two segments because I just had to share so many pictures!

We started our second day by heading out to the Kiev Funicular. I can't believe this is what a funicular stop looks like in Kiev.  It was opened in 1905 as the St. Michael's Mechanical, but in the 1930's- when St. Michael's was destroyed, it became the Kiev Funicular.  It's 2.5 minutes to the top.

I did not get a picture of how we got to the Kiev Funicular because although we took an Uber, the driver literally didn't know how to get here.  Part of me wants to believe it's because he just didn't speak ANY English at all.  But I feel if you use Google maps and show someone where you want to go, they should be able to get you there.  But, nope.  We figured it out, eventually. Have I mentioned why we were taking Ubers all over the city rather than the super dirt cheap and clean metro?  Because We took an Uber from our apartment in the southern part of the city up to the Funicular and it was under $3 USD.  THAT'S why.

After the short funicular ride to the top, you arrive at a big park on Volodymyrska Hill.  I love that my kids aren't too big or too cool to still have fun on a playground!  Oh and don't mind that sad horse on the far right.

Seeing these two happy and having fun is my everything.

Good thing Daddy is a strong spinner!

After some time on the playground, we walked through the park, which was quiet and really pretty!

Down below is the Volodymyr The Great Monument.  It was built in 1853 but he ruled from 980 to 1015. He was significant in that he brought Christianity to the Ukraine in 988.

I love an empty park with pretty leaves everywhere.

Our next stop was the VERY beautiful St. Michael's Golden Domed Monastery.

This isn't even the real church - it's just a little place for prayer out in the courtyard which was so very pretty.



The Ukrainians must have bought stock in Wedgewood blue paint.

The monastery was founded in the early 1100s, but the church of St. John the Divine was completed in 1713.  The outside was done in the Ukrainian Baroque style but the inside was at least partially done in the Byzantine style of the Middle Ages.

In June/July of 1934, the Soviets destroyed the church (because ... Communism) - including parts that were from the Byzantine style in the 12th century.  Some of it was salvaged - they think.  No one can verify that what is left (which is now in Moscow) is authentic or not.  This particular church was completed in 1999 (some of the inside mosaics weren't completed until 2000.)

We walked into the church, and they were having service!

All the angels and saints, floating on clouds outside of St. Michael's.

Moving on to the next church I wanted to see, we walked by this funny statue! This is a sculpture outside of St. Andrew's church depicting a scene from the Ukrainian film, "Chasing Two Hares"  by the playwright Mykhailo Starytsky.  If you rub the finger of the female lead (Pronia), you will have a happy marriage.  If you rub the bug on the male lead character's butt (Svyryd), then you will gain fortune!

I always love fancy doors - this one is awesome!

As we approached St. Andrew's church, Natalie and I saw this car and went BONKERS.  It's chameleon paint! With a matte finish!

My eyes literally can't handle any more beauty!  LOOK at St. Andrew's!  (Also, happiest photo bomber ever.  Like she was meant to be with our family!)

St. Andrew's is an Eastern Orthodox church that was built in the late 1740s to mid 1750s.  Interestingly, as all churches under Soviet rule in the 1900s were converted to museums, this one had an anti-religion museum inside!  The Empress Elizabeth of Russia (Peter the Great's daughter) oversaw the construction but died before it was completed.

There was a little market being held outside of St. Andrew's and Grant found a Ukrainian hat that rivals his Soviet hat!  This boy loves traditional, military and unique hats!  I like that this hat matches his eye color.  (Swoon!)



I honestly couldn't get enough of this church!  We didn't go inside, but it's very baroque and I read that it even has a pulpit!  Apparently Eastern Orthodox churches rarely have those.

According to the signs they have here at the Church of the Virgin of the Tithe, this was the earliest masonry church in all of Kiev, having been the center of religious activity in the late 10th and early 11th century.  It was built and rebuilt until the Soviets destroyed it in 1936.  The footprint of the building was reconstructed to mimic some of the earlier versions of the church.

You know us... we like to just stroll around any city we visit.  We were trying to walk to Park Landscape Alley from St. Andrew's, and we saw this huge staircase heading down into the direction of the park - so we took it.  (Spoiler: It didn't get us to the park!)



That was a pretty good sized staircase!

Instead, we wound up walking through the very pretty (but apparently very poorly constructed) Vozdvyzhenka neighborhood. It was built in the early 2000s but was meant to mimic the Ukrainian Baroque style of the 17th and 18th centuries. These residences were going from anywhere between $200k to a million dollars.  But then the financial crisis hit, and because the buildings were poorly made, no one really bought them.



The residential section merges nicely into a more commercial area with shops and restaurants.

The kids were arguing who was going to go first and both tried to cram their faces in at the same time, so I'm using Todd's picture instead.  WATCH your hand there, sir!



We stopped by Crab Burger for a late lunch and they have a really nice view from their restaurant!

I bet you didn't know Todd is fluent in Ukrainian and is reading this newspaper with ease.  His face tells you that I'm lying!



Meanwhile, Grant was hard at work on his maps!

After a light, very late lunch, we meandered on, still trying to find our way to the Landscape Park.  How about those gables!

Kiev, you're so delightful.  It's Micky Mouse!  No wait, it's got Lego Man hands!  It's... oh never mind, I have no idea what's going on here.

More pretty fall scenes in Kiev.

You come out of that nice neighborhood and back out into this.  There are definitely parts of Kiev that look like this.  But overall, I would say it was actually a very tidy city!  This was also the base of this MASSIVE hill that we climbed up (to the left.)  I need to get back to CrossFit, stat!

Our hike up (and you can clearly see this in this picture) took us past St. Theodosius of Chernigov which actually only dates back to about 2012.  But those gold domes are sweet.

So now we've finally made it up the giant hill (some might say it felt like a mountain.) Yet still... there is no way to get back down into the Park Landscape Alley.  It was so frustrating.  Finally we found a "road" (ahem, unpaved) that took us there.  But it was super sketchy.  There were these weird buildings and we were pretty certain we had stumbled upon a religious compound.  Don't mind us... we're not trying to trespass!

Our ultimate goal was to get to Peysazhna Alley (or Park Landscape Alley) which is a part of a larger sculpture park called the Kiev Fashion Park.  Finally, we arrived!

The entire park opened in 2011 and is FULL of quirky art.  This one was called the Rubik.

Interestingly, this one was called Love-River, and it used to be just made of metal until someone apparently painted it, and then spray painted graffiti on it.

I didn't get the name of this one as we went up to the actually Landscape Alley which sits up above the park.  But ... it's a pink slug, on flat tires.

The REAL sight to see is the sculpture called Peeing Colors.

The kids were weirdly mortified.  I kind of don't blame them.  The real name of this sculpture is "Rainbow" and it's by Alexander Alekseev.  Shouldn't the yellow kid have green hair?  In going with the theme?

Right around the corner from the Peeing Colors boys, we spotted a painted airplane on the ground.  Kiev must know we love to travel!

The kids ran around this little playground for a bit, although they were slightly too big for it.

That's not disturbing at all.

But somehow I can't stop staring at it.



Meanwhile, we found Patricia the Pigeon, stalking us near the playground.



Bobbing up and down next to a... well, maybe it was supposed to be a ball of Swiss cheese, but I'm not sure why it's red!  And some of the tiles came off, so it looks more like a bowling ball, but with a little mouse on top.



He looks a little worried that he might break the swing set!  Silly adult, swings are for kids!



Before we left the park, Todd and another dad pushed all of the kids on this merry-go-round and really had them going fast!  Teamwork!

This one was actually called "The Roof."  Because it's just a roof!  Get it???

Here is Natalie sitting on "The Arms."   A piece of art, right in the middle of the walkway!

Rain, by Nazar Bilyk shows a man with a giant raindrop on his face as he looks up to the heavens pondering life's biggest questions.

 This is actually a sculpture called "Balance."  This is a photographic series of my kids (and then my husband) playing around on it.  No captions needed!

Literally my favorite pic of Grant. Daddy stands up and BAM.  He's practically laying on the ground.

Our next stop along Landscape Alley was another little playground.  As we walked in, I saw this... and I'm like, "Sure why not...let's just grow some hops in a playground!"

The kids had a great time in this quirky park!  But you kind of need to say what you're seeing out loud to really appreciate how strange it was.  Colorful mosaic tiled faucets.  With eyeballs.  Dripping water.  And donuts.

Yep.  And Grant was having fun getting stuck in the donuts!

Natalie prefers chocolate covered donuts.

Grantie is so dramatically funny!

But the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!

No.  It certainly doesn't. An 8 legged spider with 8 eyes and 8 teeth.

In this section of Park Landscape Alley, there is a children's park with an Alice in Wonderland theme.



Two more of the little girls on top of a stack of pillows acts almost like an archway and welcomes you into the park.



But that might be the creepiest Alice I've ever seen.  She looks like she got her bell rung.  Or she ate a magic mushroom. Oh wait!  She did!

Grant said, "You're not the only one who can get high, Alice!" (Ahhhh, that was a terrible joke but I couldn't resist!)  Grant didn't really say that!

Natalie actually liked this little park because she had been in Alice in Wonderland at the Grafenwoehr Performing Arts Center!

 Just following my family through a park on a pretty fall day in Kiev.

This park just went on forever!  It was so much fun!  You could literally make an ENTIRE trip to Kiev based on finding really cool and unusual statues.  Apparently they are all over the city, and they love them so much that they dedicated an entire park to them!

Ok, it's time for snack time/happy hour.  So we headed for a place that sold pierogies.  On the way there, I spotted our flag.  Not sure why it was there as this wasn't the Embassy!

We got to the corner of Desyatynnyi Lane and Volodymyrska Street and we found this.  Hmmm.  Seems safe.



It's a clock!  But it also tells you the time in other places all around the world!  This is near the USchool on Volodymyrska Street.

It was time for happy hour, so we stopped by this place called Bar Pirog for some snacks and drinks.  I translated this and the first one in the middle section was a drink made with peanuts!  Super annoying.  No drink requires peanuts, ew!

Charlie Chaplin sits with his dog on the bar, next to the draft beer which ranged from $2.65-$3.00.

Natalie, don't move... your hair looks so pretty!

Bar Pirog has this awesome light in the doorway!

All fatted up with some pirogis and beer, we walked back toward our apartment which was a good hike away but we wanted the walk.  We went back through Sofiyivska Square, where we saw this statue.  The eastern Slavic people known as the Cossacks elected Bohdan Khmelnytsky as their Hetmen, which was a military and civil leader.  He led an uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to form an alliance with Russia and establish a new state for the Cossacks, so he gets a statue put up in his honor.

The National Opera of Kiev looked pretty all lit up in the evening.

Despite a lot of graffiti, Kiev is actually a surprisingly clean city.  These ladies were out cleaning and working on a Sunday evening!

Wine bottle art, perhaps?

We literally walked across the entire city (wanted to get our steps in) so we were pretty tired when we reached Kapo di Monti for some dinner.  But it was worth the walk!

While not quite as cool as the Tetris building, I liked this building because the lights made it look like a waterfall on the side of the building.

The Lviv Handmade Chocolate shop was just as funny as the rest of the city!

We bought some wine but of course the cork got stuck, so Todd took a shoe to the bottom of the bottle.  I was SURE he was going to break the bottle, but nope!  He got the cork out!

Then we were eating some bread sticks and drinking some wine when Todd pretended that his bread stick was a cigar.  As he did this, he was CONVINCED he looked like Hannibal from the A-Team.  Oh the fun we have when we travel!

Early in the morning on the day we were going to leave, we got up to visit one more place:  The Chernobyl Museum!  On the way there, I felt we should make a pit stop here.  No water, only beer.  (Side note: We did not make a pit stop.)

Just outside of the Chernobyl Museum is a work by Brazilian graffiti artist Nunca.  That work of art on the left was by artists Warren and Carole Bailey.

I've been spelling everything in the American English way for these blog posts, but you can see it's really spelled, "Chornobyl."  And if you haven't watched the series on HBO, you really must!  We had just finished the series so this was a very timely visit and we got a lot more out of the museum from having watched it. A former co-worker, Maureen Peters had done some of her graduate level work on Chernobyl and she said the series was very factual!

The Chernobyl accident happened on April 26, 1986 - and at the time, I wasn't quite 10 years old which is why I don't remember a whole lot from this incident.  It also occurred in the Ukraine (for the 100th time, Colleen - you don't need "the" before Ukraine!)  Being behind the Iron Curtain meant that we got very little information in America.

The disaster began when the #4 reactor underwent a safety test at the nuclear power plant in Pripyat - about 2.5 hours north of Kiev.  Lots of sciencey things happened (I won't bore you with words - go see the show for all of the details) and a steam explosion resulted that ruptured the reactor core.  For nine days, they could not contain the radioactive leak that continued due to the ongoing fire in the core.

Two people were immediately killed, and 134 emergency workers and staff died in the coming weeks and months from radiation poisoning.

Over 70% of the fall out "fell" on nearby Belarus (it's less than a half hour from Pripyat to the Belarus border.)  But weather conditions affected where the radiation went - at first it drifted north toward Sweden, and then, getting caught up in a cold front, moved south/southeast again.

In Pripyat and around the Chernobyl area, there are still some places that have high levels of radiation, so we chose not to visit with the kiddos, even though people say it's safe and DO visit there all the time - especially since the HBO series was so successful.

Natalie is learning that there was no containment structure over reactor #4 which would have prevented many deaths.  However, one was placed over it very soon after the disaster and a more permanent one was placed over it in 2017 at the cost of $2.1 billion. It's called the New Safe Confinement and it's the "world's largest movable land-based structure."  I didn't get to see that superlative though! (By the way, I'm just kidding, Natalie was talking to her dad across the room!)



The environmental impacts were enormous.  Agriculture, bodies of water, forests, and animals were all affected.  They even had a stillborn pig that had very clear deformities.

The museum isn't huge, but it does have three big rooms. The last room has a fantastic ceiling display with a map of the world depicting where all of the nuclear power plants are in the world.

Beneath the light display is an artistic rendering of reactor number 4.  I really liked this museum, and how it was dedicated to the selfless plant workers, firemen, military and first responders, many who gave their lives to evacuate and clean up Chernobyl after the disaster.  (They called these people "liquidtors.") 

This museum also had a little display area showing how much radiation was currently in the room.  It measures in m/rem which measures a persons biological risk to suffering something harmful from the radiation.  The CDC says that a mammogram emits 70 m/rem, so this was really quite low. 



It's hard to imagine how the families dealt with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster.  The World Heath Organization said there have been 5,000 thyroid cancer cases among children (those under 18 in 1986) who lived in Belarus at the time of the explosion.  It was also said by the WHO that there was a 3-4% increase in cancer deaths among the liquidators, the evacuees and those within the containment zone (which was 30 square mile area around the reactor.)



I really liked this museum, and how it was dedicated to the selfless plant workers, firemen, military and first responders, many who gave their lives to evacuate and clean up Chernobyl after the disaster. 

Some examples of vehicles that assisted in the liquidation of Chernobyl, complete with very flat tires! (Perhaps so they aren't stolen!)

On the corner by the Chernobyl Museum, we were treated to a nice sunset view.  The tram cars in Kiev have a very nostalgic feel to them (as do the metro cars!)  Even though they are obviously dated, it's so cute and clean!

Alas, we had to take our late night flight back from Kiev to Nuremberg - as much as I would have loved to stay a few more days!



Little did I know, we would have an entertaining flight on the way home!



So there was this guy and his friends, and sort of similarly to that awful Spirit airlines experience we had back in 2015, they were uproariously drunk and loud.  Natalie named him, "Three Dollar Chain."  He was super weird with his black turtleneck, big gold necklace, oversized glasses and his wavy blond hair. I'm pretty sure he just stepped out of a John Hughes movie.

Nat and I had a blast laughing at them all evening!  They just kept ordering drinks and the flight attendant kept giving them to them!  They were playing music out loud and squeezing the flight attendant's butt.  (The same flight attendant didn't seem to mind and was also in the back of the plane painting her nails at one point!) Finally a male flight attendant came over and although it didn't sound like he said settle down or anything, they must have sensed they were being obnoxious because they all kind of calmed down.

What a fun time!  Until next time, Kiev!