Today is about getting our bearings in Kiev and doing a bit of planning of urbex exploration for Saturday. Zak and I headed out early to discover a beautiful city bathed in sunlight, full of well dressed people striding around town with a particular sense of purpose. I was acutely aware that I didn't have ANY Russian or Ukrainian language skills, such that I wasn't even able to say thanks or goodbye, but thanks to a slow speaking taxi driver, I now believe 'spas-ibo' is thankyou and 'dos-du-vanya' is goodbye. I could be totally wrong, so I'm going to confirm this after writing this blog. Tea - are you reading this? Am I right? What other phrases should I have under my belt? 'Two beers please' always seems to come in pretty handy as well.
In lieu of any urbex, Zak and pretty quickly found ourselves up a 86 metre bell tower in the City's cathedral. I'm not brilliant with heights and the precipitous climb around the inside of the giant tower had me hanging on to the hand rail far tighter than I like to admit. The view at the top however was amazing and Kiev revealed itself as an ancient walled city with golden church domes and a winding river cutting through lush green forest.
After the cathedral we explored the war museum / memorial. An inordinate number of tanks and tracked vehicles lined wide boulevard style walkways where ubiquitous loudspeakers played somber and moving traditional Ukrainian / Russian music of the kind you get in Soviet war movies. The place was amazing and there were some truly spectacular statues on a colossal scale commemorating struggles and victories passed. The entire park was overlooked by a defiant robed female holding a sword and a shield emblazoned with a hammer and sickle which made the statue of liberty seem somewhat of a dwarf. Whilst I've taken photos of these things, unfortunately it appears that my 7D will not communicate with my net book, or more specifically, the software that I brought along to install requires a higher resolution machine than I have. Without a card reader, this may mean that photos taken on the 7D have to wait until my return to the UK before I can post them. Bummer. I'll break the IXUS and camera phone out tomorrow to so that at least I can put a tester on this blog.
We're going out for a beer shortly to meet a contact over here to discuss other explorations and put a plan together for Saturday...... time to go drink some Tuborg ..... still haven't found a single Chicken Kiev......
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