Kyiv days 1 and 2

26^th of June

We got off our night train from Odessa at 8am in Kiev. Our hostels directions were fairly easy to follow and we were there in no time. We spent a few hours chatting with the owner while we waited out the rain but at 11am we gave up and donned our rain coats. It was a 5 minute walk to the hub of the city: Maydan Nezaleznhosti. There, we looked around in the underground mall for an English bookstore we had read about. The mall is a maze and after about 1 hour we decided the bookstore was non existent so we headed towards the Museum of the Great Patriotic War on the Metro. From the Metro station the museum was quite a long walk which was made longer by a man who would not let us through a fence due to some music festival. We did a bit of bush crashing up a steep forested hill and popped out in a large square in front of a giant (62M high) statue of a woman holding a sword and a shield with the hammer and sickle emblem. There was a tank, a large soviet realist style statue of soldiers advancing, and victory music playing in the background. We concluded that this must be the War Museum. We entered through a door in the grassy mound that serves as the base of Rodina Mat (the large statue), bought tickets and started to look around. The museum was all in Russian but you didn't need to read to understand the exhibits. In one room there was a very long table set with glasses, lining the table were telegrams sent to notify parents that their son had been killed. There were also things like a bicycle powered radio, lots of propaganda posters mostly of the “101 Ways To Kill A Nazi” variety and many Nazi and Soviet war medals. The museum was a really interesting look into how much the Ukrainian people suffered during WWII.

27^th of June

Well, unfortunately we woke up today to buckets and buckets of rain. We stayed in all morning getting things like schoolwork and laundry done before our hostel owner drove us to the supermarket to buy food for the next few days. After we had dropped off the groceries we walked to St Sophia's cathedral, only to find out it was closing early, in 15 minutes, because it was a holiday. It started to rain a little harder so we gave up and went home. We had stir fry for supper and are hoping to get something done tomorrow.

The hub of Kyiv

Rodina Mat

A prime example of Soviet realist design

A grey day in Kyiv

Odessa

Odessa

Read my Dad's blog for a detailed blog about the boat trip from Batumi to here, Odessa.

23^th of June 2011

We are staying in a weird hotel called Tokyo Star. There is 1 receptionist for 600 rooms, and the rooms are clean yet tiny. It's like those drawer hotels in Japan except a bit bigger. Odessa is gorgeous, it is like a warmer, miniature St Petersburg, with it's grid streets and Russian (pre-soviet) architecture. There are not many “must-sees” in Odessa, but wandering around the leafy streets is great none the less. On our first day here we were walking around the Opera house when my Mom spotted a ticket office. She found out that we could get tickets to “La Boheme” on the 23^rd, for 20 UAH (2.45 $) each and decided that we would all go even though our wardrobe is hardly formal. We ended up with 4 tickets for a slightly higher than expected price of 30 UAH (3.68 $). We spent the day before going the show wandering around town, booking train tickets and eating Borscht. At 6:40, we went inside to find our seats. We climbed up some stairs, up some more stairs and up one more flight of stairs before arriving at what we assumed must be our seats. A women showed us to seats 108, 110,112 and 114 and a few minutes later the lights went out and the curtain was raised. The show was, like most Operas, a fairly simple story of love and death, lots of fancy costumes and loud singing. The orchestra was, personally, the highlight, although the auditorium itself was quite incredible, with lots of gilding, paintings and statues.

We have been having a bit of trouble communicating in Odessa, it seems that English is even sparser than in Georgia, I can read the Cyrillic lettering and that is handy for street names and such but even though I can pronounce it does not mean I know what it means. We have learnt how to use bus number 148 from the train station to the centre and that is all we need really. Tomorrow we are planning to head over to Arcadia beach which is supposed to be tacky and busy, especially in summer.

24^th of June 2011

We got out of our closet fairly late this morning, had some sort of apple pastry from the nearby market for breakfast and went to catch a tram. We knew that Arcadia beach was the end of the line on tram number 5. When we saw a number 5 we hopped on, paid our fare and sat inside for about 15 minutes before the conductor motioned for everyone to get off. We had a quick look around and realized that we were not at the beach but in fact at the airport, oh well. We crossed the street and got back on the same tram which had just turned around. It took about 30 minutes to get to Arcadia, and those trams are not smooth, fast and quiet as they are in other European countries. The tram is most likely from Stalinist times and the rails from even before that, maybe I'm exaggerating but it sure looks that way. An interesting thing about the trams is that nearly all of the tram drivers and conductors are women; the bus drivers seem to be men. The tram emptied out on a wide pedestrian boulevard leading to the sea. The beach at Arcadia is quite interesting, it is mostly taken up by private clubs although there are a few cramped patches of public beach, the food and drink is fairly expensive, and there are plenty of kitschy souvenir stalls. It is a good place place for people watching but not great for swimming (the water is about as cold as Lake Superior). We sat on a shady bench near for about 30 minutes, eating raspberries and watching life go by. For lunch, I went to a doner kebab shop. A little later Mhari and Dad decided that they were hungry as well and they went to a small restaurant. Dad pointed at what he assumed meant doner kebab because there was a picture of one beside it. Mhari did the same except with a hamburger. A few minutes later a man brought them their meals; for Dad, a bread roll with chicken, carrots and mayo, and for Mhari, a large crepe with dill flavoured cheese inside. Not what they were expecting but they were hungry so they eat it anyways. We are back in our closet hotel now, soon we will go out for a walk and to buy some more train tickets and later try to Skype my uncle to sing Happy Birthday. Have a good one Matthew.

Onion Domes

Old Building

Tram

Opera house

Last days in Georgia

We took a Marshrutka from Borjomi to some other town, and from there to Batumi. The bus to Batumi was very squished seeing as most people were either coming home from shopping sprees in Tbilisi or going to Batumi for a vacation and bringing a different outfit for each day. The rest of the family had a great ride except I was stuck beside an extremely fat guy whose thigh is now imprinted into my leg. The ride only got worse when the driver started playing Justin Bieber tunes, boy was I glad to get off.

The area of Batumi that borders the coast is full of renovated old buildings, fountains and posh hotels whereas about 500 metres back crumbling old apartments and horribly potholed roads are the norm. There is a great park called “Batumis Bulvari” that runs along the beach. It has cafes, restaurants, dancing fountains and lots of sculptures. We found a great restaurant that serves these little Russian dumplings and a really good soup, we ate here quite a bit. The reason we came to Batumi was to catch a ship to Odessa, we are on this ship as I write but we are letting my Dad write that blog so you can check it out there.

Observations on Georgia

• Many grey Soviet apartment have been repainted in bright colours
• Cigarettes cost between 1 and 2 dollars a pack
• Vodka can be bought for as cheap as 3.50$ for 500 ml
• Kachipuri (cheese pies or pastries) are really good and cost about 1 dollar
• The bus stations are nearly as bad as the Indian ones
• People lose their temper a lot, a shock coming from the Middle East where it is unheard of to raise your voice
• Restaurants are much harder to come by here than they were in most other countries we visited, but they're worth the effort
• I smoke at least 2 packs a day just from second hand smoke
• Georgian men smoke at least two packs a day, and that's just the first hand stuff
• I wish we brought trekking equipment because the hiking opportunities are amazing
• There are Soviet era statues and monuments all over the place
• The roads are either unpaved, paved or used to be paved but now only half the paving remains
  
  
  By the way it was not my choice to have the bullets as flowers, I just don't know how to change it.

Georgia 2

Wow, we have spent a week exploring Georgia a bit more and all I can say is that the landscape is incredibly beautiful. We went from Tbilisi to Kazbegi and stayed in a great guesthouse (Emma's Guesthouse) for 4 nights. One day we walked up to a dramatically perched church on top of a hill overlooking the town. I was sick, with a cold and the runs so I went back with Mhari and my parents walked further uphill for another two hours or so. Our guesthouse served really good food and we went to a family dinner, my Dad wrote a good post about that one so just check his blog. We spent another day in a beat up Soviet Lada taxi driving to the Russian border and some waterfalls. At one point we were driving on a steep, rocky track and somehow that incredible car managed to make it up. We were unsure what to do on our last day in Kazbegi, but we found an English guy called John who wanted to share a taxi to go to Sno Valley for the day so we thought we would go along with him. We drove down a cliff-hugging road to the village of Juta, at the end of the valley. From Juta we walked all day up a nearby valley, to a glacier at the base of a large mountain. The walk was easy for the first half but once we crossed over the river it got very steep and we had to scramble over boulders. The views from the glacier were more than worth it though. We hung around a bit at the glacier, taking pictures and enjoying the snow until it started to rain. About halfway back to Juta, the rain stopped, so we decided to take a family photo. We had tried earlier with a plastic bag on the camera only to discover that this made our photos very blurry. We played around with the camera, taking photos of us jumping for a long time before we decided we couldn't waste any more time and went back to Juta.

We are now in Borjomi, a Soviet resort famed for it's salty, carbonated mineral water. We ate a large lunch/supper at a restaurant near the train station - good food, good prices. Today we went on a long hike through Borjomi National Park. We started by walking 1 km to the administration office to get a free permit to enter the park, then we took a taxi to the Ranger Station followed by a 2 km walk to the trail-head. The hike itself started with about 2 km of steep uphill switchbacks, we reached the top, exhausted, and continued on the flat ridge for about 1 more km. At this point the path went slowly uphill for a few km until we reached the top of the hill. We stopped at a bench on the summit and had fish, liverwurst, peanuts, bread, dried apricots and various other things for lunch. After lunch we had another few km of walking on the ridge, this part of the walk had the most spectacular views. The next 3 km were by far the hardest, steep downhill slopes with loose rocks and earth to slip on. We had another break at the bottom of the hill and then had about three km to walk to the road where we could catch a bus back to Borjomi. The walk was about 18 km total and boy did we sleep well.

Georgia

Our bus from Yusufeli to Hopa was uneventful, as was our taxi from Hopa to the Georgian border. Upon arrival at the border we lined up to be stamped out of Turkey, with that finished we walked 500 metres to get stamped into Georgia. We were stamped in no problem, check our passport, compare our photo, stamp the passport and “Welcome to Georgia”. The first thing I noticed once across the border was the soviet built Lada cars parked on the side of the road, the second thing was the weird Georgian script that I would be learning and third were the cows that roamed free like in India. Georgia is an interesting country. It does not feel as modern as Turkey, and it's Soviet history is very apparent, whether it's the Lada cars, the apartment blocks, the statues of Josef Stalin on many street corners or the 5 dollar a litre Vodka. The reason that the Stalin statues remain (even when the country bears no trace of statues of Lenin) is that Stalin was a local lad, who became the leader of one of the most powerful country’s on the planet. When we arrived in Batumi the first thing we did was go to a restaurant to look at the map of our Batumi on the computer. When we walked in with our big bags everybody stopped and stared at us, not used to backpackers in the part of the world. When we sat down they all returned to their food and the man at the table beside us said “Welcome to Georgia”. We talked a bit and found out that he was from Iran and here on holiday.

June 5^th and 6^th 2011

Our 7 hour ride in a “Marshutka”(15 seat minibus) was uncomfortable but it worked, as we are now in Tbilisi. Our bus driver was a bit of a speed demon and driving in Georgia was the same as in India but twice as fast. Anyhow, Tbilisi is an interesting city, the old town is very nice, but not very upmarket, it looks like it's all falling apart. The cliffs along the river are littered with nice old churches. We wandered up onto the east bank to visit the massive cathedral, home of the Georgian orthodox Patriarch. The cathedral was very big, the floor space was not very large but the ceiling was incredibly high, it looked bigger from outside though.

June 8^th

We woke up early today, had muesli for breakfast and politely declined the slurring Russian's offer of “Do you van' drinkin'?”. We walked down to the metro, went 3 or 4 stops to Didube bus station. Upon arrival we were questioned about our destination by a taxi driver, we told him we were going to Gori, but not by taxi. He said that was fine and that he would show us to our Marshutka. He took us there and told us that the cost would be 10 Lari each, knowing that that price was insane we walked away, however the bus driver came running after us yelling “5 Lari! 5 Lari!”, so we went back, confirmed with a few other passengers that this was indeed the right price and started on our way to Gori. In case you didn't know, Gori is famed for being the birthplace of Josef Stalin, feared dictator of the USSR for over a quarter of a century. Our reason for visiting Gori was to see the Stalin Museum which is beside Stalin's birthplace, a small mud brick house, protected by a temple like structure in a park where all the other houses were demolished. It was fairly expensive to visit the museum, 15 lari each including mandatory guide. The best way to describe the museum was “Weird”; it told the tale of a poor local boy who helped defeat the tsar and was one of the key figures of 20^th century politics. Not that of a repressive dictator who sent millions of people to their deaths. The tour went a bit like this - “ThisisapictureofyoungStalinthisisapictureofStalinwithLenintheseareStalinsschoolbooks etc.”.One weird room was the room that contained gifts to Stalin from foreign countries, Stalin's coat, boots and the furniture from his office in the Kremlin. At one point I accidentally lent on one of the chairs, it gave me the chills thinking that Stalin and countless other famous politicians had sat in that exact same chair. The creepiest room is empty other than a circle of columns surrounding a pedestal on which sits one of Stalin's nine death masks. A more realistic room was the “Room of Repression” It talked a bit about the Gulag but it never blamed Stalin directly, just the Bureaucrats who directly sentenced the “Spies”. After our dose of reality we left the museum building and visited Stalin’s birthplace and childhood home, which was fairly humble considering his future. The most interesting part of the museum was probably Stalin's train carriage. We took a photo of Stalin's toilet and I got to sit on his bed. It was amazing to think that this carriage brought him to the Yalta conference and many other conferences and key occasions in 20^th century politics. With our museum tour finished we went for a walk around town. On our walk we noticed the square apartment blocks,wide streets and old cars. It was exactly what we would have imagined the soviet union to have looked like. We also noticed the bullet holes in all the buildings, left over from the 2008 Russian invasion.

Yalta Conference

Kremlin furniture

Entry hall

Stalin's house

Stalin's toilet

Goreme - Yusufeli

30^th of May 2011

We were a bit reluctant to wake up after our day on the bikes, but by 8:30 our stomachs couldn't take it any more and we had to go for breakfast. The hotel owner served us some sort of molasses that was made out of grapes and sweet peas, it wasn't really my cup of tea, although the delicious Turkish tea sure was. When we had finished the molasses, we walked to the Goreme open air museum, the admission price of 15 lira (10 dollars) made us a bit unsure but because it was “the” sight to see in Cappadocia, we decided to go anyway. There were lots of rock cut churches with very impressive frescoes although you had to wait in line because of the many tour groups. We had a watermelon for lunch and then Mhari and Dad went back to the hotel while Mom and I took a minibus to Nevsehir. From Nevsehir we took another bus to Derinkuyu, home to the underground city. The city was dug a long time ago by some people to hide from other people, it was then used by different people to hide from other different people who then turned it into a museum. The admission is a lot but it's worth it. There were a ton of tiny tunnels leading into unlit mazes of rooms and the main staircase goes down 8 storeys. From the bottom you can look up the ventilation shaft to the tiny spot of light above you. There were a few tour groups at the start but later on it was mostly empty making it a bit spooky for going down to places such as the graves.

31^st of May - 2^nd of June 2011

From Goreme we took a bus to Kayseri and bought train tickets for the 2am to Erzurum, a 16 hour journey. We had about 12 hours to spare so left our bags with the snack shop owner and walked downtown. We spent about 2 hours in the Bazaar, the second largest in Turkey, I bought a Kayserispor Football club scarf that has something in Turkish written on it. With a dictionary and a travelling linguist we met later on, I figured out that it includes the words “fall down” and “reciprocal love”. We also spent an hour chatting with a carpet salesman who told us that he thought backpackers were “low-quality tourists” because they did not buy carpets (he didn't know we were backpackers). We returned to the train station and sat around all night because the train was late and arrived at 7.20am, not 2am. We got off in Erzurum at11pm after a spectacular ride. We only stayed one night, We saw the beautiful “Çifte Minareli Medrese”, reminiscent of “A Thousand and One Nights” and got on a bus to Yusufeli.

3^rd of June 2011

Yusufeli is an interesting town, there are far to many hair salons and cay shops, and the restaurants all close by 7pm. We managed to find one place open serving pide (turkish pizza). When we asked what kinds of pide he had, he replied “Meat or Cheese”, he then hesitated before adding “Meat and Cheese” not health food by any means. We ordered one of each and they turned out to be very good, and for 3 lira (2 bucks) per pide, a bargain as well. Today we went for a walk up into the hill, we stopped near a stream to eat apricots and made a series of dams to divert the water flow. We returned to the pide place for lunch and are now napping or blogging.