My First Trip to Kyiv!

Last Sunday, I traveled to Kyiv with Monica, Nathan, Jakob and Laura (from my Peace Corps training cluster). It was an interesting experience, especially since we traveled without our Language Facilitator and none of us are fluent in Russian (yet). Monica’s Peer Advisor was in Kyiv, so we met up with her and she showed us around the city. I was really thankful for a tour guide that was another Peace Corps Volunteer, she saved us the hassle of having to try to navigate the Kyiv metro train system by ourselves and find places from our Lonely Planet guidebooks.

The view from the steps of St. Andrew's Church

We left our town at 8am on Sunday morning by electric train, and arrived in Kyiv around 11am. The train station in Kyiv is especially large and confusing since it is a hub for a lot of domestic and international trains

escalators! Haven’t seen those in a while.

We were so excited to see our first McDonalds in Ukraine at the train station. Fun fact: when I was practicing my Russian food vocabulary with my host mom and sister, they both said that the one food that they did not like was McDonalds! This McDonalds was almost exactly like the ones from home, meaning that all the menu items were exactly the same but just written in Russian. 

and check out McFoxy!

     We took the metro train to the central part of Kyiv. I think it is interesting how inner-city subway maps all look similar. Well, I guess this is only judging from the New York City, Atlanta, Singapore and Beijing subway maps. The Kyiv subway uses little blue plastic tokens about the size of a quarter, instead of a magnetized ticket (old school!) and you simply use 1 token per ride. Fun nerd fact: the Singapore subway and city bus system both charge fares based on distance traveled instead of per ride. 

These apartment buildings and the cable wires above the street remind me of downtown San Francisco!

From a glance, would you be able to tell that this photo was taken in Ukraine?

Our first stop was this theater. When I showed this photo to my host mom, she was pleasantly surprised and informed me that her restaurant is just down the street. Maybe next time we can go visit her restaurant!

 I just thought the two towers on this building looked interesting, they remind me a little of the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Monica’s peer advisor pointed out this 4-story department store, apparently it was famous during Soviet times and is still a huge shopping center today.

We walked past a Lexus car with an Illinois license plate! This is would be extremely unusual in my little town, but it didn’t seem that out of place in Kyiv since there were so many ex-pats around the city.

Our next stop was the capital area of the city, called the Maidan. If you’ve ever looked up Kyiv on Wikipedia, chances are high that you’ve seen pictures of these exact same landmarks!

I wanted to climb up on the horse but everyone was already judging me for standing up on the statue.

Here is Monica with her peer advisor Megan and Megan’s friend Kelsey! Kelsey actually roomed with my peer advisor Sasha at their Staging! I love the Peace Corps Ukraine network. They are standing in front of the famous Kyiv Opera house.

Our group is standing in front of the celebration statue. This statue is apparently one of the newer landmarks in this area.

We miss you Heather!

We ran into some of our fellow Peace Corps Trainees from Obhuhov! Of course Warren and I are doing the token asian pose.

Warren and I are token PCV asians.

Monica and I are also great at the token asian pose.

 After taking lots of pictures in the Maidan area, we went into the Globos shopping center. It is a crazy intense mall, I would compare it to Lenox in Atlanta, Fashion Square in Scottsdale, or the Macy’s in Union Square (downtown San Francisco). They sell regular things inside the mall from regular stores like Hallmark, shoe stores, underwear like Victoria’s Secret, department stores, etc.

they even have a Sanrio store with Hello Kitty!!

The mall even had an international food court, including a Chinese food stand! I ordered some steamed pork buns there, it was a huge relief to speak Chinese and not have to worry about my pronunciation or conjugating verbs correctly in Russian. We left the mall after grabbing a snack at the food court and walked around to where the famous churches were.

standing in front of St. Sophia’s bell tower

one of Ukraine’s famous Cossack military leaders

This was a super touristy area of Kyiv, we were surrounded by groups of kids clearly on a school field trip and other ex-pats.

I love this picture, it would be perfect except Jakob isn’t doing the asian pose correctly and we are missing Heather

We walked behind the baby blue church down to St. Andrew’s church and the famous street bazaar. This was a serious cobblestone road, literally built out of chunks of rocks and mortar. I have no idea how Ukrainian women walk everywhere in stilettos, the cobblestone hurt my feet and I was wearing my relatively flat footed boots!

this was my favorite church, because it is teal and gold!

This photo is for my old roommate Annie, who got me into House. Ukrainians love the House tv show, they call it ???? and apparently they sell little touristy magnets of Dr. House!

my favorite is the one in the upper right hand corner that says “Only Salo can help.”

The street bazaar had a lot of stereotypical Ukrainian items like the traditional Russian dolls, furry hats, old Soviet memorabilia and painted eggs.

Touristy items like this are really common, I'm waiting until right before I come home to do any shopping though.

a view of another castle-like building and the street bazaar

We walked down the street, to the bottom of a big hill. The street bazaar must have been a solid half-mile long and had tons of stands that were all exactly the same, pretty much like Chinatown. Do you like how I compare everything here to Chinatown? I guess that is probably because I spent last summer in Beijing and Singapore and I miss it.

Nathan bought a Kyivsky Tort cake for his host family!

They have a Domino’s Pizza in Kyiv! I wonder if they still have the 5-5-5 deal.

At least they deliver pizzas!

We ended up walking around Kyiv from about 12noon until 5 pm, but it was fun to be back in a big city and see the sights. We will be heading back to Kyiv next Monday for “bank day” – hooray for payday and new ATM cards. I hope the ATMs here have English (another fun fact from last summer: ATMs in Beijing all had an English language option on the home screen).

A Ukrainian History Museum and Field Trip to White Church (Белая Церковь)

Last weekend, we had a cross-cultural information session about the history of Ukraine. I learned a few interesting things during the session, like how Ukrainians refer to WWII as “The Great Patriotic War” and how almost every family in Ukraine was affected by that war in some way (since many of the USSR’s troops were actually from Ukraine).

This picture was HUGE on the wall... it must have been like a solid 5x7 ft.

Afterwards, we walked to the town’s local museum. Our linked town is so scenic… if I printed these out as postcards and mailed one to you, you would probably never know the difference!

So picturesque. I can't wait to ice skate on this river when it gets colder here.

This is the Bridge of Love... reminds me of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.

The view of the town's church.

Look, they have a tank too!

The museum was really interesting, we actually got to see some of the things that we talked about during the history lesson and admission only cost $3 UAH (60 cents).

My host mom thought it was hilarious that we took a picture with our tickets.

The museum turned out to be a private 2 story home that had been converted into a home for the collection of artifacts from the town’s history and about the history of Ukraine.

There were saber-tooth tigers in Ukraine??

Here is a picture of Monica and I with several people from our  linked cluster. We are standing with their Russian Language Facilitator Lena – in the red jacket, Sarah – a political science major from Utah, and Ally – a Biochemistry major from Texas (but fun fact: her family lives in Singapore).

Yes, these wooden cabins can still be seen around Ukraine today.

We took a picture with a bronze statue of Lenin. Statues of Lenin are very popular in Ukraine, we have one in our town and there is one in our linked cluster’s town as well.

Yay statues! Sorry to Ally for getting cut off from the bottom of this picture.

Here is the famous Ukrainian poet Shevshenko (Тара́с Григо́рович Шевче́нко). I’m sure his name comes up from time to time as a Daily Double on Jeopardy.

This guy has a ton of statues of him too, apparently he was a big deal.

He knows whats up.

Ukrainians are very self-sufficent and some people continue to weave and sew their own clothes. I am proud to say that I can name the chronological sequence of steps needed to weave fabric, thanks to my fun Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering (PTFE) elective classes at Georgia Tech.

Ahh, the good old days.

In the good old days, Ukrainians apparently also used to carve their furniture and kitchen ware by hand.

Danielle with one serious cup of chai.

The Soviet era is a very big part of Ukrainian history. I’m sure that you can recognize this poster from your high school history books. 

Lenin pointing at progress.

Surprisingly enough, the town’s landscape hasn’t changed much since this huge wall mural was painted. This mural reminded me of the sort of rustic countryside landscapes that are painted on the walls of "Old Country Buffet" restaurants.

Danielle, Jun, myself and Nathan.

This was an exhibit showing some important political figures in Ukraine. It also displayed some of the old currency. Unfortunately, all the captions for the pictures and labels for everything in the museum was all in Ukrainian… so I couldn’t read like any of it.

From rubles to hryvnia!

We really enjoyed how the artifacts in the museum were authentic. Can you guess what this exhibit was about?

Sarah is super cute in the soldier's hat.

salute!

We all taught a few more lessons at school this week, and I even got to teach a class all by myself for the first time! It was really exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. I taught a little about United States history and geography to the 11th form (the equivalent of high school seniors at our school).



Nathan and I discussing lesson plans with our 11th form teacher, Tatiyana.

Monica and Laura taught "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" to their 5th form class.

For our weekly field trip, we took the electric train (eletrichka) to Biliecirkov (white church). It is a city of about 200,000 people and famous for its Bazaar. We had fun on our first train ride in Ukraine.



Entertainment on the train: random guy playing the accordion and begging for money.

The train has booth-style seats that face each other and our car smelled like a port-o-potty.

We ate lunch at a great little pizza place, where they served real pizza (without ketchup or mayonnaise!).

Our group with our Langage Facilitator, Larysa, on the left!

After lunch, we had a little scavenger hunt around the city and I took a few pictures of the city’s landmarks.

Every town has statues of Lenin.

Funny story: I managed to call a wrong number when trying to reach my Language facilitator Larysa and yet still had a successful phone conversation about meeting at the White Church in a mix of Russian and English… apparently there are quite a few ladies named Larysa that work for the Peace Corps and it just so happened that I copied down the wrong cell phone number for my Language Facilitator. So I accidentally called the Larysa that works in Vasylkov, then she immediately called the correct Larysa that I was trying to reach and we figured everything out in a span of 5 minutes.

One of the town's famous white churches.

Their library looks like the White House!

Monica bought a sweet fur hat while we were shopping. I’m jealous, I haven’t found any nice ones for cheap yet (but hopefully I will!).

whats classier than fur hats and espesso?

Before we left to head back home, we took a group photo in front of the 4 story mall. Walking around the mall was almost like being in the Silk Street market building in Beijing, except definitely less crazy.

we miss Heather! She hurt her knee :(

And last but not least, Sveta (my awesome host mom) cooked burritos for dinner! Who would ever have thought that they sell tortillas in Ukraine? The tortillas came out of a package that looks just like the regular Mission tortillas that they sell at Walmart. I love my host mom, she has been great about working on Russian with me, I love chatting with her at the dinner table. I told her that we (the 6 American Peace Corps trainees) wanted to cook some Mexican food like fajitas and she surprised me with burritos!

I never thought a burrito with cabbage, hot dog and mozerella cheese would be delicious.

We went to Kyiv yesterday, which was awesome but it means that now I'm still like a week behind on my blog... so photos of beautiful golden church domes will be coming soon :)