I barely recognize the Kiev that I see on the news every night now. Independence Square –Maidan Nezalezhnosti– looks nothing like the square that I walked through almost every day during the weeks I spent in Kiev in January and February 2012. The protests that began back in November escalated last week and more than …
Kiev and I did not get off to the best start. It was snowing lightly when I arrived on a Saturday in mid-January and then it proceeded to snow every single day for the next nine days. When it finally stopped snowing, no sooner had I started celebrating the fact that I could finally get …
The first thing I noticed as we drove through the outskirts of Odessa was what was missing: snow. After weeks of snow in Kiev, freezing temperatures in western Ukraine and a horrible mix of melting snow, ice, slush and mud in Moldova, I felt like spring had finally sprung for me. The sun was shining …
(Editor’s note: this is a continuation of Crossing the Black Sea (Part 1), the story of my five day Black Sea ferry ride from Ilyichevsk, Ukraine to Batumi, Georgia) My heart sank when I heard the announcement that the Port of Batumi was closed. It was Sunday afternoon, my third day on the Black Sea …
137 Hours on a Boat: Crossing the Black Sea (Part 2) Read More »
I arrived at the UkrFerry office promptly at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday morning and asked for Vladlen – the faceless man with whom I had been exchanging emails for the last month about the Black Sea ferry from Ilyichevsk, Ukraine to Batumi, Georgia. In our most recent email exchange, Vladlen informed me that the ferry, …
One of the things I was anticipating the most during my travels was the opportunity to do homestays – living with local families, learning about their culture and sharing a little of my own. Unfortunately, they haven’t quite gone as well as I hoped. The latest chapter? Living with a seventy-year old woman named Alevtyna …
When people think of Ukraine, they tend to think of the capital city with the golden-domed churches: Kiev. While I enjoyed Kiev, I really fell in love with Ukraine during the two weeks I spent exploring the western part of the country. Lviv My first stop after Kiev was Lviv – the pseudo …
Learning the art of traditional Ukrainian egg painting (known as Pysanky) was not on my list of things to do on this trip. But when Oksana from Active Ukraine (who I found through Twitter!) said one of their guides, Olesia, could do a free class for me, I jumped at the opportunity. What better way …
The Art of Pysanky (or, How I Learned to Paint an Egg) Read More »
Planning makes me happy. Before I left on this trip, I wrote about the perils of being a planner. I wrote about how I would try to be more spontaneous on this trip. How I would try to not plan so much. Although it may not be apparent to all of you, I am actually …
The most fascinating thing for me about visiting Chernobyl was the 90 minute documentary we watched in the van on the way to what is known as the 30 kilometer exclusion zone. It isn’t that the rest of the day-long visit wasn’t interesting – it certainly was. But it didn’t feel as eerie or moving …
