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A trip to Arcachon and Saint-Émilion

A compelling reason to visit Bordeaux is that it is in a perfect location for day trips. The two places we visited were Arcachon Bay and the village of Saint-Émilion but I was far more excited about visiting Arcachon Bay, to see the Dunes of Pilat. These are Europe’s highest sand dunes and while the internet provided me many photos of how impressive the dunes would be, seeing it for real is quite something else.

We take a train from Bordeaux Saint-Jean station to Arcachon and from there, a bus to the dunes. The bus journey is the exact opposite of my experience of France, in that it was €1 each way and I was momentarily stunned to realise how cheap it was. As a result, I was incapable of inserting the paper ticket into the ticket machine and looked like I’d never been on a bus before. On arrival at the bus stop by the dunes, there are some gift shops and cafes, before you take a short walk through the woods, which let you know you’re getting closer to the dunes by the increasing levels of sand around your feet. The dunes themselves remain hidden until the last moment when they come into view as if by magic. They are enormous and intimidating. I have never experienced anything like them.

The dunes are busy moving between 1 and 5 metres inland every year, and it’s possible to imagine the joy of moving to such a beautiful area and home on the Avenue des Dunes, only for the dream to turn to a nightmare as your living room starts to resemble a beach. The dunes are 500 metres wide, three kilometres in length and over 107m in height. It is roughly as tall as the spire of Milan Cathedral – having walked up to the roof of that cathedral, I can assure you that the height is not insignificant. Similarly, getting to the top of the dunes is not an easy thing to do, as you swiftly come to realise that the peak seems to always be further away, so you climb some more, look out and see there’s another peak just beyond it. Eventually, with ragged breath, you will get a view that just doesn’t seem possible in Europe. In one direction is Banc d’Arguin, a sand bank that you can visit by boat or ferry and beyond is Cape Ferret. Look another way and you’ll see the dunes spread out in a thin line of sand reaching to the horizon and behind that is an uninterrupted expanse of woodland. It’s a rare sight that looks close to nature and it’s wonderful to see that France has not overdeveloped this beautiful landscape.

On the dunes, I had one of those very fleeting moments of complete calm where my brain felt empty of worries and concern. It’s a beautiful moment. Perhaps it was the ability to stand atop the dunes and be confronted by the vastness of the landscape with soothing sights in every direction. It’s a view that makes you want to explore for days. Overhead, many hang-gliders are taking in the view in their terrifying contraptions.

The town of Arcachon, which abuts the dunes, is pleasant in a seaside way, but as with Bordeaux, the streets all look impeccably clean and paving looks like it was laid for our arrival. The spend on infrastructure and making France look divine must be eye-watering but the results are worth every centime. In the past, Arcachon was where sick people were taken from the city to “take the air” and look out at the sea. Arcachon is split into four parts, each according to the season. The Summer town is closest to the sea and contains the bulk of bars, restaurants and attractions. When we visited, the Summer town beach was mostly empty and the walk up the pier was a pleasant and relaxed affair, proving that I only really enjoy beaches out of season. Separating the Summer and Winter towns is Parc Mauresque which is well maintained and peaceful. If you’re a fan of heights, head up the Observatoire Sainte-Cécile which wobbles as you ascend it, which made me feel fairly terrified. The views from the top are worth the terror, though. You get views of the sea and the Ville d’Hiver (Winter Town) neighbourhood. This neighbourhood has a very peculiar estate of houses that all look like they’re haunted. The hundreds of luxurious villas are all slightly different but any one of them would make a great set for a Tim Burton film.

As this is February, not much is open so we find a remarkably characterless bar, one that has those cliché pictures of Paris in black and white on the walls. Next time I go to Paris, I will see if Parisian cafes have pictures of Arcachon on the walls, or just more pictures of Paris and that damned Chat Noir. The men playing a game in the corner seemed happy enough and I was transfixed by the lady serving us drinks, who had a pair of glasses that were on a chain and purposefully broke in the middle. What a place! To round off our day, we went to La Table du Boucher where a three course meal and wine came in at under €30. The options are written on chalk menus and the sea bass was excellent. Relaxed as we were, we entirely forgot to check train times to Bordeaux, with the last one of the day being a mad dash away. Arcachon was nice, but it wasn’t nice enough to warrant an emergency hotel stay.

The weather saved the sand dunes and Archachon, but it wasn’t playing nicely for our trip to Saint-Émilion where the grey skies matched the grey buildings. Despite this, Saint-Émilion is a great village to have a meander around the medieval wonders. There’s Europe’s largest monolithic church there, built into the rocks. There are also caves and ancient buildings to explore. It is clear from the moment you get to the village that this is an important place for wine; the land is almost entirely taken up by vineyards and chateau. When you arrive in the town, a large proportion of the shops are wine-related. As we’re flying back on Ryanair who are petrified of anything weighing their craft down, all the goodies are entirely wasted on me.

We have limited time in Saint-Émilion as we need to catch our flight, but we manage to stroll around the village, taking a lot of photos and we find the time to have lunch at Chai Pascal, which was one of the few places open. The interior has a lot of warm stone and feels immediately cosy. We were in luck as this is a wonderful restaurant with vaguely gruff service along the lines of “sit there, wait, eat, go” but the food was good enough to warrant this. I ate an incredibly rich confit of duck which came with greens and roast potatoes. The saltiness of the dish worked wonders with the fat from the duck, and I drank a small glass of local wine that cost €9 because my finger apparently hovered over that and not the €6 wine. This was a blessing in disguise as the wine was sensational, one of the best reds I have ever tasted. The tiny measure of wine goes against guzzling it down, but it was worth it. This was a wonderful end to a wonderful trip. I was deeply content.

Until…I forgot that Ryanair boarding passes need to be downloaded within two hours of the flight. Upon the realisation that I had no boarding pass and the app was not letting me conjure one, I had to run around the airport terminals looking for a human. When I located a human, I had to grovel to the people and staff arguing at the baggage desk, promise them a blood oath I wasn’t dropping off luggage and get a boarding pass for €50. The person behind the baggage desk didn’t really get that my flight was imminent and languidly printed out the blessed boarding pass to freedom. For a brief moment I contemplated that the worst outcome would be spending another night in gorgeous, enchanting Bordeaux, but it wouldn’t have been as fun without my friend so I ran at Bolt-like speeds to get through security and back home. From blissfully relaxed to horribly stressed, this trip had it all!

A trip to…Bordeaux

For a £25 return flight to Bordeaux on Ryanair, what did I expect? The budget terminal at Bordeaux airport shares DNA with a lean-to at your Aunt’s, but not quite as nice. Nobody is at the passport desk and when they deign to arrive, the man doesn’t even glance at me to check I am who I say I am. A half hour shuttle bus later and we arrive at the city’s main train station which is a thing of beauty, announcing you are somewhere that deserves your attention. Smart trams whiz us to the centre in a sleek and stylish way and when we arrive, I am a little overcome with envy of the populace of Bordeaux. It is a seriously gorgeous city, with the buildings glowing in a warm honey colour in the afternoon sun, while at the same time the UK is being whipped into a froth by Storm Dennis. We’re staying at Hotel Konti, and it’s brilliantly located, right by the luxury stores I couldn’t afford to visit and it was a reasonable price too. Research conducted once I’d gotten back to the UK suggests that a 3 night stay in June, had 2020 been a normal year, would have been triple the cost.

But fear not, the room isn’t ready, and when it is, we try out our bedside lamps and one of each pair is malfunctioning so at least there’s symmetry at play. Add to that, the twin beds were fused together to make a double bed so we trudge down to the lobby to ask them to turn the double back into twin beds. This takes 20 minutes but the hotel lobby has a ‘cosy corner’ where we are able to have mini cakes and coffee from the terrifying and hostile coffee machine. The machine growls, gurgles and then spits out something hotter than lava roughly into a cup. I know these are reasonably minor quibbles, but when I arrive at a hotel, I always want to have a quick shower and to write “I will not fly Ryanair” 20 times as penance. Despite my moany tone, I’d stay at Hotel Konti again without a doubt.

When we head out into the city, we walk in the direction of the medieval St Pierre district to visit the Phillippe Stark designed Mama Shelter and the rooftop bar. We’re gravely told that the rooftop is full, even on a Sunday night, so we walk about admiring the city while trying to locate ground-level drinks. Like moths drawn to a light, we find ourselves outside what is perhaps the cosiest bar in France, La Comtesse. It’s a sublime space, with ramshackle chairs just on the edge of collapse and with every light covered by a lampshade. The junk shop vibe was exactly what I wanted and the ice-cold beers were the glacé cherry on the cake. If I lived in Bordeaux, this would be by local, even if I lived far out. The only other bar I have found in France that competes with the level of cosiness is Le Cercle Rouge, in Angers. Any bar playing vinyl of Portishead and The Rolling Stones is going to score high with me.

Dinner at Au Bistrot was a major success, even if the initial welcome was a strange one. Half an hour after the restaurant was scheduled to open, the doors were locked and the staff seemed faintly surprised to see us. They take us inside to what looks like a stock room filled with boxes of wine doubling up as a restaurant, but soon, the open kitchen comes alive with flames from vigorous pan action, something I am far too scared to achieve at home. If I could slow-cook a stir fry, I would. The menu initially appears to offer much in the way of offal, and I refuse to end up retching in a public space over tripe again. Luckily, pork loin which Google translates as the less yummy backbone of pig came with tender vegetables and a warming peppery sauce. The saucisson with brioche that my friend had was also outstanding. The secret weapon was that the brioche soaked up the rich gravy, creating a heavenly texture. The wine was far too drinkable, which explains the stock room vibe – when it’s this good, people are going to want lots of it. For a nightcap, we went to Frida, bursting with fairy lights, where I was presented with a tropical cocktail in a Tiki mug. I find Tiki mugs to be among the least subtle of containers, the exact thing James Bond instinctively knows to avoid. My cocktail drinking experiences are more Rosa-Klebb-by-the-sea, but I’m a sucker for a cocktail with a bit of dried pineapple in it.

We ended the night walking through more gorgeous streets, the very streets that inspired Baron Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris and the streets that Alain Juppe wanted to be rescued from the blight of pollution and heavy traffic. It is remarkable to think that Bordeaux was, not so long ago, a dirty city, the buildings encrusted with grime and clogged up roads. Where the Miroir d’eau now enchants visitors, stood a giant car park scarring a vista that longed to be seen. It has been a phenomenal change for the better and in some ways it feels like Bordeaux has been reborn.

It’s a slightly strange thing that so many places in Bordeaux are closed on both Sunday and Monday, at a stroke killing off a weekend mini-break if you were so foolish to visit on the same days I visited. As a result, our breakfast options were limited and anywhere that looked cosy or inviting laughed us onto the drizzly street. Eventually we stumble across Kokoma, and have a deeply traditional French brunch of pancakes, bacon and eggs. I was fine with this as the food was great. Kokoma is staffed only by people with beanie hats that don’t cover the ears (an affectation too far in my books) and a young girl in a Kangol hat just waiting for Samuel L Jackson to come up and share fashion tips. Lonely Planet would call it “achingly hip”. After filling up with Le pancakes, we eventually find ourselves in the Bourse to admire the Miroir d’eau, only to find it is turned off and the Bourse is only half visible due to scaffolding and Brad Pitt’s massive face advertising a bank. It’s a little disappointing that a city would do this to us, so we go to find a bar where we’re ignored for ten minutes.

One site that is open on a Monday is the City of Wine. Bordeaux is wine country and the region has an incredible 14,000 producers and 400 wholesale dealers. The UK makes 15 million bottles of wine a year versus 8 billion in France so there’s a lot of history here and a lot of money. The building itself looks somewhat like a decanter and shimmers from afar. It cost €80m to construct and so charges a premium price of €20 for entry. Despite the price tag, it’s the most detailed wine experience I could imagine and as you progress through the building, you’ll be shown a lot of interactive videos about wine from around the world, including Georgian, German and Argentinian wine. The videos are genuinely interesting and you soon realise that people plant vines in the most unfriendly terrain, but still they succeed even if it’d be easier to do almost anything else. Even countries like Pakistan and Canada have a wine-making culture.

Watching videos of people enjoying wine responsibly is all well and good, but where were the videos of tourists picking a fight with a mirror? They really missed a trick there. I hope they follow my advice of creating an escape room experience for hen and stag do’s. Everyone gets locked in a wine cellar and to escape, they need to down a bottle each. It could be the museum’s set-piece.

One of my favourite parts of the museum was the smelling stations where you squeeze a pump and a scent associated with wine comes out. There were smells for all sorts of things, from pears, tobacco, liquorice, peppers and even faeces. A sweet dungy aftertaste, goes down well with a beef wellington. You could call it the Jilly Goolden section. When you have learned all you can about wine before museum fatigue sets in, which takes a couple of hours, you head to the top floor for a glass of wine from countries like China, Portugal, Italy or France. We chose a local glass and looked out over the 360-degree views of the city. Just popping its Nazi head out was the submarine base built in World War 2 where the Germans beat Ken Adams in creating a terrifying bunker set. It is 245 metres in length, 162 metres in width and is 9 metres thick. It recently opened as a light and sound show of the work of Gustav Klimt.

For dinner that evening we initially had numerous options until we realised most were closed, but my friend struck gold with Loco by Jem’s. It’s in the part of Bordeaux that comes after the glorious architectural wonder of the centre, so it’s concrete chic. We arrive to an entirely empty restaurant until a bunch of Brits come in. I am immediately suspicious of all Brits these days and worry we could have made a terrible mistake. If they sing the praises of Boris Johnson, I feel my only reasonable response would be to flip tables at them.

The food at Loco was something of a revelation as far as tasting menus go even though the restaurant has some strange ideas about how we’d like our food presented. Bread and butter arrives, but the bread is placed daintily on some twigs, even though the twigs are placed daintily on a plate. Why twigs? Who ever thought this was an idea worth pursuing? Why not lob some bread in a coffee cup they found in a bin? How about soup in an old can of Dulux? I’m sure that’s happened. For €41, we had an amouse-bouche, two entrees, a main and pudding. The main was sea bass adorned with a few slivers of smoked eel. Having never eaten eel before, my fussy side wanted to fling it out a window, but my experimentation paid off and it turns out that eel is far tastier than I could have imagined. The pudding came in numerous components, part brownie, part ice cream, part giant biscuit which all mashed together was very good. The service was friendly, attentive and casual, the Brits weren’t lovers of the Prime Minister in a bad wig and we left feeling satisfied, despite the slightly bizarre twig thing. I can live with that if the food leaves you feeling happy inside.

Despite visiting Bordeaux in February, a terrible time of year, when much is closed or opens when it feels like it, I’d advise anybody to go. It’s a stunning city that is a genuine pleasure to walk around and explore. The food is of a high standard and if you find yourself with nothing to eat, the cream puffs at Dunes Blanches Chez Pascal will keep you not just alive, but in a state of rapture. Or you could just visit when everything is open. No matter what, you won’t be disappointed.

A trip to…Athens

I knew I was going to like Greece, because I was going to Greece. Everyone loves Greece. For years, I wondered why I had been to so many places and yet still hadn’t explored a country absolutely heaving with culture, history and food. Now that I’ve been, it seems even more bizarre that I’d never visited. Greece is an absolute gem of a holiday destination.

My first impressions of Athens as we head to the suburb of Glyfada, is that it bears resemblance to the Middle East. Along the route, plenty of buildings have rebar sticking out of first floors, giving the buildings an air of being trapped in time. Almost complete, but something got in the way. There was more than a whiff of abandonment, which is exactly what a 25% reduction in a country’s economy would do to anywhere. The spectre of the global crash may be apparent on the roads into Athens but as we arrive in Glyfada, we enter a smart, well-heeled neighbourhood where buildings are complete and trees overhang anything they can. The air is fragranced heavily from bushes and flowers.

We head to Yi, a raw vegan restaurant for dinner, and it felt like an immense treat to be in a restaurant in late October with all the windows wide open and many customers eating on the terrace. I wasn’t terribly excited by the concept of actual raw food, but it turns out that you can pop food in the oven up to 118c and still be considered raw. A big starter of salad was bursting with flavours and my main was a Caponata with pasta. What intrigued me on the menu was not the yummy dishes but a long list of notes for the customer such as “the customer is not obliged to pay if not given legal proof” which is longhand for a receipt. They also had a paragraph telling us the lament of the frozen items and the joys of the fresh produce. There was even an advertisement for the complaints book, but there were no complaints for us and the book remained unsigned.

For an after dinner cocktail, we waddled over to Holy Spirit, in a part of town buzzing with activity even on a Sunday night. There, a DJ played the same song on a loop for what felt like many days and one of our party spent ages talking to him about how great his music was. I maintain that the DJ was just playing the same song, despite evidence to the contrary. Later, at the apartment, we get ready to sleep after watching an excellent video for Athens cats and dogs home, replete with sound effects of animals having a lovely time. Unfortunately, none of us really manage to sleep. Mine is the sort of slumber where I’m unsure if I ever lose consciousness and hear every sound made, even the sounds of air molecules bouncing languidly off one another.

The next morning, we buy a 5 day metro pass which will let us travel to everywhere we want to go in the city for €9, the same as one cocktail from Holy Spirit costs. At moments like this, I sense how much money I’ve wasted in the my life and weep. Our first culture his is the gorgeous Acropolis museum, which is a bargain €10 to enter and despite it being late October, it is still busy, which makes you wonder what it’s like in the middle of summer. The building is a huge upgrade on the concrete lean-to that came before and it exists so that there is one large space to show off all the Elgin Marbles. Now this museum exists, Britain’s argument for keeping the marbles seems threadbare. With the Brexit negotiations looming (or not, you just never know), it looks like the marbles will soon have a new home. And why not? We don’t have nearly as nice a location to store our loot; here, the marbles will be in viewing distance from the Parthenon and in their rightful place.

Once museum fatigue has set in, which happens no later than two hours from entry, we explored Plaka and head to Brettos bar for what is misleadingly called a sharpener. Brettos is Athens’ oldest bar, and it has been distilling and serving drinks since 1909. I had something red and plummy. It wasn’t cheap but it was delicious. However, the star of the show is undoubtedly the stunning interior of Brettos. Hundreds of brightly coloured bottles are stacked to the ceiling behind the bar, backlit for maximum effect. Barrels of liqueurs and ouzo are to the side of the room. It has the atmosphere of a place you’d rather not leave and was as beguiling inside as the weather was outside. But leave we must and Plaka, though very charming, is a busy place to be. There are photos on the internet of Plaka with empty streets; perhaps these were taken at a ridiculously early hour or they time travelled from the coronavirus era, but Plaka in late October was hectic.

Our next stop was in Anafiotika, a smaller neighbourhood of Plaka, where a far quieter landscape enchanted us. Though small, this neighbourhood feels like the Greece you see advertised – tiny whitewashed houses, twisting lanes, an abundance of nature and far-reaching views. It’s like Santorini with air pollution. It looks the way it is because in the 1800s King Otto I wanted to turn Athens into a modern city and cast his net for builders from across the country; many of them came from Anafi Island and so naturally built dwellings that looked like their own. The cubed whitewashed buildings with blue accents bring island architecture to the mainland and are reminiscent of the Greek flag.

Perched on Acropolis Hill, this is the kind of place Lonely Planet would call “unspoilt” which in today’s parlance means there are no Air BnBs or tourist shops. But sadly, it is very much spoilt. Anafiotika once covered a larger district but archaeological explorations destroyed all but 60 or so homes. However, what’s there today is still exceptionally gorgeous and a wonderful opposite to the crowded streets of Athens. In a city that doesn’t want for viewpoints, there are some stunning ones here and it’s far too easy to photograph everything, from the blooming bougainvillea to cats doing tightrope walks between buildings and the way the sun strikes the side of a building.

As tempting as it is to do that, we have tickets to visit the Acropolis and of course, it would feel incomplete to not go to where all eyes lead to in Athens. The Acropolis demands your attention and being up there gives a sense of scale to this remarkable complex, including the scale of the scaffolding of the Parthenon temple, which is said to be thousands of years old. The scaffolding was taken down briefly in 2010 but since then, they’ve been continuing the restoration work at a snail’s pace which means that the restoration work, including adding new marble to the temple, has taken longer to do than it took to build the temple in the first place. All sorts of nuisances have happened up on the Acropolis, from fires and looting, to wars and plucky Brits nicking bits of it and cowboy builders but it’s always a humbling experience to see a building constructed two and half thousand years ago, up close.

There’s really nothing to do up on the Acropolis but look at the ruins and scuttle around the crowds, but it’s deeply peaceful and a chance to just spend time soaking up the breath-taking views all around and contemplate life. From up high, you get an overview of Athens as a city. It seems to go on forever and the vantage point of the Acropolis, which is 490 feet above sea level, gives Athens a perspective that few cities have unless you’re up a skyscraper. You see the hills all around, the white blocks stretching out for miles and the sea.

I specified to my friend that what I really wanted every evening was a cocktail or glass of wine on a rooftop bar with a view and for our first edition of this we went to A for Athens. We hadn’t reserved and snatched the last available table with seconds to spare, giving us a superb view of the Acropolis and the city in front of it. Initially, I was a little miffed because the table we were at was by a window but magically, the window was retracted and all my dreams came true as we relaxed, chatted and let our minds empty of anything troubling. The wine we ordered was so good we ordered a second bottle as dusk became night and Athens was gloriously spread out in front of us.

A holiday to…Ukraine. The church experience.

The weather developed a mean streak for day three with overcast skies and a vindictive mizzle. The show must go on though, so after a speedy breakfast of some croissant-related thing and a coffee we headed towards the Hydropark located on the Dneiper River. I’m sure it looks wonderful in summer, but on a gloomy Autumnal day, there were few things to see to spark joy. It’s a strange time-warp when you enter the park as there are paintings of Arnie’s first foray into being the Terminator in 1984, machines you can punch a la Stallone’s Rocky, empty arcades and pubs with dodgy dance music blaring out, only serving the purpose of making the two of us feel very alone. Walking on, the tackiness gives way to the park and some unexpectedly brilliant autumn colours on the trees. Some of the deep reds came out accurately on my camera but it all looked fake, which is a sign of a top-notch autumn. Before long, we are accompanied by some cats also out on a walk and one enjoyed snuggling up to our legs for quite some time. I think the love went two-ways. When we reached the silverfish-coloured river, it became apparent that we’d exhausted what Hydropark had to offer in the rain; there’s only so much bleakness you can take in one morning and the views over the river would have benefitted from some blue in the sky.

The next stop was Kiev Pechersk Lavra, a religious complex which is the best part of a thousand years old. We could see tantalising glimpses of this complex of churches from the window of Salute Hotel Communist HQ and Strip Club and I was excited about the caves within the complex, where the original monks lived and prayed. My interest was piqued again on how, after soviet times, so many of the buildings were still intact. How serious were the soviets about erasing religion from their utopia?

We followed a busy road towards the complex, where I annoyed my travelling partner Rokos with a horrible rendition of Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ emphasising the shrieky parts she does so well and I do so badly. We arrived at the entrance and unsure of prices to enter the site, we asked in our best Ukrainian the cost of two tickets to a woman in a little wooden hut. She stared at us and closed her hatch. Clearly we’d said something wrong so I opened google translate’s best feature, where you open your camera for google to vaguely translate the words written on boards. It turns out that we went up a woman selling bibles and trinkets, asking for tickets. No small-talk, just wrong words. No wonder she shut her hatch. These little moments remind me that I am indeed an English tourist, but I am forever grateful that I didn’t just say everything louder at her like the absolute worst tourists do.

So, we enter without a ticket, fearful of the wrath of monks because I am at heart a law-abiding citizen, hate being told off and in my research I’d found a long list of prices, some for tours, some for exorcisms and so on. The complex is beautiful from the off and I can’t recall seeing a more impressive collection of churches in my travels. As we’d entered from the road, our first site is the Church of the Life-Giving Source, a small church at the bottom of the hill. Walking up a grand set of steps, the view opens out to a plaza with white-washed buildings, green roofs and the ubiquitous golden dome on top. There’s something calming about the unified designs and despite the numerous signs banning photography, we still do it because it’s too pleasing to the eye to not photograph. On photography, I will accept a telling off by a narked nun or a moody monk.

I recall a lookout that gives great views over the city so we keep continuing up the paths, via a very long covered walkway that seems to lead nowhere but eventually we go through a door to another religious knick-knacks shop and a small but pleasant chapel. Finally, the lookout materialises and while the views of the complex are impressive, the miserable weather relegates these photos to “best you can do in the circumstances” league.

Finding the caves takes some time as the signs point in many directions, but we manage to find two different caves, one short and stuffy and the other longer and wider, with a chapel inside. People take candles in with them, which cost something like 2p and the heat of the candles and being underground means things warm up rapidly, increasing the sense of mild claustrophobia. Old women barge past us in both to kiss a glass coffin and do a little prayer. I wince at the cleanliness of kissing everyone else’s lip stains. We burnt up about a tenth of the candle during our time in the caves, but I can’t quite think this is a massive financial racket.

We spend the rest of the trip above ground, admiring the statues and buildings until lunchtime beckons and the canteen of the Pechersk Lavra looks unappealing. We choose to leave the complex and have lunch at Barsuk, part of another “family” of Kiev restaurants and on the way we stop by a spellbinding example of soviet architecture, which is now a supermarket called Velyka Kyshenia. The building has, over time, become partially hidden on three sides behind a squat grey market building, loading bays full of trucks and the general detritus of now. When I become the boss of Kiev, I shall work tirelessly to restore the views of buildings like this. This is why I won’t become the boss of Kiev because the process of decommunization in the country doesn’t seem too friendly towards soviet blocks, and with good reason. Barsuk looks unrewarding from the outside, but once you enter, things brighten up. It’s a cosy space and I have a vague recollection that it was spaghetti carbonara but I have good memories of it being very nice, paired with a lunchtime beer.

Restored, the walk continues to the soviet spaceship I have been obsessed with visiting, which is an important remnant of the design of the late 1960s, part of Kiev’s Institute of Information. The spaceship, next to a once lovely but now dilapidated-looking tower block is a small component of the ministry, which was originally designed to be a venue for concerts. Naturally, pennies were pinched and in the end it was used as a cinema. Today, it looks like it is about to be demolished, with metal hoardings around the bottom of the building. Despite the fact that it looks in dire need of some care and attention it is still an otherworldly edifice that has echoes of the space race between the USSR and America. It isn’t a protected building and could easily become victim to progress, so my advice would be to book your flights to Kyiv right away before it becomes rubble, making way for something as bland as the neighbouring Ocean Plaza shopping centre. To gain access to the shopping centre, you need to pass through a scanner to check for bazookas and bombs. The security staff looked beyond bored, everyone passing through beeped, nobody was stopped. Inside the shopping centre was the standard Gap, M&S, Superdry stores, which is never going to excite me as much as a flying saucer building. Still, the M&S came in handy to buy a scarf.

After churches and flying saucers, I was feeling rather pooped so we headed back to the hotel for an afternoon nap, the kind of nap that makes you feel guilty and fabulous at the same time.

Later that evening, it was time for dinner and having learnt nothing from the night before, where we ate in a cabin in an eerie wood, we didn’t book anywhere. Getting to Hutorets na Dnipri, a restaurant on a boat, the waitress looked at us like we were annoying tourists who hadn’t booked a table at a restaurant. I felt just like someone Carrie from Sex and the City would have mocked. Mind you, Carrie wouldn’t be seen dead in Kiev. More fool her, the shoe-freak with no soul. We were shown a table that was up against the grill and all that separated us from the grease and fire was a piece of glass. On google photos, this table was nowhere to be seen, but a table is a table when we were so hungry. It was shockingly hot, the waitress shrugged her shoulders in a “deal with it” way and we proceeded to get very red of face. Then the food came, and it was so good that it didn’t matter if we were eating in a skip with locals throwing cabbage leaves at us. We started with mixed varkenky and it was incredible. My main was chicken and vegetable skewers which came with a range of spicy sauces. Ah, this was the meal of the holiday as every flavour seemed to be so individual, so fresh and so perfectly balanced. At the end of the meal, one of the waiters, perhaps a manager, came over and shook our hands. Maybe he was congratulating our stamina for getting slowly roasted, or he was just very polite.

The night ended at Pink Freud cocktail bar, the kind of venue that Lonely Planet would write about in the style of “the hip young gunslingers all laze about on sofas, drinking the night away and smoking shisha” and, yes it was a bit like that. It’s a cosy venue created by putting a glass roof across two buildings. There was a haze of shisha smoke and all the barmen had beards and tattoos, making me briefly forget I was in Kiev. At the end of day three, the city stands out as much more than I could have imagined. It’s cooler and younger than I anticipated, and there’s a great nightlife scene that’s as sophisticated as cities that cater for many more tourists. I can’t help but feel surprised that the word isn’t out about Kiev. As a tourist, the troubles with Russia seem very far away and the absence of stag and hen do’s makes such a positive difference.

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