A food tour…of Athens

If I had been counting calories in my time in Athens, I would have swiftly realised I was pregnant with triplets. The food was endless and almost all of it was gooey, yummy, delicious and with enough vegetables to trick the mind into thinking it was healthy. But healthy food has never tasted as good as the food in Athens. My friend, Rokos, had planned a day of doing little but eating and doing some walking between food stops to give us the illusion of exercise.

Part 1: We started at one of his favourite places, Stani. It’s one of a dying breed of dairy bars in the city and is in a neighbourhood that has seen better days. This isn’t an austerity comment, as most of Athens looks and feels like a normal functioning city but Omonia just looks tired. Watch your step as you could trip over some jagged pavement, avoid the overflowing bins and eventually you’ll arrive at Stani. It’s tiny and looks like it hasn’t changed in decades, which is exactly how it should be. The offering is simple and excellent; we had sheep yogurt with honey, a cake containing custard that oozes out when you break the pastry as well as coffee. The first mouthful was so good that suddenly the surroundings became palatial and glorious.

Part 2: Our second stop was Loukoumades Ktistakis, which sells very little but the eponymous fried honey balls. There are a few tables inside but this is the sort of place where you order, eat in one mouthful, make a face that is close to the face of someone that’s just seen God (and when he does return, he’ll go there and do the face of god when he tastes these). This is food that cracks open into a gooey mess, but it gets a thumbs up from everyone.

Part 3: The central food markets. This has the potential to go either way, once you enter the meat and fish section. As someone who has mostly given up meat, walking through a giant hall filled with flesh of every kind being cut up wasn’t very pleasant. Even the beaks and hooves on display didn’t fill me with joy. So I learned that I’m further along the vegetarian marker than I’d realised but not quite there. But the markets don’t just do meat, they do anything you could imagine and I always find a large array of brightly coloured vegetables really soothing. The real pleasure I get from them is seeing ingredients I don’t usually come across, which gets me thinking about what I’m going to cook next. It’s the same when you see spices piled high; reminding me of a middle eastern souk. The markets bring to mind a time before everything came pre-measured, in a glass jar or plastic pouch and I foresaw my past-self going round the stalls, haggling over prices before stopping off for a quick coffee. In this past life, I almost certainly had a wheely trolley full of the day’s shopping.

Part 4: The Mediterranean Grocery store is a superb deli that instantly made me want to live in Athens so I could pop by here all the time. Holiday mode does this to me; we have these sort of deli’s in London and even in Walthamstow, but still. I was in love. Aisles stacked high with every sort of olive oil imaginable, biscuits, different types of pasta, pickled things, wine. It all just looked so enticing and I cursed my lack of hold luggage on the flight back. Consequently, my phone is full of photos of Greek produce I’ll always be on the lookout for.

Part 5: Nikita’s. After various bites across the city, it was time for a big meal and Nikita’s has a great atmosphere of ‘home-cooked food by mum’ plus an outstanding cat having a snooze on one of the outdoor chairs. In my world, this is as good as getting a positive Jay Rayner review. At Nikita’s, we ate as much as the table would hold, from moussaka, to dolmades to vegetable stew and saganaki, all washed down with beer.

It got me thinking about the food of my childhood which was in no way as rich and varied as this. It was more of a traditional British meat-n-two-veg household, the kind of place where boiling a cauliflower until it’s a limp and soggy tragedy was deemed blanching. We didn’t eat cheese, ever, and adventures in seafood went as far as cod in a parsley sauce. It wasn’t battered! Watch out Heston. When I lived with my Nan, she somehow decided I was a maniac for lamb chops and chicken chasseur and even twenty years after her death, I still fondly think of her getting on the bus – the number 18 in Birmingham if you like buses –  to go to the butcher’s so she could get the meat. But still, no cheese.

After all the food and reminiscing, we needed some perking up to stop us all falling into a food coma so when we found Dope Coffee we were all delighted. Not only do they serve great coffee in a very (I hate myself for saying it) Insta-friendly backdrop but more importantly, some superb cinnamon buns that were so good we found additional space in our already-distended stomachs for them. Hands down, one of the best cinnamon buns I’ve eaten in my life. It poses a threat to everything Scandinavia holds dear, it’s that good.

God seems to figure today with the holy dough balls and the holy bun, so it was obvious that we needed to follow this up by going to church. And so we walked to the Metropolitan Church of Athens which is pretty enough, but in its shadow is the very cute Church of Virgin Mary Gorgoepekoos and Saint Eleutherius, bringing some 12th century swagger into the heart of modern day Athens. Inside, it is a showcase of what churches do so well; it feels intimate and calm while also as chintzy as you like. Cracks in the walls indicate the damage earthquakes can have on the city.

Next up was Syntagma Square, which I am familiar with from the austerity riots and also that time that Jason Bourne ran through the square mid mayhem to do something in a film. It is a becalmed place now, featuring the mighty Evzones guarding the President. Let’s take a moment to admire their uniform. A cap with a tassel, a shirt with flared sleeves for that Studio 54 look, stockings made of wool, clogs with a pom pom on and a gun. The clogs, presumably, are for kicking as they weigh 1.5kgs each and the pom pom is for fun. The gun is to shoot people dead. It is endearing for nations to keep these ridiculous traditions, and the world would look far less interesting without them. Take off the bearskin cap of the British Foot Guards and not only would they be able to see, but they’d just look boring. Anyway, my main point is that the military really embraces a camp aesthetic and should be applauded for how progressive that is.

Are we in LA? No.

On this whistle stop tour of the foods and sights of Athens, we still had more to see and so we walked through the national gardens which featured palm trees that rivalled those seen in LA, or perhaps it should be the other way round. The National Garden is a pleasant park though fairly tiny place at just 38 acres but it’s a green haven in the city with its own set of ancient ruins (to be honest, it’s hard not to find an ancient remain in Athens)  and leads to many more sights such as Zappion Gardens and the Panathenaic Stadium which held the first modern Olympics. As stadiums go, it’s so simplistic in form and a beauty to look at. However, I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant to sit there for many hours in the sun, roasting slowly.

As we headed closer to sunset, we took a cab to Mount Lycabettus, taking the cable car up 227 metres, meaning we were the highest people in the city. It got me thinking about exactly how high it was up there, and the Shard reaches 300m so there’s a little fun fact for you. When you reach the top, there’s little in the way of space as you’re on a small peak and there is a restaurant, bar, church with neon lights and a spectacular viewing point. Everyone is crowding for the best spots but with some patience, you’ll get the shot in the end. Most people tend to choose the cable car to go up and to walk down, savouring the sublime views of a deep red sky filtering over the top of the city and seeing all the lights spread out for miles. Having never been to LA, I reckon that LA looks like this from up the highest points in the city.

In theory, walking down the hill is an excellent idea but my friends and I took a wrong turn at some point and ended up walking down the hill with phone torches as our only light and coyotes hungry for our blood. Maybe it was a cat. It wouldn’t have been great fun to trip and break a leg here and dear reader, I didn’t. We eventually fell off the hill and into sight of this gorgeous modern building that was like a little slice of Zaha Hahid with its gorgeous curves and immaculate finishing. Back in civilisation, we found a bar, we found wine and we found more food to eat. It was glorious.

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.

Plaka

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.

The Acropolis Museum

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.

Acropolis Museum view

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.

Cat of Anafiotika

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 trip to…Dresden

Such was my desire to visit Dresden that a seven-hour journey across Germany wasn’t enough to dissuade me. I can report that the journey is sorely lacking in grandeur and beauty without a mountain in sight. The journey on an InterCity train cost £20 each and we upgraded to first-class for under £10 each, which gets you a couple of free biscuits and table service where you have to pay for everything. That said, it’s a steal compared to the UK where first class comes with freebies galore at a price.

We were lucky to have a necrotic man sitting opposite us, who proceeded to eat breadsticks from a briefcase in a style I could only describe as “annoying” and when he wasn’t chewing on breadsticks he was hacking up some phlegm that had been brewing in his chest since the 1980s. He was such an awful person he even left the pinging sounds of emails on his laptop going. He thought he was so important, but he was the one covered in phlegmy breadcrumbs. We trundled and occasionally sprinted through Dortmund, Bielefeld and Hanover without incident or interest until Dessau, when I realised I was passing the home of Bauhaus and cursed myself for not stopping off here for a day or two. Thanks to my obsession with putting markers on Google maps, it’s stored for my next German adventure.

Eventually, after 15 mini naps, listening to almost all the recorded music ever made and numerous games of book versus phone, I caught my first sight of the many spires of Dresden and I knew I was going to like it. We checked into the very lovely Hotel Indigo where I congratulated myself on finding two excellent hotels in a row. The Indigo was not in a building as thrilling as the 25hours Hotel in Cologne, but it was stylish, comfortable and had a logo of a lion in a tuxedo playing a saxophone.

Zwinger

Hotel Indigo is located near the Zwinger Palace and the reconstructed centre so we headed out to the palace to explore the different levels where we were treated to the sun striking a demonic looking cherub or a dome in a gorgeous light. It is a photographer’s paradise, especially in the late afternoon. It was built in the 18th century during the reign of Augustus the Strong and held a wedding that apparently went on for 40 days. I read further to find the theme of the wedding was Baroque and Roll. Actually, that’s a lie but it sounds cool. Clearly, anyone who would countenance a 40 day wedding would have been absolutely unbearable but the complex that stands today is a real treat to walk through and more so as it was free. We walk to The Crown Gate which looks much like the most overwrought crown upon an entrance, delightfully decadent with four Polish eagles stuck on the top for added chintz. Tucked away is The Nymphs’ Bath, an elaborate water feature that reeks of absurd wealth.

Zwinger

The old city is a marvel of reconstruction that rivals old Warsaw for the effort that went into bringing the city back to life. Dresden, like Warsaw, saw over 90% of the city centre reduced to rubble in the war. Today, you know what happened in the 1940s but can’t really feel it as buildings look designed so as to look ancient but are smart and neat with straight rooves, giving away their real age. There is a mixture of buildings that were recreated to reflect their baroque history and more generic designs, yet there is a sense of scale and harmony to the centre. We walked through the city on the way to Yenidze, an old cigarette factory that looks like a mosque to reflect the factories use of Turkish tobacco. A strangely inappropriate building but one that stands out from a mile away. Service there was, at best, frosty. Perhaps Yenidze is secretly an east German icon that refuses to accept things have changed. It took two emails to get a reservation (first one they told me the kitchen was closed and didn’t make any attempt to suggest I come at another time) and when we arrived the place was deathly quiet; even a group of friends sounded scared to talk in case the waiting staff were listening in. As soon as we sat down, a dramatic storm raged over the centre of Dresden which we had a fantastic view of. The rain lashed down and the wind whipped the sides of their version of a minaret. It was quite something to behold and was more memorable than the food. The slightly strange Yenidze experience is worth it, though. Perhaps better as a place for evening drinks on their rooftop bar than for dinner.

The old town
Yenidze

We went to go for a post-prandial cocktail in the Neustadt. Around Louisenstraße, people were spilling onto the street from bars, graffiti adorned the walls and stickers covered everything that isn’t moving. The trendy district of Dresden announces itself without any subtlety. We were going to head to Pinta Cocktail bar but it was roasting hot and filled with cigarette smoke so we abandoned it for a nearby beer garden where a pint was €3.60 which just makes London seem like it’s having a laugh.

Getting back to the hotel on the tram was far more confusing than it ought to have been, with the tram pivoting away from the centre towards some barely lit residential streets. We alighted to wait for another tram back, hoping for the best. The next tram takes us on an intensely circuitous route around Dresden, going north before suddenly realising it actually wanted to go back to the south. It was more of a drama than I required, but before collapsing into bed, I had to tune into the latest instalment of Germany’s anti-hero loaf of bread, Bernd das Brot on KI.KA. Bernd is a depressed loaf that gets into all sorts of scrapes. That night’s edition saw him hanging out with his band on a tour bus, before he fell over and broke a set of bagpipes. Luckily that night his gig was a huge success. It really is the most wonderfully crap show.

The next morning we visited the Albertinium by Bruhl’s terrace for cake and coffee. The Albertinium is the city’s modern art gallery and has an imposing main hall with an outstanding gift shop full of books about Dresden’s history but this is as far as we got as we had a busy day planned. Bruhl’s terrace is a wonderful section of the city, nicknamed “the balcony of Europe” when it was part of the ramparts of a palace. In 1814 a grand staircase connected Schlossplatz to the terrace, finally enabling the locals to enjoy the sweeping views of the Elbe that the elite had enjoyed for years.  

DDR designs

The walk through the old town, snaking past the painstakingly reconstructed Frauenkirche through the terrace and to Brühlschen Garten put me in a state of deep relaxation. The city was quiet, the heat of the day hadn’t turned oppressive, the sky was a deep blue and I was on holiday. It was at this moment that I fell in love with Dresden. We read in the garden, occasionally sighing contentedly before a walk to the DDR museum, which is fittingly above a shopping centre. Even in death, East Germany is mocked. I am obsessed with the DDR, though I know I wouldn’t have thrived in the political hellscape as I don’t want to be restricted in every aspect of my life and couldn’t be on board with spying on everyone and being spied upon. I would be first against the wall. Or am I scared that I’d be a superb spy, destroying lives to save my own comfort? The design of the era is simply as good as it gets and manages the trick of having you think that a new society was being constructed from the ground up. People were at the front and centre – a less muscular version of the socialist worker, one who might have been able to extract some joy from life. The reality of course, sounded pretty damn bleak but I have always been hypnotised by the images. After looking at the drawings of happy kids at school, using beautifully-designed textbooks and drooling at reconstructed living rooms with dreamy furnishings, I went to buy some postcards at the shop. My Mastercard wouldn’t work and the man behind the till said that their machines didn’t like foreign cards. I joked that this was like being back in the DDR. He looked blankly at me. Ah, now, that was like being in the DDR.

Communist mural

Dresden has an outstanding DDR-era mural on the side of the Kulturpalast and what is so surprising is that in 2019, a full-throated piece of socialist realist art remains fully intact. There are communist symbols everywhere and the people look as strong and delighted, not to mention determined, as you’d expect. In Berlin, there’s a feeling of all the history being renovated out of the city but here is a distinct piece of soviet propaganda that puts you in a different world entirely. It’s gorgeous and I took every opportunity to photograph and admire it. The Kulturpalast as a building is a standard 1960s squat block that is perfectly nice, and manages to fit into the cityscape more successfully than you might expect it to.

For lunch, we walked up to Soul Food Sisters back on Louisenstraße. All the hipsters were probably tapping away on a laptop in a coffee shop somewhere and the area felt very different. But the food was brilliant; I had a Weiner schnitzel which was a really generous portion at a surprisingly reasonable price. The atmosphere was unexpectedly friendly, to the point that Ryan offered to put our plates in the kitchen at the back and the owner didn’t stop him wandering off.

Mini sex show

Less friendly were the people of Molkerei Gebrüder Pfund, a famous milk bar that has a glorious interior of Villeroy & Boch tiles and remains true to its roots of serving fresh milk and dairy products to the people of Saxony. The only problem was that nobody was buying the milk and the staff operate on high alert for anyone daring to flash a camera near the tiles. At one point I was being trailed round the shop by two members of staff who seemed to take real joy in being utter jobsworths. I kept going for my camera, just to keep them on the edge of despair and ecstasy. While the shop is undeniably beautiful, this obsession about cameras is counter-productive and I’d have happily given them a few euros to have been able to snap away. Leaving the shop empty-handed – it was over 30c so the idea of fresh milk was frankly disgusting – we headed to Großer Garten on a tram which took us the right way to the city’s enormous park. Dresden is a very green city and despite spending some hours in the park, we saw but a sliver of it. For day trips, the area around Dresden is rich in places to explore. There’s nearby Leipzig for starters, with Saxon Switzerland, Prague and Berlin a bit further afield. All are ripe for exploration in this wonderful patch of Europe.

A trip to…Cologne

This summer, inspired by Greta Thunberg and the dread of a busy airport full of over-tired people, also known as torture, my beloved and I took a train from London through to Prague. We stopped off in Cologne, Dresden and Saxon Switzerland before ending in Czech Republic, Czechia or whatever they’re calling it today. With this holiday’s relaxed travel ethos and saving-the-world vibe, I feel like I’ve finally nailed how to do it right.

Eurostar is just a wonder, isn’t it? Despite their byzantine queueing system where a ticket purchased on Bahn.de requires you to the “just go there, just wait there” line for an eternity while everyone seeing said Bahn.de ticket looks scared, it’s still streets ahead of flying. That is, until we’re settled in, the train is pulling out of London and a tour guide starts talking to her group in a very piercing voice for what seems like forever. They are going to Antwerp I gather, and she is guiding them through escalators of Europe, and telling them about the chances of being robbed whilst in Brussels for twenty minutes. Once she’s word-bombed one lot of people, off she goes to another group. The peace and quiet of Eurostar is shattered so I put in my headphones and listen to Slipknot to calm me down. At Brussels, we are robbed twice and can’t work the escalators.

On the ICE train to Cologne, I realise with some horror that I’d not reserved tickets from Brussels and every compartment is rammed with people apart from first class which is, as ever, almost entirely empty. It’s quiet save for the sounds of champagne corks popping, aimed at the eyes of the poor. I cleverly use my un-corked eyes to spot one compartment fully booked, but from Cologne so we grab seats and realise everyone in there is British, American or Australian. We’re drawn to the compartment, I reckon, for the romance of it and the memory of when trains were like Harry Potter. The American impresses us all with his grasp of English when asked a question in German, he barks “English”.

I recall my first trip to Cologne, when I hated the city. I had been in Brussels with a friend, which we loved and Cologne seemed dreary in comparison. At the time that Germany were holding the World Cup, there was more energy in Belgium. Imagine! This time, Cologne presented itself as a thoroughly cool place, even if it isn’t much to look at. There are shops which resemble those in London, with the same succulents in tiny holders, postcards along the lines of Happy birthday, you old motherfucker and images of Cologne cathedral in neon pink. I also feel that Cologne was far better this time thanks to the brilliant 25hours hotel which I had been interested in staying in for a while. I already knew I loved the look of the building; it’s an old insurance company headquarters and 25hours have kept a number of the original features which gives it, in their own words, a retro-futuristic vibe. Attention to detail is everywhere, from the lobby which features a stunning ceiling, beneath which is the original reception desk where old typewriters are placed. The lobby is full of deep chairs, all within reach of a giant Taschen book on topics such as architecture, art, graphic design, the Bauhaus movement and cities. The lobby also has a store where you can buy Cologne gin, excellent garish socks with parrots on, books, notepads and so on. There’s a vinyl store with turntables for playing music and even a couple of Daleks hanging out.

Design doesn’t stop at the reception, the lifts are covered in mirrors, which is ideal for selfies and the ‘gram (ugh). The rooms have plenty of little touches that mark this out as a great hotel; every room has a UE Boom bluetooth speaker which is a simple idea that I haven’t seen replicated elsewhere and made me very pleased – clearly better than trying to belt out tunes on a mobile phone. There are books, comics and magazines on the bedside table for light reading and an old phone if you need to call anyone from the past. On the roof is a popular cocktail bar which does lots of fruity drinks at a reasonable price, offering far reaching views of Cologne. The downside is that I now only want to stay at their hotels.

We stroll out to Brusseller Platz where many ping pong tables are used by the youth to play badly. One man plays with a broken arm, and he’s one of the better ones. Mature trees offer some welcome relief from the blazing sun and the Belgian quarter has a series of genuinely old buildings to admire as it wasn’t badly damaged in the war. Later in the walk, it was chilling to note some information inlaid into the street of former inhabitants, saying where they were deported to in the war.

We ate lunch at Noa, and the salad I ordered came as a giant plate bursting with fresh leaves and herbs, quinoa, balsamic dressing and I added prawns in a chili sauce on the side. To say I was happy would be to downplay the concept of happiness. We head on to Aachener Weiher for a sit down overlooking a park and we sample one of the delights of the city, a Kolsch. It’s a 200ml beer that’s deeply refreshing and a reminder of how good the Germans are at this stuff. For dinner, we went to Café Feynsinn, which didn’t live up to Noa’s taste attack, but it’s a good restaurant playing many 80’s hits which is always a tick from me. My dinner was a pasta dish that was far nicer than Ryan’s veggie burger. As ever, our simple rule of no burgers or pizzas outside London was not applied and we paid the price. To round the evening off, we had cocktails at an outside bar, watching the world go by and being shocked at just how many songs Rihanna has done and how similar they are. Even the videos could be swapped over for one another.

Our second day was another beautiful one and we headed to Café Hommage for breakfast. It’s a typical hipster place, and instead of getting a number for your table, you choose a toy animal of your liking. We chose Bambi. While the breakfast was good, Nutella pancakes being an appropriate start to the day, the coffee was the real star of the show. Fortified with caffeine, we headed through the city and across the enormous bridge to Rheinpark to read and watch the world go by. There’s honestly little better than to sit in the shade reading a book. It’s relaxation of the purest kind.

Dragging ourselves off the grass, we got a train to Brühl, named after nobody’s favourite German actor, Daniel Brühl and to Augustsburg Castle which is a beautiful example of rococo architecture and is set within meticulously manicured grounds open to the public. Built in 1725, it has a staircase so grand that you’ll leave wondering if you can pull it off in your semi. Once a seat of power when Bonn was the capital of West Germany, dignitaries would gather on the staircase for a photo op. It has the ostentatious look that a certain president would admire greatly. Ready to take endless photos, we were told this was strictly forbidden and you could only go through the building in a guided tour, in German.

Headset on, and catching the odd bit of German, I learned some nuggets of information about the castle. In a state room is a beautiful stove in the corner of the room, which has no opening to feed it fuel. Behind the stove is a corridor where workers would shovel coal in lest the poshos have to witness how heat works. Other stories we were told marked the inhabitants to be real pieces of work. Sometimes the leader had a banquet all to himself, with the locals watching from a gallery upstairs, observing and smelling the feast below. He was on record as saying they loved this.

While we didn’t have the funds to antagonise people in the manner of the obnoxiously wealthy, we did manage to feast later in the evening at WALLCZKA, where we somehow bagged a table with a reserved sign on. I guess my German is that good. WALLCZKA is in the Neuehrenfeld district, a 15 minute journey from the centre of Cologne but it was worth it as the food was a total triumph. The burrata with chimichurri was bright and zesty, the duck salad was equally fresh but for me, the courgette kofta in a tomato and coconut sauce was a knock-out. To finish the night off, we head to Little Link cocktail bar and expect good things as the website proclaims “we are excellent” and I can’t disagree. The staff are friendly, they know their stuff and they understand their demographic when a cocktail with a film theme comes in a bag stuffed with popcorn.

After a great two days, it’s time to leave Cologne, but not before a quick reminder of what happened in WW2. The city was devastated with 37,000 tonnes of explosives dropped by the RAF, in 262 air raids. One particular raid struck me; over 1000 bombers attacked the city so that Bomber Command could get a propaganda win. They bombed the city for 90 minutes with the aim to cause so much damage that the fire brigade would be overwhelmed. Sometimes war just feels like statistics that are so overwhelming it’s pointless to really think about what these numbers mean. I thought it easier to think about this; in total the Luftwaffe dropped 40,000 tonnes of bombs on the UK in the war. Cologne was essentially dismantled from the air.

Edvard Munch at the British Museum

Once, in Oslo’s National Museum, I was one of four people in the world looking at their copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The painting was accompanied by a guard and was behind a case as it kept getting nicked, but other than that, my friends and I were blissfully alone with this masterpiece and free to admire it from as many angles as we pleased. Imagine being able to say the same of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, now eternally blocked not only by people but also their smartphones.

Fast forward some years, and the British Museum’s Edvard Munch exhibition is a hellscape of tourists and people craning their necks to see the works on display, but what works they are. The lithograph of The Scream (1895) is no less sensational when viewed up close, and I was able to see it in a brief moment when the hordes were elsewhere. The exhibition is a detailed exploration of his work and influences and starts with a self-portrait of Munch with a skeleton hand. It sets the tone of everything that follows, one of despair, morbidity and grief that haunted his work throughout his life. To say the exhibition shows a man obsessed with the fragility of life is an understatement.

His life seemed to be a series of miserable situations, from his mother dying when he was five to his sister dying when he was thirteen. When you add to this the mental health of another sister and his own mental collapse, fuelled by alcohol, you can appreciate that his exhibition is not one filled with joy and it makes sense that the images he made lack human warmth and joy.

On display were Head by Head (1095) where a couple appear to be embracing, but the print suggests they are in the act of consolation rather than love. Eye in Eye (1894) shows a couple not looking at each other, but through each other. The woman’s hair covers much of her face and the man is a pallid colour, with sockets for eyes.

Dead Mother and child

Other images show mothers, stricken in grief or children, holding their head in their hands as their own mothers lay dead. On display are versions of Dead Mother and child (1900) where a child is looking at us, wide eyed in disbelief and covering her ears. It’s a potent image that stayed with me throughout the exhibition.

Next to images by Munch are are examples of works he was inspired by, including the incredible Acid Thrower (1894) by Eugène Samuel Grasset. This work, showing a woman on edge holding a cup full of sulphuric acid that would disfigure a love rival, looks so modern and violent. Her hair is a shock of deep red, with a red background that makes her slightly green skin feel all the more sinister.

Acid thrower
Obsession

Munch was also inspired by Odilon Redon, whose Obsession left me in a momentary daze. There was something about the painting that made me think about how my own worries and anxieties would appear, if painted. I felt it was something like this, so much so that images I’d never seen felt familiar. What was most impressive about the exhibition is the multitude of ways in which sadness is displayed and how relatable it all was; human frailty on display is a frightening and beautiful thing. This frailty was sometimes evident in the ways the pictures seemed too harshly rendered, but most obviously in the hollow faces of people. Munch was quoted as saying he wouldn’t alter his moods because he owed so much of his output to this, which suddenly gives a sense of humanity to everything he did and everything displayed in the room.

The best place to see Munch’s work is the Munch museum in Oslo, currently moving to a new waterfront building in the city centre. It will open in 2020.

Stanley Kubrick at the Design Museum

Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are films, hoarding and camera lenses.

Stanley Kubrick was a hoarder of the kind that gets you onto a TV show along the lines of Trapped under My Receipts is my initial impression when I walked into the Design Museum’s summer blockbuster exhibition of his work. And unlike people that shove the plastic-bag equivalent of a Russian doll under the sink, this is stuff that allows admirers to see how his mind worked and how he made his masterpieces. In 2007, the Kubrick estate gifted his archives to University of the Arts London, and much of the material on show comes from this collection, which has been on a world tour for years.

What this exhibitions shows is a level of detail to his work and an explosion of creativity that is remarkable to behold, from his early days of his career as a photographer up to the very end. The pieces on display tell a story of a man obsessed with research and a perfectionist of the highest order. This exhibition gives as much space as is possible to every film, but it’s such a rich archive and such a strong collection of film history that you’ll find bottlenecks wherever a particularly interesting artefact lies.

Kubrick’s passion for research is shown in the pre-production for Napoleon, a film that has never been made. There is a library of books that Kubrick collected on the man, index cards covering every day of his life as well as costumes and a draft script. Seeing the demanding shooting schedule would be enough to give anyone a migraine, but Kubrick had to go one further and arrange for 10,000 soldiers from the Romanian army to be on hand for the shoot. That’s a cluster headache right there.

There is brilliant pre-production on show for Eyes Wide Shut where Kubrick and his team scouted locations to make his own version of New York in London; photos of Commercial Road are stitched together to create a panorama of London to help Kubrick figure out what he could use. It’s fascinating enough as a snapshot of the capital over twenty years ago. Another item was a map of Manhattan with London street names written over the top. All of this, plus elaborate sets made in Pinewood, are the lengths Kubrick would go to so he could pop home at night after a long day’s shooting and to avoid getting on an aeroplane.

There is correspondence between Kubrick and colleagues which demonstrated his level of control over every aspect of his work. Seeing the designs that Saul Bass created for The Shining was exciting; Bass enthusiastically writing about the latest designs and how one in particular stood out and had the office abuzz. That design was the one we all know – the strange horrified baby inside a giant letter T. Other options were far less memorable and on one of them, a giant hand in the snow with Danny’s tricycle in it, Kubrick wrote “hand and bike are too irrelevant.”

Other gems of correspondence show that Kubrick upset Christians on a regular basis (one was upset with A Clockwork Orange but took no issue with Rosemary’s Baby) and good, honest Americans who were outraged by Dr Strangelove, not to mention Lolita. In some instances, we saw what Kubrick wrote back to them and he was courteous but also slightly bemused as to the concerns of these people. There was something delicious in his reply to an angry letter about Lolita, describing it as a film that had already been shot, as if they’d wasted a stamp on their outrage. A letter from Ireland announcing yet another ban argued that soon, in Dublin, a cinema may be able to screen his work and that it would be worth the wait to have it shown there. The only thing missing was a Father-Ted style “down with this sort of thing” photo with original placards.

Kubrick was interested in pushing technology wherever possible – for Barry Lyndon,  he used a lens designed for space exploration to enable him to film using just candle light and had to use candles that burned rapidly but very brightly. They sucked oxygen out of the room, perhaps leaving the actors close to asphyxiation but the end result is a stunning film that merits having an ambulance at the ready. 2001: A Space Odyssey had some incredible tricks up its sleeve that would now be made digitally including front projection of the scenes set in Africa, the stargate scene which used slit scan technology and the gravity on the space station made using what looks like a hamster wheel. The technical complexities of this film is covered in enough detail to keep geeks happy but not so much that your mind explodes.

Danny’s jumper from The Shining

As I moved into the section of the display about The Shining, there were considerable shivers up my spine when I saw some of the props; Danny’s Apollo 11 jumper especially got to me. It’s so tiny, and such an apt thing for a vulnerable boy to be wearing while his Dad is on the rampage in a hellish hotel. Close by were the sheets of paper that Jack wrote his epic novel on with country-specific versions of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It’s “Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today” in German and in Italian it’s “The morning has gold in its mouth.” Yet again, this attention to detail marks Kubrick out as something different and other images even show his desire for the snow on the ground to look just the way he wanted, not too ploughed and not too wild. By the end of the exhibition, I realised that this is the first large-scale exhibition I have seen on a movie director and I hope there are more to come. But for now, this is as good a starting place as any other and it’s an exhibition in love with Kubrick’s film as well as his mind.

A holiday to Ukraine…the Chernobyl experience

It could have been apocalyptic, a bang to set off a chain reaction of bangs that would shroud the world in a pall of radiation, poison the waters of Europe before leeching into the seas and oceans of the world. And yet, 32 years later it’s a tourist spot. Chernobyl is burned into the minds of people as a byword for disaster and as a child I was fascinated by what happened there. Even today it’s seen as a deadly place of silence and mutated creatures roaming the landscape. Having read a chunky history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhii, there were so many missteps and calamities that it’s a minor miracle I’m able to type this and perhaps a bigger miracle that I was able to have lunch in the power plant’s canteen, just a few hundred metres away from where the explosion happened. Recently, a gleaming containment unit was slid into place, soaring above the old reactor and hastily assembled concrete sarcophagus that stopped the radiation completely escaping.

People know about the event itself in the broadest of terms, but often it is the people that lived around the plant who are forgotten, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who worked tirelessly to lessen the effects of the disaster, potentially saving the world but subjecting themselves to personal catastrophes such as a lifetime of ill-health, or a swift but brutal death.

Reading Plokhii’s book, I saw a horrific image of the aftermath of the explosion. Chaos everywhere, chunks of radioactive graphite burning all around and people rapidly becoming sick. In a chain reaction, as one person got sick from the radiation, they’d struggle to tell someone coming in what had happened – perhaps also too terrified to even admit what they knew if they did know anything – and that new person would quickly get to work before they fell ill. Imagine that; it’d be like trying to evacuate a sinking ship while suffering from overwhelming sea sickness.

Booking a tour to the exclusion zone is easy; but to maintain the idea of danger, the tour company Go2Chernobyl plaster their website with radiation symbols and a strange promise to take you somewhere extreme, that’s also safe and comfortable. Which is true, I suppose, otherwise nearly 50,000 people wouldn’t have visited Pripyat in 2018. Hints that this isn’t a usual excursion come when you are required to book your trip in advance to obtain permits and the many email reminders that without passport details you won’t be allowed to enter the 30km exclusion and 10km exclusion zones.

We meet other intrepid adventurers on a gloomy day by Kiev central train station. Nobody makes much of an effort to talk to one another, though that makes sense. We’re not exactly going bungee jumping. While we wait to go, we’re asked if we want to hire dosimeters but we choose not to. Some tours offer this and make the machines look rather scary, but I stick to the belief that this is just a money-making ploy; it’s safe enough to visit, so when the machine beeps a bit, it’s not going to reach a figure that’s meaningful. I absorbed more radiation in my flight to Kiev from London than spending a day near the power plant and you don’t find the air stewards shoving dosimeters in your face the whole time. An idea for Ryanair, there.

On the journey to the exclusion zone, a video is put on with terrible CGI of the explosion and lots of people sounding earnest or sad, which is reasonable enough. Eventually, when we arrive, I step out and go to the toilet, which is just past the barrier that separates the normal world and the world of the exclusion zone. I witness a strange frisson of excitement as I pass through a little divide between everything being OK and things being not OK for hundreds of years and everything still looks exactly the same. A road leads forever deeper into the forest and nothing seems to be moving, so it certainly scored highly on the eerie atmosphere I thought would exist. We wait for an age at the checkpoint, seeing gorgeous dogs that I wanted to pet but thought better of.

We visit Chernobyl town and it looks like you might expect a run-down ex-soviet town to look but with some subtle differences. Utility pipes run above ground because the soil is contaminated so nothing can be buried underground. People still work here, but can only work 15 days in the zone and 15 off due to the build-up of radiation. Inside the town is a museum, filled with dolls and baby gas masks as well as information about what happened. In a side room there’s a large painting depicting the scene where the firefighters were attempting to put out the blazes at the plant. It’s strangely poignant to see it stored away from other items and there was also something very tragic about the painting knowing what we know now, seeing the effort and exertion in their faces. Despite the museum’s artefacts and modern installation, this painting was by far the most immediately shocking and arresting thing in there. Outside in the rain, the Wormwood Star memorial is a long line of names of abandoned towns and a large statue of an angel. Nearby is a statue of Lenin; it’s one of two that remain standing in Ukraine. The other is also in the exclusion zone, making this place feel even more like a timewarp.

Our second stop is the Duga radar station, which is a fascinating place I hadn’t heard about until I booked the tour. Our guides explained that the radar was designed to know if the Americans had launched a missile, so the radar would bounce signals into the ionosphere, where it would have a look for anything to worry about, and messages would ping back. The scientists built the enormous station, over 100m high, 700m long, launched the system but never managed to get the signals to come back to Duga. It was doomed to fail, but was a colossal project that was so powerful, using up to 10 million watts, that it interfered with radio and TV signals around the world. So, it might not have stopped the Americans launching war, but it could made Coronation Street a bit fuzzy.

It’s a beautiful sight though and I would have happily spent an afternoon photographing it from every angle. It’s such a cold war remnant; a huge installation that the Russians thought could be hidden. Even as the reactor burned, officials didn’t want anyone to see Duga, fretting over whether to let Hans Blix from the Atomic Energy Agency drive to Chernobyl and be confronted by clouds of radioactive dust which would let him know that the explosion at the plant was worse than they said or fly there, but see the secret installation. In the end he flew there, and I doubt that Duga, as massive as it is, was ever really a secret. Naturally, being a tourist site, people have put up some radiation signs near Duga, which are fake but during the day we see plenty of real ones.  

After Duga, we heard towards the power station itself and get an idea of just how enormous the site is with power lines and pylons stretching out across a great swathe of land. Impressively, a solar panel array has recently been installed and a plan for the future is for more solar farms to be put across the exclusion zone. We also stop by the red forest, so called because it soaked up huge levels of radiation after the explosion, altering the colours of the trees. Almost instantly, this became one of the most irradiated places on the planet and even today, the soil is so contaminated that radiation levels are thousands of times above the norm, so we didn’t stop there for lunch.

Radiation scanner

We stopped in the Chernobyl power plant canteen for a sloppy lunch of red and brown coloured food that is bought in from Kiev and on entering, we needed to go through a radiation scanner, which is nerve-shredding. It’s never revealed what would happen if you were the cause of a terrifying alarm, so I assumed you’d just have to live in the exclusion zone forever, serving up sloppy food to tourists that haven’t set the alarms off. I don’t know how the machines work but mine didn’t beep and for that, I am thankful.

Next up was Pripyat, the highlight of the trip, because for all the drama that happened at the nuclear plant, the town that has been left to nature is more interesting than the nuclear plant, where people still work. It was over 24 hours after the explosion at the plant that people started to be evacuated, some had spent the day after the explosion relaxing in the unusually pleasant weather. One man was sunbathing on the roof of his building and was delighted at how easy it was to tan that day, and not at all disturbed that his skin gave off the smell of burning. He wasn’t aware that his tan was the beginning of radiation burns, which would slowly cause intense blistering across his body. Many people suffered the same fate and for the squeamish, looking up radiation burns is not for you.

Pripyat is not quite what it seems and I don’t think the experience could ever be genuine after such a long time and as it’s so famous. But as the minivan meets the guard in his checkpoint shack and enters the town, we immediately see the blocks of flats almost hidden behind thick stands of trees. Everything feels different, that this is not a town that bears relation to any you’ve seen before; it’s like an English garden city if the developers decided to build inside a wood and leave all the trees standing. Every so often the trees give way and a block rises up, it’s both intriguing and eerie, but not scary. If you were there at night, it’d be a terrifying place. Our first stop is the old swimming pool and our guide tells us that we can’t or aren’t supposed to go in, so advises us not to post anything on social media for a few days and takes us inside. It was hard to say if this was a trick to make us think we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be or they’re being a bit cheeky. We were told that the pool was still operating up until 1996, used by the liquidators but now you would easily think it was abandoned along with everything else. All the windows are gone, the pool long emptied and the structure is slowly decaying. Some of the group clamber up the diving board but I find myself interested in the large swimming pool sign on the floor that reminds me of the atomic logo with people swimming around it. There’s a clock still hanging on the wall but like everything here, it doesn’t work.

Later we visit and cross another group of tourists, armed with their dosimeters which aren’t making any noise. The school feels like it has been dressed for us, almost like a film set. Rows of windows frames are left open at the same angle for that pleasingly consistent look. Maybe for Instagram, a classroom floor is littered with children’s gas masks for the emotional sequence and school books are left open on pages with the benevolent face of Lenin staring out and others show soviet kids in the woods. It’s incredibly photogenic and I can’t stop snapping away. Our guides show us before and after pictures, at one point showing us that this field we were in was once the town square. Nature has completely taken over much of the city with trees bursting through concrete, turning the old sports stadium into something more like a wood. We poke around the supermarket, which once was able to have signs for luxury foods and even have the food in stock, Pripyat being such an important town in the USSR. Near the supermarket the guides get their dosimeter out and poke it near a drain. There is distinct beeping, they explain that nobody knows what’s down the drain but nobody wants to find out.

Soon, our trip to Pripyat draws to a close and we pass the checkpoint back into the normal world. We wave goodbye to the atomic dogs and I wish I’d seen some atomic kittens for the comedy effect, but you can’t have everything. I think to the future, in my nuclear bunker/nursing home where I tell people that I visited Pripyat and think of what could have been.

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.

I was elected to lead, not to read,

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.

A holiday to…Ukraine. The food experience.

After the Georgian feast on day one, my friend and I went back to Communist HQ Hotel to watch some baffling TV before sleeping fitfully all night. Top tip, try to eat before 10pm. Day two began with a leisurely breakfast followed by a food tour with a local, organised via http://tasty-kyiv.com. Putting the food tour early in the holiday is a great idea, so you have a much better idea of the Kiev food scene.

Our guide Tania was a delight, and our tour began by walking through the city centre, talking about what it was like to grow up at the end of the Soviet Union, living in Kiev during the Maidan revolution and what it’s like to live in a country at war with Russia. From my British perspective, this is a war that has ended because it’s not on rolling news. Tania politely rebuffed this, and of course she was right. Since my visit, I have found myself reading stories of a war that is just simmering away, grinding the people down. Take this story of men who can’t collect their pensions because the office they need to visit is through the front-lines. I can’t but feel that the Ukraine authorities could help pensioners better if they had the will, but wars are funny things.  

Pickles as far as the eye can see

To get to our first stop, we have to pass a building right in the centre of the city that advertises a “Gentlemen’s Club” which is, I’m sure, full of fulfilled women dancing for pleasure and true gents there to support the arts. We arrive in the central food market where anything that can be pickled is there, in a jar. All this pickling makes for great photos and I sneak a few before a stall-holder tells me not to take photos in case the jars get upset, or some such reason. As we move through this labyrinth of pickles, Tania tells us about the traditional methods of storing food that still hold sway today. I can’t say I have a great love of pickled foods, and I have renewed respect for my fridge. Further on, we see a staple of Ukrainian cuisine, Salo. It’s cold, white pork fat, often served with something pickled and while it looked appealing, I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it. Despite being an aspiring vegetarian, I tried a slice of deer and my friend had a slice of horse which was a no-no from me.

Salo. It’s just fat.

The second stop was a legendary site in Kiev, the first place in the city to serve up fast food before the likes of McDonalds arrived. Kiev perepіchka is a tiny booth on the street that serves up sausage in deep fried dough. You can immediately tell it’s trash food, but it’s so tasty that even when the strip of paper they give you to clean up with simply moves the grease around your face, you don’t care. Perhaps you could revive a flagging relationship by romantically licking the fat off each other’s faces? Or bring your own tissues.

Fast food, Kiev style

We continue our walk and learn more about the city and revolution, before Tania takes us to a restaurant and bar called The Last Barricade. It’s hidden within the discretely ugly Globus shopping centre, right in the middle of where the 2014 protests were. Part of its appeal is that you’ll need some local knowledge and a password to get in. The password is something suitably impossible to say. Tania tried to teach me the words, which I dutifully mangled and we were permitted behind the iron curtain. Symbolism is heavy here, where you pass through a wall to enter the bar and bricks in the building are designed to look like paving slabs pulled up during the most intense stage of the revolution. There are even sculptures of hands by the entrance, suggestive of people working together. We’re told at the bar that all the produce is proudly Ukrainian. It could be easy to think that a restaurant that’s also partly a museum celebrating Ukraine’s trio of revolutions since 1991 is going to be a political meal (our specials, empty promises and lies on buses) but the food is brilliant and it manages to be both a place that succeeds on novelty and on its own terms as a restaurant. We had varenyky, which is a little like ravioli with fillings. The cherry varenyky was worth a return trip alone.

The Last Barricade

On foot once more, we headed to Kanapa for borscht and this walk showed off Kiev’s unexpected beauty. Architecturally, large parts of the city are an eclectic mix of art nouveau, baroque, soviet stylings and modern buildings often cheek to jowl so one photo can capture wildly different styles. Alongside this are the many beautiful churches that dot the northern end of the city, making a walk from the centre something worth doing that can easily eat up half a day. St Michael’s Golden-Domed monastery looked timeless in the sun, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it is ancient but the original monastery was demolished in the 1930s and is only twenty years old. Almost opposite is the equally stunning St Sophia’s Cathedral where you can climb the bell tower for far-reaching views. St Sophia managed to avoid destruction, becoming a museum rather than a place of worship. Both are topped by dramatic golden onion domes. Walk just another five minutes and you’ll spot St Andrew’s Church, which sits majestically atop a hill, but it is slowly falling apart so watch out for falling masonry or stressed out clergy.

The weather was the most perfect of Autumnal days, with the sun casting a glow on everything and the slight smells of wood-burning in the air making us all feel very enchanted with the city. Tipping us into cosy overload was Kanapa, set in a painstakingly restored 19th century wooden building on the very pretty, and pretty touristy, Andriivskyi descent. Somehow we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Outside was a terrace overlooking a heavily wooded park and I could have stayed there all afternoon. I was a bit worried about eating borscht, maintaining a lifelong distrust of beetroot, but it turns out that I was completely wrong. The borscht was served inside a hollowed out cabbage alongside some bread. The flavours were rich, with neither the sweetness nor the sour cream or dill taking over. I was so inspired by the food that I have since made it at home and it turns out in a past life I was a Ukrainian woman who made this stuff for her family every week. I mean, it tasted really good.

Kanapa

The food tour continued into its fifth hour, so it’s superb value for money. We end at Lviv Handmade Chocolate for a coffee and some of those handmade chocolates they keep banging on about. I bought chocs for my beloved, who is a bit like my mum in the “is it dangerous?” stakes, and one day I’ll let him know that the chocolate I bought, with its fancy Russian-language packaging, is a delicious local blend of Chernobyl milk and Fukushima cocoa with just a hint of cinnamon. The rest of the shop was filled with all manner of delicious chocolate, which is an ideal mum-present shop. When I saw my bank statement a while later, my supposed largesse was exposed when I was charged under a fiver for the lot. This gives you an indication of just how affordable Ukraine is. I read that it’s the cheapest destination you can visit in Europe and while there are plenty of hipster hangouts that charge more, it’s still a great bargain. Let’s just hope that Ukraine doesn’t go the way of so many affordable destinations, with endless stag and hen do’s. The horror! We say goodbye to Tania, giving her €35 each, great value to my mind when she was so engaging to speak to and made the whole day feel much more than what I had expected.

Lviv Handmade Chocolate

All of this food and talk of revolution got me thirsty for a beer and as luck had it, I had saved Craft vs Pub on Nyzhnii Val St into my Google maps and it was a stroll away. En route, we saw more grand buildings and a trolley bus terminus which I always love to see. I have never really understood these things; neither a bus nor a train or a tram. They were fit to bursting with people heading home from work and though tempted to get one somewhere, neither of us wanted to be getting out Google translate on our phones and showing the driver the Ukrainian translation of “how does this work, how do we pay, help us we’re English” so we didn’t bother. Using just our feet, we found Craft v Pub and had a pint of something lovely and cheap. It was another place that wouldn’t look out of place in London.

Trolleybus!

For our evening dinner, we had a long list of places to go to and were excited about the feast we would have. We hedged our bets on one restaurant, to find it closed so ended up at Kureni, which has many great reviews. Warning bells should have gone off when we saw that the restaurant is within a park, with nothing around it and darkness all around. When we saw the restaurant, we could see the lights were on, but nobody was eating there. It looked like a lair for a Bond villain who has no friends and we were hangry, so we tried to convince ourselves that an empty place was exactly where we wanted to eat. The confused-looking waiter quickly flicked more lights on, put on a tv and some music to try and create some atmosphere. In the end, the food was decent. My Chicken Kiev (at some point, it was inevitable I’d order this) was solid but not spectacular. The Georgian wine was good and the meal was well priced. The tragedy was that we’d eaten so well all day, and knew the city could do better, which meant that day three needed to include some of the best food Kiev could cook up. Back at the hotel/strip club I plotted for the morning; there would be more churches and a magical-looking soviet construct to visit.

A holiday to…Ukraine. The Kiev experience.

At times, I like to stress my mum out. It’s a sort of bloodsport. Not content with worrying her in Algeria, where she shrieked gems like “Won’t ISIS kill you? Is it safe? The Sahara desert?! I’ll stand in front of the aeroplane and stop you!!” I decided to delight with her my plans to visit the site of the Chernobyl disaster and the abandoned town of Pripyat. She was clearly less bothered with this, because she only said she’d block up the front door to stop me sending “radioactive postcards”. I’m grateful she didn’t know about the whole war with Russia thing. 32 years on from Chernobyl, there’s no consensus on Ukraine; you’re either crazy to go or you’d be crazy not to go. Honestly, I think there’s more chance of dying from boredom listening to people worry than there is in going to Pripyat for the day. And have you noticed that nobody calls it The Ukraine any more?

Needless to say, there’s much more than the world’s worst nuclear disaster and accompanying deformed animals (the ones I saw looked fine to me) to Ukraine. Kiev is a mixture of buzzing capital, memorial to commie concrete lust and entirely normal city. After landing at the airport, where any traveller’s heart will get a little thrill from the unfamiliar language, a taxi ride will swiftly take you through endless Soviet blocks, some of which are atrocities to architecture and others endearingly insane. There are three blocks, reminiscent of giant futuristic hairdryers, by Pozniaky metro station that equally delighted and disgusted me.

Hotel Salute – so dreamy

We were staying at a hotel that is simply one of the best slices of modernist architecture I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most stylish hotel I’ve stayed in, from the outside. Hotel Salute is a cylindrical beauty that reminds me of the Capitol Records building in LA, but with a slightly sinister edge, partly due to the circular windows at the top of the building that give a feeling of being spied upon. It should have been more akin to a skyscraper, but due to arguments during the design phase, it was cut in half. It remains a building that has a sirens call of “photograph me”, which I did at every opportunity.

Inside the belly of the beast

The Salute’s lobby is a wonder of shiny metal panels that could be lifted from a sci-fi film, when we meet the inhabitants of an evil alien ship. It’s a lobby entirely at odds with the exterior. In the evening, a cardboard cut-out of Marilyn Monroe gets brought out to invite us to see the sexy ladies performing in the room where breakfast is served; as I didn’t take advantage of this I couldn’t tell you if the sexy ladies were writhing over the cold cuts or not.

Highly traditional Ukrainian beer hall, with neon lobster

Our first stop after marvelling and photographing the hotel for hours was Syndicate Beer and Grill. Once again, I make a first stop on an exciting foreign holiday somewhere totally familiar and unexotic. When in Jordan, I took my friend to a bar that served Cottage Pie and young Jordanians danced to Rhianna. At Syndicate, there is no cottage pie, but there is heavy use of neon, bare brick walls and filament lightbulbs that could have you thinking you’re in Shoreditch circa 2013. It feels in no way Ukrainian until we order an item on the menu called pickled fries, which sounded interesting. One slight mistranslation later and we received fried pickles which are much nicer than I’d have imagined. We also ordered a nano portion of parmesan fries – the staff should have served them with a magnifying glass, so measly was the offering. The beer was brewed on site and was fantastic. By the end of my second drink, it also struck me that this beer was strong. The steps leading up to the exit had “who’s going to be drunk” written on them. The answer was obvious.

After this, we went to Arsenla metro station, the world’s deepest underground station, which goes 105 metres beneath the surface. Heading down one very long escalator, my friend proclaimed the metro was deep but nothing special. Naturally, the second escalator was just around the corner and when we timed it, the journey from entrance to platform takes 4m 32s. I guess it had to stop at some point before we entered the bowels of hell. Deep as it is, the Kiev metro is a wonderful bargain at 22p a journey and it even takes contactless payments. It’s like some futuristic miracle. If you’re in any way interested in the architecture of travel, you’ll find yourself trapped in photograph loops in many of the stations, forgetting what you were supposed to be doing. The level of care and attention in these stations is gorgeous; true palaces of the people. While no Moscow metro, it’s still a superb system that puts many Western European metros to shame.

Eventually, our stomachs reminded us we were hungry so we head to a Georgian restaurant, home of my favourite cuisine. Having been to Tbilisi and Batumi, getting to eat this food first-hand, I had high expectations for Shoti, if only we could find it. My downloaded Google map of the neighbourhood directed me to a building site and then an alleyway. Lots of backtracking later we realise that Shoti is unhelpfully written to sort of look like WOTV with the Ukrainian for restaurant underneath. But once inside, the decor of the restaurant and the logo of the restaurant, in the shape of an Adjarian khachapuri, reassures you that all is well. Shoti feels swish and the staff are friendly and attentive.  We ordered our favourite Georgian dishes of badrijani, khachapuri and khinkali, washed down with wine. The badrijani, aubergine with walnuts and coriander, was as good as I’ve ever tasted it. The khachapuri, a bread made with a sort of pickled cheese, dripped gooey mess all over my plate and was clearly very bad for me but tasted magnificent. The main part of the meal, khinkali, which is a meat dumpling, was outstanding. By this point, we were too full for pudding. A shame, as Georgian puddings can be very good, but they’ll never eclipse the starters and mains.

My Kiev happy face

Former Soviet states seem to have Georgian restaurants all over the place and it’s easy to see why. The flavours couldn’t be any fresher, with heaps of coriander wrestling for your attention alongside cherries, garlic, pomegranate and walnut. The cuisine is far removed from the stodge people often think of when they think of eastern European food. Perhaps it’s simple geography that helps make Georgian food a blend of Mediterranean and Caucasian cooking. Either way, in Kiev make sure you visit at least one of the many Georgian restaurants. You might realise it’s the food you’ve been missing all along.