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.