Kiev

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.