Day 18: Kiev Impressions

Kiev, as seen crossing the Dniepr River from the east.

If you want an awesome view of Kiev, look out the train windows as you cross the Dniepr River.  The rising sun cast a warm glow over the forested and hilly west bank of the river, with the Motherland Monument and the Orthodox lavra with its minarets and towers rising out of the trees.

We arrived at about 7AM local time and had eleven hours to see whatever there was to see in Kiev before the the overnight train departed for Warsaw.  Our first priority were storing our luggage in the security lockers of the station, which was easy enough to do.  After that, we needed to book tickets.  For the first half of the trip, I booked all the tickets in advance since travel for five is a bit more complicated than travel for two.  However, for this latter half the only thing I booked was hotel reservations in London and our plane ticket to the States, so if we wanted to adjust our schedule (or had it adjusted by circumstances outside our control) we had some extra flexibility.  Customer service wasn’t very pleasant – particularly when we asked if we could stay in the same berth (which we couldn’t) but we had our tickets, so off we went to explore the city.

The inside of the Kiev train station.	The train station Metro entrance.

My first impressions about Kiev is that it’s a lot more Westernized than the rest of Russia – at least in the sense that there are actually quite a few signs written in English as opposed to virtually none in Russia.  The Ukranian script is similar to Russian with a few minor exceptions (such as the presence of an ‘i’ character) and since Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union for seventy years a lot of things are familiar such as the metro stations and system. 

A street in downtown Kiev.  As it was Sunday, the streets were mostly empty until the late morning.	The Dniepr River.  Don’t worry about that nuclear power plant in the background – Chernobyl is about fifty miles upstream.

Other things: there are hills in Kiev.  This might seem like a no-brainer, but the previous three cities we’d been in (Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Irkutsk) were all flat.  In fact, Kiev is in the middle of the steppe – which is a vast flat expanse – which makes the hills all the more noteworthy.  The elevated west bank of the Dniepr was one of the main reasons why Hitler’s generals argued for establishing a defensive line (the “Ostwall” or East Wall) along the Dniepr since the water obstacle combined with the height of the west bank made it easier to defend.  The speed of the Soviet advance, their tenacious and aggressive river crossing approach, and lack of German preparation served only to delay the Soviets by a month or two.

Apparently, the war against ice cream goes beyond Orthodox churches to Kievian subways.	For comparison, this is what the rest of the Ukraine looks like.

With only a limited amount of time available, we set out to walk through the city center and then to go along the river to see the Museum of the Great Patriotic War and the nearby Kiev Pechersk Lavra, one of the most prominent Eastern Orthodox monasteries in the world.