Category: Ukraine

There are tours that you can take to Chernobyl, but we decided to visit the museum in Kiev dedicated to the disaster instead of visit the site… mainly because it didn’t come with warnings about how to avoid contamination with radiation.

The audio guide and exhibits highlighted many personal stories from the days, weeks and months following the tragedy. The museum represented the disaster as occurring mostly due to a design flaw. It stressed the heroics of those present at the time who attempted to mitigate the consequences, in some cases knowingly giving their lives.

However, quite coincidentally, we later met a Canadian nuclear power worker in Bucharest that informed us that the Ukrainians made many mistakes and that the accident was preventable.

Below are photos from Victor Yanukovych’s estate when he was Prime Minister and President. It is now a museum displaying his excessive expenditures while in office.

We could not read all of the exhibits in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War (below), but it was still worth the visit. It remembers the 8 to 14 million Ukrainians that died during the war.

Our stay in Ukraine was short, only three days, but we loved Kiev. We stopped over after leaving China on our way to Romania.

I may have looked like I had a broken neck when I arrived as I had not seen such blue skies in months and kept staring straight up.

With any country we visit, we get an impression of what it must be like to live there, which may or may not be correct or representative. And, of course, our perceptions are strongly influenced by the few taxi/Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts, tour guides, waiters, etc. that we meet.

In Ukraine, I felt those we talked to were angry, strong, defiant, and discouraged while at the same time still a bit optimistic (unlike in Romania where it felt that all hope for a better future was gone).  They were angry about successful revolutions followed by further corruption and the war with Russia that continues killing their young. But they were proud to have fought back. How can you not want to root for people that covered a charred building from the 2014 revolution with a banner stating “Freedom Is Our Religion”?

The photo below shows pictures of those killed during the 2014 revolution. It is, and felt, very recent.

Another monument to those killed in the protests.

But all of our tours and wanderings were not a “daily dose of depression” (as Logan often calls our Social Studies lessons).

Below are murals painted in the past few years.

Logan and then Ethan in Landscape Alley.

St. Michael’s golden-domed monastery

Below is a locally famous cat that died in a fire. They felt it needed a statue.

Communist-era construction below (strongly ridiculed by our tour guide).