Pretty much every city/town that we have visited in our European travels has several sides to it--a beautiful touristy center, poor part with graffiti and rubbish, a well off housing area, and an industrial region. Kyiv is no exception. While we love seeing beautiful churches and fortresses, the majority of the city does not look very well maintained if you go outside of the touristy area. Things have been getting better though in the last twenty years, that's for sure. But there is still a lot of unfinished constructions, dirty streets and untaken care of roads. The country is struggling, and it is clear. There is a huge devision in income between two groups of people--the very rich and the poor. And people are not sure how things are going to get better in the current political environment. I do feel quite removed from the worries and stresses of the Ukrainians, but my heart still hurts for the people who don't want to give up and want to keep working towards a better future. The whole needs to make changes though and not just a few honest people...
As we were driving around, Katya was taking lots of pictures with my or Katia's phone. So I'll share a few.
City-hero Kyiv. Every city that suffered during the WWII is called city-hero.
This is what many parts of the residential "sleeping" areas of Kyiv look like. Multi-story buildings with little space in between them.
The amount of cars on the roads has definitely increased ten fold in the last two decades. Many people use public transportation every day still, but as you can imagine, parking next to all those multi-story houses is a problem...
This is what the old-style Soviet multi-story apartment buildings look like. They usually have nine floors and balconies that people either leave open to the air or that they frame with windows to have more storage area and a place to dry clothes when it's raining.
The roads in Kyiv are much wider than in Lviv, but congestion is still a problem in the city.
And since Kyiv is a city-hero, there are many monuments throughout the city to commemorate those horrible but victorious years of our history.
New churches are still being built, in a very interesting style. I think a lot more people nowadays go to church, even if not regularly, than when I was growing up.
We found this fun sign pointing in different directions around the word, such as Taj Mahal or Gdansk in Poland or LA.
And even with all the modern developments and renovations that the city had undergone prior to Euro 2012 tournament that Ukraine and Poland hosted, there are still so many areas outside the city that remained untouched by the progress;). This is quite a gem, a relic of a car "Lada", a very popular Soviet make of a car that my grandpa used to drive and we thought was the best car ever. Apparently they still make Ladas nowadays.
We saw a lot of REAL and interesting sides of Ukraine and I am glad that the kids were able to do that. Seeing life that is very different to our routine life is an amazing experience for them that hopefully influences their formative years for good:).
Lyana.
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