After our meeting yesterday with renewed wind in our sails, we decided to do a bit more sightseeing at the WWII museum. One thing for anyone who comes to Kiev, plan on taking double the time you think you’ll need when you go anywhere. Even though we had been in the area of the museum twice, it *still* ended up taking us 2 hours to finally get there. The main problem is that on all the subway and city maps, they anglicize the Cyrillic so it can be pronounced in conversation by non-Ukrainian speakers, but when you are physically standing on the streets or in the subway stations, of course everything is in Cyrillic again- so it really is impossible to understand anything unless you can remember all the sounds of the Cyrillic alphabet. Somebody really needs to make a map that properly combines both.
We bumbled around when we got out of the subway, and began walking. After we got about 1km away, we still had no idea if we were on the right track and we stood on the sidewalk trying to consult the map. An older lady was walking toward us, babbling in Russian or Ukrainian- we couldn’t immediately identify which. Ois thought the was a crazy old lady and nearly waved her away, but I tried to figure out if she was telling us something and indeed she was trying to ask us if we needed help. Indeed she ended up insisting on walking us back to where we had come from as we all tried to make conversation happily ignoring the language barrier. There was a funny moment when as we were walking she saw a small grey rat scoot across the sidewalk and she started shrieking and hopping around, much to everyone’s amusement passing by. We discovered her name was Tanya, she had a cousin in New York city and her father was from Greece. She had beautiful green sparkly eyes and a quick smile. What a lady- despite being in her mid to late 60’s she walked all the way back to the subway, and making signs on the back of a shopping bag, she told us what trolleybus number to take, and that we needed to take it all the way to the last stop to get to the “Hitler” museum, thanks to Ois’s John Cleese imitation. Then she waved and we thought we were just parting ways, but she turned around and began heading all the way back to where we had met her way down the road. See? This is the type of thing that I mean about people over here. Everyone is so helpful and kind, it just knocks your socks right off on a daily basis. What a country.
We finally arrived at our destination, only to find that the museum was closed- so much for the website stating they were open until 7pm! So we walked around the grounds, and took photos of some of the outdoor sculptures about the Ukrainian resistance fighters, which the word “breathtaking” falls short of properly describing.
The 1st photo is the giant entrance to the large tunnel with the scenes cast in bronze and inset into the concrete walls, with gaps above for bits of sunlight to peek through. The play of shadows and light against the figures was so powerful. I’ve never seem anything like this. The scale was enormous, and the detail was so studied and carefully done. Especially all the different faces and the muscles in the bodies- everything communicated pure strength and resolve. Incredible.
Walking out of the tunnel, you are presented with Ukraine’s own Statue of Liberty- “Mother Motherland”, built as a monument to the battle of Stalingrad. With these photos, unfortunately you have no proper concept of the scale of this piece- it is actually larger than the Statue of Liberty, and when it was completed 40 years ago, it was the largest statue in the world. It is so beautiful, with touches of art deco and the shining silver surface reflecting the sky. We were just about the only people there, so I lay down on the marble bench running around the diameter of the foot of it, and looked at it for ages upsidedown.
Then it looked like it might rain, so we began to walk back to the subway. We stopped for our $1 beers in the park so we could sit down for a bit, and Oisin told me about how a pear just about fell on his head from the tree above. I didn’t even notice the pear tree! It was the only one there! I saw a pear, and I said this one in particular looked like it would be so delicious and perfect off the tree and we played eye-spy until we were looking at he same one. Then Ois decided to see if he could throw up something to knock loose the exact one I wanted. He’s so funny like that! I didn’t expect for him to be able to do it, but he did, much to the gathering crowd’s delight. Victory!
And then we left and decided to have supper at this place we read about on our city map, simply called “Schnitzel”. We have been dying lately with not-so-good food here, the choices are getting repetitive, I’m crippled in our apt without an oven to bake things in, and we have 2 pots and a single small frying pan. Plus we have to guess at a lot of the ingredients at the supermarket. And we have no moolah for better restaurants. So today we thought we’d treat ourselves to a $20 supper of beer and schnitzel after all the stress of the past week. We did, and it was great. With our beers, they gave us teeny individual bowls of what really were about 6 long skinny croutons of dry black bread rubbed with a bit of garlic. I will be making these at home to go with beers. They were good! I had apple strudel for dessert that was out of this world, it was even better than the meal. Then we came home.
Oh, but before I go, here is “Rabbit of the Day”. He was in the park where we I got my pear, and I have no idea what his little sign said, so I took a photo so my stepmom can translate. I think he thought his 2 bunnies were magical or fortune-telling or something. One of them had milky blue eyes and clearly was special. He looked like a salty old sailor, and didn’t mind me taking his picture. I said that he probably loved the fact that any lady coming over to admire the bunnies had to bend over and he was happily exactly the right height to admire cleavage all day long.
So here you go:
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