Being a diva in Kiev

The next stop on my trip was Kiev. This was where I’d wanted to go for the last few weeks as I really wanted to go see Chernobyl, which I did (and wrote about here and here). I booked a cheap flight - I’d been put off the idea of the bus by someone who mentioned that the Ukrainian roads were not all that good.

This did mean an early start. I slept badly and got up at 4 AM, got dressed in the dark and checked out, literally pushing through a group of drunken Americans who were crowding the doorway. Feeling a bad day was in prospect, I stalked off to find the bus to the airport.

I really badly needed a coffee when I arrived. I was extremely tired and not in the best of moods - I’m afraid I took it out on someone who asked for money. I was looking for somewhere to buy some coffee from, and get rid of my leftover Hungarian money, when someone appeared by my side and started talking to me. In my experience airports are generally not the places to make meaningful friendships and so I dismissed him with a rather curt “if you’re looking for money I’m not giving you any”. He immediately vanished from my life.

Fortunately I managed to find somewhere to buy a coffee and some snacks. Unfortunately there were yet more Italians arguing with the girl at the checkout over what they’d ordered. This went on for whole minutes, and I was stood in the queue getting more and more cross. Eventually I decided the hell with it, there must be other places to buy coffee, and throwing my snacks back I flounced off to find it.

Of course there wasn’t anywhere else, so I meekly had to rejoin the queue which still had the argument going on and, if that weren’t enough, more people had joined the queue since I’d left.

I was not having a good morning, but eventually I got some coffee and felt a bit better.

The flight passed without my yelling at anyone or otherwise causing a scene, and we arrived at a snowy Kiev. I was very glad I’d bought those long johns in Budapest.

Passing through the scariest border control I’ve ever been through - I thought the guard was going to have me taken into a room and beaten - it occured to me I had no idea how to get from the airport to the hostel. Usually I check beforehand, but here for some reason I hadn’t.

Luckily the airport had decent wifi, so I turned to the Internet. The bus situation looked hopelessly complicated and I was sure to go wrong, and as the consensus of the internet was to avoid taxis, I decided to try Uber.

I’ve never used Uber before, so trying it in a country where English isn’t widely spoken was perhaps a bit of a gamble but in the end it was all fine. The guy showed up on time and in the right place, and so did I.

When people ask me where I’m from I usually say “near Manchester”, because that’s somewhere in the UK that people know, and never mind that I’m actually from about an hour and a half away. The downside is that they then talk to me about football. I used to say “oh, I’m not really in to football” but this is a problem if they don’t speak much English because then there’s this awkward silence while you both try to think of something to talk about.

Wise to this by now, I pretended to be a Manchester United fan and we had a chat in broken English about watching football with a beer. That’s not what I do at all, but the guy seemed happy to have the conversation and it passed the time.

I was actually only half paying attention to the conversation because Kiev is quite an imposing city. Everywhere are these huge, Stalin-era buildings that loom over you, and covered by snow they looked incredible. I’m not sure what most of them were, but that didn’t really matter much. I assumed they were shadowy government agencies and left them to it.

The driver dropped me off at the hostel and went on his merry way. I was pleased that my first Uber experience had gone well, and it was actually very cheap - about 2.7 Euro - and went to check in to the hostel.

Here my bad day continued. I’ve never had such an unwelcoming welcome at a hostel. I wasn’t greeted by a hello or a hi or even a Ukrainian version but with a brusque “Get in”. I’ve seen enough action movies to know that the correct response to this is with a swift elbow to the face followed by an exciting car chase across town, but I really didn’t have the energy for that just now so I followed him inside.

He checked me in, telling me they didn’t take cards and I had to pay by cash. I hate it when they do this. Fortunately I had some on me so I paid most of it with a promise to pay the rest later. This did leave me without any money for the present.

The room itself wasn’t great. Taller than it was wide, it was small and smelled quite bad. There were already two other people there and they’d both strewn all their things all over the place so there was scarcely enough room for me to put my bag down. There were three lockers for a four-person room, so I had to have a tiny one down the hallway. Feeling my mood darken further I clambered up to my bunk for a nap.

Rarely have I slept so poorly. The room was too hot, and there were no obvious controls to turn it down. One of the other guys kept closing the window which didn’t help matters and in a dorm room there’s only so few clothes you can remove.

The worst thing by far was the noise. My room was next to the reception/communal area and they would play music until about 2 in the morning every night, even if no-one was there (no-one was ever there).

It was such a strange environment. No-one was ever awake before 10, and they just did not seem interested in running a hostel. It actually reminded me a lot of the hostel situation in Skopje - I felt like an unwanted guest. I slept horribly every night so my days were pretty bad too.

Even the walking tours were not particularly worthwhile. I tried to go on the first day I was there, but foolishly followed the TripAdvisor map which took me to the wrong place. No-one showed up (obviously) and it was only afterwards when I read the directions I realised they didn’t match up (I later updated the map for them on TripAdvisor). Sighing, I made my way to a nearby empty restaurant for a bad lunch.

I tried again the next day and had an average tour in the morning. The guide was fine but had no real interest in talking to most of us but it was generally not too bad and we saw some beautiful churches.

The tour guide I had in the afternoon was much worse, speaking very little to any of us and more interesting in checking her phone. It was very cold and I was close to leaving, but we did learn some interesting things about Ukraine.

It’s quite a troubled country, all in all. In the UK we heard about the Russian annexation of Crimea and the troubles in the east of the country, but news of it kind of fizzled out. The war itself is still going on, with soldiers still dying over there. All over the place you see guys in army camoflague walking around, and while I was in Kiev there were protests against the government and its links to Russia. Much of Ukraine is pro-Europe and having closer ties to Europe, but the president is said to have business interests in Russia.

I don’t know how it’s all going to end up. The people here are fiercely nationalistic, as they’ve had to struggle so hard for their independence. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been vehemently anti-Russian, which I suppose is to be expected. You can buy toilet paper over here with Putin printed on it, summing up neatly the Ukrainian view of Russia.

All this leaves the place feeling not so friendly. The only Ukrainian I met in Kiev who was friendly was the tour guide for the Chernobyl tour, with the majority seeming at best indifferent. I got some outright hostile looks while I was there, and the little voice in my head that tells you to be careful was working overtime. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a country that has an on-going war on its territory, and unsurprisingly it’s not great.

And still I was getting very little sleep. The final straw came when it was the birthday of one of the guys who ran the hostel. They had their own private party at the hostel, and ran around screaming at about 3 in the morning. There was nothing in way of security - my room didn’t even have a lock - so, harbouring fantasies of burning the place to the ground, the next day I checked out a couple of days early and checked into a cheap hotel.

This was more expensive than the hostel, but I badly needed to get some sleep. I couldn’t even catnap during the day, as they were doing renovation work. Luckily the hotel was actually quite nice, and had BBC World Service on the TV so I could find out what was going on in the world (nothing of note). It was even close to the pickup point for my Chernobyl tour the next day.

Things in Ukraine are almost embarrassingly cheap for tourists. For example, I bought a 500ml bottle of Coke that in English money comes to 24p. Even a nice cup of coffee in a decent coffeeshop comes to the whopping price of 93p. I asked someone why it’s so cheap over here and was rather hotly told “it isn’t cheap for us”. Perhaps it wasn’t the best question to ask.

It’s difficult for me to recommend Kiev as a place to go. It felt a very troubled place. The Chernobyl tour was fantastic though, and for that reason I was glad I came, but I probably won’t be back. Written on February 19th, 2018 by David Seddon