Kiev

Kiev

I usually stay at the sort of place where I am lucky to be staring at a wall out of my window but in Kiev I am on the twelfth floor looking down on the Opera House – don't worry I won't be darkening their doors to see Radio & Juliet; I am about to try my luck at a jazz club. Not a fan of jazz but I am willing to try most things. Food and vodka is on offer as well so there is hope.

Kiev is full of really nice buildings – most of them look nineteenth century although I suspect that a few are a bit older and some younger, There is an interesting variety of styles but the blocks are all substantial with either ten to fifteen windows across, or four to eight floors high, or both. They have made the air conditioners on the outside look relatively inconspicuous – the worst blemish (of which I have seen two) is a big horrible yellow M. (This information is probably wrong, large parts of the city were dynamited in the Second World War by the NKVD after the Germans had occupied it, killing quite a lot of Germans and, presumably, quite a lot of Ukranians too. {For those that don't know, the NKVD was the predecessor of the KGB – the USSR Secret police}.) The fairly modern block I am staying in is not so nice but I don't have to look at it so I don't care. Some of the very modern ones are also pretty OK so it is a nice city to look at once you have escaped the railway station.

Speaking of which - the day began badly. I was on an overnight train and we were half an hour late in. Railway stations always seem to attract the rough end of life – grotty markets, beggars, crappy roads, hassling taxi drivers etc. but I had managed to buy a map on the station and had booked a hotel whilst in Odessa so I was a lot more confident than when I arrived in Odessa. Found a nice breakfast stop and studied the map carefully – having looked at the google map of the hotel's location when I booked it and assiduously written down the name in the dodgy script they use here, as well as in Roman characters. I was feeling very confident. Did it do me any good? Did it hell. I had to get the old tinternet working and it was a main street with significantly different spelling than the version I had. Oh yes, mine was right but it was probably in Russian cyrillic, not Ukranian, or vice versa.

One thing that made an impression was that I was wandering along, map in hand, looking for the hotel when two men, separately, stopped me within a couple of hundred yards and asked if I needed any help. Can you imagine that in Sunderland? How silly of me, no tourists visit Sunderland except football fans supporting the opposition so they are there to get beaten up.

My last day in Odessa was quiet, I did go to the beach and swam in the Black Sea – for about thirty seconds - warm it is not. I had checked out of the hotel and my train was at 00.52 a. m. That condemned me to the rest of the day with little to do and no shower so I did lots of walking. Imagine the state of me, and particularly my sandals, when I got on the train. I thought I had booked a bed in a four berth cabin but, fortunately, there was only one guy to enjoy the pleasure. We didn't exchange a word – can't think why. Actually the smell of the mouldy carpet was worse than my sandals and I am sticking to that story.

You know that it is time to leave a place when you can confidently walk round without looking at a map but Odessa had been kind to me so I think that it is a nice place for a lazy few days in a country with significant language differences to the West. (Although you do realise after a while that quite a lot of young people speak English to a reasonable standard)

It is the twenty-first anniversary of Ukranian Independence Day tomorrow and they are busy setting up and testing sound equipment for what will obviously be a free music show in front of the Independence Monument; it will be a bit like a free concert in Trafalgar Square with old Horatio looking down – can you imagine it? His Lordship liked a bit of fun so he would probably have approved - not sure about such august institutions as teh National Gallery though. We will see what the morrow brings on that front.

There are lots of parks, flowers in the streets and “Christmas” type street lighting. How much is for tomorrow I don't know. It may be because Kiev is hosting/has hosted part of Euro 2012 – I assume that this is some football tournament. (There are certainly lots of new tourist information signs up  in English.) One nice touch is that there are eighteen carts in the square each with a three metre high egg in it, every one painted differently. Eighteen not twenty-one; there are twenty four oblasts (provinces/states) in Ukraine so it can't be that..

One thing for the football hooligans to do is that the city claims to have the longest zip-line in Europe (or Tyrolean something or other, as they call it). This goes across the river Dneiper which, even this far from the sea, is a good four hundred metres wide. I timed the ride at 40 seconds for about half a kilometre and, given that there is an uphill finish to the catchment point, it must have meant that the suckers were doing 60 kph+ in the middle of the river. Doesn't sound much to a cocooned car driver/passenger but you try it cycling/skiing and then you have some control – well not me, obviously.

“Teas” here are quite interesting – they seem to have the Chinese beaten for inventing dodgy infusions. Mango tea I liked but “Spring tea” which I had today was a bit strong. It was red and definitely had berries in it. The same menu – English only - had a meal called “Home made fat” - I wonder why I didn't try it?

The “Jazz” club was interesting, mainly English/American popular songs but quite well done. Fronted by a woman who sang and played a bit of sax; it is a five piece where the boss was the bass player; the only thing longer than his face was his fingers. Very odd though, I walked in before the band started and they had 3 large TV screens in this forty square metre room all showing “Some Like it Hot” with the sound off. Now, surely, the point about Some Like it Hot is the Billy Wilder/A.I.L Diamond script so why have it on silent. It got more bizarre – once the band got going they switched to bloody football. Why? I assumed it must be for the drummer because drummers are proverbially thick and, therefore likely to be interested in soccer but he wasn't watching much. After about fifteen minutes they swapped the TV back to “Some Like it Hot” where we had left off and when it got to the end, they played it again; it must have been on some sort of loop. Bizarre. (Did remind me though that I haven't seen it for at least twenty years and I forgotten most of it; I must know somebody with a copy.)

I left at eleven thinking of a little wander and a nightcap. The wander was quite pleasant, the nightcap more difficult, nearly everywhere was closed (although, of course, I managed). It felt a bit like Plymouth. Funny I should mention Plymouth. Kiev is 50 degrees 45 minutes north, just north of Plymouth. Now that did surprise me.

I ambled down to the main street on Independence Day to find that it, and some side roads, was closed off to traffic. On the main drag there were stalls set up and another little music stand (as well as the big one), basketball games, people doing silly things with bikes and those leg extension things that help you run faster, plus various speed machines on display. All rather badly organised and a bit chaotic but charming for that. Can you imagine Whitehall closed off for a days so that people can have a bit of fun each year on, say, Queenie's Official Birthday? It reminded me a bit of Queen's Day in Amsterdam. It was quite a big thing for the crowd - which I would estimate only in the low tens of thousands although there was probably quite a lot on TV.

Back to the hotel about four just as the military and para-militaryguys in the side streets were packing up and heading out, presumably on the basis that rioting did not look likely. One of the ways that Eastern Europe shows its history is that there are far too many police and para-military. They are everywhere and, essentially, doing bugger all; it must be a significant drain on the economy.

I was back down on the main street again at 8 but everything had packed up and gone except the big stage. Rather disappointing! They did a good job of putting on a show with at least eight big screens (and one of them must have been fifteen metres by twenty), the trouble is the show was crap. The singer(s) had a couple of dancers but no band! Essentially they were singing with a pre-recorded sound-track; I did wonder if they were lip-synching but didn't hang around long enough to decide.

In my amblings I did find another show which was classical music (I heard Dvorjack mentioned) with four tenors and then a soprano with a proper orchestra - a far better entertainment.

The fireworks went off at ten, presumably indicating the end, but I was in a Belgian bar drinking de Konnick by then.