Mon
12-Jul-2004

holiday in kyiv

I have returned after a glorious week in Kyiv, in the Ukraine, visiting the Brothers Smith.

Andy, Jim and I took the plane from Gatwick to Kyiv on Friday morning. Everything went pretty smoothly and we were soon on board our Ukraine International Airlines jet, eating some kind of strange dish of squidgy meatballs and rice followed by squidgy gym mat chocolate foam pudding washed down with a can of beer. Jamie was waiting for us at the airport and after a celebratory arrival beer, we all took a car to Kyiv itself to their flat. Rob and Jamie’s flat is nice – bashed in and spacious with lots of pictures and postcards all over the walls.

The Ukraine looks in certain respects similar to Poland, but much rougher around the edges, much more like a Third World country. Kyiv, which apparently is home to three million people, is a sprawling mix of tower blocks of varying quality, building works and cranes, broad squares, wide boulevards and monumental architecture. The streets are quite rough and dusty, and at this time of year, with bright sunshine most days, they feel like the laid back streets of southern countries, occupied by cheap markets and little kiosks selling cigarettes, beer, drinks and other bits and pieces. There aren’t really any bars or restaurants except for a few catering to those with more western tastes. You can just buy beer in bottles at pretty much any time of day or night from one of these kiosks and then stand around drinking on the street. All of the city’s older tower blocks have centrally controlled water and heating, so that the heating comes on in September and turns off again in March, and the entire city’s hot water has been turned off for two weeks during the time we are here. Apparently, they are cleaning out the system or something. Pretty amazing that they can just turn off an entire city’s hot water like that. The newer blocks of flats have their own boilers and are not subject to the whims of central control, but we are all stuck with cold showers for now.

In the flat, Jamie cooked some food and we all started drinking. Beer is extremely cheap here, at about the equivalent of 30p a bottle. You can also get this slightly sweet but rather nice champagne for not much more than that. After a few hours of drinking and chatting, Jamie and Rob took us out for a night time walk around Kyiv. We strolled past the amazing golden domes and blue and white walls and towers of the cruciform St Sophia Cathedral, and took the funicular railway down the hill from here to the edge of the old town, and then walked to some kind of late night expat bar, where we got more drunk, and Jim, Jamie and Rob spent about an hour explaining to a Ukrainian guy that they were from Wales rather than England, drawing parallels between the Ukraine and Wales and comparing the USSR to Great Britain, which I thought was a little excessive.

On Saturday we got up quite late, and then all headed out to the nearby market to buy lots of food, mainly cheese! The food market was in a big hall like a railway arch, and the room was piled high with attractive mounds of vegetables and fruit. There were also lots of cool looking sausages, large lumps of yellow cheese and all kinds of random products derived from fish. We had a beer while we were there, with some of the local nibbles designed to go with beer: paprika crisps, cheese crisps, these surprisingly tasty ‘salmon’ crisps cut into long flat rectangular pieces and sold in a box, little shredded bits of dried shrimp which are a bit like pork scratching but much more fishy, and these sticks of fibrous cheese which smell like a cow’s foot but taste weirdly nice, kind of smoky and cheesy, you peel off strips of cheese and eat them.

After a delicious dinner, we were taken to Shevchenko Opera House to see La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli, a complex tale of a woman in Venice who loves a man who already loves the wife of the head of the Inquisition and who is lusted after by some scheming Inquisition spy who devises various plots to blacken her mother’s good name. Luckily there was an English translation in the brochure so we were able to work out what on earth was going on, but it was a convoluted plot by any standards. Though the whole thing was four and a half hours long, there were pleasing breaks after each act and these made the opera quite manageable. We drank a bottle of champagne in each break, and admired the lavish gold walls and chandeliers of the opera house. The opera house was glorious to look at. It spanned about six floors and was very tall and thin, so the seats were stacked up over many levels, looking steeply down to the stage rather than being set back We were up in the gods, by the roof, perched by the rail at the front, with a great view that plummeted down to the stage and the pit. The acoustics seemed to be really good, with the sound bellowing up to us. The production had over a hundred people dressed in all manner of fabulous Renaissance costumes prancing around and singing. It was all rather marvellous.

After the performance we went back to the flat to eat and prepare for a psy trance night out on an island in the middle of the Dnipro river which runs through the city. The river that runs through Kyiv is quite vast, with some large islands nestled together in the middle. Various bridges join the main city to the islands, which are mostly forested and are bordered by lovely sandy beaches. We took a car to one of the bridges, then walked over it and through the island forests till a winding track took us to the trance party.

The music was very loud indeed, pounding out of the speakers into a small crowd of dancers, while other people gathered nearby around fires. It was around two or three in the morning when we arrived, so within a few hours of dancing it began to get light. We all took a little acid. It was soon turning into a bright sunny morning as we milled around, went for walks in the wood, wandered over to the river nearby to contemplate its stillness, or carried on dancing. As it got hotter the crowd thinned out to the hardcore dancers and the ground became increasingly dry, our pounding feet throwing up big clouds of dust as we whirled like dervishes in the hot sun. Cheap beer sold from a nearby tent fortified us while the talkative acid led us into enjoyable loud political arguments and realisations of the shared psychic unity of humankind.

By midday, Rob had taken over playing at the decks as the organisers attempted to dismantle them around him, I was still hopping up and down like some kind of psychedelic puppet, Andy and Jamie had decided to go swimming and were attempting to traverse the surprisingly wide river, and Jim was sitting under the trees wondering if it had all gone too far. There followed a long walk back across the island in the burning sun to the bridge, where Jamie made us devour multiple choc ices, before we crossed the bridge and caught a car home. We all passed out there. I had a freezing shower first.

We woke up later that evening and got up to watch the Portugal v Greece world cup game, before passing out again.

On Monday, we wandered through Kyiv to Andriyiviskiy market which has lots of arts and crafts, painted eggs, spiky wooden maces, bad paintings, Manchester United t-shirts and so on. On Tuesday, we all hired two boats and went rowing down on the river, pausing to lie on one of the island beaches and swim, drinking lots of beer and taking acid again. The acid gave me a profound sense of the implacable immensity of the river stretching out around us. I sometimes forget how much better psychedelics are when you spend time outdoors, in natural environments, than when you are boxed inside by walls and ceilings. And how good holidays are when rivers run through them.

We took the boats back around half seven, staggered away from them, and plonked ourselves on some chairs and tables in a clearing with some beer to drink and some roasted sunflower seeds to nibble, talking rubbish till it got dark. When we finally made it home, we carried on talking till it got light, the conversation mainly dwelling on various dirty topics, such as the fresh, ‘amateur’ appeal of Bulgarian porn, whether or not shitting in someone’s mouth could be considered a valid sexual act, and the need for humorous facial expressions in porn actors.

On Wednesday we got up quite late, had a big lunch, took ourselves to the market to buy lots more food, mostly cheese but also these rather fetching dangling lengths of walnut pieces threaded on pieces of string and covered in sweet red jelly, and then wandered round town buying cheap CDs from various music shops and stalls. We popped into an American style happy consumer mall and sampled Ukrainian fast food too. Jamie introduced us to some kind of non-alcoholic fermented bread drink, like coke but utterly disgusting.

On Thursday, we went to the marvellous Lavra Monastery, which began back in the eleventh century when various monks lived in underground caves. As they grew in number, they built a church and then a cathedral, and over the centuries it grew to an enormous complex of glittering golden domes and monastic buildings. It is still inhabited by over fifty monks and is the centre of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. All very impressive and golden. The site includes the Museum of the Microminiature, a slightly absurd but amazing exhibition of works by a Russian artist, Nikolai Siadristy, whose creations are so small you have to look through microscopes to view them. They include a tiny chess set placed on the head of a nail, a flea shod with golden shoes, the world’s smallest book and a tiny ship, the ropes which make up the rigging of this boat being 400 times finer than a human hair.

On Friday we ran around buying things frantically to take back to London and prove that we had been in other realms. I mainly took back cheese and Ukrainian sausage.

It has been a good week and has refreshed me on many levels. Now I just have to adjust to the harsh reality of beer not costing 25p a bottle…