Yes, we landed at Schiphol last Saturday. The whole week, the memories of the trip where slowly slipping out of my mind. Before the whole thing is gone, I'll try to salvage some bits in this post.
Some casual observations. The whole country is low maintenance, as in they will not do any maintenance1. It's so visible that you can guess the age of any building or road by the state it is in. For example, looking at the new pathways at the park in Kiev; "This looks so good, only minimal damage, must be about a year old". Indeed, at the gate / walk in point of the park a plate with some text and "2018". Another instance, we walked over a nice piece of green in between two driving lanes in one city. These pieces were rebuilt in different ages. The most recent already had grass growing between the tiles and some minor breakage. As we walked along, the breakage, grass and all around state went down. It was something to see. Now that I'm back, I've also started to notice lack of maintenance here, so what now?
Playing chess in the park. I hope this is still here when I'm that old.
hmm
As for restaurants. They provide many, the current hype seems to be sushi2. As with any hype, plenty of pizza restaurants also providing sushi. We did not try, I wanted to try the local food. Which was harder to get then "foreign" shit. Another observation; Queues at the McD, apparently this is a luxury item.
Meat market in Vinnitsa, just the smell of fresh meat. We ate some raw bacon here that was very nice. In reference to the market in Kiev to seen on trilema.
Way too cheap food. This restaurant turned out to be a hole in the wall for alcoholics. The salad was fine, the meatball too much bread.
We went to Lviv for a couple of days. This city is way different from the other cities I've seen so far in Ukraine. The whole city has a feel of an Italian city about 25 years ago. Traffic is a mess. Buildings need to be renovated (and some are). A lot of tourists3. We asked at the Hotel, where can we eat some good vareniki? we were directed to the worst restaurant on whole trip. You would start to hate the local cuisine based on this restaurant alone4.
Next we went to the Carpathians, we went by train to Mykulychyn5.
A view
The hotel was next to a mountain spring. The water from the faucet was directly from this spring. Can you image the great taste? The food in the hotel was homemade, in the end we spent more on the food than the stay in this hotel.
Building a house. No plan, just how your father did it.
After a week of swimming and hiking we went to Kiev to catch our plane. Here we had made a mistake of taking the sleep train back to Kiev. As we got no sleep and the whole experience was overall terrible. The two days in Kiev were nice, this city is simply on another scale.
The clouds on the way home.
- I found two exceptions to this rule; schools and trains. The schools are well maintained. These get a fresh coat of paint every year, are clean and have well kept grounds. The difference is so striking that you can easily spot a school. Some bit of conversation;
Me: That must be school
Wife (from ukr): What?, no! it's too big for this area.
Me: It must be.
Wife (to cab driver): What's that building?
TD: School
[↩] - We visited about 3/4 years ago ((a) I should have made a report then. (b) I did not see any sushi restaurants then. [↩]
- mostly Polish [↩]
- Ofcourse, now I cannot find it on google maps. [↩]
- Train stops at a strip of stones that could be called a station [↩]
That school upkeep theory kinda falls on eg Kiev swampschool.
> Queues at the McD, apparently this is a luxury item.
Elementarily, if queues then can't be luxury.
MP; I had seen 3 examples. Probably not enough derive the class then...
Yes it seemed to me they prefered the McD for some reason (it's not the cheapest choice). All the big mercedes, bmws even at the drive-thru.
BTW the parked cars on the pavement problem was way lower than 3 years ago. (Where, yes, we found a lot of random pieces of sidewalk + lane taken in by "car parks" with somebody patrolling these)
[...] yes, they're a lot more serious about maintenance. [↩]He links [...]