Kyiv to KP (Sam)

Kyiv day 3

Today, we spent most of our day visiting the Lavra, the Ukrainian Orthodox equivalent of the Vatican. We The Lavra is divided into two parts, upper and lower. The Upper Lavra is home to the more amazing architecture and is a state owned museum, whereas the lower Lavra is a church owned monastary, home to a series of tunnels containing mummified monks. The gold-domed churches and cathedrals of the upper Lavra are really nice and the mummified monks are, ummm, nice as well, I guess. This afternoon we visited the Chernobyl Museum. It was really sad and interesting; it didn't provide many facts about the Nuclear Disaster but was instead very impressionistic. For example in one room there were hundreds of photos of children who were evacuated.

Kyiv day 4

I need to rush through this blog so I can start writing about Kaymanets-Podilsky but this is a quick summary of what we did. We started the day by packing up all of our stuff, we then walked down a cute old street full of souvenir shops, ate lunch at a McDonalds rip off restaurant (Mc Foxy), saw a house with tons of statues (Chimera) on it and hung around in Independence Square.

Kamyanets-Podilsky day 1

We got off the night train from Kyiv at about 6 AM to be greeted by a man from the hostel we booked. He drove us about 2 km out of town to his hostel, which exceeded expectations. We ate breakfast and slept till 10 AM, then hopped on a minibus to the town centre. Kamyanets-Podilsky is home to an old town perched on a cliff in the bend of a river, as well as a rather large fortress, these are our reasons for visiting. We wandered over a bridge and into the old town. The old town was a nice place for a stroll but the best bit was a church adorned with statues of various saints who appeared to all be dancing, it was quite hilarious. We wandered across another bridge and came face to face with the fortress. We bought 4 tickets for 36 Hryvnias (3.60 euros) and went inside. The fortress was an interesting place; there were all sorts of corridors and towers you could climb around in and it was not very busy at all. We were mobbed by strange looking dogs while eating our lunch, they were a mix between Daschund and Labrodor, not particularly scary but not particularly cute either.

Photos: Dance, dance, dance (statues); K-P Fort and views;