Second day in Kiev and our first and only full day in this bizarre city made up of the insanely rich driving around in 8litre mercedes jeeps pumping out as much CO2 as China. Then the more modest folk driving 50year old Ladas that break down in the middle of the street.
Typically Kiev decided to rain,which made everything look horrid and grey and as our previous plan of a trip to Chernobyl had been cancelled we had nothing to do. We faced some rather intense selling from our hostel owner trying to sell us a day trip to a missile silo for $150ish, which was just far too much money and seeing as the owner was a 30 something thinking he was still on his gap year and being a douche bag, out of sheer principle declined his offer. We decided on a more civilised open top city tour the only problem is we had to find this place.
Trying to find the tour bus we had to take the metro. The metro system of Kiev is a communist marvel. The train lines are incredibly deep underground and literally takes 5mins to get down on a faster than normal escalator. At the bottom of the escalator was a massive, intimating sculpture of Lenin's head. No wonder the citizens were scared of the regime. I was, and it doesn't even exist anymore. Trains were extremely frequent and old but still served their purpose.
Trying to find this tour bus was a massive failure and ended up walking quite a distance without a map as Nathan left it in our lunch restaurant. However, we did stumble upon an amazing museum of soviet military machinery through the ages and for about 40p you got to sit in a helicopter and pretend to shoot the machine gun accompanied by a very unrealistic recorded noise trying to replicate the noise of a machine gun. Nevertheless we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and got some good 'profile pics'.
Next was the memorial to the soviet soldiers who have died and fought in all conflicts since WW2. This was very impressive as it was monumented by a very tall statue of a women holding a sword in the air although it looked like it was plated in stainless steel. Not particularly my taste.
We came back to the hostel and made our skype calls to our loved ones despite being intermittent which was caused by the router turning off. Normally this would just involve a reset but we had an owner who had a severe case of denial as he refused to accept his Internet had momentarily turned off and just needed to be restarted. I saw probably talk more about the owner tomorrow when I can be arsed.
Deciding to go out for a drink before dinner we politely invited the dutch girl who was travelling by herself. We knew that all banter would be sucked into her banter black hole but we felt a moral and social obligation. Our predictions were correct all casual conversation turned into a heated debate/argument orchestrated by the Tampon. Anyway we battled through and managed to uncover that she has attractions towards females... Which was no surprise to anybody. But we went for dinner and then headed to the Irish bar again.
Kiev is a very nice city and there is lots of nice things to see but two or three days would suffice. So long.