After a little over two weeks, it was once again time for the next holiday. And this time I was headed to Ukraine's capital Kyiv for a reunion with some of my Erasmus friends from three years previously. After chatting with Halina, my Ukrainian friend I decided that we needed a reunion and as she couldn't come to me I would go to her and we would have a reunion in Kyiv - the last city we spent time together back in March 2012. After chatting some more, our Russi...

After visiting Chernobyl, the following morning was my final day before my flight in the evening. Halina however had to leave in the morning to get her day long coach back to Warsaw, and so I was left on my own. I went to visit the Soviet Motherland statue on the hill overlooking the river facing Moscow. This was apparently built after the war, and was absolutely huge! After this I went to visit the Olympskiy Stadium, which will host the final of Euro 2012. Havin...

Leaving in the morning - being careful, as the clocks had just changed, a 2 hour bus ride took us to the exclusion zone, where we were met by our tour guide, who took us all round the area. Starting off in Chernobyl city we saw a memorial to the first firemen who tried to put out the fire in the reactor. Further up the road we were taken to a nursery school that was left in such a mess...a sight that would be repeated many times. After this, we were taken to som...

The next evening we took the overnight train to Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, and before checking into our hostel overlooking Independence Square, walked around the city seeing most of the sights - the Golden Gate, the Red University and golden topped Orthodox churches, as well as looking over the river Dnieper and visiting one of the many islands. Transport in the city was again incredibly cheap, with a single ticket on the metro costing 2 Hryvni...

Having spent all day in Krakow, we took the overnight coach to Lviv in Ukraine, which despite only a 5 hour trip by road, involved more than 3 hours crossing the border - half an hour to queue, 45 minutes to check our passports on the Polish side, another half hour in no man's land, an hour checking passports in Ukraine, and then just when we thought it was finally time to go through, half an hour to search the coach. Even more fun was when the military style bo...