Day 6 - Kiev

The next day we were up bright and early to get a train to Kiev that left at around 6:30 in the morning. There were many overnight trains on this route as well, but we opted for the express, which got there in about 6.5 hours, leaving early in the morning. Upon arrival in Kiev we were pretty impressed by the train station. The back end, by the platforms, looked more like an airport than a train station (and not in a good way, more in an overcrowded and charmless way), but the entrance hall was magnificent. Here's are Béla and I taking it all in.
We weren't as well-informed as we should have been about the subway system, which has a stop right below the train station, so we ended up walking to the hotel. It wasn't really that far, and led us along the side of the botanical gardens, but it was so very very hot...

Here's a lovely church we passed along the way. We probably should have gone in, but all I was thinking about at this point was getting to the shelter of our hotel.

This was probably the nicest hotel room of our trip, but without a doubt the rudest service. It wasn't just to us - the woman at the reception couldn't bring herself to make eye contact with anyone, let along small talk, and made it quite clear that anything you were asking her was an enormous inconvenience. In her defense, it was ungodly hot, but it's still not much of an excuse. (This rude service was more than balanced by the lovely ladies at breakfast the next morning who tried to entertain Béla so I could eat my breakfast.)

Once we got to the room I needed to rest - the heat was really too much for me. Béla had a nap with me as well, but not before exploring the hotel room fully, including the inside of all the cupboards. Is that a nupboard in our cupboard? (A very sweaty nupboard...)
After I'd slept off some heat we headed out for a late supper. We were walking toward a particular restaurant that we'd read about, but the route took us down the main boulevard of Kiev, which was lined with blocky, imposing buildings. Unfortunately our pictures didn't come out so well in the low light of dusk, but here's a small sampling:


This digital clock tower played a scratchy recording of a song (a really familiar-sounding song which I can't place) followed by a bell tolling the hour, which just didn't seem to fit with the style of clock.
It also displayed the temperature, which, as you can see, was 32 C at 9:00 pm. (It was 33 C the cycle before, but we missed getting a picture of it. Still, damn hot for so late at night.)
The Georgian restaurant we went to was amazing, and the food was really delicious. Béla even ate a fair bit at this place, which wasn't always true for this trip. In both this post and the last one there are pictures of me nursing him at supper, and this was generally true throughout the trip. Either he slept through the meal and we tried to get snacks into him in between, or he showed no interest in eating and just wanted to nurse instead. He nursed more during the trip than he had in months, but it was a good thing given the heat and the fact that the tap water wasn't potable - at least with breast milk I knew he wasn't going to end up with traveller's diarrhea, the same of which couldn't be said for fresh fruits and vegetables (although we let him eat whatever he wanted).
This was part of the mural painted on the wall of the restaurant, which is pretty bizarre. I'm not really sure what this is about, but the scenery looks pretty mountainous, and apparently such things are done sometimes in Switzerland.
Finally after our delicious late supper we headed back to the hotel, via metro this time, after missing the last funicular that would have brought us back up the enormous hill that we walked down on the way there. (Kiev is situated on a river, the Dnipro, but most of the city, including where our hotel was, is on a plateau well above the river, while the area where the restaurant was was right down by the waterfront.) And this was the looooongest escalator I think I've even been on. I've seen other really long escalators in metros in eastern Europe before (Budapest and Prague spring to mind), but this was really the longest single escalator I think I've ever seen. It gave me vertigo to look down. (In fact, this poorly laid-out wikipedia page about escalators might indicate that the third longest (or highest?) escalator in the world is in the Kiev metro, after only Moscow and St. Petersburg, but I can't quite make sense of the entry.)