Ukraine has the best traditional cuisine I never knew existed. My friend Zeke says that it’s just traditional Jewish fare — potato pancakes, lots of meat, pickled vegetables — not much bread. I arrived in time for the summer harvest of berries and purchased kilos of black berries and blue berries along with pickles, fermented cabbage and salads. My homemade breakfasts and dinners were charcuterie spreads. Many *good* restaurants in Kiev are open 24/7 which makes it one of the most comfortable cities I can remember to get well fed and affordably. The main, broad streets of Kiev are in some places paved in cobblestones offering intriguing contrast when opulent sports cars will actively accelerate and honk at you if you don’t cross the street quickly. This is a city where pedestrians yield to cars and even fear from them. And the small bunches of people who wait alongside me to cross the street — we seem to have solidarity against the other class of super-car-driving maniacs who want to run us over. I must only presume that during the winter months the dynamic is different, when snow piles up with the bitter cold — how do these same cars […]
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In 1986 a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine had a melt down and caused a drastic amount of radioactive fallout that was scattered around the rest of Europe. I feel obligated to learn about all of that and so I took a one-day trip from Kiev into the Chernobyl “exclusion zone” to learn and take photos. Unlike a quarantined zone, an exclusion zone is permanent. Due to the nature of the on-hundred thousand year high-half life of the radioactive isotopes contaminating parts of the 30km and 10km radius zones surrounding the disaster site, parts of the area will be dangerously tainted forever. Access to and from the exclusion zone is strictly enforced and controlled with rigorous access checks and security. Still, there is a large area that is safe to visit and explore with only very low, and perfectly safe radiation exposure. An unexpectedly cool part of the trip was discovering this magnificent, secret, gigantic radio tower built by the Soviets to try and anticipate nuclear attacks from the USA. It was securely guarded and hidden behind the guise of a children’s camp (replete with a fake bus stop decorated with childish, cartoon animal motifs). Conveniently located near the disaster […]
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