Guess what? This is going to be a loooooooong post. We have been back from our holiday for nearly a week already, but the past week has been so crazily busy that I did not manage to actually post anything about our vacation!
So, I will do this right now. We flew into Bucharest, which was actually surprisingly lovely. A lot of it is under construction, but you can clearly see that the level of welfare is increasing signficantly there. We wandered through the city, enjoyed the sights and visited some churches (trust me, you'll be reading more about churches....). The main attraction, however, of Bucharest is the Palace of Ceauşescu. An enormous structure (the 2nd biggest in the world, after the Pentagon), for which a significant part of the city was bulldozed. A 1-hour tour is not even nearly enough to see its magnificence, but we did see a dozen or so ornately decorated meeting rooms, as well as the grand ballroom: impressive, for sure!
Another interesting building is this building, which is the shell of the old Securitate building (the Romanian KGB), in which a new building has been constructed:
After 2 days in Bucharest, we took a night train to Chisinau, which was a very relaxing experience. You just sleep your way through the Romanian night and the Moldovan morning, without being bothered at all. And the views are gorgeous occassionally (most of it is flat as a pancake, so there are no cliffs or panoramas or anything, but it's still enjoyable)
Chisinau is an extremely pleasant town. It's city centre is very laid-back and there is very little stress. It's green, it's pleasant and important for us: it's dirt cheap. The National Museum was very interesting, despite the fact that we were being shadowed by a gang of museum ladies. Again, it's dirtcheap (20 cents for normal people, 5 cents for students), and absolutely worth spending an afternoon or so. Another major sight was the Armenian cemetery. As always, our trip consisted of visiting lots and lots of cemeteries, but the Armenian cemetery was definitely one of the most interesting ones. We also saw a bunch of churches and monasteries:
After Chisinau, we went to Odessa, read the previous post for that journey. I don't want to think about it anymore. Odessa wasn't actually very pleasant, but that probably had more to do with our state-of-mind than with the city itself. We limited ourselves to doing some of the compulsory sights, such as the Potemkin Stairs and quickly took the train to Kiev afterwards
Arriving in Kiev in the morning again, after another night in the train, we started wandering around. Sunday morning, 9 am, the city was quiet and stunning. But even when it got busier later, Kiev remained an absolutely lovely city. Very green, lots of big beautiful buildings and lots to do. We had 3 days, but that was actually not enough time to see everything. For our stay there, we negotiated with a lady at the central station for quite some time in order to rent an appartment. A huge appartment, that is, which was way too big for the two of us. But it was a nice way to relax for some time, do our laundry in the bathtub (seriously, what's a country without laundrettes???) and spend our evening watching television.
Kiev being the capital of the country and the standplace of the Ukrainian Orthodox church, there were also lots of churches to visit:
And monasteries, including the famous Caves Monastery, where for centuries the monks lived below the ground in a huge number of caves:
We also met with my friend Elena, who is a Bocconi colleague of mine. She showed us some other sights that we hadn't seen yet and showed us a great place to have dinner.
And finally, we started our gifts-shopping, because Kiev is a great place for shopping:
After all of that, we were quite exhausted when we took another night train to Kamyanets-Podilski. In addition to our exhaustion, the weather also took a turn for the worse so we did not do much there. We visited the fort of course, went to the village museum and saw a few churches, but that was all.
The next morning, we took a bus to Chernivtsi: a lovely student town with some very friendly people. In fact, we met a guy there who voluntarily gave us a big tour through the city, showing all his favourite churches (and as a Russian Orthodox guy, obviously the Russian Orthodox churches were the best ones....)
He was quite right though and showed us one of the most quaint churches I have ever seen:
After saying goodbye to Igor, we relaxed for some more time in Chernivtsi and had dinner before taking another night train to Lviv. Lviv was stunning, as expected. very kind people (far more people able to speak other languages than Russian and Ukrainian) and lots of beautiful buildings. It did have the same problem that many Eastern European cities seem to have nowadays: it's all under construction. Like Cracow, Vilnius and Bucharest, the city is being cleaned and reconstructed and everything is repainted in pinks and blues, but I guess that's part of the charm... The main attraction, however, from our point of view, is the cemetery. Also known as the Père Lachaise of the east, this is a huge piece of hilly land with over 400,000 graves. And it is stunning: quiet, overgrown but with lots of flowers. Definitely worth a visit!
After 3 days in Lviv (including lots of relaxing and some excellent food... And including lemon-coffee: don't ever try that!!!), we took a night bus into Cracow. A long bus ride, particularly because of the 5 hour wait at the border. But the price difference with the train was so much that we decided to do it this way anyway. So we arrived in Cracow at about 9 AM and spent the rest of the day walking through its lovely, but touristy, streets.
While it is definitely a beautiful city, it was also considerably more expensive than we were getting used to and very very touristy. So we quite enjoyed it, but it definitely was not my favourite. Also, the Jewish cemetery was distinctly unimpressive...
That night, we spent waiting at the bus terminal in the rain until 2.30 AM, when our bus arrived to bring us to Katowice Airport, from where we took a 6AM flight to the Netherlands.
In Holland, we saw many people, family, friends, etc, etc, and had a very good time at the wedding of Maartje and Edin (from which I hope to receive some photos at a later stage), but I really can't be bothered to write any more about it. We had a good time, in summary. At a later stage I'll share more about the stress at Uni this week, but now, I have to go and clean...
If you're interested in seeing more photos, you can do so at my Facebook account:
CLICK HERECiao,
OJ
