a day in the sun

At the end of a lovely Saturday evening enjoying the hospitality of some new friends, Olechko and I made ‘tentative’ plans to go on a day trip the next day.

I write ‘tentative’ with quotation marks because it was the tentative sort of plan you make after a couple of glasses of wine and you’re not sure if it will ever come to fruition, and whether it does or not depends heavily on how the tannins in the wine affect the equilibrium of your body, specifically, your brain.

As it turned out, my brain’s equilibrium was rather unaffected by the wine (I only had three glasses after all), and I was up bright and chirpy on Sunday – just in time for Olechko to Skype me and remind me of our tentative plans (you’ll notice the quotation marks have been removed. Because all of a sudden, the plans were really tentative. Not just ‘ ‘ ‘ tentative).

(Have you ever realised if you repeat the word tentative a lot, it sound funny and starts to lose its meaning? Well, it does).

So that’s how I found myself in the south-west outskirts of Kyiv at Pirogovo, where the open-air Museum of Folk Architecture is located.

Under the bright shining roof of the sunny sky, this Museum contains examples of Ukrainian architecture from different regions of the country. What it doesn’t have is a lot of signs (blink and you’ll miss them) or a map for sale, so I can’t really tell you too much about what I saw.

The highlight of the day was walking up a hill to visit the ‘Carpathians’ (quotation marks are back!) With the fir trees, hills, dense forest and quaint little houses, it was almost like I’d travelled to the mountains.

What I didn’t realise while I was there is that the museum is split into two parts – architecture from Ukraine before the Soviets, and some examples of village architecture from the Soviet period. I just read about this on a website (and to be honest, I don’t know whether to believe it or not…)

Ochin interesna (very interesting).

We walked around the park, kicked the football, had a nice (but expensive!) lunch and took some photos. Here’s a taster. If you want to see the rest, click here for my flickr site.