Being a tourist in the city I now live in

It was weird to not see any of Kiev for the first week, but it was good in a way. I think you feel more like you live in a city right away if you just stick with the routine around your home and work neighbourhood. We mostly only travelled between our stop and the work stop. The AIESEC office was also near the school I worked at and when we travelled to anyone else’s place or meeting location, we only came out of the metro and went right in a building, so I really hadn’t seen anything touristy until the first weekend.

There was a festival that we were participating in on the first Saturday. It was national children’s day in Ukraine. Our project is pretty relative to that, because we work with kids, so we were going to set up a booth in the main square to promote the summer camp and AIESEC. We came out of the Krechshatik stop right as this huge parade of children was coming down the street. Krechshatik is the main street in Kiev that runs into mayden Nazalezhnosti, or the Revolution Square. The square is where most of the protests took place in 2004 during the Orange revolution. There are lots of international brand stores and restaurants, and most of the main offices of Ukrainian companies. The buildings are very soviet in style because most of the street was rebuilt after WWII when the buildings were bombed or burned. On the weekends, Krechshatik is closed to cars and it’s a huge pedestrian street. You can also drink anywhere outside in Ukraine. The festival was not my favourite way to spend a hot sunny Saturday, but it was cool to see all the children dressed up and see a big festival in Meyden Nezalezhnosti. We showed off our multicultural team of interns from India, Poland, Syria, and Canada.

After the festival was over, it was still a pretty nice day, so we walked around the city centre. Naturally, we got beers to drink as we were walking. It was really cool to see all the famous parks, landmarks and buildings I had been hearing and reading about. We went to Misky Sad Park, which is between the city centre and the river. There is a big rainbow dedicated to the “friendship” between Russia and Ukraine and a statue below, added later, representing all the different cultures within Ukraine. We walked all along the river and saw about 20 different weddings taking pictures in the park. You can also see all of Kiev’s beaches from the park, they look pretty good, except for the polluted water. We saw the Presidential office building, House of Chimeras, Ukrainian Parliament, the National Bank, and the trendy shopping area. We climbed to the top of the Globus shopping centre for a really cool view of the square, and we went to St. Michael’s Monastery, but we got hungry and there was a lot to see there so we decided to go back the next day.

I got to go to my first AIESEC party in another country too. The Serbian/Canadian and the Polish interns rented a flat just to have a party and it was a shit show. It was a lot of fun, and awesome to meet the rest of the AIESECers and other interns too. They may put the amount of scandalous in AIESEC Canada to shame. After finally sleeping in, we got up and got ready for another day of being touristy. We went back to St. Michael’s and walked all around the cathedral and the square. It is an almost 1000 year old church that was destroyed in 1937 by the Soviets, but completely rebuilt in 2001. We walked down Andriyivsky uzviz or Andrew’s descent. It’s an old cobblestone street that leads down from the upper city centre to the old Podil district by the river. St. Andrew’s church also towers over the street and it’s very beautiful inside. There is also an outdoor art gallery of local artists that line a path into another park. There were really dark clouds moving in, so we quickly headed to a restaurant near the closest metro. At Kontraktova place, a really nice square with theatres and old buildings, we ate a Russian style canteen restaurant. They are very popular here and have lots of traditional food for really cheap in a cafeteria style restaurant. When we got back to our flat we watched the craziest thunder and lightning storm. It shook the whole building and there was lots of lightning hitting buildings really close to our place. The rain was pretty intense too. We heard the next day that most places got big hail, but not us.