Day Twelve. київ actually its pretty awesome.

We had to check out of the hotel by mid-day, so decided to have a lazy breakfast and then head down to the spa for a hour.  We'd then have a drive in the opposite direction and come round in a loop to Kiev, then spend the rest of the day there.

The spa was welcome, but once we left we really didn't see anything worthwhile to stop at on our drive, so we ended back in Kiev sooner than we though (despite getting lost again)

I parked on the same road, but this time closer to the Metro station and we walked under the subway to the Metro station Dnipro.


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This is a good place to park, it is busy with the pleasure boats mooring right next to it, but I'm not sure I would like to use the subway under the road at night, it's the only place we saw in Kiev that looked like it could be a bad place to be after dark.

What a difference a day made, Kiev really did feel different to us.  The Easter celebrations were on, the main street was closed, there was a party atmosphere AND we knew our way around a little.  The previous day we had remarked how few shops there were.  Coming out of the Metro today we found a amazing labyrinth of subterranean shops, and the further and deeper you went the more upmarket it got.  It started with a series of stalls, then a supermarket and finally designer clothes shops in a full shopping mall about three or four floors below ground level.

We even found a great bar called Shato with fantastic traditional Ukrainian food and it's own brewery.  It was busy, and afterwards we could see why.  I'm going to say more in another post on Original Gravity at a later date.

The open spaces in Kiev are wonderful, onion domed cathedrals stand over squares with statues and fountains, the parks are full of little food stalls and pop up bars, I've never seen as many Segways, you seemed to be able to rent then in every park. We didn't get chance to cruise down the river, but that seems very popular, there's many boats to choose from.

We were glad we had made our peace with Kiev, we knew we were going to have to return to complete our Chernobyl trip and knowing there's more for us to see will help complete the trip next time.

Soon it was time to make our way back to the car and then the railway station.  I had got the route plotted in Google Navigation on my phone, but shortly after setting off, we realised the route took us down the road that was closed.  Unfortunately Google Navigation doesn't work very well without a data connection, it is fine unless you

make a wrong turn, then it struggles.  But Carolyn did manage to get us round the closure and back on route so we arrived at the train station in good time.