A modern metropolis
After touching down at Boryspil International Airport and checking into the Premier Palace Hotel, we headed straight for Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s Champs Elysees-like main thoroughfare and the most fashionable part of the city. It’s lined with sweet-smelling chestnut trees, high-end shops, outdoor cafes, coffee wagons and ice-cream stands. During the week, traffic sits gridlocked along its plumb-line straight expanse through the city. But it takes on an entirely different atmosphere on weekends, when it’s closed to traffic and becomes a thronged pedestrian precinct with live bands. Jugglers, in-line skaters and stilt-walkers weave through the crowds creating a carnival-like atmosphere; children skip through fountains; and young and old alike, in sophisticated fashion, hit the shops and strut their stuff.
The first two full days, we took a couple of free and inexpensive tours to get the lay of the land, visit some of the main tourist attractions and learn a bit about Kyiv’s 1,500 year-old checkered history. We walked from landmark to landmark, starting in Independence Square, located at one end of Khreshchatyk. It was here that, in 2004, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, dressed in orange, demonstrated for weeks in harsh, winter conditions against political corruption and a rigged election.
Today, Independence Square is the city’s social hub, where concerts, festivals and parades take place, along with plenty of late-night drinking and people-watching. Underneath the square is the “Metrograd,” a vast, high-end shopping center, just one of many subterranean shopping centers throughout the city.
At the opposite end of Khreshchatyk, in front of the only statue of Lenin remaining in the city, is the Bessarabsky Market, a rotunda dating to 1912, where women in babushkas sell colorful spices, vegetables and flowers, fish, meat, sausage and Russian caviar.