Posts

Showing posts from 2019

Caucasus trip 2019, part 2

Image
This post chronicles part 2 of my dad's and my month-long trip in June 2019, aka the part where we're not in the Caucasus anymore. You can find part one over here . In part one I mentioned that we took a ferry from Batumi, Georgia, to Odessa Ukraine. We took a tour of the Odessa Catacombs , a huge series of tunnels around and under the city. Most of the catacombs, including the section we were in, were the result of mining. Swimming in the black sea, feat. concrete extrusions people jumped off. From Odessa we took a train to Chișinău, Moldova. Memorial 9 mai 1945: From Chișinău we took a night bus to Kyiv, Ukraine. A very strange experience, especially since we had to go through passport control 3 times, so we were only able to fitfully sleep until about 1 AM, when we passed into Ukraine. This is Maidan Nezalezhnosti, which was the site of huge protests in 2013 which kicked off  Euromaidan : It

Caucasus trip 2019, part 1

Image
Dad (Jon) and I are roughly three weeks into a month-long trip around Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. We started in Armenia, made our way through Georgia, across the Black Sea to Ukraine, through Moldova and now to Kyiv, Ukraine. We have one more stop, Lviv, and then it’s back home to Idaho. I’ll cover our first two weeks(ish) in this post, from the start to the Black Sea ferry. This trip may sound familiar, as many of our destinations match up with a trip Dad and Phin took in August 2013. They wrote about their trip in several posts: Let sleeping dogs lie in Kiev Kiev Pechersk Lavra More Kiev churches and sights Ukrainian miscellany Tbilisi, Georgia Enlinking the Caucasus from Tbilisi to Yerevan Yerevan, Armenia sights Burning rubber in Yerevan, Armenia Garni & Geghard, Armenia Ejmiatsin, Armenia Dad and I have been interested in Eastern Europe for a long time, so this trip has been a great opportunity to see a lot of new places in the east. A lot of plac