Somusing

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...

This is sad to see. In Maidan (Independence Square) in Kyiv where Phin and I stayed just 4 months ago, violence has broken out. People are protesting the decision of Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych to suspend negotiations with the European Union for closer integration. The people are not happy that the president gave in to pressure from Vladimir Putin in Russia. The Economist reported on it. In contrast, the protests that have been going on here in Bulgaria since summer have so far been mostly peaceful after initial police violence, and since then show a remarkable understanding between police and protesters. This report by a Bulgarian blogger living in Canada is informative, as is this one by a Bulgarian economist living in Germany.

We had a fun and interesting time in Kiev, and there's always more to the story than just the beautiful sights. Here's a little about some of those other moments we had. The "mini-hotel" we booked to stay at turned out not to be a hotel at all, but an apartment carved into 4 separate rooms. We didn't know this, so we didn't have any contact information for the landlord, or any scheduled meeting to get access. We just wandered around looking for a hotel that didn't exist. Nobody knew anything about it. I called the Moscow-based booking company that we used (at a joyous per minute cost of 30,52 CZK = about $1.59 on my Czech SIM card!) and they had a helpful English-speaking dispatcher who connected me through to the landlady, who said she would come meet us. But she didn't know exactly where we were, or what we looked like! We wandered around, met two really nice young couples (two of them Ukrainian, two Russian) who were out on the town and had been...