I thought yesterday’s post was going to be hard to write, but today’s is even harder. I want to write about the events of yesterday, and I will, but first I have to get the events of the last few hours out of the way. As I sit and write this at 4:49 PM, the air raid sirens stopped going off about 30 minutes ago. But unlike the last few times, this time was bad. Sitting in the hallway of my AirBnb with the owner, we could hear the explosions. They were loud. And, quickly, we were informed: a hotel in my district of Kyiv had been hit. An elderly man died, 6 more were injured. That’s why it was so loud.
Anyway, I will write more about that soon, but for the moment I want to focus on yesterday, which was momentous enough in its own right. First there was the air raid at 2 am, which lasted about 2 hours, but very little happened. Then throughout the day there were several cool and fun things that I did, but before I get to those, I have to talk about my trip to the Ukrainian Museum of the Great Patriotic War (what we call World War II). My host recommended I go and check it out, so I started walking in that direction. I first stopped in at a cafe, called The Life of Wonderful People. It was awesome, and such a contrast to the fear I’d been feeling. It’s a beautiful cafe that wouldn’t look out of place in New York City or San Francisco. I sat next to a woman with a little beagle that curled up right next to me. I had a latte and a dish of dumplings in a truffle sauce with fried mushrooms and spinach and it was amazing. Then a second latte and a piece of Napoleon cake. The music was great, the service was excellent, and the whole thing was like $20. And while I was there, the woman’s car almost got towed, which was hilarious and felt like such a “normal” event. Like, even in the middle of a war, you can park in the wrong spot.
Then I started walking to the museum, and promptly got super lost and wandered around a park for miles. Then the air raid went off again, and I was like well, shit, I am totally exposed and out in the open. I was walking along the Dnipro in a deserted but beautiful park, and I just didn’t know what to do so I kept walking. Fortunately again, this one seemed to be mostly a non event (in Kyiv, anyway). When I finally made it to the museum, I walked around and looked at their display of WWII era tanks and guns and ended up next to a smaller building that said it was an exhibition on the “Ukrainian Crucifixion”, a reference to the current war. A woman was standing on the steps and she saw my confusion and said, in English, that they were reopened from the sirens, and I should come inside. I said I wanted to make sure I had time for the main museum and she smiled sadly and said that the main museum had been closed since February because it was a wide open space overlooking Kyiv and they were worried about saboteurs. But, she said, she would give me a tour of the new exhibit in English if I wanted.
And so for the next 2 hours I had a private tour by one of the museum curators named Alle of one of the most immediate and moving exhibitions I’d ever seen. She told me that it was the same display that they show to journalists and visiting dignitaries to help them understand what was going on. I felt very lucky. Usually museum displays are about the distant past, and they can feel very remote. But this one was about March, and it was not remote at all. Everything was right out in the open for you to feel and touch. All the items had the feeling of having been collected just last week, and in some cases that was because they had. They had displays of captured military IDs, military rations, a room full of weapons such as the remains of a Buk missile and grenade launchers.
But then she took me down into the bomb shelter. Ironically, it is in fact the real bomb shelter for the museum staff, but they had decided to “redecorate” it, using some source photos, as a replica of the bomb shelter where 140 people spent 37 days in Hostomel, under the control of the Chechens. They had taken all the real items from the shelter (which isn’t that far away; Hostomel is a suburb of Kyiv) and brought them there. There were makeshift beds, mattresses, blankets, children’s toys, Russian army rations given to them by the Chechens. She showed me a handwritten plaque written by a grieving husband who buried her 78 year old wife who died of pneumonia. She told me how they missed having bread. It is hard to even know how to write about that experience, because it was so raw. I could say it was heartbreaking, for example, but that hardly seems to cover it. I could say it made me angry but that doesn’t even really fit either. I think the thing I kept thinking, as she calmly and professionally showed me her countrymen being held hostage, was “this really, really has to stop”. Like, as an engineer, I just started thinking “how can we make this stop”. Because it just has to stop. It has to stop. There is nothing more important than getting this whole thing to stop.
Anyway, after wandering around dazed by that experience, I eventually ended up at a delightful Ukrainian restaurant called Tsars’ke Selo, where I overate again. Due to a miscommunication I ended with 3 beers, and Chicken Kyiv, and some delicious Daruny (a sort of potato pancake) with salmon, and a Kyiv cake, served by some charming men in very traditional costumes inside a recreation of a Ukrainian farmhouse. It was all very touristy, actually, and in a way I found that relaxing, like normalcy had returned. At one point during my meal the power went out, but they didn’t even blink, bringing out candles until it came back on 15 minutes later.
Then I came home, talked to my host about my day, surfed the web, and went to bed. The next day would be New Year’s Eve, and my last full day in Kyiv.
