The Ukraine has some unique architecture. Below is a section of some interesting homes that I think look like they came right out of Smurfville or Disneyworld. In other parts of Ukraine, the buildings are all concrete, blocky, and throwbacks to Soviet government-mandated design, so it is nice to see a reminiscent style of architecture that seems to blend the olde world and the modern.

I’m leaving the Ukraine today to head to Amsterdam, where we have the Casual Games convention lined up. I’ll be pretty busy there, but I’ve always got the camera in the bag if an opportunity arises.

We worked late the other night then walked home from the city square back to our apartment. Along the way, we pass through this heavily forested area that looks quite skeletal and cool in the snowy midnight light.

I still have yet to get appropriate shoes and headwear for this part of the world. It is clear to everyone around me that I am not from this land.

Back in 1051, the Venerable Anthony, with a name that is quite venerable, settled in a cave on the Dneiper River. Other followers joined and eventually they built this entire Orthodox Christianity complex. The Monastery was built over the centuries thanks to donations from Prince Izyaslev and other Kievan aristocracy.

Kharkov is on the Russian border of the Ukraine. If you take the amount of cold and snow in Kiev and multiply it by four, you get a pretty good idea of the Kharkov is like.

This is the central town square of Kharkov, which is decorated with bright blue lights on every tree up and down the street. There is an ice skating rink in the middle, complete with hulking Soviet-throwback KGBesque security guard that came up to me and asked why I had such a large camera. I told him it was because I was an American capitalist and that’s the way the cookie crumbled. He didn’t know what I meant, and he simply pointed in the direction, indicating a hasty egress was my best course of action.

On my last day in Kiev (Kyiv is the Russian/Ukrainian name of the city) I climbed a extremely sketchy series of icy metal stairs up this hillside to the get this picture. Below is a famous street that I can’t remember the name of, and even if I did, you have to be a dolphin to pronounce it.

On that dolphinesque street, there are all kinds of local goods being sold from little carts and booths. Various nest Russian dolls, old Soviet war medals, pictures of the wars, wooden maces, particolored scarves, and cold-weather gear of every size and shape.

In the distance, you can see Saint Michael’s cathedral on the horizon.

This is Saint Sophia, buried deep in the snow after several nights of blizzard-like conditions. We walked here from Independence Square up and down slippery cobblestoned streets. I have possibly the worst shoes possible for walking around icy Kiev - Nike 5.0 running shoes. These things were built to “breathe”, and not to protect against ankle-deep slush puddles.

St. Sophia’s cost about $1 USD to enter and walk around the grounds. I spent a while goofing around with the settings on my camera to get these strange conditions in the right light.

Saint Sophia was almost destroyed by the Russian government after the revolution of 1917. They wanted to destroy the cathedral and convert the grounds into a park called “Heroes of Perekop”, which was named after a Red Army victory in Crimea.

(Part 2 of those story is located here.)

I spent the day in Chernobyl. One of my Kiev game dev friends hooked me up with a private tour, so I decided to go for the day to check it out. Every woman in my life told me this was a bad idea. Every man said it sounded awesome.It was awesome, although I really usually fare better when I listen to the women. For the guys, here is a picture of me holding a Geiger counter at the main reactor.

Anyway, the day could not have been colder, but it fit with the milieu of the trip to Chernobyl. In case you don’t know or can’t remember, this is the infamous nuclear power plant that melted down in 1986; it was the worst nuclear plant disaster in the world.

I have taken a bunch of photos, but only had time to process a few of them. I’ll post more in coming weeks and months, but I have pieced these together that show a good sampling of the day.

After I made it through the 30KM security radiation zone, where Will was detained by the military for not having proper documentation (a longer story which ended with him sitting in a military bunker for four hours watching Colombo dubbed in Ukranian), I was handed over to a member of the military who took me on a personal tour of the area. We passed through the 10KM security radiation zone, and then we were well within the exclusion zone.

I paid one of the military guys and borrowed his geiger counter so I could keep track of the RADs as we moved around. More on that later.

First, we stopped in Pripyat, a fascinating place right out of the Day After. Pripyat was built as the ultimate Soviet communist panacea, a place for Chernobyl plant workers and their families to live, go to school, play, and live their lives in master-planned bliss.

Pripyat was immediately deserted after the accident - kids left schools with their books still on the desks, families rushed out without getting everything, just complete and instant desertion. While I was there, it was completely quiet, and it was extra surreal with the early 80’s styling of the Soviet buildings, windows ajar, stuff still sitting in all the windows.

First, from Pripyat, here was the shining star of the city, the fine hotel in its Russian splendor, now an empty, cold, and radiated husk.

Second is one of the large apartment buildings with a slowly rotting exterior. I could still hear shutters opening and closing in the wind.

Next, I went to the creepiest part of Pripyat, the playground and amusement park. This was recently completed just before the disaster. Bumper cars, swings, a ferris wheel, and other bits of abandoned toys now lay quiet and creaking in the snow. The second picture is another part of the playground, where the kids emerged from school for playtime.

We checked the Geiger counter because this area was supposed to still have a significant amount of caesium-137, which takes a good 300 years to dissipate to safe levels. It was around 0.054, so we decided to keep moving. Now we started heading for the main power plant complex. We stopped in something he called the RAD forest that had an old Chernobyl sign that was kitschy and interesting. 0.290 on the screen. He looked at me, “We should leave quickly.”

Finally, I ended the the tour at the Chernobyl power plant itself. It was nerve-wracking, so I took a few shots then moved along.

On the way out, I went through three different radiation checks. Below is one of the military guys that was holding a geiger counter gun that he ran along the car and a few other things. I went inside to a special decontamination center and entered a device that looked like stripped down telephone booth / nautilus machine. I placed my hands and feet on special sensors. It said I was clean in some cyrillic word that may or may not have said I was clean. I looked at the military guy that escorted me in there and he gave me one of those Russian frowns and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Eh, good enough”.

(Part 2 of those story is located here.)

(Part 2 of those story is located here.)

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(Reminder - You have until MIDNIGHT tonight to vote for me for the Bloggies in the Photography section, if you would be so kind - thank you. Also, I will upload pictures from Chernobyl soon.)

This evening while walking to dinner at an Uzbekistan restaurant, the sun started to go down behind the icy overcast skies, casting more of that eerie blue light across the city of Kiev. There were a few flecks of snow beginning to fall, but not enough to obscure Saint Andrews Church here as we passed.

This classically baroque church was originally in the mid 18th century and is still occasionally used by the creatively anachronistic Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church for services. It’s built on a very steep hill, near a steeper and scenic curved road, which was too icy for me to get down with the tripod. It’s one of the few times I decided discretion was the better part of photographic valor.

(Reminder - you have until Midnight to vote for this blog for the 2007 Bloggies - thanks!)

The Byzantine gold glowed hot when I got inside, a divine signal to me that God was mad because I brought my camera inside. However, I reasoned with God, the sign read “No Cameras” in a Cyrillic lettering, a lettering style I do not recognize since the Jesuits trained me in the Romance languages and not these Slavic uncials.

Besides, I was inside Saint Michael’s Cathedral, and I was holding a camera, and, as the saying goes, when in Rome, shoot interiors of churches in Rome, and when in Kiev, break Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Councils.

While God was busy figuring out my flawless reasoning, I spotted a cloaked HeiroMonk in is post-Matins chanting, moving in a pattern indecipherable by my camera, thus the ghostly visage in this seeming partial transcendence.

This morning I decided to do something that seemed smart at the time, and now, in retrospect, was clearly an awful idea.

I thought I would get up early before work at sunrise and go take a picture of St. Michael’s Cathedral in the morning light. I loaded up and got into a gypsy cab, which was still warm from running missions for the mafia the night before, and told him to take me to St. Michael’s. The taxi driver looked at me strangely and stabbed his hand out the window towards the sky.

Yes, I told him, I know there is a blizzard and it is dark.

I was thinking maybe it’s just one of those morning blizzards that passes through, like fog in Texas or a light dew. After he dropped me off, I noticed there was no discernible road, running cars, people, or heat. I especially noticed the last one as the wind started to whip around, carrying the snow at orthogonal angles to the ground. I used a protractor to make sure.

Before reaching full hypothermia, I squeezed out this nine exposure HDR, and the final result was able to peer through the density of the snowfall in all the exposures… so this does not really indicate the severity of the blizzard, but it did get a strange blue morning light through the clouds.

Getting another cab home was a problem. My feet were so cold by the time I made it back to the hotel, the only way to warm them was to insert my toes into a room service omelette.

Tonight our hosts took us to a traditional Ukrainian dinner. It was very good food, quite hearty, with portions that would have been fine if I was a tauntaun. In fact, after Will was done eating, I was considering slicing him open to stay warm in the Kiev streets. He does, indeed, smell bad on the outside.

At one point during dinner, they brought us some bread slices with a viscous white topping. I inquired with our host:

“What is that white stuff?”

“It is,” he said in a thick Russian accent, “like bacon without meat part.”

“Whaaa?” I said, working it out in my head. “Oh.”

After that, we walked over to Independance Square where I got this night shot as the traffic rolled through the streets.

I made it to Kiev, and it is perhaps the slipperiest city in the world. It could be colder, but I don’t know how.

No matter which way I walked, the snow and wind beat into my face like a sandstorm combined with a monsoon combined with my mother-in-law’s attitude. The other Ukrainians and wayward Russian wives were walking around without hats like it was normal. Will and I wanted to dress up in our Spies-Like-Us-winter-garb, but we haven’t found where to buy that yet.

Here is a shot of the opera house in the middle of the snowstorm. That little blip up there on the left is a snowflake that had the inconsiderate vector to land on my lens.

The large version of this one is a little dizzying.