Friday night, Khreshchatyk, mild traffic, limos drive by every now and then. Hosni Mubarak resigned a few hours before. Ukrainian politicians are done TV-fighting over whose fault it is that the country's facing a shortage of buckwheat.

A young couple is hugging and kissing on the snow-covered part of the sidewalk. Suddenly, they both fall down - fresh snow conceals fresh ice underneath. They don't bother to get up. Instead, the girl climbs on top of the boy, and they lie like this for at least 15 minutes, kissing and petting.

Cars keep driving by. A few cab drivers sit inside their vehicles nearby. A few men walk past the couple, staring at them intensely, but not interfering. A police jeep is circling the neighborhood, but it never approaches the couple. By the time it re-appears for the fifth time, the couple seems to be asleep. Or frozen to death.

The couple's friends - a whole bunch of them - are drinking on one of the benches in the chestnut tree alley, some 50 meters away. One of them finally comes up to the couple, gets the girl off the boy, drags both of them up - but they aren't able to maintain a vertical position for longer than 15 seconds. The boy is a lot drunker than the girl, and he's much bigger, too. Their friend spends the next ten minutes trying to lead the couple back to the bench. They keep slipping and falling, slipping and falling, all three of them.

The helpful friend gives up eventually, leaving the couple by the bus stop, ten meters or so away from the bench.

They manage to get up by themselves, and they even make a quick attempt to have some sort of a conversation. As soon as they start kissing, though, they fall down again.

I watch them from my window until my feet turn cold. I leave for my room when the girl joins their friends - while the boy comes up to a car parked on the sidewalk and pees generously on it.



It's like watching a silent movie, so I keep thinking of an appropriate soundtrack for it. Gogol Bordello's Start Wearing Purple is the best fit I can think of.



An hour later, I'm at the balcony that faces our crazy Besarabka backyard - and guess what I see?

A different young couple is down on the ground, the boy is on top of the girl this time, she is struggling to get him off her, cursing at him, and he's cursing back at her. (This time, from the balcony, I can hear them really well.) She kicks him hard with her leg, he curses some more and gets up. He looks frustrated, but successfully fights off an urge to push and hit the girl as he helps her to get up. She's all dressed up, wearing high heels - and she looks and sounds quite furious. Like the first couple, these kids are very, very drunk. And the backyard is even more slippery than Khreshchatyk. They walk away unsteadily, still cursing at one another. The boy, quite traditionally, carries the girl's tiny, very feminine handbag - but since there's no longer any use pretending he's a gentleman, he's swinging that handbag madly as he walks.

Hard to believe it hasn't even been three weeks yet since we returned from Istanbul.

All day today I was having flashbacks to Jan. 15, when we all went to Bebek, and, once there, I left Marta and Misha at the playground by the Bosphorus and set off for a long walk.

This walk consisted of much climbing, getting lost somewhere around Bebek Dağı Sokağı, running into the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi that, if I remember correctly, a dear friend of mine attended back in 2002-03, then finding my way out again and descending down Günaydın Yolu back to the Bosphorus minutes before the sun disappeared behind the hills.

It was such a nice walk - I felt so free that day! - and I longed to look at the pictures today, but the way I store them is kind of messy, and I've only gotten through to them now. Below is a pretty random selection, and it doesn't reflect the beauty of that walk or anything else about it at all - and yet it feels good to have these pictures within reach somewhere...

“Say hi to the dinosaur,” mama tells us as we set off for the Natural History Museum (or whatever it's now called in Kyiv). Her memories of this museum must be fresher than mine: I haven't been to it since I was a kid, while she used to take children there when she worked at school in the late 1980s-early 90s.

On the way to the museum, we stop a few times and I take some pictures. The ugly new thing at Teatralna that's being built where it doesn't belong. A rather beautiful old building across the street that looks deserted and about to collapse. But there are four six satellite dishes on its facade, and there's light in many of its windows at night, and I've no idea if it's home to some homeless now, or to some more legitimate residents who are waiting for it to be refurbished and fixed. I explain to Marta, as simply as possible, why I'm taking pictures of these two structures, each gut-wrenching in its own way.



At the museum, the huge animal skeletons I used to be so impressed with as a child aren't all that huge anymore: I have grown, they haven't. The butterfly collection - something that I've remembered all these years - is still there. I keep looking for the dinosaur, but fail to find it: mama must have meant the mammoth.



Nestled underneath the skeleton of some huge, long-tailed sea creature, there's a dusty but neat scale model of the never-built Paleontological Park:



An elderly museum employee tells us that this construction project had been given up in the early 1990s - due to lack of funding, of course.

She then begins to follow us around, talking about things that everyone here seems to be preoccupied with: our dim-witted president, and his allies' notorious destruction and construction projects, including the one down the street, at Teatralna. She talks of her post-WWII Kyiv childhood, describes their cozy courtyard just off Maidan, and a little fountain that used to be there - but is now replaced by a tall new building that, of course, doesn't belong there.

She says she used to work at some “enterprise” - until they fired half of their workers. She found a job at this museum, while her friend went to work at one of Lavra’s (secular) museums - and is about to be unemployed again, because it looks like the current regime is shutting those Lavra museums down.

This museum isn't likely to last much longer, either, the woman tells me.

I hope she's wrong, but I won't be surprised if some fancy shopping mall does move in here, sooner or later. It's a huge building, but much of their collection is housed in the long corridors, and it's obvious that they do need more space, which could well be used as a justification for moving it elsewhere, to a less lucrative location.

So here is a Flickr set with some more pictures (lousy, taken with my iPhone) of this dinosaur (or mammoth) of a museum.

Now that I'm no longer a kid, what impresses me most here is this well-preserved - yet neutered, impotent - Sovietness. No one is consciously trying to recreate the atmosphere of that extinct country here, there's no Soviet propaganda left (and even if there is some, it no longer serves its purpose), but they lack money to modernize the place, and, perhaps, this isn't a bad thing, if it allows you to have such a wild time-travel experience. Because it is absolutely awesome to suddenly find yourself in a place that's as close in spirit as it gets to Eldar Ryazanov's Garage movie set - among other things.

The construction site over Teatralna metro station (and across the street from the Russian Drama Theater) is very much alive again, despite various attempts to resist this odious project - and despite common sense.

There used to be a little area with flowers in front of the apartment building there - nothing special, but it's hard not to think of it as an absolutely crucial space now that it's gone - and gone in such a grotesque manner.

According to Korrespondent.net (RUS), they are building a shopping center there.

And there's going to be a protest rally tomorrow, at 2 PM: anti-construction activists are planning to appeal for help to UNESCO this time.

Kyiv:

My father lived in this neighborhood as a kid - before the war, during the occupation, and for a while after the war as well, I guess. I don't think their building is still there. I have a vague memory of where it must have been.

It hurts when I try to remember more: instead of papa's childhood stories, I recall very vividly how I went searching this area for him in July 2007, how I was showing his photo to the people who seemed local or semi-local to me (some elderly person, and a parking lot attendant). What if papa had tricked himself into thinking he was a little boy again - what if he was trying to find his way back to his childhood home? Every step I took back then was fueled by some tiny, seemingly rational hope like this one.

For the past few years, I've been trying to reclaim Kyiv. Not all of it: I have no plans of going close to the Botanical Garden ever again, and I always feel numb when I pass Vydubychi. But then there's also this street, and a number of other places that are so much about papa's pre-2007 life that I know I won't dwell on those horrible memories forever. It just takes time, somewhat longer than elsewhere.

Yesterday, at some point, it began to feel so good to stare at all these buildings on my way up towards St. Sophia, that by the time I reached the top of the hill, I was actually thinking about my own childhood more than anything else. How steep this hill used to seem when I was little, and how easy it is to conquer it now. How lazy I used to be as a kid, and how far I'm capable of walking now. How proud papa would have been of me. (And, even more so, of Marta, who is always excited about our walking tours and can walk almost as much as I do without getting too tired.)

Istanbul is so overwhelming. As I was picking photos to post tonight, I felt like screaming, "Somebody, please stop me!"



The distances we cover daily are impressive, and what's also impressive is how little effort it takes, compared to Kyiv or Moscow. And Istanbul goes on and on, well beyond the places we manage to reach.



Istanbul seems to be made up of small towns, dozens - if not hundreds - of them, drawn really close together by some weird kind of gravitational force. And it's impossible to feel claustrophobic in these small town-like neighborhoods: there's always the next one to explore. (Very sadly, after Istanbul, Kyiv feels as if it's made up of ghettos...)





In Istanbul, I often wish I had some really tall stilts to walk on: trees and light poles always get in the way, and it's a bit oppressive to be always looking up at the buildings, like a dwarf, and to have to climb hills that seem almost perfectly vertical, in order to be able to catch a panorama view of the neighborhood and of the rest of the city beyond it.



On a different note, today I've heard church bells for the first time here: at 4 PM in Kuzguncuk, a neighborhood where a Greek church, a synagogue and a mosque are located very close to one another. It felt strange, in a nice way. (Now I dream of catching the simultaneous sound of these church bells AND the azan...)



***

The weather's kind of horrid, so this, for now, is the last batch of Istanbul buildings photos. I promise. But as soon as the sun is back, I'll run to take more - I can't help it. (All photos from this trip are here.)























The dark building with roses and other Art Nouveau stuff, located in Sirkeci, got me thinking about being a tourist vs being a local - and about being something in between. It reminded me of my day trip to Vyborg in 2004 (the text on this trip is still there, at the wonderful site of The Morning News, but where are all the pictures from that trip, I wonder... I can't believe I never posted them anywhere, but I do have a vague memory that I never did...). Anyway, in Vyborg, they've got quite a few buildings that are as beautiful - and as battered as the Sirkeci house (or even worse). And battered means not only photogenic - it also means big problems with sewage, nasty insects and rodents, etc. And as a tourist you go "oh" and "ah" and "how sad what the Soviets/time/etc. did to such beauty" and you take some nice pictures and go home feeling a bit melancholic but quite happy in general - while as a local you are probably cursing your mayor and that guy who runs your neighborhood's communal services (and in Vyborg in 2004 it happened to be someone I used to know as a kid, a charming person, and it hurt a lot to discover that 18 years later he was shoveling shit out of the basement of one of those beautiful buildings - it still hurts to know that, actually). And in Istanbul I go "ah" and "oh" and take some pictures - and then I think of the filth and the decay that one would find inside that beautiful building, and I think of Vyborg - but it's Istanbul, and it doesn't let me think of any one thing for too long really, so I walk on, and end up with this image of the city as a gorgeous creature that keeps shedding its skin, sporadically, here and there and then here again, and some of the new skin doesn't stick, and some ages too fast but refuses to fall off, while some of the really old skin protrudes in the unlikeliest spots, and then there's also the stuff that's buried underground, lots of it, I'm sure, and I do end up feeling dizzy and kind of laugh at myself for having managed to compare Vyborg to Istanbul - what a silly comparison, Veronica.