13. UKRAINE

My time in Turkey came to an end and all countries to the east of Turkey were still closed. Actually, I wanted to enter Iran and travel overland until India. So I ended up checking the cheapest flights out of Turkey and a 30 Euro flight to Kyiv in Ukraine appeared. Yes, the weather forecast of minus 10 degrees and tons of snow the next days didn't convince me at all but somehow I had a good gut feeling about Ukraine.

I ended up traveling in Ukraine for only 2 weeks for several reasons. Compared to all the other countries I traveled to before, Ukraine was the first one that I didn't really click with. Surely the climate played a big role as well but also many encounters with people were not among my best experiences. Obviously, that's only my humble personal impression that I got during a short period of time. The problem of many people with handling alcohol is impossible to miss and omnipresent on the street and in public places.

In Ukraine I ended up visiting the two big cities Kyiv & Lviv and some countryside & villages around the polish border.

Kyiv, the capital of the country, has plenty of beautiful golden domes of Orthodox cathedrals that are mixing up with grey concrete blocks of Soviet times. The first thing I needed to do there was to collect myself a proper winter setup for my clothes. I bought gloves, a scarf, a thick winter jacket and a hat at a local market. Traveling in cold countries makes it much harder to travel only with hand luggage (normally I never exceed my 9 kg luggage weight). I explored some of the churches & former Soviet buildings and tried some Ukrainian dishes.

After 4 days in Kyiv, I took a long-distance train to Lviv in the west of Ukraine. The city center of Lviv is really beautiful and is even part of the UNESCO World Heritage List. On top of that, it's the most "Ukrainian" region of Ukraine. Most signs were only in Ukrainian, even when it used to be a Soviet province. Compared to other bigger cities such as Prague, Krakow or Budapest it's lacking the huge amounts of tourists and the historical center feels much more authentic.

From Lviv, I hitchhiked to a village close to the Polish border and from there out of Ukraine to Poland's East. Without any COVID-related documents, it wasn't that easy to enter the European Union back then (November 2020). But on my second try, a friendly border officer gave me the green light!

Now, since February 2022 Ukraine is in a state of war. A terrible, unnecessary war that claimed the lives of so many innocent people. Let us all hope for the fastest possible peace and an immediate stop of another unnecessary war in our world.