KYIV DIARY – DAY LAST

What else when you have to leave a city and are still reconciling its lasting impressions?  A windy day, a politician causing traffic jams with his outrageous motorcade, a walk atop a hill with poplars on the river, a look through an artists’ squat, petite feminist performers on the run from Moscow police, Jake Chapman listening to metal and sketching furiously, myself almost getting detained at the airport for an irate exchange with the security guards, an exposed, violent, peacefully anti-developed, bare, stacked in high-rises, bi-polar city with its warrior lady liberty ruling the main bridge off the central isle of the settlement referencing a grand past, an engineered famine, an oligarchic today, and ruling over an unsettling amount of beautiful landscape.  There were two ways to take – if not the airport, a two week meandering car journey through some of the most spectacular mellow hill-scape to the sea, into the history of Odessa and eventually into the lush wine country of the Romanian east.  To be continued, Kyiv has whet this appetite.