It's Morning in Chimerica

"Wondrous is the Dnieper, too, on a warm summer night, when everything falls asleep, (man, beast, and bird), and God alone grandly surveys heaven and earth and grandly shakes his robes. Stars pour from his robes. Stars burn and shine over the world, and all are reflected at once in the Dnieper."

Crashed hard after the Chernobyl trip and, thusly, woke up at 3am or so. To avoid disturbing Sara I went to the kitchen and ate some dry salt-cheese and some powdery olives. With equal parts desperation and ingenuity I, at last, discovered how to open the Impenetrable Yogurt. It took a knife. I won't say any more about it, other than to say it took a knife.

It tasted like Cool Whip. Our first trip to the Ukrainian yogurt aisle resulted in sour cream and dessert topping. So, not a very satisfying breakfast, but things would be open soon. Things were open now, in fact.

We're both reading Bulgakov on this trip. I chose The Master and Margarita, because I love cats, but she is reading The White Guard, which is a novel about the history of Kyiv. There's a bit in there where it says many families from St. Petersburg and Moscow fled here after the Oktober Revolution. Since there were so many new folks crammed into too-few apartments, folks needed space, so the late-night trades thrived.

It's tempting to think the 24-hour diners and coffee shops we see around here stem from that tradition.

I sat on a little second-floor balcony and read a book called Ostend. It's about a gang of German authors and celebrities hiding out in Belgium at the dawn of WWII. Most of them are completely forgotten, but they were big deals in their time. I was particularly interested in an author named Irmgard Kuen.

A sad, inspiring little read on an uncomfortable bean bag that threatened to slide me onto the floor at any moment.

Sara woke up, and we went out for coffee. The streets were quiet. It was the Saturday before Easter, and it felt like most folks were taking it easy. This is a large city in both size and population. Very clean, though a little rough around the edges. It feels a like a big Sofia to me or an off-brand Budapest.

The goal today was to ride the Metro to the Arsenalna station, which is the deepest in the world! The deepest subway station on the planet! None deeper! We got the large coffee at the place with the colorful lids, since we didn't know how long we would be on the escalator.

Said escalators are very fast, as I've mentioned. We bought our plastic blue tokens at the Golden Gate station and fooled around in the tunnels until a blue and yellow train dumped us down in Arsenalna. It took two fastcaltors to get us out. Up and up we went. People slept on them. People read books on them. People fell in love, dated, and broke up on them.

We rose ever higher, I could feel my beard growing. I thought about work, I thought about a play I have in pre-production at home. I thought about relationships, books, records. My mother. The stars wheeled in the heavens. Tulips opened their petals. Moths bred and died. And then, we were halfway up.

Outside, a cart promised hot dogs. They're all the rage here, these hot dogs, but they're not like hot dogs at home. Half is encased in a sort of bread sheath, by which it is held, and the other half is the exposed half of God's own hot dog. They look a lot like meat lipsticks.

Anyway, the cart was closed. We'll have one eventually. I so swear it.

Long, pleasant walk down wide, quiet boulevards and through quiet parks. It's all very sweetly lain out. The goal here was simply to wander and explore with maybe the destination point of something called The House of Chimeras.

The President lives there, and entertains there. Crazy old Art Deco building supposed to be covered in monsters on the exterior and hunting trophies inside. We stopped first at Mariyinski Palace, a massive teal and white palace seemingly auditioning itself as a location for a Wes Anderson film. Very pretty to see the teal against the bright blue sky.

We paused for a rest, so Sara could eat some walnuts. They are her vitamins. Then onward to the House of Chimeras! Which proved... elusive. The map suggested it was in one place, but we were in that place, and... no house.

We walked in a circle around a little buttonhook park. Held the map upside down... one thing about Kyiv is the street signs are not at all prominent. No names on the sides of buildings, no hanging placards near traffic signals, no posts. You just kind of need to know.  And we didn't.

Eventually, I just asked a lady who was sweeping the sidewalk with some branches. She didn't speak any English, but her friend did! So I went into a little pub where her friend was, and he didn't speak much either, but I whined out "Chimeras?" enough to where he eventually got it. They pronounce it "him-eras."

He could tell I would never find the streets, so he just kind of waved in three directions to indicate we should go this way, then this wave, then this wave. I was very grateful. We followed the hand a way we hadn't gone, and sure enough...

But the street was sealed off by soldiers.

I saw some civilians pass by them, though, so we headed that way trying to look as inoffensive as possible, and the lead soldier turned his body just enough to indicate we were going to be questioned.

Internally, at this point, I was cracking up at the idea that there WAS NO House of Chimeras. That the whole thing was a Ukrainian snipe hunt designed to prank tourists. Like, lets describe an amazing, impossible place and name it after a word that means "illusion" and see how many goofy Americans come looking for it.

But I mewed 'him-era' to the guard, and since I said it the way they say it, he nodded and let us through. Down a long, blocked off row of official buildings and parked military buses. We were surprised to see soldiers sleeping in them. They looked exhausted.

Sober steps to a locked gate where we beheld.... one side of.... The House of Chimeras!

It lived up to the hype, smothered in bearded fish and rhinoceroses. Strange and stark. I wanted to see it from the front, but I didn't want to wake the Army. So we backed out of there to see if it were possible to approach it from another side.

It was not. BUT, we saw a different building with large-breasted dragon-mermaids, and Sara drank coffee out of the back of a van. They call it "boot coffee" here, since it's espresso prepared from a machine stuffed into the trunk of a car.

Sat in a little Soviet-era square and let the sun wash over us and bleach out our chimerical plans. Headed back to "town" where the plazas teamed with children and the elderly. There's a massive public art project with hundreds of painted bunnies on pedestals, and some folks seemed to want to photograph each one.

In the shadow of St. Something or Other, we split up to see different things. I drank coffee in the sun and finished that Ostend book. Oh, Irmgard Kuen!

When we met back up, we walked through a low archway with wooden eggs suspended from the roof and listened to the locals strike them and make them clatter. We ate sausage and grilled zucchini at an Easter Market and listened to hilarious Russian pop songs.

Then home for sleep! The plan was to take a nap, then get up for dinner, but we ended up oversleeping. But! It's a late-night town, me lads. It's a late-night town. And plans are illusions.