Greetings from Kiev

Who would have thought that one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe would feel so young?

I'm sitting a few feet from Independence Square, where just a few months ago, Ukrainian citizens rallied to demand a new government in what's come to be called the Orange Revolution. These days, the only sign of all the fuss are tables full of orange T-shirts on sale (as well as other shirts with V.I. Lenin flipping the bird). But there are still a lot of young people around — there's a rock band playing in the square right now, with a small group of police officers and a huge crowd of high school and college-age kids looking on.

Finding your way around Kiev isn't difficult, thanks to all the landmarks. For example, I came up out of the subway this morning, looking for the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, and thought to myself, "Well, I can either head toward the 300-foot statue of a woman holding a sword, or head in the other direction, toward all those run-down apartment buildings. I think I'll check out the statue."

The Museum is something to see — big and imposing in the way that only something made by the Soviet Union can be big and imposing, and filled with exhibits that let you know (no matter how bad your Russian is) that the Ukrainian people had a really, really bad time of things in World War II. It's quite a shock to go from the area outside the museum, which is filled with tanks, helicopters and even a submarine from the war (huh huh, huh huh, tanks are cool) and enter a room three times the size of my high school gymnasium that's completely filled with photographs of people who died in the war. In the center of the room is a table set with empty plates and glasses. The message is clear — these are all people who will never come home — and it's one that stays with you for a while.

Near the museum is the Caves Monastery, the major tourist attraction in Kiev and (from what I can make out) one of the primary pilgrimage sites of the Orthodox church. The monastery itself is a huge walled complex on the side of a hill, filled with beautiful churches — some green, some baby blue, all topped by those familiar gold onion domes. Beneath the monastery are a series of catacombs in which notable monks are — well, not buried, since they're each lying beneath an ornate cloth in a transparent coffin. You walk around the caverns holding a lit taper (candles are the only source of light down there), and if you've gone with a Russian tour group, as I did, you're able to simultaneously confront your fears of enclosed spaces, the dark, fire, crowds, and being around lots of dead people. However, it's quite interesting — among the glass caskets are beautifully-rendered paintings on the walls and the familiar Russian ikons, or stylized religious paintings, surrounded by gold cases.

It's strange to see the gold domes of the monastery behind the silhouettes of the guns from the museum (and with a few billboards for strip clubs and cell phone services thrown in for good measure). But that's what Kiev seems to be like, so far: a mixture of the moving (watching a school group pass through the Chernobyl Museum brought it home to me in a way that wouldn't have happened if I'd seen it alone) and the mundane — for one thing, alcohol is everywhere. I mean, everywhere.

Every retail establishment you see is either a bar, a liquor store, or something in between. There are bars in the underground passageways you use to cross the street (and slot machines, too). There are bars outside of churches. There are bars on Andryivsky uvitz, a long, windy, uphill street where everything from Matryoshkas (those little nesting dolls) to Soviet medals to peasant dresses to high school biology books in English are for sale. I tried to avoid the bars by buying a glass of kvass, a beverage that tastes like drinking ginger bread, from a roadside vendor.

Turns out that's alcoholic, too.

When in Rome...