don't try to sell me crazy

The days I spent with Andrew were fairly lazy. I was recuperating from the massive drinking I found myself involved in when I was with Pavlos, and so for the most part, Andrew and I stuck to small amounts of beer and wine. I wouldn't meet up with Pavlos again for a few days, since he was off staying at another couchsurfer's place.  The nights were spent in such a way, cooking eggs and sausages and drinking our aperitifs.  We chatted through the night, Andrew and his roommates, Olya, Jenya and a tall and ripped Ukrainian man who washed windows and painted tall buildings for nearly 12 hours a day.  Jenya and the man had to share their room, both sleeping on the floor, and I found a space on the floor in Andrew's room to sleep.   

With Andrew, I went to the Chernobyl Museum, near Kontraktova Square. The place was in what appeared to be an old firehouse, with old style ambulances and troop carriers in the front – I wasn't really sure if those were part of the museum or for police use, since there was a police station right next door. The museum entrance was in the front, and immediately we went upstairs to the museum itself. We were greeted by an old babushka who pointed us into the room. The museum itself, besides its arty interior, had no seeming organization or relevance. Mostly, it was composed of random belongings of people who had died in the Chernobyl accident, held in glass cases with yellow stickers that had the radiation symbol on them. I wasn't sure if that was for effect or if the things actually still registered with some radiation, and if they had, I wasn't sure how they thought that the glass would protect the viewers from the radiation. 

Kontraktova Square

Chernobyl, for those somehow unaware, was the nuclear accident that occurred back in the 80s in the then Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic. The accident was essentially caused by a failure of the safety systems as they were undergoing tests of those systems. There were about 30 deaths immediately and over 30,000 people died from cancer afterwards (a number still largely unknown). Afterwards, the Soviets had to relocate over 300,000 people from the area and spend 18 million rubles trying to contain the disaster. It didn't cost as much as their war in Afghanistan (or ours), but it was still pretty damaging to their economy. They tried to cover it up as best they could, the West only finding out about it when monitors in Finland spiked and people started asking questions about the large nuclear cloud that was forming over the rest of Europe. The museum itself has several simulations concerning the spreading of the cloud and the evacuation.

If you had nothing to do in Kiev, then why not visit the museum? But otherwise, it wouldn't rank as a “must see”, not like the pair of human skin Nazi gloves they've got in the WWII museum (designed by a relative of the Koch brothers, by the way). Chernobyl itself has some interest to me though. It serves as a sort of Soviet Pompeii – as the area was nearly completely evacuated, the place is like an ethnographic museum on Ukrainian life in the 1980s. The grounds are relatively safe to traverse these days and many places organize tours up there. One of these days I'll hop along.

The next day, we went to meet an old friend of Olya's who was living just on the outskirts of downtown, hear the Olympic park. Ivan liked to collect old Soviet memorabilia, and the walls of his room, which smelled something of unwashed laundry and sweat, were covered in old posters and flags of the different modern countries which were once part of the Soviet Union. He spoke slightly crazy, shaking his hand as he talked and repeatedly brushed his hair back, though there was no need to. He spoke in Ukrainian mostly, but sometimes switched to Russian or English depending on who he was talking to. We also met there Slava, a red haired girl who was studying English and was eager to practice with native speakers, though she had to leave soon.

Ivan showed us a video he had made some time ago, with him an Olya and a few others traveling across the Ukrainian countryside and visiting some random village. I couldn't tell what the point of the video was – as it was all in Ukrainian – but he seemed quite proud of it or the idea of it, I couldn't tell. I kept thinking about the movie 12 Monkeys and thinking how much the guy reminded me of Brad Pitt's character, with erratic movements and speeches involving bizarre conspiracy theories, “Germs, man, germs!”

When we left, I had the feeling that I had just watched some sort of thought provoking, life changing movie, but I couldn't remember any of the details or the plot. Andrew seemed to share my sentiments. “That guy was crazy,” he told me. “Yeah, just a little bit,” I responded. “Bona fide.”