Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Day 4 afternoon museun

STALKER. yes, some girl standing in the metro was reading the famous russian book about the forbidden nuklear zone.
She wore a top with a pattern of the recurring message:
YOULL MATE MEBIYL OF YOURLA SOIRROW
Surely a secret code.
The underground train was fast, full to capacity and noisy. The passengers, as always, cool, quiet and diciplined.
I avoided panicking even tbough i forgot to count the subway stations. I even successfully changed from the red to the blue line by ingeniously flowing with the masses.
My exit was unexpected, though. I was aiming for the National History Museum of the Ukraine, on the top of the hill, but found myself down at the Dnipro river waterfront, waaaay below. Ok, so Poshtova Place is NOT just a short walk away from the grand museum.
As we will see it turned out to be perfect. I spotted beach and umbrellas on the opposite sandy shore! Some pleasure boats were moored at the promenade, i had a chat with a perfect english speaking girl from the cruise-ship T G Shevchenko. She told me that this was the last cruise, the boat was sold to some oil company abroad.
As i said, perfect, because there was the miraculous old funicular cable car. I even got a great photo of the control room, as retro as you can imagine! A women-only crew operates all the technological controls and ticket booths. Later I was told the pay is bad.
For a 15 euro cents fare we were adventurously hauled uphill towards the museum, the steel rope looked well enough maintained, but there was a little unease, still.
I got into museum for free, nobody cared about my presence until I was upstairs. The museum is jealously guarded by a horde of busybodies, older women who watch your moves and muster you first before the contemplate turning on the lights. They turn them off the very second you step out of an exhibition room. There is no turning back to again look at the previous room unless you are prepared to withstand judgement day by those psychics.
The museum has no english explanatory labels, just a note at the entrance to each room with a general and often interesting english explanation for the period of that room..
The exhibits seem a tad stale, but I enjoyed the 5 floors of treasures, and the interaction with the guard regiment.
My sport was to covertly take photos, i managed to take quite a few!
Afterwards I was off to have another stroll through the beautiful quarters at the old golden gate, and later a bortsh at the caza fat stomach,
My host rang at 6:30 so i am off "home" now, for my last night in the charming 1950s style flat.
In the overhead electric bus I caught a window seat because i have to see my landmarks in order to exit at the correct stop. The seat was unfortunately directly over the heat outlet. As i am writing these lines i can already smell the rubber from my sneakers and my buttock are fried medium rare.
Wonderful, i made it. The bus was held up in long traffic jam, during which i endeavoured to find open access points to download the latest us-propaganda from VoA news. It worked! Voice of America told us about the evil chinese' the bankrupt europeans and terror terror terror. Not one word about the USA being bankrupt, US wars of terror and their aggressive warfare in economics, cyberspace and subversion of democracy worldwide.
At "home" we drink some wine and i tell of my experiences today, we watch the little hedgehog on youtube and have a task to find four ravens in a cage, near the hedgehog. There is a russian streetview of Kiev, but internet by gsm modem is too slow.
Day 5 tomorrow ...
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