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filed away filed away pre blog stuff mostly amazing places on this planet may 5 2018 večer in slovenian friday april 27 i ve been walking around kyiv too much these past few weeks today i ve done 15 km the city s such a happy place again after half a year of winter s cold and gloom yesterday i suddenly realized that 32 years ago when the chernobyl power plant blew up on april 26 1986 everything was exactly the same as it is now people were drunk with springtime joy the city was crazily beautiful and so tender life was good because we d all survived yet another winter that day my mother took in a dog from the street and i a 12 year old then couldn t have been happier when i got back from school a dog of my own finally and until much later hardly anyone knew anything about the horror that was happening just 100 km to the north of kyiv chernobyl is about thousands of disrupted human lives the criminal cowardice and silence of the authorities the fear of the invisible threat which lingers on for years afterwards it is also about an interrupted kyiv spring saturday april 28 we re flying to istanbul tomorrow so today is the day of packing i can t wait i love traveling but at the same time i hate leaving always feel desperate even when we re just going on vacation there are these brief trips that don t involve any heartbreak such as saying goodbye to dear friends and then there are the real long term departures when you re leaving places and people you love for long enough for it to feel like forever and a tiny part of me refuses to admit that there s a huge difference between the two what s good about it though is that i love returning to those places and people i once left and this seems like a good explanation though not the only one of why we ve been stubbornly traveling to istanbul as often as we can for the past 19 years ignoring other amazing places on this planet sunday april 29 getting through passport control in istanbul and then through a traffic jam to our friends place takes longer than actually flying here from kyiv but these 40 minutes of waiting just to get your passport stamped prepare you well for what s ahead for istanbul s scale the amount of life here all the people cars boats cats food laughter noise everything istanbul is like a huge puppy that can crush you to near death accidentally just playing happily with you unaware of its own force it s an incredible city always overwhelming never boring tiresome too perhaps but we ve never stayed for more than three weeks here and somehow that s not enough time for me to get tired of istanbul we are flying on to edremit tomorrow so we re spending the night with our dear friends who live close to the airport i take a walk along the seafront where hundreds of people are enjoying the sun barbecuing flying kites riding bicycles taking selfies eating out in cafes and watching airplanes fly by just a hundred meters above us every two or three minutes a plane appears over the sea of marmara and heads for landing bringing in all those crowds of people from all over the world that we hung out with at passport control earlier today it s mesmerizing to watch these planes i could do it for hours checking where each one s coming from with the flight radar app imagining what those places are like dreaming of traveling to some of them one day looking at the sea in between these arrivals it s a good way to fight my fear of flying too very reassuring so many planes and they all land without any problems monday april 30 the day s first call to prayer wakes us up at dawn reminding us that we aren t in kyiv anymore but no matter how different istanbul is from kyiv it feels just as much like home just as precious our flight to edremit takes about 40 minutes our friends pick us up at the airport our friends who have long been like family to us each time we return to them it feels as if we d never left after two antiques shops and a delicious lunch oh how i always miss these hedonistic meals that we have here we finally make it to the mountainous village called kayalar which translates as the rocks our friends beautiful house sits right above the village but it s the greek island of lesbos a dozen or so kilometers away across the aegean sea that dominates the view you see it once you cannot take your eyes away until you leave and even then this view stays on in your mind as always i have no words to describe the beauty of this place tuesday may 1 if it weren t for the minibus with loudspeakers and may day stickers all over it riding through the streets of edremit yesterday blaring yaşasın 1 mayıs long live may 1 i d probably not remember about may day today here the holiday still has a genuine feel with the annual attempts to hold rallies in istanbul despite all the police and their water cannons tear gas and helicopters circling above taksim square back home it s just an extended weekend for most people the time to go to their country houses plant potatoes detox or get drunk relax in the former soviet union may day is an anti work holiday my mother says they stopped taking it and other soviet holidays seriously after nikita khrushchev s 1956 speech in which he denounced stalin and his crimes i somehow have a very vague memory of just one may day rally the one they forced people to attend in 1986 on the sixth day after chernobyl this is something that is still hard to fathom and impossible to forgive the official evacuation of kyiv s schoolchildren began two weeks later in mid may i was sent away on may 7 for a whole year that summer my father wrote me in one of his letters the most striking thing about kyiv now is that you won t see a single child as you walk outside just imagine a city of 3 million and no children whatsoever wednesday may 2 in the courtyard of one of the antiques shops that we stopped at on the day we arrived i noticed five cannonballs of slightly different sizes i lifted one it was rusty and very heavy imagine how horrifying it is to have those flying all around you i told our 12 year old daughter the shop s owner said they were from the wwi battles that took place in çanakkale an hour or so away by car troy is over here too whatever remains of it mount ida is nearby and that s where the greek gods sat watching the trojan war behramkale assos has the ruins of its ancient temple on top of the hill and the view of lesbos is simply perfect from there pure tranquility aristotle lived there st paul passed through an elderly local man once told us his ancestors graves were on lesbos and out of reach to him an echo from the 1923 population exchange between turkey and greece fishermen s boats make for a beautiful tourist sight but coast guard boats are there as well the magnificent lesbos so idyllic from a distance is now witnessing the tragedy of thousands of refugees this is the ancient land packed with stories and myths from the distant and not so distant past and it is so full of life still thursday may 3 a few weeks ago i spent an hour looking through old soviet postcards at kyiv s book market three boxes of signed ones sent by strangers to their family friends and colleagues 30 40 years ago the vendor said he had 30 000 more stored in the corner of his tiny dark shop and i immediately saw myself spending the rest of my life there sorting through this treasure trove then i reigned myself in and bought just 15 cards for less than 50 euro cents some of them are handwritten calligraphically with pencil drawn lines some are even typewritten a soviet practice i ve totally forgotten about some make me a bit depressed others make me smile i have them all in front of me now because i d been hoping to write about them but kayalar is a very fjaka inducing place so it ll have to wait but here are two teasers from a 1979 new year s card astrakhan to kyiv nothing good in our lives all the same over and over drinking is ruining everything from a 1983 march 8 card to the same recipient from a different leningrad based friend i m thinking about last summer so often how good it was wish we could repeat it at least once more nika smetana aka veronica khokhlova lives between kyiv moscow istanbul and otok vis loves walking languages cities loves telling stories to herself and to anyone who d listen has always kept some sort of a diary got herself a blog in 2003 occasionally writes and edits central eastern europe content for various venues by nika no comments filed away under 2018 non fiction turkey ukraine older posts home subscribe to posts atom everything else instagram medium neeka s backlog work log global voices tumblr twitter neeka s linklog flickr vimeo non fiction 05 2018 amazing places on this planet 11 2004 new kids on the bloc 11 2004 protester s diary 05 2004 vyborg 04 2004 chernobyl 03 2004 hay market 11 2003 shevardnadze 07 2003 red dusk 03 2003 10 23 02 2003 demography 09 2002 am i a woman or what 05 2002 evil trains fiction 2003 ali s pictures photo 03 2004 a day in the 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