Common Sense and Whiskey

It's Ukraine. Ukraine, I tell you.

Chernobyl 27 years ago

“There has been an accident at our nuclear power station. We ask you to be calm. Gather up your necessary things, what you need for three days: food and clothing. At 1400 hours a bus will be sent to your home, and you are to take a seat on it.” - Nina Melnick, local radio news reader, 26 April, 1986.

One More Look at Pripyat and Chernobyl - A Dozen Photos

Photos from a March visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. Click 'em to make 'em bigger. More photos here.

Kindergarten inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, near Chernobyl, Ukraine.


The lobby of the Palace of Culture, Pripyat, Ukraine, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.


School inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

School inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine - HDR.

The Supermarket on Lenin Street, on the central square, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

The gymnasium at the Palace of Culture, inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine - HDR.

That's Chernobyl reactor 4, the ruined one, on the right. The New Safe Containment is the structure under construction on the left. It's an arch (as you can see through the trees) which will be jacked up in the air on legs one section at a time, until it's tall enough to slide on tracks over to the right to cover reactor 4. This photo from March, 2013.

The amusement park at Pripyat, Ukraine, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Kitchen inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Chernobyl, Kyiv & Istanbul - Wednesday HDRs

Now that spring has arrived here in the southeast U.S., Chernobyl looks like a cold and forbidding place.  It was a cold and forbidding place, matter of fact.

Here are a few HDR photos from last month's travel. Click them to make them bigger. There are 35 photos posted so far to this gallery at EarthPhotos.com. One or two more go up most days.

First is the gymnasium at the Palace of Culture in Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat was the town built specifically to service the Chernobyl nuclear power complex. At the time it was evacuated, it held some 45,000 scientists, engineers and their families. The average age was just 26.

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Same building, just on the central square, along with a supermarket, government buildings, a restaurant and a hotel. The rug says "CCCP 60," to commemorate the USSR's 60th anniversary, which was a little over three years before the accident.

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The Great Patriotic War Museum in Kyiv is just about all in Ukrainian, with just little laminated cards to read in English, but much of the story being told is visual, anyway. The lands between Berlin and Moscow had it tough. They were flattened from one direction by the Germans, then from the other by the Russians. This monument is in an underground walkway outside the museum.

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There's a restaurant atop the Legacy Ottoman Hotel, just above the Eminonu ferries, with this fine view of the Golden Horn. Arrive about 5:00, as we did, and you have the whole place to yourself.

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There's a warren of alleyways between the indoor part of the Grand Bazaar and the waterfront. Here, men line up for a little work. Somebody dropped off there bundles of merchandise, and these guys are carrying them who knows where.

Chernobyl, Istanbul, Kyiv, London

London, Istanbul, Kyiv and Chernobyl. 25 pictures so far. Click here. Then under 'styles,' click 'slideshow.' Make 'em as big as you can.

One or two more most days, right through April.

Wednesday HDRs - London, Istanbul & Kyiv

The three cities (besides Chernobyl) that we visited earlier this month. Everybody takes this tourist picture of London, so I decided to do something else with it - first tonemap it and then make it up to look like an oil painting. Man, it was cold that day.

Sometimes I think there is no city greater than Istanbul. Here's the Haggia Sophia at twilight.

And this is St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv. (Kyiv is the Ukrainian language spelling. Kiev is Russian.) Kyiv is full of cathedrals. There are several more waiting on my hard drive.

Click 'em to make them bigger. There's a new photo or two a day from this most recent trip showing up here at EarthPhotos.com and here, more slowly, on Flickr.

St. Michael's Cathedral, Kyiv, Ukraine HDR

Chernobyl Reactor #4

The concrete blocks on the buildings to the left and center comprise part of the old sarcophagus built to contain radiation after the 1986 accident. This is as close as they'll take you, about 300 meters.

A new sarcophagus, an arch, is being built off to the right and behind this photo. It will slide on tracks right over the top of the old one. But radiation levels increase at higher elevations, making it unsafe to work at the top of the construction site, above thirty meters.

The really clever engineering solution: First they've built the top of the arch on the ground.

"We then attach some legs to that, which are the next part down. The structure is then jacked 30m into the air, the legs swing in and are tied together to prevent them from spreading out flat. We remove the jacks, add another pair of legs, jack that up another 30m and the process is repeated until we get the arch structure 110m up in the air," Dr. Eric Schmieman explains in this article.

Snapshots, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Yesterday we arranged a visit to Chernobyl, about 110 kilometers north of Kyiv. You must have a permit to travel inside the 30 kilometer "exclusion zone" around reactor number 4. Here are a few first photos. Starting with the second one, they're all from inside the exculsion zone.

Click through for more.

Into the Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl

Long, remarkable day yesterday. A trip from Kyiv up to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Chernobyl town, reactor number 4 and Pripyat.

Top: Cash register at Middle School Number 3, Pripyat, with gas masks, and bottom, a copy of Soviet Patriot newspaper dated April 23, 1986. The accident occured just after midnight on the morning of April 26.

More to come.

Road Trip: Turkey and Ukraine

 

Taksim Square and the view to the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul, Turkey.

We're climbing aboard British Airways tomorrow. Next batch of posts from one of the world's great cities, Istanbul. Later on next week we'll talk with you from Kyiv, where, as I write this, it looks darned cold.

Photos will go in the Turkey and Ukraine galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

Cheers for now!

Rainy Day Reading

We've been a little scarce here at CS&W as we try to finish up some longer-form writing and get set for a trip to Rapa Nui that's about a month away. More on that as we get closer.

For now, here are ideas of interest from all over, if you're so inclined:

- Not long ago, my pal Rick Lewis moved to Cotacachi, Ecuador. He blogs about it at brokedownpalette.
- Alfred Molon, a Dane, has some 23,000 photos here, from much of the world.
- Albanian Tourism Project Puts Beds in Bunkers, from Der Spiegel.
- Kebabistan, a Eurasianet food blog, is worth a look.
- Update on the state of things in Ukraine, from Salon.
- The Enclaves and Counter-enclaves of Baarle, on the Dutch/Belgian border, from Big Think's Strange Maps.
- And you might have seen that the British have invaded nine out of ten countries, from an upcoming book.

Quick Travel Links

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden: Story of a visit to the exclusion zone, in Outside magazine.

The Pizkuny Wall: Story in Der Spiegel about life along the Lithuania/Belarus border, and their own mini-Berlin Wall.

Where is Resolute Bay, site of a 20 August 737 crash in northern Canada? Way up there, it turns out. Several maps. The air carrier was First Air. Here's its route map, from its web site:

 

Crossing the Black Sea

From 2007:

Today we’d sail on the Yuzhnaya Palmyra, a ship of the UKRFerry shipping company, on once weekly service Istanbul to Odessa. It was to be an approximately 28 hour crossing of the Black Sea south to north, although we’d have to see about the timing.

Departure was set for 9:00 on the web, 10:00 on our ticket (a hard copy they insisted on sending via DHL for $70 from Ukraine to the U.S.), and 11:00 by the people at the hotel, who made some calls on our behalf. So arrival as well, I suspected, ought to be approximate.

We presented ourselves down at the Karakoy docks shortly past 8:00 a.m. “Actual Time,” as the reception clock had it. We had ample time for a spin up and down ship, stem to stern, and an extended goodbye to the mosques filling the Istanbul skyline, lying at anchor, as we were, just meters across the Golden Horn from Topkapi and Sultanahmet. There would be breakfast service before heaving ho, part of the “three meals a day provided all passengers.”

It may have still been Istanbul outside but it was full Ukraine in the песторан (restaurant). Most of the good Ukrainian women were fat as those Americans they worry about on the news, most everyone smoking wherever possible, and a bunch of smoking and horseplay over a 9:30 breakfast of Slavic breakfast staples, cheese and meat slices, an egg dish and a sausage, a tea bag and aching-sweet juice the color of kvass.

Kvass was a Soviet era concoction a young man named Еѵгєлу (Evgeny) once showed me how to sample back in 1986 in a kiosk outside Red Square – served with the nice Soviet touch of a single, shared glass. Here each got our own glass. Mirja and I shared our table with a family of three women, all in print dresses, and a video-taping man.

Even as you gazed out onto working ships with good Turkish names like the Turgut and The Osman, and teeming local ferries of the Tur Yol line, here came women indefinably Ukrainian, with name tags Iruna and big 'ol Svetlana, slinging plates for six or eight stacked right up their arms. There were pats of butter, and a jug of кетчуп (ketchup) on every table.

Syrupy ballads from the steppes blared straight out of Slavic central casting. They were just enough too loud to notice they were a little too loud.

It took half a year for word to reach the Atlantic coast that gold had been discovered in California. Here, it took three minutes to be jostled by regular, abrupt announcements, way too loud. In the style of receptionists back home, whose announcement echoes across, say, the parking lot of the car dealership, they never thought to put the handset down gently, but instead rattled it around in search of its cradle.

Turkish, Turks will tell you, is useless outside his country's borders. Even inside in this case, as even at the Istanbul dock, the only announcements were in Ukrainian with just an occasional partial English translation.

Further humiliating, the Ukranian home currency, the hyrvna, and the dollar were just about the only ones in play. I had extra Turkish lira, and while they'd trade in them on the Palmyra, I put them away in the (probably idle) hope I could convert them later at a less usurious rate than on the ship.

Lots of smiles among the passengers. A country crowd, I thought, except for young men, most in sleeveless T's or undershirts which apparently pass for cool or maybe virile hereabouts, all painted with the permanent scowl of defiance you see on 17 or 20 year olds worldwide.

I wish I could have telepathically conveyed, on behalf of every other man, the simple notion, "We don't want your (brightly painted) woman."

Worth Your Time

Timely:

"Twenty-five years after the Soviet-era meltdown drove 60,000 people from their homes in the Ukraine, a rebirth is taking place inside the exclusion zone. With Geiger counter in hand, the author explores Europe's strangest wildlife refuge, an enchanted postapocalyptic forest from which entirely new species may soon emerge." - from Outside Magazine.

Expensive:

"This 17-minute-long "national image film" features a string of uplifting facts and inspiring pronouncements about modern-day China." - from Danwei.

Dangerous:

"On 4 November Qantas flight QF32, an Airbus A380 outbound from Singapore, ran into serious problems when a turbine on its Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine suffered an uncontained failure. We caught up with one of the five pilots onboard, who describes how the crew professionally dealt with the incident, the sequence of events, and how the most dangerous period was after they had landed." - from Aerospace Insight.

"Europe's Strangest Wildlife Refuge..."

... around Chernobyl.

Monster Wreath Attacks President of Ukraine

Fabulous Destinations When Money Doesn't Matter #9

Proximity to Power is Pricey.

This surely wouldn't appeal to everybody, but it's right up my nerdy alley:  

Global Challenges in a Post-Perestroika World

World Leaders Symposium: Russia & the Black Sea

With Condoleezza Rice, William Perry, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other special guests

Aboard the Silver Wind • August 30 — September 15, 2010

I'm no cruise fan, but this is no ordinary cruise. It's a symposium that begins in Moscow, travels to Istanbul, and then continues by ship and local transport to Batumi and Tbilisi, Baku, Sochi, Yalta, Sevastopol and Odessa. 

I'd say put me down for that in a flash. Just one tiny problem: The least expensive accommodation is $47,980 for a "Vista Suite," based on double occupancy.

*****

There are photos from Moscow in the Russia Gallery, Istanbul in the Turkey Gallery, Tbilisi in the Georgia Gallery, Baku in the Azerbaijan Gallery and Odessa in the Ukraine Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.