Daniele Somenzi's Ukraine

Ukraine

Entering from Hungary, the border was fairly quick, also because my visa was in order. A little further on, a stop for the night in a round hotel with a big car park. The next morning I discover that my motorbike won't start, flat battery — damn it, did it have to happen right here? So I push it up the slope and, rolling down, it finally starts by pushing, but that only solves it temporarily. Lviv is the first stop to visit, ancient churches and a lot of traffic; I see there are trolleybuses, just like in Milan, except here the vehicles are a bit older in style.

Zhytomyr is the other city I pass through, and I get the chance to have two spot-welds done on my luggage rack. And in Kyiv, the capital, I find a new battery for the motorbike, unfortunately not a Yamaha but a Honda, an outrageous price and not its original one, €200, but the important thing is that it works, and so it does. Here I notice that most of the buses are driven by pretty girls. Incredible.

The Dnieper river is crossed thanks to a big bridge and I continue to Luhansk, where I'm lucky enough to find a fairly new guest house, complete with satellite TV that lets me watch the Hungarian Formula 1 Grand Prix. Ukraine is an immense field of sunflowers and other crops, with very few mountains; the roads are fairly good, the cars fairly ugly, and life for us with the euro costs little here. A feature that immediately catches the eye as you walk around the city is that the girls here are truly beautiful — but where are the ugly ones? Shut at home, or they really don't exist.

A lovely surprise was when I saw that on many power poles there are stork nests, with their chicks; I had seen it on TV but never in real life.

Bye