Winter Routines

November is Ukraine’s most melancholic month. The temperature falls below freezing, and the orange and yellow leaves that make October so picturesque fall on to the street and are trodden into dirty puddles (the Ukrainian word for November, Listopad, means “fall of leaves”). The plain, snowless clouds feel low enough to touch. People discard their colourful autumn clothes and clamber into black and dark grey coats. A cold wind blows stern looks onto our faces – autumn forgotten, the country settles in for an attritional winter.

Photo set: Before the fall

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Half a dozen photographs that I took in Ukraine this summer - in Khersones (Crimea), Kyiv and Chernihiv.

The Storm Before The Calm

Kyiv, June 2009

There is much to enjoy about early mornings in Kyiv: the cool air and peaceful blue tint in the sky (or whimsical snow in winter); the purposeful stomp of expensive shoes on the street as its businesspeople make their way to work; the unflustered rhythms of the metro before it becomes crowded; the melodious whirr of the coffee machine in the kitchen in my office, churning out triple espressos to be sipped before the working day starts. Unfortunately – due to my body’s own unflustered rhythms – ninety-nine times out of a hundred while all this is going on I am still in bed, jabbing weakly at the snooze button on my alarm clock.

Photo set: Kyiv

Some photographs taken in Kyiv, central Ukraine, where I have been working since 2007. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge them.

The Way To Pushcha Voditsa

Pushcha Voditsa, June 2009

Thinking of ways to spend my birthday, I remembered having read an article about the number 12 tram, whose route takes its passengers out of Kyiv and through a pine forest to a small town called Pushcha Voditsa. Exhausted by the city, desperate to explore somewhere beyond it, and intrigued by journey that the writer of the article described as “one of the most remarkable tram journeys in the world”, Ana and I set off with a picnic of bottled water and bars of chocolate toward the tram stop in the Podil district.

The Breath of a Thousand Strangers

Kyiv, January 2009

The smell in the corridor is a familiar mixture of boiled cabbage and cheap cigarettes. A brown carpet in the bedroom is fixed to one of the walls instead of the floor. In the bathroom half of the bathtub sits under a chimney and the lock on the toilet door is on the outside. The kitchen is decorated in eight shades of beige – a flat so infuriatingly fragile could only be Ukrainian.

Photo set: Lviv

Some photographs taken in Lviv, western Ukraine, over New Year 2009. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge them.

Borderland

Lviv, December 2008

Pitching up at the apartment in Lviv – which I had rented for Ana and me to spend three days in over New Year – gave me an improbable sense of déja vu. As we entered the cosy flat on vulytsya Fedorova I felt as though I was stepping not into the home of a rotund lady called Marianna, but of my imagined thirty-five year old self. It was clean, light, and decorated in a comfortable style that, subconsciously, I had aspired to wrapping myself in ever since being punched and kicked out of a Stalin-era ghetto the year before.

Photo set: Crimea

Some photographs taken in Crimea, southern Ukraine, in 2008. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge them.

Photo set: the people of Ukraine

A gallery of photographs of people – some are of friends and acquaintances, others are of strangers. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge them.