Kiev

WE MET some of the kindest, most helpful people we’ve ever met when we visited Ukraine.

Kiev has magnificent wide avenues, incredible churches, highly intelligent young people, older folk aspiring to the material world with their big cars and flashy clothes, old ladies who look like their lives haven’t changed since the old Soviet days.

They have great beer, fine food, lovely old parks full of Soviet tanks and aircraft and missile launchers, ridiculously huge Soviet statues, gorgeous-looking women and sinister-looking men.

It’s a unique place.

If I had a year to live, limitless money and was choosing all the places I wanted to visit and could only see a few I’d seen before, Kiev would be top.

We hope to go back one day, and see places like Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk. And a return to Kiev is definitely in our minds.

Look at the beautiful blue church, St Michael’s. Inside, these churches feel a bit smaller than they look outside. But you don’t really see things like this in the UK. Shame.

Chernobyl Museum.