My International Friendship Shorts

 

The beach is in a lovely setting, beside a river the same colour as my recently unwrapped swimming trunks and with a view of the Lavra monastery at the other side. The sticky sand is far from tropical, but the people of Kyiv travel to it en masse at weekends, to escape the strains of the city without having to leave it altogether.

But the route to the sand is bedlam: a scrum of beach bags and babushki thrusts through the heavy metro doors, and the path to the water leads through a fairground and a gauntlet of shaurma stalls. The smell of barbecued meat and the sound of pop music - that most Ukrainian of combinations - fills the air.

There are two areas: a main beach populated mostly by men drinking beer, and the children's beach, where everyone else had moved to in hope of avoiding the drunks. We took one of the last remaining spaces on the children's beach and covered our faces with our shirts - mainly to keep the hot summer sun out of our eyes, but partly due to the sight of sixty-something women in fluorescent green bikinis, who each proudly display more fat around their protruding midriffs than there is on all the young ladies on the beach put together.

You can find the whole of Jonathan Campion’s Ukraine diary, along with his photographs, at http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Vinovat-Sudarynya. From there it is possible to contact him, comment on individual diaries, and subscribe.

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