We have known about Chris's Ukrainian heritage forever. Both of her parents were born in the western part of Ukraine, in an area known as Galicia which has a complicated history. The region has been ruled by Lithuania, Poland, and Austria-Hungary over past centuries. Her parents left Ukraine during WWII as children and never returned.
Chris visited parts of Ukraine in 1993, on a tour with her Grandfather. It was just after the breakup of the USSR and I remember her stories about how rough the tourist infrastructure was - if you could call it that! Power outages, hot water for an hour a day, no menus in restaurants - what they served was what you ate.
Since then, we visited Crimea and Odessa in 2010 on a Silversea cruise, and it was certainly nicer than she remembered. We figured it was high time to go back and see what had changed in the last 25 years. Chris is fluent in Ukrainian so we weren't worried about being on our own, though she had some trepidation given that languages evolve over time. The Ukrainian that she learned from her parents and grandparents is what was spoken in the west in the 1930s and earlier.
So we planned a long week split up between Kyiv and Lviv. Kyiv is of course the capital, in the middle of the country, a famous city founded over 1000 years ago. It's in the middle, between the Russian-influenced Eastern half, and the European-influenced Western half. It has been the site of several political uprisings in recent years as well.
Lviv was the capital city of Galicia, founded in the 1200s, and we thought it would be a good contrast to Kyiv. Lviv, by nature of its western location, tends to have a pro-European mindset and it's been getting a lot of press as an up-and-coming destination. Plus, there is a very personal connection for Chris because her mother was born there.
So we looked at flights first. We couldn't string together an itinerary out of Albany that went to Ukraine on a single ticket, so we decided to mix and match by first getting to a European hub, then taking other flights to and from Ukraine. We found direct flights from Paris to Kyiv, and Lviv to Frankfurt. Then we put together an open-jaw itinerary from Albany to Paris, and Frankfurt to home.
Now for hotels. I booked a room at the Hyatt Regency Kyiv and used some points to do a suite upgrade. Then we had some expiring timeshare points to use, so I exchanged them for what I hoped would be a nice room in Lviv. With those dates set, we booked an internal flight from Kyiv to Lviv, and then it was all over but the waiting. Or so we thought!
The flight from Lviv to Frankfurt got canceled about two months before our trip, when the carrier decided to stop flying that route on Sundays! So I had to find another flight, which ended up being on Lot, with a connection in Warsaw. Oh well, still OK.
The last interesting thing that I found out was just a few weeks before the trip. Unbeknownst to me, my uncle had hired a professional genealogist to trace our family tree a few years ago. He happened to mention this to me and I asked him to send the results along. It was amazing and it went back over 1000 years. And to my surprise, Anna of Kyiv was on the family tree as a many times great-grandmother, along with her father Jaroslov the Wise, and grandfather Volodymyr the Great!
So now I have a Ukrainian connection too! Chris was amazed because these were people she'd learned about in her history classes. Who knew? This promises to be a fun journey, with interesting things to discover for both of us.
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