Chernobyl, Part... a lot.

Okay, so this has kind of turned into its own monster.  I'll try to be succinct about it and just get to the good stuff.  Pictures!  Lots and lots of pictures.

We next went into a kindergarten.  Remember how I said one of the biggest problems residents had was finding a kindergarten school for their children?  Yeah, keep that in mind.

See?  Soviet Ukraine wasn't so cut off.  They even had Children of the Corn.

The kindergarten was named after some kind of fish or something.

Following this, we went to a Fabrik, a factory where they were "making cassette tapes," e.g., manufacturing war-type stuff for the Soviet Union. 

Then we walked to the police station.  It was pretty small, a couple of barred cells and maybe 10 actual cells.  These were educated people, but they still lived in the Soviet Union.  So public intoxication was sort of a problem.

This was the front of the station.  No, really.

Helen read this, it's an arrest card where some guy got arrested for public drinking.

Well, I'm sick of staring at my computer, so I'll leave you here.  Hopefully we're only one more post away from the end.  But, next up is the amusement park! 

Chernobyl, Part 4

I woke up bright and early on Saturday morning, filled with excitement and anticipation.  Just kidding.  I told Michaela that I was going to sleep half an hour later than I had stated the night before, and required food and caffeine before I was fit for proper company.

Meals were served a short walk from our hotel, by slightly sullen-looking employees forced to wear "traditional" Ukrainian outfits to serve tourists who'd come to gawk at their national tragedy.  Nonetheless, they were delicious.  The meals, not the employees.

First we went to the Chernobyl City church, the only one left standing.  As I understand, Mother Russia wasn't too fond of religion, so they naturally didn't build too many.  This particular church was originally built out of wood approximately 700 years ago.  They kept rebuilding it, repainting it.  As one of the Dutch guys noted, "I love the churches here.  In the Netherlands, the churches are dreary and plain.  Here, they're saying, 'Let's do some religion, baby!!'"  I couldn't have said it better myself. 

Above: religion being done.

We went to another memorial, this one for the robots that they employed to do the dirty work, before the radiation overcame their circuitry and they became just so-much-metal.  I thought the oddest thing about this particular memorial is that they not only cleaned the robots (well, I suppose they had to decontaminate them), but proceeded to repaint them.  In offensively bright colors.

We finally reached the height of our tour... Pripyat!  This city of 49,000 people housed primarily the workers for the plant and their families located a mere 2 km away from the reactors.  This was a model soviet town, filled with all kinds of luxuries not found in many other places this side of the Iron Curtain.  Helen noted that her mother and sister would wait for hours in a line to get bread and meat, while Pripyat residents had access to all kinds of goodies; they could buy more than what was rationed to the rest of the population.  There were stores and malls, a hospital, a police station, a theater, cafes and restaurants, hotels, an Olympic-sized swimming pool.  The rich in Kiev (because no matter how communist you say you are, there are always rich people) would travel to Pripyat to shop.  This was a young, educated city, where the biggest problem average people had were finding a kindergarten that could accommodate your child (the average age was only 26) and the biggest crime was public intoxication.

Since 2005, the buildings have been slowly collapsing. Somewhere around 2007, Ukraine decided to prohibit entry into the buildings of Pripyat, specifically.  However, our guides seemed to be cheerfully disobedient to this rule.  And we cheerfully followed them into the abyss. 

That door that's falling off its hinges?  Yeah, we went in there.

Okay, I'm being melodramatic.  We cheerfully followed Helen into a 13 story apartment, up the stairs, around the 10th (or so) floor and onto the roof. 

So, thirteen floors is kind of a bitch when you don't have an elevator.  Luckily, we took a break on an obscenely high floor to look around.

So, remember how shit started to go down super early morning on April 26?  Well, they told the Pripyat residents sometime during the day to just "stay inside, close your windows, there's a fire at the plant.  But no need to worry."  During the afternoon of April 27, they notified the residents that, due to this fire, they needed to evacuate everyone from the city.  It required so many buses that they had to bring in a bunch from Kiev.  To keep order and prevent panicking (and to keep people from bringing everything they owned onto these crowded buses), they told the residents they'd be returning soon and to only bring enough clothes and essentials to last them three days.  Three days.  So everyone left behind family heirlooms, valuables, etc.  And they were shipped to Kiev, who was also receiving their fair share of radiation. 

None of them ever returned to Pripyat.  Not to live, anyway.

Ukraine's Labor Day is on May 1st.  They have a parade.  Today, the parade that took place in 1986 is called The Parade of Death, because they insisted on carrying forth with the plans and a bunch of people were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive dust.  The government didn't want mass panic, so they didn't tell the residents of Kiev about the giant cloud of fallout hovering over them, settling on their clothes, getting breathed in, by them and their children. 

The Zone of Exclusion was closely guarded by the military until the fall of the Iron Curtain.  Somewhere around the chaotic aftermath, the borders were not so closely guarded.  Looters came in and took everything that was worth taking.  As a result, there is not a lot left in any given apartment. 

Except nightmares.

That's a totally reasonable place to put a toilet.

Sad wild dog climbed up here to die and will probably stay here for a really long time.

We climbed up, up, up.

To the top.

In the distance you can see the reactors and the new sarcophagus.  On a bright day it's easily seen.

And now I will leave you, because the kindergarten and school is coming up next, and that will take some energy to get through.  And espresso.  But I leave you with this cool shit to look at.

Chernobyl, Part 3

After the train yard, we had our last major stop of the day.  I'm still not really sure what this place was, I'm afraid I was thinking about the train yard still and not paying enough attention to our guide, Helen.  So, if any of my Chernobyl people are reading this, help a sister out and tell me where the hell we were.  I think it's some kind of administration building.**

This was a map of the surrounding areas.

Part of the tragedy of this place is how pretty everything is.

We drove through a portion of the Red Forest.  It was so named after the event, when the fallout killed all of the trees, turning them a rust color.  Flying over them, the forest looked red.  They pulled them down and (I'm assuming) buried them, like they did everything else.  They replanted trees, so none of the trees you're seeing in my pictures are older than me.  The Red Forest remains highly radioactive, because the radioactive dust landed on the ground and soaked into the dirt.  Even though our windows were up, they pulled out the Geiger counter on our drive through.  The beep that had become the background noise to our lives slowly increased its tempo.  Helen read out loud to us, "4 microsieverts. 5. 6. 7."  Already higher than outside Reactor 4.  Beep, beep, beepbeep. "8. 9. 10. 11. 12."  As we drove on, it slowly decreased until it finally stopped.  Looking back, I'm not sure why I was surprised it could reach us through the van.  You get so used to thinking that being inside something provides some level of comfort and safety.  Gamma radiation can pierce through a solid meter of concrete. 

Here's the scary thing about radioactivity.  You can't see it.  You can't smell or hear or touch it.  You start to think you're in a pretty place and turns out it's killing you (sometimes not so) slowly.  So it's easy to forget that you're in a place where they restrict access.

And, perhaps worse of all, it's inconsistent.  Depending on how the wind blew during the days after the event, the dust fell randomly, gathering more in some spots than others.  You could be standing in a spot that measures 2 microsieverts, then 2 feet away, it's 75 microsieverts.  This may seem like an exaggeration, but it's not.  There was a hotspot in the amusement park in Pripyat that was used as a landing area for helicopters and gathered radiation.  It counted up to almost 75 microsieverts before Michaela got up and walked away from it.  The Geiger counter was screaming at her.

We then exited the Zone of Forever Deadly.  Upon leaving the 10 km zone, we had to exit our van and go through a checkpoint that scanned for radiation on our bodies.  I'm not entirely sure if it actually works, but it looked somewhat imposing.

This thing looks older than me.

Following this, we were taken to the single store in Chernobyl.  We were told that we weren't supposed to drink, but they wouldn't mind if we bought a couple of beers for the night (they seemed very nonchalant about the rules).  So almost everyone did.  I ended up with some mystery beers (everything was written in Russian or Ukrainian or whatever).  I called it Beer Roulette.  Nobody knew what they were getting.

This was mostly a convenience store for the people who live and work in Chernobyl, selling stuff like meat and deodorant.  They had a small "souvenir" section that was pitiful.  I wish I could tell someone that they could pay me minimal amounts of money to completely rework their souvenir section into stuff people actual want, they could make so much money.  Some of the guys bought the horrible shirts they sold, because they were so horrible.  See?  Hipsters exist outside of America, too. 

We went back to the hotel for the night after dinner (they fed us really well, like 3-4 course meals).  We hung out in a small common area that consisted of about 12 chairs, a dilapidated couch and a ping pong table, lacking any actual ping pong accoutrements.  We shot the shit, got a little tipsy (my 2 beers were 5-6% each).  Our group was made up of some quite interesting, intelligent and witty individuals.  We had a great time together.  I think we bonded quickly over our mutual travel interests and the fact that we were forced to stay together at all times.  They even locked us into our hotel, "for our own good" from 11pm to 7 am.  I can just imagine why they started doing this- some stupid tourist must have decided to go for a midnight walkabout and wandered straight through a hot spot or something.  Although, I can't say the temptation wasn't there to look around at night.  We weren't allowed to go anywhere without the accompaniment of a guide.  I felt like a kid in kindergarten or something. 

I made it until almost 10 pm before surrendering to sleep.  It had been a long, exciting, eventful day.  Tomorrow we go to Pripyat.
 

Not exactly your stereotypical hotel notice.

**Note: I was informed by one of my friends that this was in fact the Pripyat bus station.  Now the giant map on the wall makes way more sense.