Hurry up and Wait

I've been in Kiev a little more than 24 hours. I'm a little upside down. We are 10 hours of time change away from home so things are pretty much upside down.

I landed at 8:30 am yesterday (July 3). It took us about 30minutes to reach the hotel after we waited for another person at the airport that never showed up. After checking into the hotel I ran into another crew member who said everyone was meeting in the lobby at 10:50am. From there we went to the stadium to have a look around and come up with a plan. That took us about 2 hours, waiting for all the different departments heads to show up.

After our meeting we came back to the hotel for a little break and got ready to go to the Chernobyl museum.

One of the festival volunteers gave us a guided tour. He was 6 years old when the accident happened and lived in the closest town to Chernobyl. Both his parents worked at the nuclear power plant. I didn't realize that the plant continued to operate for 14 more years after the accident. There were a total of 4 reactors. 3 of them remained operational after the accident. They finally shut down the reactors in 2000.

One of the things that I found most interesting was the fact the total lack of care for the people. There was such a high need to keep the strong image, the government was willing to risk hundred's of thousands of lives. It took 3 days to start evacuations near the disaster site. 4 days later on May 1st there was a big parade planned in Kiev. The government had a chance to call it off, but didn't. Thousands of people were exposed to high levels of radiation.

The picture to the left is used to depict the devastation and lack of life since the accident. There were entire villages that were buried because the radiation levels were so high. They say the radiation levels were 500 times that of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan during World War II. Over 600,000 people, mostly young servicemen, were involved in the clean up of the accident. They were released from 2 years of their mandatory service time if they would spend 45 seconds cleaning up the debris from the core of the reactor. In that amount of time they received a lethal dose off radiation.

It was a pretty sobering experience.

From there we went across the street to a restaurant that specializes in Georgian (Russia) cuisine. It was very interesting. The bread was good, the veggies were fresh.