Kiev, Ukraine - February 18, 2015
So here it is again, February 18, our wedding anniversary. Why we ended up getting married in February is a whole other story.
Last February 18 started off like most days up to that point last year. It seemed that last year, 2 to 3 times a week, there was some kind of march or protest going on. But this day was actually quite quiet and an even bigger surprise, it was quite sunny. I had steadfastly avoided up to this point going to the site of EuroMaidan, though my wife had already been there a couple of times. So I figured it was my turn to go down and see what kind of mess they had made of our city. But that idea quickly got dropped when I saw huge plumes of black smoke rising from about a mile away and noises that sounded like guns being fired. So I stayed a long way away from there.
It was about an hour later that we got a call from our son's school. They told us to come down and pick him up. This I thought to be quite ridiculous because he lives about a five minute walk from our house and was 17 years old. It seems they didn't want any of the students, especially the older ones, strolling down to the center of the city to see what all the noise and smoke was about. Likely a good precaution.
We had plans for that evening to go to the ballet, something we had not done in probably five years. Normally we would have drove the car, but the protests were directly between our house and the opera house, so we figured we would take the Metro (subway) instead. That plan had to quickly be scrapped because the authorities, for the first and only time in the many years I've been in Kiev close down the whole Metro system. (During the course of the street protests last winter, they had often shut down certain stations near the protest epicenter, but never the whole system).
So it was back to driving the car. But I clearly did not anticipate just how bad the traffic situation would be with the Metro shut down. In addition, roads were shut down in the center of the city. And so many people were walking that the sidewalk could no longer accommodate them all, so onto the street they came. It didn't take us long to figure out that those who were walking were moving a whole lot faster than those who were driving, but we hoped for a while that the traffic jam was temporary and that the traffic would start moving again soon. But after about 10 minutes we understood that that was not to be. So we figured we needed to try to park the car and walk the rest of the way to the opera house, but parking spots will not be found. We convinced a police officer to let us behind the barricades to park, but he specifically warned us to park and do not attempt to drive. While that was not our plan, we figured that we would not attempt to try to find out what he meant by that either.
So now we started to walk to the opera house. Needless to say, neither of us had planned to do a great deal of walking. My shoes were up to the task; my wife's shoes were not. But we persevered on. I had to remind her along the way to be careful about what we said, because even though we were speaking in English, there still might be people around who understood English and would not be happy about anyone bad mouthing EuroMaidan. Our route took us within a half-mile of the protests, on an evening with hundreds of burning tires, hundreds of riot police, and on the day when there had been gun battles on the street.
We arrived at the opera house about 15 minutes late, to a place that was about 90% empty. Unfortunately for us, we had bought a couple of pricier seats. If we knew something like this was going to happen, we could have bought ourselves a couple of cheap tickets and then sit anywhere we wanted to sit. While the show allowed us time to try to forget the troubles of the day, we were also aware that the day's cast had quite a good number of student dancers. But considering the day's circumstances, at least the show still one on.
After the show, we walked 15 minutes back to the car, was greeted by the police officer who let us park, and returned home. But one last surprise awaited us. On a side street close to the building where we lived, there was a large group of who knows who, but likely a group of right sector thugs. What they would doing there and what their plans were, who the hell knows? But they were right around the corner from the police station. It seems the police had absolutely no idea that these people were there.
So this year? A quiet evening at home seems more to our liking this time around.
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