kiev

"Do you like it so much?" asked my sister. "No," said I "I DISlike so much" I simply couldn't stop taking pictures of this Kiev hotel.
It's called Salut, such a nice name for such a tacky place. Dunno, maybe Kievians like it, who knows. It certainly stands out - it's not massive and gray like most other edifices in Kiev but it's still a bloody blot.
Golden domes of countless Orthodox churches interweave with what remains of the previous system creating a unique patchwork of old and older. Both styles pompous, they make you feel out of place, the era of such buildings like this one is hopefully over and the churches simply don't fit into this urban mess, either way - not only do they fit one another, they also leave no room for what could and should be happening in a modern city architecturewise. Simplicity must be a taboo concept there.
If the buildings leave no place for the new, the streets definitely do. I have never in my life seen so many hight-end posh cars all in one place, not even in the U.S. My Toyota looked pretty lousy, to say the least, among all those big, bugger-off-I-have-black-windows SUVs and other not so compact cars.
Who drove them is yet another story.