Ukraine is a land of contrasts. No wait – the past is a constant companion in Ukraine. Or how about Ukraine is the Montana of Europe? A trip to Ukraine is a trip back in time? Awful stuff but people seem to like it. According to Google Chile, Guinea (“the Switzerland of Africa”), Kansas, Jamaica, Iran, Mozambique, Brazil, South Africa, Quebec, India and – I don’t have time to check the other 71,700 hits – are all “lands of contrasts.” So since people like it, let me say that in describing my hotel room I would have recourse to such words as “ancient,” “aging,” “Soviet-era,” and “antediluvian.” The glint of metal in mouths, pot-holed roads, vodka, street markets, derelict buildings in the centres of thriving towns, vodka, strong cigarettes, broken-down cars (many of them “ancient” or “Soviet era”) – there’s no need to assemble all of that into sentences.

Unusually, I was in a group. When asked how I had slept in the draughty, etc etc etc hotel room I answered in accordance with the truth that I had slept very well. However, it turned out that some of the younger members of the party had not slept so well: their rooms were draughty, Soviet-era etc etc etc. Since I am engaged in Travel Writing I will pronounce the following: a new generation has grown up unaware of the hardships of communist Poland and are now voting for Donald Tusk with their I-pods while on the way to work in multinational PR agencies.

Later that day I ordered a soup called “Solianka.” There was a lemon in it. It’s perfectly normal.