Photography — Ukraine blog

My year in Ukraine in photos

One year ago I flew from Ukraine to Canada. I purposely don’t say “flew home” because I don’t necessarily see Canada as my home. Well, it is one of my homes — it’s just not the only one, and saying “I flew home” implies that Ukraine wasn’t my home, which it most certainly was.

When I moved to Ukraine, I’d get these flashes of feelings from Canada, the most common instigator being when I saw someone in Ukraine who looked like a Canadian friend.

Maybe I was still adjusting to being so far from what I had known as home for all my life, and so I was looking for something to bring me comfort. This lasted a month, maybe two. And before you knew it, I would see Ukrainians who looked like other Ukrainians I had met in the city before.

Lviv: A photographer's paradise

I think I found the winter wonderland everyone keeps singing about.

It's Lviv.

As I write this, giant snowflakes fall from the sky — the ones that are just fluffy enough that they're not too wet that they soak your clothes and not too dry that they hurt your eyes.

Photography, Exploring UkraineKaitlin VittDecember 22, 2017Lviv, Friends, Photography, Photos Comments

Chornobyl: Visiting the site of a disaster

The mystery around the Chernobyl disaster is fascinating.

The number of deaths linked to the April 26, 1986 explosion varies between sources. So does who's responsible.

Thirty-one people died from the explosion itself, but thousands of deaths are linked to its radiation.

Starting my stay with Troyanda's tour

I was supposed to tour Ukraine with my dance group, Troyanda Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, in 2014, but because of the Euromaidan Revolution, the tour was cancelled. Visiting Ukraine has been on our minds since, and this year we made the trip happen. And conveniently, our tour ended just days before the yearlong program started.

I wrote about the 15-day tour at troyanda.com/blog, so check that out for more details of what we did and what we saw, but below are some photo highlights from the trip. We stayed in Lviv, the Carpathian Mountains, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, and Kyiv but also made stops in other cities and villages, including Kolomyia and Mamaivtsi.