Today was my last day of lectures at uni. I’m so glad I could get back to Kyiv before my exams start because I feel so much better back home. And I know that two months away from home is kind of a short period of time, but to me it felt like ages. It feels so weird to revisit all the places I used to hang around a lot before the war. Some stayed just the same (like my street), and some are borderline unrecognisable (like the area around my school).
The day after we came back, one of my closest friends and I met up near our former school. Then we found a landmine. Sort of. It’s a funny story, come to think of it.
My friend arrived in Kyiv way before me. She had a job at a now closed coffee shop which couldn’t keep running because of the war screwing things up financially. But she found a new workplace and still had the time to meet up with me to show me around the living area near our school. It’s absolutely messed up.
As we were going through the rubble, we saw a couple of kids who were about 12, tossing rocks at what appeared to look like a landmine. A lot of local parks and forests are absolutely full of these, as russians left plenty of them behind. We instantly started panicking because this was incredibly unsafe. People were just passing around, not really minding the dangerous explosive that was practically at their feet? Anyway, without much thought, we reported it to the police and left the scene to calm ourselves down (as important it was, we certainly shouldn’t have done that). In a while, the cops arrived to check how the explosive looked like. We quickly scurried back to the spot..only to find that the supposed landmine was gone.. And I was terrified of getting in trouble for making a “fake call” or something. But thankfully one of the cops found the landmine, which turned out to NOT be an actual fucking landmine! What? It was actually a screw-on filter of a gas mask! Just randomly lying on the ground. Nothing more than that. And I just so happen to own a gas mask (don’t ask) so I feel even dumber for not noticing it before one of the policemen pointed that out. The green thing I’m holding is a similar filter to the one we found on the ground.
I still feel like we did the right thing for reporting something suspicious, what if it actually was a landmine? russians hid explosives in plush toys and other seemingly innocent-looking items so this is not new at all. Anyway, that’s something I’m definitely not going to tell my hypothetical grandkids!
Being back in Kyiv is nice. I feel safer than I did in Chernivtsi, actually. Which is realistically not true, but hey, there really is no place like home. Today I went to Podil which is a very nice part of Kyiv I’d really want you guys to check out if you ever get to play here. It’s got so much authentic restaurants and a very nice atmosphere. If you walk a little farther away, you can see the river port and the funicular, which are very tourist-y places I still come and see sometimes.