Kharkiv #3 - hanging out, metro and street art

Last Kharkiv post.  This is from the early June trip.

Kharkiv is a surprisingly good city to chill in. Daniel and I wandered around, stopping here and there to read a book and chattering on about this or that.  We hung out in a few of the city's many parks and a coffee shop called "Coffee Life" that is the closest thing to Starbucks I've seen in Ukraine (btw, there is a Gloria Jean's in Kyiv).  Counter service and a non-smoking section (Gloria Jean's doesn't have counter service).  It was later confirmed that it is certainly the local Starbucks equivalent when the very cool locals we were hanging out with made fun of us for going there (Gloria Jean's isn't very cool either). 

Although nowhere near as good as the art in the Moscow metro (not that I've seen it), the Kharkiv metro has some interesting stuff going on.  Even better, it isn't that crowded, and you can take photos, unlike in Moscow.  A guy I know apparently went to every metro station in Moscow just to see all the designs, which some people think is weird, but I think is a great Moscow-on-a-shoestring plan, as it seems that for the average backpacker a metro token is about all that is affordable.  If you'd like to see a collection of photos from the various Kharkiv metro stations that borders on an obsessive compulsion, click here.  And of course there is the post I just made about the Gagarin station if you'd missed it.

Here are some shots from the Kharkiv metro - this station is very "meet George Jetson."

More street art than I had expected.  There was an alley of murals sponsored by Caparol which was quite interesting, one of my favorite parts being this photo:

which is a boy playing with this Gazprom building (one of the symbols of Kharkiv, Marina told me) as if it were a lego set:

And here with Lenin, because we can:

Two more from the mural alley:

This next one was near a courtyard with some similar work.  Slipping through the gate, we were immediately tracked down by an on-guard babushka.  "What are you doing?"  "Looking at the paintings."  "Look from the other side of the gate."  Ok.

"Every window is a door" - it sounds philosophical, but it was on an abandoned building and the only way in was the broken windows.  Ta ta!