Where to Stay in Kiev, Ukraine?

April 22, 2007 4:44 PM

Kiev, Ukraine, accomodations in mid May. Any suggestions?

I will be in Kiev for two days on my own after a bit of work in mid May, and have searched the web and guide books for a reasonable (under EU 100 - i.e. US $150 per night) place to stay with my wife. Most sites and travel books are out of date. Phone numbers don't reach, emails not returned. Have called a few places but reception doesn't speak English. I would really rather not stay at a babushka's flat... any advice will be eventually toasted in absentia with the best vodka... Standard, proably...

posted by zaelic to travel & transportation (2 comments total)

Check out Gridskipper's Kiev-related posts here.

Here's the TripAdvisor page for Kiev's hotels, which ranks them based on the comments and ratings of the site's users. Looks like the Rus, Hotel Sport, and Tourist Hotel fit your price range and are in the top ten.
posted by mdonley at 6:04 PM on April 22, 2007

I beg to postulate that you haven't really been in Kiev until you've slept in a Soviet-era flat. But if you're dead set against it, so be it.

Now, by 'two days' do you mean дві доби, i.e., 48 hours, or do you just mean два дні? (Доба: a period of 24 hours. День: a period from sunrise to sunset.) Because if you can get 48 hours, spread out over one evening, the whole next day, and the following morning, I highly recommend a trip to Lviv. They run overnight trains both directions every night; as I recall, the departure times tend to be around 9 PM, and the arrivals around 7 AM. So you could roll out of Kiev, sleep in the gentle rocking of the railroad, play all day in the Florence of Eastern Europe, and return the way you came.

I find I sleep very well in trains, though I sleep quite poorly in airplanes or buses, and not at all in cars. If you buy all four places in one second-class compartment (всі чотіри місця в одному купе), you needn't worry about privacy or security, and that'll run you something like USD35 per night.

In Lviv you can literally blow a whole day walking around historic districts taking photographs (I have), but you could also visit the tourist or actual markets, climb the hill to take in the panorama, attend an opera or symphony (the opera theater is the jewel of downtown, you couldn't miss it if you tried, and May is opera season; the Filarmonia is harder to find, but go to the downtown McDonald's and ask anyone on the street), or try to figure out how many cafés Lviv really has (the number is probably countable, but countably infinite comes to mind). If you want a fancy-schmancy dinner and don't mind spending USD $20 per plate, try the Wiener Kaffeehaus. And don't neglect to visit the Cukernie for pastries.

No, really. Spend two nights on a train, and the best day a tourist ever had. Lviv.
posted by eritain at 10:07 PM on April 22, 2007