Cobbled together

This is St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kiev. We had to stay for one night on the way back from Uzbekistan, and we thought the city was great.

It's in the midst of frantically beautifying itself ready for Euro 2012 this summer. To get here we had to walk up a steep hill in the process of being nicely cobbled, avoiding diggers nearly dropping huge loads of sand on our heads and string tripwires every few metres. Although I get annoyed when health and safety regulations are so stringent as to be restrictive, the EU will cite things like this as reasons why the Ukraine can't yet join it.

We failed to eat a chicken Kiev, to our eternal disappointment.