As I think I noted in my trip posting, Kiev actually has two botanical gardens.  We went to the larger of the two, the National Gardens, so I’ll have to see the other one on a future visit.  The weather had been pretty decent, but really started to get warm on this day, so walking outside for a couple hours was probably not the best choice for that day.

The day started out quite nicely, with a stroll back down to and around Podil — hitting a couple churches on the way because, well, they are everywhere.  From Podil we caught a bus right to the gardens (pretty convenient) and then wandered around for a bit.  (Impress your friends!  The Russian word for garden is “sad,” with the “a” softened to be more like “ahh.”  Not quite like “sod,” but pretty close.)

Curiously, we spent a good deal of time at a zoological exhibit while visiting the botanical gardens.  It was somewhat interesting, but not really worth the separate admission.  Eh, what are you gonna do?  So there aren’t a lot of plant pictures, but there are plenty of animal and bug pictures.  (I didn’t get any pictures of the iguanas or boa constrictors; I had to draw the line somewhere.)

I also got a few pictures of one of the churches there before my camera battery died.  No trouble with the camera; I’d just forgotten to charge it up the night before.  This was the church where I got chided for sitting cross-legged in the vestibule (and no, I’m not going to make any jokes about sitting cross-legged in a church).

The trip home from the gardens involved riding a trolley bus for the first time.  The trolley buses are electric and get their juice from overhead wires.  The novelty was short-lived because it was, after all, a bus.  But we got off at Arsenal Metro station (so named for a small cannon mounted in front of the building) and took the subway the rest of the way home.  Fortunately, there wasn’t anything too interesting about the subway station, or I would have been even more bummed about having a dead camera.

Gardens