Pereyaslav-Khmelnitski

We took advantage of the long 4th of July weekend to get out of the city on Monday - we drove to the small town of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky, located about an hour and a half to the east - maybe 120 km. As is our style, we found something on the internet and, despite its popularity and size, the GPS had no idea the city even existed, and definitely couldn't find a point of interest if it's life depended on it. Aaron had read up on an open air museum there that sounded interesting. I'm sure we do this in the States, but here they like to have ethnographic museums that collect buildings from different periods and regions and ship them all to one place. Perhaps this was a way to combat the increasingly uniform and unattractive architecture of the Soviets, or perhaps to control how people appreciated cultural diversity? Who knows, perhaps that's an overly cynical take. Anyway, we really like this particular museum, mosquitoes aside, as it was far more stroller-friendly than the Pirohiv museum, which is the same format, but in Kyiv. Pirohiv has a huge rutted sand/mud road that you have to literally traverse before you get to the buildings. In this case, we merely drove to the town and then used the "DPS" - the Dorothy Positioning System, to ask someone where their big open-air museum was. It worked well.

Here we are stopped at the town's WWII memorial, before getting to the museum. It looks like it needs a little TLC, but who can resist getting your photo taken in front of surplus military equipment? Not my husband! No, Goldilocks - don't go into the three bears' house - stay away from the porridge and the beds!This is the standard interior of a Ukrainian home from the 1800s. The embroidery in the corner would have been where they hung an icon - during the Soviet period, it became the "red" corner and you replaced the religious symbols with those of the Communist party (or did you?)S loved this place, since all of the houses seemed built for her, and it is designed to go into and run out of - like playhouses on a grand scale.