August 2020 Month In Review: Exploring My Home Country and A New Addition to the Family

Whew, can you believe it’s the end of summer? 

As I’m writing this blog post, it sure doesn’t feel like it! Right now I’m in Kyiv, where it’s a sizzling 32 C (90F) but ironically it was raining just an hour ago as we sat in this coffee shop, and later tonight we’re going to have thunderstorms again. It feels like today’s weather is 2020 in a nutshell, isn’t it?

I wrote last month that I planned to do more traveling around Ukraine (my home country) and I fulfilled my promise! This blog post is going to be exclusively about Ukraine and some of the most interesting spots I visited, ate at, and saw. 

Ready? Let’s dive right into it!  

ADVENTURES IN AUGUST:
THIS MONTH IN TRAVEL

🇺🇦 Ivano-Frankivsk 🚋  Vinnitsa 🏢 Kyiv 🏙

This month started in Ivano-Frankivsk, which is where we arrived just three days before the calendar flipped into August. Ivano-Frankivsk is a city in southwest Ukraine, right between my hometown (Chernivtsi) and Ukraine’s second most popular city (Lviv). I’ve been to Ivano-Frankivsk before, but only for a few hours when I was traveling from the Carpathian mountains back to Chernivtsi and needed a place to nap between my bus connections. 

This time we planned to be in Ivano-Frankivsk for a week, but it quickly turned into two weeks because, well, we just liked the city so much

At first glance it looks like a regular city in Ukraine, but Ivano-Frankivsk is way more than that! It was the perfect home base for us because there were so many interesting cafes to sit, work, and enjoy the atmosphere. The building where we rented an apartment was completely brand new and super chic — it was so nice to chill in an aesthetically-pleasing place, you know? Best of all, we even had a 24-hour ATB grocery store on the first floor so we could get snacks at 3AM after finishing a work project. 

But what I really love about Ivano-Frankivsk is how dang cozy it is. You can walk down a street and see beautiful Rococo-style buildings on one street, and then turn a corner and walk straight into a lush green park. The streets are just small enough to feel inviting, some with cobblestone paths and other more modern and brick-lined. 

Our original plan was to go to Lviv after Ivano-Frankivsk (they’re like a 3 hour train ride from each other so it wasn’t too far), but we had to change plans because the COVID-19 situation in Lviv became worse after each day (now it’s the 2nd most affected oblast in Ukraine). So it was off to Vinnitsa instead. 

I didn’t have many expectations about Vinnitsa because it’s never really in the news, much less a tourist destination. Located near the center of Ukraine, Vinnitsa actually won the title of the most livable city in Ukraine for like 4 years in a row, so I guess that tells you something, right?

After our 10 days in Vinnitsa were up, I wholeheartedly agree with that title. You know those cities where it’s just made for people? Like everything is comfortable and convenient, close by, and well-maintained? That’s Vinnitsa to a V. 

Case in point: they’re one of the first cities in Ukraine I’ve been in that have a payless ticket system. You get on the tram/bus, tap your credit card on the reader, and voila! When we were taking the tram to the train station to catch our train to Kyiv (more on that later), there was a conductor who was checking to make sure everyone had bought tickets. She had this little device that you tap the card you paid your fare with, and it tells you if you have a valid ticket or not! Cool, huh? I just hope I don’t end up with an unexpected $200 bill from a sushi cafe

Since the city was fairly small, we rented an Airbnb and spent half of our time working on client projects and the other half working on our new blog. 

Our final stop for the month was none other than the capital, Kyiv! We were here for a week before moving onto some more exciting things (to be discussed in September’s month in review 🤫). To be honest, I have a weird love-hate relationship with Kyiv. On one hand, it’s our country’s capital and full of things to do, but on the other hand, it’s just kinda meh. I’ve been to Kyiv a handful of times, both when I was there as a tourist and just transiting to other countries, and there’s just something about it that I can’t place my finger on. To sum it up, it’s a nice city to be a tourist, but I wouldn’t want to live there… I guess I’m more of a Lviv type of girl.

One of the most exciting things I got to do while in Kyiv was celebrate День незалежности — it took me 25 years to celebrate our country’s Independence Day in the capital, but I finally did it!

Ironically, I really wanted to buy a vyshyvanka* dress for the past few months but everything I saw was either not my style or wasn’t a nice material. A few days before, we were wandering around the shopping mall when I saw a really cute vyshyvanka-style* dress on display. They only had small sizes so I was kinda ehh about it, but the employee said it was a loose fit so I decided to try it on. Lo and behold, the dress was perfect on me, and I wore it for Independence Day – you can see me wearing it near Maidan in the top left corner. 😊

* – vyshyvanka is the national dress of Ukraine and are those hand-stiched geometrical print shirts and dresses you might see in photos and souvenir shops

LUDA’S LIFE

This month was really straightforward in terms of my life: blog, travel, work, and repeat. In Ivano-Frankivsk we (badly) f’d up our sleeping schedule and for a week we woke up at 3AM and went to sleep around 5PM. That was literally the most excitement in our month. 

In my previous Instagram post where I talked about my plans for August, I mentioned taking online courses. I bought a business bundle all the way back when we were stuck in Turkey on quarantine and this was the month to finally go through them! The bundle that I bought had something like 100 courses on everything from copywriting to social media, photography, branding, productivity, and so on. Since my work (and blog) use copywriting on a daily basis, you can guess which of the classes I went for first ;) 

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my productivity and self-development for the month: I finished 5 courses, listened to a bunch of podcasts, and read blog articles to develop myself personally and professionally. If I was a teacher, I would give myself an A+ for self-development for this month. :’)  

Also, some more big news: we got a new member in our family! Well, sort of: for our 1-year anniversary, my boyfriend and I bought a GoPro Hero 8. We were torn between the Hero 8 and the Max— the Hero 8 has a longer battery life and crisper image, while the Max had 360 degree photos and a front screen (!!). But in the end, practicality won and we went with the option that had a better battery and image quality.

After taking it literally everywhere we went, we fell in love with our GoPro. It’s so awesome and takes epic photos and videos… Now all we have to do is figure out how to properly use video editing software and we can safely start our vlog.

 

ON THE BLOG

In last month’s Month In Review post I said I was working on some blog posts from my time in Turkey and Nepal, and I ended up finishing two city guides! I traveled to Pokhara way back in 2016, so it’s  nice to finally cross off Nepal from my giant list of posts by county. Here are the blog posts I’ve worked on this month: 

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🇳🇵Pokhara, Nepal City Guide – Most people check out Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, but Pokhara is a gorgeous and way less hectic city to visit. It’s so lush and full of parks and a giant lake, plus it’s the gateway to the Annapurna circuit! Cool, huh?
➡️ Click here to read

🇹🇷 Lavanta Köyü, Turkey’s Lavender Village Travel Guide – I found out about Turkey’s lavender fields completely out of the blue (on a tourism poster in a metro station, if you’re wondering) but it was one of the highlights of this summer! It was also my first time visiting a proper lavender field, so that was a nice bonus.
➡️ Click here to read

🇫🇯 The Ultimate Fiji Bucket List: The 15 Best Things to do in Fiji – I always thought of Fiji as a resort island where you chill on the beach all day long, but there are some pretty cool things to do! Included in the post are the legendary Beqa firewalkers (seriously, they walk on fire), a heart-shaped island, and getting wrapped up in banana leaves. :)
➡️ Click here to read

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Since this month was fairly busy with work projects and work on my new blog, I didn’t have much time to write for this blog. However, I’m in the middle of doing a huge SEO audit on my website, which means going through old posts and making them look prettier. 

It’s so surprising to go all the way back to 2016 (when I first started this blog) and see how much things have changed. Back in the day I had no idea about SEO or how to write a blog post at all and wrote whatever came to mind… even if that meant a 300-word mini essay about what I bought in Japan.