The bus left at 7:00 AM. Diana said it would take three and a half hours to get to Uman. This is what they had told her when she bought our tickets. They had lied.
"Nature takes her clothes off with dignity," said Diana several hours later, apparently in a poetic mood as she looked out the window. The bus was rocking down a road paved through the middle of a forest. On either side, trees blazed red and orange and yellow. Soon those leaves would fall and leave nature naked, but before then she'd have one last burst of glory.
At 11:00 AM, when we should already have been in Uman, Diana asked the driver if we'd soon be there and laughed at her. The bus kept on its slow way, stopping, it seemed, every fifteen seconds to pick someone up or drop them off on the side of the road. Diana and I were going to Uman on a whim. Uman is famous in Ukraine for it's park, reputed to be the Versailles of Ukraine (which, admittedly, doesn't say a lot). Neither Diana nor I had been there, but we thought it would be great with the fall foiliage. We were discussing this on Friday. Not having a lot of time, we decided to do it as a day trip on Sunday.
Finally the bus pulled in, six hours after we left Zhytomyr. It being near winter, it was already starting to get dark. It was raining. In the bus station we found there were no more buses headed back to Zhytomyr that day. Still, we knew we could still get back to Kyiv that night (all roads lead to Kyiv) and if we could get to Kyiv, we could get to Zhytomyr. We headed over to the park, which was in walking distance of the bus station and, when we got to the entrance, Diana found that she had lost her wallet, either on the bus or in the bus station. We went back to the station, but it was not to be found. I was going to find that black cat and kill it. Deciding to make the best of it, we headed back to the park.
The park was built in honor of a woman named Sophia. A little over a century ago, a nobel had fallen in love with a Polish concubine and built the park over several years as a gift to her. As with everything in Ukraine, much of the park was destroyed during World War II, but it was famous enough to have been rebuilt under the Soviet Union. And guess what? Even with the overcast skies and dim light, it was still beautiful.
A map of the park
The following photos show nature in her dignity (and show Diana and I being not quite as dignified)
This was kind of cool: there's a long tunnel that goes under the park. For 2 UAH you get in a boat and a guy pushes the boat along the tunnel using a stick. For most of it there's absolutely no light (except from idiots who can't turn off their mobiles and people like me who insist on taking pictures)
The trip back was shorter than the trip there: a marshrutka to Kyiv and then a marshrutka to Zhytomyr. Unlike buses, marshrutkas haul ass. Of course, the bus station and the train station in Kyiv (which is where one marshrutka arrived and the other left from) are on opposite sides of the city. Also, for all their really efficient Soviet planning, the bus station is inexplicably far away from any metro stops. Which, with it raining again and raining hard, meant we got pretty wet. I blame the cat.