Best City / Worst City

[Gordon Styer]

I have an interesting question for anyone who would like to answer. After joining this forum and going through lots of posts. Most of us have travelled to the FSU at some time and many of us have been many times. As for me, I’ve been to Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, Lviv, Tallinn and villages in Ukraine.
Whilst it has been difficult to take our eyes and attention off the women, maybe you noticed some other stuff around.

So what do our members like and hate about the cities they visited and which ones are your favourites?

[Drew]

St Petersburg is great for the museums, palaces, etc., but weather pretty crappy most of the year.

Riga, Latvia is a very interesting city for just walking around.

Kaunas, Lithuania has a very nice downtown area that is closed off to vehicles.

Kyiv is great for it's many parks, churches, musical venues, opera house, river boat rides, etc.  Khreshatic has to be the greatest street in the world on Sundays when no vehicles.  Many water displays and Independence Square.  Very good subway system.

Lviv has very interesting architecture.

Kharkiv has a couple of nice parks, many universities to visit and a large selection of fine restaurants.

Dnipropetrosk has a fantastic river walk.

Yalta and the surrounding area has great collection of palaces and gardens to view, mountains and boat trips.  But I would never go there now with Russian control.

Moscow is to be avoided entirely.  Getting around is a nightmare and the people are mostly a$$holes even as they think they are God's gift to mankind.

So St Petersburg has best museums, Yalta has best collection of palaces and scenery but, overall, Kyiv cannot be beaten.

[GQBlues]

Top of the list for me is Prague, then Budapest and Bratislava...

I like 'some' parts of St Petersburg, notably Peterhoff, but not most of the city proper. Same with Moscow.

[Anotherkiwi]

I've stated on here several times that I think that St Petersburg is the most beautiful city in the world - Vienna was top of my list until I got to Russia, but I haven't been to Prague.  Apart from the architecture, I also found the people in St Petersburg to be far friendlier than I had expected, especially as my first port of call had been Moscow - which lived right down to expectations as far as customer service was concerned.

Kyiv is number two - quite different from St Petersburg, with the hills and a different type of river creating a different type of port.  It's an amazing city to walk around, and there are wonderful things to see such as Pechersk Lavra, the Mother Ukraine statue and the open-air Military Museum beside it.

Number three would be Kazan, not just because Bauman Street is the best pedestrian mall I've ever seen, but its Kremlin is wonderful and it has a fantastic new racecourse and Metro system.

I also loved Krasnodar (especially the central square and park between the Courthouse and the regional Duma, and the amazing Cathedral of the Army and Holy Trinity Cathedral) and Rostov-na-Donu with its Cathedral, Central Park and the river promenade.  To be fair, Rostov also has the ugliest building I had the misfortune to see in Russia (look at the Gallery here for my photos).

Odessa is certainly pretty enough in places, but the people generally left me cold.  The only other city I visited in Ukraine was Nikolaev, and I was there for less than a day, although my initial impression wasn't that favourable.

But...you can't beat home!