During this visit to Kharkiv I went to an excursion into a basement under some college, and to a walk into a former (?) residential area for the military. Plus, saw some random stuff in between.
This city was also preparing for the football. People were repaving the sidewalks, and park sculptures about the soccer ball appeared. One of such balls was still wrapped in cellophane.
The opera theater was still standing.
A new lane appeared behind the opera, connecting two streets at last.
Instructions in case people find own chicks were hanging in the botanical garden. Picking little owls was not recommended.
I didn't see any owl chicks. My destiny was to see this turtle-like flowerbed.
And this artwork of dancing humanoid stains.
Some roof works were taking place.
The following is the main image of this page. Ladies and gentlemen, please make your eyes wide open and witness this plaque with both errors and mistakes engraved and polished. Never skip the proofreading step. Even when it is just one short text like this.
This college had an old basement, to where excursions were offered by a few enthusiastic people. I went there. It was a tiny walk through three small rooms — nothing interesting, unfortunately.
It was so not interesting down there, that I had to take photos of condensate drops on the ceiling. In low light conditions. The amount of the condensate was not an interesting one, too.
A pic of the visitors and the guide for scale.
I was taken to a semi-abandoned military settlement near Kharkiv's Horizont microdistrict. Formerly a pilot training base, the area was open and had the long Serhiy Tarkhov street going inside.
The settlement had lots of trees making shadow for the not very high living houses. The houses were inhabited, kids were using playgrounds.
The other side of the street had abandoned buildings on it, such as: the club,
and the headquarters.
A gas mask was laying in the untrimmed grass.
The humorous name of this road was «the alley of 38-th parallel», referring to the border between the two Koreas. Living area was to the left of it, and the training sites were to the right. A monument to a MiG-21 is visible in a distance.
Someone had defaced a Lenin statue, if it was a statue of him in the first place. I can say that was a John Doe statue.
This building was a functioning training site. The road of concrete plates sometimes was used as a museum of aviation.
This something resembled a hangar but did not have an entry wide enough for even a small plane.
Light through cracks and holes.
It was rather clean inside. I expected to see used syringes, beer bottles and feces but none of that was present, phew. Not as clean as Yerevan city, but clean — taking into account the remoteness and lack of any kind of guards.
We left after some time, and did that using the alley of 38-th parallel. We saw a nicely decayed checkpoint and the MiG-21, which had been moved here from the main building of the base somewhere in the city.
That same MiG-21 a.k.a. Fishbed from below.
Maybe it is some kind of rule that military settlements should have more trees than the usual ones. I've seen a few and they were all following this theoretical rule.
A mega-swing was spotted near some living block.
The basement enthusiasts organisation and their photos of the upper-mentioned basement.