On our way to the airport we made a detour to the Bessarabian Market in central Kiev. The Bessarabian Market is Kiev’s equivalent of Les Halles or Covent Garden – a large circular nineteenth-century building with a ribbed cast-iron glass roof. Below is a market, with fierce but friendly women in brightly coloured headscarves, standing behind pyramids of beautifully displayed fruit and vegetables and pickles. There is a flower section – the Ukrainians give flowers to each other on any social occasion – and a meat section, with whole hog’s heads and mounds of fresh meat, and the rear-quarters of
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