Kiev is very pretty

Work finished promptly today so we walked back to the hotel, a walk of about 5km or 7km if you follow our route! This gave us the opportunity to see a lot more of the city, a lot of which looks like the photograph above.



The center of the city is quite large and there are decorative and impressive buildings in all directions. There are a number of squares, fountains and statues. Most of the squares are currently occupied by political campaigners ahead of the elections this weekend (30 September). This campaigning brings a host of flags and small tents to the squares and brings democracy to the heart of the city.

The main street in Kiev is wide and busy. The pavements have been designed for promenading and have lots of places to sit and lots of things to look at while seated. This is clearly a popular pastime with the locals as most of the benches were occupied by people resting or reading.



And every now and then you find a building as grand as this one.

Vodka

One of the good things I like about travel is that you learn about other cultures, which helps you to understand different perspectives that different people have. The lesson that I learned today was about drinking with meals. In the UK I am used to drinking a bottle of wine with my evening meal or a few beers with a curry etc., but today was the first time that I have had a bottle of vodka with my meal. I guess that's the sort of thing that happens when you are in Ukraine and are with a few Russians. The food was good, by the way!

Kiev in the rain

My short trip to Kiev got off to a wet start but I still managed to walk around the city center for about an hour before it got dark and hunger forced me back to the hotel.

First impressions are good. There are many beautiful baroque buildings to remind you of places like Prague and Riga but there is a little extra too with the domes on the orthodox churches, such as the one in this photograph.

There is much evidence of wide-scale renovation so the city center is likely to look even better soon. All the building that I could see under construction (including the one in my Facebook album) are in the baroque style so the character of the city should remain. And before you moan about mock-Baroque all I can say is that I have seen large scale building in the old style in Gdansk and it works!

The only negative so far is that the overground public transport (i.e. trams and buses) seems to be a little thin on the ground.

I am here until Friday morning so hopefully I will get the opportunity to explore the city a little more.

A new school year starts; will things get any better?

The start of each school term means a meeting between the Local Authority and Chairs of Governors. This is billed as a "Governors' Partnership Meeting" but really it is about two hours of Local Authority officers telling school governors what to do. I always go with a sense of optimism and always leave despairing at how clueless most people involved in Education are. These are the notes I made during the meeting:

• The presentation on healthy school food was full of information that we did not need to know (e.g. how the report was compiled) and ended with conclusions that were not supported by the preceding data.
• If you want to narrow the achievement gap then you need to widen the resourcing gap.
• Target setting is still the centre of all that is happening in schools, despite it being fundamentally flawed (see previous references to Lean Thinking etc.), and there was a lot of talk about outcomes but none about inputs (each child is different) or resources. Pointless.
• The questionnaire on the vision for schools had the views of parents as the very last question when it should have been the first.
• The Local Authority has a Victorian view of what a school is and does not realise that the world has changed and is changing still. Schools now provide a wide range of "services" to the whole community and are part of a wider ecosystem of communities and service providers, which requires a radical rethink on what schools do, how this is managed and what resources (e.g. buildings) they need to do this.
  

Casablanca

The day's "contingency" on the North Africa trip worked well as my colleague and I managed to tie up the loose ends from the previous six days and also had plenty of time to explore Casablanca.

We spent most of the morning exploring the main mosque and a large part of the rest of the day walking around the old town (Medina) which is a warren of narrow streets full of shops that are a delight to browse through. We looked closely at shoes, leather jackets, electrical goods and jewellery. The atmosphere was lively but comfortable. There were fewer beggars than in London and they just sat at the side with their hands out. The biggest danger came from the motorcyclists who use the roads there even though they are mostly about 2m wide and full of people.

After the walk we explored the hotel that we had been staying in for the last three days and found a small balcony on the top (ninth) floor which was good for views but not so good for vertigo! This photograph was taken there and shows the roofscape of the new town looking towards the mosque, from this you get a good idea of just how big the mosque is. If you look closely you can also see that there are hundreds of satellite dishes with every roof having several.

I am going back to North Africa, Tunisia this time, on holiday in October and whereas before I was looking forward to this with some excitement mixed with some caution, I am now more excited about the prospect and have none of the worries. I really do like what I have seen of North Africa so far.