From Chernobyl with love

Ing. Jan Jileček
5 min readFeb 2, 2019

“We have to visit Chernobyl!”, we decided with my friends in June of 2017.

I was a fan of the place for years, I liked it because of CoD4, STALKER and Fallout series showed me the beauty of the place. We talked for a bit and then did it. Each one of us packed only 1 small backpack — minimalist style, and on the adventure we go!

First thing we have done was to book the airline tickets, hostel and the Chernobyl tour guide. We booked a room in Hostel Podolskij.

It was about 80 grivnas ($3) per night, and the quality of the rooms was way better that you could ever expect from the the looks of the building. But a lot of things is like that in Ukraine. We were really pleasantly surprised when we arrived.

We took a bus from Brno, Czech Republic to Budapest, Hungary. At the airport we slept on the ground, waiting for the flight to Kiev in the morning.

My friends (Budapest airport)

In Kiev, after we got off the airport came quite a culture shock when a marshrutka arrived. It is a small and very old bus, which is almost falling apart. With no electronics at all there also aren’t any ticket machines or log-in’s inside. When the bus is full, the people in the back pass hard paper cash by other people to the driver, who has a paper shoe box next to him, acting like a cash machine. People here just trust each other that way. The ride was also…

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Ing. Jan Jileček

INTP, UE5 dev, Master’s degree in comp-sci, Creator, indie game developer, director, writer, photographer. I like BJJ, Jungian psychology, mythology and memes.