Chernobyl Journal #6: Pool & School

Monday, May 18th, 2009 | decay, project wormwood, travel journal, video

This is part six of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.

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We waited for half an hour for Yuriy to come back -- he had gone to the security perimeter to report the looters -- until we took up Tanya’s offer of quickly going to “school #2″. The school, one of Pripyat’s seven schools, was supposed to be south of Lenin square. We followed her through the woods around old apartment blocks, came across an old electronics store with lots of old TVs, but didn’t find the school.

TV Shop (Album)

The driver picked us up on Lenin square (Yuriy was still gone) and drove us north to the old public swimming pool. It was a fantastic location featuring a great, multilayered pool hall with a big jump tower. Its roof was angled upwards, and the evening sun tinted the hall in a warm yellow through the enormous windows, which contrasted its otherwise blue hue. The pool itself was about 5 meters deep, its floor full of rubble, insulation material and remains of plastic chairs. The building also contained a gym hall with wooden floors.

Swimming Pool (Album)

Just next to the pool was “school #3″, a huge complex of two buildings full of classrooms and halls. Its entrance was barely accessible, it was so overgrown. In one of the classrooms I found an old school project about traditional clothing, pinned up on a wooden board. In the dining hall we found a large number of childrens’ respirators on the floor, their empty eyes staring at the paint chips in the ceiling like little grey elephant heads. It was an eerie teaser for the school we would see the next day.

School #3 (Album)

We spent an hour around the pool and school #3. But the lights was getting dim, and Yuriy was back too, so it was time to head home to Chernobyl before the mutants came out of the sewers.

After a stopover at the Chernoshop (an unspectacular room in a white building, mostly containing alcohol shelves and people in blue or green uniforms), we got back to the InterInform agency building. There, we checked our hands and feet for contamination (Beat had a little scare because the machine didn’t work when he used it), thoroughly washed our hands, and went to dinner. It was good Ukrainian food -- lots of vegetables, along with rather fatty (but nevertheless tasty) meat. Unfortunately, it drove my stomach into further culinary culture shock, and I spent the night hugging the toilet bowl of my hotel room, while the rest of the troupe checked out the local Chernobar.

This is not the end, only the end of the first day. Stay tuned for day two.

Video: Small Contamination Control