A hotel in Kyiv for the budget-minded traveler

Kyiv is an expensive city: Almost every hotel room is at least $100 a night, and many are $180-200 -- if you want to stay downtown. However, I found a low-cost alternative: the Kooperator Hotel.

It's a three-star hotel a short walk from the opera house and St. Sophia Cathedral. It has hot water, cable TV, a restaurant (and supposedly a workout room and swimming pool, but I never saw those facilities). The cost, including a breakfast buffet: $65 a night.

The hotel is operated by the Union of Consumers Societies of Ukraine. (The union includes regional consumer groups as well as universities, trade schools and some business enterprises.)

The hotel's brochure says (and I quote!):

"The Union's primary goal is to take care of people, whereas the hotel's and its stuff's main objective is to professionally do their job. Therefore, at Kooperator Hotel the highest level of service and homely comfort meet the requirements of the most exacting traveller."

Breakfast was great, in a German kind of way: cold cuts, cheese, hardboiled eggs ... cereal ... a plate of Italian-looking gnocchi or Texas-like chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. Local radio was playing in the background -- sprightly tunes interspersed with Fred Flintstone's yabba-dabba-doo! (Morning radio must be the same the world over.)

Here's what breakfast sounded like in the dining hall.

As long as I'm posting audio, here's another clip -- of a military march that was booming over the loudspeakers at the train station as we waited to board the ride home to Kharkiv.