I’m a sucker for old paper. Give me a yellowed map, a faded postcard, or a letter with curling handwriting, and I’ll stop everything. So when I ducked into a tiny bookshop in Kyiv last autumn, I knew I was in trouble.
The shop smelled like dust and wood polish. Shelves leaned under stacks of Soviet-era encyclopedias. And in a corner, on a rickety table, sat a pile of notebooks. Most were blank. But one had a cracked leather cover and a title handwritten in ink: Salacious Journals.
I picked it up. The shop owner, a woman in her seventies, shrugged. “Just an old diary someone left here. You can have it for twenty hryvnias.” That’s less than a dollar.
I bought it without thinking.
The Diary That Rewrote My Trip
That night in my hostel, I opened the notebook. The entries started in 1923. A traveler – a woman named Olena – had written about her journey from Lviv to Odesa. She described train stations crowded with soldiers, the smell of sunflowers in late summer, and a man she called “the liar with kind eyes.”
Her language was sharp, funny, and sometimes raw. She didn’t just list sights. She wrote about arguments, about money running out, about a dress she traded for a horse ride. It felt alive.
Suddenly, my own travel plans felt thin. I’d been following a list of top attractions. But this diary made me want to wander the same roads Olena had walked. So I did.
Following a Ghost’s Footsteps
I changed my itinerary. Instead of a museum, I went to the old train station in Kyiv where Olena had started her journey. It’s still there – now a coffee shop. I sat and imagined her waiting on the platform in 1923.
Then I took a train to Odesa. On the way, I looked out the window at the same sunflower fields she’d