Mm, picnic. What does one take to a picnic? Crisps, dips, sausage rolls. No, come on, think outside the box.

Mm, napkins? What are you, the mum? No, something a bit more exciting. Something like, I'll have those red scratch cards please. Add some play with National

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Hello, it's Saturday the 3rd of July and thanks for joining me on the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the independent. Today, why you should go to Ukraine when it's good and open. It's a year today since the great unlocking of international travel

and more on the Indian variant of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Really, there is no need to panic.

So, this podcast, of course, is completely free,

as is my weekly travel email.

You can sign up at independent.co.uk forward slash

newsletters. Well, today, as you will know, England are playing Ukraine in Rome in the quarterfinal of Euro 2020, the great footballing festival.

And I thought it was a good time to remind people about

this great country. Four point six times bigger than England, you might be interested to note.

Population is about 80% of England's, but the people are very friendly, very hospitable,

and there is an absolute wealth of astonishing things to see. This was, of course, part of the

Soviet Union, along with Russia and Belarus and many other places, and that has meant that quite a lot has been

preserved in a way that perhaps it wouldn't have been on this side of the iron curtain.

The place to start, if you possibly can, is Odessa, the miraculous port and beach city that's on the Black Sea. An incredibly elegant

19th century city that is simply full of wonders and if you wanted somewhere just to have

a great beach holiday I can recommend nowhere better than that. You've also north from there got

the very exciting capital city at the heart of the great rail network and indeed Kiev's

main station is probably the biggest and most complex in the whole of the former Soviet Union.

Certainly, I mean, while Moscow's got about 10 stations, a bit like London, Kiev has this

...