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Want me to tell you a funny little story from life in Kyiv? One of the thousand reasons why it's simply impossible not to adore this city once you really get to know it? Well, here goes. If you've ever played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, you probably remember one of their legendary locations, Rostok, with its iconic stalker hangout, the 100 Rads bar. The location also makes a comeback in the recent hit S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Now here's the thing. The developers at GSC Game World came up with this location because, back in the early 2000s, when they were working on the first games in the series, they had their offices inside the former Rostok instrument-making factory in Kyiv, at what is now 4 Vaclav Havel Boulevard. It's a fairly typical gigantic Soviet industrial monster that lost its competitiveness with the arrival of a normal capitalist economy. Its enormous grounds, workshops, and buildings were turned into cheap spaces for office monkeys, warehouses, online stores, and, as it turns out, developers of legendary video games. Right nearby, at the corner of Havel Boulevard and Harmatna Street, there's also the enormous Rostok Factory Palace of Culture, built in 1957, complete with a grandiose colonnade. Just the sort of thing you'd expect from a major old Soviet factory. And guess what? That's exactly where I worked ten years ago. In the office buildings of the former Rostok factory, the very place where the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games were developed. I'd just moved to Kyiv with a single backpack and landed my first job, writing for peanuts at a third-rate media outlet. For nearly six months, from May to October, I walked to the metro every day past that very Rostok Palace of Culture, through the remnants of Kyiv's Soviet rusty industrial jungle, without the faintest idea that the legendary S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games had been created right there. And then, this evening, ten years later, I happened to drive past Rostok again. I googled it... AND IT FINALLY DAWNED ON ME. And that's exactly why I adore Kyiv. This great old city just keeps throwing these wonderfully strange little surprises your way, for years and years and years, the kind of stories you can't help telling your friends after your fourth drink.