The sink is the first honest thing in the video. Katia Kulyk stands over it on a August morning, hauls a bucket out from under the basin, and washes her trash before breakfast, because that is how water works where she lives. "This is the worst part of the sink," she says, and then, with the flat good humor of someone who has made peace with it: "This is why we bought a house." The camera does not cut away. For the next half hour of her "day in my life" video, shot in the village of Zavale, she walks, cooks, takes calls, films in a field of tobacco, and inspects a half-finished home with her partner, all without the polish that most lifestyle footage carries. The result is a portrait of a chosen life that is less a fantasy of the countryside than a working document of it.
The video, published in September 2021 and filmed in mid-August of that year, is worth a close look for anyone who has ever wondered what moving to the country actually requires day to day. Katia is a personal coach who also teaches yoga and meditation retreats, and the description places her life in a Ukrainian village in a clear arc: years earlier she lived in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, then in 2017 the couple moved into an old house and lived what she calls "the most basic life ever." What follows is less a manifesto than a series of small decisions, shown in full.
The day begins with a choice. Katia says her usual routine is to exercise at home, take a cold shower, then start work or cook breakfast. On this day she felt like walking instead, so she made coffee, put on socks because the mornings are cold even in summer ("like 11 freaking degrees," she says, in the middle of August), and went out into the countryside. The walk becomes a kind of tour: a river where people swim and wash the cave-club clothes, a neighboring region visible across the water, a horn of corn "taller than my me with the arm reached up," and a bunch of tiny plums she identifies in Ukrainian as alicha.
Her meditation habit sits underneath the whole day. She tells viewers at the start that she has been meditating since 2012 and now does one or two hours a day, and she invites people to try her meditation playlist if they want to build the practice into a morning routine. It is a small, unshowy detail, but it frames what follows. The day is not presented as a string of picturesque moments. It is presented as a practice, with work and chores and rest woven through it.
The schedule is loose by design. She edits her email, cooks lunch, checks on renovation, returns to a client call that runs long, and eventually heads back to the cave club for another visit. The lack of structure is part of the point. She says in the video description that "it is not a set up, I did everything I normally do and just shot it on camera." That single sentence is the ethic of the whole piece.
Howdidathree-dayvisitbecomeahome?
The origin story is compressed into a few minutes, and it is the emotional center of the video. Katia first came to the speleology club, the cave club near the village, in 2017, planning to spend three or four days. She wanted to visit a cave her friend loved, known as Atlantis in English. Then something happened that she still struggles to put into words. "I don't know how to explain this," she says. "There's just something inside you that tells you this is your place, and then you just stay." Her best friend from that visit became, as she puts it, the person she loves until today, and the three days turned into a life.
The video does not claim that the move was easy or obvious. Her description says she lived in Bangkok and Chiang Mai before settling in the village, and that the early years were spent in an old house with the most basic amenities. The video's own humor carries the evidence: "fun fact, there was only one plug in each room when the house was built," she says, and adds that Ukrainians will get the joke. The house they now live in, which is still under construction, is the next chapter.
"There's just something inside you that tells you this is your place, and then you just stay." (Katia Kulyk, in the video, around 6:49)
Whatistherealworkbehindcountrysidelife?
This is where the video earns its keep. Katia shows the renovation without flattering it. She walks through the new house, which has walls and a ceiling in the biggest room but still feels unfinished. She shows her own clay experiments, because the couple is doing the clay finishing on the house by themselves. One test panel "has cracked," and another is "too much clay." She tries a new stove, shows her office, and points out the room with a view toward the cave. The construction is slow, hands-on and imperfect, and she treats the imperfection as ordinary.
Then there is the water. The sink runs off a supply that has to be filled by hand, and washing dishes and clothes becomes a logistical task rather than a flick of a tap. The bucket is not a metaphor; it is the plumbing. For anyone who imagines the rural life as simply quieter, this is a useful correction. Quiet is available, but it is paid for in labor, and Katia's refusal to hide that labor is what makes the video credible.
Even the self-presentation is handled with the same candor. She explains that she does not always brush her hair or wear makeup, but that today she is recording a YouTube interview with a friend, Veronica, and "camera is my mirror." She fixes her mascara on camera and admits it: "just to even out the colors." It is a small comic moment, but it reveals the deal she is making with her audience. She is a coach who sells personal growth, and she is also a person who is visibly still working out how to be on camera.
Whydoesthevillageitselfmattersomuchtothestory?
The neighborhood is not background. A neighbor named Luda appears with her dog Circo, a guardian of the milk, and the two women share a little exchange about the land. Katia points out the river that flows around their orchard and explains that a neighbor redirected part of it into a pond, so the water that once ran deeper, where fish sat and people swam, is now more of a brook. She shows the two property entrances and admits, cheerfully, that she does not know what to do with the old outbuildings yet.
The tobacco is everywhere. She notes that the whole village seems to grow it, and that the smell in the air, drying in the heat, is nothing like a cigarette: "it smells better than cigarettes, it's not burning." She shows how the leaves are dried and points out a neighbor who, she jokes, will send you into the cave if you come by. These are the textures that a short holiday would miss. A visitor sees a picturesque field; a resident learns the schedule of the harvest, the neighbors' habits, and the names of the plants.
Howdosmalldailyanchorsshapetherestoftheday?
Late in the video Katia talks about a water jar. Since a session she describes as the UPW with Tony Robbins that spring, she has been drinking about a liter of water every day and refilling the jar, two liters in total. This afternoon she took a sip, put the jar somewhere unusual, and forgot about it. Her interpretation is practical: some people have visual anchors, meaning that when they see something they remember to do the thing attached to it. If you have that ability, she suggests, use it, and put your water where you will see it.
It is a modest idea, and it is a good one to take from the video. The day she films is full of such anchors, even if she does not name them as such: the socks against the morning cold, the coffee, the ritual of the walk, the camera that reminds her to care about her appearance, the speleology club where she goes back again and again. The life she has built seems to run on cues like these rather than on willpower alone.
Whatshouldaviewertakefromadaylikethis?
The video does not sell the countryside as a cure. Katia openly describes money, work, and the fact that August is "the least working month in Ukraine," which she uses as an excuse to take a slower pace. She talks about her weekly small crypto purchase with the same offhand candor, calling her investing "a game" rather than a plan, and she says that a call with a client ran two hours instead of one. The life is not idealized. It is simply lived, and then shown.
She also closes the loop with the viewers. The description asks people to comment about the place they wish to settle in, and it is a reminder that a video like this works as an invitation rather than a lesson. The most useful thing a viewer can learn from it is the method: notice the actual labor of your ideal life, film or write down a normal day, and see whether the bucket under the sink still feels like part of the picture.
Wheretogofromhere
If this video resonates, the most rewarding next step is to watch the whole thing with the sink, the clay, and the camera in mind, rather than as scenery. Pay attention to how Katia moves between work, rest, and practice without a schedule, and how she holds her meditation practice as a steady thread. Her own description also points to her guided meditation playlist, her coaching work, and her retreats, which are the parts of her life that take the reflective side of this day further. Read the day as a question you can ask of your own life, not an answer she is handing you.
Katia Kulyk is a life coach and meditation, happiness and yoga teacher who studied with Thai monks, voices meditations for Moonly, and created Meditate in Ukrainian.
In her August 2021 video, Katia walks the countryside, washes dishes from a bucket because the sink has to be filled by hand, takes a client call, and inspects the house still under renovation. She says she shot it without a set-up, doing her normal routine on camera.
She describes first visiting the speleology cave club in 2017 to stay three or four days, and says she felt something inside her told her this was her place. She says she then stayed, after previously living in Bangkok and Chiang Mai.
She describes visual anchors as the way some people remember to do something when they see a particular cue. She puts her daily water jar in an unusual place as a way to use that ability, and suggests viewers put their water where they will see it.
She says she has been meditating since 2012 and now practices one to two hours a day. She suggests viewers who want meditation as part of a morning routine try her meditation playlist on YouTube.
Katia's video shows the daily labor clearly: a sink filled by bucket, clay walls that crack in testing, and a home still being built. She presents this work as ordinary rather than as a complaint, and says the choice is one she makes from the heart.
The speleology club is a cave club near the village where Katia and her friends used to live and where friends still are. She first visited it in 2017 to see a cave her friend loved, and she returns there several times in the video.
