We took the summer camp students up there in the afternoon, after teaching in the morning. Together we all got to run around and play on the castle for a while (Sean, Carrie and I climbed up to the highest window in the standing turret). Below the hill, in the blue waters of the Black Sea, a pod of dolphins jumped in and out of the water. I have photos to prove all of this, once I manage to get a few online.
From up there we could see the cove that once held Soviet submarines, and the concrete entrance they used to enter a bunker buried in the hill across from us.
After the students left, we paid this skipper of a tiny boat to put us around the hill the castle stood on, to a cove called Silver Beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon tanning, swimming (the water was freezing), skipping rocks, rock hopping and looking at the hundreds of jellyfish in the water. They had no tenticals and didn't sting. In fact, the Ukranians would pick them up and throw them at one another. I think jellyfish are some of the most beautiful things in the world, as close to angels as we will ever get on Earth, so ethereal I'm hard pressed to understand them as animal, or even alive. They just seem mystical.
A relaxing afternoon, to soon be followed by a night of clubbing (and then back to teaching in the morning). This is the life.
*Addendum* After a lot of bad Russian on my part and figuring out how to get them to move photos from my camera to the main computer in this internet cafe to my terminal (they wouldn't let me plug it into my machine directly), I got a grand total of two photos moved before the whole process became to slow to bother with.
But here is Moby. There's no zoom. I was that close. He's the bald guy on the right. It was dark, so I couldn't really take good photos, hence the first dark one with a flash and the other, movement-blur without. Still, proof that I was there, right?
