Getting pics online in Ukraine is a lot harder than in the rest of Eastern Europe, so it will probably be a week on these pics, but I'm seeing some cool stuff.
Despite some half-hearted protestations on my part, Katie is paying a lot of the cost of the trip (which is peanuts to her since she makes the British pound, currently 1:8.6 hrivnas). She bought me dinner in a posh restaurant overlooking the Black Sea here (hey, I paid the tip) and it cost 14 pounds for both of us. Katie points out that she can't buy dinner for herself in Britain for that price, so it makes me feel a little better.
Since all the volunteers I knew in Odessa have left Peace Corps, she ended up springing for a hotel as well. A 27 pound hotel room, in Odessa, it turns out, gets you a two room suite with a huge bathroom. We each got our own beds, which is just as well because I developed some sort of chest infection and have been hacking my lungs out. Still, that didn't stop me from seeing things.
Odessa is really cool, a sort of run-down Budapest architecture-wise, with great views of the Black Sea. We saw the Potemkin Steps, made famous by a movie that I haven't seen, and wandered around Arcadia Beach. Arcadia Beach reminded me of Mexico: the sand and water were beautiful, but it was surrounded by run down buildings, crumbling docks and detrius. Of course, we didn't go in it because it's polluted. Still, you could tell that at one point that this was prime vacation real estate in the USSR, but has since crumbled into ruin. It's probably pretty pumping in the summer, though, because a couple areas, now deserted, were obviously open air clubs now closed for the fall.
Me being sick prevented us from checking out any of Odessa's famed clubs, but today we're going to try to find and explore the catacombs used by partisans during WWII. They're outside of town, and the guide book says nothing more than to get a tour to go to them. Well, the off-season tour costs $85, so we're going to try to get out there on our own and see what happens.
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Addendum: We have an hour before the train leaves back to Kyiv, so I thought I'd hop on the net. We found a marshrutka going to the town with the catacombs and found the museum that the catacombs exit into. The museum was open but had no one in it, including any attendents. We found the stairway going into the catacombs, but it was pitch black. There were a couple of flashlights around, but I figured they'd get upset if we took them without permission. We went to a nearby store and bought some matches, but they didn't have any candles. I was about to use some dead branches for a torch when a bus pulled up full of kids, and a woman that was with them started taking them into the catacombs. We negotiated a tour for 6 hrivna each and down we went.
The catacombs were really cool: full of old matress frames, rifles and machine guns, cooking pots, radios, typewriters, you name it, all used by partisans to fight the Nazis when they occupied Ukraine during WWII, and all just left around these tunnels carved into the sandstone underneath the village. There was graffiti on the wall in Russian that said things like "Blood for Blood" and "Death to the German Occupiers!" as well as pictures of Stalin and the Russian flag. The tour guide spent most of the time yelling at the kids who kept trying to run off down various tunnels, so mostly we hung back and wandered around the tunnels, trying to not let their voices get too far off because we heard that people had been lost in the catacombs, never to return. It was pretty damn cool, and well worth the price. The entire catacombs trip, including marshrutka and tour, came to $3.60. Compare that to the $85 the tour company had wanted.
We wandered around Odessa for the rest of the day, watching old men play chess in the park and wandering to another beach. This one had the remains of a concrete sea wall, so we sat on that for a while, amongst people fishing. The beach was lightly populated, but there were two really attractive girls in their 20s sunbathing naked, a man in his 60s lying between them in a pair of speedos. Not sure how he got that gig. And nearby them was another older man, who was just hitting a ball on a paddle up in the air over and over--but suspiciously close to the naked girls.
Possibly the old man was a sex-pat, one of the Westerners that come to Ukraine for dates and/or wives. At the posh restaurant, a German man at the next table was speaking in broken English to a translator, who was translating it into Russian for the extremely hot Ukranian girl sitting across from him. How you pick up a girl through two langauge barriers, I don't know. Although taking her to a posh restaurant probably helps.
Katie and I met one more sex-pat on the way into Kyiv from the airport. He was from Austria and absolutely lost coming out of the airport. He heard us speaking English and asked for help. He got on the marshrtuka with us to Kyiv, and told us he was meeting his girlfriend--whom he had met on the internet. She was arriving in Kyiv from Moldova (the next country over) to meet him and get a visa for her to Austria.
Katie and I got to talking about Ukranian women on that hour-long trip to Kyiv and I told her about the sex-pats, and the Austrian was visibly upset and told me he didn't want me to think badly of him. I told him the truth of the matter: every Ukranian woman I have ever talked to about the subject, including Diana, thinks that it's a good thing. If a Ukranian girl can have a better life in another country, so be it. And the Moldovan girl was from Transnistria: the breakaway region in east Moldovan that's run by warlords. She lives in a war-torn hell hole and if an Austrain guy is going to get her out of there, good for her. If they love each other, even better.
In any case, when we got off at the train station in Kyiv, I was going to help him find her train when he realized he had left something important on the marshrutka. He started patting his pockets with a look of fright on his face and then took off running after it.
We never saw him again.