From Russia with Love

I'm Koo-Koo for Krimea!

During our second train ride, we slept much more soundly since there were no boarder crossings involved. This was, of course, only after we made it to sleep. Around eleven o’clock, we realized that we hadn’t snatched up our blankets in a timely enough fashion and two of my sputniki were left blanketless. Chris was already off in dreamland, so we were left to fend for ourselves. Since there’s power in numbers, Adam accompanied Marco to the front of the wagon where the attendent kept all-night office hours. Much to their surprise a fat Ukrainian man, not the wagon attendant, opened the office door looking quite perturbed.
“What?!” he yelled.
“We need some blankets.”
“There are no blankets!” he snapped back. Adam and Marco could clearly see the treasure of heavy blankets stacked up against the wall next to a woman dressed like a hooker. This style of dress is not uncommon in Russia or Eastern Europe in general, but finding it on a disheveled women in the wagon’s only cabin with a door rose some suspicions.
“What do you mean? There are some blankets right there,” they pointed out.
A slammed door was the only response they got. It was time to call in the reenforcements, that is, the closest thing we had to a native speaker, Gigi. The three of them returned to the front of the wagon and made the same request.
“You can’t have any!”
“We paid for those blankets,” Gigi instisted, more comfortable with arguing in Russian after growing up in a Russian household.
“I paid too!” was the man’s response. The three of them weren’t sure if he was refering to the fact that he bribed our attendent to use the room or to the fact that he had a hooker in there with him, who by now was naked from the waist down.
Luckily, the late-night triste didn’t last too long and our friendly wagon attendent returned and willingly gave us the blankets. For the record, there was no appology involved in this exchange.
Fourteen hours later, we found ourselves in Krimea. We all rushed to the nearest, clear bathroom we could find (being the one in the nearby McDonalds. It has come to my attention that outside of the States, McDonalds’ bathrooms tend to be the cleanest, free toilets one can find) and proceeded to stretch our legs out walking through the Simferapol’s market. We quickly found a café to get lunch at and wait while Chris bought our return tickets to Moscow. It was there that we made our first Krimean friends – the stray cats. Moscow’s problem of wild dogs is at least twice as worse and due to cats in Krimea. We fed the kittens that probably lived nearby and knew quite well what they could get from gullible tourists passing through.
After paying the bill, we received a call from Chris. Everything that could go wrong at a train station in a post-Soviet country did go wrong. After waiting in line at the trainstation’s ticket counter, he was told that said counter only sold tickets for trains departing that same day. He had to go across town to a different trainstation to get the tickets where he found himself waiting in another line for over an hour only to have the window closed on him when he was next in line. At this point he called us. If we waited for him, we wouldn’t make it to Yalta in time for our tour, so he put Gigi in charge and told us to find a ride to Yalta and make contact with our tour guides there. He’d meet us as soon as he could.
On our own! How invigorating, right? We negotiated a microbus ride to Yalta, about two hours away, with one of the many men camping out infront of the train station. It was an amazing ride that gave us our first real view of Krimea’s mountains, the villages perched in the mountains, wide valleys and numerous vineyards all hidden in the winding landscape. We felt truly alive riding through the Tsars’ old paradise but not necessarily because of the scenary. All the mountain roads were about three lanes in width. This is to say that there were two lanes going in different directions and a middle lane used by everyone for passing. Our driver knew we were late for our excursion and was looking for a good tip, so he basically turned into the Ukrainian version of Mario Andretti (although I’m still not completely sure he needed an excuse to speed). Long story short, after the first hour, I gave up on looking out the window; it was simply too frightening.



We made it to Yalta in one piece, found our tour agency and immediately started our tour of Yalta on our way up to the old Tsarist summerhouse. Summerhouse is really too modest a term for this royal residence; it was more of a mansion. The second floor houses a museum to the Romanov’s that preserves the mansion’s atmosphere of everyday life alongside family photos and personal artifacts of the Empire’s last royals. The first floor is the home to yet another museum to the Yalta Conference, which took place in the mansion in 1945 (?) when the Allies decided the capitulation of Germany. I wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘history-buff’, but I enjoyed the exhibition. Much of the mansion’s tsarist glory was preserved after the Revolution and seeing the original documents was actually really cool. In case you were wondering, I liked Churchill’s signature the best.





After the museum, our tour continued onto the boardwalk were we got our first up close view of the Black Sea. It was around sunset by then, and the view was just amazing, especially after nearly two months in drearyMoscow. We were so taken by the sea-side atmosphere, that we even took this photo (belongs on Middlebury Schools Abroad website, maybe?):



After dinner, we drove another hour to where we’d be staying. Our host’s name was Andrei Pavlovich, and like many Krimeans looking to make some money off the tourist industry, Andrei rented out his guest house to travellers. He grew up in western Ukraine, a traditionally anti-Russian, ethnically Ukrainian area of the country, but after years of living in Krimea (always a favorite vacation spot for wealthy Russians and Soviets alike, which remained a part of the Russian Federation until Yeltsin officially gave the peninsula to the Ukraine), he seemed to have become quite Russian-friendly. Like most of the older generation, Andri Pavlovich was very fond of recounting his personal history and views on history at large, and we listened politely. His manner of speech was very relaxed and the timbre of his voice had such a soothing quality that I actually enjoyed listening to him. His house was situated in Simiez about a seven-minute walk from the sea. We woke up every morning and had breakfast on the balcony with the Black Sea’s majesty providing a beautiful background.


Although it was already halfway through October, Liza and I still went swimming in the Black Sea. The water was great!




Pusking and I at the Fountain of Tears in Bakhchisarai. The water drips down like tears in this fountain, constructed by the Khan in memory of one of his dead mistresses.

Our life in Krimea was relaxed. Aside from a day trip to Bakhchisarai (the old Khan’s fortress) and the 2,000 year-old city of Chufatkale, we lived at the slow pace of life on the sea, lazily waking up in the morning pondering over tea what the day would bring us. Unfortunately, our time in Krimea was all too short. Our last day there, we went wine tasting, as Krimea is known, among other things, for its wine. I can’t say that I liked the wine very much. Depite the fact that the wineries add no sugars to their Musckats or even dessert wines, they were all entirely too sweet for my taste (thanks to the climate and kind of grapes that grow there).



It rained that day, and I like to think that Krimea was mourning our departure. We drove back to Simferapol and boarded our train back to Moscow. It would be the longest train of the trip, and my life in general – altogether a 24-hour ride. We got back to Moscow around eight o’clock the next night, and strangely enough, it was a relief. We all felt for the first time that we were returning to something familiar, a Metro we knew and a language that we could actually comprehend; in a way, we came home. It was a wonderful feeling that encouraged me for the two weeks of classes and midterms I had ahead of me before the next break.



I’m already halfway through that second break and tonight will be leaving for a weekend in Petersburg with friends. Be looking forward to impressions from Peter’s city: as European as Russia gets.

posted by Misha Molodoi @ 3:12 PM