Morskoy Odessa

... on until tomorrow. We'll do some more research and then buy the tickets on the day. We got a meal in a restaurant, a couple of beers, and sat there reading Cyrillic words and deciphering letters... We had a feeling of doom – what did we get ourselves into? As inviting as the Arab world was, as open eyed and open minded, and open armed, accepting and friendly, the exact opposite awaited us in the Ukraine. Customer service was not in their dictionary ...

But that is it! More than two weeks with people who i can say now i love and would like to see more often if only i could. Who knew that i would find SO good friends here! I've never been treated so well. Who knew that i would fall in love.This craziest thing we know. And it's not just a seaside story it's a fairytale, my own story with continuation. <br>

... hot and we paid again to get a bench and an umbrella. It was a lot more expensive but we got a mattress type thing and a huge umbrella. We stayed there the whole day and just enjoyed the hot sun and the cold water. A bit later, we were shocked to hear the first words of English uttered out of any mouth since we got to Ukraine and they were British. I have to say that generally, I have great respect for the Brits. They are extensive ...

... at the festival. Their camp was next to this sunken area looking like a swimming pool or old foundation to what used to be a building of some sort. But it was perfect for football! (soccer) We played many many games in this space...so cool. Well one of the american guys invited me to his place and after the festival we hitched to his town. Hitching there was quite the adventure as we took i think 12 rides that day!! Most of them were short rides and it was a ...

... pushing 400,000 and Odessa rings in at an even million. You'd think there'd be a decent road between the two, but today we found our tour bus (don't think it was a particularly nice bus. It wasn't, but you know the size) off-roading through a cow field. How we wound up there, I don't know. I was reading a book about turn of the century Montana at the time (they also had cows and fields) but when the bus went over a particularly bumpy stretch, and the front bottomed out, I ...

Although I wasn't sure my stomach could handle a train ride, I needed to find better accommodation for one that is ill. So took the night train to Odessa. ended up in 3rd class as everything else was faily booked up which turned out to be the best place. Met a very nice family on the train who spoke quite good english and were on their way to run a marathon. It was really nice to speak with ...

... a more rainy and for my taste boring weather. A little cell phone is my great helper in presenting you flash lights of the world we will see on our travel. It shall help us in the trial to sometimes catch the "decisive moment"... Whenever you see photographs on this travelblog they are taken with my little smartphone SonyEricsson K800i. The camera in this phone has 3.2 megapixels and ...

... lit in the middle of the crowd, that dampened our excitement none nor did it in any way dissuade the policy from breaking the party up as we all spilled away in one big happy soccer hooligan wave chanting "Hey Hey U-kra-ine!" To keep the good times rolling, we (well, first we ate again) headed out to Arcadia, the bar and disco on the beach district. We caught a bit of France-Togo with the for sure Mafia guys in the corner who everyone coming in had to go ...

... lay beneath a small village of a few scattered houses named "No More Killing People," according to Stanislav. It was one of many "stations" of the partisan army during the Great Patriotic War, some 1500 soldier citizens who created havoc among the Nazi-led Romanian occupying army, accounting for over 5000 casualties, 16 bridges destroyed and pretty much forcing Germany to keep a large force in the occupied city for two years between 1941-2. The network of tunnels provided a ...

... the next morning, showing up in the lobby as I was checking out, and we were halfway out of town before he asked me - "Which airport?" What do you mean which airport? I figured there was only one. But no. And the ticket I had received from the travel agency in Odessa didn't specify. "No problem," he says. And we're off to Boryspil, where he bounds out of the car and runs inside with my ticket to see if this is the right one. He comes back out a couple of minutes ...