Moscow Hotel Simferopol

в загол 86;вке не "стыдн
086; б..." а "стыдн
086; батен 00;ка"

те ;ст на знани
...

Final Ukrainian Bits and Questions

Sunday November 1, 2009

Yalta to Simferopol

Gosh, I missed Halloween. Hadn't even thought about it much until I saw my Face book page yesterday and realized I have skipped another great American Holiday. And I’ll miss Thanksgiving too but I will be in Australia for that holiday and w...

Cave Cities

Wednesday October 28, 2009



I was picked up promptly by my guide and driver this morning. I slept on the train very well but I'm still tired. My guide is a chatty fellow and while he is Ukrainian and Crimean, he is more Russian than anything and says everyone here speaks Russian even though they are supposed to...

So here I am, impatiently waiting for the plane in Boryspol, having slept one hour tops on the plane. Luckily the woman sitting next to me on the plane from lisbon is also going to simferopol so I have somebody to chat with.
Finally check in opens, we go to the boarding gate and at around 9h15 they annonce that the plane has been delayed 2 ho...

Vi ler når vi ser navnet på baren. Bar Mojito. Ikke fordi det er et spesielt dårlig navn – navnet er dårlig, men ikke dårlig nok. Vi ler fordi vi banner på at de ikke har mojito der.

For slik er Ukraina, barn. Slik er Ukraina. Ingenting fungerer som det skal, og aller minst serveringssteder.

For eksempel: La oss si du har me...

I am now on a brief vacation in Crimea. So far I've been to Bakhchisarai, the ancient capital of the Crimean Tatars, and Yevpatoria, a beach resort community. Tomorrow I'm going to Sevastopol, where I'll see Chersonesus, some ancient Greek ruins. In case you're wondering, Crimea is a peninsula just barely attached to Ukraine that juts out into t...

I just returned home from a week adventure to Crimea, and spent over 24 hours on a train with windows that would NOT open, and NO air conditioning. It was the most sticky, miserable train ride I've ever had. I tried to console myself imagining how much worse it would be if I was a wartime prisoner being shipped off without a place to sit, or a t...

Up in time for a power failure at the Hotel Ukrainia. Spent an hour reading by a window in the dimly lit lobby and watching the front desk check guests out by flashlight. Yvgeny arrives and we're soon threading our way through rush hour traffic in Simferopol and on our way to Bakhchysaray. Now, there's a juicy word to savor. Bok-CHEE-sa-rye is T...

Like in Russia, there are four classes of train travel in Ukraine. Spalny vahon offers a compartment with two berths, kupe holds four bunks, plan skart is an open car with four bunks in each alcove and two in the aisles and zhalny vahon is a black hole of hard bench seats. If there were a fifth class, I'm sure it would include occasional beating...

Yes still here...this time I'm writing from Crimea, south of Ukraine on the black sea so far we have done 3.500 kms...we have been in Rivne, Kiev, Yalta and dozen of other places...too many to list, small villages are so cool and people are even more friendly, everything looks so Russian, so soviet! Our worst enemy as expected is the police, we ...