Ode to Odessa

Unfortunately I didn’t get much more sleep and we rolled into Odessa fairly early in the AM.  I was tired, disoriented, hungry, and this combination is never good in decision-making situations.  I ended up talking to an old woman offering rooms.  I asked where.  She said, “Just behind the station.”  A 30 minute tram ride, and a 10 minute walk down a dirt road later, we were halfway to Kiev and very much out of the centre.  I was to stay in a house owned by a woman named Nadezhda (which means ‘Hope’ in Russian), a great ogress of a woman, billowy and dolled up in pink lipstick and a hairstyle and colour that reflected the chic and cosmopolitan nature of the Odessa populace in the late 70s—early 80s.  Evidently the woman at the station played agent to people like Nadezhda (Naddie, as I like to remember her as) and collected a small fee.  

Naddie was by no means a warm and welcoming hostess, and I was not totally pleased with the location, but was at the point where I did not have a great deal of choice.  Not feeling totally comfortable staying there for any amount of time, but also realising that being tired was no excuse or being grumpy, I went out to take in all that Odessa had to offer, which involved falling asleep on a cement dock several kilometers south of Odessa proper.

I bounced around from café to café in Odessa's bohemian quater and one customer could tell I was an English speaker.  As it turned out he had lived in Kitimat working on the oil pipeline, or oil terminal, or a boat that regularly called at Kitimat and carried oil.  His name was Alexei and he invited me to his house for a barbecue the next day, and even offered to put me up for the night.  This was a nice alternative to the outskirts of Odessa with Naddie and her pony-sized angry dog.  So I kicked around the city, bought some vintage postcards, went to the famed Potemkin Steps and looked for the nearest baby carriage to push down them, and ate a nice dinner at a Georgian restaurant that involved an awkward toilet-not-working situation and three women barging in on me in the bathroom.  Lots of fun. 

It was just as well too.  I returned just after 9pm and boy did Naddie let me have it.  It was past my curfew and she was not pleased.  She was also not pleased with my inability to speak perfect Russian (or Russian at all, really.  I was not very good at this stage in my trip, and I get progressively worse—possibly on purpose—when dealing with people I don’t like).   She had soup ready for me, which was nice, but was not happy I had let it go cold.  The next day, I collected myself and said goodbye to the fair Nadezhda for the last time—until I saw her again when I was waiting for the tram.  But since then we haven’t bumped into each other.  

I found Alexei’s home and met his family.  He was Ukrainian and his wife was from Volga German descent.  The grandmother lived with them and while she looked as Ukrainian as can be, she still spoke German.  We had a barbecue and Alexei told me about life in the Ukrainian army, which involved times in which he had to crawl through mud, eat worms, and drink urine.  This, coupled with the memory of an article in National Geographic I read about Ukraine in the mid 90s that had pictures of Ukrainians lifting weights by means of a makeshift gym constructed from dismantled Soviet tanks has led me to conclude that if push had ever come to shove, we would have lost the Cold War big time.