Ballin' in B-Clav

No Flo Zone.

 The first disappointment about Balaclava is that I could not find a single statue of Florence Nightingale.  This is something I have since had to get used to: there are a lot of statues in Ukraine, and almost none of them are of Flo-Night.  I suppose a lot of this makes sense because she was on the opposing side of the Russians, and they tend to play up their efforts instead (for more on this, see every single monument ever built in the Ex-USSR which shows the struggles endured during the Great Patriotic War).  The second disappointment is that is was almost impossible to find the hostel, and that it wasn’t really a hostel, and that it wasn’t really in Balaclava.  This is something I had to come to terms with as well.  The third thing I wasn’t totally keen on was that there were no perogies to be had in the Crimean peninsula, and this is something I grade very harshly on when taking Slavic countries into account.

   

The Port of Balaclava, featuring
New Money.

 As it would turn out, the Crimean Tatars have been making a comeback and their food is increasingly prevalent.  The problem is that there is a fairly large racial divide between the Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars, and asking for perogies in a Tatar restaurant results in a scowl, pilaf in a Ukrainian restaurant gets a scowl and anything that isn’t Russian in a Russian restaurant a nasty scowl and a lecture on why anything else is not good for you except meat-filled pelmeni with sour cream.  Despite having a wealth of fortresses and interesting landmarks, the Ukrainians have left much of the area to fallow, so children are free to walk up to crumbling fortresses built by the Genovese (I have no idea what the Genovese were doing here.  Presumably not introducing a café culture, that is all I have been able to ascertain) and Turks (same argument as with the Genovese).  I walked up to the fortress on the cliff to survey my most recent conquest, and was able to confirm that the Black Sea is quite large.  You heard it here first.

Balaclava was by no means a disappointment, but there was something a bit lacking in it.  The cherry blossoms were blooming and it was certainly a beautiful time to be there, but the inner harbour suffered from neglect.  As it was my birthday, I decided the only want to truly turn 24 (and this goes for everyone) is to do it in Yalta.  So back to Sevastapol I sheepishly crawled and into a marshrutka that dropped me off in Yalta, the resort capital of the Soviet Union and the place where eastern Europe was carved and served upon a platter like a ham nugget.   



A pressure front.





Fortifications.

  


This old girl has the right idea.

 

Putting pictures up in Blogger is the bane of my existence.