Crimea River

Such were my material circumstances en route to the Crimea.
Tea, yogurt, and hard-boiled eggs.  Jealous?

The first thing I actually wanted to do when I arrived in the Crimea was cry. I just wanted to sit down and cry my little heart out until I couldn’t feel pain anymore. There are several reasons for this: for one, I had just spent 18 hours on a train; second, I learned the hard way that you do NOT, under any circumstances, try to steal a towel from Ukrainian State Railways; third, I had no idea how to get to the centre of town because Sevastapol has a very confusing urban geography, and when I tried asking a marshrutka driver who had stopped to pick up a large group of people he started screaming at me and then flipped me the bird. 

As you can imagine, this was really, really upsetting for me. Apparently in The Orient (defined in my geographic imagination as anywhere outside the Pacific coast of Canada) it’s quite commonplace to yell and flip the bird, but I am Canadian and this is completely unacceptable. I was so horrified that someone would do that to me that I sat and, as usual, considered writing a strongly-worded letter to the Sevastapol transit authority, assuming that these marshrutki are regulated and not anyone with a van can just start one up. 



Quarries!

Actually, as it would appear, literally anyone with a van can start up a marshrutka business. This is something quite foreign to me. In the Ukraine they are a bit more regulated than the furgon trade in Albania, with signs and defined stopping points, but if you can get your greasy little hands on an old Mercedes van and can weld some iron bars together in the back to make seats, then you are in business.  



Disembarkation proved to be
disorienting and emotionally
difficult.

Naturally, I have thought about transplanting this brilliant system back into the heart of pro-environment and public transit Canada, Vancouver. Imagine, if you will,: 1) a number of old Mercedes vans crowding the UBC bus loop with several fat old men with a shirt rolled up to their armpits screaming the destination and then herding students into their respective vehicles; or 2) a 7-year-old kid hanging out of a van circling Westbrook Mall screaming the destination and having it stop every time a student flags it down. Groups of hipsters would flock to the Main Street-Commerical Drive marshrukta, rich kids would abandon their BMWs and Mercedes Benzes for the sleek and rugged look of a 1985 orange Mercedes delivery van, and all those women who collect bottles at UBC would be delighted by the roofracks when they are taking the day’s haul back to Shaughnessy.

Until all this catches on, however, I’ll have to stay in eastern Europe to really maximize my love, and utter contempt, for affordable public transit. So feeling sorry for myself was not in the cards—this was life. If being treated poorly by a Ukrainian was a part of growing up, then I was going to do it. As usual, I rationalised that I would hate driving a marshrutka and having to deal with someone like me.  So I sat at the bus stop and talked with an old woman who confessed that English is the international language, but that she refused to learn it.  I told her she had gotten this far already and that I agree—it's not worth it.  



These three had an easier time
navigating the peninsula, I'm told.

When I had purchased my ticket to Sevastapol, I wasn’t really thinking about where I would go. I assumed the Crimea was enough of a destination and so I just blindly went. As such, I had no plan or idea of where I would stay in Sevastapol and was devastated to disembark and find nowhere to stay. I was still new to the scene and I was not expecting hoards of babas to swarm me at the station with cardboard sheets pinned to their jackets offering rooms. When they did I was immediately wary of their mysterious and pixieish ways, and I decided to stay clear of these Crimean sirens and opt for a café with wifi instead, where I discovered some form of lodging/hostel in Balaclava. Naturally, this was exactly where I wanted to go: I love the Crimean War, I love the Charge of the Light Brigade, and I love the fierce rivalry between Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. All of this took place 150 prior in the little inlet of Balaclava, famous the world over for the aforementioned things and the namesake for appropriate ski-wear in Canada and a street in Vancouver that several of my friends have lived on.

 

So I bid adieu to the fair Sevastapol and my cool and hate-filled memories associated with it, and decided that I would spend my pre-birthday in Balaclava, reliving as much as I could of the great battles between the Turks and the Russians, and figuring out how to get to Yalta.

Keying into Kiev

Before leaving Chernivtsi we took a bus to Kamenets-Podolsky, which we later determined to be a sad and decaying town.  Unfortunately, we hadn’t read the Wikitravel entry on it, nor ran a quick Google Image search of it because it’s actually quite beautiful and historic.  Next time, I guess.  From Chernivtsi, we hopped aboard the night train to Kiev, which to my pleasant surprise was going to be 15 hours.  As I have come to learn, no matter where you want to go in Ukraine, it will take you 14+ hours by train.  That is because the trains travel at 40km/hour, but the good news is that they are always on time.  In each of the trains there is a schedule letting you know when we will arrive in each of the stopover cities, and for exactly how long.  What a dream job railway administration must have been for type-A personalities in the old system. 

Something I probably have never bothered to express via the medium of Web 2.0 blog postings is that I am really into metro systems in post-socialist countries.  Like, really into them.  It’s my dream to travel on, or at least gaze at from within, each one currently in existence.   Kiev’s metro gets a 6.  Out of 100.  But trying to figure out how to transfer at key spots is pretty tough, and don’t even think about taking a picture.  Unless, of course, you enjoy the idea of having five security guards suddenly emerge from inside the wall, surround you, and physically delete it from your camera.  God forbid I replicate this poorly-conceived public transit experiment anywhere in the first world.

Actually, I’m a bit hard on the Kiev metro.  I mean, it works, and it has some great reach, and it’s actually in the ground and there are trains.  That earns it more than Budapest’s Metro 4.  However, the painfully slow escalators that sometimes didn’t work (which left me stranded in Suburban Kiev because meaty-armed babushkas working for the transit authority would not let anyone into the station) have left it sitting pretty low on the list. 

We poked around Kiev, which has its share of churches and museums.   Naturally, of course, we had to stop by one of the hundreds of open air markets and blend in with the locals, in hopes of scoring free pickles and anything else the babas were vending.  We also saw the large motherland statue, affectionately known as “Tin Tits” in tourist brochures.  Say what you will about the inefficiencies of central planning, but when the necessity arises to procure enough sheet metal to build one of these in each of the republican capitals, it gets the job done.  And judging by this Slavic maiden’s piercing gaze and command of the landscape, it was well worth it. 

Kiev was lacking in something but it took me a while to really figure it out.  At first I thought it was an alternative, underground hipster scene, but I discovered all Po-So countries have those in spades and I was foolishly looking in the Podil neighbourhood, which was sadly did not live up to its 19th century reputation.  Then I thought perhaps it was the bars that were lacking, because from the outsider’s perspective the Kiev bar scene consists of kiosks on the street that sell “live” beer.  You bring your own plastic 1L bottle, they fill it up, and then you go join the hoards or people—homeless, students, businesspersons—in the park and drink it.  However, I discovered that there were plenty of suitable pubs that were simply disguised as other things, like a 1940s hospital/laboratory where you can drink shots out of test tubes and wear old German war helmets from the Great Patriotic War.

Just like West Edmonton Mall,
you can get Ukrainian food in Kiev.

I finally realised what it was that Kiev was missing: Ukrainians.  Aside from the Ukrainian flags and the enormous Hotel Ukraina in the centre of the town, there wasn’t a Ukrainian to be seen, except in “ethnic” restaurants peppered around the town.  Everyone spoke Russian, and the food was decidedly more bland than in the west.  The thing about the Ukraine is that all roads do not lead to Kiev.  For the most part, I don’t think all people in the Ukraine know that they live in a country called “Ukraine.”  If you’re from L’viv, then you’re a national hero and you are a true Ukrainian.  If you’re from anywhere east of Kiev, you’re probably a Russian and are unaware that a border exits between the two countries.