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.

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.