Rosalinde and myself took the night train from Warsaw to Kiev. The trip was ok, it was interesting to stand for 2 hours to wait until they changed the wheels. The width of the tracks is different in Ukraine than in Europe. Somehow we had benches in different parts of the train, so we could visit each other. We talked in Russian, English and mime language with Rosalindes roommates.
We walked around. We got lost. We found ourselves back again. It was nice.
The sleeper train to the Crimean Peninsula was even nicer than the one to Kiev. We shared a cabin with an elderly couple. They were very sweet and gave us advice on where to go in Crimea.
After a short stopover I Simferopol, in which we ate the best flat bread ever, we took the bus to Yalta. And not just a normal bus. No, this is the longest trolley bus line on the planet. And also one of the slowest. Average speed: 30km/h. But hey, it got us there, and the views where great. After 2,5 hours, we ended up in famous Yalta on the seaside. Because we didn’t find a couchsurfcouch there, we thought we would have to look for a hostel, but then we found out that there were many old ladies roaming the streets for fresh tourists to put in their empty rooms. We found one that was nice, and actually not very old at all, and we stayed in her house.
Yalta has this image of being a horribly commercialized tourist trap, a bit like Ibiza or Antalya. Maybe it is like that in the middle of the summer, but when we were there, it was not so full with tourists, and the atmosphere was actually really nice. There were people selling stuff everywhere, but in a way it was all a bit amateur-like, with big paintings you can stick your head through for pictures, and a guy with a monkey, and popcorn vendors.
Because we were lazy, and I had a bit of a cold, we ended up staying for 3 nights. The fact that it was 27 degrees and sunny was probably also one of the reasons for that.
It is surprisingly nice to be here. Not only because of the weather, but also because of the people. Everyone is friendly, you do not get the impression that they are fed up with the tourists yet. It probably also helps that most of the tourists who go here are Ukrainians and Russians, we hardly see any ‘western’ tourists. And people like it very very much when you try to talk with them in Russian (here, no-one speaks Ukrainian). Rosalinde speaks Russian fairly well, and I understand a bit because of the little Polish I speak. And Rosalinde is teaching me to read Cyrillic, which makes the world here a lot more understandable.
Yesterday we took the bus to Sebastopol (yes, we are on a train trip, but Yalta is not connected to the train grid, so it was a bus by necessity) Here we are couchsurfing again, and doing some sightseeing. They have a Russian naval base here, and there are Russian military people walking around everywhere. And the whole city is still full of Soviet style memorabilia and statues. That’s actually quite interesting here. In the Baltic states, they renamed all the Lenin avenues to Freedom avenues, and took al his statues down, but here Lenin is still proudly watching over his people on every town square.
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