Odessa

sorry for the delay, it seems as though the minute I got back from vacation work just started pouring in!

so, the night train to Odessa was a bit disappointing (we booked the most luxurious compartment we could get)

picture this: it's 33 degrees, the windows are nailed shut and smells like a mixture between horses and salami.



just when I thought things can't get worse, I feel my bladder screaming out - I have to use the washroom. yep. that is a hole in the floor. you see the tracks under you. It smells even worse than in the rest of the train.



and there's no toilet paper. As you might guess, it didn't take me very long to master the technique of peeing standing up in a moving train.

After 15 or 16 hours we arrived in Odessa



There were tons of old babushkas offering rooms or houses to rent in russian, but they were outside of town and we had no car, so we set off through the city to try and find a cheap hotel. and we did! Only first, we had to decipher the names of the streets - our travel guide, being written in english, had all street names in normal latin alphabet. Now after a smelly night dreaming of salami eating horses, try understanding if this:



means "preobrazhenskaya street" or not. yeah, I know.

so anyways, we found this hotel:


"Hotel Passage"

We had a very big room with bathroom and 4 meter high ceiling for about 20 euros a night, smack in downtown and close to the harbour. There was no hot water in the hotel, but that is relatively normal in Ukraine.

We went shopping in the beautiful shopping center next to the hotel:



they also had an air conditioned, modern one closeby, but this one just had more style.

We visited the Potemkin stairs, for those of you that have seen "Battleship Potemkin", it was filmed here.



This was also fun:


yeah, that's a real live snake.

Okay, now on to the more serious things:


The beer was good and cost about 60 cents for half a litre glass. The waitress didn't speak english and didn't understand that we wanted to pay, and just kept bringing out two more... oh well.

And, there's also something for the single traveller in Odessa:


after we took a bus to Transnistria. It is a part of Moldova that declared itself independant and had a civil war 10 years ago. There were warnings to travellers on the canadian governments website to steer clear of it, but how often do you get to set foot in an international no man's land? So we went. Stay tuned.