Crimean road trip, part 2

The final pictures from my student's road trip this spring...
(Part I is here.)

Crimean road trip, part I

Imagine:
Early spring near the sea.
You.
A motorcycle.
An open road before you.

A former student lives in Simferopol and owns a motorcycle, which means awesome road trips all around the Crimean peninsula. I asked him if I could share some of his pictures here, since Crimea is beautiful and he's covered a lot of ground on his bike this year. (Thanks for agreeing, Sergey!)

He took these pictures in April-May 2017. You'll notice trees still dull from winter and the deserted beaches of early spring. I left the pictures in the order he took them on his travels. He sent so many pictures that I'll share the other half with you in a later post.

Храм-маяк Николая Чудотворца. The temple-lighthouse of St. Nikolai, worker of miracles. Malorechenskoe, Crimea.

Medieval battle in Sudak

Here's something that's popular in Ukraine: historical reenactments.

Most of them are pretty old school. Mongols versus the Kyivan Rus, knights versus dragons, Soviets versus German soldiers. You can find a whole list of them here. And here's a peek at the “Tu Stan!” Medieval Festival near Lviv.

Crimea?

Yesterday we teamed up with a friend from the Russian language meetup and went to the opening lecture in Reed College's Understanding Putinism event. Most of the talks sounded too scholarly for our ragtag group, but hearing "Crimea" = instant draw. It's weird- although I never liked Crimea much before (especially the capital)....

Hello, Simferopol!

... now I keep thinking about it.

But is it summer in Simferopol?

Here's something worth taking a peek at-

if you don't see the video, here's the link

That was Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, yesterday as people were coming and going from the train station. I'd been dreaming of traveling looking up the weather report that same evening and got this-

Yikes!

How our story began

A long, long time ago, D took me on a trip to visit the city he was born in.

We'd been dating for perhaps a year or two and I still couldn't really understand what Ukraine was. It was only some far away place with a complicated history. Ukraine meant that he drank more tea than anyone I'd ever met and had a family that drove to town to bring him food, worried he wasn't getting enough from the university cafeteria. It meant a super-sexy accent when he spoke English, and hours spent together checking his literature essays for grammar mistakes. It meant me scratching my head continuously over wait?-what-language-do-people-speak-there? Beyond those things, I had no other notions of the country (except for a shady vibe from a geography teacher who had briefly visited the place and came back convinced he'd been followed by the mafia).

D must have taken pity on me, or maybe he was just tired of trying to explain everything, because one spring day he proposed the trip idea. After a long hot summer of driving tour buses across the Arctic Circle -

NEVER AGAIN!

- we got on a plane in Alaska and disembarked in a daze in Kyiv. The capital city felt overwhelming. I remember following D through the streets, focused completely on not losing sight of his heels. Eating fast food baked potatoes in an underground mall. Taking a bus tour of a bajillion monasteries and cathedrals, all of which started to blend together after the second stop. We caught the train to Crimea, pretty much just showing up at his relatives' place... who took it pretty well. Score one for Ukrainian relatives.

But like I mentioned before, the magic of Crimea is not found in Simferopol. Simferopol is full of buses and markets and passengers in transit. The real draw is the seashore.

Ukrainians

There have been hundreds of photos taken lately that show Ukrainians dressed for war.


These are not those photos.

Kharkov

 Kyiv

Yevpatoria

Poltava

Simferopol

Simferopol: yea or nay?

Remember this?

Have you guessed the destination of our first trip of 2014?

That's right- Simferopol! Otherwise known as D's hometown.

My feelings on Simferopol are mixed. Ukraine has a lot of beautiful cities, but I'm not sure Simferopol is one of them.

It's the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the jumping off point for visiting any city that borders the Black Sea. In my eyes, there are nearly as many trains, electrichkas, trolleybuses, buses, marshrutkas, and taxis as there are residents (just over 350,000). Simferopol seems like more of a gateway than a destination for most people.

Since there's no metro, I haven't been able to explore the city much; perhaps there's undiscovered beauty waiting in other parts of the city. Or perhaps it's the timing of our visits as we almost always visit in the fall, winter, or spring. Maybe summertime Simferopol is worthy of an entire deck of postcards, who knows.

main square with the mandatory Lenin statue

BUT I will say that this (very short) visit did open my eyes a bit and allowed me to see more charm in the city than before. We walked as much as possible and even places that had been umimpressive on previous visits seemed a little cooler.

The main drag- Pushkin street.

Here's one of my favorite finds from this trip- a library tucked away on a quiet street.

Yevpatoria in October, part 2

As you can see, Yevpatoria is a mix of the grandiose and the mundane.

Gates that proclaim the entrance to the "old city"

Yevpatoria in October, part 1

Yevpatoria- hands down my favorite place on the planet.

They say it's a hot mess in the summer time- beaches swarming with tourists, rusty Ferris wheels running nonstop, exorbitant prices. Vacations and the massive dance festival/party called Kazantip (advertised to "crazy party animals") bring tens of thousands of visitors into the city during the hottest months of the year.

In the winter the city is sullen and silent. Most of the shops are bordered up. Downtown feels haunted, empty, and unsafe. Hotels drop their prices.

For both economic and sanity reasons, we avoid the entire Crimean peninsula in the summer. Come fall, winter, and spring though, you can find us on the phone, booking a room in Yevpatoria for the following weekend!

This was our first time visiting in the autumn. Last year we managed a visit in the winter and in the spring. This year we fell victim to workaholism and only now took our first vacation of 2013. Can't complain about the timing too much though, because we found a train that left Kharkov at 2 AM, meaning we could work a regular day on Thursday and still arrive in Crimea the following morning.

View of the countryside from the train window

Plus, we ended up travelling in the first-class compartment, which meant it was just the two of us! : ) Usually we travel in a four-person compartment, which is fine but it can't compare to having your own private space. Not to mention that trains coming through Kharkov are often en route from elsewhere, so when you board at 2 AM you enter a pitch-black compartment where people are already sleeping and you're fumbling around to make your bed in the dark. Not this time!

A train ride away...

Hooray, we got our train tickets!!!! I feel like a peasant living in mediaeval Europe who rarely ventures beyond the city walls and now my farmer husband is in his Sunday best, hitching the horse to the wagon, and I (in my finest) am climbing into the back of the wagon with the vegetables and livestock that we'll sell in the neighboring city.

Well, except that we have no produce or pigs to sell.
Or a horse for that matter.
And in a very un-peasant-like manner, we'll be traveling there... СВ!!!

СВ stands for спальный вагон, or sleeping car. It's the first-class version of overnight train travel with only 2 bunks to a compartment. I've only met one person who has ever travelled this way. We usually go купе (kupe), which is second-class with 4 bunks to a compartment. Most friends and relatives travel плацкарт, which is the cheapest and also resembles how cattle are transported (if cattle could be coaxed onto a bunk. And if they drank beer in transit). D and I took плацкарт once. I told him that if he wanted our relationship to survive, then the future held only купе for us.

СВ is usually prohibitively expensive but we waited so long to buy tickets that it was the only available option. Плацкарт is usually the first to sell out, then купе. I guess the truly wealthy are too busy traveling around in helicopters and Maseratis to be bothered with traveling first-class on a train, and СВ is too expensive for most. Luckily the tickets weren't too bad this time: $50 each to get there via СВ, $25 each to get back in купе. I'm really, really excited to see what conditions are actually like in СВ, even if it merely means freedom from snoring strangers :p

I'm not going to tell you where we're headed yet, but here are some clues...

It takes about 10 hours on the train + 2 hours by bus to reach this place from Kharkiv.

It's my favorite place to visit in Ukraine during the chilly months. Everyone else says this is crazy, that it's vastly superior in the summer. But on our last visit these two cats agreed that winter is best :p Cats are never wrong, right?

And one final clue- the city is ancient. I mean, all European cities are old, of course, but the party started here in about 500 BC.

See you next week!!!! : )



PS: If your curiosity has gotten the best of you, here's the answer.