Åsas sida (Åsa's Page)

From Odessa to Minsk

Tuesday morning, we left Odessa and drove all the way up to Kyiv with only a stop at Ukraine’s beautiful Botanic Garden outside Uman. The highway passed outside of villages and towns, so we mostly saw fields on the way up to the capital. (That Ukraine’s domestic agricultural policies have an impact on the world’s grain markets becomes obvious when driving through the country.)

Kyiv was nice as always. We stayed at Hotel Bratislava a couple of metro stops outside the centre, and to save a bit of money, we decided to stay in a unrenovated room. The receptionist was reluctant to even give us the key, but we insisted. And no, it had not been renovated since the 1960s or the 1970s. The beds squeaked a lot at the slightest movement, and the bathroom left a lot to wish for. But it was quite cool to stay in true Soviet style for once. These rooms will for sure be renovated in a year or two.

Our first day, we mostly walked around the city, looked at the main sites and visited the Chernobyl museum (sad and dark). The second day, we went to the famous monastery caves at Saint Anthony’s Monastery. Jonas and I agreed that some of the monastery’s grandeur was probably lost to us because we are not religious. While the monastery was beautifully situated on a hillside above the Dnepr river, there was an immense commerce inside the monastery’s walls with icons, candles, scarves, and entrance fees. In the end, we only went down in the actual caves. I don’t know what I expected, but not really what I found down there. Inside the small rooms down the caves, there were glass coffins with mummified bodies wrapped in embroidered velvet drapes. The caves were full of people, all holding candles and many of them kissing the lids of each coffin that they passed. I just thought the whole experience immensely bizarre and somewhat tasteless and undignified.

The last thing that we saw in Kyiv was the Babyn Yar ravine (or park today), were approximately 100,000 Jews, Roma and others were killed during WWII. Of them, 35,000 people had been gathered there when the Nazis first occupied Kyiv in 1941, and in killed in 48 hours. The horrors that took place are simply beyond understanding!

Independence Square in Kyiv

Kyiv's last statue of Lenin

In the afternoon, we continued our journey and drove up to Chernihiv, a few kilometre from the Belarusian boarder. I have to say that in spite of a population of 300,000 people, Chernihiv was an immensely sleepy town and I had the impression that very little goes on there, and the thought of being young there almost pained me. But perhaps it had something that we missed during our short stay there. We did however end up in the most central hotel in town (Hotel Ukraina), located in a building that seemed to have been an administrational building that had been turned into a hotel, with long corridors and concrete staircases. Our room was a small apartment with golden wall paper and golden curtains. But it was really comfortable as everything was brand new (except for the taste of the decorator, which seemed to have been stuck in the old communist style).

Jonas in Chernihiv

Friday morning, we headed towards the Belarusian boarder and Minsk. We had feared the boarder quite a lot and foresaw a lot of hassle, especially on the Belarusian side. But everything went smooth and I was even surprised to see that the boarder guards on each side were too lazy to even bother to check our trunk.

The road from the boarder to Minsk was really pretty and in some ways, it reminded me a bit of the Swedish country side. The houses had changed from stone cottages to wooden houses in the last kilometres of Ukraine, and in Belarus, almost all houses were made out of wood. The difference was only that in Belarus, all houses were really well taken care of and painted in nice colours. So were the roads. And the bus stops. And the street signs, and so on. Everything was very well maintained and many times even new.

We stopped for lunch and a coffee at one of the few roadside cafes that we passed (traffic was not exactly heavy in Belarus), and ended up watching part of the opening of the Olympics. I have to say that it felt a bit surreal, sitting there at a café in the middle of no-where in Belarus on 08/08/08, watching the opening of the Olympics from Beijing. But I guess that is the charm of travelling: that you experience things that you are not used to and do not do in your everyday life!

Люблю тебя мая Одеса

Three days in Odessa. My fourth visit in 1.5 years. And I never get tired of it. I just love the city and (hence the headline of the posting: “I love you my Odessa”, which was the slogan of a tourist campaign posted around the city when we were there). Valeriu and Doina came with us down to the seaside to spend the weekend at the beach. They had however brought a tent and stayed on the beach when we headed into Odessa Saturday evening, and then we joined them again the day after. (Needless to say, I was a bit tempted to stay with them and spend the night at the beach, but we had already booked our hotel.) So we had two relaxing days at the beach, not taking into account all the time it took to drive back and forth to the beach, which was quite far away but a lot better than the beaches closer to Odessa.

Monday, we stayed in the city, walked around a lot and saw the main sites. We also wanted to have lunch on the top floor of hotel Odessa, which is out on the pier by the Potemkin stairs. We were quite far away when I started getting hungry and we walked and walked, determined to have lunch out there. When we finally got there, it turned out that the restaurant was closed for renovation. By then it was already 3:30 in the afternoon and we were terribly hungry so we just sat down at the first restaurant that we saw when we got to the top of the stairs again. It turned out to be a “Mexican” place. But since I had not had a burrito in two years, it was fine with me. The waitresses were however not the least interested in their customers and looked mostly annoyed about our presence. And when we finally got our meal, we were almost scared of them and hurried to get out of there.

In the evening, we met up with Anna E, an acquaintance of mine who is moving to Minsk for work and who was in Odessa for two weeks to study Russian. I got super excited about the idea to study Russian in Odessa, so if I do not have any other plans for next summer, I will seriously consider doing that. 

It is interesting to see how Odessa has changed since the first time I was there in May 2007. Many of the buildings that were then being renovated have been uncovered from the plastic that used to cover them and are now shining in all their splendour. The City Park has also been reopened. At the same time, some buildings have been torn down, others are being renovated, and entire streets are dug up to be repaired. To me, some of the charm with Odessa is the fact that it is a bit rough while traces of its former glory can be seen through the dust and the faded painting. But I am sure that Odessa will be even more beautiful and grandiose in a few years, when the entire city centre had undergone renovations. And I am of course happy for the Odessians. To me it is really the jewel of the region!  

The Black Sea 

Sibiu, Driving to Moldova, and Two Days in Chisinau

We are now in Ukraine again since Saturday morning, and we have seen a lot since I last wrote. When we arrived in Sibiu on Monday night, little more than a week ago, we instantly felt that we wanted to stay for a while. There had been too much driving and too little relaxed tourism. And Sibiu was an amazing town, built in the middle-ages and with a myriad of small streets and allies, and with colourful merchant houses. Since Sibiu was the EU’s Cultural Capital of the East in 2007, the town centre has undergone immense renovations and is now shining colourfully and with newly laid stones on the pedestrian streets and in the squares. There were quite a lot of tourists in Sibiu, but mainly Romanians, and my impression was that there were still mostly locals hanging out on the bars and cafés in the centre in the evenings.

It was already quite late when we arrived on Monday evening and after looking around a bit for somewhere to stay, we ended up getting a room at a luxurious hotel that according to my guidebook dated back to the 1500s. It had now been renovated and probably lost some of its former charm, but there was still a lot of blue, white and gold, and high ceilings, giving it a bit of a royal touch. So it was quite different from our previous, back-packer style lodgings. I felt very posh!

The best about our stay in Sibiu was that we had plenty of time to walk around the town, but also just to sit and read in a park, and to relax and watch people at out-door cafés. I.e. very much vacation. The only thing that disappointed me a bit was that no-one was the slightest impressed with my Romanian. In Chisinau, it is not unusual that people comment on the fact that I speak Romanian (and not Russian) and are happy about the fact that someone has learned their language. But no-one in Romania even seemed to notice – they spoke Romanian with me and English with Jonas. And I was so proud of the fact that I could speak the local language!

Sibiu

On Wednesday, we started our long drive back to Chisinau. I thought in my ignorance that at least the first part through Romania would be quite smooth, and I mostly feared the border to Moldova and bumpy roads from there to Chisinau. It turned out that I was wrong. Due to road works in Romania, the first 130 km took tree hours. After that, there was less work on the roads, but oh so many villages to drive through! But even if it took time, it was nice to see how the landscape and the villages changed along the way to Moldova. When we drove through the Romanian region Moldavia, the rural areas started looking more like the ones that I have grown accustomed to of in these past two years. And it was interesting to see old Romania meeting new Romania, with all the roads and construction work, and at the same time passing an uncountable number of horses with carriages, transporting hay and agricultural produce.

When we finally arrived at the boarder to Moldova, it was ridiculously empty and we only had a few cars in front of us. After we had crossed the boarder, the road to Chisinau was perfect: newly paved and almost empty. It only took us about an hour to drive from the boarder to Chisinau. Needless to say, Jonas got a very good first impression of Moldova. 

Showing Chisinau to a friend was great. We walked around and looked at the sites around the city: old buildings and parks, communist monuments, the local hang-outs, and even UNIC (or ZOM), the old department store from the USSR. We also ate out a lot, and every time at a different restaurant. In Jonas’ view, Chisinau has by far the best food of all the countries he has visit so far on this trip. I can only agree!

Since we are going by car, I wanted to bring some things back to Sweden and so I started to pack up some of my things. It felt very strange and a little sad. After all, Moldova has been my home for the past two years, and even if I seem to have many new adventures waiting for me, I can’t help feeling a bit sad about leaving this lovely country.

Sunflower field in Moldova