We'll Always Have Vladimir

I'm leaving Vladimir in about 2 hours. Yeah, talk about putting blogging off to the last minute. But it's been such a nice summer that I didn't want to sit inside on the computer. I taught one class - it was my favorite level and I had a great group of students. The weather was really hot for a couple weeks and we spent a lot of time outside; on picnics, throwing the football around, swimming, or just grading papers in the sun. I took a day trip to the monastary at Sergeiev Posad, a weekend trip to visit a friend in Nizhni Novgorod, and a weekend trip to Moscow when my family was there (they were also in Petersburg and Vladimir, and it was great to have them here).

Of course, it's hard to believe I'm leaving. I don't really have anything to say about it, other than that I had an amazing time. Maybe when I get home I'll be able to reflect on it more. I'll probably just sit around for a few weeks in a melancholic state drinking tea and listening to Кино.

But I've got some things to do before that. Tonight Eric, Sara, and I are getting on the train and heading 24 hours south to the city of Rostov-on-the-Don. We're going to teach English there for three weeks to Russian scientists. Then Eric and I are heading to Moldova to do the same thing for 10 more days. Next we're flying to Tblisi, Georgia. We should get there on August 2nd, and we have tickets from Istanbul to New York City on the 18th. We're planning on spending a few days in Georgia and then traveling around the eastern part of Turkey before going to Istanbul. From New York I'm planning on heading to Boston for a few days before flying home on August 23rd. I'm not sure how good my internet access will be this summer, but I should be able to check my email sometimes. So please write to me, and maybe I'll even blog if I get ambitious. To those of you in Russia: goodbye and I'll miss you a lot, to those in America: I hope I can see you soon. Here's one last picture of a wonderful lunch we had at the American Home. I hope I'll be back to Vladimir again before too long.

Spring Break, Part 3: Odessa and Tiraspol

Finally, over three weeks after we came back from vacation, I'm finishing my blog posts about my trip. Better late than never, as they say. Well, we came into Odessa on the train at around 5 in the morning. This is the train station:

In the other two cities we visited we went with the person who was renting apartments, and we stuck with the tradition this time. Here in Odessa it was a very old, stooped over, amiable grandmother. "Come with grandma," she said, "Grandma will show you a good apartment. Grandma has good apartments." "Is it close to the train station?" we asked. "Close," she assured us, "Close." We followed her onto the trolleybus. After riding for about 40 minutes we realized that Grandma's apartments weren't so close after all. We rode to what I think was the end of the line, to a very quiet neighborhood near the sea. We followed Grandma to a yard where we were met by her much less amiable daughter, who showed us a nice two-room apartment. I asked if it had hot water and she said, "Of course" like I was a complete idiot for asking. She was pretty pushy and was asking for more money than we wanted to pay, but we were exhausted and agreed. We only paid her for one night, though, secretly planning to get a new place. We slept for a couple hours and then Sara took a shower, and soon realized that the hot water lasted for approximately 5 seconds before turning cold. We asked the irritated woman about it and she said that you just had to keep turning the water on and off. Even that didn't work.

We left our place and walked down to the beach. It was deserted except for fishermen and workers getting things ready for beach season.

Next we got back on the bus for the long ride back to the center. We spent the day just walking around the city. The center is a maze of cafe and shop-lined streets, decaying art noveau-styled buildings, and funky monuments. This is near the central Cathedral Square.

The Opera House and trees around it are beautiful.

We went to the Potemkin Stairs, well known from a famous scene (people being massacred and a baby carriage bouncing down the stairs) in the groundbreaking movie Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

This statue, at the top of the staircase, is the Duc de Richelieu, who was the governor of Odessa and is considered a founding father of the city.

And here's an example of one of Odessa's many mystifying statues.

Along one bridge we noticed lots of locks with lover's names written or engraved on them, locked on to the rails on the edge of the bridge. This one is dedicated to Vova and Sveta.

Not only are there a lot of churches in Odessa, but we also saw this new mosque, which is actually, interestingly, called the "Arab Cultural Center for Justice and Democracy".

Here it says, "God is One" written in Arabic-style script, but actually in Russian.

We visited a book store and bought some Russian classics, which we started to read in what became our new favorite restaurant, Top Sandwich (it's amazing how hard it is find a real sandwich in Russia, especially in Vladimir). We also booked a room in a hostel, which was more expensive than we had been paying, but in a very central location.

At night we headed out to our suburban apartment. Before going all the way there we took a detour to the beach, sneaking through a gate. There were a couple guards who saw us and chased us down. We were a little nervous, but when we told the old guard we just wanted to sit on the beach, he said, "Why didn't you just come and tell me? That's fine, just tell me." We stayed out there for a long time, watching the waves and looking at the stars.

In the morning we told our host that we were leaving her and to our surprise, she wasn't upset. We went into the city and checked into our hostel, which was filled with the usual assortment of quirky characters - a very talkative English girl who told us the same two stories over and over, a Canadian day-trader who works one hour a day and used to be a fruititarian, a Japanese guy who didn't speak English but constantly spoke Japanese to himself, an old Polish guy with a very creepy smile, and the typical middle-aged Australian owner who does nothing but sit and talk with his hot Ukrainian employees.

After checking in, we (and the English talker) caught an excursion out to the catacombs. There are hundreds of miles of catacombs under the city, and during WWII partisan fighters lived, cold and hungry, in them for over two years. This is their slogan: "Blood for blood, death for death."
Here is a reproduction of the partisans' kitchen.

And of course, pictures of Lenin and Stalin.

The tour was interesting, and it was amazing to hear about how people (even children) lived in such horrible conditions for so long. We learned that Fidel Castro had also taken this tour and was also impressed.

The next day we decided to take a trip to Transniester (sometimes spelled Transnistria), a territory that is technically part of Moldova but considers itself an independent republic. The English girl had gone there the day before and had gotten in (on her second try) by paying the border guards 10 dollars. We bought a bus ticket to Tiraspol, the capital, and hoped that we could cross the border without any problems. But at the border a large, scary guard took our passports away and told us to start filling out some forms. He asked if we had visa invitations to get in, and we said no. He told us that we couldn't get in without invitations, but told us to keep filling out the forms anyway. We filled them out and then waited for a long time. Finally someone else came and told us again that we couldn't get in without invitations. This began a long process of standing around, talking to different guards, and trying to see if there was any way they would let us through. Our bus waited awhile for us but finally left. We made friends with the guards who were checking passports as cars drove through. They told us that they would gladly let us go across the border, but it wasn't their department - they were passport control and the people who weren't letting us through were migration control. But eventually, when no migration control guards were in view, we ended up just walking across the border (this was over two hours after we arrived). We caught a taxi to Tiraspol, glad to finally be in a breakaway region, but a little nervous about our illegal status there. We changed our money to Transniestrian rubles, which are obviously only good in Transniester. Then we ate lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon strolling around. As we had heard, the city was just like what you'd imagine a Soviet city to be like - clean and quiet, with lots of Soviet monuments. Here are two billboards celebrating Transniester (its full name is the Transniestrian Moldovan Republic, which is what those three letters stand for).

Transniester was part of the Soviet Union longer than the rest of Moldova, and the majority of the people there are Russian and Ukrainian. The main language is Russian, so we got around fine. Of course Lenin still makes his presence known there.

And this is the Russian general Alexander Suvorov, who founded Tiraspol and appears on almost all of the Transniestrian ruble bills.

This tank says, "For the motherland!" on it.

The streets were very quiet...

...but there were some kids out (quietly) playing with goats.

We walked by the Dniester River and also saw the Kvint brandy factory, which is so important to the city that it is on the 5 ruble note. We also took a taxi ride to the outside of town, where a new stadium complex has been built for the Transniestrian soccer team. The huge sparkling complex, with a Mercedes dealership attached to it, looked very out of place in a city of Soviet apartment buildings.

We were planning on taking a bus back to Odessa, but when a taxi driver offered to take us back for a pretty good price, we agreed, not knowing how things would go over when we crossed the border back into Ukraine. We told him our situation and he suggested that we get our passports registered in town or the guards would try to bribe us on our way back. We had no trouble, and only had a pay a couple dollars, to get our passports registered. No one asked any questions at the border and we got through fine. On the way back the driver, who had lived in Tiraspol for over 50 years, told us about life in Transniester (he confirmed things we had heard about it being completely controlled by mafia). When we got back to Odessa we tired and hungry, but happy and relieved not to have gotten into any trouble for our excursion into a lawless republic.

The next day in Odessa was our last, and we wandered around the sunny streets, eating ice cream and buying some souvenirs. We made one last trip to Top Sandwich and got on the train to Moscow. Altogether, it was an amazing trip and I recommend everyone who's at all interested to visit Sochi, Yalta, and Odessa (and even Tiraspol).