Ah, Odessa, your courtyards are beautiful!

I first came to Odessa in 2012. At that time I was on my way from Truskavets, where I spent a month of relaxed and unhurried vacation, to Moldova, through Transnistria. The purpose was to “run-in” my recently obtained passport of a citizen of Ukraine.

It was my first time traveling abroad, with lots of excitement and a curio when I had to insure myself under the guise of a car. However, this is a completely different story. In this article, I will tell you about how I spent two days in the very colorful Ukrainian city of Odessa.

My train Lviv – Odessa arrived at the station in the pouring rain. Having unloaded my things and having hardly run to the stop, I tried to leave in the direction I needed. At that time I was still a young and green “tourist”, so I didn’t know about the necessity to have a PowerBank with me (they didn’t even exist then) and a worked out route on the map to the hotel. So I found myself with a dead cell phone in an unfamiliar city.

On a piece of paper was written the address of the sovdepov-type hotel I had booked earlier. I approached the girl at the bus stop and did something unforgivably stupid – I asked her for directions. Then it would turn into a whole philosophy – why you can’t ask locals for directions, but I was far from it then.

A girl of about 28 years old clapped her beautiful eyelashes and pointed to one of the minibuses, which I jumped into. After about 5 stops I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where to get off! I jumped out again in the rain and ran into the nearest store, where I bought a bar for refreshment and asked the saleswoman where to go next. Without thinking long she tells me that I have to go the other way.

Angry at the girl from the bus stop, and at the same time at all Odessa residents, I get on the bus in the opposite direction. And that’s when a brilliant trick occurs to me! Ukrainians very rarely treat each other normally, especially tourists. What can’t be said about foreigners. Here, we have a whole cult of the foreigner (which is quite strange, especially for Odessa, a port city). Today, in 2017, this is realized even more clearly. If you are some foreign blogger, preferably an American – you can go traveling in Ukraine. You will be watched by everyone, thanked by thousands, and your promotion will be free of charge by the largest media and TV in the country.

Having realized all this then, I pick up the dead phone, put it to my ear and start talking to myself, giving a slight accent to my voice, complaining to my interlocutor that I had not been to Ukraine for so many years, I was studying in Germany and now I had arrived home, just off the plane, and there was such a cold reception…. Exactly in a minute 5 or 6 people helped me to find my way to the hotel, literally taking me to it by the hand. For which, of course, I thank them very much.

While I was checking into the hotel and changing into dry clothes (which didn’t help much, I had a bad cold the next day), the sun was shining outside, and my friends were already waiting at the entrance, who were going to show me around the city. We went to see Odessa with them!

Most likely the cold was starting to make itself felt, because this time the city seemed to me incredibly ugly and filled with negativity. And now, many years later, looking at the pictures, I realize that it was a completely subjective perception. Here I don’t remember such wonderful weather, I remember this beauty! It’s good that in 2015 I came back here with a great company and completely rehabilitated the city in my eyes (although, most likely, we fell a bit in the eyes of the city when we walked along the embankment half the night and sang songs).

I confess that the center of Odessa didn’t interest me much that time. I pulled my companions into back alleys that they had never been to before. I wanted to feel this Odessa color, to look at Odessa courtyards. Which, by the way, did not differ much from Lviv’s. But the atmosphere here is completely different!

We walked till night, I photographed night Odessa, but since I used a weak soapbox for traveling, the photos were so bad that they can’t even be put in a home album. Therefore, I do not attach them.

The night was calm and warm. The next morning the weather was sunny and I went for new adventures to Tiraspol, the capital of unrecognized Transnistria.