...И горячей воды ещё нет

So I'm taking care of some last minute thins before heading off to Georgia tomorrow. Well, just to Kiev tomorrow, and then Georgia the next day. One thing I have to do is write something up here about my trip to Sevastopol on Saturday. My bus left around 10:30 Saturday morning and arrived about 11:45. All the guidebooks say that it takes two hours to get to Sevastopol, so I was surprised to see that it was really so much quicker. The ride back took closer to an hour, even. The ride out was pretty nice, The weather wasn't great; overcast and a little chilly, but at least it never rained. The countryside isn't as nice as on the way to Yalta, since that road goes through the mountains, but there was some nice scenic farmland and wooded areas. We skirted around the town Bakhchisarai, which is now at the top of my list of places to visit in Crimea, after having taken care of Sevastopol. The landscape gets pretty cool once you get close to Sevastopol. There's a town called Inkerman at the end of Sevastopol Inlet, where there are a bunch of cool cliffs that look like they have caves carved out of them. It gets pretty hill as you get into town, with lots of smaller towns all along the way. The bus station is right next to the train station, at the south end of a small inlet off of the main inlet, and from here one must head north to get to downtown Sevastopol. There was an old train engine on display outside the station with car attached that had a huge gun mounted on it, and on the engine was written "Death to Fascism!"
I caught a minibus into town, and was confused by the payment procedure. I guess buses do it differently in every town, because in Simferopol you usually pay the driver when you first get on, where as in Sevastopol you're expected to pay as you get off. I tried paying the guy when I got on and he wouldn't take it. I hopped off once I saw the statue of Nakhimov and I knew I was in the center. I headed straight for the water, and was pleased to find a nice little promenade area where people where out for a weekend stroll. This is where Sevastopol's famous eagle statue / pillar mounted on a rock out in the water is, though I was surprised at how close to the shore it was. I always figured it was out a ways in the water, but it was only about ten feet or so out. I walked along the water for a bit, when I saw some sort of huge awesome statue on a hill on the other side of a small harbor, and I knew I had to go check it out. I headed back up to the main drag and started in the direction of the statue. From the main street I turned down a path into Sevastopol's central market, which was fairly busy, this being Saturday. I didn't really bother stopping to look around the market area, because markets around here are more or less the same, really. Besides, I was on a mission to find the statue. I had lost sight of it by this point, but relied on my sense of direction to guide me. I ended up back down on the waterfront, this time on the other side of that small harbor. I found some stairs leading up, walked through a parking lot, then found another, much long set of stairs that took me to the top of the hill, from where I easily found the statue. I walked towards it along a dirt path, then down into the big open square below the statue. The statue was of two soldiers, one with his arm outstretched towards the sea (of which there was a nice view from the top of this hill) and pointing his bayonetted gun towards the sky with his other hand, while the other had his gun posed to shoot. To the tip of the bayonet the whole thing was probably about 50 feet high (though I'm bad at judging the height of things). I'm not really into all that militaristic stuff, but I thought this statue was really cool. I was just so blown away by the size and grandiosity of it. I sat beneath it for a while, watching the few other people mill about the square. There weren't a lot of people around since the statue is pretty out of the way. There were a few teenagers skateboarding, and when once tried to do an ollie his friend yelled out to him, "you got about 5 millimeters there!"
From the statue I headed back towards downtown. From the that hill I had seen to the top of another hill in the main part of town, and I could see another large statue, this one of Lenin pointing towards the sea. I started heading up that hill to find it, but got sidetracked by other things along the way. First, I came upon a nice looking orthodox church, and sat in its courtyard for a little while. There was a big water tank covered by a little roof with a cross on it, which I assumed meant that it was regarded as some sort of holy water. Most orthodox churches have some sort of spigot on the grounds where worshippers drink and wash their hands a faces, but it was funny to see this one coming from a normal-looking water tank. I saw quite a few sailors out as I walked up the hill as well, reminding me that I was in a Navy town. I got near the top of the hill and found a viewpoint looking down on South Bay (inlet, really), where most of the Russian Naval facilities are. In case you didn't know, Sevastopol was home to the Soviet Union's Black Sea Fleet, and when Ukraine became independent in 1991 there was a long drawn-out negotiation process between Ukraine and Russia over control of the fleet. In the end, Ukraine took a portion of the fleet for its own navy, while Russia kept most of it and was allowed to "lease" the port from Ukraine for a contracted period. They currently have it leased through 2017, and while Russia would certainly like to extend that lease when the time comes, while President Yushchenko has signaled that he would like to see the Russians leave and not have the lease renewed. Of course, 2017 is a long ways off, and a lot could happen between now and then. This struggle over Sevastopol is central to the tensions between Ukraine and Russia and the whole Crimean question that I'm here to research. I was actually quite surprised at how low-key the port seemed from the hilltop. I could see some warships, but there seemed to be only a few, with not a lot of soldiers around or anything. I guess I just expected there to be more activity or something. From this viewpoint I headed up into a park. There were some nice statues and fountains, as well as a carnival with rides, but the main attraction in this park is a large building called the "Panorama," that has a large panoramic mural of the history of the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. It seemed interesting, but you can only go in with groups and at scheduled times, and I didn't want to bother waiting around for another tour to start, so I skipped it. I know I'll be back to Sevastopol and have plenty of opportunities to see it.
I sat on a bench in the park for a while, when I saw a girl walking around who screamed American. She had a Vasser sweatshirt on, a backpack, and she was carrying around the old Lonely Planet Ukraine. I though it would be nice to have someone to talk to, so I caught up with her and asked if she spoke English. I think I made her nervous and startled at first, but when she realized I was asking a question in English she realized what was going on. She was, in fact, from the US, but she had grown up mostly in Argentina. Her names was Malina, and she did in fact go to Vasser. We walked out of the park and talked for a while. She currently lives in Kiev volunteering at some organization that helps the Jewish community in Ukraine (I can't really remember what it is they do exactly). She was in Crimea for a conference in Yalta, and was taking a day trip to Sevastopol. She also studied Russian in school, and also spent a semester in St. Petersburg after I did. She was on her way back to the bus station but decided to tag along with me for a little bit in my continuing quest to find the big Lenin statue. We went down a small street in the direction I thought it would be, but after a while it was beginning to look like we weren't really getting close to anything. I assumed, since the statue was so big, that I'd spot it eventually, but it wasn't working out. She was getting worried that we had gone too far in the opposite direction of the bus station, so we took some stairs down the hill towards the street that heads to the bus station so she could head out. I had already bought a ticket back to Simferopol for 8:00, so I headed back towards town to do some more sight seeing. We traded email addresses as we watched a man going into epileptic seizures while his friends tried to help him. We thought about trying to help, but we really didn't know what we could have done.
I walked back to where the statue of Nakihmov was and took some stairs down to a little dock area behind it. There was an old lady trying to recruit people for a guided tour on a boat, but I politely refused. On the dock, the captain of the boat also asked me if I wanted to take a ride. I was afraid it would cost too much, so I turned him down again, saying I was just there to take some pictures. I thought about it for a little while, and decided it probably wasn't that expensive, and that it was probably worth doing either way. I asked him how much it cost, and hie said 40 Grivnya (like, $7), so I decided to go for it. It was pretty late in the day by then and starting to get pretty chilly, especially out on the water, so I put on my new big warm hoodie. The tour started by heading down through South Bay (where the fleet is), where we got a closer look at all the ships. There were more there than I had initially seen from the top of the hill, but it still seemed pretty quite for such an important naval base. The captain also gave a guided tour with with all kinds of historical and topical information about this sights, but he didn't have an intercom or anything and I was sitting in the back, so I could barely hear him over the sound of the engine. I have a very hard time understanding Russian if there is background noise anyways, so I gave up quickly trying to listen to what he was saying. The tour was nice anyways, and I got some decent pictures of the boats and of the town from the water. after South Bay we headed out a little ways into the main bay to get a look at the eagle column, then headed back to port. On my way back up the steps, that same old lady stopped me and asked me where I was from. She asked me if I wanted to go to Moscow, so I said I'd already been there. She handed me a card of her tour company and asked, "Do you want to go to Moscow right now? Nobody goes to Moscow except us." I told her "maybe in the future," and was on my way.
I stopped into a little restaurant for dinner, and felt quite awkward the whole time as I was the only person there. I had a beer and an eggy pork chop wit french fries. Not that good, but not terrible I guess. I was starting to wish I hadn't bought a ticket back for so late, as I was getting tired and the sky was getting dark. I had a couple hours to kill, so I sat on a bench on the promenade for a while, looking out at the sea and listening to Kino on my ipod. I then wondered up some more stairs towards some other monument, but it was too dark to really see what it was of. I still had some time before I needed to be at the bus station, but I decided to head down there anyways, since I didn't really have anything else to do. I hoped in a marshrutka heading towards the station, but since it was dark I wasn't really sure when the station was coming up. I figured somebody else must be getting of there, or somebody at the station getting on, but I saw it go passed with nobody asking for the driver to stop, and by then I was too nervous to shout out for him to stop, so I kept riding it until somebody else needed to get off. This turned out to be quite a ways through what seemed like a bit of a sketchy area, so I figured it wasn't a good idea to walk back from there. Instead, I crossed the street to catch a bus heading back in the opposite direction. As I was boarding the bus, there was a bit of a jam of people near the door, as some people were trying to pay the driver before getting of while others were trying to get on. One guy trying to get off was getting frustrated. I had just gotten up the steps when he tried to shove his way down, and in doing so we kind of bumped into each other. Not a big deal or anything, but this guy got really mad and shoved me as hard as he could into the bus and into a group of people, and shouted at me, "YOUR MOTHER!" Now, this is a very common Russian insult, except he left off the first word, which means, "I fucked," though because of the grammatical structure, that part is still implied. I think this is the first time anybody's said that to me, which I guess makes it something of a milestone. I didn't really fall or anything, just kind of stumbled back a bit, and as he got off the bus I just gave him a look that said, "are you kidding me?" You know the look. Right after he got off, another woman caught in the jam of people tried to go for the door and got tripped up on something, falling into the area near the driver's seat. She never said anything but had an angry and embarrassed look on her face I helped her up with a couple other people, including the angry guy now outside the bus, and i was worried that she was with him and that the guy was going to get angry again and try to hit me or something, but he didn't say anything and the bus was quickly on its way. The whole incident happened so fast, probably about 15 seconds all together. I rode one stop back to the bus station where, thankfully, somebody else had to get off too, so I didn't even have to tell the driver to stop.
I waited around the station for about an hour before the bus left. It was more of a marshrutka than a bus, and I ended up with the very front single seat, so I had lots of leg room. The ride was quick, but unfortunately took us to the bus station downtown next to the train station, not the one near my apartment. I grabbed a quick shaurma, then caught what was probably one of the last buses of the night back to my neighborhood. A few stops down a huge crowd of people got on, which was very strange considering it was bout 9:30. When I got on it had been pretty empty, so I had a seat, but the bus got more and more packed. It was the most people I had ever seen on a bus in Simferopol. I figured that maybe it was literally the last bus of the night, so everybody had to pile in or they would be stranded. For a while I wasn't sure how I was going to et off, since there were so many people packed between me and the door, but enough people got off before my stop that it cleared up a bit and I was able to get off OK. I was pretty beat from a long day of sight seeing, and slept in nice and long Sunday morning. I was surprised to see that my computer's clock had gone back an hour, and then discovered that European Daylight Savings Time ended Saturday night, a whole week before it does in the US. SO, for this week only, I'm nine hours ahead of PST instead of 10.
On Monday my internet cut out, and I realized that I was supposed to pay the day before and had forgotten, so I headed over to Ardinvest to pay up. As of today the internet still wasn't working, so I headed back to see what the dilly was. As soon as I told the secretaries my internet was down, they said, "Vorovskogo 60?", which is my building number, so I immediately understood that the whole building (or cluster of buildings, as that address applies to at least ten buildings) was having problems. They asked for my apartment number, and told a guy in the back who was working on the problem. He asked what the number of my "something," and I didn't know what he meant. I said I didn't understand, so the secretary asked him, "do you know what it is in English?", and his face lit up and he asked, "You speak English?", in English. He seemed delighted to use his English, which was pretty good, though he still didn't know the word he needed, so he had another guy sitting next to him look it up. Turns out it was a word for "entry way" that I didn't know. He said that they were doing a lot of rewiring or something in my building, but that he would call his engineer and tell him to take care of my line right away. He gave me has number to call if it wasn't fixed by 4:00 today, but thankfully it was and I was able to get online just in time to Skype with mom.
Today I also bought some glue to fix my shoes, since after walking around Sevastopol I discovered that my brown shoes had cracks in the sole that were wearing through to my insole and had actually ruined my sock on the left foot. The shoe repair guy said he couldn't fix it, so I went to the "shoelace" ladies too see if they had some good glue. I was thinking something along the lines of Shoe Goo, but they gave me some super glue that supposedly works on shoes as well. They seem to be holding up pretty well so far, but I have a feeling they'll wear through after a bit of walking around. I was planning on wearing them to Georgia, so hopefully they'll at least hold up that long. I also bought some new insoles, which will hopefully keep my socks safe.
One last thing - Monday I had another meeting with Sergei, my advisor. We met briefly at the University to go over my project plan. Since it's still a bit up in the air, we came up with some general ideas. For November and December we agreed I should focus on reading and developing my ideas, as well as meeting and talking with some of the important people he knows. He told me about a good library downtown that has the best collection of material on Crimea anywhere, and he just happens to be friends with the director. He's going to take me there once I get back from Georgia. He also said that he's going to help arrange excursions around Crimea for me, which I'm very excited about. I feel like I'm in good hands under his tutelage, and I think he can provide a lot of good opportunities to meet people and make connections while I'm here. He's going to be showing a short film about the recent Georgia conflict and giving a brief lecture about it tomorrow afternoon, and although I might be busy getting ready for my own trip Georgia, I'm going to try to make it. He'll also be bringing some books for me to borrow. Should be interesting.
Ok, that's that. Expect something about Georgia once I get back in about a week. Wish me luck!


-Austin