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Published: August 4th 2008
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I'll write up the diaries from the first part of my summer trip when I have the time. In the meantime, here are some holiday snaps of Yalta, the Southern Crimean port next to the Black Sea, where.....
* Ana and I rented a room in an uncomfortable, small stone cottage that belonged to a tiny Armenian woman named Anna Vakhrudinovna, her two sons and their fiancées.
* We bought an inflatable green hoop and swam every day in the Black Sea - which was warmer than anything I had showered under during the rest of July.
* You can see bodies of all shapes and sizes tucked into bikinis, from the incredibly heavenly to the incredibly heavy.
* I wondered whether Russians take the socks out of the front of their swimming trunks before they go into the water.
* We bought cactus ice cream for breakfast, chicken
shaurma for lunch, and vodka martinis for dinner.
* We took strolls along Yalta's seafront every afternoon, when it became too hot to lie on the beach. I wondered where else in the world you can find tropical palms trees next to a statue
of Lenin.
* I ordered a fish pizza from a restaurant - translated as
"Pizza with Pish" in the English version of the menu.
* I burned my back after lying in the sun for too long.
* I was told by the old lady sunbathing next to us that the best cure for a sunburned back is to rub sour cream on it, followed by
kefir, then cabbage.
* We found out that the best cure for a sunburned back is really a night in Cristall nightclub, where we watched an American gentleman in his 70s dancing (like a tortoise who had been given four cups of coffee), and being escorted to and from the bar by two young blonde girls.
* I left my camera in the cottage as we spent one night on Massandra beach - as a spectacular firework display lit up the sky behind a row of palm trees, and its reflection shone in the pitch black waves that lapped at our feet.
* We took a day trip to Vorontsovskii Palace and sat on a wall beside its garden, with the shimmering blue sea on one side of
us and the hazy mountains on the other.
* We took a boat to the "Swallow's Nest", a castle built by a 19th Century nobleman for his sweetheart, so that she could have the best view of the Black Sea from her bedroom window. When the castle was finished she refused to live there because it was too cold.
* We took a wonky cable car up into the mountains of Ai Petri, from where the view of Crimea was worth scrambling up to the top in flip-flops for.
* I realised that Ukrainians don't leave their bad habits at home when they go on holiday - from mothers' unnecessary strictness with their young children, to the crassly built holiday homes that ruin the hills, to hawkers dressing up monkeys in woollen sweaters when the temperature is in the mid-thirties, and selling tourists photos with them for 15
hryvnya.
* I spent a lot of time thinking about the direction in which my life is going, and how best to make sure that the next few months pass with less conflict than the last couple.
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liz
non-member comment
trust me- the kefir really helps!!! :-)