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Published: October 4th 2007
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Around half five I went to the bathroom on the train to be ill and decided that it was near enough arrival time that I could get up properly. The sun hadn't risen when we began looking out of the window so we saw the naval port in dusky light. When we arrived at the train station around half six we headed into the main station to sit and enjoy solid ground and formulate a plan for accommodation. We were instantly bombarded by pushy men offering taxis.
After consulting Lonely Planet which was useless and had no information about Sevastopol, we decided to head to the centre of town and find a hotel there. The guidebook did tell us that you could get any bus from the station to the centre but neglected to tell us about the psychotic women who patrol the buses. After struggling to decide which direction the centre was we hopped on a trolleybus. It was too busy to walk along the bus and pay the driver, so we decided to stay put. About a minute into the journey this little loud mouthed woman started shouting apparently at us. She didn't make eye contact or any
gesticulations so we assumed she was just one of many crazy people that we've encountered whilst traveling. We edged up towards the driver to get away from her and to pay, but the driver wouldn't take our money. It was around this time we realised we were supposed to pay her so we asked her how much. She continued to look through us and shout at the top of her voice and most people on the bus were looking at us. I asked a girl next to me how much she wanted and she told me. Rob lifted a 50 (£5) out of his wallet and tried to hand it to her. She looked at it, rolled her eyes and started shouting again. Eventually she did take the money and even managed to find us change. The ordeal wasn't over yet though. With all the shouting and messing around with money we had missed our stop and we stayed on too long. A rather nice guy with limited English spoke to Rob and told us to get off the bus with him. He then took us to the right stop and told us which bus to get and where to
get off. This we did almost successfully but we did get off a little prematurely.
We managed to find Hotel Sevastopol rather easily but with a bit of a walk. It was in a very grand building with pillars and a large lobby although there was a scary doorman. The reception staff spoke reasonable English and we managed to get a cheap "double" with minimum difficulty. We went straight to bed for a few hours to recover from the night before.
We got up and left the hotel around four, it was 24°C in the shade and way too hot for me. Our hotel was right by the water, so we walked all the way along the promenade as far as we could. The place was busy with tourists, though most of them were Ukrainian. There was little to no English anywhere and Ukrainian seemed to come second place to Russian. With the elections this weekend there were posters for the different political posters and the communist party appeared to be favorites here. The Crimea is an autonomous republic which has been trying to become part of Russia with Ukraine stopping it. All round sevestapol there were hammer
and sickle signs; in gates, on monuments etc.
For our meal both of us wanted proper food, so we headed to the far end of town to a restaurant we read about in a booklet we picked up. On the way we came across a garden with about twenty cats inside. A lady was throwing food down from her balcony so they were congregating there.
The restaurant had one vegetarian option which was more than any other restaurant. We sat outside and were given some blankets which I readily accepted and Rob didn't. It's one of the nice things about the Ukraine that I've noticed. Where there is an option to sit outside, there are usually blankets available. Rob decided that it was only right of him to have fish seeing as though we were in the Crimea, so he had "Drunk Salmon with special stuff". We had a bottle of wine from the Crimean region which was very sweet, but got better the more you drank.
We had spotted a cute little bar on the way to the restaurant so we headed there for a drink. It was slightly strange in that we were told to
sit down and the drinks would be brought to us. We sat outside again and watched the tables around us with their Hookah (water pipes). We kind of wanted another drink but we struggled to ask and randomly ended up with our bill split into two. So we called it a day and went back to our hotel.
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