Spare us trains that arrive at 5am

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Geo: 46.4693, 30.7356

We knew it was going to happen, we postponed our departure from the hotel in yalta as long as possible, last minute swim, last coffee, but finally we went off and caught the bus for the two hour ride to Simferopol station. I'll even own up to solving the problem of what and when to eat before a train leaving at 5pm by having a macdonalds! To top it all Liz has come down with a heavy cold and didn't expect to sleep on the train either! And she didn't. But it made no difference, nothing we could do would alter the fact that the train pulled into Odessa station (admittedly a rather wonderful station) at 5am. We cheekily tried our hotel who were rather taken aback but couldn't find a room for us to move into then, even at a price. But they did take our bags off us and at 5.30 we went sightseeing. It was actually quite pleasant, cool and quiet, people sweeping and washing the streets, and we quickly discovered the magnificent opera house (and returned later to get tickets for La Boheme this evening - £ 8 each)
We had also found the Potemkin Steps, the statue of Catherine the Great who founded Odessa, but the statue to the mutineers on the battleship potemkin was taken down so that Catherine,, her statue on the site torn down by the bolsheviks in 1920 could be resurrected. What a fuss about a few statues. We had seen the house Gogol lived in for a while and the statue to Pushkin who lived here, and has a museum. Coffee and orange juice in the all night cafe at 7, the other customers seemed to be ending rather than starting their day, eggs benedict in a cafe by the park at 9, rest on a bench overlooking the port, a walk along the pedestrian shopping street and lo and behold it was time to check into the hotel. Liz having a recovery doze while I went back to the train station to buy my ticket for Chisinau, Moldova tomorrow as Liz flies home via Warsaw.
Busy old day. Now to try some photos.

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