Odyssy to Odessa

November 29 2010

Ron and I just returned from nine days in Ukraine which is the largest country in Europe. We visited three cities: Kiev, the capital, Lviv in western Ukraine and Odessa in the south. Ron’s maternal grandmother immigrated to the US from Odessa about 100 years ago.

It was a very rewarding trip and it was fun to compare two former Soviet states. It probably isn’t fair to compare since they are so different in size. There are 48 million people in Ukraine and 4 million in Georgia. Kiev has 3 million residents. Some observations and generalizations: Ukraine appears to be more prosperous than Georgia judging by the stores, (they are much larger and have better quality goods), restaurants (two that we visited were over the top in terms of décor including an eight meter Buddha with a granite stand), number of women wearing fur-coats, jackets, vests. People on the street smiled more and seemed happier, cars were newer and we didn’t see anywhere near as much Bondo (used for body work), drivers drove sanely, staying between the lines and actually yielding for pedestrians, buildings were in good repair and we didn’t see any abandoned, crumbing old factories like we do in ROG. The best was that they have no smoking areas in all the restaurants now. Well enough generalizations and on to the facts.

Kiev is a big city. We managed to get an apartment close to sights we wanted to see or that were easy to access via the metro which was built during the Soviet times. Kiev is a city high on a plateau but there is development below the plateau as well so the metro is very deep in order to be on the same level no matter where you go. It was two very long escalator rides to the platforms. Many people use the metro and I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like during rush hour. It was cold the entire time we were in Ukraine but it didn’t deter us. We took a walking tour our first day and immediately saw an old Russian army vehicle parked on the street like any other car.

Our first stop was St Vladimir’s Cathedral, considered to be one of Kiev’s most artistic churches. It had seven black domes and beautiful paintings depicting Kiev’s spiritual history. Next we walked to the National Opera House. Two young men who were university students helped us buy tickets to a ballet that night. Imagine two engineering students going to the ballet…not usual at home. We found very few people who spoke English in Ukraine other than staff in hotels. We did find English menus in the restaurants where we ate.

Next was St Sophia’s Bell Tower and Church. This was a huge complex that includes a small museum with period furnishings. Inside the church which is now a museum there was an exhibit by a contemporary artist, Ksana Mas who had created a wall piece that was fashioned after a 17th century icon of Madonna by Theotokos Eleusa. Mars’s piece was made from 15,000 hand painted Ukrainian style eggs done by 70 artists.

This was followed by St Michael’s Monastery of the Golden Domes. The original structure from the 12th century was destroyed by the Soviets during Stalin’s destructive wave of 1937 and was recently rebuilt and completed in 2001. By this time we had seen enough interiors so admired the exterior and moved on down the road. From here we got a little lost but asked directions and started down to the lower city (we had been on the plateau known as the upper city) and passed by various vendors selling souvenirs and crafts. We stopped into a charming museum called Museum of One Street. Here they had two rooms with displays of personal items from various residents who had lived on this street. There were displays of a circus performer, an Orthodox priest, a Jewish rabbi, a composer, a soldier, and a writer. It was a small museum but told a wonderful story of the lives of people who had loved here about 100 years ago.

We stopped at the bottom of the hill for afternoon tea and a pastry. We rode the funicular back up the hill. That night we saw a ballet at the beautiful opera house. Don’t ask which ballet because we have no idea since the two students bought the tickets for us. We never asked and the program was in Ukrainian which we cannot read!

The next day we visited the central synagogue that was reopened and restored after the fall of the soviet union.  Then we did some of the shopping streets. We were surprised to discover they block off one of the main streets, making it a pedestrian street every weekend. We found a shop that specialized in fine crafts and got some cross stitch table linens and lacquered jewelry boxes with beautiful paintings of flowers. We ate at a restaurant nearby that played Ukrainian music videos on a big screen right near where we sat. This was a very small restaurant. I looked up to see scantily clad women in thongs and bras gyrating across the screen. I asked them if they would change the channel not realizing it was a DVD and they said no. Since we were the only customers at the time, I didn’t mind asking. Later videos included fast cars, crash scenes and automatic weapons. Oh my, have I become a fuddy duddy? Not my idea of music to dine by! It started getting dark by 4:00 here and was dark by 4:30. At 1:00 there was a large demonstration regarding a new change in the tax law and it was still going on at 3:30 when we took the metro back to our hotel. That night we dined at the Buddha Bar. Go figure. The décor was unbelievable. No expense was spared. There were at least 100 Buddhas from Asia there: India, China, Japan, and Thailand. The most impressive was a wooden Buddha from Thailand that rested on a granite stand and the combined height was eight meters (about 26 feet). Well they had to pay for all that décor so the prices on the menu were high. It was our first time to pay $12.50 for a liter of water! HA! The food was quite good and beautifully presented.

On our last day we visited the famous Kievo-Pechersky Lavra which is a caves monastery. It is the number one sight of Ukrainians and tourists. We however were non plussed. It is a series of churches, libraries, caves, and museums. Over 500,000 pilgrims visit here yearly and it is considered the spiritual heart of the country. We walked the grounds and visited the ‘near’ caves. This required that I put on a wrap around skirt which went to the ankles and cover my head (I had a hood on my jacket which was sufficient. We walked through a ‘hallway’ that had been plastered. It was narrow and we had to walk single file. There was no room to maneuver and there were folks in front and in back of us. So we basically marched through this hallway which was the cave. There were one or two small rooms off the hallway but they were crowded so we did not go into them. We carried candles as our light source and the event took about five minutes. Perhaps if we were religious it would have meant more…

Lviv

That evening we boarded a plane for a short hop to Lviv which is in the western part of Ukraine. UNESCO designated the entire city as a World Heritage Site in 1998. Lviv was once part of Poland and consequently feels very European. There was little evidence of the Soviet style butt ugly architecture here. Because there was no industry to speak of here, there are no abandoned factories like we have all over Georgia. Attention to detail is everywhere here. As we walked the neighborhoods we were constantly pointing out beautiful iron work, doors, window boxes and the like. Art Nouveau is in evidence here in abundance. The weather was sunny for the most part although chilly. Our hotel was absolutely wonderful, furnished with antiques; it was housed in an old building that had been completely refurbished. Everything from the bed covers to the curtains was beautiful. There were 12 rooms in this small hotel with a great restaurant with good coffee and a good breakfast.

The old part of town is very ‘walkable’. We did our usual first day tour of the city on foot and managed to get around quite easily. When we got to the main town square we were looking at our map and a woman walked right up and started telling us where to find all the important spots. It was charming and said a lot to us about how the town appreciates tourists. Because there was no industry here, the Soviet apartment houses and abandoned factories are not in evidence in Lviv. The symbol of the city is the lion in honor of the founder’s son, Leo, hence the name Lviv from the Slavic root for lion. The lion motif is found throughout the city: sculptures, door knobs, cornices, gates, keystones, etc.

There were lots of fun things about Lviv. One of these is the story of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch (1836-95). He is remembered best for the clinical term for morbidly obsessive behavior: masochism. He was a writer and wrote novels about his own childhood fantasies. He was said to have beat his wife when she refused to whip him. So far this isn’t funny. But there is a statue of him in front (note the extra hands appearing on his body) of the Masoch restaurant. The restaurant apparently has a vaguely pornographic menu (no we didn’t bother to eat here), the interior is bedecked with whips and laced up bodices. The staff will offer to handcuff or whip you if you so choose. While I am writing about restaurants, on several menus we saw the term ‘lard’ as an item you could order. We learned from a guide that in one of the invasions of the region, the invaders were Muslim and took all the livestock and food except the pigs. So the locals ate the entire pig including the fat. Now they have a taste for it. YUCK! Once Ron ordered a bacon and cheese sandwich and it was raw bacon. ! Double yuck!! Another restaurant gave us a complimentary appetizer plate and it had slices of cheese that turned out to be lard. Yikes!

On our first day we visited an outdoor market where we bought some needlework items and we saw a working pharmacy that had been in the same location for the past 250 years. It was part museum, part pharmacy. We went to the Lviv History Museum which had some fabulous old metal work, ceramics, textiles, etc. The old Jewish quarter was at the end of our street where we were staying. Some buildings still had the mezuzahs on the doorways.

On our second day we hired a guide to take us out of town to see the nearby countryside and a castle from the 1327. It was perched on top of a small knoll and gave us a good panorama of the Galician countryside. Our guide was very knowledgeable and talked throughout the tour with numerous stories on the history of the castle. He wore a jaunty hat he has purchased in Germany I think. At one point I got saturated with history and wanted to say to him, ‘take a break, it’s okay.’ But I never got the nerve to do it, afraid I would hurt his feelings. His castle tour took two hours. The castle had started as a fortress in 1327 but by the 15th century had become a chateau for the Polish nobility. Now it is an eclectic museum of medieval art, religious artifacts, and late 16th century furniture. There was a fabulous icon of the Last Judgment that our guide explained in great detail and I only wish I had a copy of it as it showed some folks headed to Hell and some headed to Heaven, including those who had been born before Christ and who had not been baptized. Intriguing how religion makes it work for some .We drove back to Lviv afterwards and had a good discussion about current affairs in the Ukraine. Our guide felt the last election was a total fraud. This is the election that was backed by Russia. Now there’s a clue…as the candidate favored by the Russians won! Well imagine that. Our guide told us the cappuccino was created by the Capuchin monks. The story goes that a man was captured by the Turks and became fluent in the Turkish language, learned about coffee and later opened a coffee house that was not successful until he added milk to it.??What was the relationship to the monks?

At the end of the day we visited the Museum of Ethnography and Craft housed in an old 1920’s Soviet Bank, which was quite elaborate. It contained all manner of things: textiles, ceramics, clothing, etc. On our walk back to our hotel we shopped at the outdoor market again and bought a few more textiles. We also stopped by the chocolate factory and picked up some gift chocolates. Ron took photos of the young women who work in the window making the individual chocolates.

The next day we tried to find some of the sights further a field but were not successful. We stopped in a brew pub and had a yummy lunch of garlic soup, hearty black bread and a brewskie for RB. We also popped into a couple of antique shops on our way back to our hotel. We had sunny weather almost the entire time but it was cold about 10 degrees Celcius. We visited a museum of the religions of Ukraine. Some exhibits were much larger than others with Christianity being the largest. There were several branches of Christianity exhibited: Orthodox, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox for example.

We boarded a plane for Odessa via Kiev that night. Our hotel was a small fabulous place centrally located to what we hoped to see while there. It was well decorated but had no restaurant. We could have a continental breakfast in our room or get a voucher for one of two restaurants nearby. Our first morning we went to Buffalo 99, owned by a Ukrainian who was in Chicago at the time but who had spent a lot of time in the US judging by the décor and menu. We had a good breakfast. Again we did a walking tour, self guided. We got tickets for Puccini’s Tosca that night, great seats for a great price. We visited the synagogue to see if we could gather any information on Ron’s grandmother who had lived here before coming to the US when she was a young woman. No records or resources were available.

We found the park where the local crafts folks were and bought so more needlework items. Such beautiful work. It rained throughout the day and even with our umbrellas we got soaked. We walked down to the port and viewed the famous Potemkin stairs, designed by an Italian architecture and built in 1841, there are 192 steps which I refused to descend. By this time we had been on our feet since breakfast and it was past lunch time. We did see many restored buildings and I would describe the exterior decoration as wedding cake icing. They were well done but looked sugary sweet.

After lunch we went to the Museum and Eastern and Western Art to get out of the rain for awhile. This was a small museum and the western section was closed due to the restoration of part of the building. Often when we go into older buildings in this part of the world, we see peeling paint, crumbing walls and buckled flooring. This museum was no exception. But we enjoyed the small collection of Asia objects and the photography exhibit on India and Nepal. The exhibits made me very homesick for Asia. We managed to dry off a bit in the interim. Once we went back outside the sun was out although Odessa was cold the two days we were there. That night we ate at the brand new Karma Sutra restaurant next to our hotel. The décor was over the top. Huge walls covered with sculptured karma sutra poses, elaborate colored chandeliers, exquisite fabrics on the windows and tables. It was non stop eye appeal. The food however was mediocre.

Off we went to the opera. The Odessa opera house is supposed to be one of the top three in Europe. We were bedazzled! The opera house was recently restored and the gold leaf was incredible. I’m not sure if the décor was Rococo or Baroque but it was very ornate. Not our style but we had to admire the craftsmanship. We had a small box for three and right at my elbow was the next box with three people. During Act II, the young woman (early 20’s would be my guest) next to me picked up her cell phone and dialed her friend for a chat!!!! During the performance, not during a break!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I came unglued and told her to be quiet. She apologized and continued to talk at which point Ron and I both leaned over and told her to hang up. What a frigging idiot! I hate cell phones for this reason. We have become so obtuse and rude as a result of the little handy gadget. BOO! After the opera I spared her my lecture of how to be a good member of a live performance. Our son Mark is a classical musician and I always think about him when people talk during a performance. During a rock concert maybe but an opera? Okay enough of my rant. We treated ourselves to dessert and tea afterwards in a nearby restaurant and toddled off to our hotel and to bed.

Did I mention all the furs in Odessa? Women wore all sorts of outer wear made of all kinds of furs. Jackets, coats and vests. I think Ukraine is much more prosperous than Georgia judging by their dress. I have never seen so many furs and shops selling furs. Somehow in our travels we read that many fur bearing species are now endangered in this part of the world and the piece I read was discouraging tourists from buying a fur while visiting the Ukraine.

The next day brought more walking with no specific target in mind. We tried the alternative restaurant for breakfast and regretted our choice. We should have stayed with the known quantity. We passed by an antique store and went in to look at the artwork and ended up buying a very old amber necklace and a carnelian necklace.

Our trip back home was an adventure. We checked into the Odessa airport Sunday morning. You are not allowed to check your bags thorough to your final destination for some unknown reason. So we checked our bags to Kiev where we had one hour gather our bags, to change from the domestic terminal to the international terminal which was within walking distance, check in with a different airline, go through security, customs and passport control. Each of those had a line. Talk about a panic. At our last line, passport control, the line was quite long. We looked at our watches and realized our flight was boarding. So we got brave and said to people in front of us ‘excuse me, our plane is boarding, may we jump ahead of you?’ People were quite kind and let us through. This required repeating our statement numerous times and made us feel good that even with long lines, people were very generous. We got through and realized there was no gate number on our tickets. It turned out that the gate hadn’t been scheduled and we ended up with five minutes to spare. Whew! The reason for the panic is there is only one plane a day with the various airlines to TBS so if we had missed our flight, we would have had to wait another day to return. Luck seems to be with us ever since we found each other all those years ago. Lucky lucky us!