Travel report (verbose format)

Stopping by an internet cafe I take the opportunity to write a little bit more. Jalta is great. I truely and intensively recommend it. The weather is like the mediterrainean, but the mountains make the scenery more beautiful, and prices are (I belive) lover. Here you pay 15-30 SEK for lunch, kosmosolvskaja pravda (newspaper) is 2 SEK, beer is about 7 sek a bottle. Sometimes prices are even difficult to understand: I just offered to pay more than 22 grivn (x 1.5 for SEK) for a CD copy of my camera memory card, but it turned out she was saying 9 grivn. It never occured to me that I should listen for a one digit number.

If I write "we" it is most likely meant to be myself, and Hakan and Birre, the swedish guys who live at the same dormitory as I do. The are of my age, a few years older, and we get along quite fine. We are also in the same study group, so walking around after school is a mix of exkursion and language repetion. Classes are between 9 and 1230 so there is loads of time for sun and fun in between.

When I went here I was prepared for a soviet/russia experience, but this isn't anything like it. Ok, I must admit I write about our dormatory as the sovietnij dom (the sovjet-like house), but walking through that door really is a lot like time travel. Outside the doormatory people are nice. The listen and try to understand when we speak in our lousy russian, and occationally they even speak english (good for yalta, bad for us) . Swedish tourist travelling with Iventus describe the hotel Yalta as a very nice place.

Hotel Yalta indeed is a very special place. I believe the standard is good - we went up there to depart on a boat trip the other evening and it was airconditioned, clean and everybody speaks english. On the other hand it has a spooky kind of feeling attatched to it since it has obviously been built for a lot more tourists than the numbers that visit the hotel theese days. Bars and gamling machines spread out like empty fields, populated only be a few spread out tourists. Long corridors, empty halls. But it's alive, it's got the best beach in town (or at least so our guide says) and the bars and restaurants are working. There is even a delfinary show.

In harsh contrast to this is our choice of living. When reading this you need to understand that we are paying 285 SEK a day. This includes accomodation, teaching, swedish speaking representative and two free meals a day. Remeber I wrote you get what you pay for. In this case toilets of hole-in-the floor model, showers that only hav e hot water between 15pm-20pm, and a bed that looks more like a practice skiing slope. The funny thing about the dorm is however the timetravel effect. You walk out of a modern tourist city that looks like most western beaches and suddenly you stand in something that looks very.... russian. Exept for already described cleaning there are ladies watching the door, handing out keys, keeping control and order. The head of theese ladies isn't very modern, she's got a huge fake-blond haircut and a blue coat-like dress. It is like time had been standing still since the USSR was shattered.

But all in all, giving this place a few years it will have seased to be a romantic place for wanna-be russian speakers like me and instead we will se warmth and beauty tourists from all over Europe. At least that's what I think. All it needs is - as the swedish paper expressen wrote - a deal with Ryan Air.