Odyssey
Renting a car in Moldova is surprisingly easy. We pick up a little Corolla, and everything we expect at an American rental place is provided for at the rental shop: extra insurance, permits, liability contracts (very poorly drafted by the company – as in it is very favorable to foreign renters, yay!), and a GPS. We’re told the GPS only works in Moldova but we print off some extra maps and off we go.
The road to Odessa is worse than the road to the winery. It’s only 120 miles but it takes us four hours. Pot hole after pot hole and slow moving trucks without enough room to pass. It doesn’t help that we stop every so often to snap photos of the view and the occasional ornate church. This country is poor, but devoutly Eastern Orthodox and the churches are well taken care of.
We arrive at the Moldovan side of the border and I tell Javier to snap a few photos. He wants to keep it procedural and refuses, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves. Our border official is a large portly man that takes our passports into a small office to the side. Javier decides then that he does want some photos, but stages them as selfies so it doesn’t look like we’re just snapping away. He waits however until the border guard is in the frame for the selfie, and we’re quickly caught. He walks over to Javier and points to his iphone and says coldly, “No, daleet.” He makes Javier cycle through the photos and at each one with the border in it says, “Daleet.” Passports are stamped though and we then proceed to the Ukrainian side, which is strangely 5 km down the road. Javier and I wonder what type of shit goes on in the 5 km no mans land between the two countries.
On the Ukrainian side the border guards are all army soldiers sporting AK-74s; much more imposing than the Moldovan side. Assuming they want the same documents we hand them our passports but the guard also asks for our “Green Card.” My first thought is that he thinks we’re married to Ukrainian girls and wants proof of marriage. The guard speaks only Russian and after several failed exchanges about producing a Green Card he directs us to pull over to some trailers lining the border crossing.
The trailers have numerous windows and the guard points randomly at them and barks some commands in Russian to us. Maybe we’re supposed to go to a window? We get out and try a random window, and the official in there speaks English and tells us we are at the customs window. He tells us we have to go to passport control first. We guess at which window passport control is and after several failed attempts an armed border guard comes out and in broken English asks for our passports (ok, progress!) and our Green Card (shit, back to this). He does manage to explain that the Green Card is a form of temporary auto insurance that we need to drive in Ukraine. I’m a little miffed the rental place didn’t tell us about this and sell it to us there, but whatever. I’m directed to yet another office further along where a large dirty man at a desk watching a Zac Efron movie on a nearby TV sells me insurance (about $15 for the minimum two week pass). With all documents in hand now, we enter Ukraine.
The roads are worse than Moldova, and that’s hard to do. The wheat field we pass right after the border is randomly on fire. A few miles down the road Javier needs to go to the bathroom so we pull over to a gas station. The toilet is in a little outhouse and when he comes back Javier shows me a photo of the “toilet” inside; it’s a just a cement slab with a hole cut out.
The GPS is no longer working, but we have some hand written directions and we recognize the Russian word for Odessa on the occasional road sign and gradually we enter the city. At least we think it’s the city. After driving through industrial projects for a good ten minutes we come to a small commercial area and park the car. We try to find wifi to get our bearings. Everywhere in Moldova has wifi and we expect the same here but no luck. After walking aimlessly for twenty minutes we pass a veterinarian clinic. Javier figures the staff inside is 1) educated so they may speak English and 2) working so they are probably not going to rob us.
Getting mugged was the least of our worries. Before leaving we asked some Moldovan friends how safe Odessa was. None of them had kind things to say. The stories ranged from getting mugged, to getting kidnapped, to getting killed by scuba divers hiding in the Black Sea that would ransom our bodies back to our families for burial. We figured the odds of the veterinarian doing these things was low.
Our first question after we go in and find a worker, “Is this Odessa?” He looks at us like we’re idiots, which is a fair judgment at this point but at least he understands English. Yes, we are in Odessa. “Where is wifi?” he points us to a restaurant around the corner and we head there.
Inside it’s a nice place, and we order some beer and fish and pork fat on the waitresses broken English. Everyone is staring at us, including two large men with shoulders so thick they don’t have necks. They are drinking beers and shots of what I assume is vodka. I’ve brought my stuffed Moose with me and take him out to snap a few photos including one of him pretending to drink the beer. One of the large men gets up and comes over and points at Moose. Please, please, please I pray, don’t kidnap Moose. He says, “He is too young to drink, yes?” and then laughs and walks outside to smoke.
The food comes out, and though I was expecting the seafood to be the highlight considering we’re right on the sea it’s the raw pork fat (served with dill and mustard) that steals the culinary show.
After checking wifi and maps I think I have a good enough sense of where we are in the city so we go back to the car to drive to where the main street meets the Black Sea. I promptly get us lost. By some miracle Javier’s Google maps starts working in the middle of the city and we drive to the north end of the city, passing Soviet monuments, and gradually improving quality of infrastructure. By the time we get to the Black Sea we may as well be in Paris. It’s beautiful.
The buildings are all clean and classical architecture. People are well dressed and every fifty feet is a trash can or a cart selling coffee. Odessa is a port city so while we can see the water the view is marred by all the cranes and shipping docks.
We walk along the equivalent to the board walk, and come to a main square where a rally is beginning. Some people hoist black and red flags that Javier identifies at part of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a political group known for anti-Soviet activity. The rally is generally calm, maybe only a hundred people, but it’s sunset and getting cold so we go in search of a coffee house rather than see if the protest gets more engaging. We find a super nice one, again think Paris, and get some really really rich espresso drinks. I could be convinced to stay overnight, but I really don’t look forward to the drive back in the dark with the state of the roads and Javier agrees and we leave Odessa.
The border guards from when we entered are still on shift and remember us, “Ah, it is you again.” No mishaps this time around, although when we get to the Moldovan side we take the wrong road initially and have to back track the wrong way down a one way road to sort it out.
I would gladly go back to Odessa to spend a few days, shop around, eat, catch a show (there were lots of theaters and cultural centers), and generally just meet people. I think Putin may have other plans for the area though.