Humor Day in Odessa

Melissa and I decided to take a last minute trip to Odessa this weekend after finding out about the April Fool's Day festival that promised to be quite a scene. After going to the opera to see Madame Butterfly with my host family and Fulbrighters and having a couple of my host mom's boyfriend's signature Bloody Mary shots we headed to the north bus station to try our luck at getting a seat on a bus around midnight. The two big buses in the parking lot were full so we had to get on the one mini bus. We got worried for a second because I thought the driver was this old man standing near the bus who was clearly wasted. Melissa demanded to know who was driving though and it wasn't him so we were in the clear. Of course he was on our bus though along with his enormous bag full of branches and another bag full of what sounded to be quite a collection of bottles. He passed out as soon as he got on the bus and didn't wake up again until we got to the Ukrainian border where he had to show his passport. This was impressive because the driver blasted a Russian gangster show on the TV for the entire 5 hour trip. While we were waiting to cross the border the driver came back on and said "Grandpa" (with the meaning "Hey old man," not that he was his grandfather) and motioned for him to get out of the vehicle. It turned out he had to pay a bribe to cross the border for some reason. The 3 twenty-two year-old guys that were partying in the back of the mini bus got this info out of him. Soon after they all became friends because the old guy pulled out a bottle of vodka and offered them some. They asked if it was good, to which he replied, "There are two kinds of vodka: good and really good." Their eruption into laughter served as agreement and they went through the bottle pretty quickly.

All in all, it was an entertaining trip to Odessa through the middle of the night. We arrived at our hostel at 5 am and the girl working was super nice and let us go into the room to sleep right away. We were expecting that we would just be able to leave our stuff there but they didn't even charge us for sleeping there that morning. We got up around 9:30 and the American guy who is co-owner of the hostel gave us a map, a schedule of the festival, and told us of good places to go to breakfast. We walked around for hours on Friday and saw quite a bit of the city. The downtown area has some really pretty spots and we got to go to the famous Potemkin stairs down by the water. The festival consisted of tons of people walking around in weird hats and costumes if they were really into it. We got matching sailor hats that say "1st of April" and "Odessa" and we looked legit. There were also concerts, a parade, lots of street food and games. Standard festival. At night we went out with the owners of the hostel and a couple guys from England to check out the gala concert. After that we met up with a couple other people, got food, and went to a bar. We were supposed to go to the Detroit Club which was rumored to be "as ghetto as real Detroit" but it was closed so we went to a different place close to the hostel that was nice but low key.

The next day we splurged on a lunch replete with fresh juice, pizza, delicious salad, and milkshakes in the prettiest area of Odessa. (Not splurging by US standards considering that cost us about $10 each.) We got on the bus to head back to Chisinau around 3 and had a quiet trip back. It only took 4 hours this time because the driver was nuts. Quite a bumpy ride because the roads are in disrepair to put it mildly. I liked driving through a bunch of villages to see some of the houses and people shepherding, doing other kinds of work, or playing outside. When we got back to the city we had dinner at the mall and saw the movie "Limitless" dubbed in Russian. Great end to the night.