ODESSA!

My hotel is located in a suburb of Odessa, close to the sea, but not right on the beach. The first thing I did was go and look for the sea! I got to a beach and saw the Black Sea for the first time! Amazing - and fulfilling a travel wish that I have had since childhood.

This morning I took a tram to the city centre... walked around for quite a long time and eventually found the famous "Deribasovskaya Street. (Дерибасовская)




From there, it was not hard to find the famous "Primorskiy Boulevard". That was featuring in some film I saw as a kid, and the name stuck in my mind. Forgotten the name of the film though.
There is a sort of alley walking path in the middle of the street, all very nice and pretty.
There are some very beautiful 19th century buildings in this area - including public buildings.



From there, you can walk through a public park, which is beautiful, but has been neglected for many years. Eventually you get to a beach.

Black Sea beaches in Ukraine have almost white, very fine sand.

I had dinner (by myself and starting to feel a bit lonely...) at a restaurant with a terrace overlooking the sea. It was almost impossible to read the menu because it was written with some very fancy, ornamented handwriting script + I don't know how to say almost any dishes in Russian. I did not want to be awkward with the waitress, so I just picked something which she said was fish - it turned out to be a nice salmon steak.

Odessa feels very safe and again, people are friendly and helpful but I feel stupid because I can't even thank them properly for helping me. My Russian is really a lot worse than I had thought.