Odessa

At the beginning of May, we had a four-day weekend (to make up for having had two in-service days on Saturdays). I took advantage of it to go visit Odessa on the Black Sea. Odessa is even more heavily influenced by Russia than Kyiv is. A few times I asked for directions in Ukrainian and got startled responses "you're speaking Ukrainian!" yeah, forty words.

A silent movie from the 1920's was filmed in Odessa about the mutiny of sailors on the Battleship Potemkin in 1905. Sailors were told to eat "maggoty meat" (nice close-up of the meat) and revolted. Citizens of Odessa supported the sailors, and soldiers of the Czarist regime fired on them.

One of the most famous scenes in cinematography (not that I ever heard of it before this year) is a slow-motion take of a baby buggy bouncing down the Odessa Steps. I climbed the steps and saw a couple with a baby carriage at the top. "Don't do it!" I thought.