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'That's because this is Odesa.' It is a statement that we hear time and again during our visit. Independently of the specific context it is meant to both explain and stress that this city is different. Different from the rest of Ukraine, and maybe different from the rest of the world. A Ukrainian port city first ruled over by a Frenchman, once the third-largest Jewish city in the world, with a dialect of Russian that has its own dictionaries to enable the uninitiated to understand it - a lot of reasons are given for how Odesa came to be different, and an equal number of explanations for how this difference shows itself. Being open to the world, and a spirit of cooperation necessary for good business are among the most common.
Yet even without the explanations, just walking through the streets, the atmosphere is obviously different from the rest of Ukraine. The wonderful boulevards, often newly renovated, and the backyards, angled and idiosyncratic, mix to infuse everything with a sense of being further west than the occasional Soviet apartment block and the unmistakably Ukrainian store signs signal. The cafés and bars everywhere in the center make it welcoming to the visitor - and when he is a foreigner, ordering in his own language, he has a good chance of being understood. After all, this is Odesa >>>

Irkutsk and the Lake Baikal – Day 13

Paris, Romanticism, Alexandre Dumas, Zidane and Sarkozy… This is France in Russia! 

Though we’ve been travelling across Russia for a while, we still definitely don’t look like Russians. Wearing beards long hair as we do, we are not very “akuratny” (understand this very Russian expression as “tidy”). So, what do Russians think when meeting us or seeing us walking along the streets?
Usually, we are seen as Polish people, sometimes as Czechs since we are able to speak Russian. This is a clue for Russians that we are from a Slavic country but, surprisingly for them, we are definitely French. Yes, “real” Frenchies as they usually want to get confirmed.
Once they get to know that we are French travellers, the first thing coming to their mind is: “Oh… Paris, the Eiffel Tower.” Then, very often, the romanticism comes: “Je t’aime”. It seems that it is one of the main symbols of our country in Russia. Funny! I also have fun listening locals repeating the two same sentences in French they know by heart, quoting dialogues of very famous Soviet movies >>>

Holodomor - Three Questions

'Holodomor' - the Ukrainian term, coming from the words 'holod', 'hunger' and 'mor', 'plague', refers to the winter of 1932/33, when there was a famine in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine as well as the Soviet territory where ethnic Ukrainians where settled. While the Ukrainian president, Victor Yushchenko, is pushing for international recognition of the 'Holodomor' as an acto of genocide, others contest this fact, up to some denying that there was a famine at all. The debate, which often ranges along Ukrainian/Russian nationalist lines, is heated, and all too often simple accusations replace facts. In the end, there are three questions as part of this debate that need to be answered >>>