Arrived in Simferopol (finally!)

Wow, Kiev was a mad house. I arrived at 1:30pm. At the airport hardly anyone spoke English, but the signs were in English which was helpful. I managed to get through passport check and customs and get my baggage. Then I had to find where to catch my flight to Simferopol. I ran around the airport looking for 'terrrmeenal A'. Finally I gave up trying to find it myself and threw on a pout and deer eye face. Almost instantly two Ukrainian men asked me where I'm was going, and showed me how to get to terminal A. They also carried my luggage down a flight of stairs. I had no idea what they were saying, but I really appreciated their help.

After I made it to terminal A (see above), which was in a completely different building and I had to go outside to get to it, they told me that my flight had been delayed until 5:30pm. Then they told me it had been canceled and I would have to wait until 7:20pm. I started frantically searching for a computer with internet. I ran around the airport pushing a cart that had about three times more luggage than anybody else' and asked random people "internet?internet?" while air typing. Eventually I found an internet cafe and emailed Olia (my contact) to tell her my flight had been delayed. I then returned to terminal A only to find that my flight was boarding! I was gone for twenty minutes! But I was grateful I was going to leave soon. I checked my bags and found out one was over the national 40lbs. limit. It cost me 80 hyrivnas ($10). Then I got on a bus (see below) which took us out to the tar mat and I walked up some stairs to board the plane. Yeah!

Finally I arrived in Simferopol and there were five people waiting for me. :) And one of them had a car! Ukrainians drive fast and don’t wear seat belts. We drove into town to Eugene's apartment and that's where I'm staying for two weeks until all the interns arrive and then we'll share an apartment. Eugene (see below) is very sweet, so is his apartment. He went out and bought a little Ukrainian cake for everyone to share and made tea. He’s a computer programmer.

It’s more colourful here than I thought it would be. The buildings are a little…scruffy, but many of them are painted pink, blue, yellow which gives them a quaint look. It smells like unfiltered cigarettes and ocean, though there is not nearly as much smoking as I anticipated. There are designated areas for smoking and smoking indoors seems to be frowned upon. However, I was puzzled with all the little fires in the agricultural areas. I think this adds to the smoke smell, which is actually quite tolerable, kind of like camping. But these fields, some of them looked as though they were slowly burning crops.

Another thing that stuck out for me is that no one wears sneakers/runners/cross-trainers. All the women wear very, very high stilettos and the men wear dress shoes or fancy runners. I brought my lululemons, but I don’t think I’ll be wearing them. I stuck out enough in my UVic sweater as it was.

All in all, I think I’ll be well taken care of during my stay here.