Odessa, be ready for One Star.

I went to Odessa for the first time this summer with two experienced Odessa visitors who had been to this city about five times each. However, one of them couldn’t even give me an answer to my very first question. I asked: “What is on the beaches of Odessa – sand or pebbles?” Somehow I felt stupid when he said, that he “used to go to the beach only at nights”, so he didn’t pay attention to the makeup of the beach.

Actually, that is not that unpredictable for Ukrainians, because nobody (among the people I know) goes to Odessa to swim in the sea. It has the same climate as Kharkov and the sea is not consistently warm during the entire summer. That’s why people prefer going to South Bank of Crimea with its sub Mediterranean climate and its marvelous nature. The main aim in Odessa for me was to have fun and I succeeded at that task, but since somebody mentioned the hotel Zirka (in the last post), I should talk about it.

If I had a chance to forget something unpleasant about my trip to Odessa it would definitely be this hotel. I’m not a pretentious creature, I’m used to sleeping on rocks in a tent, but when you’ve got a place with “hotel” in its name, you don’t expect that the sink will be a size of an ashtray, and that the space between the ceiling and the floor would be bigger than the area between the walls. The second problem for me was a lack of air circulation. The window couldn’t be opened while the central air conditioning barely worked. I can’t say anything about having a nice view from our window since all I could see was the wall of the next building just 50 centimeters away. If I didn’t know that Ukraine was the biggest country in Europe, I would think we were suffering from a land shortage or overpopulation in our country. Actually, Zirka doesn’t give you enough space for thinking about things, so this idea came to my mind only now.

Of course, if you suffer from the slightest form of claustrophobia, you shouldn’t go there! You might be fortunate not to suffer from paroxysm in the elevator but your luck might run out in the bathroom which is actually quite smaller.

So I guess when they named the hotel “Zirka”, they actually meant not “Star” in singular, but a“1 star” rating for the place. Their website talks about the comfortable rooms but you’d better believe that the name of the place is actually the best representation.

Posted by Helen