Odessa railway station or rather Jumping all over the map.

It makes some sense that foreigners choose air travel because train stations in Ukraine have either no inscriptions in English or very few of them, except some transliterations which are of no help. This causes some difficulties in getting around the place. It might be better to learn a couple of significant words before going there, such as «поезд» (poyezd) for train, «касса» (cassa) for ticket window, «платформа» (platforma) for track,«метро» (metro) for subway. The last one seems to be the first word learnt by most foreigners coming to Kharkov, but it’s quite useless in Odessa because there is no subway. The absence of it is caused by a ramified system of catacombs under the city (approximately 4000 kilometers) which could be used only if you want to get lost or steal partisan artifacts circa 1945, do some monkey business as a smuggler, or kidnapper etc. If you get really bored you may go there on an excursion, but I will postpone talking about the catacombs for a while so that not to run ahead of John’s “Z to A” order.

I’m not aware of the “beautiful” architecture of Odessa’s train station since I never went inside of it or maybe I did walk in and I didn’t notice anything which is worse, but it doesn’t look impressive for me even from the outside. As many others in Ukraine it was built after its destruction during the WW II. I suppose all of those belong to the so called Stalin Empire style, or simply empire style dominating the whole city. I don’t count the Opera House (or Opera Theatre) building with its luxurious baroque.

Of course, among all of the train stations I have seen in Ukraine I prefer Kharkov’s, but I’m not afraid of being subjective.

The one in Kiev could be competitive if didn’t have a huge steel-and-glass hi-tech appendix which rose on the body of the old building and looks like a parody of the airport of Antalya in Turkey (in accordance with Google images there is the same “palm tree” disaster at the railway in Madrid and maybe at many others which I haven’t seen):

  

                Kiev, modern part of train station building

                                    Antalya, Turkey Airport

Getting back to Odessa’s train station, there is one unpleasant thing about it and all the city streets in general. There are a lot of beggars, mainly gypsies, who are so bothersome that they may even be worse than the taxi drivers who try to catch you just after you get off your train.

I should add something to what John said about the word “вокзал”which itself doesn’t mean “train station”, you may come across it looking at bus stations, sea ports. But if you search in Google, you will find a challenging inscription, «железнодорожный вокзал» (zheleznodorozhnyj vokzal), its abbreviation ЖД вокзал or ж/д you have to be sure that it is about a railway station. It just crossed my mind that I would likely pay a couple of dollars to a foreigner who could pronounce this expression correctly without using an abbreviation.

Posted by Helen