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Tip #4: Liquid Courage, the Best Anxiety Med

 

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There were no hostels in Crimea.  OK, to be fair, the hostel craze has, by now, reached that rocky diamond-shaped tumor hanging by a thread from Ukraine, but there was only ONE in 2008.  And to call it a hostel was a stretch…a far cry from the trendy hostels in the rest of Europe, where the young, charming local staff takes you out on pub crawls and organizes movie nights.  Crimea’s one hostel was one of those all-purpose Soviet-era buildings, non-descript and functional, slowly crumbling from decades of post-Communist liberated neglect.

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Isn’t this the set for that one movie, Hostel?

This was the kind of place where teenage boys with outdated haircuts from across Russia congregated to drink beer from 2 liter plastic bottles smeared with snazzy Cyrillic labels, milling about in a yard sprinkled with the jagged ends of rusting old playground equipment, whose faintly-painted rebar was melting into the crabgrass.  They would while away their days blasting Russian pop and doing idiotic drinking tricks as part of their macho posturing for the congruent group of gorgeous Russian girls across the yard, coyly giggling into their hands as only foreign women can.  Passions ran high as these youths desperately tried to snap up their own Slavic paragon of perfection, hoping to enjoy at least a solid decade of utter sensory bliss before the Eastern European curse sets in, and their beloved inevitably hits 35 and becomes a veritable trashcan with arms in a housecoat and headscarf.

There simply is no need for hotels or hostels in Crimea.  Everywhere little babushkas line the streets waving hand-written signs.  And I mean everywhere.  Given their determination and sheer numbers, you might be tempted to surmise that Vladimir Putin was coming to town and had promised multiple photo-ops holding a huge sturgeon he just caught with his bare hands or flaunting a bitchin’ Red Army service rifle, all with his shirt off just so the ladies swoon.  All that suppression of the free press and gay rights really gets the chicks feeling freaky.

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The babushkas are down any of these roads

Actually the signs say, “I am renting a room.”  This is THE spot for Russian sun-seekers.  People come from as far as Vladivostok to spend their summers here and bask in the warm sun on the pebbly beaches of the Black Sea.  Hell, even Stalin invited Churchill and Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference here, which was not so much a “conference” as Stalin punking the Western leaders into letting him keep half of Europe in his grip.

The thing is, nobody stays in hotels here.  Why would you if the cheaper options assault you with clamorous Russian shouts as soon as you step out of your car?  As a side note, if you ever wanted to see two crinkled-up old ladies elbow the shit out of each other, this is your heaven.  Mind you, these rooms may or may not have plumbing, and occasionally, for no reason, all running water is outside.  Often in the most logical place: just outside the front door.

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           On the fateful day that I would finally experience the Crimean guest room, my earlier stop had me apparently being reborn from a giant birth canal.  Am I still mentally in middle-school, or does a tomb with a huge dome and a doorway that looks like what is pictured below not look like the inspiration for the famous scene in Almodovar’s Talk to Her or some kind of macrophilic B-movie?

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Yea…

The tomb, called Kul Oba, was built by the Scythian people, ancient horsemen inhabiting the vast, treeless plain, or steppe, stretching from Eastern Europe to China.  Accustomed to this terrain, the tombs of Scythian leaders were usually massive mounds, constituting the only landmarks in an otherwise flat landscape and the only way the Scythians felt they could show their leaders’ mark on the world.

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The steppe

This tomb was the only one I’ve ever heard of with such a unique doorway.  It is not a stretch to theorize that this ancient people viewed time cyclically, and thus built this structure to return the deceased to a symbolic womb visually similar to the object that had originally given him life.

But I digress with this geek-out.

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The caretaker likes cats

To see the tomb, we had to wave some money through a gate to the caretaker.  We had arrived way too late, and the tomb was closed.  But, hey, that old man needed a spare buck, so we got a private showing.  By the time we were done, it was almost dark and we had to cover 160 miles by car back to the city in which we intended to spend the night.  While that distance might not be that significant on I-5 here in California, on a two-lane rocky highway built by the heroic working classes 50 years ago, it’s an eternity.

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We tried to tough it out, but after about 90 miles, it was time to give up.  By now it was at least 10:00, pitch black, and we were in a strange city with not a babushka in sight.  It seems this was the day that the entire population of Moscow decided would be their holiday, and they snatched up every last room.  We drove up and down the main road, and then we tried side streets to no avail.  My friend and I desperately used our broken Russian, but all we kept getting was “nyet”, “nyet”, “nyet”.

After an hour we found one last place that still had a sign up, at least a mile in the countryside, away from the main road.  A smiling old lady came out, and when we asked, she nodded her head and started opening the gate.  At last, the twisted, quivering dough that were my insides for the last hour, stressing anxiously, stopped its furious kneading.

That lasted for about half a minute.  Right then, out comes the surliest, meanest, most murderous-looking short-statured Russian in an Adidas track suit coat, soccer shorts, and a ridiculously fake gold chain with his eyes giving you a stare that was 50% Zangief and the other half Ivan Drago.

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Blessed Virgin, protect us from Ivan Drago

There should really be an emotion known as “anti-relief”.  That feeling after you have just been pursued relentlessly by wild pigs in a jungle, threatening to gore you on their tusks or eat your face, and you jump into safety, climbing the highest tree you can find.  As you finally notice the pounding of your heart in your eardrums, and the beating slows while you take calm, satisfied, but laborious breaths, you look up and you’re staring right into the eyes of the jaguar that lives in the tree.  Your ears get hot, your stomach sinks, icy needles prick every inch of your neck, and only then do you remember that your adrenaline is running on a quarter tank.

 

Adrenaline is known as the “fight or flight” hormone, but why is it that I always only feel the “flight”?  Except this time flight was not an option, as the gate was being closed by said surly Russian.  Cue every wild, horrific, nightmarish fantasy of a depraved kidnapping situation.  The worst was, while I was internally suffering this survival crisis, my friends seemed unfazed, even though they were both females and this guy was unnecessarily aggressive.  I whispered to them in hushed tones that I felt something was off with the Russian, mental illness perhaps, but I was shrugged off.

 

As luck would have it, we were hungry and this made for a great excuse to get our car out of that gate and have some semblance of freedom.  We indicated that we wanted to eat, and the babushka gave us sign language directions of how to get to the main road.  We start pulling the car out, and we are almost completely out when the surly Russian comes jogging out, scowling, lips pursed and gnashing his teeth.  He comes to the open window (my side, of course) and starts gesturing just as the old lady had with his ham-like forearms resting on the inside of the car, his shaved head peeking in.  We say, “Thanks, bye!” but he clearly doesn’t get it because he just keeps making the same motions.  We say thanks again, and I hear him say what I know to mean, “Let me in, I’ll show you.”  Uhhhh, fuck that, buddy!  We gave him a resounding “nyet”, and drove off.

 

The hot night air breezed in through the open window and started to cool the tips of my ears.  I wasn’t home free yet.  I start scheming: how was I going to protect these women?  Which pieces of furniture in our room could I use to blockade the door?  What item in my backpack could serve as a weapon?  Spray him in the eyes with sunblock?  Use a chair leg to hit him if he tried to barge through the door?  Clearly my friends did not give two shits, and this enraged me.  Why hadn’t they listened to me?  Why couldn’t we just take our stuff and drive all night?  At least I wouldn’t be called to defend myself and them from some psycho in nut-huggers.

 

I sat down to the meal to pack myself full of fuel to keep watch and beat back the would-be intruder.  This braveness faded away as I considered that I was eating my last meal, and I suffered in bittersweet silence.

 

Until I opened the menu and saw those beautiful symbols that revolutionized my night: “100g”.  This magical combination is the perfect measurement of a double shot of vodka, and it was the cheapest drink on the menu.  Mineral water was more expensive.  As you savvy science geeks might point out, liquid is measured in milliliters but that just proves how shitfaced the menu guy got with these shots.

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Ahhhh, sweet, sweet courage nectar…with a hilarious and suggestive name

My cheapness dictated that this would be my beverage, and each hundred would prove to numerically build on the previous one until I was a changed man.  After an hour, I strolled out with my chest puffed out, relishing the slight ringing in my ears and staggered eye movements caused by that courage-inducing nectar.  On the short drive back, I lapped up the humid air like a cat laps up milk from a saucer, parroting that determined, bloodthirsty look that my present host had shot me just hours earlier.

 

I guess I half expected him to be waiting behind a tree, ready to lumber over and bludgeon one of us, but before I knew it, we were in the room safely, with the lights turned off.  I sat in the darkness, inhaling the foreign but not unpleasant aroma of the blanket, feeling the cool sheets where my skin was exposed through my tank top.  I kept my ears open for several minutes, but did not hear anything but crickets.  I let the wheat juice course through my veins, lulling me to sleep and drowsily promising myself to tackle that fucker if he crossed the threshold.

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This guy is tasting chair leg if he walks through that door…

Birds chirped and sun bled through the blinds, and I sat up in bed, startled.  It was morning and we were fine.  Not so much as a crowbar mark on the door.  I didn’t want to see the Russian, partly out of shame for my discomfort the night before, and partly because I was sure that broad daylight would not deter him from killing someone with his bare hands in his front yard.  As we stepped out, there was the old lady, pruning her fruit trees, but her son/nephew/transient boarder was nowhere to be seen.  I kept expecting him, but he kept me waiting.

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Making our escape

We packed up the car, and I smiled as we drove off, waving back at the lady’s gnarled, knobby hands.  One last look in her eyes, glinting in the morning light, and I knew that she had purposefully ushered the surly Russian away: renting rooms was this old babushka’s business, and he was bad for it.

 

Lesson learned: People on your travels might seem crazy, or that may just be who they are.  If you ever doubt your ability to protect yourself, 100 grams does the trick.

-Paul (Californian with German parents), 27, renting rooms with randos in Crimea, Ukraine

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