Every April 1st in Odessa Ukraine a huge celebration is held throughout the city. Humorina is the name and is Ukraine’s way of celebrating April Fools day. The day is filled with carnival type activities such as a parade, carnival food, carnival games, concerts, dancing, and great people watching.
I left Chisinau on April 1st at 5:50 am with Ross heading south east on a full bus full of people who I assume were headed to Odessa for the same reason. Our plan was to get there and meet up with my lovely girlfriend Irina and her friends who had left the night before on a bus which we thought was going through Transnistria, a big no-no for Peace Corps Volunteers. However we found out after alternate tickets were purchased for Ross and I that their bus did not go through Transnistra so we all were separated from the beginning. We planned on using Ukrainian sim card to call each other, but that was put to a stop when neither of the cards worked. So we planned on meeting at Ross and I’s bus stop at 11 am.
The ride there was rather uneventful apart from the ridiculously large number of times we stopped to pick people up from the side of the road. We arrived in Odessa at 11:30 and immediately began the search for our other group. However, we realized very early that nobody was there to meet us and we should begin our search for the party. We decided that a map would surly help us find the city center, but upon inspection of the maps we were unsuccessful in finding one in the right alphabet. So we began our lost march into the city. If you ever watched the T.V. show Home Improvements growing up you will know that men have metal buggers and therefore can feel in their nose which way they should go when lost. I remembered from a map I looked at before going that if I turned left while leaving the bus station we would be going towards the water. So we turned left. We walked up hill for about 20 min and were unsuccessful in finding any sign of a party. I happened to notice a paper taped to the window of a local business that was in English, so we took a chance and entered hoping for an English speaker. We were pleasantly surprised to find the business employed people from all over the world and like any traveler knows that everyone in the world know English. We asked for directions to the celebration and found that our metal buggers had led us in the right direction. Once we followed the directions we found the parade without any trouble.
The parade was pretty cool as you can see from the picture. I was not able to pinpoint an exact theme, but I think that’s what the point was. After the parade was past us we decided to try to find some of Ross’s friends that were also in town. They told us that they were at the Potemkin Stairs and to just ask someone where they were. This advice didn’t help at all because as many of you can imagine, we don’t speak Russian or Ukrainian. So, again we began our lost march into the depths of the celebration hoping we were going in the right direction. Ross being his observant self saw a mother daughter combination with a map. Using our awesome logic skills we decided that they were tourists and may know English (remember everyone in the world knows English). However, they knew 0 English and ended up running from us. So there we were again, lost, when a group of girls about 17 or 18 years old approached us. The alpha girl stuck her face very close to Ross’s and said “Can we help you?” Ross of course said yes and showed them the text explaining were we needed to meet. They talked among themselves a moment and then the Alpha turned to us and said, “Come with us”. We all formed a line and continued into the mass of people in the city center. After about 10 mins of walking they stopped turned to us and said we are there. After a little small talk with them they told us they were going to find some friends so we thanked them and sent them on their way.
At the steps we easily found Ross’s friends and began making out plans for the rest of the day. We decided to walk through some of the city with a local guy they had already met. We made our way around a few blocks where the crowd was not very thick and saw a few historical buildings. We ended up at the Odessa Hotel which is located at the bottom of the Potemkin Stairs out on a large pier. A side note about the Odessa Hotel is that it is the exact same building, with exception to color, as the Presidential Residency in Chisinau. It is like taking the white house, painting it blue, moving it to France and calling it the national hotel of France. After we looked at the boats docked and walked about to get pictures we headed back up the hill to a restaurant to eat. We were taken to a cafeteria style restaurant where you pick your food from under heat lamps, not really what I was hoping for in a meal from another country, but it was cheap and I got a lot of food.
After lunch we decided to just wander around the celebration and experience the party. As we walked down a path I looked to my right and see this crazy attractive girl running down the road chasing someone. Obviously this crazy attractive girl was my girlfriend and I stepped in front of her, momentarily scaring her, but then jumped into my arms in a very corny romantic scene from the movies. After the introductions to my new friends we walked to the other Moldavians that we were supposed to meet earlier in the day. After some talk I realized that Irina and her friends only waited till 11:15 for our bus to arrive. I’m not sure why another 15 minutes of waiting would have been the end of the world, but it is okay. We met, we walked, we talked, we arranged for Ross and I to ride on a different bus home, and then Irina and I left to walk through some more of the celebration. We ate cotton candy and watched a little of a concert before we had to walk back to the busses and prepare for what would be the worst bus ride I have taken in my life.
Let me set the scene. The bus was full with exception to 3 seats and one fold down seat next to the driver. Guess who was nominated to sit next to the driver? Me! This seat had just enough room for me to sit sideways in and even then my legs were pinned to the dashboard of the bus. The bus driver assured me that the seat was way to unconformable to have 2 people in so I would have the seat to myself the whole trip. As we left I tried to fall asleep for a bit before we got to the first border crossing. I think I was successful in sleeping for about 20 minutes when we reached the first border. Because we left Odessa with a convoy of about 50 tour busses you can imagine the wait at each border was long! This is an oversight that I will never make again. We waited at the border of Ukraine for about 2 hours until we made it through. The bus then sped into the night with not stops in mind! Until 1 mile down the road we reached the Moldova border and had another 2 hour wait ahead of us! So we sat, listened to music, talked (not me because the Moldovan girl we were with told the driver I didn’t speak Romanian, so therefore was treated as def mute the whole trip), and tried not to go crazy. When we reached the building where we need to get our passports stamped and bus checked for bombs, Mexicans, and drugs, the other bus driver came from his sleeping box located directly under my fold down seat. He left the bus and came back with a guy about my age, drunk, and VERY dirty. He then told the other driver that this guy would be sitting next to me for the rest of the trip back to Chisinau. The driver that was currently driving tried to put up a fight for me, but lost the battle in the end.
So off we go down the road at 3 am. The first hour or so was okay. I sat on my corner of the seat and tried to sleep. As you can imagine I didn’t get much sleep, but the guy next to me slept like a baby with his head resting on the dashboard. At about 4 am I was just drifting off into a dream land when I feel a head resting on my shoulder. Without thinking I pushed this guy off me and then was blindsided with a punch to the back! I couldn’t believe I had just been punched! The driver saw this and started yelling at the guy and threw the guys bag at him and told him to put his head on that. After about half an hour Irina called me to tell me she was home. This phone call woke the guy up just enough to try to sleep on me again. So mid conversation I feel his head on my shoulder again and again I took his head and threw it to the other side of the seat, turned to finish my conversation, but then received repeated blows to my back not from the guys fist, but head! I took my phone from my ear grabbed his head again and yelled something like, “Dude! What’s wrong with you! STOP”. After a few more heads to my back the bus driver was half way off the road trying to fend the guy off of me. After the driver threatened to kick him of the bus he stopped and fell right back asleep. The rest of the trip was pretty quiet except for one more attempt to sleep on me, but after I threw his head off the window to his right he stopped.
Once in Chisinau I left the bus, walked about 2 blocks in the cold spring air and then decided I had suffered enough on the way home to walk half an hour in the cold, so we got a taxi. At Peace Corps I tried to get some sleep before people started showing up, but that was short lived because it was 6:30 am and people started coming to the office at 7 am.
The End!
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