Sevastopolifragilistic...

And so I left the Crimea. I wouldn't have taken the bus but there were problems with the trains on my day of travel so it was easier to go by chara. Sevastopol's bus station is a relatively sedate affair, buses are well marked, and there's lots of signs in the windows of the buses to give you an idea of where they're going. Some even post the times too, although they always wait five minutes extra for stragglers. I sat in the waiting room out of the sun for a while before getting on board my bus. A mid-20s male came in while I was sitting there. He had a white t-shirt on that said 'Lyndsey's Lovely Ladies' on the front. When he went out a few minutes later, I noticed it said 'Amorous Anne' on the back. He didn't look like he was part of a hen night posse, or that he would ever be in the future. Maybe he didn't have a clue what was written on the shirt, or maybe a relative - or even Lyndsey herself - had sent him the shirt as a gift...

So promptly, fifteen minutes late, we left Sevastopol. It took nearly two hours to do the 90km to Simferopol - where we stopped for almost an hour while the driver drank tea and smoked - although I do admit we were delayed slightly by the two old women, one old man and a dog who had decided to herd twenty or so goats across the main road just as we were approaching. It got dark after that and they switched off the dvd player and everyone nodded off. I woke up at five the next morning, a crick in my neck and the knee of the woman next to me in my side, to find that we had already reached Odessa, where we were due in at eight. Luckily it was cool enough for me to walk into the centre, checking the way by asking the street sweepers in my terrible Russian. One man I asked looked puzzled, then asked if I spoke English. I said yes and he smiled, told me which tram to take - the number five - and, as he held up his left hand to make sure I understood, I noticed the top half of his first finger was missing. He was a salvage engineer he said, and had worked all over the Black Sea and Mediterranean. He was due to go to Suez in a month to try to raise a tanker from the bottom of the canal. I wondered how he'd lost the finger. He had been to England only once, he said, a trip that had consisted of sitting for ten hours at Heathrow airport waiting for a flight to Kiev. He watched me walk to the tram stop and waved as a tram came along and I waved back through the dusty back window as I trundled off into the early morning sun.