Odessa - Arkadia beach

Odessa - Arkadia beach, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

We then found our way to the charning little museum where a kind lady with pale skin and a pink scarf on her head talked us through the exhibits and the history of the Jews in Odessa, which in the early 1900's was the third largest Jewish city in the world after Warsaw and New York, with at one stage 40 percent of the people being Jewish. However they suffered badly under the Romanians during the Holocaust, everyone being surprised that the Russians didn't defend the city better from the Germans. Later on there was Soviet repression and then economic decline under an independent Ukrainian stste.

Breakfast (today) is now served, excuse me).


After the museum, we somehow managed to skip lunch and made our way to the beaches for a nice long walk in the downs, past all the empty seaside attractions. It was not what I had imagined the seaside would be like but one could easily imagine every spot on the sandy beach being taken up by Russian tourists in the summer.

We spent the evening at Sergey's friend Sergey's house, where I cooked pasta all'amatriciana (just missing a bit of chili) and Sergey cooked some prawns, accompanied by fine wine from Ukraine and plonk from Moldova. We didn't get back til quite late...