Crimea XI: The rest

The days I spent in Crimea after Wednesday weren't all that busy. I got up late, spent a lot of time just lying in my room reading or stuffing face at various restaurants. My legs were giving me hell every time I tried to do anything remotely demanding, so I just settled for a little driving around Yalta and its surroundings.

I went to a place called Valley of Ghosts just east of Alushta, at a place called Luchistoye. The name sounded very intriguing to yours truly, but again my Lonely Planet guide was misleading - either about its actual location or about how interesting it is, because I was hard pressed to find much beyond the ordinary, landscapewise.

I had also read about The Swallow's Nest, a small castle that had been turned into a restaruant. I tried, but couldn't get closer to the place than about a kilometer, and with my legs that was a distance I didn't want to attempt, especially since there was a difference in height of a couple of hundred meters.

One good thing was that I finally managed to track down a couple of decent eating places. One is the "Pint Pub", of which there are two in Yalta. Go to the one on Pushkin street, not the one in the very center, the food is as night and day. As with all Ukrainian places it takes a little time to get your food, but the Pint Pub in Pushkin street was worth it. I can highly recommend the goose breast!

Also recommendable is the Kozyrnaya restaurant just outside the actual town of Yalta, part of a national chain serving traditional Ukrainian fare. The restaurant lies on the ocean side of the road between Alushta and Yalta, and the interior is tastefully decorated (as tasteful as anything can be in a country where spray-on whipped cream is still the very height of culinary refinement as far as desserts go) and the views are quite good too. I recommend their borsch (soup) and their sashliky (shish kebab), which is almost delightfully untouched by western thoughts on vegetables as an integral part of a meal. Meat eaters of the world, unite! I also had my first taste of Russkie dark bread and a peculiar Ukrainian dish called Salo - which is essentially salted pork fat, which you then spread on the bread, sorta like butter, and eat. Lonely Planet "dares" you to eat it, but I thought it was quite tasty.

Saturday I flew from Simferopol to Kiev, where I stayed the night at the highly forgettable airport hotel at Boryspil. Its only redeeming feature (besides the extremely purdy girls in the reception) is a 24-hour restaurant. Service was slow as always, but I actually got a heartfelt smile from the waitress when I asked for Salo...


Valley of Ghosts pics here, Swallow's Nest pics here and Kozyrnaya pics here.

All the pics from my October trip can be found here.

Valley of Ghosts. Looked like a pile of rubble to me.




The Swallow's Nest.


The Pint Pub on Pushkin street.


A Danish beer poster in the Pint Pub.


Kozyrnaya. This room, which I sat in both days I was there, was decorated in a charmingly haphazard way. You got the feeling you were in someone's home.


The sashliki. Meat stuffed in a thin breadlike thingy with some onion on the side. Meeeeeat!


Salo. Spread on dark, Russian bread it is quite tasty.


The exterior is quite cozy too.


There is a vaguely eastern Hansel & Gretel feeling to the whole place.


The airport hotel at Boryspil is Russkie concrete architecture through and through.


I think I know what they're trying to say here and I appreciate the sentiment.