Almost all of Day 10

Thursday, Day 10

Last night I had the worst stomach pain of all time and barely slept. I still feel super craptastic, but you know, the show must go on. Plus, it was warm by the time we went to get breakfast, and very hot the rest of the day. I guess we totally lucked out that it wasn’t like this the entire time we were here, as I had partially expected.

We had been talking about visiting the catacombs here, partially because a lot of people hid there during WWII and it was somewhat relevant to the research I have done, and partially because they’re just really creepy in a fascinating way. We thought (actually, Dad thought) we would have to go outside of the city to get to an entrance, but there are hundreds of them around the city, and it was actually Senya and his wife who told us where we could go.

The awesome thing about the place we went was that it was also a museum, and the entrance was in a mansion that had a lot of history attached to it. It was a partially-restored giant house in the center of the city, built in the 1800’s, and the owners actually created a parlor (with a little path to it, from the second underground level of the house) so that people could comfortably sit and hang out in the cold. (It was freezing in there; we picked a good hot day to go, but that meant I was standing in my t-shirt and shorts in 50 degrees, 50 feet underground!) She gave us a lot of the history of Odessa as to its relation to the catacombs.

I guess I naively thought that there just happened to be tunnels under the city? Or maybe that people dug the tunnels to have an alternative means of getting around, but really, people just started digging the stone out of the ground in order to build the city. So, she said, you can’t have catacombs without the city of Odessa, and vise versa. Pretty cool. So the city sits, sort of scarily, on lots of nothing, in a way.

It was a full on cave, with very high ceilings and stalagmites and stalactites, with a winding path that slowly descended to the center. Then there were the typical tunnels, and forks in the tunnels. The one to the right led to the center of the city, and the one to the left led straight to the sea, and the owners of the house and their guests (if they weren’t too drunk) would go through the tunnel to the sea to take a boat out on the water if they so chose. These, of course, were closed off to us, because I guess tours used to go through and people would get lost, etc.

There was even a trap door in the floor that the home owners used to use to capture the thieves that would use their tunnels to escape either to or from the sea. It was a 9 meter drop from the trap door to the bottom, also stone, and I can’t imagine that fall, in the pitch black, and how silent, maybe minus some water dripping, it would be to survive that fall and be straining your ears waiting for someone to come and either rescue you or finish you off.

Our guide let me take pictures, even though there were a million signs that said no photography allowed, and I think this was because it was just me and Dad. He (cautious as always) said he was from Odessa but I was visiting and only knew very little Russian, so he translated for me, and she was very patient throughout that process.

We weren’t exactly expecting a private tour, but it was really personal and interesting, and Dad and the guide (maybe 5 or 10 years older than him?) traded stories about how they used to find openings to the catacombs when they were little, and trail string or clothesline behind them and explore, usually finding a furious (and relieved) parent at the end of the tunnel when they finally came back out. What a giant, awesome, terrifying playground. My pictures don’t really do it justice, and man the flash from the camera was bright down there, but I’m grateful she let me break the rules.

We were going to go straight to the Jewish museum after the tour, but it wasn’t opened yet, so we went to the opera house again to see if we could at least get into a gift shop. How ironic and sad that they happen to be off and closed for the three weeks encompassing the time around when we are here. We trekked over there, but there was only a box office open for future shows (the ballet!) and the woman looked very pissed that we even dare ask questions about the inside. I tried all the adjacent doors, just in case we could sneak in, but they are all locked. We can say we tried.

By this point I hadn’t eaten anything yet and was super hot and maybe not too well tempered, so we came back to the apartment to have a break. Then, the Jewish museum, which was super weird because there were all these mannequins set up all over the place (behind curtains and stuff) and it kind of just seemed like someone’s hobby of collecting WWII relics turned into a way to ask for an entrance fee (informally called a “donation”).

We did find the book that my great-grandfather is in, but it really was more like a log of all the Jews in Odessa pre-WWII, so we didn’t buy it. He tried though. It was a pretty strange little experience. It’s located in the middle of this residential square, like Dad used to live in, so there were all these cats and little kids playing in the yard, laundry on lines, etc.

After, we walked through the street fair to buy a little something for Nastia, my little shadow, and finally were successful. On the way to the apartment again, we passed gelato, and I don’t really know how I managed to even find it appetizing, but we piled one cone high with the flavors we couldn’t recognize/have in the states. It was all beautiful shades of pink, but there was bubblegum right in the middle of all these berry flavors. That’s what we get for an ice cream obsession.

Finally the Olympics are on again, and we’ve got some quality wrestling going on. Neither of us understand the sport (Dad claims he “does not remember”) so we keep wondering why people are getting points, utter confusion. We have no plans for tonight, and secretly I would love to drink tea in my sweats and watch more dubbed movies, but Dad’s making his afternoon social calls, which could mean anything. Mr. Popularity. Tomorrow’s our last full day! How did this happen?