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Message |
    
Gary Thomas
New member
Username: Mallarduck
Post Number: 5
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 - 12:21 am: | |
Marv, thanks for the outstanding reports on the Ukraine cruise you and your wife took. The excursions really brought the history of the area to life as I read your summaries of each port. We hope to follow in your travels in a year or so. Thanks again for all the writing. |
Jeffrey G. Carlen
Senior Member
Username: Jcarlen
Post Number: 222
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 04, 2006 - 08:57 pm: | |
Sounds like it was a marvelous trip and you really enjoyed it. Thanks for the great trip report-it is a trip we have wanted to do for some time. |
Marv Feldman
Senior Member
Username: Marv
Post Number: 496
Registered: 02-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 04, 2006 - 07:56 pm: | |
REFLECTIONS - VIKING RIVER CRUISE (Dnieper River and the Black Sea), UKRAINE
Taking a cruise had been Carole's dream for years, so Marvin thought this was a great choice of a birthday present for "a very special lady". Now this experience is a memory, here are some reflections.
1) Ukraine has only been an independent country since 1991, so relatively few tourists find their way here. Our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook on Ukraine was a slim volume, compared to its publications on Israel or Portugal. Indeed, this is "the road less traveled".
2) The Dnieper River cuts right through the heart of Ukraine so this cruise gave us a "fair sample" of a variety of cities, towns and villages, including both Kiev (its largest and capital city) and Odessa (a huge contrast with its Black Sea port and fashionable boulevards), and the Crimean Peninsula.
3) Like spring flowers bursting into colour after a long, cold and drab winter, this newly-free (from the USSR) country is like a teenage girl at her first (unchaperoned) dance! The richest merchants in the country must be the manufacturers of red hair dye or knee-high, leopard-skin, stiletto-healed boots! No longer the grey square-shaped, Soviet-style women, young ladies here are mostly very slim, attractive and dance the night away to bright strobes and blasting American music videos which fill life-sized plasma screen monitors. The Soviet's tight 70+ year grip is history although old habits die hard; but now "Jack is out of the box"!
4) While the cruise itself was most informative and Carole loved it (pleasant staff, good food, interesting lectures, comfortable room, etc.), the part we really enjoyed was our time off the ship. We are independent travelers, enjoy looking "just around the corner" and wanted to stay in some places longer and other places shorter (or not at all).
5) This trip brought our classroom history courses into stark reality - from the lavish palaces of the Tsars/Czars, to the ornate Russian Orthodox churches, the tragic battlegrounds of the Crimean War, and Babi Yar, where Nazis murdered over 100,000 Ukrainians (mostly Jews).
HAPPY TRAVELING,
Marv |
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