New Adventures In Sleeping Arrangements

This past week or so I have been on a vacation from work. Having spoken with Erin about wanting to see Odessa, she was nice enough to invite me along while she went to Kiev for three days and then headed to Odessa for three more. Once I agreed, she made all of the arrangements and I just tagged along for the ride. During this trip I had two new experiences- staying in a hostel was first, and the other was arriving to a city and renting an apartment from the old ladies at the train station. These ladies are everywhere just beyond the platforms in the train stations of most major cities. Here are my observations…

We arrived to Kiev by train on Wednesday morning and we headed directly for the “Magic Bus Hostel”. We had the address and rang the bell on the call box. We are buzzed into an old apartment building with windowless hallways lit by single incandescent lights. Luckily we only had to go to the second floor. We knocked on the door and were greeted by a young lady named Marina. It turned out to be everything I expected from a place called “Magic Bus” complete with the strong smell of incense, tie-dyed wall hangings and a combination of “Make Love, Not War” and “Thank You for POT Smoking” bumper stickers on the makeshift reception desk (and I use that term with the loosest of meanings). Marina invited us in and gave us the “pivot tour” where we all stood in the middle of the room and turned in the one spot as she pointed everything out in the course of about 30 seconds. First the bedroom. There are actually three private bedrooms in this hostel, but the 6 bunk-bed main room is the one most of the guests stay in. She pointed to three empty beds and handed us each a towel, pillow, and 2 sheets. There were blankets left on some of the bunks by previous travelers that you could just take for your own bed. On the way out she pointed to a rack of individual lockers whose keys were issued upon payment. We then walked into the, very small, common area. Two arm chairs and a leather couch were the extent of the furnishings. There was a common kitchen with a couple of upside down 5 gallon pails serving as the seats at the breakfast table. One private shower and one private toilet rounded out the whole of the accommodations. Most of my Peace Corps friends are much younger than me and I hear about their hostel stories frequently. Sometimes they are comparing notes with other volunteers and sometimes telling me of a particularly good or bad experience they have had. By American money standards Kiev is pretty cheap, but by my Peace Corps monthly allowance, it is a fairly expensive city. To put sleeping accommodations into perspective, an average hotel (like a Holiday Inn) will run you about US$115 per night, though you can spend hundreds of dollars on a Hyatt or Radisson. The Magic Bus is located in the same part of town as those hotels and runs us US$6.50 per night each, so, for our money this was the obvious choice. The saying “you get what you pay for” can certainly be applied here. The mattresses were cheap and well used. I suppose I did not expect a Serta, but the lack of padding made it difficult to get comfortable. Also, for the first 2 days, I got stuck on the top bunk, which means that you can feel every movement the person on the bottom makes. This made for a rough night’s sleep. But, I will admit it was quiet enough to sleep once you got comfortable. The toilet worked, but one toilet (in the room with the bathroom sink) can be challenging when there are 17 people sharing it- especially at peak times. Speaking of peak times, technically there was a hot water shower, but very few people actually get to enjoy it. There is one boiler- probably a 20 gallon tank. The problem is that if two people take a shower and do not conserve the water (shutting it off while they are soaping), the chances of having any remotely warm water for the third person is minimal to nil. On day two and three I took my shower at 6:00 am while the rest of the people slept. All in all, this was a respectable first hostel experience for me, though I hope to not need to resort to this when my post-Peace Corps finances kick in.

After three days in Kiev, we took a train to Odessa. Now, a couple of weeks ago Erin and I stayed in a rented apartment in the city of Sevastopol. We did not arrange for the apartment, as everything had already been arranged by our friend before we got there. This concept of renting an apartment instead of hotel (or hostel) was foreign to me. I have heard of renting an apartment for a month or more through an agency, but a single night or short term stay at an apartment was a new concept for me. Once we found out it could be way cheaper than a hotel, and given the fact that we were not in the high season, we decided to try it on our own. We got off the train around 9:00am on Sunday, and as we made our way with luggage through the obstacles of taxi drivers and tour group operators we finally hit upon our first apartment renter. She was an old lady standing in the cold with a 4”x6” cardboard (think a scrap of cereal box) handwritten sign paperclipped to her jacket that read in Russian: Apartments, rooms for rent. Erin and Chis took the lead here and since none of us had ever done this before we weren’t sure even what to ask for. I had read to make sure you ask if there is hot water and also make sure that you get a key- that you aren’t just renting a room in someone’s house. Soon (literally 20 seconds into it) we were surrounded by several women of all ages asking us how much we were willing to pay. Always a bad sign- especially if you don’t know what the going rates are, or even what part of town the apartment is in. We were just getting into town for the first time, so we didn’t know where we wanted to stay or what a reasonable price was. We knew we could probably get a hostel for about 50 UAH per night each (150 UAH total per night) and that a hotel would run us around 800 UAH a night- on the train ride we had discussed that if we couldn’t get an apartment for less than 300 UAH we would just go to the hostel. As we stood there surrounded by women wanting to rent to us, some representing some of the higher end places turned away when we told them that we were looking to spend about 200 UAH per night. They knew that we weren’t going to meet their much higher reserves and surely it was still early in the day and there were plenty of hours to find the right renter. As our old lady began franticly making phone calls from her cell phone, we realized she had a whole roster of owners, each with different size apartments meeting many different needs. She was looking for a 3 day apartment in the 200 UAH range as close to the city center as she could. Some of her regulars were filled, some were too expensive, and some too far. Before long she had a place lined up for us to look at. She told us the best she could do for us was 250 UAH a night which was still in our price range. Soon, another older lady arrived and told us to follow her pointing the way on a map in my guide book. After about 10 minutes we were there. We walked through the common area of the apartment building which was a mess to say the least. Like a construction crew left town mid-job several months ago. The apartment was on the first floor and we walked in to a bit of a smell like it had been a while since people were in it. Like it needed a good airing out. The whole place was a bedroom with a king bed, a kitchen with a pullout bed, a toilet room and a shower room. The door was solid and secure and there was hot water. We decided to take it- opting to get on with our exploring instead of haggling ourselves out of the place and having to walk back to the train station to start over again. In retrospect, again, you get what you pay for. As soon as you have time to sit and soak in your surroundings, you start to see the things that you didn’t notice when you were first standing in the kitchen trying to finish up the transaction and get settled in. The place was really quite dirty. Some of it a film of construction dust coating much of the kitchen, with other examples being the mildew on the shower curtain that you wouldn’t notice until you were actually standing in the shower. There was a lot of dust piled along the baseboards underscoring the need for a good cleaning. And lastly, the 2 cockroaches we saw in the kitchen- one each on our last two days was what made us consider if we had vetted the place properly. Let’s just say even before we saw them, we were washing all of our dishes and utensils in the sink with our own store bought sponge instead of the shriveled up grey-but-used-to-be-orange sponge that came with the place. We agreed to be out of the apartment by noon on Wednesday and got all of the contact info for the landlady before she handed over the keys to us. We called her a little early and she arrived within minutes to conclude our apartment renting experience.
On the way out, I pointed out that her sink drain was very slow to which she said she knew and explained that someone had made a Ukrainian pasta dish and a lot of the flour had gone down the drain. I couldn’t help but think that maybe she would want to get that repaired if you were going to rent the place out, but then I thought, this is Ukraine, you don’t fix anything until it breaks and even then it pretty much has to cause harm or discomfort before the project is attacked.
All in all, I was glad to have experienced these two new sleeping options and now I have a yardstick by which to measure future arrangements.