Bulgaria with Noodles

A blogger with his in-laws. It was my hero, Michael Palin, who said in Around the World in Eighty Days that air travel is a great way to see airports. Real travel is something you read about while you are sitting in seat 33D. Well, yes, I would more or less agree with a lot of that. Airports are pretty dull places, about as sexy as Brexit. I do, however, want to write a few lines about one particular airport that I found quite interesting. There, I have said it. An interesting airport. Is that an oxymoron?   Very surprising and beautiful - and it's an airport. Simferopol airport has only recently opened and, considered as a piece of architecture, it really is interesting. The shape of the building is supposed to resemble a wave and the effect really is quite startling. There is also a huge wall along one side of the departures area, with thousands of plants growing on it. This green wall acts as a sort of lung, freshening the air and introducing a touch of Nature in ...

It must have been about twenty-five years ago when I was first in Simferopol and in Kiev. In those days, the Crimea was still very much part of the Ukraine and it was the era of perestroika , or maybe just after that difficult time. What I saw then made a big impression on me. Those who are so quick to criticize Putin's "illegal occupation" of the Crimea should do a bit of research and find out how dreadful things really were back then.  I remember that in the summer it was 18,000 Ukrainian  kuponi to the pound; by Christmas, 24,000. I remember having to pay to use the beach at Yalta. Then there were valutni magazini , the well-stocked shops for those with foreign currency. These valutni shops had almost no customers at all and all of the prices were in US dollars. The local shops, by way of contrast, were full of empty shelves or there were maybe just a few jars with some mysterious brown liquid in them. A strange object could sometimes be made out, f...