Table of Contents
Intro
There are holidays where you travel and you see things, make many discoveries in one single day. You go to bed in the evening, head buzzing with the new learnings and impressions.
This is not one of those holidays. For 10 days, I am confined to one place – a popular all-inclusive family resort near Obzor in Bulgaria. I am bound here by lack of public transport and an appalling road, by the wish of my kids to stay near the pool instead of exploring new cities in the heat, by the good food and activities I don’t want to miss.
For 10 days, I explore the same location: a little patch of sand, a nook on the balcony where I write and read in the morning while the family still sleeps. The big bar terrace above, where I can drink coffee and watch the sea, swallows and seagulls, and also other hotel residents and workers.
When I have time to look around but not much to look at, I start looking within, write more, remember more. In the end, it is a kind of inward journey, a holiday where you travel to see yourself better.
Sea
I came back to the Black Sea some 34 years later. I saw it once when I was little, during a family visit in Crimea, Ukraine. I still remember many small pieces from that trip.
When I was little, we used to go to the Baltic Sea in the summer – it was the sea for me, the one I knew and loved in a way you would love your family or your first home. Sometimes you find more faults with it than good sides, but it is still irreplaceable.
Except for that one-year trip to the Black Sea, it was always the Baltic Sea, until I turned 17 and got to see more of the world. But that time in Crimea, I could only compare the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea. It felt weird, akin to realising for the first time that some people are rich and you are not, but their life – even though grand – looks also more complicated and intimidating, and so you are relieved to get back to yours.
Black Sea then felt so much more than what I was used to having in a sea. It was warmer, bluer, saltier, and more transparent. It had fish, jellyfish and – I was told, but haven’t seen myself – dolphins. I loved it, but it was not easy. I hit myself on the rocks while diving, got my eyes itchy from the water and swam right into a flock of jellyfish. So, all in all, I cherished the memory of that holiday, but never caught myself longing to return to the Black Sea instead of the Baltic.
But now I’m almost 40 and I have seen some other seas and two oceans, and I am back again at the Black Sea – and I love it here. Now that I have expanded my knowledge and also my comfort zone, this feels to me like the most comfortable sea I have been to. The sand is soft, and the water feels cool against the skin, pleasantly refreshing, neither the burning cold of the Baltic nor the blood-warm waters of the Adriatic.
It is getting deep slowly – not annoyingly so, but also doesn’t plunge. There are waves high enough so you can jump in them, almost as strong that they might take your swimsuit off if you’re not careful, but only just about.
When water gets into your nose and mouth, it tastes salty, but when you dry, the skin doesn’t itch, even if you forget to take a shower immediately. The colour is a pretty greenish blue close to the shore, deeper blue into the open sea, and the white foam on the waves makes the colours brighter.
I watch the sea and think that it is similar to the food of Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine. These cuisines may not be recognised as the fanciest, but to me they are the perfect mix of comfort, taste and health, simple, quality products, grill, spices, clean flavour, big portions.
I watch the sea and I feel at ease and comfortable. I remember how Corfu took my breath away at each glance with the beauty of the sea. Here I sit and watch the waves and breathe deeply, my lungs full of sea air.
War
While on holiday, I have a small task marked as “not yet done” on my internal to-do list. My friend’s mother is from Crimea and still lives there, and my friend would like to bring her to live together in Lithuania.
There is a problem, however. The mother only has an internal Ukrainian passport, not the biometric one required for travelling abroad. To get it, she would need to go to the mainland in Ukraine, and my friend is afraid to take her there. Her mother is in a wheelchair and cannot walk.
– Imagine there’s an attack while she is there! – My friend tells me. – She will not be able to run to the shelter. It would be like I have killed her with my own bare hands.
My friend calls Lithuanian border control, and they tell her the mother would not be let in without a valid biometric passport. I couldn’t believe it when she told me, and I checked the regulations – it appears that Ukrainian citizens still have the right to seek refuge in Lithuania. After all, the war hasn’t stopped.
I call the border control myself. The lady on the phone listens to my explanations of why the lady is not able to go to Ukraine to get herself a new passport.
– This is what wheelchairs are for. – She tells me knowingly, as if sure in Ukraine all the bomb shelters are adapted for wheelchairs, and the Russian drones would wait even for the slowest of people to make it inside before dropping the bombs. She continues:
– Your friend’s mother needs a proper passport. If the war had just started yesterday, this might have worked. But no one at the border would fall for these tricks now.
There are two faces of Lithuania when it comes to the war in Ukraine. One is kind and brave, one of Lithuania welcoming refugees, collecting money and buying drones, all the time thinking of new ways to use yellow and blue in marketing and to make Ukrainians more welcome. Another face must be that of this border control employee. She uses the slang word “bajeris” – “a trick”, and the word burns into my brain as if I got scalded with hot water. When I call my friend to report back, I omit most of the conversation except for the facts, and also tell her that I will email more institutions to see if I get something else from them.
If I stand on the shore facing the sea, I would be facing Georgia even though I cannot see it. Somewhere to my left are Romania and Ukraine, and to my right – Turkey. But the bigger shore, hidden somewhere behind the horizon, is of Russia. Sometimes I see the ships crossing the sea, and I wonder what countries they are travelling to and from.
In theory, I know that everything on our planet is connected, but this Black Sea makes it frighteningly obvious. Here I am, jumping with the kids in the waves. Somewhere further, there is Odesa. My friends there post stories on Instagram, a mix of beach parties and bomb shelters these days. A little further away is the war criminal itself, preparing more bombs to drop them on the beach parties, on the regular life, which I now know is not a given but a rare gift. And somewhere between the war and peace, in the blue of the Black Sea, Crimea is stuck.
Sunrise
I get up at 6 to watch the sunrise.
Since I got the smartwatch, my favourite function is checking the time of sunrise and sunset, as well as moonrise and moonset, right on my wrist, adjusted to any location I find myself in. This doesn’t mean I actually get up to see those sunrises – sunset and moon phases proved to be more useful so far. Still, knowing the time of sunrise makes me feel more connected to the daily cycles. It is not that I am a night owl, but I am not an early riser either – in terms of productivity, I am a midday person, maybe because I was born at midday.
My friends of the same age often remark:
”I feel older now. When I was young, I could study/party all night and be fine in the morning.”
Perhaps I was always old in this sense. I could occasionally party all night, but I wouldn’t feel fine the morning after without getting some sleep. I most definitely could not study all night – early on at school, I realised my head would not store any input after 10 pm and gave up on the idea of preparing for exams the night before. I had a much better chance of passing it if I had just gone to bed at a reasonable hour and turned up for the test well-rested in the morning.
In summer, my day timing usually allows me to catch the sunset but not the sunrise. However, winter (especially in Lithuania) is a different matter – you can easily see both; during those shortest days, they fall into my fully productive hours.
When I was little, seeing a sunset in Vilnius was somewhat accidental – it happened while you were doing whatever you were doing, and you would see it if you happened to be outside, but miss it if you were inside. Whenever we went to the seaside, though, all the sunsets became intentional, the key points of the day. You would plan all your activities so that when the time of sunset approached, you would be ready to go to the beach or on the pier if you were in Palanga and watch it.
My parents taught me that if the sun set in the sea without any clouds in its way, the next day would be sunny. If even a little stripe of clouds appeared between the setting red sun and the edge of the sea, the coming day would be cloudy. This always worked better than any weather forecast we had in the newspaper when I was a child, so watching the sunset also had this practical purpose. I don’t know who taught my parents this – my grandparents came from places far away from the Baltic Sea.
The Baltic Sea in Lithuania has the perfect set up for the sunset: the shore faces directly west and because we are far in the North, the sun sets very slowly in summer, giving you enough time to settle in the dunes, drink a beer, eat some smoked fish and take a photo pretending that you are holding a little red ball of a sun in the palm of your hand. The sunset is an activity I have been showing to all my international friends visiting my country.
There was one trip I remember particularly well – my friends came over, and we made a big hike through the Curonian Spit, catching all the sunsets we could. But for once, I still felt an energy in me and an unsatisfied hunger for more sun. One morning, I left them sleeping, tiptoed out of our room and walked to the Bay of Amber near Juodkrante. It was the second half of August, and the straw sculptures were already set up in the bay, ready to be burned on the Equinox.
If the sea shore faces towards the west, making it a perfect spot for watching the sunset, then the opposite shore of the Curonian Spit makes it equally ideal for watching the sunrise, I discovered. I took some pictures of the red sliver of a sun rising above the water, changing the colour to gold and then finally becoming so bright you had to turn your eyes away from it.
As I scrolled through the pictures later, showing them to my friends, I realised that they are indistinguishable from the ones I took the evening before the sunset, just set in the opposite order.
Years later, when I was visiting my grandmother in her care home, I arrived just in time for dinner. I saw a room full of old people sitting at round tables, and nurses were helping some with locating their food, filling up glasses, and feeding those who could no longer hold the spoon. The scene was so familiar to me, so similar to those I have witnessed in my kids’ kindergartens. The start and the end of life look the same, just set in an opposite order, like my sun pictures.
The bay of Obzor faces directly East. When the sun sets behind the mountains, the sea turns a distinct shade of blue, a milky, dusty blue that glows from within. It is beautiful. I always thought not having the sun set in the sea takes some points away from the place, but now I realise – removing the sun from the picture makes the sea glow on its own.
But I am still very curious about the sunrise, and so I finally get up at 6 am and walk to the beach. The red sliver of sun appears above the edge of the sea, resembling the sun rising above the Curonian Lagoon and setting into the Baltic Sea. The connection of everything and the sameness of it for a second makes me confused about what I am right now – a child watching the sun set into the Baltic Sea, a young woman watching the sun rise above the Curonian lagoon, or the now-me here, my feet washed by the water from both Ukraine & Russia.
