DASVI'DANJA YALTA

This picture is kind of the money shot of yalta, called the swallows nest.  I didn't get to see it yesterday because I was sick when the bus left.  So just for me, they went by it as we sailed out of Yalta today.  

Today we had a tour of a palace of a very rich man who's name I never quite heard.  We had been told ahead of time that he incorporated Florentine, Moorish, and English architecture into this building, so I was expecting a McCastle, but it was actually quite nice.

 Everybody's favorite room was an ocean-facing room that was kind of a sun porch with ivy growing on the walls and ceiling.  

During the Yalta conference, Churchill stayed at this house and was very

enamored of one of the lions.  There's a story that he said to Stalin that he knew of the old Russian custom that if a visitor asks for something most valuable he is give it, so he would like the lion.  Stalin reportedly said the most valuable thing he had to give was socialism.  

After our morning tour we came back to the boat for our gala sailing away party where we were allowed to buy a two for one champagne which was really fairly awful before lunch.  We will now sail until sometime tomorrow morning because we are now backtracking through the Black Sea on our way back to the Dnieper River. We just had a Ukrainian lesson, which was Ukrainian and Russian which we learned in great depth in an hour.  NOT.  it was interesting, though.  I have more or less learned the consonants but not the vowels.  There are actually only7 letters in Russian that represent the same sound in English.  There are many more that look the same but represent different sounds.  

By the way, I got an update today for the blog ap for iPad and it does something different again from before. Yikes.  

It's a bit windy on the deck as we depart.

Zoe's dessert at lunch.