We're in Odessa! Or Odesa. How many ssses you use depends on which side you're more sympathetic to Ukraine or Russia.

We left from different airports, I had an easy time making it to the big international airport by train and had plenty of time to use airport wi-fi and have a vending machine coffee before boarding my Ukrainian operated Brazilian plane bound for Odessa.

Odessa is the 4th city of Ukraine but a very important port city. It's also under Martial Law thanks to the recent Kerch Strait crisis. It's a strategic city, seized by a Nazi-allied Romania in World War II and Ukraine's biggest port - all the more important now it's overbearing neighbour has started snapping up much of the coast.

We got a bit ripped off on our way to the centre but at least it meant I got rid of a lot of my 1, 2, 5, 10 and 20 hyrvinia notes. There's 35 hyrvinia to the pound...

The suburbs of Odessa are grim. Very grim. Like, very, very grim. There's none of Kyiv's snow so Odessa looks a lot more grim. It was however, snowing, but the sea breeze preventing any settling. The centre along the shores of the Black Sea is however rather quaint. There's fancy, tsarist style architecture, like any typically pretty European city.

We had burgers and Ukrainian beer at lunch before finding our smashing hostel, hidden away down a car park. We then went for a stroll around Odessa, stumbling across the Potemkin stairs. These stairs are Odessa's main tourist attraction. It appears the Odessa tourist board is a tad desperate.

We made our way pass a love shaped mound of locks and a few palace type buildings. We're quite elevated, so have a great view of the horrifically ugly industrial port. It's huge, it's all the Ukrainian economy's got anymore to be honest.

After having a fancy latte in a basement cafe we stumbled across a history museum. We visited exhibitions about the Romanian Nazi-backed seizure of the city and the Soviet take-back from the Black Sea. We also saw harrowing pictures from the 1930s famine, caused by Stalin's nihilistic agrarian policies that turned one of the world's most fertile nations starving.

Odessa's pretty, the architecture is cute. There's lots of prams, a big christmas tree and street hawks selling books about the Hara Krishna movement in Russian. It's a very mixed city, Russian is everywhere here but clearly the sentiment isn't as extreme as further east or in Crimea. Still, an odd diversion, but interesting to 'see it' so to speak.

Anyways, laters!