Part 6 == The Nightlife ==
Nightlife in Sevastopol gets pretty interesting, the closer you get to tourist season. There are two main hot spots for fun in Sevatopol: the downtown waterfront and Omega Beach. As the sun sets and night sets in, both become fill up with tourists and with people who want to have fun. Discos and bars abound everywhere. People set up tourist stalls, selling curios and knicknacks. People bring in horses and ponies for people to "ride" (reins are held by the handler, not the rider). We also saw a lot of an old carnival game, the one where the guys take a sledge hammer and hit the platform to see how strong they are.
We spent a lot of nights downtown, but Marina prefers Omega Beach instead. Omega Beach is a rocky beach for people to go swimming. There is a strip of restaurants and discos along the beach, and when the sun sets the night belongs to the party people.
Marina and I visited a few discos on Omega beach, and it was interesting. Warning beforehand: the toilets have only the bowl, no seats. I saw this in public bathrooms everywhere in Sevastopol, so it should be no surprise the disco was any different. You just brace your hand against the wall, squat and go. Luckily, I never needed to do this.
The dance floor of a lot of discos have one wall that is basically a large mirror. This is the most popular spot on the dance floor, for women. They love watching themselves dance. Marina pointed it out to me, in humor. The disco is pretty much packed during tourist season, and getting a seat at a table is often a challenge. If you do find a seat and sit a while, be prepared to shave a few weeks off your life inhaling copious amounts of secondhand smoke.
One thing that Marina cautioned me about is that once tourist season really picks up, muggers and thieves abound. They often come in late at night, after people have drank excessive amounts of alcohol, and start casing their targets. They look for expensive clothes and jewelry. They look to see who spends a lot of money. They look to see who's drunk. Then, when their target leaves, the leave just behind him/her and wait until they walk into an unlit part of the street (there's a lot of them). After that, their victim usually wakes up with a severe headache and missing cash, jewelry, cell phones and anything else worth money.
On a different note, Marina, Mama and I went out to a disco on Omega Beach one night. It was around 9pm, still early in the evening. Even so, the disco was packed. After Mama did some talking with the bar owner, he found us some seats with a pair of late 20-something girls. While we sat and drank our wine, Mama chatted with one of them. Apparently, they were both single mothers and they were out at the disco to find husbands for themselves.
It might work for them. One of the things that the bar owners like to do is put single men at the same table as single women. It generates a lot of revenue for the bar, as the men buy the women a lot of drinks. :-) Finding a loving and lasting relationship, on the other hand, is probably a different story...
