Odessa. Season 2016. “Stop ragul!”

Tatyana Gerashchenko, journalist, Odessa

...No matter how much they are called tourists and guests of the city, for Odessa residents they will remain just that - visitors. From which there is only one problem. Only if previously there was a white man swimming like a dog in a funny Panama hat, enthusiastically telling all of humanity “Look, meadow!” - this was not the hero of jokes, but your real beloved uncle Petya, engineer from Moscow, then today it is Ragul erectus, an alien element: “A de more?”

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

Habits: looks at Odessa residents like Blotting Man looks at Sharapov, swears at Russian-language signs - “Abyr!”, behaves in public places and at intersections like Hottabych in the subway, goes to stores naked to the waist (although for those who won the revolution, dignity is possible without pants - why these soviet prejudices?), talks to ATMs: “Tilky, try my szhera card!”, throws heads of corn into the sea, because the “gurgle” is funny.

He always blatantly pokes me when he demands to know how to get there. And, by God, it’s good that he’s not interested in theaters and museums - Ragul erectus goes straight from the station with all his luggage to the beach!

And this is where the last patterns of the locals are broken. Because imagine: the sun is blinding and pleasantly tingles the skin, the instructor is explaining to the student how to stay on the surf, the children are building a tower out of sand, the young people nearby are discussing “Game of Thrones”, and then suddenly from behind: “And that’s garneau! It’s a pity for Nem’s horse - they would be stingy”, well, “bathe” that is - they don’t swim and don’t sunbathe, they wash in the sea (so that later they don’t wonder where cholera comes from).

Ragul can jump up screaming “My ring, and remember those delicious worms from the vusama?!” and rush over heads and bedding after the shrimp merchant, and never mind that twenty more merchants will come after him. So a ragul can rush up to a kilometer (with the intonation of Drozdov from “In the Animal World”), and Odessa residents laugh: “Bandera ran!”

At the sight of a light wave, Ragul begins a panic attack: “Bang, tsunama!” There is a “tsunama” in the Black Sea, Karl! He can also easily take out the tailor’s scissors from his packs and start cutting his toenails in front of everyone...

And officials proudly call all this “an unprecedented influx of tourists”! To the general horror of Odessa residents, after “Krymnash” it is truly unprecedented. What about Türkiye? You still can’t get there by hitchhiking on carts...

It should be noted that the ominous spirit of the influx was in the air long before the official start of the holiday season. For the first time in all the years of independence, the coast was put in order - new nice embankments appeared, stairs to the sea were repaired, wars between vacationers and owners of paid beaches subsided, because municipal beaches appeared - with free trestle beds, awnings, umbrellas and water fountains - if If you don’t want to relax on the sand like a “savage”, then please use your comfort zone!

Ragul “appreciated”... But how to evaluate the same bureaucratic joys “After all, this is an unprecedented income to the budget!”? Because such “influxes” spend the night not in hotels or in camping areas, but in tents, which they put up wherever they want. And more specifically, in public places. And they live in them around the clock with all the nuances of a communal apartment - public drying of underwear, etc.

And in Odessa there is still such a wonderful place as a dog beach, where they have been going with their four-legged friends for decades. So last year, two-legged “not friends” managed to set up an entire tent city “on Sobachka”, sticking a “Maidan” sign in its center. And the piquancy of the situation was given by the fact that they also performed hygienic and physiological procedures wherever necessary, only without the grace characteristic of dogs.

How can we share the bureaucratic delight if other subspecies of the erectus tourist, apparently, spend the night at the station, eating not in public catering (which would still be a replenishment of the budget), but consuming “all of their own”? Their nutrition is a completely separate issue. They chew as well as drink, or rather, they always drink, stuffing themselves and their children with melon, ram and tomato with beer at the same time (they dig scraps with bottles into the sand as they are used to in the gardens).

The rescuers I know, believe me, are accustomed to everything from resuscitation of drowned people to sunstroke and severe alcohol intoxication, were shocked when faced with the situation “We ate too much frogs today, and our stomachs hurt.”

But then the raguli children simply ate jellyfish, and what to do about it?!

Returning from the beaches, Odessa residents are full of stories - they pass them on to each other, like anthropologists returning from scientific expeditions with field observations - simply discoveries!

Even novice “laboratory assistants” can easily identify the material being studied by tattoos - for example, by a yoke in the form of a trident. Then Tatko and his son will buy a souvenir shell and immediately gouge it with a stick to see “A de ravlyk?”

Then some big guy yells at everyone in Ivanovo, “Mom, give me a carrot!”

Then, having overheated, they will “put water on the head” so that “they won’t be completely dead.”

Then I see a drunken lady rushing in the water right onto the rocks, and I, Mother Teresa, tell her: “Don’t go there, you’ll hurt yourself - the bottom there is dangerous.” She is proud and full, like Savchenko at the trial: “Heroes will not die!” Result: I fell and broke my knees. But this is nonsense...

The other day I had to watch a touching “love story” when a couple of lovers enthusiastically ate sprat on the beach. And then HE took and laid out a heart of freshly bitten fish heads on the sand for HER. And SHE almost shed a tear, because the sea was roaring so romantically, and Chris de Burgh was tenderly singing about “Lady in red” from a nearby cafe. As they say, “glory to Ukraine, glory to the land - I tebe kohai and you mene kohai.”

The behavior of raguls in the city is a topic for another discussion. By the way, being ahead of events and understanding that the Ragul reader will accuse me of Ukrainophobia, I note that Odessa residents will always explain, and describe in vivid colors “how to get there,” and will support a conversation with a cultural tourist - no matter what language he speaks. But if a tourist behaves as he is used to, as if in a stable, because he is a “titular nation” (this is a complex philosophical concept, like “hello ass, New Year” approximately), then an Odessa resident... that an Odessa resident - he will joke. But peculiar.

Therefore, without saying a word, Odessa residents launched something like a flash mob “Stop Ragul!”

For example, if “it” brazenly demands “Hey you, how to get to Arcadia?” (“on” - as in a farm) you need to tell in detail how to get in the opposite direction and further away, for example, to the village of Kotovsky.

When the wonderful question follows: “Hey, do you have Potyomkyn gatherings here?” We act on the same principle - the route to Tairova.

The other day I was riding in a minibus, and the drunken ragulians in it couldn’t even formulate where exactly they wanted to go, but when we drove past the cemetery, the whole minibus, along with the driver, said in unison: “You should get off!”

Near Privoz, a “tourist” shouted on the phone to the entire tram, “Kupyla panties!”, so the female driver was not taken aback and announced through the loudspeaker: “The train will not move until the village speaks out.”

Another fresh story, also from a tram. Ragul, drunk, talked to himself: “This Porechenkov of yours is a scumbag, he supports the separatists” (hereinafter, completely unliterary expressions and even non-network ones). One woman turned around and asked: “Can I not express my personal opinion in a rude manner to the whole salon?” And he told her: “They said on TV a hundred times that he’s a scumbag...” But then all the passengers joined in: “Shut up, pan-head!” The driver left the cab in bewilderment: “Can I drop him off?” And Ragul still keeps up with the woman: “Are you from Russia?” Driver: “Don’t you see, the whole tram is from Russia?!”

Just recently, an Odessa resident posted specific photos on Facebook - two men walking along the Health Route completely naked, well, in general. They are going that way with confidence. The user emphasized that they spoke Ukrainian. They spoke Ukrainian in broad daylight, yes...

Commentators were immediately surprised: where were the police? But what's the problem here? And the fact is that the first police appeared in the coastal zone only in mid-July (earlier in the current holiday season this was a rarity akin to the Red Book), only if they beat someone to death. Why? Because the police bicycle patrols, widely advertised by Governor Saakashvili, never began service. Despite the fact that bicycles were purchased, and a special summer uniform, and, God forgive me, Saakashvili, as always, ritually wearing his trousers backwards and almost holding holy water to fanfare, blessed them on their way...

But it turned out that they accidentally forgot to purchase helmets, knee pads and first aid kits for the law enforcement officers. So the Raguli did what they wanted. However, maybe no one would have stopped them - still in a European way.

And for non-Odessa residents, I will explain in detail: we walked in this form along the Health Route - this is a local landmark, in fact, a huge environmentally friendly park, where there is no car traffic; with playgrounds and sports grounds, where they ride bicycles and rollerblades, where they play table tennis and badminton every couple of meters, where there are benches, where there are a lot of children, where there is a cable car, trays with cotton candy and ice cream...

She, the Health Track, puts a number of ragulians at a dead end. The length of the route from Shevchenko Park (Langeron Beach is also located there) to Arcadia is almost six kilometers of green zone. However, Raguli is clearly not aware that most of Odessa, including the historical center, is located “on a plain rising above the sea,” if as in the encyclopedia. That’s why we mostly don’t go to the sea, but go down.

Raguli, having “swimmed” somewhere on Lanzheron and wanting to return to the station again, travel along this route all the way to Arcadia, that is, all six kilometers, and with their last breath they lament, “This mountain never ends.”

It is noteworthy that, at the request of Odessa residents, the city authorities want to extend the route as far as possible. Then there is a chance that the mountain will never end, and they, “in unprecedented numbers,” will go along it to where they are so zealously striving with cries of “Europe!” and Provence.

Although, however, all this could be displayed quite succinctly in a couple of words: “Get the fuck off the beach!”

And for those who will definitely start writing in the comments “Where were you on May 2?”, I will explain that it is among such people, who can hardly distinguish edible objects from inedible ones, that the weapons that were stolen from military warehouses in 14 are now dispersed.