Representatives of the two taxi companies which won the tender to be represented at the airport provided great service at reasonable rates. Their new Mercedes cars were clean and cool with air conditioning. The driver smiled and helped me with luggage.
I was always wondering why people in Crimea never smile.
The initial experience was a huge contrast to previous trips to Crimea, whose notoriously poor service clashes in a strange mismatch with its picturesque cliffs and beaches.
I was always wondering why people in Crimea never smile.
The hotel in downtown Simferopol welcomed me with a lot of smiles and offered a great buffet for breakfast. Had Crimea really changed?
No, unfortunately, I woke up to the same old Crimea.
In Crimea, you often have to pre-select your breakfast in advance from three ugly options per day, and this rarely meant you were served faster. It’s a system still in place from Soviet days. If you are staying for a week, you need to guess what you would want on every day. The waiter asks for your room number to match it with your breakfast: A, B or C.
The amazing thing about it all, despite providing such horrible service, such famous Crimean waiters still expect tips!
On this day, he was not happy to see me.
He pretended that he needed to make an urgent phone call. But after a few attempts, he could not get through, as it seemed. I was the only one in the restaurant. I finally got his attention after about 5 minutes.
Did he say hello? Nope!
Did he try to smile – absolutely not!
And the amazing thing about it all, despite providing such horrible service, such famous Crimean waiters still expect tips!
I was always wondering why people in Crimea never smile. My colleagues, who have worked in tourism, said that it is extremely difficult to teach locals in Crimea to smile. It’s as if they lack the muscles to do so.
I remember reading about the deportation of the Tatar people from Crimea, a policy under Soviet leader Stalin who sought to repopulate the peninsula with Russians from the north. People from the north found it very hard to adapt to the local sunny, hot and at times tropical climate. They never learned how to growth indigenous crops that the Tatars had grown on the peninsula for centuries before.
I have noted in Europe people smile more in the south than in the north. It does not work this way for Crimea though.
Whatever the cause of Crimea’s problem with smiling, it remains a mystery for me why so many tourists still go there.
I can’t imagine spending money on my vacation among unfriendly people who never smile. But some people obviously do not seem to mind it. Crimea is crowded and overcrowded as always.
