Dating ukrainien man
18-May-2020 09:49
They populate Odessa's numerous terrace cafés, stroll in hordes through its parks, and fill the plush velvet seats of its 19thcentury opera house.
A foreign man, usually though not always over 60 and American, sits with a Ukrainian girl, probably in her twenties and strikingly attractive.
It becomes clear that the dating scene in Odessa is not all it seems.
Locals laugh when I ask them about the strange no-shows, and tell me that in all probability, the women that these men thought they were falling in love with do not even exist.
The oldest is 76-year-old Giuseppe, an Italian plastic surgeon, while the youngest is 29-year-old Chris, a stand-up comic from New York.
Most of the men are divorced and in their fifties or sixties.But when they arrived in Odessa, in the vast majority of cases, the women were nowhere to be seen.Some of them turned off their phones, others arranged dates but did not arrive.They then have a week to go on dates with the women they encounter at the socials, meet up with those they have met online previously, and perhaps end their tour with a proposal.
With their clipboards and information packs, the men listen attentively to the induction speech in our hotel's conference room, given by tour leader John Carlton, who speaks in a Tennessee drawl.
Curious to find out if the "mail-order bride" is alive and well in the 21st century, I joined a 10-day "romance tour" organised by Anastasia Date, one of the world's biggest "international dating" agencies.