In the summer after my first year at university it turned out that student holidays are a month shorter than school ones, a discovery everyone makes on his own and always too late. It was for these shortened holidays that Dad pulled strings and got me a trade-union voucher to Crimea; on what principle those vouchers were handed out I cannot say even today; I only know it was not for my pretty eyes.
We set off in two buses. Of the whole first year, apart from me, nobody seems to have gone, but there were so many of the female sex on those buses that the male one immediately passed into the category of scarce goods.