The end of the Trek

Kiev was really awesome. In the inner core of the city where we stuck to, things are very promising. We agreed that the look of the buildings and feeling of the atmosphere was very similar to Warsaw. If any of you have a serious entreprenurial spirit, you should learn Ukrainian because the time is ripe there and it is the Land of Opportunity. Kiev has a long way to go before the entire populace has reached to levels of more than just survival mode and an expat from Chicago told us that the outskirts of the city are still very slummish, but they are definitely on their way up and it was very heartening.

After our horrible introduction yesterday to the Ukraine (the train and not being able to buy tickets, etc) we didn't expect too much of Kiev. Our hostess at the hostel wrote down on paper our request for train tickets and told us a better place to buy them and we managed to get our return tickets to Warsaw as planned. Whew! That was a huge load off my mind and we couldn't have done it without her writing it down for us. We quickly discovered this was going to be the norm. Luckily I had studied the cyrilic alphabet and a few words on the train ride and it came in really handy becuase very very few people spoke english. Not that people were impolite, but if we couldn't speak Ukrainian or Russian, they just didn't bother to try to communicate with us.

The two days that we were there we wandered all over the city and looked at a lot of cool sites. At the Ukrainian Orthodox church headquarters they have a cave system of thousands of bodies and we visited a piece of it housing numerous saints. It was kinda creepy and I also felt a twinge of guilt at gawking at this spectacle that was such a huge religious experience for them (people make pilgrimages to this place).

Like any mass transit system anywhere, after you take it once, you should kinda have the hang of it and it isn't so bad. We took the subway numerous times and it was cheap and easy (as long as you have a rudimentary grasp of cyrilic). As you can see from my pictures, Kiev is built up on a hill and in the flood plains surrounding the Dnepr river. When they built the subway, instead of attempting to navigate the altitude change, they built the subway pretty much at the flood plain level for the entire city. When we were in the upper city, we had to take 2 long escalator rides down to the platforms; when I say long, I mean long. They were easily about 10 stories each and even though they moved faster than normal escalators in the mall, the ride was 1minute 50 seconds on each. Crazy.

We had a bit of a scare the first day because Jason couldn't pull money out with either his credit card or bank card. His bank card had been frozen and he got that fixed easily, and we think he had hit his 24hr limit for the credit card (we had to pull out a bunch of money to pay the hostel the first night). Once we got it taken care of we bought tickets to the Ukrainian National Opera House. I had really hoped to see the ballet, but the only show playing before we left was the opera Faust. The opera house was beautiful, we had fantastic seats for about $10 each, and the show was great (and they even had some ballet in the last act!).

On the last day we happened upon a demonstration by what we believe was the foreign relations department building. I have since read up on it and it was an anti-NATO protest. I know that tensions between Russia and Georgia are escalating but hadn't paid attention to why. Reading about this I now understand that Russia is - of course - against these countries joining NATO and the people demonstrating were probably Russians living in Kiev. I would suggest this news blog for a summary of the situation: go to the June 20th entry http://blog.kievukraine.info/2008_06_01_archive.html

The trip back to Warsaw ended up much better. There was no first class train, but we had upgraded from the Ukrainian second class to the Polish second class car and it was night and day difference. We had only 3 beds but no 3rd occupant which was nice. The compartment was just much nicer in general, including our own sink. A guy in our car - some train official though not sure in what capacity - spoke German and helped get us settled. He asked us to carry some vodka and cigarettes for him and we did. What the heck. At the border they never even asked us if we had anything to declare so it wasn't a big deal at all. And I have to mention the border stop this time was at about 10pm so it we were actually able to get a night's sleep. Not too shabby!!

So we picked up the car in Warsaw, which we had left at the hostel, and headed to Frankfurt Oder in Germany. It was a really long day - there was tons of road construction and at one place we were backed up for miles due to an accident in the middle of the one-lane construction. Crap! We thought for awhile we may never get out of Poland! Well we did, and the next day we drove down to Munich. We had an extra day to get the car washed (it was embarassingly dirty) and our luggage figured out (we bought a box to check for some of the extra stuff we had picked up). I had hoped to finish up the blog but we didn't have internet access at the place. We flew to Frankfurt and ran into Drew who ended up sitting right in front of us on the flight home. And one last really long flight and we were back in Portland! And it was cloudy! Go figure.....