planes, TRAINS, automobiles

Oh geez, the train ride to Kiev deserves it's own post for sure, but I guess I better quickly sketch Warsaw. There literally wasn't much to Warsaw to see. The city was flattened by Hitler in response to the "Warsaw Uprising" at the end of the Nazi occupation and they did a very thorough job. We went to a museum that explained all about the rising and it was really interesting. There was a guy that left over a 1000 pictures of everyday life during the occupation and underground journalism was kept alive with a surprising amount of video footage remaining. Very informative and powerful exhibit, very well put together.

Poland played Austria in the Euro Cup so we went to a bar recommended by the hotel to watch it. It was full of young people and they projected the game on a nice screen in a *gasp* non-smoking room. It was fun to watch with all those Polish.

Ok, the train ride. We had booked berths in a 4 person cabin for the overnight train to Kiev. The two other ladies were Ukrainian so we were unable to really communicate with them. I had packed some crackers and water and had read there was a snack car for any other items we may want, but after walking through the sleeper cars we came to a dead end! No restaurant car and therefore there was also no place to sit and hang out except on our bunks. We took the top two bunks and pretty much everyone went to bed after the first stops (the train left at 9:30pm). Thank goodness for earplugs! The motion of the train was actually pretty soothing, but it was a very clackity, loud affair. At the border, the Polish guards checked the Ukrainian passengers for duty items - this is at 2am, and took a long time. Then a little while later we were stopped again and the Ukrainian border patrol came through. First they checked the Ukrainians, then they checked everyone else. Then they took they moved the train and jacked it up to change the wheels because the track width is different in the Ukraine. After that, the border guards came through and returned our passports (boy, were we nervous with our passports being confiscated!) and finally we were on our way again. We remained on the train for the entire process which took about 2-2.5 hours. And this is standard because we arrived on time. The next day in daylight my suspicions were confirmed about the state of the bathrooms: the toilets emptied right onto the track which explained why they had locked the bathrooms while they were changing the wheels. :-) There was an official person in each train car and they sold a few things to eat and drink and there was hot water available, but of course we were not prepared for any of this and the people only spoke Ukrainian so we had to just make do with what we had. We arrived in Kiev the next day at local time 2:30pm.

After wolfing down some food, we tried to buy some tickets to return to Warsaw. We stood in several lines and couldn't find anyone to speak english or understand that we wanted to get tickets. It was miserable. We finally gave up figuring the hostel could help us and went to take the subway. We spent over 30 minutes trying to find the damn subway! There is a major lack of signage in Kiev and what they do have is all in Cyrillic - we were screwed!!! And we were so tired it was unbelievably frustrating. Finally, we managed to find it and get to the hostel. The folks wrote down some info for us so we could show it to the ticketing people the next day. It began raining absolute buckets, as in I haven't seen it rain this hard since the monsoons in Phoenix. We went to get dinner and were both soaked in less than 2 blocks even trying to run from one cover to the next. With the weather and being exhausted from the train ride and subway ordeal, we then went to bed. There was a free Paul McCartney concert that night which was supposed to be a huge big deal but I was in no shape to partake.

I have to get moving so that is enough for now. Off to explore Kiev!!!