I think this will be part III of IV. This will be a short one, I don't really have much to say about Ukraine because, to be perfectly honest, I didn't really do much there.
So Shannon and I took the bus from Kosice, Slovakia to Uzhhorod, Ukraine. I'm not going to lie, I was a little tense about Ukraine beforehand. As difficult as it was sometimes trying to figure things out and ask for directions in Slovakia, it wasn't comparable to Ukraine. First of all, hardly anybody speaks English. The fact that I was traveling during the "off season" only exacerbated this fact. Secondly, Ukrainian, Russian, and a few other languages use the Cyrillic alphabet, with such recognizable characters as the backwards "R" and the character that looks like a man playing the bass drum. Anyway, after spending roughly 45 minutes at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine, our bus was finally let through. As we passed through the last check point, to the right of the bus was expansive, empty field surrounded by barbed wire. In the middle of this field, was a giant statue of Ukrainian man, one leg up on what were presumably bricks, planting a big flag in front of them. That was what greeted a person as they passed through the border there. It certainly had an "Eastern Bloc" feel to it, and I couldn't help feeling like the statue was acting as a sentinel of some kind. "Welcome to Ukraine. Do not screw with us."
Anyway, we only stuck around in Uzhhorod long enough to fumble our way through purchasing train tickets to Lviv. Hand signals and diagrams were an essential part to communicating with people in Ukraine. I also ordered some strange kind of pizza with mayonnaise drizzled on top. It was disgusting, but I was hungry.
After a few hours of waiting in the train station, we hopped the train to Lviv. The boiler they had in our car was powered by coal. I didn't know why at first, but my friend Ian explained to me that Russia cut off 25% of Ukraine's fuel supply or something like that. I guess they're still rather bitter about the whole independence thing. Anyhow, the train moved very slowly and we had a Russian family of three sitting across from us, a man, a woman, and their infant daughter. The man looked to be about 40, while his wife couldn't have been older than myself (21). The man had a serious problem with body odour that I have never experienced before. I'm not the type to harp on someone about that (I certainly didn't say anything to him, not that he would have understood me if I did), but it was nauseating. I thought it might have been the train at first, but when he came back from having a cigarette (yes, there was a smoking car on our train, oddly enough), there was no mistaking. He was a nice enough fellow though; he told us which stop was Lviv. Thank God he did, I'm not sure if we would have recognized it otherwise.
Six hours on a train later, we finally arrived in Lviv. There were a few tense moments at this point, since we didn't have very good directions to our next couch surfing host's apartment and Shannon's cell phone wouldn't work. However, we did manage to get close and after asking a hotel clerk for directions, we finally managed to get to the apartment. Ksenia (our host) was a very nice girl and she treated us to some Ukrainian wine we arrived. It had a bit of a kick to it, to say the least. Her bathroom was in her kitchen, which was something I had heard about but never before seen. The only thing that separated the kitchen from the toilet and the tub was a thin panel wall and a sliding door. One had to light a gas heater to get hot water at this place too.
I'm sure there is quite a bit to see in Lviv, but by this point Shannon and I were fairly low on funds, so we spent most of our days touring the city and going inside places that were free. I'm not going to lie, at this point, it started to feel like "seen one Eastern European capital city, seen 'em all" (thankfully, I was proven wrong in Krakow). Trying to use my phone card to call home was ridiculous. One can only make international phone calls from certain phones in Ukraine, usually located in call centres next to the post office. Shannon and a Ukrainian woman had a bit of a shouting match, due to our inability to understand each other, when I tried to call Slovakia to inquire about the whereabouts of my camera. Lviv also had this EXCELLENT buffet style restaurant that we went to both nights we stayed. I can't remember what it was called now, but according to Ksenia, this restaurant was apparently what they consider fast food. It was delicious, nonetheless.
It rained for a good portion of one of the days we stayed in Lviv, so we didn't really get up to much there. Ksenia was pretty busy doing translations of essays for people, so one night we just bought a bunch of cheap, Ukrainian beer and stayed in. Our last night, we went to the bus station to catch the bus from Lviv to Krakow, Poland, our final stop. I walked in and used the woman's bathroom at the bus station by accident. Their symbol for the woman's washroom is, apparently, a very narrow isosceles triangle with a dot at the top, making it look sort of like the letter "i". I didn't notice the other bathroom at first, so I simply walked in. Two women were sitting in a booth (you usually have to pay to use public washrooms in Europe) when I walked in. They were trying to tell me something in Ukrainian, very emphatically I might add, but of course me being the silly foreigner, I just slipped them a bill and went right on in. Not once did I question the lack of urinals as I went in, did my thing, then went out. As I left, they looked up at me and laughed. It wasn't until I went in to use the bathroom before we got on the bus that I glanced down the hall and noticed the men's bathroom, which was represented by an INVERTED narrow isosceles triangle and a dot at the top.
Part IV, the final chapter, takes place in Krakow, Poland, my favourite city of the entire trip.
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