"Traveling Through Eastern Europe (Or: How I Learned to Love Communism)" and Other Stories Vol. 5 Part III

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.

"Traveling Through Eastern Europe (Or: How I Learned to Love Communism)" and Other Stories Vol. 5 Part II

The second part! Oh boy!

Slovakia:

Early on Thursday morning, Shannon and I left Budapest for Bratislava, Slovakia. Trying to find the proper bus top in Budapest was a little tense, but after asking a few people, we managed to get there.

When we arrived in Bratislava, it was cold, raining, and dreary. Plus the bus station was just outside of the old part of town, in an area with slightly dilapidated gray buildings. Needless to say, Bratislava seemed very depressing at first. However, we met up with our Couch surfing host, Michal, who took us into the old city centre and Bratislava was really very nice in that area. There was an old medieval castle perched atop a big hill, overlooking the Danube river, which was pretty neat. Also, Bratislava has these strange bronze(?) statues of men doing random things around town. For example, one of these statues is sitting half inside a sewer grate, as if he is supposed to be climbing out.

After wandering about town for several hours, we went back to Michal's apartment, which is in a little town outside of Bratislava called Pezinok. It had been a few days since I had taken a shower last, and I wasn't feeling very spring fresh, so I asked to use his shower. The door to the bathroom wouldn't shut properly, but I gave it a good yank and I managed to get it all the way shut. Very bad idea. In yanking the door shut, the metal mechanism that the door knob controls had somehow jammed, so that when I turned the knob, the metal bit wouldn't slide back into the door. After alerting Shannon and Michal to my unfortunately hilarious situation, we tried to figure out how to get me out. We tried removing the knobs, and trying to move the bolt with my pocket knife, but it was stuck good and there was no way to take the door off the hinges. In the end, the door had to be pried open, gouging out the frame and destroying the metal bolt in the process. I felt pretty bad, but Michal and his mother took it in good humour. She said she needed a new door anyway and that I did her a favour.

Michal took us out both nights with a bunch of his friends in Pezinok, who are awesome people. They gave us gratuitous amounts of Slovakian wine, which was pretty good. So far, the trip felt like it was shaping up to be pretty good!

We left Pezinok/Bratislava on Saturday morning and headed East, to a town called Spisska Nova Ves. This part of our trip was supposed to be the camping portion, as the Slovak mountains are in this region. After a long train ride, we arrived. The camp site we were supposed to stay at is called Podlesok, just outside of town. Getting there, however, proved to be quite a task. We wandered all over town, trying to find someone or something that could tell us how to get to the camp site. However, the farther East you go, the less likely you're going to run into someone who speaks English. Eventually we learned there was a bus that would take us to a little village close by, and that we had to walk the rest of the way. At this point, it was almost 6, it was dark, I was tired, and we didn't know exactly where we were going, so I made the executive decision to check us into a hotel instead. Sunday, we tried again, with a little more success. We found Podlesok camping, which is right below the Slovensky Raj (the hills where we wanted to go hiking), but the campsite was closed. So we wandered a few kilometres to a village we passed earlier and managed to find a place that had a private room, dropped our stuff off and headed back out to Slovensky Raj.

The hike was incredible. Slovensky Raj was very beautiful, and the trail was an adventure. It was definitely designed for hikers, that's for sure. There were places that you could cross the river on these little wooden bridges, which was pretty neat. There was also parts were you had to ascend the cliffs on these built in metal ladders, next to still partially frozen waterfalls. It was amazing.

After a few hours of hiking, we went back to our little private room in the village. The next day, we hopped a bus from Spisska Nova Ves to the city of Kosice, the second biggest city in Slovakia. We didn't originally plan on staying here over night, but we wanted to make sure we were in the right place, with enough time to catch the bus to Ukraine. Kosice was a pleasant little city, I wish I had have had more time to explore. Instead, we arranged our transportation into Ukraine and took it easy for the day at the hostel, perhaps in subconscious preparation for Ukraine.

Alright that's probably enough for now. Part III: Ukraine (alternatively, "why I hate the Cyrillic alphabet")