Passport Stamps

Nice Truck

After waiting around in my hostel all night for my train to arrive I finally got to get on. When I gave the train attendant my ticket he took the ticket from me and motioned for me to get on. The problem was that I had an assigned place and I didn’t know what it was because it was on the ticket and the attendant had taken it. I tried several times to get him to show me my ticket and he kept motioning for me to get on the train. Finally I snatched the ticket from him and opened it to see my number. Once I did that he understood that I didn’t know where to go and he took me to my compartment where there were three bed births. The bottom one had a woman in it, she opened the door. The middle bed was her husband a very large naked man, covered only by a small white sheet. My bed was the top bunk and I quickly put my stuff away, climbed up to the top, put my ear plugs in and laid down to sleep.

Nearly as soon as I had fallen asleep the attendant came around to make sure that everything was okay. As I fell back to sleep I was awoken by Polish Immigration to look at my passport and give me a stamp to leave Poland. Once they left I went back to sleep to be awoken by the Ukrainian Immigration officials who stamped an entry into Ukraine in my passport. I was feeling very frustrated at this point that people kept waking me up and once I had fallen asleep again the train attendant came around again to let me know my stop was in 30 minutes. Needless to say when I arrived in Lviv at 6am local time, 5am in the time zone I came from, I was irritated and tired.

At the train station I went to the bathroom and was greeted by my old friend the squat toilet. I decided not to use it because I have only mastered the squat toilet while naked and I had tennis shoes, jeans and several coats on and decided that it would be too much work. The sun wasn’t up yet and it was raining outside. I rode the tram to the stop for my hostel and walked back and turned right as the directions I had been given instructed. After walking around for thirty minutes on the empty streets I discovered that they meant follow the train and then turn right.

In the Ukraine the language is Ukrainian and uses a different alphabet than in English, making it much more difficult than those foreign languages that have the same alphabet. Nothing is the same and it is impossible to pronounce anything by simple looking at the words. I feel terrible that I don’t know anything in Ukrainian, but when I only plan to be in the country for two or three days, it doesn’t make much sense to learn.

I went to my hostel and dropped off my bag and then headed out into the city to explore. For lunch I found a cafeteria style restaurant that was nice because I could simply point to the things I wanted. Everything in Ukraine seems to be very cheap, I had lunch for $4 and got my haircut for only $3. Walking around the streets I noticed that the women are very beautiful and wear knee length boots with short skirts. This is definitely a good style that I wouldn’t mind seeing in every country that I visit. I know that I am a pig, but at least I am an honest pig.

When ordering meat at a restaurant they have a price on the menu that is per gram and then you tell them how many grams you want and they bring you that amount. I didn’t know that they did this and when I ordered ribs and the waitress started saying things, I thought that they didn’t have ribs, so I was going to change my order but then she went away and brought me the amount that she thought I would want. It turned out to be the prefect amount, which is good because now that I know how it works I still don’t know how many grams of something I want.

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10_23_09 Lviv small