Our Ukrainian Adventures

Last weekend it was that time again — time to flee the country — so we took a short trip to Ukraine. (Why is it that I want to say "the Ukraine"? I keep hearing Miss Teen Whoever saying "the Iraq" over and over in my head and I'm trying my hardest to keep from sounding like her.) Anyway, we had to leave the country again so that our 90-day allotted stay was renewed so that Anna and I would have enough time to apply for temporary residency permits. Super long and complicated story, but that's why we had to leave the country.

Anyhow, it was an adventure-a-minute kind of trip, so get ready. It all started Saturday afternoon...

SATURDAY
1 p.m.: We took the train to Warsaw to see the worldwide leadership training broadcast, which was amazing.

3 p.m.: We arrived in Warsaw and Trevor searched for a bank to withdraw some money for our trip while I walked around the giganto mall with Anna and coveted all of the cool clothes and shoes. Man, we need to come back when I have some money to spend.

4:30 p.m.: We were in a huge rush to get to the chapel, but we were starving. Because Trevor was busy looking over the millions of movies they sell in the train stations for like $2, literally, I was in charge of getting us some food. I went to a little stand and ordered a half of a baguette with mushrooms and cheese on it (the Polish word for it escapes me) and a cheeseburger. To my surprise, they put two patties of some kind of meat on each side of the bun and filled the middle with shredded purple and white cabbage and carrots, and topped it with a red sauce, white sauce, and a yellow sauce that was not mustard. It was strangely tasty but difficult to eat. You had to hold it like an ice cream cone and it would have been much easier to eat with a fork, but we managed.

Okay, so that really has nothing to do with our trip to Ukraine. I just wanted to tell you about the crazy cheeseburger. Not much happened until the next evening, so fast forward to SUNDAY EVENING for the rest of our adventures.

9:15 p.m.: We boarded the night train headed to Kovel, Ukraine, not really having any idea what we were in for. Instead of stamping our tickets like we're used to, they took our tickets. So we had no proof of why we were on the train. That was a little unnerving. But we didn't let that get us down. Here are some pictures of the good time we were having.



We had a cabin all to ourselves, with two bunk beds, but we weren't sure where to have Anna sleep. The beds weren't an option, because I'm sure she would have rolled off, so we lifted up one of the bottom beds and found a cubby for storing luggage. This seemed perfect. We wiped it down, laid down a mattress pad they provided, and put her to bed.

MONDAY
1:00 a.m.: We were woken up by the Polish border control guards, who all have guns and look super intimidating (especially at 1 a.m.), so they could check our tickets and passports. They knock on your door and let you know they'll be coming in a few minutes so you can get everything ready. Anna slept through it all, and looked so cute in her tiny cubby, that I snapped a picture. (See below.)


I was looking at the pictures I took on my camera when the guard came to our door. He thought I was recording him and got quite upset (in Polish, so I didn't really know what was going on), but Trevor quickly filled me in and I quickly put the camera away and things were fine. But that was kind of scary.

As the guard looked over our three passports, Trevor pointed out where Anna was sleeping so he could check her photo. He got upset again, asking us why we hid her like that (because of the tiny cubby), and then Trevor said, "Where else are we supposed to put her?" (I'm SO glad he knows Polish so well. We probably would have been deported on the spot if I had been doing the talking.) Anyway, the guard left and all was well.

2 a.m..: The Ukrainian border guard came to our door and woke us up so he could check our passports. Trevor asked him to be quiet because Anna was asleep, but as he said it the guard turned on the lights. The guard looked down and saw Anna was there and said, "Oh. Baby." By this time, Anna had woken up. The guard asked, "Why isn't she sleeping?" Trevor said, "Because you woke her up. You turned on the lights and opened the door. As soon as you came, you woke her up." The guard then said, "Ah, I see. She doesn't want to sleep." Trevor said to me later that it was then that he realized that the man didn't speak Polish.


The guard made us fill out forms stating why we were going to Kovel, and we had to provide an address of where we were going to be staying. We weren't planning on staying that long, but that would look a little shifty if we said were going to come back in a few hours. So the night before we left, we searched all over the internet for the address of a hotel in Kovel. There was none to be found, but we did find that some monument or something was located on Independence Street. So we wrote that our purpose for being there was "tourism" and that our destination was "hotel" at the address " Independence Street" — and the guard didn't seem to have a problem with that.

But then they took our passports and didn't bring them back. We had no tickets to show, we had no passports, and we started to get a little worried. The Ukrainian guard was a happy, go-lucky guy who looked throughly through each of our passports, but then he said "thank you" and took them away. The Polish guard may have been strict and mean, but at least he gave our passports back. The Ukrainian guard eventually brought our passports back a couple hours later, so all was well.

3 a.m.: Because the train tracks are different in Poland (and the rest of Western Europe) and Ukraine, they had to stop our train, raise each car a few feet into the air, and change the wheels to fit the new tracks. This was about a three-hour process that we luckily slept through.

6:10 a.m.: We arrived.


7 a.m.: We wandered around the train station for awhile, wondering how we were going to purchase our return tickets for 3 p.m. While it's somewhat exciting to be in a completely new place, it's also a horrible feeling going to some remote location and not speaking the language. The alphabet is totally different too, so we couldn't even really recognize any similar words or anything. Luckily a few people here and there spoke a little Polish, so Trevor managed to get us some tickets after withdrawing 600 Ukrainian whatevers from an ATM. We had no idea what the name of their currency was or even the exchange rate. (This was totally dumb on our part and will not be repeated again. While it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment trip, we will definitely do our homework next time.) So we paid 500 Ukrainian hryvnia (but I'll call them dollars for our purposes here) for the tickets and had 100 left over for the rest of the day.

8 a.m. We set out to go find some food of some sort and were totally shocked by how insanely cold it was outside. Honestly, it may have surpassed how frozen we were during The Slapper from the girls trip to NY in February of 2004. (That's how the wind felt on our faces on that trip, by the way. Like a good slap.) Both Trevor and I agreed that it was the coldest we had ever been. We left the train station and saw that a huge bazaar or market was located right next to it. We wandered through it and then went down a few side streets to see if we could find a restaurant of some kind. Again, we couldn't read any of the signs and we had no idea where to look for a restaurant. We finally wandered into a small convenience store and purchased some fruit, a yogurt drink, and potato chips (a delicious breakfast) by pointing at them and Trevor saying the words in Polish. (We figured Polish was a whole lot closer to Ukrainian than English.) We wanted to check out the rest of the city, but it was way too cold. Anna, who refuses to keep her mittens on, kept crying out "Cold, cold" every few minutes. So that told us it was time to go back into the train station to eat our breakfast.

Here is the one and only picture I took in Kovel. This church was right next to the train station, which is basically why it's the only picture I have. But I loved the church because it was so cute and small, and yet it also had this elaborate gate around it.


9 a.m.: We found some seats next to a barber shop in the train station and we ate our breakfast (don't ever buy a yogurt drink that's chocolate-orange flavored — I'm not typically a picky eater, but I could only handle two swallows) and tried to warm up a bit. It was pretty entertaining to watch people go into the barber shop with long hair and then see what they looked like when they came out.

10 a.m.-12 p.m.: Trevor and I took turns taking naps because we were SO exhausted. I had absolutely no trouble sleeping sitting up. Later I had to go to the bathroom, so after some wandering I found what I thought was the bathroom. When I walked in, there was this giant empty room, except for a lady at a desk, with two rooms off to the side, which I saw were the men's and women's bathrooms. I saw people paying the lady at the desk and then going into the bathroom, so I went up to her and held out a 50-cent coin. I thought I saw a sign that that said the fee was 10 cents, but the lady nodded her head no and spoke to me in Ukrainian. I just held out all my money (it was like two dollar bills and a couple more coins) and let her take what she needed. I felt totally useless and dumb, but at least I could go to the bathroom. I headed into the women's section, but the lady pointed me toward the one roll of toilet paper hanging on the wall. So I grabbed some and THEN headed into the stall. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the toilet was actually a hole in the ground. But it wasn't your average hole in the ground — it was a porcelain hole. There were ridged edges for your feet to keep you from slipping and everything (yuck). So yeah. That was good times.

12 p.m.: We thought it must be a bit warmer now that it was after noon, so we ventured outside to the market. We had no idea how enormous it was, and it was a complete maze. So many little stalls selling EVERYTHING you could imagine, from baked goods to scarves, from laundry detergent to pasta, from car parts to wallpaper. We had about 100 Ukranian dollars to spend, so we bought anything we remotely fancied. (We found out later that the exchange rate is about 5:1. So for $20, we bought breakfast and lunch, a hat, six decks of Russian playing cards, an apron, a cute pear-shaped cutting board, a wooden rolling back massager thing, a pastry, and a waffle cone filled with candied puff cereal — an interesting, but tasty, treat. Not so bad for $20, huh? Especially when Trevor had to pay extra for a plastic bag to carry our food in.)

2 p.m. This brings me to lunch. We were very hungry by this time and we were ready to eat anything. We scoured the city square for a restaurant and then I saw that a couple of signs had a word that looked similar to "kafe," just with an extra crazy letter, so we decided to check it out. We went in and looked at the menu, but, strangely enough, we couldn't read a thing. There was a case of food near the front so Trevor did his best to point to things and tell the girl, who kept giggling the whole time, how many we wanted. He pointed at the pickles and told her we wanted four (we were starving), so the girl put four on a plate and then put the plate back in the case. What? It was too hard to communicate, so we came away with four little meat patties and two slices of bread and two open-faced sandwiches topped with salami and thick slabs of cheese. Or what we thought was cheese. It was the kind of cheese that Americans call butter. When Trevor was "ordering" the food, or playing charades, it was so funny to see him try to ask/act out if the food could be warmed up. "Outside, cold. Inside, hot. Food, hot." Ah, good times. He's such a good sport. And to top it all off, we're not even sure if we ended up paying for the pickles, but we're pretty sure we never ate them.

3:40 p.m.: We boarded the train and found that they had given us first class tickets, so our cabin was extra nice with a little chair and a mirror and velvet-covered beds. It was a nice surprise, but we still had 9 hours to go and this time we weren't going to sleep the whole way...

We all took naps, at one point or another, and then Trevor and I pulled out a new deck of cards for some gin rummy (our game of choice, as of late). Not only were the cards super thin, maybe a little stronger than a piece of paper, but the decks were missing numbers 2-5. Awesome.

5:00 p.m.: This time we got to see in the daylight how they hoisted up our train car to change the wheels. The picture doesn't show very much and it's blurry because we were still moving a little, but it'll sort of give you an idea of what the gigantic garage was like.


11:10 p.m.: We arrived in Warsaw, took a taxi to Magda and Darek's apartment, Anna threw up, and then we went to bed. Pretty eventful day, wouldn't you say?

This was my cool artsy photo that I took of us on the train back to Lodz the next day. I just put this one up here because I thought it was cool.