The day after the staying at Mykyta's friend's house he Picked me in the morning and we went to his.
There, I met couchsurfers he was hosting who were leaving to go out for the day. Mykyta needed to apply for jobs online so he sat at his computer for the majority of the day and I read my kindle and nodded off a few times.
Much later in the day he was heading off to play 5-a-side footie so asked if I wanted to cone with him for a quick tour of the city before he went to play.
It turned out that he is training to become a tour guide so I had a rather comprehensive tour within the time that we had. The main thing that stood out for me was the statue of Jesus wearing a hat. Supposedly its the only image of Jesus wearing a hat. It certainly looked bizarre..
Then something happened to me that hasn't happened in years. My gullibility got the better of me.
We went into a coffee house in the middle of Lviv which had what appeared to have a mine underneath. Mykyta explained to me that it was a coffee like mud that was extracted from the ground which was then used to make coffee.. It certainly smelled like a “coffee mine" and I could have sworn I saw people “mining". After about half an hour the empiricist in me pushed for answers about the “mine" to which I got the reply “It was a marketing gimmick". I felt like the gullible child I thought I had grown up from. The child who believed, amongst many other things, that Irn Bru was made from rusty girders and that a haggis was an animal from Scotland which had its legs on one side shorter than its other, leaving it perfectly adapted to run around Scottish mountains in a particular rotation. The way you would catch them would be to chase them the other way, causing them to roll down the mountain where people would catch them in tartan sacks.
I would like to add that all these stories where further embellished by my parents, making me look like a complete idiot in front of my friends and teachers, much to the entertainment of Mam and Dad. Cheers for that! Nothing like being scarred for life so that now I don't believe anything anyone says until I read up about it myself.
Anyway, enough of my parents' bizarre social experiments, back to Lviv. Mykyta left me in Lviv to go play football so I had an hour to kill in the city centre. I found a coffee house with WiFi and caught up with friends and family.
After meeting Mykyta again we went back to the flat I stayed at, had a bite to eat and grabbed my stuff and got a taxi to the station as it was pitch black.
We got there just in time and after saying my goodbyes the train departed from Lviv for an overnight journey to Kiev.
It was my first time in a sleeper train and I was impressed. I managed to shove the bike into the overhead compartment of the cabin in was in. I had the cabin to myself but after a few stops more people got on and I shared the rest of the journey with a family of Ukrainians, one of which spoke English (a stunning blonde woman who was possibly the same age as my own mother) and told me her son lived in Sheffield, which I found random.
We reached Kiev early morning and I had a two hour wait for catching the next train to Sumy. Getting onto that train was eventful. The guard did not want the bike on there and was just shouting in Ukrainian at me for a good twenty minutes. I finally got on and was sharing a cabin with a young woman and her three or four year old daughter. Both of whom laughed at the amount of junk I had.
We spent the majority of the journey miming to each other, with both of us using the odd words that we that the other would understand, the tiny amount of Russian I was able to learn from phrase book apps on my phone not really helping.
I got off at Sumy with help from the girl and her daughter. Who I waved off, much to the pleasure if the little girl!
Trying to find the hotel I had booked would turn out to be a nightmare, my GPS gave me the completely wrong location of where I was meant to be heading. I ended up on a dark street in the middle of an estate which I didn't feel safe at so I headed back to the train station and got a taxi instead. It was miles away from where my GPS had taken me.
I checked in, showered, rang my folks to let them know I was fine then headed out for supplies and something to eat before getting an early night. Russia tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment