Craphole Glowny

Well, after having been a bad blogger who chose drinking over writing, I now have to bore everybody by posting multiple entries at once. If nothing else, they will remind me in the future about what I did during this trip other than look at snow, wander round churches and drink inadvisable amounts of vodka. I'm now in Ekaterinburg, but rather than writing about this place now I'll start at the very beginning with our trip from Prague to Kiev last Thursday/Friday. As I can't connect my laptop to the internet at the moment these posts will be pictureless for now - I'll add pics as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Anyway, we had initially planned to get the bus from Prague to Kiev, but after a fruitless and particularly frustrating afternoon in Prague spent vainly wandering between the bus station and an impossibly well-hidden bus company office (in the course of which I nearly ended up stranded on the motorway), this plan appeared increasingly implausible. In eastern Europe, it pays to know that just because badly translated transport company websites say that there are services, this does not actually mean that these services ever actually operate or that they have existed in any form since about 1993. I unfortunately did not know this fact, and in a resulting fit of pique decided to book the train, despite the fact that it was both longer and more expensive than the bus. It was thus, on Thursday, that we said our goodbyes to Prague and departed via Kiev en route to Moscow. The diversion via Kiev was necessitated by the fact that Belarus, which is the most direct route between Prague and Moscow, is a mean country that charges British citizens the princely sum of 65 quid just to pass through its borders. As even Americans pay less than us, it would appear that as a nation we have done something to piss off the Belorussian government. Given that it is the only remaining authoritarian government left in Europe, I can live with that.

The 36 hour journey to Kiev was largely uneventful; although we were booked into a three person cabin the train was almost empty, so Katie and I had the cabin to ourselves and no Ukrainians to bond with.As the journey involved two nights, the time passed relatively quickly, with the exception of our soujourn in Krakow Glowny station, where the train spends a scheduled seven hours shunting around in the sidings. Given that they don't change that gauges (this is all done later, in another enjoyable three hour stop at Prezmysl on the Polish-Ukranian border), and that nobody can get on or off, the purpose of this diversion other than to thoroughly bore the passengers remains entirely unclear. Those seven hours were long and dull, and although I'm sure Krakow is as lovely as it's rumoured to be, from our vantage point in the sidings of Krakow Glowny station it thoroughly deserved its new official name of Craphole. By this stage we were also running out of food; having incorrectly anticipatedthat the train would have a restaurant car and that we could get off and restock at Krakow, we had boarded the train with only some stale bread (stolen from Cafe Louvre), two apples each, a packet of crisps and, in my case, a little lollipop shaped like an elephant. It was thus with empty stomachs and sad faces that we trundled slowly across the foggy plains of eastern Poland. The landscape was generally flat, sad and unlovable, and we came to the conclusion that eastern Poland would not be the ideal place for a winter break. As night fell, we passed (slowly and painfully) into Ukraine, where we officially left the EU's loving embrace and collected our first, bright orange, passport stamp.