For no apparent reason

Hello from Moscow! Elizabeth and I arrived at the Kievskaya train station here in Moscow at about 5:30 this morning. After spending three days and nights on the train we were glad to be standing on some solid ground.

Monday evening we headed out from our hostel in Prague to catch our train to Kiev as I had mentioned in the previous post. The tickets we purchased were for a kupe (2nd class). On this particular train the kupe had bunk beds three high. On the bottom bunk in our kupe was a mother with her 2 year old daughter, Elizabeth had the middle bunk (once we determined it was safe to sleep on despite missing a piece) and I had the task of climbing to the top bunk.

The trip was long and extremely hot, but fun as well. We met a couple of other Americans who were also heading to Ukraine. The four of us entertained each other helping to keep our minds off of the tremendous heat in the train.

Oh yeah, that 10 hour border stop that I mentioned before, the one where they change the wheel sets on the train, yeah that wasn't exactly what happened. We reached Krakow, Poland at about 6 or so in the morning on Tuesday and just didn't move anywhere for 7 hours. For no apparent reason. We weren't even at the station platform, we were in the middle of the train yard with nothing in sight other than concrete cable poles and car trains. The actual border crossing and wheel change only took about two hours.

Once we got into Kiev on Wednesday morning we went straight to the ticket counter to get tickets on to Moscow. Elizabeth stood in line and worked on getting the tickets while I went back and forth to the currency exchange counter trying to get the right amount of Ukrainian Grivna to actually purchase the tickets. We were able to get the tickets for that evening and the woman at the counter even assured Elizabeth that she was giving us the least expensive tickets available. As we boarded the train we realized that the least expensive available was not the same as the least expensive. We once again were in a kupe car. This one was much more roomy and even had A/C! The ride to Moscow seemed to fly by.

And so here we are at the Lenin Hostel. We just finished dinner and are contemplating evening plans. So there you go. More later...