Not a Good First Impression.

So. Ukraine.

Much more difficult than I expected.

I blame that mostly on being sick, and the fact that American devices don't seem to work on Ukrainian wifi. Funny how much we've come to depend on the internet....

Anywho, Steve and I took an overnight train from Warsaw to Kiev, which was mostly uneventful as we spent the first few hours snuggled up together looking out the window, and the second half of it trying to get some sleep before we arrived in Kiev on Wednesday morning. Click here to see our sleeper compartment!

We got our second and third passport stamps (whoo!) - one when we exited Poland and another an hour later when we entered Ukraine. Passport checks at the Ukrainian border were kind of scary, at least for me: the guy who checked mine did like four comparisons with my picture and my face, then called another guy over and he did the same thing. I had to get up and stand in the light, take my glasses off, etc.... Steve thinks they were just messing with me because they probably don't get a lot of Americans coming in by train, but I was a little freaked out. Maybe cutting my hair and dying my bangs pink and wearing glasses when my passport photo contains none of that was not such a good idea... :P

The rail tracks in Ukraine and in Russia (which was the final destination for the train we were on) are a different size than the tracks in the EU, so we were waylaid for a couple hours while the border guys changed the wheels on the train. From then on (this was at about midnight) Steve and I tried to sleep (in the same tiny train bed at first, which was unsuccessful) before waking up to sunshine (pretty much the first time this whole trip) and the green Ukrainian countryside.

The moment we got off the train, we were like "AWESOME! There's McDonalds!" Now, before you roll your eyes at the fact that we had McNasty for breakfast - keep in mind that McDonalds has free Wifi. YEAH! (Also, this McDonalds had a side restaurant call McFoxy..?! From the signs, it looked like a slightly more upscale McDonalds...)

My excitement was immediately crushed by the fact that Ukrainian wifi doesn't work for us.

Boo.

So without internet, I couldn't get the rest of the instructions I had asked for about how to get to the apartment we were staying at. Luckily, my husband has a cool (and quite handsome) head on his shoulders and navigated us around to the subway (where an angel in the form of an English-speaking Ukrainian girl showed us how to get the subway tokens and vanished with a curtsy and a "Welcome to the Ukraine".) Once we got off the subway, however, we were once more completely lost. Steve had an entertaining conversation with two Ukrainian guys that involved lots of pointing around. Eventually, one of the guys called the person who owned the apartment we were staying at and even walked us to the front door of the apartment building, which was really nice. He did not, however, walk up 22 flights of stairs with us to the 11th floor of a building with a broken elevator. I was already tired from a week of walking way too much every day and a night of little sleep, so all those stairs were not a welcome sight. My spirits were lifted when we finally got into the apartment and were offered glasses of homemade apple juice while the apartment owner (who is probably about our age) and her mom (who only spoke Ukrainian and German, so Steve had another entertaining conversation in his broken German) showed us around. The outside of the building was quite run-down, but the inside of the apartment was very cute. It is much bigger than I expected (and only $35 a night!!!!) We will be stopping in Kiev again on our way out of Ukraine in a few weeks, so we will post a video of the apartment then.

I think all the germs that public transportation has to offer finally caught up to me on the sleeper car, because I was feeling quite crappy. Steve and I agreed that we would stay in for the day to rest (he is getting over being sick as well) and learn basic Ukrainian phrases before exploring the city a bit the next day.

This plan was immediately foiled when we found out that the wifi at this apartment didn't work for us either. Stupid Ukrainian internet configurations >:( raining on all my parades. This was even more problematic for us because we were waiting to hear back from a third-party agency about train tickets from Kiev to Kharkiv on Friday. We had to order train tickets through an agency based out of the UK because Ukrainian railways did not release information about train schedules and prices early enough for us to buy tickets and have them shipped to the States before we left. But without internet, I couldn't find out if we had tickets or where to pick them up, so my feathers were all ruffled and we ended up taking the subway to the train station and purchasing tickets because I was afraid the train would be sold out and we had to get to Kharkiv on Friday.

To sum up our stay in Kiev, it was a lot of taking naps and trying to get better as we didn't want to be sick for the duration of the EURO2012 tournament. We wanted to just go to the store and eat some chicken soup but.... THEY DIDN'T HAVE SOUP! No top ramen, no chicken noodle soup, nothing. At least nothing that looked like soup at all. How are we supposed to get better if we can't eat soup and drink tea and sleep?!

(They did, however, have EURO2012 themed eggs.)

We wandered around Kiev a little bit on Thursday and paid a visit to the EURO2012 fan zone, which was open, but there wasn't much going on. I also expected there to be many, many more tourists since Kiev is the capital city of Ukraine and a host city, but I suppose since Ukraine is so far away from the rest of Europe and their first game isn't until next Monday, people won't start showing up until the weekend.

Overall, we did not get a good first impression of Ukraine. Part of it is the inconvenience of not having internet (which will be a very big problem for us if we have to go three more weeks without internet, because there are a lot of travel plans that rely on internet, like checking train schedules and making Skype phone calls and getting directions) and part of it is me being grumpy because I got sick at an inconvenient time, but part of it is that Kiev so far has not been a very welcoming city. I expected it to be a little more tourist-friendly, being the country's capital and a host city for the biggest soccer tournament in Europe. But no. It was very hard for us to figure out how to get around and the people were not very helpful. There are hardly any signs anywhere that even advertise EURO2012, which was very, very surprising to me. If we weren't in Ukraine for EURO2012, I would have had no idea that Kiev was hosting it at all.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Kharkiv and Donetsk will be better, because we are spending over two weeks in those two cities and it will be a bummer if the only thing we end up doing is hanging out at the hostel because it's no fun to travel around the city.