Odessa to Kosice

Train toilet

4 star hotel in Uzhgorod, Ukraine- for our unexpected overnight stay

Sunday, Mar. 27th, my roommate and I left for our annual IM staff conference in Kosice, Slovakia. We took the overnight train 19 hours northwest to the border city of Uzhgorod and were planning on crossing the border on the afternoon bus. When we got to the bus station, we found out that there was only one bus that day and we had missed it. So we headed down the street to find somewhere to stay for the night. Uzhgorod is a river city that I've always wanted to see, so our unexpected delay didn't bother me at all. We spent the afternoon walking around the old town part, seeing a castle and wandering through a Ukrainian village made up of houses, churches, etc. that had been moved from villages all across western Ukraine. It was a really nice afternoon and we enjoyed sleeping in beds that evening, rather than another night on the train.

Bright and early the next morning we headed back to the train station to cross the border into Slovakia. We had a little bit of fun at the border, when they called my roommate off the bus to question her...and then sent her to get me. It turns out that they were just curious and it wasn't a problem at all. We chatted with the border guard for a while, but he was just interested in what Laura does in Ukraine and why I can speak Russian...."Why do you know Russian? Where did you study? Why did you start learning the language?," etc. We reboarded the bus to the great curiosity of the other passengers, "What were they asking you? Why did they take you off the bus?" The funny thing is that the majority of the bus was smuggling items across the border(cigarettes, vodka and coats) and so since they were guilty, they assumed that we were also guilty of something. The guard was quite nice, though, and it was more amusing to us than anything else. So off we went and arrived in Kosice several hours later. I'll leave the story there for now and resume later with my time in Kosice and at the staff conference.

In Uzhgorod

A wooden church in the old village