Around the World in 109 days
Um die Welt in 109 Tagen
04.05.-21.08.2008

Ukraine, 05.-06.05.2008




It took another 55 min on the Ukrainian side of the border (luckily Germans do not need a visa for Ukraine anymore), after that we had to wait another 45 min behind the border for no apparent reason. After almost every stop the drivers provided hot tea for all passengers as Russians need their tea when traveling.
The European Union ends after Poland as one can already see comparing the Ukrainian border post buildings to the significantly more modern ones on the Polish side. The further we drove East the worse the quality of the roads (how nice it was to drive on the Autobahn). The standard of the public toilets at gas stations (which itself looked quite modern) and resting places decreased rapidly, too. I had little hope that this would improve on the upcoming 10000 km.
During one longer stop I had the time for a little stroll around and could have a look at communist remains such as a Cultural Palace and a quite run-down mass apartment house. Apart from that we mainly saw many large fields and farmland. And we watched a dozen episodes of a Russian TV series called "Zakon". I did not understand a word, but after many hours of monotonous bus ride (I forgot to bring enough stuff to read, damn!) I had quite a good idea about the main characters of this series and their relations to each other. TV seems to be quite the same anywhere in the world.
The interesting things to see on the streets (apart from Cyrillic letters on the traffic signs, here I could already practice a bit for Russia) were the numerous old German cars and trucks, now driving with Ukrainian number plates but still showing the adverts of their former German owners on the sides. nd I saw a (probably) Ukrainian minibus of the amusing type name "I-Van". Around 4pm we passed through Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, where election campaign posters could be seen everywhere (I only knew prime minister Julia Timoshenko).



Then we returned to the countryside, passed Kharkiv by night and finally reached the border at Novoshakhtinsk around 3:30am.
Here the entire border control procedure took two an a half hours. On the Russian side everybody had to leave the bus (up to there the border police had just collected our passports in the bus), walk through a regular passport control channel (the official guy there only spoke Russian,, luckily someone from the bus translated for us) and our cabin luggage was - for whatever reason - X-rayed like at an airport. And finally we were inside the Russian Federation.

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