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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