*I’ll back up now and tell you a bit about our first travel day…and by day, I mean 4 days straight. I flew out of Flint, MI on Wednesday, June 16th at 6:15am to Atlanta, GA (2.5 hrs) and arrived in New York, NY (2.5 hrs) at 12:30pm on Wednesday afternoon. We flew out of New York at 6:00pm and landed in Paris, France 7 hrs later on Thursday, June 17th at 8:00am their time (which is 8 hours ahead of us).
*We flew out of Paris at 12pm and arrived in Kiev, Ukraine about 5 hours later. Then we took a 30 min bus ride to the train station, hung out for about 2 hours, got some crepes for lunch which is a little adventure in itself since we couldn’t read or understand anything in the train station. The language here is Ukrainian and Russian…and we don’t speak or read either. We rode the train for 10 hours and arrived in Odesa, Ukraine on Friday morning at 6:30am.
*The train ride from Kiev to Odesa, Ukraine was interesting. It looked similar to those that you see in the movies, with the bunk beds and tiny hallway. The tickets were all written in Russian so we did our best to find our cabin. Five of us finally located our cabin, packed all of our 5 gigantic backpacks, 5 regular backpacks and tents under the seats, in the shelving at the top of the cabin and everywhere in between. As soon as we got everything put away, a group of big Frenchmen came to the door and explained(through hand motions) we were not only in their room, but we were in the wrong section of the train all together. Darn it! Haha Ah well, we tried. We then found out we were all spread out in about 3 cabins, so I stayed with 2 women that seemed pretty friendly. 10 hours later, the train stopped and we were on our way once again.
*One of the hardest parts by far about being here is the lack of communication because of the language barrier. Fortunately, our contacts both speak English but the woman that owns the hostel, Olga, we’re staying at does not. We’re slowly learning the basics, so we’ll be able to chat some more as the month goes on.
*Our contacts are wonderful, patient, helpful people that we are so grateful for. They’ve helping us learn Russian which is the main language here, took us grocery shopping and showed us around the neighborhood we’ll be staying in. Olga is the woman we’re staying with. She doesn’t speak any English but she has the kindest and warmest heart. We now know how to say ‘hello’ (pri-viet) and ‘thank you'(spah-se-bah) to her in Russian…for being here one day, we feel pretty good about that. J Oh, and we also know how to say bus (pronounced: Marsh-root-kah)! Our other friend here is Whitey. He’s an old scruffy cat that loves to hang out with us. We’re pretty sure he has a couple of diseases, so we pet him with a stick instead of our bare hands…see how cautious we are?! J Cute stray dogs everywhere around here, too! We even saw a weiner dog wandering the streets. Our self-control to not pet them so far has been holding up. Well, we’re about head out for the bus. More about our first day and a half to come…
Miss you and love you all!
