Annoyed

Day 510

The train arrived in Kiev at 5 am and it was still dark out. I grabbed breakfast at the only place open, McDonalds as the sun came up. It then took me about 40 minutes to walk to the hostel. Most of it was up hill. I rang what I thought was the door bell and waited. I sat there for about an hour waiting and no one came. Eventually I gave up and found an internet cafe. The problem was that they were shutting down for an hour in 30 minutes. I checked my email and could see that the girls who owned the hostel had emailed me asking if I wanted directions and the door code. Why the hell would they ask and not just send them? I emailed them back and then tried to call both of their cell phones but didn't have any luck. In no time my 30 minutes were up and I had to leave.

I went back to the hostel and found that the door had been left open. I went up the stairs and rang the bell. The girls were really apologetic. To get in touch with me they had sent me 2 emails (I had to leave so I hadn't got them) and had called the phone number on my Hostel World account thinking that it was my cell phone. The thing is that I don't have one, it's my parents number and it was 2 am in the States. They had woken up my parents. I felt really bad about it and they felt bad too once they had asked what time it was there. I couldn't be too upset though, calling an international number to try and find me was really quite a nice thing to do. I'm just sorry that my parents lost sleep over it.

After showering I headed out to buy my train ticket out of Kiev and then set off to explore the town.

Once I had checked out Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the very communist main square, I popped into the guilded and recently reconstructed St. Michael's Cathedral. it as really quite nice. I then headed further uphill (this city is nothing but up hill) to the Spiritual Treasures of th Ukraine Museum. Unfortunately it was closed. It was, however, right next to the very pretty St. Andrews Church.

Finally on slightly even ground I found the National History Museum. It was ok, but no photos were allowed. The stone and bronze age stuff was boring. There was a rather interesting display of holograms though. Not much was in English, but my spidey sense told me that some of it was about the Austria-Hungary Empire, the Crimean War and WWI. For unknown reasons there was also a mermaid.

At this point I was dragging and went back to the internet cafe. I managed to type a bit but mostly chatted with people from home. If I'm good at one thing it is certainty procrastination!

Before heading back to the hostel I picked up dinner. I was able to barrow one of the girls computers for some time and managed to get my pictures organized and uploaded. That has been the biggest challenge recently and soon I will be able to get the blog back under control.

That night I tried to sleep early but the other person in my room, a retired Dutch man, was a terribly loud snorer and it took me a long time to find sleep. I could hear him thru my earplugs and over my ipod!