bus stop

got up at... I don't even remember. What I remember is waking our hosts at 5.38 am so they could let us out the door. Walked to the bus station. A nice 20 min early morning jaunt. Ah yes. Get on the bus and turf out the people in our seats. You could always sit somewhere else and let them stay...but about 75% of the time the people who have tickets for your seat show up and make you move... and then there's a mass shifting of passengers as seat 18 claims their seat and that person goes up to 15 and claims theirs and then that one boots out the #13 person and so on and so on until the person in seat 3 crawls back to seat 25. I just get it over with ASAP (unless I'm holding the ticket for 31... then I'll stay in #10 and hope like anything that person doesn't show up and claim their seat... I got over liking the back of the bus in Oh Grade 5 or so). BUT- this is beside the point.

so we hit the road. We doze. We wake up. We read a little. We fall asleep. We lurch into a bus stop (after what seems like 5 hours... or no time at all, depending on how much sleeping actually happened).





First- locate the WC... this is rather vital.













Next, off to find some kind of coffee. Another machine, another coffee... not bad, either. Claimed to be 'whole bean'... hmmm... vanilla flavored. Good stuff. But it's a 20 min stop so there's still heaps of time. And there are still hours of trip ahead of sitting and dangling your feet and wishing you could move... so now's the time to do it. Here we go. Bus station. Fun stuff. You want junk food? You want something to drink? (I can see the Pepsi from here).














This lady had no idea she was the star of my little photo op but she sure did a nice job of posing anyway.

If you need tobacco, you'll have to move on, this stand's closed... but the friendly little grandmas selling sunflower seeds will gladly scoop up a bag full for you. (I think it was cold right there...)


about face and head back towards the bus (small town- ours was the coolest bus in the lot)


How about a fun little kid clowning in front of the bus? Eventually though, you have to get back on the bus and point your mind to more hours of travel.

There were a few other stops more or less like this one. We got back to Kyiv- pulled into a bus station I didn't even know existed... stumbled off and looked around... and found the steps down to the metro...

In Kyiv, if the metro's nearby, you're un-lost Pronto. Thankfully. Home about 3 pm...

But the people we saw were super and the day was a good one.