<p>I decided that travelling to Lviv via Krakow would be fun as well, even though I had already been there. So I got on the bus at 5 pm, had a few near death experiences on the two lane roads connecting Vilnius and northern Poland (Imagine a convoy of 100’s of trucks on your lane. Every 1 km a truck comes from the other side. Is this a reason for the bus driver not to overtake? guess again… ) <br />
Crossing the border is interesting as well when some of the Russians on board are too drunk to find their passports. <br />
Anyway, at 6 in the morning I arrived in Krakow, just in time to see the sun rising over this beautiful city, covered in snow and with a thick mist slowly rising. <br />
<a href="http://thomas.macconsultant.nl/GL_Gallery2/Krakow/">The photos from krakow.</a><br />
It was definitely a good experience to be there again. But only for a few hours, since the train to Lviv was leaving at 2 pm. <img vspace="10" hspace="10" align="left" alt="" src="http://thomas.macconsultant.nl/galler…C_5532.JPG" /><br />
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Traveling by train is totally different here. Think bureaucratic sowjet relic and you’re quite close to how the system works. There are for instance seperate offices for travel information, where you can find out when and where the train leaves, and for buying the actual ticket. <img vspace="10" hspace="10" align="right" alt="" src="http://thomas.macconsultant.nl/galler…C_5524.JPG" /><br />
Once you are on the train, guess how long a journey of 300 km takes? About 10 hours. That’s just pathetic. <br />
You have to change trains at the border since the rail has a different width in the Ukraine. This means I had to spend two hours in the rather spooky station in Przemysl. After that there was some problem with the Ukrainian train, which meant that by then I was running over an hour late. Which in turn meant that I arrived in Lviv at 2 am. Believe me, Lviv is quite a scary place to arrive in the middle of the night. Lada’s with blinded windows pulling up next to you…. <br />
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An extra challenge here in Lviv is the Cyrillic alphabet. I had the street name and name of the hostel, but in latin. That means that no taxi driver can understand it. Eventually, after some adventures, I managed to find a taxi driver who understood where I wanted to go based on the map in my lonely planet guide. He dropped me of somewhere near the hostel, and it took me about 40 minutes and a short ride by a security officer to eventually find the hostel. Turns out that the description of streetnames in latin is not really helpful when the signs are in cyrillic. <br />
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I have never been so happy to arrive in a hostel before…. (<a href="http://www.thekosmonaut.com">website of Kosmonaut Hostel Lviv</a>)<br />
<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&a…,48.164063">Lviv op de wereld kaart</a><br />
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<a href="http://thomas.macconsultant.nl/GL_Gallery2/Lviv/">De eerste fotos uit Lviv staan hier, </a>maar meer is onderweg…</p>
