Alright, here we go!
All my lights are off...
Hey there, for Drew?
Uh, Ukraine.
Ah, young Drew.
So confident, so sure of his abilities.
Positive that he left for the airport with enough time to account for three separate
accidents on the freeway, not to mention a snarl in the city caused by an officer-involved
shooting.
[exasperated sigh]
Keen viewers will realize that this is still San Francisco.
[drum roll on thighs] I missed my flight!
The check-in had closed ten minutes before I got there.
We cannot print out any boarding passes.
As you can tell, our systems are closed right now and turned off.
So I'm not getting on this flight?
Um, not that I know of right now, no, because we don't have the authorization to open the flight.
But things like this happen when you travel. They just do.
And you can get mad about it or you can say "it happened, what are we going do now?"
And that flight leaves tomorrow when?
So, the moral of the story: learn from my mistakes and leave for the airport very early.
Let's try this dance again.
Well have a safe trip, it's gonna be incredible.
Thanks!
[jazzy tunes]
With my first snafu behind me, I eventually got to Stockholm only
a day and a half late.
I spent a total of 18 hours in Sweden.
Much less than I originally planned, but still enough time to meet up with some lovely Cloth
Map Patrons.
Yeah, I brought a camera and everything!
One of whom invited all of us back to his apartment, where we hung out playing Fibbage
until five in the morning.
The trip had barely started and I already had a high point.
I am now going to go grab some sleep because I have to wake up... today and take a flight
to Kiev.
Seeing Cyrillic on the seat backs was the first stark indicator that I was leaving Western
Europe behind.
We disembarked using stairs and a shuttle, which I came to learn is the norm for this region.
I bypassed the throngs of bootleg taxi drivers and got a taxi boarding pass from the information
desk to ensure I wasn't getting ripped off.
From the car I got my first up-close look at Ukraine, blocky apartment buildings, cobblestone
streets and all.
Before I knew it we were crossing the Dnieper, which I always associated with a PC game I
played back in the early 2000s called Korsun Pocket.
My hotel was apparently tough to find and at one point my driver just got out of the
car to look around.
Hi, I'm Drew.
I'm sitting alone in a Ukrainian man's taxi cab.
Welcome to Cloth Map.
Eventually we found it and I got to try out my Ukrainian, which seemed to excite my driver.
[excited Ukrainian]
I then checked into my hotel which was... not what I was expecting.
I don't think I really realized when I booked this place that I was booking what appears
to be an apartment.
And a really nice one by the look of things.
Dining table, a stove, a fridge.
There's stuff in here.
Look, I got cheese already!
Not bad for less than 50 bucks a night at the height of Eurovision season.
Alright, first night just walking around Kiev.
It's a nice night, I don't even need this jacket.
I stopped at the first place that looked like it would give me food, which turned out to
be a pretty decent Czech restaurant.
By then it was 10 PM and I was exhausted.
The following day I treated myself to some tea and did a grocery run.
What I like to do is to stock up on food that is easy to store and easy to eat.
Like bananas.
This is actually my second batch of bananas that I bought.
The first one... the lady looked at me and asked me a question and I just went "uhh..."
and she had to run off and do something and then came back, and I noticed she had added
a sticker to the bananas.
So this time, I watched somebody else to see where they got the sticker.
A guy took some cucumbers, put them in a bag and then brought them over to a weighing station.
So I had to use my phone to look up what what "banana" was, and "oranges," how to spell
those in Ukrainian, and then I entered them in the system that then printed out a label.
Then I brought it to the checkout lady and everything was fine!
This stuff can really bolster my breakfasts or my lunches.
Actually, for lunch today I did go to a restaurant.
I found on Foursquare a ramen place nearby.
It was kind of hard to find.
You had to go through an alley and then into a courtyard and there was a door with a bunch
of stickers on it and that was the secret ramen shop.
Pretty popular place, and pretty good, actually!
That night was the Kiev meetup, where an English teacher named Nick showed up and gave me some
excellent tips and phrases.
It was great to finally be in Ukraine, despite the jet lag, and there was still a lot more
to come.