1) The overnight train from Krakow to Kyiv. Easy, simple, they come to your coupe and stamp your passport at the border and you don't even have to get out of bed. Fall asleep in one country, wake up in the other. Cost: $60.
2) Take a train from Krakow to a border town. Take a marshrutka from the border town to the border. Wait in line at the border, go through customs then walk across. Catch a marshrutka from the border to Lviv. Catch an overnight train from Lviv to Kyiv. Cost: $20.
Which did I go for? Dude, I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer.
The train from Krakow to the border town. Polish trains don't sell seats, they sell tickets. When all the seats are sold out, people stand in the hallway, like I did.
At the Ukrainian border. What's cool was that at the Polish border town (I forget its name), everything was in both Latin and Cyrillic letters. Because so many Latin letters in Polish have different sounds ("S" is "Sh" and "W" is "V" for example), it is easier for me to read Polish words in cyrillic than it is in Latin. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the signs.
At customs. This is the slavic definition of an orderly line.
The line to get into Poland. Like at the Mexico/USA border, the line into the poorer country is far faster. Seth and Sean came this route and stood for four hours in the rain waiting to cross into Poland. The crush near the door because so bad that Seth spent half an hour with one hand over his head and his ribs shoved into a metal pole. Luckily, I was across in twenty minutes.
The marshrutka to Lviv was another story. As if welcoming me back to Ukraine and its quaint customs, the marshrutka to Lviv was packed solid when we left and only became more so because the driver never stopped picking up customers on the whole two hour drive. I spent most of it standing in the aisle with all my weight on my left foot because an overly large woman was shoving into my on my right side and someone's box of fruit was between my feet. Soon my leg started to hurt from the weight, then burn, then finally, thankfully, went numb.
Still, I felt my luck was holding: I managed to catch the last train to the border town with seconds to spare (it started moving as soon as I set foot on board) and caught the last marshrutka to Lviv. From there, whether my luck held is debateable: after spending thirty minutes in a mob at the Lviv train ticket window, I was told that on all five of the trains leaving to Kyiv that night, the only seat available was in SV, which is the second highest class on the train. A platzcart ticket--the lowest class and which I usually take--would have been about $7. The only way I could get to Kyiv by the next day, and I had to, because Steve and Carrie's birthday party was the next day, was to buy a $40 train ticket.
So I did.
My SV coupe
For those keeping up, my extremely complex journey across half of Poland and half of Ukraine ended up costing the same as if I had just gotten on the overnight in Krakow. Well, almost. I did the math and found that I saved myself $6. Six dollars ia a lot of Pepsi in Ukraine, so I will say it was worth it.
SV, though, was not worth it.
But, finally, I was home.