Customs officials and sniffer dogs

Sunday 15 April (continued)

We are stuck at the Ukranian border for 3 and a half hours. But we later arrive in Lvov on time so the train must be at the border for that long every time it makes this journey. After our passports have been checked twice at the border, a woman customs official briefly looks in my suitcase, then looks at Reg's huge backpack and smiles. “Just clothes?” she asks, in a thick Eastern European accent, and Reg nods. She disappears and another customs official with a black spaniel appears in the doorway. Drugs! The man asks us a question in what seemed to be Polish.

“Sorry, we don't understand,”we reply lamely, “We're English”, as if that explained everything.

“Do you have any drugs or dangerous weapons?”the official asks, extremely politely.

“No” I reply, thinking of the mountain of herbal tablets we have with us – glucosamine sulphate, ginko bibloba, EPA high strength fish oil, 6 bottles of Paraclens to ward off dodgy tummies, not to mention malaria tablets. I smile benignly at the sniffer spaniel and say “Hello, there!” in the kind of voice we reserve for children and dogs. The spaniel luckily isn't interested in my herbal pharmacy and waddles out of the cabin, followed by the very polite customs officer.

We are tired and drained and can't wait to get to Lvov. Finally the whistle blows and the train jerks itself into action. We are soon speeding towards our destination. As we pack up our bits and pieces, we discover that if you lift up the cabinet/tabletop opposite the bunks, there's a washbasin concealed below, with hey presto! running water. So there had been a use for the soap and towel after all.

As we are nearing Lvov, we wait by the train exit door with our luggage and get talking to a Ukranian lady who is married to an Englishman, whom she met while working in Park Street! Finally, we've met someone who's been to Bristol!  She has an online clothing business, and made us laugh with her tales of doing business with the Chinese, and her difficulty in using chopsticks.

We are met at the station by the owner of our hostel, thank goodness! The owner tells us as we arrive at the hostel that we will be "home alone" overnight, as he's going back to his house, and there's no other guests staying here at the moment (well the hostel is as yet unrated as it only opened in March this year). Reg knew he took a risk booking it up, but the fact that it's right in the centre of Lvov swayed him to book.

The owner points out the kitchen where there's free tea and coffee but we have to go out for breakfast or make our own. After walking up a wide stone staircase, we reach a huge room with four sets of bunk beds in  it, and we walk through this to our double room.  The bed was described as a “deluxe double bed” in the information on line; we discover that  the bed is only 4 foot wide so we know we'll have trouble as I'm a very restless sleeper.  We also find out it's not very comfortable, appearing to be a converted couch/"put-u-up",  However, the room, though small, appears clean and has a shower-room toilet cum toilet right next to it, opening out into the large bunk-bedded room.  We're grateful really that there are no other guests, because it means we actually do have an on-suite bathroom as described on line; had the bunk  beds been fully occupied there would have been 10 of us using the tiny shower room cum toilet.

   

We're both asleep as soon as our heads touch the pillows.