A Jaunt to Ukraine

When older brother Ryan came and visited me last month, I knew that I should  expect 3 things:

1) We’d probably eat a lot 2) Ditto for drinking, and 3) We’d be constantly on the move.

Needless to say, I was three for three. For the few days we actually managed to stick around Frankfurt, Ryan managed to teach my Hungarian and Polish roommates the American tradition of Beer Pong, celebrate his birthday on a few different nights (sorry I couldn’t stay up past midnight on your actual birthday, since I was participating in a case study competition the next day). He also managed to find a wine festival on his own accord while I was at class. Nicely done.

Weekend one entailed a perfect 4 day trip to Italy to visit some old friends of mine, to be detailed at a later date. Weekend 2 entailed a 1300 km drive, each way, to Ukraine and back to visit some old exchange friends from his time in Uzhgorod, our sister city,  10 years ago. I thought the whole idea was perhaps not the best plan, since a)the rental car company doesn’t allow you to bring their cars to Ukraine b) Even if you promise to park the car in Hungary while you take the train across the border, they only let you rent a Ford c) I had class on Thursday and Monday d) European gas tax! e) etc. etc.

These reasons clearly weren’t strong enough to break Ryan’s sense of adventure, so I complied and we set off from Frankfurt at 9pm in our Ford Focus. I slept most of the 9 hours to our first major stop in Budapest, only to wake up from time to time to a) translate the sign that we did in fact need an Austrian Autobahn pass, just in time to miss every exit to buy one, b)ask for a Hungarian breakfast, only to end up stopping at the next Mcdonalds, or c) yell at Ryan to get gas.

In Budapest we picked up some of Ryan’s “Hungarian with Ukrainian passport” friends who would guide us to the friendly man’s house at the border who would let us park our Ford in his lawn, and hope for the best while we took the mildly decrepit train 20 minutes across the border, and spend the next two days in the forbidden lands.

Our friends told us that we should expect issues at the border with our passports, because the Ukranian border guards didn’t accept any funny business…just bribes. Seeing as how Ryan had put his passport through the wash recently, so several pages were stuck together, and how I have about 10 pages of Chinese visas, coupled with an old picture that looks nothing like me, we expected the worst. Luckily we caused just a minor diversion, and the passport lady called her boss over to try to determine if it was really me in the picture.

The rest of the trip pretty much involved going from place to place of people that knew Ryan while he was in Ukraine before, or relatives of those who did, eating meals, taking shots of vodka, and looking at old, extremely entertaining exchange-era pubescent pictures.

Ryan’s old host brother Christian has a young, adorable daughter now, whom we dubbed “Hurricane Valeria,” as she never really stopped moving/screaming/terrorizing (see video below, ukranian translations welcome).

A few more pictures, and a video below!

Corvallis' sister city, Uzhgorod

I want one in every color.