Trainspotting

This past week, I returned to Moscow by train from Serbia.  This pretty much isn't meant to be done, at least not in one go.  Serbia is simply too far from Moscow to go directly - you're pretty much better off flying.  But, seeing as a one way ticket would have cost me $400, I figured that I'd be a cheapskate and take the train.  It actually wasn't that bad, after the first two hours.  The first train, to Budapest, didn't have reserved seats.  This means that if you didn't grab a seat early because you were busy fending off a gypsy holding a dirty gypsybaby and trying to buy cigarettes, that you would wind up sitting next to the restroom on the floor and not have a seat until the train arrived at Serbia's second biggest city (and America's biggest target in Serbia during the 1999 war) - Novi Sad.  Maybe the gypsy cursed me.  In any event, I was happy to see Novi Sad, because it meant that I got a seat for the remaining 6 hours to Budapest.  Whereas the Serbian terrain was beautiful and included a lot of red-tile-roofed houses on hills overlooking the Danube, Hungary mostly consisted of sunflowers.  Lots and lots of sunflowers.  I guess that's where the sunflower seed oil in European kitchens must come from.  I spent a whopping 35 minutes in Budapest, one of Europe's greatest cities, in the railway station before boarding another train that would take me to Kiev.  I had a second-class sitting ticket to the border, and then a bed in a 3-room compartment once I was in Ukraine.  Ukrainian trains are insanely cheap to travel in - I paid 13 euros or so for the third leg of my journey.
   Kiev is an amazing city if you're not desperately trying to get back to Moscow.  The girl in my compartment had decided to leave Budapest a day earlier than expected.  Why??  Too expensive!  I didn't mention to her that Ukraine's Chernobylicious capital is dirt cheap by most people's standards.  All in all, I was on trains for almost 4 days.  I had to wait for an available train ticket, which I got on Sunday.