We spent most of the day yesterday hanging around the hostel. Two weeks of walking, travelling, and sleeping in new places, exhaustion has finally set in. The bar/restaurant attached to the hostel really does make the most delicious cheeseburgers. I got through a little over half of it and couldn’t eat anymore, they’re decently sized, but the reason was due to two weeks of eating smaller portions.

An interesting thing about England is that their food doesn’t have all of the preservatives that our food has it. Even the sodas don’t have the preservatives and even use real sugar instead of corn syrup. The food there is so much better for you and even tastes better.

We got up early in the morning, just shy of 4:00am so that we could check out and hop on a bus that would eventually lead us to Heathrow Airport. We would have taken the underground, but almost all of the tunnels were shutdown today due to maintenance. The bus completely passed up our stop, unfortunately. We ended up having to take a taxi.

Check-in at Heathrow also took forever, because in front of us was a group of tourists, over ten. They didn’t have their stuff ready and instead of all of them going to one check-in window they clogged up most of the open ones. We were also delayed on take-off due to software problems in their maintenance checklist program. The flight back to the states was a better one than the one coming to England.

Back in O’Hare in Chicago we already had a 4 and half hour layover scheduled there between the flights. However, storms in the area pushed that back for about another hour and a half.

After all of that I finally got home around 8:00 pm. So tired.

We checked out of the hostel and made our way through the street markets we had seen two days ago. As it had been on almost all of our other flights we had time to kill.

Going through customs and boarding the plane was once again an annoyance. Customs literally look back and forth between your passport and your face five times. Boarding the plane, there was a lack of personal space yet again, and combine that with a lack of deodorant.

We got into London fairly late. Luton Airport is a good distance outside of the city, so we had to find train tickets to get us back into London. Unfortunately the train was ending before the London Bridge exit. So we had to take the underground from the place where the train ended to London Bridge.

We quickly checked into the hostel, which was the first one we stayed at, and went to bed. It was after midnight at this point.

After we got up and got ready we got to talking to the hostel owner. After finding out that I did computer support, he offered to give us free lodging if I could fix the public computer. I spent probably 2 hours looking at the public PC as well as the office PC. I removed quite a few viruses from the public PC and it was running fine. Score.

This city is like San Francisco with all of the hills. Doing a lot of walking in this city is not for the fat American, let me tell you. During our journey around the city, we visited Independence Square, Friendship Arch, Saint Sophia’s Cathedral, and a couple other places I can’t exactly remember the names for. We decided to eat at McDonalds due to the language barrier. Although the language barrier proved to be just as big of an issue at McDonalds.

Come to find out that in general Ukrainians will not understand you unless you speak their language perfectly. They also pronounce Big Mac slightly different than it should be, and if you say it as it should be they won’t understand you. They are very nationalistic about their language. The hostel owner told us how they still have the mindset to do as very little work as possible as it was under communism. They still think doing a lot of work is stupid and doing as little as possible is the right thing.

Today we went out on a tour outside the city with the hostel where we were able to shoot AK-47’s.

For dinner we went to a place that the hostel owner suggested, which was right down the street. We went and set down. The waiter gave us a menu, which unfortunately was entirely writing with no English. We asked the waiter if they had an English version of the menu, he pointed down the street and said “fast food… McDonalds”. We went back to the hostel and asked the hostel owner and he said that it was a cafeteria style, you could go inside and point to what you wanted. We went back to the restaurant and sure enough on the inside it was.

Tomorrow we head back to London for a day then back home!

We did a bit more walking around the city to kill time because the flight out wasn’t until about 8:00pm.

Boarding the plane, we found out quickly that Ukrainians do not have the same concept as a personal bubble. It wasn’t very pleasant. They didn’t line up in a queue at all. They were rushing like they were afraid the plane would leave without them. I can understand the reasoning behind it, considering they were under communism and they had to rush to get food and supplies. But times have changed, they’re no longer under communism.

We got to Kiev fairly late, almost midnight. It was a pain to get through their customs, due to the amount of time they took with each one and not having enough booths open to check.

We got a taxi outside of the airport to take us to the hostel. Taxi cabs in Kiev do not have seatbelts in the back seats, seriously. Out of all of the cities we had been in, Kiev is the one with the need for seatbelts because people here do not know how to drive. On the way to the hostel we saw a wreck at the other side of the road involving a semi and a car. Lets just say the person from the car was on the road in pieces.

We took a bullet train out to Dusseldorf today, it only took about a half-hour or so to get there from Cologne.

The train station wasn’t near the center of the city, so we had a mile or two walk to the center, which is where all of the points of interest were. It was still fairly early once we got there so we walked the riverside seeing what all was there.

We stopped at the Dusseldorf museum and went through it. Unfortunately we found out that most of the attractions in the city shutdown on Mondays. The only reason that the museum was open was due to some political media thing going on.

We walked around the city for a good amount of time. We even found a couple Japanese stores in one area of town. I was a bit disappointed because I didn’t find any weird Japanese things in there. We took the bullet train back to Cologne.

Tomorrow evening we leave for Kiev.

Today we walked around the city more. We visited a Cologne history museum. Really other than that, there wasn’t really anything exciting. Cologne can definitely be done in 2 days.

Tomorrow we take a day trip out to Dusseldorf.

Once we arrived in Cologne yesterday, we were going to walk to the hostel, but the hostel was atleast two miles away and the map we had wasn’t exactly the best. We ended up flagging a taxi to get to the hostel. The hostel is a fairly nice hostel, similar to the hostel we stayed at in London.

We spent most of the day doing laundry and catching up on sleep.

For dinner we stopped at a German restaurant that was a block or two from the hostel. The served a lot of German specialties. I decided to try blutwurst (aka blood sausage or blood pudding) served with mashed potatoes, cooked onions, and apple sauce. The look of the blutwurst is basically of a steak, but that is where the similarities end. There is a unique texture to it when you bite into it, it’s not whole like you’re biting into a piece of meat. It has a really good taste to it as well, if you can get past the fact one of the ingredients was blood it is worth a taste.

Today we got up and began our trek around the city. We walked back down to the cathedral, which is literally right next to the train station. This cathedral is simply amazing when you consider the size of it and that it was finished over 300 years ago. The pictures I’ve seen of the cathedral simply do not do it justice.

We continued our walk around the city and ended up back at the hostel around mid-afternoon. We still wanted to go to the chocolate museum, but we couldn’t find it in our first trip. Later in the day we made another walk back down to the river, which isn’t far from the cathedral.

After a lot of looking we found the museum. There’s not a lot to say about the museum other than chocolate is also made there. From the sample of the chocolate I tried there, I can say it’s probably the best tasting chocolate I’ve had.

After the museum we grabbed some dinner and walked back to the hostel.