Ukraine Road trip 1st part: Kyiv - Mukachevo-Uzhgorod

---

After my first trip in Ukraine in Kyiv, I felt that I needed to see more of this country, which was so different from all the other countries that I had visited until then. Asia was different for me but I was expecting it to be different. On the contrary, when I visited Ukraine I was not expecting it. For that reason and because I was missing my Ukrainian friends, when I found a really cheap flight ticket to Kyiv, I booked it directly and that time, I stayed 10 days there, so I could travel to other places in the country and meet my friends again.

Thanks to my great friends Nastya and Sasha who planned everything for the 2 weekends that we could spend together there exploring the country, I got a very good time here.

I have to admit that it took quite a while to arrive in the 1st place we were supposed to go: after a 3 hour-flight to Kyiv, we took a 11 hour-night train to Ivano-Frankivsk. This was a long journey but it was a nice one. I like night trains when it's with friends because you can just enjoy the view outside in the morning, talk with your friends, play with them, eat and it's more confortable than car.

So, in the train, we ate various ukrainian dishes (salads, some cabbage with meat, some brioche) and we played cards (I brought some Russian cards -offered by a Couchsurfing couple from Russia last year- ). The game -дурень in Ukrainian- we played was at first quite difficult for me to understand. Ok, I admit it took me hours to fully understand the rules and what's even funnier is that once I understood the rules, I was playing worse than when I didn't understand them. So I lost several times when we played second time. But anyway, as Nastya said "unlucky in games, Lucky in love", we will see if it's true :p. What I liked with that game is that all the times we played it, we could meet new people: on that night, we played with the guy sharing our wagon and on another night, we played with a girl, who likes travelling and who heard us speak English, so she joined us for some time!

When I said that it took us a while to get there, it's that when we arrived in Ivano-Frankivsk and I was thinking that we were almost there, then arriving at the bus station, they tell us "there is only one bus today going to Uzhgorod leaving in 1 hour and it will take 9 hours to get there. So, after 3 hours in plane + 11 hours in train, I thought: "no way!!", I don't want to spend my whole weekend just travelling there and stay there only a few hours. But we all know that those kind of change of plans can be good as well. So I took it the positive way: I could see the landscape and how people are living in the small villages in the Carpathians mountains! So, I could see an old woman holding a rope with her cow at the other end of it, sitting on a very small stool in her field/or maybe garden, since it was not that big! I saw people riding carts to go to the next villages, I saw nice landscapes with rivers, forest and mountains, I could look at the Sunset for almost one hour with its nice orange, red and yellow colors. So, to summarize, I enjoyed that journey.

Then, in the bus, we decided that instead of going directly to Uzhgorod, we would stop in Mukachevo for the night. In that place, there was a really nice castle so we could stay there and visit the castle in the morning. So, we booked a house for the 3 of us to stay there for the night. I loved that house, it seemed so cosy and nice there! It was also a funny place: to go from kitchen to bedrooms, you had to go through bathroom with toilets, and the door between kitchen and toilet was a glass door -meaning from kitchen who could see people in toilets 😉!!- Then, the main bedroom's door was also a glass door, so in this house, you could see that you could never get some privacy. And, this even more, when the landlord came 3 times back to the house after our arrival in the evening to talk with us and when he arrived at 8.30am the next morning to remind us that we had to leave at 10am!!! Except that, the place was really nice, with also a nice garden, with little wood houses, swing on the tree, bbq place,...

After a nice dinner cooked by Nastya and Sasha -yes, in that city, there were not a lot of restaurants opened at 9pm on a Friday night!, so we went to grocery store 😊- and a good night sleep, we woke up in the morning to go visit the castle. This castle was on a -volcanic- hill, where you can have a nice view over the city. This castle has been built by Hugarian in the 14th, century and then centuries later became a prison -we could even visit the torture room there!- and was then a college.

After that visit, we took a bus to -finally! 😊- go to Uzhgorod. The bus journey was really short -only 1 hour- in comparison with the journey started on Friday evening! And I have to say that it was totally worth the long journey to get there!

I loved that city so much! It is really nice with the river Uzh which divides the city in 2 parts (old one and new one). Building are really nice, you can see the influence of Hungary there. We walk a bit in the city and I was feeling great. We also went to a "Beaujolais wine festival". Ok, I have to admit I was quite sceptical at first, because it was Beaujolais and Western Ukraine was for me not a famous wine area 😉 But Nastya really wanted to go there (after sangria in Portugal, wine in Ukraine 😉) and I have to admit that we had a great time there! We could taste any wine we wanted for free. The wines there were really fruity, some were dry, some were sweets,... I was amused when I was reading at the name in Cyrillic and I could read in Ukrainian "Merlot" or "Cabernet Sauvignon" 😉 Nastya bought some bottles and one of them was named "Pink Lidia"!! We had to buy it because of our dear friend Lidia, who was not with us at that time 😊 So we drank some Pink Lidia on the next day for dinner 😉

After this wine tasting, we continued walking in the city, tasted some honey stick (really good! but eating the whole stick in once is crazy for me!), saw a beautiful cathedral, visited another castle with nice view over the city, went to Bondarenko cafe (surname of my friend Nastya 😉) and then we went to take our night train, which was taking us to Kyiv.

In the train, we played cards again, slept and in the morning I could enjoy the beautiful sunrise from the train!

Western Ukraine amazed me, I loved it!

---