Travel day

I don't know how I feel about travel days. I usually think they are something to get over with, they are a means to an end to arrive at your destination (literally).

I feel like you also think there will be much more spare time, which just seems to melt away as soon as one thing is delayed or you have to be conscious of other people.

Then you end up sleeping like shit, and everything becomes stressful. Vampy for example, just before we go thought it would be a good time to pee every 5 minutes as if he had a urinary problem, but no, he is just being annoying.

As an aside

I was looking for how best to blog while “on the go” and found this as the top result:

What happened to having a THINK? Who the fuck is reading AI blogs anyway? Are you stupid?

Fly with me...

I don't really like planes. I tolerate them more than anything. They’re loud and hot and stuffy, and no sockets. I know it’s Ryanair and I shouldn’t expect much more than a space for a small child and the ability to not explode in the air.

This time we had some Ukrainian dad next to us. When you fly to Warsaw or krakow you notice like 50% of the passengers are Ukrainian visiting home. It makes you feel part of one big group instead of an individual, you’re all going through it together.

That thing? Shitty border control when you reach Poland as if it’s a Poles’ natural god given duty to be as hostile as they can to Ukrainians. This time wasn’t so bad though, they seemed relatively friendly. It’s usually border guards at the train stations which suck. Which leads me to the next part…

Train time

Then all we had to do was get to the damn train.

We took a taxi from the airport and that took almost 2 hours because of road closures. Had some Azerbaijani driver blasting terrible Russian/Georgian rap about being in prison and how cool they were. i tried to fall asleep but couldn’t.

first we went to Zabka, a taxi directly to Zabka. Because going to Zabka is more important than anything else when you land in Poland.

We got to the train station with a few hours to spare and spent most of it scrolling or worrying about the cats.

Cat sitter woes

The cat sitter we got is clearly inexperienced, she had no idea what to do it seems. She scooped the litter robot, she didn’t top up the litter to the line, and who knows if she checked if Miku actually ate her food.

One thing which annoys the hell out of me in the UK is how awkward it is to give feedback for a service you pay for, you are always made to feel like you are the problem even if you gave all the information you could.

We wrote and printed out a 10 page guide on our cats, our house, the litter trays. She even seemed to read it because we saw on the camera.

Did that stop her scooping the auto box which it says not to do? No.

So I’m sending messages almost every day saying oh can you not do this or that… it’s in the guide! But I look like a strict asshole. And then I have to balance that with my wife telling me oh no please tell her like damn I’m in between a rock and a hard place having to get the bare minimum for our cats!

And who am I messaging? A generic Facebook account for all the cat sisters working for the company, so there are layers of abstractions, like I’m contacting the council to bitch about bins and I have to go through four people to get to the right person who tells me to fuck off anyway.

Anyway back to the train

It was some soviet ass shit. we didn’t seem to get lucky and get a refurbished one so thankfully we were blessed with a hot, stuffy, red mattress cabin.

We also had an annoying woman as our third bunk. She kept complaining that we were making too much noise and stopping her sleeping (at 8:30pm). She then called her friend to bitch about us and said “these stupid lesbians making so much noise” 🤭

I could barely sleep. It was so warm and I had to strip down and hope nobody was looking in our cabin, fanning myself with my passport. Very horrible.

Once we got through borders it started to cool down and I managed to get a few hours of sleep. I Played 0 hours of games, when I thought I would play at least a few hours.

Romancing Triss and rejecting Yennefer will have to wait :(

A comment on structure

Initially I wanted to put the travel day together with the first day in Ukraine. But we are already at 733 words just talking about the trip, without pictures and comments.

It would be easier for me to split them and tackle them as different days.

I can give a summary of the day we arrived (11am). We did some admin stuff and did my teeth scan, ate sushi and went to the shop.