Today should of been the day when we were gonna throw it back to Chernobyl, by now we should of somehow realised that nowt ever goes right for us, as despite having emailed the hostel 3 days in advance to book it for us (and the government require 3 days advance notice to sort out your documents etc) they didn’t reply until a day later when it was too late. Factoring in our as yet unresolved cash flow crisis this was probably for the best. So over a spot of breakfast and beers in the hostel we decided the only thing for it was to head into Maidan Square to soak up the aftermath of an historic event – how often is history happening right up close to you, like an onion?
Now being experts at the Kyiv Metro Location Unit, we jumped on the metro for the two stops to Maidan and headed up the infinite escalator, quite unsure as to what we would find at the top. The metro emerged slap bang in the middle of the protesters encampment – a desolated square, covered in khaki tents with fires on the go, banners with patriotic slogans and Ukrainian flags, huge barricades of debris, tyres and burned out vehicles, the charred remains once-grand international bank headquarters and literally MOUNTAINS of flowers and candles for the people killed during the most violent couple of days of the riots. Words can’t describe the atmosphere – it was very sombre and triumphant at the same time. Someone we met later that day summed the feeling up very well – “We have won our freedom, but the cost was very high.” Continue Reading
We arrived at Kiev with the bouquet intact where we resisted the harassing offers of taxis into town (with the aid of our cunningly scribed hand dictionaries) and decided instead to make our own way on the little old rickety mini bus that took about an hour to get to the train station. From there,our hostel had given us directions of the various Metros we needed, so we (upon finally locating the underground station and having a quick beer next to it – after Lithuania’s non-street drinking/no kiosks with booze on the street corner, we were very relieved to find the streets packed with little shacks selling cheap booze for the thirsty traveler) we bought tokens for the metro and attempted to put what we thought were the tokens into the turnstile, only for it to spit them out and the security man shouted at us until we sussed out that we were actually putting our loose change into there instead of the plastic tokens. Michael Bayed that right up like! We then descended down into what seemed like the core of the earth on the massive escalators and pushed our way onto the packed Metro, trying to perfect our non-standing out, dour Eastern European demeanour of not smiling at anyone when making eye contact. Put the rest of this in your face
You find us one week ago, on Susan’s birthday, stepping groggily off the luxury bus from Riga to Vilnius. Bedraggled and hideously hungover. Susan’s friend Laimonas met us at the bus station (with a lovely birthday bouquet for Susan, that is still with us on our travels!). He drove us to our hostel (which was fortunate as we would never have found it on our own), which was a very bizarre little place that seemed apart from us, to be occupied by lone male travellers, all of whom were wanting to stick their man parts in the little blonde receptionist who was git loving the attention and treated our arrival as a bit of an inconvenience breaking up their worship of her. Plus we had to take our shoes off, just to check in, and then put them back on again to walk back over the road to the building where our room was and it was a TILED FLIPPING FLOOR so what the fup damage would shoes do? And we didn’t get our welcome beers!!! Put the rest of this in your face
So where did we leaf off? Sitting in a camper van bar in Riga drinking Fisk! After an afternoon spent boozing it up on the amazing hemp and ginger beer that was 7% and writing our hilarious blog that NONE of you could even be bothered to comment on (not that we’re bitter or owt), we finally found our way through the bookcase into our dorm room where we came upon our roomie, German Marketing Martin, who would become our endearing third Privvy Leg for our time in Riga. He didn’t take much persuading to join us in a beer or ten and offered to show us the sites of Riga which he had found the evening before. We fuelled up with some fisks which inspired Susan to teach the Latvian bartender the joy of Austins (fisk bombed into cider) and force him to drink some with us (Katie you are spreading across the world!!). Unfortunately, as it was a Sunday night, pretty much all of the bars that Martin took us to were closed, so we ended up in generic tourist bars rather than dubious dives where random old Latvian men would talk to us, which was what we had requested from our tour guide. We still managed to have a great time as Marketing Martin had some good craic and would do owt. We went back to the hostel around midnight and realised it was Susan’s birthday, much to the joy of our new nemisis, Latvian Anthea, who from then on insisted on plying us with as many black balzams as possible, despite us shouting at her “NO! Bad Latvian Anthea!” and “Fup off Latvian Anthea I dinnit want it!!”. We have no idea what her actual name was but she looked like our friend Anthea (damn pages again not letting you tag people in it anymore!!) and was Latvian. Turned out they were having a staff party and we had inadvertently lucked into/had the misfortune to get stuck in the middle of it. Put the rest of this in your face
Let us take you back…back to Gatwick, where it all began.
After an emotional reunion (involving many bottles of wine and a big bucket of ice, and we’ll say no more about it) we made it to the airport on Friday morning in time to brave the hideous queues for beer. The 2 hour flight passed in to time, mainly due to the delicious 40 Euros worth of wine and nibbles.
Arrived in Tallinn to find it bracing but sunny and set about demolishing a couple of cans of local cider from the kiosk before getting the bus to the city centre. Which we stayed on until the last stop which was actually a ferry terminal nowhere near where we had to be. So we walked in the general direction of the church spires, hoping that would be some kind of central square, and with the help of Google Maps managed to locate our hostel (The Red Emperor) which was on the top of a nice pub called The Beer Garden which served a nice range of local beers and the food that the table behind us were eating looked quite nice so we decided to get some dinner. Susan had a smoked cheese, mushroom and sun-dried tomato soup with a pastry lid that was basically an Estonian fondue and fupping delicious. Jill had a platter of lards of the world, with gherkins and a shot of vodka on the side. The soup was definitely the winner, but you cannit be having the option of a lard platter and not try it! Put the rest of this in your face
“You know, instead of us both buying houses in Dublin and Sunderland, I bet we could buy a whole village in Kosovo for the same price”
“Lets do it!!”
And here is the plan…
With a miserable start to our evening in Maribor, due to a malfunction of the loose egg location unit, or indeed location of any loose foods, as every restaurant/bar we approached immediately began packing up the tables, we eventually gave up trying to find the thronging hub of the 2012 City of Culture and stumbled into a dubious looking doorway claiming happy hour all night, where we demanded a litre of wine and directions to the happening night spots, which were met with derisive laughter and shaken heads along with apologies that it wasn’t as good as Ukraine, where she was from. Thus began the start of another new friendship, sealed over local firewater boozes which a young couple called Anna and Igor kindly thrust upon us, as she had an English exam next week and could justify an evening of drunken debauchery as studying. Returning to our hostel at some ungodly hour, we were met with crowds of punks and hippies, soiling out of a load of squat nightclubs which appeared to of sprung or of every random doorway behind the building! Fool of a Caxter Barman wandering around town looking for life when it was right here on or doorstep! Obviously wandering around the city centre looking for craic was an amateur move when the graffitied tenements on the outskirts of town were the place to be! And even more amazingly, Transvision Vamp was blasting out of one of them! Put the rest of this in your face
After some initial panic (running around Bajram Curri in the dark at 5am trying to find the chef in his car, then watching the ferry pull out of the dock as we drove up) we caught the Koman the Barbarian ferry through the Nice Nice t Nice Nice Northern Albanian Alps, crammed in with a variety of locals and their sacks of potatoes (Potato!) who had scaled down cliffs to the lakeside to clamber on board at random points throughout the journey. A furgon filled with old men playing a sitar and singing obviously bawdy Albanian songs (probably about Jill’s buubs) later, and having missed the bus to Thethi as it leaves at 7am, we met a pie fingered Albanian Brummie who arranged a car and house for us in Thethi. 4 nerve racking hours in a jeep with only right side suspension, packed in with 2 Albanians, 2 Spanish, 2 Germans, 1 American, 3 crates of beer and a sack of dubious meat (on Jill’s lap), took us to the beautiful remote mountain village of Thethi – only to find that those 3 crates of beer were not for us and our all inclusive house stay had no beer in the fridge! Only homemade plastic bottles full of crazy fire water that we politely tried to sip and were dismayed only to have it refilled by the little old woman as soon as we managed to get any down! And despite calls from our organiser demanding they give us beer, none arrived :o( therefore we went in search of a bar and ended up lost and stranded halfway up a mountain just as the sun set and had to resort to trespassing across peoples fields and houses, commando style, to find the main path – only to backtrack to let some cows pass on the narrow path (which Susan touched – animal no. 3, check). In search of a bar, a nice loose egg and to touch all of the animals (we are sure the stories of the cackling, large breasted, beer demanding, animal touchers will abound in Thethi for generations to come), we finally stumbled upon a hut/bar where we spent the last of our meagre funds on beer and had a rousing game of dominoes with the mountain men who insisted on giving us lots more beer Put the rest of this in your face
Wandering in search of a nice loose egg, your favourite idiot broads abroad embarking on an yet another enchanting voyage of self-discovery (not the kind that's in those arty french films with subtitles and hairy biffs). Join us in our journey!
2 Girls 1 Country (per Day) - an Adventure in Pinge and Wang 