billus' VirtualTourist Home Page

I'm getting just a little annoyed with everyone and their #@$%&! vacations. I even think the only reason you people are taking vacations is to make me jealous. No sooner do I get back from Ruthenia than the limelight is stolen away from me by Brian, who just got back from Japan. Japan? That is just soo early nineties. And my parents just back from South America. Where do those people get off stealing the name of their continent from us? Oh and Robin just got back from Turkey, as if I hadn't ever been there. Well I have been there, and no, I didn't write a travel page, and yes, I am jealous. Thank you.

So the Ukrainian vacation has long since passed into the realm of History, and to mark the occasion, the History Channel just played Part 6 of its WWI series, "Shackled to a Corpse", about the Eastern Front in WWI. The corpse is Austria Hungary, the shackled is the German Empire. The sad Austrian corpse was attacked by the vital Russian Body who layed seige to the town (appendage) of Przemysl in 1915 and captured the Galician fortress town. It's cool seeing vintage newsreel footage of the Polish border town I had no idea it was a battle site. So anyway the Austrians lost it and then the Germans came in and re-captured it for the Reich. Apparently the Germans had some big plans for the disinfection, civilizationization and Germanization of that part of the world even in WWI. Certainly, they replaced the wide gage railways with narrow gage German tracks. And catalogued the population. The Jewish inhabitants were subject to persecution and exploitation on both sides! Amazing stuff, this history. It's all so Klaus Marie Brandauer in "Oberst Redl". Its Art imitating the History Channel.

Well the Ukrainian border police were great fun. That woman in the skirt laughed at me- yes, she did, for not speaking any useful languages. And gave me a verbal dress-down for using the Latin alphabet on my entry application. Having said that, you don't even need a visa to enter Ukraine any more. They ditched the visa requirement when they hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2005!

The bus from Przemysl, Poland, to L'viv, Ukraine, takes only two hours. The bus gets preferential treatment (!) at the border as it races past miles of queing trucks and cars and perambulating merchants. The border formalities take only about thirty minutes to complete upon entering Ukraine. That guard in the beret spotted me taking pictures and instantly fell upon the bus. He instructed me to delete the pictures as this is the law and you never know when the next invasion is coming. In any event I forgot how to delete this picture.

Big Mac's called the BIG MAC®
They wouldn't know what a Quarter Pounder is they got the metric system over there. Its called the "ROYL CHYIZBURGER"