The loooooooong journey

In Ukraine at last! After quite an eventful few days, we arrived in Kiev. Let's start at the beginning. We got up, loaded up the car, and were on the road by 7:30am on Saturday. Now, bear in mind that we have all of our luggage for a year or two's stay in Kiev plus Inger, Gunnar, Merete, Torben and I. Talk about squishy. When we got to the bus station an hour away, we couldn't find the bus stop. Finally, the Eurolines bus pulled in, we wished the family goodbye, and we were off. We travelled south and the more people that got on the bus, the more I noticed the subtle shift from hearing Danish all around me to hearing German. After 7 hours or so, we arrived in Berlin, Germany. COLD is the main adjective of our stay in Berlin. It was colder there than it has been in Kiev so far. COLD!!! But very interesting. We found our train station, put our baggage in storage, and went to explore the city. Cool thing - I had no idea Torben could speak so much German. He always says he only knows a bit, but there he was, carrying on conversations with people! Of course, I was completely lost, but I'm used to that feeling by now.
My one goal during the time in Berlin was to see where the Wall used to be. We went to Brandenburger Tor, this monument right next to the Parliament, where all of the celebration happened when the Wall fell, so we knew we were close. After asking four or five people, we found some bricks in the road that ran the whole length of where the Wall seperating East and West Germany had been. Such an amazing thing for a history fan like me to see.
And now, the fun stuff. The train. We boarded the train at 9:45 pm on Saturday and were immediately pushed into Eastern Europe, back to the place where NOBODY speaks a word of English, but they are very content to keep speaking Russian to you, even when they know you can't understand. At least the word for passport is the same in English and Russian. And at least they couldn't question us when we came to the Ukrainian border 20 hours later. Yes, I said 20. A total of 25 hours in the very Soviet Union style train, bringing the grand total of travel time to 40 hours Herning to Kiev. Craziness. I'm still tired.
A few random stories - my mother called about 15 hours into the journey to tell us that my sister Dana had her baby. Olly Michael is my newest little nephew. I've heard he's very cute and very tiny. I can't wait to see pictures. Another story - it turned out that the restaurant in the train was closed, so we lived on chips and candy for 25 hours...believe me, we were HUNGRY by the time we got here.
So that was our insanely long journey. I have more stories to tell - bearded Russian ladies and Torben breaking windows - but those will have to wait for another time. Vi ses!!