I was woken up by my mom bringing my cat to my bed at 7 AM. I had time to sleep until 8 AM, but I can never fall back asleep once I’m awake. And I always wake up when I hear the slightest sound in my room. I took a bath and then had breakfast. We rechecked everything in the backpack once again, and it was time to leave. The train station is in another city a few hours away from us.
We arrived, and just had a walk in the park. There was a big nice lake there, with a boat going around it. We took it.
After that we went to restaurant and ate some yummy food.
After eating, we went to the shop to buy a small bean bag thingy, so that I could carry documents with me easily, instead of always having to carry my big backpack.
We then went to the train station.
There was a group of English speaking people, and they all wore Forca Ukraine clothes. My brother googled who they were, and apparently they’re a team of trained medical professionals that help teaching ukrainians. Brother went to them and thanked them for doing their work. They were happy to hear it, and gave us both some swag:
30 minutes later, my train arrived… The realization that I’ll probably not see my family for possibly years hit us all like a fucking truck. I couldn’t hold tears, and neither could my family. We hugged for the last time, and I boarded the train. I continued crying, and we shaked our last goodbyes via window.
I sat in between of 2 old ladies with the same name. They saw me crying, and consoled me. We talked about what’s gonna happen next. The scariest part was obviously the documents check.
We arrived at the Lviv train station. The last passengers boarded, and then the border guards went on too. We now entered the lock down mode. You couldn’t leave or get out from your seat while all the procedures were under the way.
A nice young woman came to me and asked for my passport and █████████████████████, and then asked for my age. She said I look much younger than I am, which flattered me and eased the tension. She looked at █████████████, said everything seemed OK, and took my passport for whatever additional checks they needed. ███████████████████████████████████ Then a person with dog walked by, trained to find drugs. They went through the train a couple of times, checking everyone’s documents. After about a hour we started moving, and after around another 30 minutes I finally got my passport back. At that moment I realized that everything is fine, I have succeeded. There were almost no more obstacles, except for the Polish customs.
The Ukrainian border guards hopped off the train at the last station before Poland.
We then crossed the border to Poland. I expected it to feel freeing, but I was still feeling kind of heavy. The first thing I noticed was the red lights flickering on the large powerlines. I always really loved seeing these on the other people’s photos, so it was really cool seeing them in real life.
The second thing I noticed was that Poland actually has 5G, lol.
We arrived at the █████████████ train station. The entire area is completely blocked off, and you must go through customs and security to get out. ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
They opened the doors in the cars one by one. There was a huge line in front of customs █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████.
I didn’t get asked a single question by the Polish guard. He took me passport, looked at me, and put the stamp. I then put my backpack through the scanner thing, and I was out. Truly free.
My time in Poland was very short though. I found the next train station, and waited about 40 minutes for the next train. This one was a sleeper train, which would take around 8 hours to arrive in Prague.
I made my bed (barely), and soon after my neighbors started to arrive. One was a Ukrainian girl that was just as confused as I was, and other was an asian guy, with which we spoke in English. Girl’s English was very bad, so I had to be a translator for a bit. We just talked about why we were going to the Prague, where we were from and such. It was my first time speaking in English in casual context IRL.
Honestly, everything still feels completely surreal. I’m writing this riding this train to Prague, having not a single idea what waits me next. My life has completely changed overnight, and I’m scared but excited at the same time.
