the trains in Ukraine are mainly a pain

actually the trains themselves are fine, a little slow but very cheap for 2nd class and pretty comfortable.

however I have discovered one of the outer circles of hell, right here on earth...it's the main hall of the Lviv train station. It looks great from the outside (as all gates to hell probably do) but then you walk inside and are trapped in the sort of nightmare where you have a task to perform but you can't read any of the signs and you can't communicate with any of the people, and you know you want to get a ticket for the 8:11 train to Kiev and you have it all written down on a piece of paper in Cyrillic even so you go to a cashier and wait in line for a long time and then she looks at your paper with disdain and pokes at her computer and shakes her head and writes 8:54, but you can see the 8:11 listed on the departures board so you go to booth #2 and try there and she says No No No so you go to information and wait in line and they say "go to #2" so you go back and she says no, and points at some sign you can't read, so you go back to information and they look at you like you're a complete idiot moron and say NUMBER TWO so you go back to number 2 and she won't even look at you anymore so you give up on the 8:11 and decide to get a ticket for the 8:54. so you go to the booth you THINK should sell tickets for the 8:54, because that seems to be what the sign taped up on the glass indicates, even though you can't actually read it, and you wait in line for a long long time and an old man tries to sidle in front of you in the queue, like you won't notice, and then you get to the front of the line and the ticket seller won't sell you anything for the 8:54, and writes down 12:33, and you start to feel like you are losing your mind so you go back to the first booth, and wait there for a long time, and ask for the 8:54 and wait for what seems like an eternity before the woman behind the glass nods and ACTUALLY SMILES and you feel like crying you're so relieved. and of course because this is a nightmare you are carrying a 25kg weight on your back the whole time.