An epic journey featuring people selling vegetables, and some other things.

Hello! Or to use the equivalent local word, 'greetingski'.

Well we've arrived in Lviv, the main city of western Ukraine! Getting here was an epic journey in every sense of the word. 24 hours travelling across eastern Europe by train. Very little sleep. Christ. I'm knackered!

None of the signs here make sense to me cos they're written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but I'm pleased to see there is a man working on the counter at this internet caff who has a 1980s mullet a bit like Dr. Sanchez off Garth Marenghi's Dark Place. That familiar sight in this unfamiliar land has brightened my day.

So where did I leave off...? Oh yeah, on Wednesday evening my friend Katy and I went to an underground punk gig at an east Berlin squat (that, as I have already mentioned, has its own website... or should that be a websquat?). The place took a lot of finding, and we missed the first few bands, but it turned out to be a really great night!

The Kopi squat is a huge apartment block on a backstreet near the city centre, hidden from the world by a tall gate and covered on the inside with multi-coloured paintings and graffiti. We found it packed to the rafters with punks and assorted Germanic crusty types - my kind of people! There was a great atmos, a little bit like Blackpool "rock club" the Tache but one thousand times better!

There were hardcore punk bands playing in the central room, using an immense sound setup that cleaned the cobwebs right out of my eardrums let me tell you - and there was a bar selling bottles of beer and a stall selling CDs and records (these squatters think of everything)! The music wasn't really my cup of tea but I thought it was a great spectacle to see - you don't really get the same underground music/squatter thing going on in the UK which is a shame. F*ck tha man!

Yesterday we started the journey to Lviv, catching our first train from Berlin to Warsaw. Nothing much to say about that bit of the trip other than we passed lots of green and pleasant hills and lakes and stuff, and spent 2 hours stuck outside Frankfurt when the train broke down! They sent a replacement train to tow us to Warsaw.

This delay didn't really help cos we were cutting it fine making it on to our next train at Warsaw station. We ran round like headless chickens trying to book the sleeper carriage, which it turned out wasn't as simple as we'd first hoped. But after bribing a surly-looking railway guard on the platform with our leftover Euros, we were allowed access to the train with seconds to spare! (Another guy who wanted to get on the train was trying to bribe the guards with a software CD, and he wasn't having much luck. Crazy times! This episode taught me that 9 out of 10 communist officials prefer cash bribes.)

The journey to Kovel was great fun - we shared a rickety wooden carriage with a nice Polish man called George. As the train sidled through the inky-black outskirts of Warsaw the three of us got chatting in broken English. He was heading to the Ukraine too, to see his family. He was a great bloke - really generous. He bought Katy and I a black tea, and he unexpectedly produced half a roast chicken from his suitcase and shared it out! We then discovered his suitcase was full of contraband roast chickens - he explained poultry is much more expensive over the border in the Ukraine so he was taking his family some supplies. So there you go.

We all got a bit of sleep but then at 2am we reached the border and there was a lengthy stop while we scribbled our names into immigration forms. Then the train was winched up off the ground to get its wheels changed to a different gauge! I was excited about this wheel-changing but in hindsight I would describe the experience as like spending the night inside a garden shed while a friend bashes the walls with a sledgehammer.

This is one of the profound things I will be putting in my book when I write it.

We arrived in Kovel at around 7am local time. It was grey and wet and full of grannies on their way to market. We made friends with one old lady who was 86 years old! They were very curious to see some Westerners, let me tell you. Her and her granny mates were very nice and seemed to be offering us accomodation, which we sadly had to refuse. Our train to Lviv arrived eventually - we were now only 5 hours from Lviv!

Now, I don't know if you've ever been on an internal Ukranian rail journey before, so I'll assume you're new to this particular delight: it's a bit of a culture shock if you're used to leg-room and seats soft enough not to give you terminal piles. It was bloody amazing though. There was a family of buskers in our carriage singing songs to pay for their train ticket, people on their way to market selling vegetables, bundles of wood and other random goods (like stationery and make-up!), and people trading goods each other! The guards allow it all to happen; it's part of the local culture I guess. It was fantastic to watch but it got a bit tiring to be stuck in the middle of it!

We arrived in Lviv around lunchtime today. We're staying at a new hostel in the city centre called the Sun Hotel tonight, then tomorrow we're meeting up with a lady called Olka to start our two-week volunteer placement. Who can say what it will bring? The info we have on our placement is mysterious and vague. It involves restoring an old castle out in the countryside at a place called Zolochiv but we know nothing else.

I have to sign off now. It is getting late. If you made it to the bottom of this page, jolly well done, and thanks for bothering!