in poland

hey folks

so we made it to poland after a 36 hour train ride, and it was a long and tedious one. we left at midnight on the 13th adn we were awoken at 6 in the morning by russian border guards checking our visas. and the thing is, our visas said we were only to be in russia until the 13th, and it was now the morning of the 14th. so after sitting down with us in the train, throughly examing our passports and pestering us for being 6 hours later in russia than we should have been, they let us go.

so then our train split off from gerrits and dylan and i sat in our train in belarus for about five hours waiting for a train to connect to us. we finally got going around 6 pm and fell asleep around ten. then came the belarusian border guards as were leaving belarus. they woke us up at one am exactly and lo and behold, our visas said we were only going to be in belarus for until the 14th, and it was now the 15th. these guys were even freakier than the last ones. once again, they sat down across from us and informed us about 20 times that it was now the 15th, they pulled out their phones to show us the date and made me whip out my calendar on my ipod to see which date it was. after telling them about 19 times that we understood he started talking about what was going to happen, did i mention they spoke terrrible english. so after explaining that we would have to go stay in a "police hotel" for the night, then get our visas renewed the next day and then we would continue on to poland in an "unnofficial" train, whatever that meant. so dylan and i were now sitting there wondering what this police hotel would look like and what gerrit was going to do when we didn't show up at the train station. after making some ridiculous hand signals to us and saying who knows what in his language he wrote down that if we paid 200 euros we could stay on the train. so we eventually paid 100 euros each to keep going which was really annoying because we were only in belarus an hour over our visa limit.

anyways, now we are in poland for the night, it's a beautiful city, and we are heading to berlin tomorrow.

i will post pictures soon.