Try again.

Take 2 of trying to escape Moldova. It turns out that we'd spent more days in Chisinau than any other major city in Ukraine, but that Chisinau had much less to offer than any of the major cities we'd visited. We had to get out.

We headed down to the train station really early, in a last ditch effort to get on a train. No change, still no space. Our only other option was a night-bus. It left at 18:45 so we had a whole other day to kill in Chisinau. We had some crap pizza, and complained and headed to the bus stations early.

We sat down and just as we were getting comfortable, two, huge pairs of eyes slowly appeared above the seat in front. They were slowly followed by two pairs of grubby hands that helped pull the rest of the kids' faces up. Oh, for god sake. What do you have to do to eat your pretzels in peace these days? Every movement we made was closely watched. Their mum was totally disinterested, too. The only attention the paid them was when they started to squabble. She'd pull them down to her knee and repeatedly whack their thighs. Of course, this didn't help and only made them scream more. Glass-shattering, palm-piercing screams.

They fell asleep just before the border crossing. Which took ages. What a relief. We arrived back in L'viv bright and early. It was nice to see familiar buildings.