I’m in Kiev today for medical. I’ve been up since 4:00am and it’s earlier than I planned to be awake to get to Kiev. You see, it’s the end of summer and the university students are monopolizing the trains to get from their villages to their universities. The train I usually take was full earlier than I expected.

This caused me to be at the train station last night, trying to buy a ticket on a train coming from Moscow. For some reason or another, you can only buy tickets on trains coming from Moscow 12 or less hours in advanced. So, it was crunch time when I showed up. That train was full and I ended up getting one that left Konotop at 5:36am.

It’s not this earliness of it all that is bothering me. In fact, I’ve gotten used to getting up to do things at the ungodly hours of the morning. Even better was that I finally started to fall asleep on the train, a feat I’ve yet to master.

And that’s where things went wrong.

For some reason, at 6:30am and on, people were walking up and down the train selling things. They’d walk past and loudly state what they had. Candy. Soccer balls. Cars and airplanes. Music boxes. Beer, water, juice, and champagne.

Why would they do this to me? Right when I was learning to fall asleep and enjoy a nighttime train. Why must there be people walking by and speaking?