10/27/2011
so, we decided to go to ukraine.
i had an extra day off because of all soul’s day, a holiday that is faintly heard of in most of the united states. y’know, it’s that day after halloween. here it is a solemn day to remember those dear ones who are lost to us. back home it’s shoved under the overwhelming adjacency of costumes and candy, though increasingly in san francisco it is a day for white hipsters to co-opt the hispanic version of the same holiday, dia de los muertos.
i decided that learning about my long-dead grandfather would be the perfect way to observe this holiday. so i shuffled some other things around, rescheduled my halloween classes, and suddenly we had five days to play with. not a LOT by any standards, considering that most estimates gave us at least 14 hours to get there, but it was something.
it also meant, because of the surprisingly great distances involved, that we would have to leave on the night train, two hours after i finished teaching my last class of a very very full day.
we decided the only way to do it was to play it by ear – head to przemyśl, the closest Polish town to the border, and then see what happened next. if we couldn’t make it over the border and had to spend some time in that town, fine. i hear they have a beautiful church. or we could turn back and head to tarnów, my old stomping grounds, to visit family and haunt some delinquent school directors. but ideally we would use it as a jumping-off point to cross the border and get to drohobyć, the closest town to my grandfather’s village (l’viv is the closest CITY, drohobyć is the closest small city, or town, depending on who you ask). we also thought about just going to l’viv and being tourists, if nothing else worked out.
i didn’t even tell my friends where we were going that weekend, just that we were going out of town but we weren’t sure where yet. i didn’t want to jinx it until my mom definitely had the tickets; we didn’t buy them until the morning of our departure, mostly because we hadn’t even been certain until the night before. but with a “yeah, fuck it,” it felt safer to just plunge forward without thinking about it too hard, though i also tried not to think about the fact that last time i bought tickets to ukraine at the last minute i ended up in third class steerage.
so my mom was charged with the mission of getting the tickets. she insisted on getting a sleeper, mostly because her hips aren’t what they used to be and we’re both overly familiar with the misery of trying to sleep in Polish train compartments. an overnight first class sleeper to przemyśl was about the equivalent of $50 each, a little rich for my blood, but my mom wanted to ensure our safety and, plus, this was the realization of a mostly-life-long dream. or so we hoped.
she went during my first class of the day, somewhere around 9:30 am, while i was talking about phrasal verbs or exam procedures or some shit, and trying to contain my growing excitement. i didn’t let myself breathe until she called me after 10 and told me we were set. that knowledge didn’t temper my unbelievably high energy level, though. perhaps one of my many groups that day noticed that i was a lot more hyper than usual. all i know is that i crashed somewhere around 5 pm, in my evening group at the bank. emotionally drained, i told them, deadpan, that i was going to ukraine in six hours and boy was i tired. it was almost as if they had sucked my excitement out of my body so they could play it back to me, but also i could tell that part of their brains didn’t believe me.
this is one of my favorite groups, since there are only three students and they all love to talk up a storm, shoving their opinions at each other, and dragging me away from the topic over and over. their excitement for conversation is infectious, and often i find that i am the one who has led them astray and not, as usual, the other way around. then we play a fun game of trying to trace the path of our conversations backwards, from point to point, deciding, finally, who is to blame and where, exactly, we dropped the ball of yarn and let it roll downhill, turning where it might. that class we talked about ukraine, and family, and business metaphors, and polish labor law, and ukraine, and shit i had to do to live here legally, and taxes, and more legal shit, and finally i gave up on the book and tried to run a class about amnesty, which turned into a discussion of the pros and cons of legalized marijuana.
awesome.
my brain fried but happy, i left the bank for my return trip to the main school where i work when i suddenly realized that i hadn’t packed my little mini-cassette recorder. it was a constant companion on our first trips to Poland, and much babbled family history still lies hidden in muffled Polish on various tiny tapes. i knew i had my recorder, but i wasn’t sure where i had put it in my somewhat-new flat. so i called my mom and led her a merry chase through the many drawers and cupboards of my landlord-provided ikea furniture set, as i paced up and down the tram platform, occasionally yelling, “don’t look in there!!” or “you don’t have to search any further there. don’t search any further!!” all to no avail. i gave it up for lost, until she called back a few minutes later and told me it was in the last place i hadn’t directed her, the glass-fronted cabinet, but not at all visible from the outside because of some crappy CDs or something that had been in the way. she packed it, and my blank tapes, in the suitcase that she was charged with dragging to meet me at work.
i hung up when the tram finally arrived, and went off to teach my last class, pondering what the hell the night would bring.
