10/28/2011
it was after midnight. we were on our way.
well, eventually. the conductor had been right when he had said we had plenty of time. the train stayed motionless on the tracks as we sat back and gazed around us at the downright luxury of these sleeper cars. my mom had spent part of last summer travelling across the US in an amtrak sleeper, so she was dumbfounded at all the space provided by the Polish equivalent. there were extra bottles of water, a hidden sink under a flippable counter, a closet with hooks for clothes and the ladder for me to use to climb up to the top bunk. (it was a given – my mom’s fake hips do not make for climbing, and i don’t mind the heights).
we started to move. it was late, and i wanted to take full advantage of the beds, but i was too excited to sleep yet, and also just thrilled at the space, the comfort, the quiet. we went crazy with cameras to document everything, but soon the darkness outside became total as we left the city environs. so we drank beer and ate krówki, Polish toffee candies, as things grew quieter around us. i kept expecting the conductor to bother us for something else, but he had left us alone after we had shut the door.
nice.
we went to bed in comfort, woken later when the heat became unbearable and we had to get the conductor to come turn it off. then back to sleep. eventually.
i woke a little over an hour from our destination, sad that i had missed seeing my old town of tarnów, though aware that we would be passing through in the wee hours. my mom went to ask the conductor for coffee and he asked how many we wanted. “as many as possible?” she replied, to be told that only one each was provided free of charge. not one to pay for things if it can be avoided, my mom settled with the free stuff. oh well, it would have to be enough. it was delivered to our cabin and we slowly woke up, gazing out at a familiar landscape as we rolled closer to our destination.
- przemyśl
then we were there. przemyśl. i had been once before, the last time i went to ukraine. this time i had an idea where we had to go, to one side of the platforms, but decided we should ask at the main train station on the other side. i wanted to see it, and the square around it, once again, but i also didn’t trust my instincts. when i had passed through over a year ago the station, like most major Polish train stations, was under construction. nothing appeared to have changed, except that you could no longer go inside. temporary ticket windows were set up out front, and my mom asked at one for directions to the border bus. right, instincts win. back under the platforms.
too focused to dig for a camera to take a picture of the anarchy symbol scribbled in permanent marker on one of the platform signs, we shuffled down the tunnel under the tracks to the bus station. this was the same way brendan and i had walked to get our train to kiev the summer before and flashbacks were hitting hard. but the international train platform was up the righthand stairs and the bus depot to the left, so i only got a glimpse of the passport control box of horror (where i had been sure brendan was going to get arrested) as we left the tunnel and headed away.
there are many ways over the border here. because ukraine is not in the EU, the borders are closed and require passport checks on both sides of the line. the price discrepancies between ukraine and poland mean it is financially worth the trouble for smugglers to attempt to bring cigarettes and alcohol across. because of this one-way illegal traffic, going into ukraine from poland is not as terrifying as coming back the other way, so mom and i decided it may be worth it to attempt what we were then attempting.
brendan and i had stuck to the trains, which had turned out to be a heart attack nightmare come to life, but probably because we were in third class. we had taken the domestic train to przemyśl and then bought tickets from there to kiev, the reason being that it was then cheaper to travel within Poland’s borders than to buy international tickets from smaller towns. in addition, the rails in ukraine are of a different size than in all of europe, so there’s always some wait at the border; may as well take one cheaper train to the border and then another from there across, or leave yourself open to busses and whatnot. brendan and i had been less short on time than me and mom, but we had had farther to go.
mom and i had a shorter distance to go in ukraine itself, and therefore more time, so we were going to hoof it across the border. i had heard it was easier. we were about to find out if that was true.
przemyśl is the closest polish town to the border, so if you are going to walk across you take a train to the town and then look for a bus to the actual border crossing. the important thing for me to have remembered at this juncture was that the border busses are NOT run by PKS, the official Polish bus service. so maybe going to the PKS window to ask for the bus to the border was a bad idea.
unfortunately i forgot. until it was too late.
my mom got up in arms when she asked the PKS man for information and he angrily growled profanities at her and turned away, ignoring her continued questions, her continued presence. that was the point when i remembered that maybe PKS would not be thrilled with this competition, so i tugged at her sleeve to shake her from her determination. it was also the point when a young man approached us and asked if we were looking for the bus to the border. he was as well, and he had probably been yelled at by the PKS man minutes before we had arrived. he did not seemed geared towards taking the matter into his own hands, though, so we all stared at each other for a few minutes until my mom started moving, dodging incoming buses of various sizes to get across the lot and ask one of the drivers for directions.
i was convinced the drivers of the PKS buses would be as helpful as the guy in the ticket window, so i didn’t immediately follow her into the fray, but the man smoking in front of his bus smiled and pointed back the way we had come. “see that yellow bus.” “is that it?” “no. it’s beyond that.”right. giant mess of buses, one of them yellow. this was as clear as he seemed capable of being, and i arrived at my mom’s side with enough time to help her thank him as we headed back to the young man.
my mom explained to him where we had to go and he nodded, seeming absolutely unmoved by the information. we paused a moment to see if he was going to come with us. no, apparently. so we headed on, through a seemingly-unending line of moving vehicles. trying to make sure we were heading the right way, my mom tried to ask a man who a minute before had almost hit us with his van as he was trying to line it up with a bus. he jumped out and started quickly loading indeterminate packages of seeming contraband onto the nearest bus, which, to me, meant he wasn’t on the up and up enough to want to stop and answer my mom’s questions. still, she persevered, while i tugged at her sleeve. so we continued to wander through buses, until we reached the tourist shack in front of the very stairs we had come up from the underground passage, originally.
so, if you’re ever going to endeavor to do this, keep in mind that the buses to the border are immediately behind the tourist shack to your left as you come up the stairs from the tunnel under the platforms. currently the shack has the name “brooklyn tours” on it, which i think is hilarious. all of the buses are of the smaller variety, and they all have signs that say “granica/za granica” (or “border/to the border” in Polish) in the front window. as we arrived one was just filling up, so we were directed to the one behind it. don’t try to pay as you get on, they collect the money when the bus is full, just before departing. it was 2 zł each, or about 65 cents american.
- corn cob throwdown
so we got on the bus and waited for it to be full. this didn’t take long, really, but it felt like a long time as i looked out the window, watching one of the drivers peel corn off of cobs for an ever-growing mound of foraging pigeons. he seemed to have an endless supply of corn cobs, but after he finished each one he would toss the cob aside and then kick at the pile of birds that he had just caused to happen in front of him, as if he were annoyed at their very existence. talk about passive aggressive.
mom and i speculated about the type of bird perched on the sign outside. was it just an extremely fat crow? or some other breed? i took pictures of the saints pasted above the driver’s seat, sandwiched between sports banners for regional teams. i also spent a great deal of time trying to mentally influence my mom’s penchant for speaking in English really really loudly. it didn’t work. on and on, ways to occupy my mind. but with the addition of two young party girls in the seat ahead of us, who i thought were Polish but who my mom insisted were speaking russian, the bus was finally full, the driver collected money and we headed off, on the apparent scenic route through przemyśl. i found myself almost fascinated with the town, as i often think of possible past outcomes as i travel through towns in Poland. “what if i had ended up here when i was first searching for a job? would it have been awful?” i couldn’t tell as we crawled through the outdoor market and its environs, residential neighborhoods of pre-war tenements growing sparser and sparser, until we passed the requisite building-monsters and out into fields.
- fields
despite my travel jitters the night before, i was instigating my somewhat-new mental travel plan, which consists entirely of compartmentalizing EVERYTHING to avoid a pile-on of panic. for example, should you be on a virtual head-long rush to who-knows-what, it pays to focus only on the present situation. i put this into effect as we were getting off the train. ok, train dealt with, next step, find the bus. deal with that now. ok, bus found, wait on the bus, deal with that now. ok, driver wants money, deal with that now. on the way to the border, just worry about the now, the fact that the sun is blinding you and the bus is kinda crowded and the Polish/Russian girls in the seats ahead of you keep squealing as they pass the mp3 player ear buds back and forth. don’t worry about the next step, not yet, not at all.
other things i found to think about included the fact that the poor young man in the seat across the aisle and ahead of us had been cornered by a very talkative middle-aged woman. my mom also independently noticed this phenomenon. the faces he made were amazing, as he tried to pay attention to her rambling, tried to nod in approval. but what really drew in both me and my mom was the fact that this woman had strange indecipherable things stuck in her hair. plant matter? bugs? small animals? none of it was moving under its own power, but who knew? we spent a lot of time wondering just what the hell it was as we drew closer to the border.
the whole scheme worked quite well, as my mind was fully occupied when we pulled from nothing fields into what looked like a factory outpost in the middle of nowhere.
