It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

i can’t believe i’m still writing about the first day. here’s the beginning of this story. oh, my.

this post concerns the second and third legs of this bus journey here:

 28 october, 2011

so there we were, in the center of sambir, but still not at our destination, when traffic thickened to a point that we were stopped, then we inched, then we were stopped again. i watched a man dig through the trash behind a building, marveled at graffiti that read “fuck cops” not only in the latin alphabet, but in english, and slowly went crazy with wanting off that bus.

once i got bored of staring at the trash picker, i moved my attention to the back window to stare at the man in the car behind us, his head on his steering wheel, seemingly napping while waiting for traffic to move. i tried to get a picture, but he decided to pick his head up just as i was pulling my camera up, so i had to pretend i wasn’t at all interested in him as he stared back at me.

fuckcops

and still we inched, and inched, and stopped, and inched. if waiting for the bus was annoying, waiting to get off the bus was torture. and we still had one more bus to go before getting to our destination. i tried to continue compartmentalizing the trip by not thinking about how long we would have to wait for the next bus, but the thought was lurking behind the bundle of impatience that was taking up most of the space in my mind.

sofia and stawek sat next to us, stirring with mild impatience themselves. and we waited.

finally, finally, traffic started to move. slowly. i looked back and realized that we had only gone about a block from the center of town that had been our last stop.

argh.

as we get off the bus, i continue to document.

but the last few minutes went quickly, thankfully, and i was shaken from the fugue state caused by my mad desire to get off the bus by people beginning to get off the bus. we found ourselves in a dirt lot, but i barely had time to look around before sofia was pointing and verbally pulling us, “there!” and i sighed relief. the bus to drohobyć was there, waiting, and it was newer than the one we had just gotten off of. we had to wait a few minutes to board, so i took a picture of our hell bus as it peeled out of the dirt lot away from us, and my mom asked what those tanks on the top were. i explained to her how gasoline is really

hell bus takes off to torture more people elsewhere

expensive in many countries due to exorbitant taxes, so people use hybrid vehicles: gasoline and compressed natural gas combined. she was a little shocked to realize that we had been sliding back and forth and from side to side, barely avoiding capsizing, with giant tanks of compressed gas on top of our heads, kept off of us by the most tenuous of structures.

i shrugged.

getting on the last bus.

soon we were on the bus; we paid our 10 hryvna ($1.25) each and we were on our way.

it was about 45 minutes, i guess, but it flew by. the bus was crowded but comfortable, though we had to keep the small suitcase in the non-existent aisle, which meant people constantly knocked it into my legs as they got on and off. sofia and stawek were sitting in front of us, so there wasn’t much talk at first. then sofia pulled out her phone and made a call to a friend of hers. afterwards, she turned to us and told us that her friend recommended a hotel that is right in the center. we had tried to look up hotels online with very little success – only one result but it was not in the center of town; sofia said it was nice but it would be too difficult for us without a car. thus we were alerted to the existence of the hotel tustań (Тустань), which was right in the center and not too expensive. she told it was about160 hryvna for two people, or almost $20. so our mad dash into the unknown had been slowed and cushioned by the kindness of strangers.

and this was the point where she told us that they were getting off before us, one or two stops before the center of town, and therefore could not bring us to the hotel themselves. she told us to take the bus to the end and then ask for the bus to the center; we could walk it, but she didn’t want us to get lost, and it was too difficult for her to explain. suddenly, after hours of having a guardian and helper, we were going to be on our own again. i felt more terrified than i had that morning at the border crossing; it’s harder to have some help and then lose it than to go blindly flying into terror without thought of a savior. but we had to swallow our fear and smile.

both of us realized that we had not thought of getting a picture with the two of them, and though it was impossible to pose with them on the crowded bus, they did allow us to get a souvenir shot of just them. the bright late-afternoon sun nearly washed out their features entirely, and sofia grimaced when i showed her, but it shows their kind smiles. my mom told them, “pamiątka z aniołami.” a souvenir of our angels.

the souvenir of our angels

and then that was it, they were gone. there was much wringing of hands and smiling sadly and waving until they were off the bus. i realized that i hadn’t been paying attention to the landscape the whole ride, being distracted by talk of hotels and being on our own. we were suddenly in some semblance of an urban-type center, with soviet-style building monsters all around.

drohobyć bus center

two stops later and we were in another dirt lot — the bus center. my mom asked our driver, back to her mixture of Polish and Ukrainian, where we could get the bus to the center. she had to ask a few times, but the driver was nice (as you will see, the only nice driver we encountered) and pointed the way — bus bay #1. we got off the bus.

we had made it to drohobyć.