spoiler alert … we did get out again. but how?

october 28, 2011

“collect all four!” i yelled, as we left the border complex, referring to the fact that i had three ukrainian stamps in my passport with three different symbols denoting the method of my entry or exit. plane, train, and now … i glanced at my passport, shocked to realize that when you walk across the border into ukraine you don’t get a little picture of feet but rather a car. boo. i wanted some official acknowledgement of the fact that we had just walked across the border, that we had survived all of my worst bureaucratic and cold-war-spy-film nightmares, and on foot to boot. but no.

i was spending way too much time mulling over this fact, and wondering if you really get a picture of a bus if you take a bus across the border, or if that was considered a car, too, when we hit the main drag and i was forced to stop looking at my passport and put it the fuck away.

there is very little information on the internet about crossing the border on foot, which is part of why i am going into such extreme detail here. there is precious little of actual practical value — where the buses are, where the path starts, what to expect — but a lot of people talking without saying anything. but what seems to shine through in every account is the fact that the main road on the other side of the border crossing is lined with people waiting to take advantage of you.

i kept thinking of father leszek’s wife. leszek is a polish catholic priest we had met during my first visit to Poland in 2006. we were visiting with him shortly after learning about grandfather’s village in ukraine when his wife, an unpleasant woman in the best of circumstances, told us not to go to ukraine. “they’ll take the bread from right out of your mouth.”

a stark image that floated in front of my vision the whole time i had spent in kiev, and now here it was again, as we approached the row of money exchanges, pawn-type shops, indecipherable signs pointing to inexplicable businesses, and a few straggling drivers waiting by their taxis. it was not the onslaught i had been expecting, as one driver kinda shrugged at us while lackadaisically stating, “taxi, taxi.” a few others followed suit, but in general everyone else pretty much ignored us and the few other stragglers exiting the border complex. huh. maybe it was the slow time of day?  we carried on, following the directions to the bus stop that would hopefully be our way to drohobyć.

for those who need to know, from the exit of the border complex go straight ahead, away from the line of cars waiting to cross into Poland , past the businesses and people who will probably not bother you much, and take the first street to the left. this is where we paused, partly because of the spectacle of a horse-drawn cart collecting recyclables and partly because the directions we had gave distances in meters, which i did not have the common sense to translate into feet/yards/something that makes sense to me. i have a serious amount of trouble judging distances anyway, and my brain absolutely refuses to take the extra step to try to understand and remember exactly how big a meter is. i was also starting to worry about the amount of walking my mom was able to do. so i left her on the corner to watch the horses and went to scope out how far the bus depot really was.

not far. to put it in terms that make sense to me, it was a little longer than a city block. well, a san francisco city block, not those shorter seattle blocks, nor the longer new york blocks, not to even mention other cities with different methods of measurement.

jeez, even that doesn’t work. suffice to say, it wasn’t far, but because of the terrain it is not visible from the corner.

i went back to collect my mom, making a mental note that we only had about 9 hryvna (around $1.12 – the exchange rate hovers around 8 to 1) on us, left over from my last trip. still, because i was compartmentalizing needs, and right then we needed to figure out about the bus, and also because i tend to trust ATMs more, we passed the money exchanges with little thought and approached the travel center.

it looked like it had sprung whole from disney dreams of rustic modernity, a log structure attempting to signify something it wasn’t, new and somewhat shiny. travelers lounged around, an older woman in polyester dress, apron, sweater and kerchief swept away cigarette butts and straightened up, and, in the bus office, a young girl who spoke no language other than ukrainian shook her head and told us that we had just missed the morning bus to drohobyć and would have to wait until 6 pm, seven hours, to get the next direct bus. in english, polish, russian and ukrainian we three danced around understanding as she explained the complicated series of connections we would have to take if we didn’t want to wait. we didn’t. ok, then, what? first stop, mostys’ka. the young woman went through the three steps for us multiple times, and then she called the older cleaning woman over to check with her. yes, first stop mostys’ka. then sambir, then drohobyć. and again, she went through the steps. ok, ok, ok, but could you write it down? confusion. what? why? finally we made it clear, that though we pretty much had a handle on the cyrillic, it would be easier to have the letters on paper. the list she gave us is barely decipherable in any alphabet, but it was something. right, ok, so where do we go? the bus is right there, we deciphered, following her pointing finger to the far side of the parking lot where a marszrutka (маршрутка – a mini-bus of the type we had taken to the border) was almost certainly getting ready to leave. it’s about to leave, she said. and i freaked out.

traumatized by the dearth of direct buses to drohobyć, i panicked a little when the true amount of money we had became clear to me and i did some mental calculations about how long we had before the bus left. this modern-seeming travel center lacked an ATM and a money exchange, so i would have to run back up the street to the turn-off to exchange money. some uncertainty as we discussed what to do– exchange american money? polish money? what do we have more of? what should we hold on to? what will make us seem least conspicuous? my mom handed me 100 PLN (around $33) and i started to run when the old woman stopped me. she seemed eager for something, but what? translation seemed impossible, even with my mom’s various languages. finally she worked it out. the woman was offering us 200 UAH for the 100 polish złotych. my mind reeled. what was the exchange from złoty to hryvna? i hadn’t looked that up. i knew dollar to złoty and dollar to hryvna, but my mind refused to extrapolate. i knew it wasn’t 2 to 1, but was it close? the woman stood between us, eager, beckoning, while mom and i quickly discussed my mathematical failings over her head. i told mom i didn’t know if that was a good exchange, i didn’t know what to do. my mom, somewhat lacking of tact on occasion, turned right to the woman and asked her if we could get a better rate at the exchange. it probably seemed ruder because she had to repeat it multiple times. finally the woman gestured us angrily away and said, “go to the exchange.”

so i ran.

up the hill (did i mention it was a hill? no?), around the corner and … faced with a row of nearly identical exchanges, some with rates outside, some without, i was uncertain which to choose. finally i leaped into the one closest to me that seemed the least shady.

a small shack made up entirely of a short vestibule with plexiglass-covered windows on either side. i turned to the left, merely because the woman behind the window there was looking up when i came in. unable to remember even the slightest word in ukrainian, i showed her my polish money. smart. but she just gestured to the window across from her. i still have no clue what she was there for. there wasn’t much by way of furniture in the room with her, not many office supplies or tools of any kind. there were no hints that any other business was contracted there, no signs, aside from the exchange signs outside. maybe she was just there to point confused travelers in the right direction?

i turned to the other window and marveled at what looked like a cross-section of a diminutive living room. a people aquarium. the man inside was sitting in his chair, turned away from the window, watching the t.v. set in the corner. domestic furniture with knick-knacks atop, dressers and sideboards, old and comforting wallpaper. books. the only indication of his profession was a small counter under his side of the window, holding only a money box. i handed the 100 złoty bill to him and he handed me almost 250 UAH. no receipt, no computer record, no paper trail of any kind. ok.

when i got back to the travel center, the bus was pulling out, in fact it almost hit me, but my mom told me she had been informed that another bus was pulling up and would leave when it was full. ha ha, funny joke there, life. my mom was not amused, though, when she found out how much the old lady was trying to rip us off for.  but then we actually laughed when it turned out that the bus was only 3 or 4 hryvna each, which meant we had had enough money the whole time.  heh heh.

we got on the bus, sat in the back row and waited, again, for money to be collected, for the next part of our journey to begin.

NOT the border entrance

october 28, 2011

we were purged from the bus with no indication of which way to turn, as every other rider seemed to move in their own independent direction, shattering the mental myth i had cultivated that we would all trudge as one towards our doom.  some gathered in front of the incredibly anomalous grocery store that suddenly loomed up ahead of us.  everything around us screamed “official” and “desolate,” what the hell was a biedronka(1)  doing there?  catering to travelers, i suppose.  we got our bearings and then turned in a likely direction.  to the left of us was chain link, surrounding mysterious buildings.  ahead, a driveway blocked by a guard, by a wooden-armed-gate … was that it?  didn’t look too much like an actual crossing, but who knows?  but, no, it was a yard for buses.  or vehicles.  parts sold there.  or something.

vendors, both legal and illegal, lined the street we had driven down, lined the fence, moved in lines like giant snakes as they shifted back and forth, displaying their wares to new arrivals.  somehow we found out:  back down the road a short distance, following the lines of vendors to what looked like a field, to our right.  but, no, not just a field; a gray sidewalk cut through it, rolling away from us, around corners and rises, destination screened from our eyes. that way.  i tried to gather my courage to take photographs of the middle-aged women brazenly displaying, in arms cradled as if holding children, bottles of whiskey, cartons of cigarettes, which they had obviously just finished carting over the border into Poland.  i couldn’t do it.

well, it's something

there were so many of them, meeting, dispersing, clutching at every passerby for a moment, hoping they could get a firm grasp.  i tried to take a picture of the woman selling used clothes by the side of the path, some of the contraband sellers behind her, but i moved the camera too soon and got something that, while interesting to me, doesn’t really capture the scene.

sigh.

mystery ...

but my mood was lightened as we turned the first corner of the path.  we were finally able to get a first glimpse of the border complex, but my attention was drawn primarily to the bank of biedronka shopping carts(2) that were gathered at the bend.  my mind reeled a little.  why were they partway down the path from the ukrainian side?  were they abandoned by shoppers crossing into ukraine who had suddenly realized that they weren’t supposed to take them?  or were they left there by smugglers who would return to them later, when they crossed back over to ukraine?  i mean, yeah, people needed some way to get their wares across the border, but did the border guards really allow them shopping carts?  what the hell were they doing there, so many of them, so far from any people?

no answers were forthcoming from anyone and we were too nervous for much speculation so we just carried on, following the band of youngsters ahead of us who suddenly seemed to be the only humans on earth.  in fact after we turned the corner, the vendors instantly behind us, things got dramatically quiet and still.  the kids were carrying big bags and instruments, three guys and one girl, and i couldn’t help but think of them as dorothy and her companions, following the gray brick road to the most fucked up emerald city ever.

more path, uphill, fences moving in until we were just rats in a maze, and suddenly a few people passed us going the other way.  like apparitions, they startled.  we hadn’t really been walking that long, but time slowed and stretched out there in no man’s land.

and then we came to a stop.  of course, the path ended in a line.

it wasn’t moving.  hard to tell how long it was, as it snaked through a revolving door of thick metal pipes, invisible into the building beyond.  we stood, we waited.  and waited.  people were coming out through a door to our left, but they were obviously passing into Poland.  not many of them, a trickle.  we waited some more.  i tried to listen to what the young’uns were saying while also attempting to remember my cyrillic enough to read the signs around, which were also in Polish and english.  i was struck with the level of my hubris, for the second time.  this had happened during the first trip to ukraine.  then i had thought, “different alphabet, no problem.  i’ll pick it up.”  i had studied the internet-provided cheat sheet a little before we left, but it wasn’t until our train was drawing close to our destination that i started to panic and attempted to shove it all into my head in one go. i had gotten pretty good at it then, so i just assumed it would all come back to me.

it didn’t.

my mom, though, was a superstar.  aside from speaking fluent Polish, she has studied both ukrainian and russian, (the latter more than the former, though) and is pretty good with both cyrillic alphabets.  so i didn’t need to panic, but it took me a little time to remember that.

the gateway ...

finally people stopped trickling through the other door and our line started moving, one at a time, through the revolving monster.  ever since getting stuck in the revolving door at the bank where i work i’ve been really nervous around the beasts.  this one would only allow one person in at a time, so you had to cram yourself into what was essentially a narrow cage and wait for the green light to tell you it was time to push.  somehow we were almost the last people in line, so the revolving door spit us out into a space inadequate for the amount of people that had entered before us.  when the space is packed, or when they have to let people through from the other side, they freeze the door, which is what we had been waiting for outside.

two lines, one for EU citizens, one for everyone else.  i decided, despite my irish passport, to stick with my mom, who is saddled with her US identity.  also, i was concerned at the amount of grumbling that was coming out of her mouth, the target of which was a poor woman who was just trying to get out of the way of the last few people being thrust into the room.  her only choice was to move to the side of the line, almost next to us, to avoid being crushed into our backs.  my mom obviously thought she was trying to cut the line, and her sense of justice was duly inflamed.  i had to assuage her volcanic tendency to right supposed wrongs, so i stood by her on the line, patted her shoulder and tried to change the subject.

a metal barrier that we were all shoved against in turn, waiting for another green light, no honor system here.  a grizzled man in farmer’s clothes swung his giant bags over the barrier long before it was his turn, just trying to get them out of the way, but it felt too much like an infraction.  every cold-war-era drama that had reared my imaginative mind was coming back to haunt me.  the line thinned.  and then it was my mom’s turn.

something about waiting for a green light to condone my movement makes me incredibly nervous, especially in bureaucratic situations.  is this a test?  if i try to push before the light goes off, am i considered too eager?  dangerous?  if i am too slow to push, am i an idiot?  unfit to enter?  why do they want to stop me, anyway!!??  psychological profiling could never reach the level of my imagination.  so, one hand on the gate, i looked between the light and my mother, who, due to our family tendency to over-explain, had been coached to answer that she was a tourist.

the man looked at her passport, said not a word, stamped it and she was through.  she waited on the other side for me, beyond the plexiglass booth, so i could see her staring at me as the green light came on and i easily pushed the gate and approached passport control.

the man seemed completely confused.  what the hell was i doing in his line?  the other line was for EU passports, not his.  since ukraine is not in the EU, i imagine he sees fewer EU passports than other European border crossings, and he did not seem equipped to deal with overflow from the other line.  of course, all of that is known in retrospect — at the time all i could see was that there was a problem.  he rifled through the pages of my passport, stared at my picture, looked through it all again, then got up and went to his colleague in the EU booth.  the door to his booth was behind his seat, so he opened it right into the general area of my mom, who jumped right into explaining that i was her daughter and i didn’t speak very good Polish and was there a problem?  he waved her off with a mixture of annoyance and uncertainty.

i waited by the space where he had been, watching him confer with the woman in the other booth.  she barely glanced at him as she was checking the last passports in her line, and then eventually waved him off in the exact same way he had waved off my mom.  fine fine, scan this part here.  he came back, looked through everything once more, and handed the passport back.  forgetting that i was just clearing Polish immigration here, i expected a stamp.  my mom had gotten a stamp, where was mine?  i attempted to ask in Polish.  “nie potrzebuję …?” the word for stamp would not be conjured, so i made a hand motion that i hope defined “stamp stamp stamp” and not, as it surely could have looked, “stab stab stab.”  he shook his head.  i took back the passport and met my mom on the other side, breathing a sigh of relief.

as i said, i had forgotten that that was just the first part of the process.

last view of poland, through metal

we exited through the doors and found ourselves back on the gray path, but this time the tall green fences cut us off not only from the fields around us, but also from the people coming through from ukraine.  claustrophobic.  we were joking about the fact that i really hadn’t thought my EU passport would be the problem, but at least it wasn’t really a problem, after all, but, boy, had that felt scary!  to our right we could suddenly see the vehicle entrance to Poland, lines of cars with their engines running, not moving.  my shoulders drew up involuntarily.  turn off your engines!  and then these words from my mom’s mouth, “ukraine welcomes you,”  i looked up and saw the sign she had just read, and my heart sank when i realized that it wasn’t over. yet.

ukraine welcomes you

my previous run-in with ukrainian customs and border control included darkness and waiting and yelling and giant guns.  repeat.  repeat.  so i was decidedly nervous as we entered the tiny shack with the poorly-fixed welcome sign. no revolving doors nor green lights here, just a line up to one window, on the other side of which sat a young man with humorless yet somewhat nervous eyes.  my mom approached him first and he barked a command at her that was incomprehensible in its suddenness.  “i’m sorry, could you repeat?” she said in Polish, thinking it safer to stick to a language she knew well instead of attempting his language.  he repeated, again too fast.  she leaned closer.  and again, this time a pause and then it got through. “oh!” she exclaimed, as her hand flew to remove the sunglasses she had forgotten were covering her eyes.   he stared from her picture to her face, back and forth, and then stamped her passport and let her through.

i tried not to pay attention to the woman in uniform, who was pacing back and forth in front of the door to freedom, ready to pull aside those whose bags seemed suspicious.  she really looked like she was half a wardrobe malfunction away from being in a david-lee-roth-era van halen video.  my mom was forced to wait near her as it was my turn at the window.  it’s really hard not to flinch when someone that serious is staring into your eyes, trying to determine if your identity is true.  it felt less like he was trying to catch me in a crime and more like he was trying to find out if i had betrayed him personally.  i wanted to apologize for whatever i may have done, for lying, for breaking his heart.  whatever.  anything.  my only reprieve was when he looked back to my picture.  but then it was back to my eyes.  picture.  eyes.  finally, after what seemed like decades, a stamp.  here you go.  have a nice day.

i tried not to look the van halen guard woman in the eyes as i pulled our small suitcase behind me and we made our way to the last section of gray sidewalk.  she moved to intercept a man behind me and i slipped out the door, immediately stunned by the sheer numbers of people waiting to be let in the other way.  no small line before a revolving door here.  no, on this side there was a locked gate, far back from the building, people shoved up against it clutching their bundles of possible contraband.  there was something terrifying about the cage, the closeness, the faces waiting with resignation.  such a long line.  when would they start letting them through?  did anyone know?  i turned my attention to a small cat, who seemed to be singing us into the country with its purrs of pleasure.  it didn’t seem abandoned, but rather just there.

to one side running cars, to the other people in cages, behind us bureaucracy, ahead of us a beautiful, happy cat.

welcome to ukraine.

(1)  i am not 100% positive that it was a biedronka, which is a discount grocery store (think grocery outlet rather than trader joe’s), but that’s what i remember. more importantly, there is photographic evidence to support this idea (read on to the grocery carts, dear reader). but, really, if i were going to choose which grocery store to put on the Poland-Ukraine border, it would be biedronka.

(2) see, proof!  biedronka shopping carts!

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.

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.

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.

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.

apparently i like to keep people in suspense … this story begins here.

waiting for the train, but still smiling.

there is one important fact to know about the wrocław train station. it’s not that it has been under construction for what feels like decades, nor that the tram lines are constantly being ripped up and reconstructed, so even if you think you know how to get there you suddenly find that you are wrong. no, it’s that no alcohol is served within a three to five block radius.

and those are some big blocks.

i knew this, the way you know something that you vaguely noticed but never let sink far enough into your brain that it effects your decisions.

i had one more class.  my mom was supposed to wait for me at the green cock, the restaurant on the ground floor of my school building. the place is usually hopping on the ground floor, which is also known as “the smoking area.” by Polish law, restaurants and pubs are now required to have a separate “non-smoking area.” there is a reason i am using sarcasm quotes. in the green cock, you have to wade through the walls of smoke to get to the stairs that lead down to a quiet smoke-free basement where you will inevitably be forgotten by wait staff.

i warned my mom of this truth as i was getting on the tram to go to meet my last group, but i also told her that it’s nice and quiet and she could sit there for 20 minutes until i got out of class, and then we could spend most of the two hours we had before the train left trying to get someone to serve us.  we could down our eventual beers and run for the probably-incorrect bus or tram. we both get overly nervous before travel, and the stakes felt higher than usual that night, so a secluded place to sit and self-medicate our jitters seemed like a necessity. the green cock would be perfect.

that was the plan anyway.

in the reality of that thursday night, this quiet smoke-free enclave was full of a dance party, which my mom was unable to discover until she had dragged the suitcase through the wall of smoke and all the way down the many winding stairs. she sat down on one of the empty chairs feeling more nervous than ever, while revelers ignored her and waitstaff failed to appear, for about two minutes before she decided, “fuck it” and lugged the suitcase back up the stairs and out of the building. that’s why i found her sitting outside my room when class let out, students streaming out of everywhere while asia at reception whispered in Polish that my mom looks just like me and i whispered “what? what? i can’t hear you” back until she switched to English.

so, plan foiled, we were left without a backup plan, which meant meandering towards the tram, which didn’t go to the train station anymore.  but there was a bus, which showed up right away and took us to another bus, which left right away and deposited us at the station, two hours early. because of never-ending construction on the building, the current station is a small temporary box, with few places to wait inside. as we perused the outdoor food stalls around the building, the thing i had failed to realize started to worm its way into my consciousness, that there would be nowhere to wait, warm and peaceful, while calming our travel jitters with booze. we pushed through crowds of travelers and drunks, the latter the cause for this alcoholic black hole.  undaunted, we started to walk walk walk around the neighborhood, detours around construction, getting more and more annoyed with the suitcase, which really wasn’t that heavy but did require noisy rolling over broken cobblestones.

finally, about halfway back to the point where we had started, we stumbled out of the dead zone in front of a convenience store. bars were visible down the street, but walking farther seemed like the worst idea ever and time felt short, which it wasn’t, so we stocked up on beer for the train and headed back to the station.

blurry photo, but accurate, as it's just as hard to read in real life.

because there is no room in the temporary train station building, the powers that be set up an arrivals and departures board outside, near the entrance to the three platforms that were functioning that night. there are also a few speakers for announcements, but if you want to see the board you can’t hear the announcements, and if you go over to where you can almost make out the scratchy nonsense booming out unintelligibly every so often, you can’t see the board. but we still had over an hour to kill, so we perched ourselves below the board, watching letters twist into new configurations every so often and rats running out near the crowd with slightly more regularity, only to run right back into the construction site when they realized there were suddenly surrounded by people and lights. we watched long enough to determine that platforms were not being announced until about five to seven minutes before the trains were supposed to depart. great.

so our travel jitters had become full-on shakes as the time for our train slunk closer with no announcements, no changes to the board, no information at all. we worked out a system where my mom would stand near the speakers and i would stand near the board with our bags, so we could see each other just enough to shake our heads every time something was changed or blurted and it was not about us. finally my mom asked one of the nonchalant people around us. surely they can’t be waiting for the same train, they’d be freaking out as well. but the woman smiled impatiently as she informed us, “we’re all waiting for that train. they’ll tell us.” oh, ok. didn’t make me freak out any less, but at least we could stand near each other and keep an eye on that woman instead.

finally, many minutes after it was supposed to have left, the announcement came over the horrible speakers and people started to stampede. we rushed along to keep upright in the packed crowd, up the concrete stairs, the train pulling in as we fled down the platform, unsure where the hell the sleeper cars were.  just knowing we had to get on the damn train, we could figure it out from there, we jumped on the nearest car and immediately got stuck in an aisle packed with our fellow travelers who had become decidedly less nonchalant as soon as the rush had started. my mom pushed ahead and asked the conductor where the sleeping cars were just as i got stuck between the wall of the aisle and the chest of a giant man who would move for neither me nor my giant backpack.

that’s where i still was when i suddenly heard the loud and panicked shouting of my name from outside the train again. i finally pushed through, surely causing bodily harm to either the giant man or the other fellow i shoved aside on my way out of the wagon again, but refusing to realize a need to apologize until it was much too late. oops. i turned the corner to the steps off the train and saw my terrified mom’s face relax slightly as she motioned for me to run, her terror barely enough to abate my need to tell her not to shout my name onto crowded train cars.

the conductor had told her that we needed to get off the train and then on again farther down for the sleeping wagons, which i guess makes sense. you don’t want drunken plebians bothering the uppercrust, which i was apparently now part of, especially not while they are sleeping. so no access from the regular cars. dammit. the conductor had also told her that she shouldn’t worry, there was plenty of time. but i hadn’t heard that and she apparently didn’t believe him.

so jump down, run, up to the very first car, where conductors were waiting patiently for our arrival with looks of amusement at our panic, which led me to believe that when you are in a first class sleeper they really just don’t take off while you are still running to get on.

weird.

they took our tickets away as we flew onto the wagon, which immediately brought us up short as we tried to remember the number of our reserved cabin. i had had it all memorized before the panic flight had begun. oops. the conductor helped us figure it out, handed us bottled water and processed-vending-machine chocolate croissants, and left us to sit back, breathe for the first time in a half hour, and finally open a beer.

it was after midnight. we were on our way.

mom photographs our spoils.

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.

from left, great uncle, great grandmother, grandfather.

10/27/2011

sometimes my mom goes into what would best be labeled as intermittent fugue states. sometimes it’s about something she doesn’t want to forget, a bill she has to pay in two weeks’ time, or some task that needs to be done eventually.  it’s an effective way to remember life’s necessities, repeating them constantly with no breaks for anything else to enter conversation.  but sometimes it’s bigger than the everyday.

“i want to go to ukraine,” she started saying five years ago, when we first learned the name of the village where my grandfather had been born. sometimes the statement would have a strong emphatic drive, “i WANT to GO to UKRAINE,” and sometimes it would resemble a soft, forgotten whine, but it was always there, repeated multiple times, whenever there was any mention of her arrival anywhere in europe.

it got worse when i moved to europe in 2009, and even more so when i got the chance to go to ukraine myself in 2010. granted, i was in kiev, which might as well be the other side of the world from l’viv, the closest city to my grandfather’s village, but still … i had broken through the barrier, i had taken the first step. i had made contact with ukraine and i could be her guide. she really really wanted to go to ukraine. i had just made it a little easier, but i had also stoked the fire.

dapper

my grandfather was tight-lipped about his life, and when he died prematurely, in his 60′s, my 20-year-old mom was left with a large pile of questions that apparently festered and festered, prompted by various events, especially the death of my grandmother 30 years later, to grow and grow until it exploded all over the place and, in 2006, she paid to help her near-indigent daughter accompany her to the land of her father’s birth.

i recently unearthed my travel journals from that trip, and they are hilarious. what i thought was going on most of the time was very much not what was going on. most of the time. my interpretations were skewed less by my american-ness and more by my comfort with the Polish culture nurtured in me by my youth in an expatriate community. my confidence in my knowledge is appalling, and often misplaced. but the record is there, and i’m going to start posting some of that story here, somewhere. it goes along with this story, for that is when my mom saw her cousin for the first time in 40 years, and first heard the name of the village. wacowice.

(not at all to be confused with wadowice, near krakow, which is the birthplace of national hero karol wojtyła, otherwise known as pope john paul II. not at all)

at the time that my grandfather was born, at the end of the 19th century, Poland did not strictly exist, at least not on any map. it had been partitioned by its three powerful neighbors, a state that existed for over 100 years and was finally put to an end after WWI, when prussia (germany), russia and austria were all too broke and depleted and exhausted to put up a fight against a burgeoning independence movement. at the time that Poland had been partitioned, a great deal of what is now ukraine actually lay within its borders. so my grandfather was born in a village that was austrian territory at the time of his birth, polish territory as he came of age (a territory which he fought and paid dearly for) and ukrainian territory after WWII.

phew.

my grandfather fought in l’viv, against the soviets, in the war directly after WWI. called “the polish-soviet war” in english, it seems to have no name to speak of in Polish, but is rather considered part of WWI. well, that’s according to a few of my students and a cursory internet search that clearly demarcated the current boundaries of my Polish language abilities. but what i know is that it was about independence, about supporting a newly-sovereign nation, but it also seems to be about which of the put-upon got to claim which pieces of land for themselves.

grandfather, with head wound

but, whatever. my grandfather fought. he was wounded when a bullet went through his head. considering that his three oldest brothers were killed one after the other in WWI proper, his mother deemed his survival a miracle and decided a life path for him. since god had saved him, god would call him to service. he would be priest.

this is an exciting story. really. it’s about pride and sin and excommunication and renegade religions. but it’s also one i can’t get into right now. the important thing for you to know is that he left wacowice when he was 18, he went to l’viv to fight. and then he went to l’viv to study. he studied religion and he became a priest and then he left the area and never ever returned.

he also never ever told his daughter, my mother, about any of these details.

eventually he ended up in the US, where he married a crazy woman, whom he shortly divorced. he had a crisis of faith and left the priesthood. and then he somehow met and married my grandmother. he had three children with her, my mom the youngest. and he never talked about where he was from, what happened to him, how he was shot in the head, his youth, his hubris, his inability to disappoint his mother.

what he DID talk about was the beauty of Poland, the poetry of the birch trees, the songs of the land. his homeland. he missed it, his entire life.

so maybe you can see why my mother drove me crazy with this declaration of want. no, more a pushing need. this fall, when i came back to Poland from my summer vacation in the US, she came with me. and she told me, over and over, about her desire to go to ukraine. and i wracked my brains trying to figure out how to do it. first we had no housing when we got back. then we got a flat, but i was pretty broke and had very little work. then i got too much work and had no time. and the whole time this statement repeated, as it does. “i want to go to ukraine.”

it wasn’t until it changed, just a little, that i was spurred to action. “i want to go to ukraine” became “i guess we’re not going to get to go to ukraine.”

and i thought, “fuck it. WE are GOING to fucking UKRAINE.”

to be continued …

words to live by ...

7 november 2011 9:24pm

so much for productivity.

i’m sitting with a head full of allergens, amy winehouse inexplicably referencing roger moore in my headphones, wondering how it is suddenly november.

tonight in class i had a weird moment when i could not, for the life of me, remember an english word. this has happened before, but usually i just need a minute and it will come back to me. tonight it took an hour. and i was sitting there cursing myself for not allowing any of my students to translate from the Polish. if i were to break that rule myself they’d eat me alive. so i just stood there, mumbling, “y’know … the thing … you do to your ticket … on the tram … what’s that thing? jesus.” in my head, the Polish imperative “skansuj, skansuj, skansuj” over and over.

it wasn’t until i was on the bus home that i almost shouted out loud, “jesus! validate! what the fuck!?!?”

there have been a lot of languages whirling in my head recently, and a lot of germs, and a lot of work. and maybe some varieties of fantastical thoughts. none of this makes for remembering such important words like “validate.” poo.

all of this is beside the point, which is that there are many stories to tell, but i’m going to break my usual protocol here and focus on one in particular, which is long and has many parts and is probably being told in better fashion by others at the moment. so all of the day to day, which i am failing so wonderfully at writing about at the moment, will have to wait even longer.

i will just say, briefly, that i’m actually getting my shit together to live here completely legally, and though that thought makes me a little nervous, i didn’t realize how nervous i actually had been living in the sort of legal grey area i have been inhabiting for the past two years. somehow this feeling of strange relief has loosened my fingers.

if only something could be done for my brick-like head.

9:39

PS this story i mention starts here …

“we are five polish people … i think it will be impossible”

cold platform. not our train.

7/10/2011 4:07 am

jesus christ it’s 4:07 am.

last night appeared to be “national make a fuck ton of noise” night, culminating in waves of drunken parties singing in the streets. this was lovely because i could hear them far off & their harmonies would merge as they came closer to my window and passed beneath; 6 stories above the ground and it didn’t seem to matter – they may as well have been in the room with me. but then i wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the wonderful doppler effect.

all of that sucks hard because we had to wake up at 2 am to make sure we got to the train station waaaay too early for our weekend jaunt to prague.

so now we’re sitting on a concrete platform – the cold slowly eating its way up my legs from my wet feet. we tried to wait in the temporary train station, but it was full of the coughing and twitching damned. hard to tell the homeleses from exhausted travelers. my mom sat on the one free seat, between a man resting his heavy drooping head on a hand that didn’t look up to the task and a rail-thin consumptive folded over in his seat, wracked involuntarily. i looked at her there and decided it maybe would be better to be cold.

like the first time i came through wrocław, the platforms are half out of commission, so we have to wait until right before our train comes to see where we’ll be leaving from.

damn.

4:29am

on this, the anniversary of all my shit getting stolen, i filled myself with melancholy by putting photos from my first laptop, which was also stolen two years ago, on this, my current and never-to-be-stolen lifeline to the world. while i was in the US this past summer i found all my old backup DVDs, including those from that long-ago lost machine, taken from me in the wilds of Portland, OR, during the heat waves of 2009.  being windows-made back-up discs, they required a lot of time for digging through files and programs and applications that are now unnecessary in these heady days of linux, looking for any graven images from the past. i had put off doing that on my last laptop, which was stolen a year ago.  and then somehow i decided that today was the day to do that. there were just enough to make me feel … blah. blech. sad. ish.  about all the things and people that are not here.  about all the times that are over.

a year ago tonight i went to bed drunk and blissfully unaware that someone had pawed through my stuff and stolen anything that might have any value or importance to me, including the wallet i had made by hand.  i only discovered it all the next day, when i noticed my laptop bag gone.  everything else came in increments.

when i realized the anniversary, my melancholy deepened.

but, really, i should be happy. i had lunch with ania, and then she rushed home and i lingered around the center so i could look up some stuff on the internet. i had trouble finding a spot on the rynek that wasn’t blasted with sunlight, as i seem to be finally getting the summer weather i have been waiting all summer for. so i hunkered down on swidnicka, under the only buildings that were creating shade.  well, i was on a curb, but i might have been sitting on the street for all it looked like.

which is where kuba found me.

he approached me while pushing a bike with a flat tire, exclaiming, “don’t tell me you are homeless now! no, no!! anything but that!”

as has been mentioned here before, Poles usually don’t sit on the sidewalk with laptops.

i haven’t seen him since i’ve been back in town, so it was a wonderful surprise, and we walked north together and said incredibly deep things to each other while he pushed the bike that wasn’t his that had let him down shortly before he found me.

his humor and help had really pulled me through the nasty time that was last year around now, so it was like the world was telling me everything’s fine.

we parted with promises of me coming over for tea and talk. then i went home and made myself sad.

but sometimes it’s ok to feel a little sad for a little bit. tonight i sit in my kitchen and ponder old friends and newer friends and read zines in broken english and try to urge myself to write in my journal, which has been as neglected as this blog.

you guys don’t get to read that shit, though. ha ha.

you’re not missing anything.

still no internet in the new flat, as it has been discovered that the reason the landlord was so eager to rent and so flustered about everything is that he is getting married this weekend. so, with honeymoon factored into the mix, it will take about two more weeks before we get the home internet sorted out.

maybe that’s a blessing.

without it i can sit and focus, and that’s how i remember to tell about the dream i had the other night, where it was the end of the world so i threw away my phone. then i realized that it wasn’t quite the end of the world enough yet, and i had no other way to know what time it was. without a timepiece, i missed my class at the bank, which prompted a whiny, cringing reaction in me, where i insisted that it was everybody else’s fault but my own. then i went looking for my phone, while i waited for my boss to find me and yell at me.

that’s the most anxious work-anxiety dream i’ve ever had.

and kimya dawson sings in my ears about broken bicycles just as i’m writing about broken bicycles, and joy division puts more tears in my brain, and some jerk guy sings the saddest song ever.

phew.

11:02 pm

nothing makes you feel stupider than punching a hole in the access card you need to get into the international swiss bank where you spend most of your life teaching english, only to find out that anything piercing the card invalidates it. i walked into the revolving door, held my card up to the reader and … nothing. stupid. tried to explain to the security guard. in polish. sorta. (“nie działa” “dlaczego?” “bo ma … hole.”) then i had to go tell on myself so i could get a new card. idiot.

at least i started out with, “i have the stupidest thing ever to ask about …” which made everyone smile. but i was embarrassed enough to blame it on an imaginary brash young friend who seems to have very little grasp of how the world really works, but just enough life story to think her experiences are the same as everyone else’s.

sometimes my imagination gets carried away, especially when my pride is at stake.

but they all laughed and said it was fine, they could make a new card, what are you worried about?

well, originally i was worried about losing my damn card, since a friend of mine did that recently and her own imagination went wild with the possibilities of how they were going to torture her for her indiscretion. her wild imagination set mine ablaze, and not even the fact that her bag, and card, had been returned to her could quell the fire burning out of control in my head.  so i wanted to fix it to a lanyard. is that so wrong?  
heh.