Russia Trip: Enigmatic Encounters

Actually, this story began back in the Bay Area before I even left. A Russian friend told me she was sorry for all the trouble "back there." I wasn't sure what she meant. We'd done something together a short while before that and it hadn't gone exactly as planned, but it was nothing to apologize for. Did she mean that, I asked. "No," she said. "I mean for all the trouble you're going to have when you're in Russia."

"Oh," I said. I wasn't expecting Russia to be an easy place to travel, not after all the effort it took just to get a visa, but a pre-apology? That sounded ominous. She didn't look like she was joking, though. "I see. You're apologizing on behalf of your people for all the bad things that are going to happen to us when we're there?"

"Yes, you're going to have to deal with a lot of inconveniences," she clarified.

"Well thanks - I'll remember that. Maybe it will ease the moment a bit when we're starting to get frustrated about something." And in fact, I did have occasion to remind Trish, when we were on the train to Kiev, that we had already been apologized to for the inconvenience of booking a first class sleeper and receiving an ordinary, aging car with bedcushions held in place by duct tape. The closest the car attendants had come to apologizing was when we tried to figure out how to turn the seat into a lower bunk bed, which seemed to us must involve ripping off the duct tape and reconfiguring the cushion somehow. That led us to a dead end so we called Handsome over and asked him to please show us what to do... he went off to his own cabin for a moment and came back with - more duct tape. Which he used to tape the cushion back into place. As he did this he was cursing all the while "stary vagon," which means "old wagon," and that's about as close as we got to "I'm sorry your cabin isn't what you expected."

I should also say that once we got our beds made and had a few glasses of wine in us, our car was just fine. I love traveling by train rather than airplane for a number of reasons. First, there's a sense of continuity to traveling from A to B without leaving the ground. As fascinating as I find the city of Kiev, I am equally fascinated by what lies along the way to Kiev... kilometers and kilometers of wheat fields and sunflowers, tiny villages resistant to change compared to the big cities where the rise and fall of past regimes is more apparent.

I also prefer train travel, especially overnight, for the rhythmic cla-cla-clunk of the wheels that lulls me off to sleep now just as effectively as it did when I was a teenager exploring Western Europe on my own for the first time. And the third reason I like the train is a pragmatic one... now that I am a flight instructor, while I find airplanes interesting, of course, it's also nice to get a break from them.

But I digress. I included the word "enigmas" in the title for this post because we've had more than a few enigmatic encounters on this trip so far. The first was a young Kazakh woman who picked us up on our way to the Cave Monastery in Kiev. Somehow, one minute to the next, she was just there, walking along with us on our way to the caves. OK, she seemed nice enough. I won't give her name because she said she was playing hooky from work. I know... what are the chances that her boss back at her IT firm in Kazakhstan will somehow find himself reading my blog? Pretty much zilch. Just in case, though, I'll just call her our Kazakh friend.

We learned a lot about Kazakhstan in the two or three hours we all spent together. We also had a Russian translator during that time, since she spoke English, Kazakh and Russian. This was fortunate, because the Cave Monastery turned out to be an important pilgrimage site for Ukrainians. Signage was minimal in English and limited to information about where to buy tickets for a tour. We didn't want a tour. We just wanted to see the caves. Our Kazakh friend was able to figure out how to see the caves themselves, along with the pilgrims. She also had the foresight to purchase three candles before we went in. I had only read a little about the "cave monastery" and had in my mind an image of a wide mouthed cave dug deep into the mountainside along the banks of the Dnieper River, but that's not what this "cave" was all about.

The Cave Monastery of Kiev is a long, descending labyrinth full of dead saints. Once inside, you're in there for a good 30 minutes or longer, depending on how many coffins you stop to kiss. The tradition in Orthodox Christianity is to kiss relics and icons during prayer. People come to this cave from all over Ukraine to pay respect to the many, many monks whose bodies were preserved and displayed, covered with beautiful church robes and ornamental jewels, in small glass coffins placed in niches along the walk. The only sources of light are the small stained glass oil lamps that hang over every body, mosaic, fresco... and the candles that pilgrims with foresight bring with them to light their way. There is little to no room for passing. I was grateful to my Kazakh friend for bringing the extra candles, which of course tuned out to be for me and Trish. Trish, however, discovered early on that she is claustrophobic and backtracked her way out - when I later realized that the labyrinthine tunnel was full of dead bodies I was glad that she'd gotten out while she still could... assuming that claustrophobia gets worse when dead bodies are introduced into the situation.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the dimly lit row of saints with the Kazakh waif, as well as our brief stop at the memorial for victims of famine on our way back. Ukrainians of the past have suffered more than their share of politically induced famines and the Ukrainians of today have not forgotten. We all stopped to take in a very moving statue of a starving young girl holding a stalk of wheat in her hands - wheat destined for central allocation under a system that starved to death the very people who toiled in the Ukrainian "breadbasket" of the Soviet Union.

We felt guilty about wanting to stop for lunch after that but we did anyway, and then our Kazakh friend disappeared as quickly as she had appeared, now on her way to find a hotel and get ready for the Red Hot Chile Pepper concert that had lured her to Kiev for a super short sanity break from her job.

Our next enigmatic encounter was with a very odd man who never spoke to us in a word of English but held a 20 minute conversation with us nonetheless, during which he offered us apples to take back to America and, when we declined those, upped the offer to a half smoked joint. "No, no!" we emphasized. I caught the eye of a policeman walking by. Great, this guy's going to get arrested for pulling out a joint in a public square and we're going to go down with him. We were lucky to waive over a young translator who found the whole situation fairly amusing and gave us a probably unwarranted sense of security. "Is he homeless?" Trish asked. "Are you homeless"? the guy translated. "No, no" we said, "you don't need to translate that question." But it was too late. The reply was already on its way back to us. "No."

He lived somewhere, this strange man, and was in town for something. We couldn't tell what but by this time we were ready to move on. "One last thing," he said. Our translator gave us the final message carefully, sentence by sentence. "We are all Ukrainian." Listening. "We speak Ukrainian." Listening. "We are all Ukrainian brothers." Listening. "Goodbye."

And then they just disappeared. Both of them. I turned my head to glance over at the other side of the square and when I turned around again the strange Ukrainian nationalist was gone, nowhere to be seen, and the translator was gone as well. "That was weird" I said, and we decided to go hang out in the next square instead.


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Russia Trip: Slow Train to Kiev

I wrote about my first sleeper-train-to-Ukraine experience, in Spring of 2009, back a few entries in this blog. On that trip, when I finally succeeded in finding my car - the sole car on that entire train that was in fact going to Ukraine at all - it was an elegant, first class affair, decked out in heavy curtains and lace doilies worthy of the oldest fashioned Eastern European coffee house. Since this was not only Trish's first sleeper-train-to-Ukraine experience but her first sleeper-train-to-anywhere experience, I was hoping our first-class cabin, booked weeks ago back in the States, would be just as comfortable as that lovely home away from home I enjoyed on my way to Lviv.

It was not to be.

A rounded mound of flesh poked horizontally from the entryway, a tentatively displayed hillock sprouted with wiry Russian manhair. As suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. Gone inside, as it turned out, to cover itself with a proper railway company shirt and make a more dignified appearance. Although the cabin attendant attached to this particular mound of flesh was off-duty, his younger, fresher, and infinitely handsomer on-duty co-worker seemed determined that public shirtlessness was not to be tolerated while he was in charge. Or maybe just not in Budapest. In any case, there did seem to be a rule. As Handsome checked our tickets, the Stomach reappeared on the platform in a button-down shirt. Not a particularly clean shirt, mind you, but it was a step in the right direction.

We stepped onto our car. No plush red curtains met us in the corridor. No plastic flowers to brighten our journey. Indeed, there was not a doily in sight. As we opened the door to our cabin - our home for the next 26 hours remember - a look of horror appeared on Trish's face. "This is not what I bought." Trish had ordered the train tickets after careful study of the various web offerings. "We paid for first class. They had pictures." I gave her a moment.

"It's not so bad," I finally offered.

"It's a dump."

I poked around a bit. "Look, there's a basin." I opened up a cabinet behind which a small sink was hiding. "We can wash up here." Trish glared at the crumpled strips of duct tape holding up the rear cushion of our seats.

"This is not what we paid for," she said again, and I was a bit worried that she was going to get off right then and there and find another way to Kiev. "Just think," I said, "it's probably a historic car. These very cushions were probably used by Soviet diplomats cutting deals in Budapest during the Cold War."

That didn't seem to help and I concluded that she just needed a moment to herself. To process her own thoughts. It certainly was not a luxurious cabin. It was, however, a "first-class" ticket, Handsome explained, in the sense that it could have been set up to sleep three people and instead it was configured to sleep two. He followed that explanation with a slightly embarrassed it's-the-best-we've-got look and we left it at that. The train pulled out of the station with Trish still on it, and we were on our way to Kiev.

Once we had our beds made, later that evening, it looked a lot less dreary. Almost homey. And you really haven't lived if you haven't experienced border patrol officers making their rounds at 2:00 am to take your passport and search your belongings for illicit narcotics. Or your train being hoisted ten feet in the air to have its wheels replaced. Or the mesmerizing lull of wheel on track as the Ukrainian countryside pours on by, kilometer after kilometer, full of wheat and sunflowers and low misty clouds dotting the hills. Or the smile on Stomach's ultimately kindly face when you stumbled through a "


spaseba" first thing in the morning.


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Russia Trip: She Said, She Said

Ah, Budapest. Before we left, Trish and I talked about writing a joint travel blog we would title She Said, She Said, one "She" being me with my heterosexual female perceptions of Eastern Europe, and the other being Trish with her lesbian perceptions. We had our first opportunity to explore that theme yesterday while walking along the Danube on our way to the Pest side of the city.



First, though, let me say how awesome it is to travel with someone who values a good natural thermal pool as much as I do. We arrived Thursday late afternoon with just enough energy left in us to scope out a place to eat dinner, down a few glasses of the complimentary wine we found in our excellent hotel room at the St. George Residence in the castle district, test out the internet connection, then fall into a deep, travel-tired sleep. We promised each other we would write a fabulous review of this place on tripadvisor, but for the moment suffice it to say that the beds in Room 3 are hands down some of the most comfortable beds either of us have ever slept in.

We only had 2 full days in Budapest. Under the circumstances, it could be a lot to ask to dedicate almost the entire first day to soaking at the bath house. But Trish was up for that. In fact, I think it was her suggestion. We found our way to Szechenyi Furdo, purportedly the largest spa facility in Europe, and there we found a veritable spa smorgasbord. I was in heaven. Indoor thermal pools, outdoor thermal pools, swimming pools, weight class pools, steam rooms infused with a variety of aromatic essential oils, saunas, even a corner where old men congregate to play pool chess. It was awesome!

Trish's neck was out of whack because the person next to her on the plane couldn't quite fit into his own seat and had flowed over into hers, forcing her to sit a bit cock-eyed for 10 hours. She got her first ever Thai massage at Szechenyi Furdo and got herself stretched and pounded back into alignment. After that, we found the covered food market, figuring we would buy a few things for a simple dinner back at the room. Through no fault of our own, we broke the rule about not shopping while hungry and soon enough the forints were flying left and right, not stopping until both of us was burdened with heavy bags full of fruit, cheese, bread, sliced meats, Hungarian yogurt and, especially for Trish, 4 prize fresh chicken eggs. She had to do a lot of negotiating to get someone to throw in an egg carton to carry them home in, which, of course, made them taste that much better.

The morning of our second full day, after our leisurely breakfast of yummy market foods, we set out along the river to see what Budapest had to offer other than thermal spas and fresh local foods. That's when we had our first She Said, She Said moment. We'd both vaguely noticed the day before that people were staring at me. Mostly women as far as I could tell. Trish thought it was both women and men. I had attributed the stares, which seemed to me to focus on my shoulder area, to the fact that I was wearing a gray tank top. "Maybe it's kind of masculine," I said. "I think it looks like a men's undershirt to them."

"Patti, you don't look masculine," Trish said.

"No really... you don't see women wearing this sort of thing here. I think I must look really butch. They see this and they think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever or some gang member from West Side Story."

"You have no idea what butch looks like." She proceeded to explain it to me... something involving short buzz cut hair among other features. "They're staring at you because you have long hair and you're showing a lot of skin."

"I am?"

"Relatively speaking." We looked around. Sure enough, most women did have hair above the shoulder line, and very few were wearing shorts.

"So you don't think they're trying to figure out if I'm a guy or a woman?"

"I think they know you're a woman."

"You think they're looking at me because I'm dressed like a slut."

"I think they're noticing that you have skin and hair and they're giving you the stay-away-from-my-boyfriend stare."

"I can deal with that. I prefer that to slut." We stared at the river for a moment. "Still, maybe I'll ditch this tank top when it's all sweaty rather than washing it out in the sink."

Trish sighed and we changed the subject, remembering something about the museum we had stumbled upon earlier that morning. We meant to find our way to the metro station at the bottom of the Buda hill where we're staying, but we'd taken a wrong turn and instead ended up walking near a garden strangely decorated with metal statues. We only had to pause for the briefest of moments to get the attention of the curator, who was outside trimming bushes. He waved us in so vigorously that we could not resist his pull, and found ourselves inside the museum of non-ferrous metallurgy eating cookies with the curator and learning about Hungarian technology of the Industrial Revolution. This was a fascinating place and highly worth visiting, and if I can figure out how to use my new blog-posting app I'll upload a photo of Trish with our suspender-clad new best friend.

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