Train Train Train

I'm finally in Paris after a short side trip to Ukraine to visit a friend of mine doing Peace Corps there. The trip there was the luckiest 30 hours I've ever had. Or at the very least, the most improbable.

I flew Lufthansa from JFK to Munich, and then, miraculously, caught my 25 hour train to Ukraine. It was the only itinerary that would get me there not at 2am, and not force me to make 8 connections. And the only way I caught it was because my plane was a whole 40 minutes early. There was a good share of bemusement in the pilot's voice when he announced how, even though we had to wait a half an hour to take off, we'd still arrive in an unprecedented 6 hours.

My train went Munich- Budapest, and then Budapest- Ukraine. Another lucky thing. On the Vienna- Budapest part of the line, I was joined in my cabin by this big Hungarian guy who turned out to have studied hospitality in Texas. He wound up taking me all around the Budapest train station trying to help me figure out some train ticket stuff and showing me where everything was. Which was really good, because Hungarian is a language that I don't have a clue about. It scares me, with all of its accent signs. And not even basic words like train platform look recognizable at all.

Oh, and then I got a sleeper car from Budapest all to myself. And those things are nice! There were little green curtains in the window, a big green curtain that was sort of like a closet, and a carpet that ran down the hall and into the room- green with colorful decorations. And they gave you your sheets and towels, and there were mats to put down like mattresses. Oh, and a little table with a white table cloth on it, where, if you lifted up the top, you'd find a sink. Of course, this was Eastern Europe, so it was a little worn around the edges, but it was still pretty. And the conductors were jovial Russians, which was amazing because, first of all, I'd only seen these sort of people, with their way of talking, in movies we had at home. And second, because I could actually understand someone without any trouble, finally!

The train ride was really nice, actually. You just sit there and enjoy the scenery, and when you get tired, you sleep. The most noticeable thing about Ukrainian scenery is that all the houses we past in the country had gardens with all sorts of vegetables, and sometimes even fruit trees. The gardens look fuzzily green, with stalks of plants sticking out in all their little patches.

You also notice the quantity of farm animals everywhere. I saw cows tied up by the train tracks, on long long cables, to graze. There were these two cows, and one was washing the other one, and it was very cute. And sometimes village people would wander by the tracks leading their cows somewhere, and sometimes they'd be accompanied by their dog. And you see chickens and geese wandering around, and sometimes even pigs in people's yards.

At some point I noticed that the sky was uniformly gray. And I thought about this for a bit, because I was pretty tired, and realized that skies are generally much bluer than that. The sun would not come out until four days later, on the day I'd be leaving.

Ok, so I finally got to Ternopol, my train station in Ukraine, found the bus station, and the bus that took me to my friend's town. It was fun to speak Russian to do all this. And the funny thing was that I'd be talking in Russian, and they'd resolutely and stubbornly answer me in Ukrainian. Case in point. I go up to my bus driver to show him my ticket. And I ask him, “shestoya mesto?” (sixth spot?) and he says “shistii mesto” (sixth spot, sorry, I don't remember the precise Ukrainian, so that's a guess for what it was), and I double check, “shestoya?” and he answers, yes, “shistii.” It was great. The people were really friendly in their Ukrainian, though, and no one was mean spirited.