Traveling by Train for the Holidays
School cut out for winter break here on the 28th of December and I’d been given until the 8th to travel back to my host families and celebrate the new year. It was a really nice chunk of time to have off.
The train station in Odessa is cold this time of year. It’s not an open air building but with all the people coming and going any heat was quickly escaping to instead contribute to the larger global warming effort. People were dressed up in their nice clothes with thick coats and hats. Many women here wear long coats with fur or imitation fur around the hood. The waiting area of the train station was full. All generations of people, strangers to one another, sitting side by side just waiting. Young teens on knock-off smart phones playing games and old men and women simply sitting, watching, or maybe reading the paper. The Ukraine that these various generations live in has changed so much. Just to think, the old man sitting across from me may have been imprisoned for his political beliefs or worked to exhaustion on a community farm under gunpoint. Or could possibly have been the one holding the gun. And then to look at the 15 year old boy next to him who is changing his status on his favorite social networking site and eating frys from McDonalds. A generational gap of enormous proportions.
The train system operates to the beat of modern Ukraine but echos of Ukraine’s history.
From the difficulties of buying a ticket in a mob of a line where people feel free to cut to the front. To the somewhat illegal tea and cookie business that the train car workers run quietly from a converted bathroom in the back of the train. The whole system ringing of the past and feeling cold through the whole experience.
But of all the things I’ve seen in Ukraine the way the train tickets are printed seems very efficient. Everything you need to know is there and organized and if you have any questions you just flip it over and all the abbreviations are explained. It was one of the lessons we had in our language classes, part of the traveling topic, to learn the vocab and essentials of train travel. It was an interesting mark of my progression, to be headed back to where I started and to look down at my train ticket and read it without problem and to know have language skills capable of taking me far beyond that.
The trains for longer trips are made of sleeper cars. A bunkhouse on wheels with people and their stuff crammed into every free space. Strangers attempting to follow their nightly routines in shoulder bumping proximity to one another. The holiday feel of the train cars was a warm one, people traveling “home” to see friends and family. Sharing pre-packed bags of train snacks with one another and making conversation.
I was trying to go rather unnoticed through the whole ordeal, though this only ever works for so long, I did pretty well. I got busted once as an outright foreigner after wearing my boots on my bunk while laying down to read and not being quite ready to sleep. One of the train attendant guys saw that and just ripped me a new one. Telling me he was going to make me sleep in the bathroom while watching me wipe a smear of mud off the rubber bunk mat.
The lights went out at about 9:30 as the train rocked along on our journey. I’d laid out my sheets and a scratchy wool blanket and was trying to drift of to sleep in a way that didn’t leave my feet hanging off the bunk and getting bumped by every person who walked down the isle in the dark. At every stop I would awake from my shallow sleep to jerks and noise of a car being added or removed from the train. But the night wasn’t so bad and I awoke about an hour before my final destination feeling pretty well rested.
I think I’ll plan on more train trips like this one in the future.
