Vladamir makes crying motions with his fingers running down his cheeks as we prepare to leave him on the train. Astrakhan in 2–5 he writes on a piece of paper…Astrakhan in 2005 we say to him as he helps us to get off the train with our baggage…carrying his address and phone number carefully in my backpack.
The evening we are to leave Yekaterinburg on the train, Bob loses his change purse containing a credit card getting out of a mini-bus. Olga’s son drives us in his car to the internet cafe on the way to the train station so Bob can email the bank.
Waiting for Bob, he and I have an interesting conversation. I make a comment about the importance of having all the information you can get your hands on and he agrees…free press or no. He tells me he has been reading a web site about American foreign policy and is afraid, that since we invaded Iraq, that someday we might go to war with his country. Alarmed, I try to reassure him that this would be very unlikely and give him my email address and ask him to send me the url.
We get on the train at midnight to find two adult women and a child in our berths and no amount of turning on the lights and loud talking and piling of our luggage in-between the beds will dislodge these people who are stubbornly pretending to be asleep.
We collar the carriage “mother” as I call her (who almost wouldn’t let us on the train in the first place because she was confused by the fact that we were ticketed through to Ulaan Baator) and she finds us a new cabin with Vladamir (is every Russian man called Vladamir?) who seems to be pretty familiar with this route. He is a diesel engineer on his way further east to Chita to “advise,” we gather, considering we have two words in Russian and he has maybe three in English. We settle in, glad there are only three of us instead of four.
The next morning we share each other’s food and he orders delicious Russian borscht for us all from the attendent at the end of the carraiage who makes our soup in a space maybe four feet by three feet at the most. Then Vladamir wants to talk…to tell us everything…in Russian. We get maybe a tenth of it by interpreting body language. “Maxi, maxi, he says and points to Bob when he shows him the map of Nepal and Mt. Everest.
I see some Russian girls dressed in skin tight pants with flat stomach showing beneath a short jacket and above a very short mini-skirt and knee-length spike-heeled boots with very pointy toes and with little short-handled purse slung over the shoulder clicking along the platform. “Russian girls,” I say to Vladamir. This he understands. “Russian gerls! Russian gerls! he exclaims proudly. Cick click they go down the concrete platform. They love the clicking…you can tell. They will spend a month’s earnings on a pair of shoes. There are websites with 40,000 of these girls looking for western men to marry, Sasha told us in St. Petersburg. They are sharp and are disappointed in their own men who only seem to want to spend their time drinking beer and vodka.
Most carriages are of East German origin solidly built and warm in winter. Each carriage is staffed by an attendant whose “den” is a compartment at the end of the carriage. She collects your tickets, lets down the steps at stations, and comes round with a vacuum cleaner and a small broom dipped in a bucket of dirty water to keep the carpets swept. She maintains the samovar, opposite her compartment, which provides a continuous supply of boiling water for drinks and cups of dried soup. She is the ruler over all that happens in the carriage and you are her subject.
The only place where passengers may smoke is in the unheated area between carriages. In second class, there is a bathroom (such as it is) at both ends of the carriage and compartments have four births…two on each side with a little ladder that swings out for the person lurching onto the top bunk. (First class has only two bunks in each compartment but is twice the price so we are going second class.) People wear slippers to pad around in especially when headed toward the toilet where the floor is usually wet. Track suits are the fashionable attire of the Russians. There is a small table in-between the two bottom births under the window that passengers can use to share their lunches with each other and on which sets the vodka bottle.
During the day you will find yourself sitting on your bottom berth sharing the sitting space with one of the passengers from the top bunks. During the night, with window and door closed, the compartments are claustrophobic and hot as hell (as are most of the homes and public building, by the way.) One night in frantic despair of getting any sleep I take a pillow and lie on the filthy floor in the space between the cars where there is some cool fresh air.
We welcome our breaks from the train at various stops. Bob hops off in the freezing cold in his shorts and does some jumping jacks causing the locals on the platform to stare at this grey-haired foreigner in disbelief. Bob actually wonders later why all the locals don’t do this. This is dangerous however for another reason: if the train takes off while you are off the train all your belongings will be tallied and taken off the train at some unknown station! A Swiss couple we heard about luckily had enough money with them to hire a taxi to speed toward the next stop to overtake the train.
We boarded a Moscow train at midnight. We are headed across Russia on the trans-siberian train system. However we will be breaking up the trip by getting off in Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk, with a side excursion to Lake Baikal, in Russia and Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia on the way to our final destination…Beijing China.
The next morning one of our cabin-mates, (there are four of us…two racks on each side of the cabin) Vladamir, starts his day with a bottle of beer. Enjoying the changing colors of the trees as we climb and dip through the Urals our cabin mates and we share all our packed lunches with each other and Vladamir, who knows no English shares his vodka with us. Diana, who is a translator in German/Russian for a Moscow law firm) does speak English, tells me there is no Russian like Frank Sinatra…and that she doesn’t like Antonio Banderas because he is “dark.” (We have discovered that anyone “dark” is called “black” and is discriminated against…as are homosexuals…hardly anyone out of the closet here.)
Unknown to each other, they are both traveling to their home town of Yekaterinburg, the third biggest city in Russia, to visit their parents. On the way our rich Moscow train passes through dirt-poor even though picturesque villages and Vladamir gets off at a town famous for it’s glass factory to buy a set of crystal glasses (about a dozen glasses for about $20) and bag of apples from the sellers who are tapping at our window. Regulars know what to buy at each stop-whether a bag of berries picked by bucket in the forest or a baked chicken from a babushka (grandmother). We even saw men hawking huge chandeliers. One man was trying to sell a stuffed bird with a wing span six feet wide!
An ex-pirate by the name of Yermak, who is recognized as the founder of Siberia, crossed the Ural mountains and challenged the fur traders for control of the land. In November 1581 he raised the Russian flag. By 1900 over a million people had made he long march to the squalid and overcrowded gulags of Siberia and the word, Siberia, came to mean a place for criminal and political exiles.
In 1891 Tsar Nicholas III began construction on the railway from Moscow to Vladivostock on the east coast of Russia near the Sea of Japan. The greater part was built without heavy machinery bu by men wit nothing more than wooden shovels. Nevertheless, they could lay up to 2.5 miles of rail in a good day, according to the Trans-Siberian Handbook. Most of the labor force had to be imported as local peasants were already employed on the land and the workers came from as far away as Italy and Turkey but the Chinese coolies were terrified of the Amur tigers with which the area full and the government subsequently turned to the prisoners in the gulags to relieve the shortage of labor.
The trans-Mongolian line (to Beijing) branches off from the main Trans-Siberian route (to Vladivostock) at Zaudinsky and follows the well worn route of the ancient tea caravans that traveled between Beijing and Moscow in the 18th and 19th centures. In those days traders made the 7865km journey in no less than 40 days. Since the railroad began operating in the mid-1950’s the journey now takes about 5.5 days.
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2004-09
Like in the big Central European cities we visited, there are cranes everywhere… old soviet buildings built during the Stalin era are scheduled to be razed and new one modern ones put up. Foundations for Stalin’s “Seven Sisters, called “Wedding Cakes” by foreigners, were laid in 1947 to mark Moscow’s 800th anniversay when Stalin decided that Moscow suffered from a ‘skyscraper gap’ compared to the USA.
Inextricably linked to all the most important historical and political events in Russia since the 13th century, the Kremlin (built between the 14th and 17th centuries by outstanding Russian and foreign architects) was the residence of the Great Prince and also a religious centre. At the foot of its ramparts, on Red Square, St Basil’s Basilica is one of the most beautiful Russian Orthodox monuments. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Moscow is a free-wheeling city. To the ambitious there are no limits…the streets around the hotels outside Red Square are lined with black Mercedes and BMW’s with black glass windows guarded by black leather clad “goon” drivers…looking like the mafia. I find a fancy hotel where there is free WIFI in the lobby while participants in a European Union meeting saunter back and forth and high-heeled jeans-wearing translators wait around having lively conversation with pipe-smoking goons.
While I sit here uploading text on our blog, Bob wheels off to find the American Medical Clinic where he has a smoldering tooth extracted by a Russian-speaking dentist before we get on the trans-siberian train for Yekaterinburg (birthplace of Yeltsin) Lake Baikal and Mongolia beyond. We miss each other at the end of the day and it costs me 600 roubles to get back to the flat in a taxi because I’m too chicken to hazard the buses and metros.
The night we saw “Spartacus” at the Bolshoi Theater, our bags were searched by monstrously big “security,” one at least seven feet tall. Tanya says, “I never see them there before…” I ask if it is because of terrorism and she says yes, terrorism. By the way, the suicide bomber that killed several of the people in front of the metro entrance was only about 5 minutes from her flat…she says she was at that metro only a few minutes before the bomb went off. People in Moscow worry she says, but what can you do? Yes, I said, I know, thinking of our Josh who works at a restaurant in lower Manhattan.
We are in the ozone at the Bolshoi, the first ballet for Bob who now says he is ready to take ballet lessons if you can picture that and we enjoy conversations with people around us during the intermissions…one older woman from Berkely and a young woman who is here for a few months to volunteer with an AIDS education Non Profit Organization. Come to find out, over a glass of champaign and caviar-filled pastry, her boyfriend, having graduated from Harvard, is working in Chicago as a chef and they are moving to Manhattan…so of course I take her email address to give to Josh.
We leave on a midnight train for Yekaterinburg.
Our homestay in Moscow is in the “burbs.” Tanya works for a French men’s underwear company and later admits that her son is the wholesaler and she works for him under the table. When Bob says he wants her to bring home a red French thirty dollar thong for him, she giggles but doesn’t believe him.
She is lively and we love to make her laugh by telling her how good a cook she is…fried potatoes, boiled eggs, sauted chicken, toast and cucumber and tomato salad for breakfast! She says she taught herself English three years ago using a book and audio tapes. Her apartment is brand new IKEA and spotless…when she tells us her mother was German I said to Bob “I knew it!” We sleep in her comfortable living room on a couch made out into a bed…Liam, a 24 year old, from Vancouver B.C., traveling a similar route as we are sleeps in her bedroom and Tanya sleeps on a mat on the floor in the tiny kitchen–her guests supplant or probably exceed her income.
Our first foray into downtown Moscow is quite an adventure…we can’t read the Cyrillic words on the walls of the underground so we look closely at the first three letters…and even then ended up nowhere near where we wanted to go…so reasoning that if we just get back on the train going the way we came from we could start out again where we started out before. But of course there was no way this was going to work in Moscow. What started out to be a 30 minute trip ended up being 2 hours. All we could think of the whole time in the underground was the old MTA song by the Kingston Trio:
Well, let me tell you of the story of a man named [Bobby}
On a tragic and fateful day.
He put ten roubles in his pocket, took his family,
Went to ride on the M. T. A.
Well, did he ever return?
No, he never returned and his fate is still unknown.
(What a pity! Poor ole [Bobby.} Shame and scandal. He may ride forever. Just like Lenin and Trotsky.
He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Moscow.
He [could have been] the man who never returned…
We take local electric trains three hours north from Warsaw to Ostroda where we book into the Park Hotel on a lovely lake that caters to German-speaking tourists many of whom are coming to the former East Prussia to revisit lost homes and distant relatives. In fact while there we get a glimpse of a crackly BBC news report of an organization of older Germans who are demanding recompense from Russia for lost land and money during WWII…comparing themselves to the victims of the holocaust! President Shroeder, of course, refuses to intervene on their behalf, reminding them that the whole mess was due to their own country in the first place.
We luck out and find a pretty English speaking taxi driver in the line-up outside the Ostroda train station who agrees to take us the next day on a 20 minute drive (with liberal European speed limits amounting to no limits at all) to my ancestral village of Szczepankowo. And by village I mean village. Besides three or four homes with cobble stone lanes leading away from the main road, there is one tiny market. The village and the surrounding lush farmland looks like an 18th century pastoral painting.
While I walk around taking pictures of cobbles and pigs, the driver notices what appears to be the remains of a compound-like rock wall in the trees and overgrown grass across from the market. When she asks the old man in the market who lived there the response came: “Oh a rich man used to live there a long time ago.” Since my great grandparents sold their land in order to bring their 10 children to America and since anyone in 1890 who owned land would have been considered rich, and since my ancestors lived in this village as far back as the early 1700’s, I’d like to think I found their home…even if it wasn’t.
Five minutes away is Pratnica, a small town where we visited the church that my ancestors attended. Two priests, one 82 years old and a younger one originally from Gdansk, came to the door to the well-maintained quite large rectory and welcomed us in…offering candy and a viewing of copies of church records since the original were sent to Germany during the war )and since have been photographed by the LDS Library).
They let us into the church, which burned down twice in the last century…with one huge original rock cemented in near the foundation. But a rector’s chair was dated 1602 and we are told that a large hollowed out stone standing just inside the front doors is the original baptismal font. A Polish descendent like myself from Wisconsin donated nice new church pews in the 1970’s. The older priest remembers that one old Mroczynski lived nearby but has been dead several years. We drive to the home nearest his old one to visit an old woman who might remember him but there is a big lock on the door and no one is at home except the chickens and ducks.
Before leaving Pratnica, we stop for a bowl of soup at noon and our driver is happy to see Duck Blood Soup on the menu-a dish my grandparents always reserved for special occasions. We order our favorite made with rich dark smoky mushrooms from the forest.
On the way back to Ostroda our driver, in her early 30’s with two young daughters, tells us that there are few jobs in Poland and that her husband went to Ireland two years ago for work. She visited once, she says, but “things were not the same anymore so we must get a divorce.” (Skeptical Bob thinks there is more to the story.) But by this time we have made friends and she invites us to her parent’s home where she lives with her two girls on the top story. Her mother is in the hospital getting radiation and chemotherapy for breast cancer that she says is very common in Eastern Poland…due, everyone here thinks, to the Chernobl nuclear disaster in Russia about 25 years ago. We pick plums and apples from their backyard orchard. On the way out her father offers us Polish beer but we have already had coffee and cake in his daughter’s apartment and I feel bad turning him down.
My great grandmother was born in Radom…another visit to Poland some day.
Before leaving Poland we tank up one last time on pierogis..little savory pockets of noodle dough stuffed with mushrooms or other vegetables, meat or cottage cheese or sweet ones filled with blueberries or other fruit…just like my grandmother used to make at home. Oh, and I buy a CD that is popular in Poland right now…romantic songs sung by a thrilling Polish Zucchero. “I like very much,” says the young little blond in the music store. Read More
We are out of the unusually hot and humid Czech Republic. After an all night train we are in cool Krakow Poland. We accept an offer by a young English speaking man at the train depot and end up in a hostel…six flight up…”old building…no lift!”
The historic centre of Cracow, the former capital of Poland, is situated at the foot of the Royal Wawel Castle. The 13th-century merchants’ town has Europe’s largest market square and numerous historical houses, palaces and churches with their magnificent interiors. Further evidence of the town’s fascinating history is provided by the remnants of the 14th-century fortifications and the medieval site of Kazimierz with its ancient synagogues in the southern part of town, Jagellonian University and the Gothic cathedral where the kings of Poland were buried. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The first night out we look for Polish food and find ourselves in a Hungarian restaurant instead!
The next night we move to a nice little Jewish neighborhood-Kamimierz-with little cafes and jazz music up and down the street…and Internet hot spots to boot! There are fewer than 150 Jews in Krakow now. Most of the hotels in this neighborhood are full of young people from Israel visiting Auschwitz and Bzerzenka…surrounded by big burly bodyguards…
By the way In Poland, if you’re invited to dinner at someone’s house and you’ve had enough to eat, DO NOT clear your plate! This means that you want more, and your hosts will really get their feelings hurt if you refuse another helping. Same for drinking–always leave a little bit in the glass.
My medications, that had gotten held up in Custums in Frankfurt, finally arrived in Berlin via fedex. We had planned on taking the train through Austria and Hungary but now we are out of time. We arrived in Prague on the 11th after a scenic train ride along the Labe River and through Dresdon. We had earlier also planned a stop in this town that was totally obliterated during WWII but we kept pushing on in order to make good our train reservations to St. Petersburg Russia.
Riding a hot crowded subway in Prague someone pushes against me from behind…pushes against my backpack…an underground train full of jostling young men…but at our stop the train doors won’t open…I am pushed again as unfamiliar sweaty hands and arms reach around me from behind and tug and pull at the jammed door…I am pushed again and again and finally squeeze through the barely open doors into the cool air of the underground…but something is wrong…I drop my backpack to the ground to find it open and my Mac laptop gone!
My best stuff has been ripped off and I am suddenly bereft…jangled…this woman on whose bathroom wall hangs a poster from the 60’s mandating us all to “Sell All Thou Hast and Buy a Flower!” The next 10 days are a frantic maze of memories of telephones that won’t respond to those free US 800 numbers, emails to banks heading off misused financial information, insurance companies..the American Express. After three days of looking we finally find a Mac wholesaler who agrees to sell us another laptop…but the Visa computers are down…so we return the next day with an American Express card.
Tip: Keep your backpack on the front of you instead of on your back.
Coming up out of the U-2 line of the Zoo railway station and thinking of course of the Irish rock band we enter now-rich, Western, happening Berlin. We pore over maps trying to get our bearings once again. Ah, the pension is close…we check in and nervously wait for a friend to fedex 6 months worth of forgotten pharmaceuticals…missing Austria and Hungary for lack of time.
While Bob explores on his own, I savor raw oysters and beer on the 6th floor of the amazing Ka-De-Wa Department store, the largest of it’s kind in all Europe. I make friends with 3 generations of a German family sitting next to me…the smooth-faced 14 year old grandson will soon be off to a Chicago suburb on a rotary exchange program…his mother is worried…the grandmother is too…walking slowly away she waves goodbye and looks back at me twice with a smile…the second time nodding her head…in assent of our brief friendship I think.The grandfather gives me his business card. We know we will never see each other again.
Laughingnomad 