2007

We buy tickets at Budapest’s Keleti Paliudvar, following signs past the plywood fences and semi-transparent tarps of renovation to the international ticket office. The high ceilings are framed in dark wood with peaked windows open to the outdoors. Twelve ticket windows sit beneath. Two are open. It is freezing. Between the dark wood tables with thick marble tops the lines are long, filled with Americans, and moving slower than the line at the Greenpoint post office. A third window opens and a line forms quickly behind it. The window at the front of our line closes. The defeated crowd shuffles to the rear of the other two lines.

At the window we ask for tickets to Split. The man behind the counter speaks English and looks several things up in very large books. He sells us tickets from Budapest to Zagreb, with a transfer at Zagreb to Split. Good any day within the next thirty days, the guy behind the counter says.

The only international train at Keleti Paliudvar at 8:25am is on track nine. Its second class cars are interrupted only by one dining car and one first class car. A corridor runs through the left side of the second class cars, and on its right repeating units of one three seat bench facing another with a window on the side are enclosed by glass. The seats have numbers above them and some people come aboard scrutinizing these numbers, looking for specific seats. We do not have reserved seats. We keep our bags close by.

The train pulls out of the station right on time. An official comes by. He comes by to tell us that the dining car is open and serving breakfast. Three hours later the conductor comes by for our tickets. The train is not full. We have our own glass compartment. We close the door and play with the radio and light buttons above the door. None of them work.

The train to Split is a sad train when it comes, two whole cars gliding into the Zagreb station like lost sausage links. And the conductor will not let us on. We have tickets, the conductor agrees, but we need a reservation. He tells us to go to the information desk. We run to the information desk. The lady at the information desk tells us we ought to be at the ticket window.

Luckily it’s not a large station.

The line is short and the reservation process is quick and we are on the sausage train with time to spare. You can smell the plastic newness of the train car. The seats are covered in blue cloth and the tray tables fold down like large blonde wood lozenges. At the front of the car a red LED display spells out our destination. Split. The train starts to move, and it feels like the Long Island Rail Road. Then the digital display stops working.

Just like the Long Island Rail Road.

The train swoops and turns up into the mountains so that it feels like we are flying close to the ground, but the light fades too early and for most of the journey only the distant city lights bob toward and away from us. The Split train station is across from the ferry terminal.

…

EC52
ONE WAY TICKET SECOND CLASS 16362 Ft (ABOUT $79.48USD)
DEPARTS BUDAPEST’S KELETI STATION DAILY 8:25AM
ARRIVES ZAGREB 2:18PM (SCHEDULED) 2:40PM (ACTUAL)

RESERVED SEAT, ZAGREB TO SPLIT
ONE WAY SECOND CLASS 36HRK (ABOUT $6.23USD)
DEPARTS ZAGREB DAILY 3:22PM
ARRIVES SPLIT 8:47PM

We walk into the ticket office in Krakow. We wait in the wrong line. The lady behind the counter kindly points us across the room to the windows that say “International.” We walk across the room. We stand in line behind two American girls who are talking about their culture shock. We hate them.

We ask for tickets to Budapest. We tell the nice lady where we want to go. We are offered second class travel or the sleeper car. We can pay with a credit card. And we are done.

It’s an hour before our train is scheduled to depart and we are at Krakow’s tiny train station. The waiting room is a picturesque mix of ancient, wood-slatted benches and the pigeons who are crapping all over them. So we walk across the cobblestone square to the mall, browse through the H&M and buy marzipan from a vending machine. By the time we return our arrival track has been announced and we walk over to merge, with uncomfortable seemlessness, with the squadron of backpackers waiting on the platform. Four enormously drunk men in matching shirts and scarves walk by, and then down the platform, and then they walk by again. As they walk they sing a soccer anthem, then stop singing to do push-ups, and then begin singing again. The train pulls in with one Krakow-Budapest sleeper car. We get on it with half the backpackers. The other backpackers and the soccer fans head for the second class cars. I am glad we paid for the sleeper.

And the sleeper is classy. Three bunks are stacked along one wall. On the other wall, below the shaving mirror, the table folds up to reveal a sink. Standing in the narrow walkway between the beds and the concept of furniture it is hard to imagine three people occupying this space at once. But our compartment and every compartment we peer into has only two occupants. Inside the mirrored cabinet above the sink-table are two bottles of water, two plastic-bagged croissants filled with chocolate pudding and packets with wet-naps and soap. It is a relaxing ride. We spend the morning waking up and asking ourselves if we have missed Budapest entirely.

…

TRAIN TO BUDAPEST
ONE WAY TICKET SECOND CLASS SLEEPER 306PLN (ABOUT $100.96 USD)
DEPARTS KRAKOW GLOWNY DAILY 10:36PM
ARRIVES BUDAPEST-KELETI NEXT DAY 9:32PM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Croissants with pudding inside!

It’s 10:30pm and it’s dark. We have the name of one youth hostel but we’re not sure quite how to find it. And we’re not sure that Kiev’s scenic alleyways are best experienced in the dark. We can always take the train to Kharkiv. We don’t know where Kharkiv is. But we can take the train there and then try to get a ticket to Krakow in the morning. Or we can sleep in the train station.

At least the train has beds. We are going to Kharkiv.

Down the stairs to the platform, we ask the lady taking tickets at the train’s door where Kharkiv is. She calls to a passenger who comes to the door, a man with dark hair in a black leather jacket who speaks some English. Where is Kharkiv? He tells us Kharkiv is in Ukraine. Where in Ukraine? East? West? We have reached the limits of our common language. Now we get nervous.

Back at the ticket window the line is twelve people long and moving slowly. It doesn’t matter. We wait as the train to Kharkiv leaves. We wait as the train to Krakow leaves. We wait on line to buy our tickets to Krakow, and we wait on line for a refund for our tickets to Kharkiv. And then we turn to the station.

At night most of the seats in the Kiev train terminal are occupied by the homeless. The seats in the central corridor must be the most comfortable, because they are so popular we never get to sit in them. These seats are packed with heavy ladies with heavy hands and heavy feet, scarves tied babushka style on their heads and carefully packed bags arranged around their feet. In the chilly, dimmer seats on the second floor of the international train station men who smell like vodka lie down across as many seats as they can grab and travelers compete for the seats that remain. As the long night wears on the distance and difference between the homeless men and unlucky travelers recedes.

Our seats at the front of the station offer unobstructed legroom but also the closest proximity to the gusts of mid-October that sweep periodically through the terminal. We try to sleep. There are many ways you can try to sleep in these seats. You can lean your head back into the pillow of cold air, hoping this will fool your body into thinking this plastic seat could be a bed. You can lean forward, head resting on the bag in your lap, or you can lean sideways towards a companion or empty seat. No one way is sufficient for an entire night or even an hour. So try them all, repeatedly, eyes and mind half-closed and unwilling, one after the other after the other.

It’s only midnight when the police officer and lady ticket agent come around. If you can present a ticket for travel on the next day they will let you be. They kick out the homeless men. Two seats to my right unlucky travelers are reduced to tears. The homeless men move to the seating area on the other side of the international ticket balcony and lie down. The heavy, package-laded women of the central corridor come in to take their places.

After a third sweep by ticket officials we are all motioned across to the other side of the terminal, where the homeless men have just claimed the best spots. In our new seat Mister Chen is to my left and to my right side is a man who smells like vodka and is kicked out by ticket officers six times. Each time he goes back to sleep. Each time they come back and yell. And then he goes back to sleep. Across from us a man fishes around inside his rotten parka and takes out a kitten.

Morning breaks late and Mister Chen sleeps later. At 8am we eat butter on bread ripped from a loaf. Then we put our bags back in the train station lockers. Then we head outside.

We are back an hour before our train leaves. We wait, fists balled in anticipation, for our train to reach the board. It is not appearing – this is some kind of rush hour and the board is thick with trains leaving ten minutes before ours. I leave Mister Chen with the bags and walk swiftly down the train corridor, reading the individual departure signs – and there it is. Track nine. I walk back, we grab our bags, we go. Boarding, we ask the lady taking tickets if the train is going to Krakow. Krakow? She doesn’t know. Poland? Poland? Yes. The train is going to Poland. Good enough.

The train’s configuration is new to us. Each compartment has three bunks. The bottom bunk is a bench seat. The middle bunk is the backrest of that seat, which folds upwards into a bed on an impossible series of hinges. The third bed is already folded out very, very high up. Our tickets assign us the bottom two bunks, and we have the room to ourselves until a few minutes before the train pulls out when we are joined by a Ukrainian journalism student. She is going to a music festival in a castle outside of Lviv. We talk about music. She says most bands don’t bother coming to Ukraine, and it’s very hard for Ukrainians to get visas to visit EU countries to see shows. She calls Belarus a “special country.” Her impression of Americans is that they have all written self-help books. She tells us the extra charge on the Moscow-Kiev train was for the bedsheets. She tells us to watch out – the Russians will steal your shoes.

The Ukrainian journalism student leaves the train at 7am. We get off at 9am at Medyka, Poland, surrounded by customs officials, to board a shuttle train to the customs office. We are entering the EU.

A review of our passport, a stamp, and we are all through. Except for a man in a baggy suit who is shouting his innocence as he is patted down. Then he removes VHS tapes from his pants pockets, from pockets inside his suit jacket. They keep coming, and I am standing in the next room watching him because they have also detained Mister Chen. Since Mister Chen has not though to bring VHS tapes the customs officials must eventually let him go.

Taking a left out of the customs building, we walk one block and take another left to the train station. There’s enough time to get some zlotny and walk around the main square at the train station, where the few store fronts offer money exchanging. When the train to Krakow arrives we board it with little drama, sitting mostly by ourselves at the windows in a six-person terrarium and dozing as the train moves, slowly, locally, through Poland.

Later that night – after arriving in Krakow on a Saturday, spending the whole afternoon and evening wandering to nearly a dozen hostels and a few too expensive hotels and not finding any room at the inns, after sitting in the common room of the hostel we have booked for Sunday night, silently biding our time until the common room closes and we will be back walking the streets until dawn, deciding that it is time to go, as we are putting our coats and hats back on the lady at the desk stops us to say that another group’s train has been delayed, and we can have their room for the night. It’s 1:30am. We drink the beer.

…

TRAIN 051 TO MEDYKA
TRAIN 37100 TO KRAKOW
ONE WAY TICKET KUPE 335 HRYVNA (ABOUT $67.00USD)
DEPARTS KIEV 8:42PM
ARRIVES KRAKOW NEXT DAY 3:40PM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Sit next to an educated Ukrainian with a great command of English and a real love of music and try to find a band you both know in common. The Ramones? No. Just Moby.
reiseauskunft.bahn.de

Fresh off of the night train from Moscow, our first task in Kiev is to buy tickets for that night’s train to Krakow. There is a building with a bell tower to our left. This building is useless. The building to the right has ticket windows. The different ticket windows will give you conflicting reasons why you should not be at their window and go to another window. And so we go across the cavernous hall, to the other room of ticket windows with fast food stands in the middle. And so we go back across, and then we go back into the hall, and then we ask the lady at the information desk. She points up.

On the second floor two long corridors lead to the train tracks, and past these train tracks, past the kiosks and money exchanges and waiting areas stacked with the indigent and ice cream vendors is – another train station. A new, shiny, completely different train station. The one where you can buy international train tickets.

Mister Chen buys tickets to Krakow from the International ticket window. Platzky class. “At least I’m pretty sure I got tickets to Krakow,” he says. We look at the ticket. It says “XapKiB.” Cyrillic. Of course. We pay at a desk in the basement for two tokens and use the first to lock our bags in a locker. Eight hours later we are back to spend the other token.

Hurrying to the departures board, bags on our backs, we spend our last Hryvnia on food and bottles of beer. And then we wait. The display alternates between Cyrillic and Roman letters. XapKiB to Kiev, KNiB to Kharkiv. We wait for the platform number. Then a new train appears, the train an hour later than ours. The display changes. That train is going to Krakow.

We run to the international ticket window. Above the window a television displays the number of tickets remaining on all departing trains. We stand in line. Tickets on the train to Krakow = 0. At the front the lady in the window instructs us to stand on the other line for a refund on our tickets to Kharkiv, and then stand on this line again so she can sell us tickets on the next available train to Krakow. Understand my use of “said” to mean she was speaking in Ukrainian and gesturing and we were speaking in English and panicking.

There is a tall man with a shaved head and small beard standing on the other line, and he now comes to our aid. He speaks to the lady in Ukrainian. Yes, we can get our tickets to Krakow here, and THEN get a refund. Where are you from? He asks. Brooklyn. Oh, he says. I live in Astoria.

We thank him. We buy our tickets. When does the next available train to Krakow leave?

Tomorrow?