March 2008
An hour further west from me by train was a large town called Vinnytsia. It was the central city of our oblast. A volunteer lived in the town and the rest of us were scattered around it within an hour or two. PCVs conducted an English Club in Vinnytsia every other Saturday with local teachers and Ukrainians who wanted to practice English. It was also a great opportunity for the Americans to meet up.
When a volunteer who had been in Ukraine for a year invited me to the city for the English club, I was thankful because it was the first time I would be around other Americans in a month. I went by elektrichka to Vinnytsia to visit the club. My host mom was worried about me getting there but I was just overjoyed to escape. Matt came, too, from Nemiroff, where they make famous vodka.
We met with about 10 English-speaking Ukrainians. At that first meeting, the topic was on the Iowa Caucus, election and U.S. government. One gentleman at the club brought up points about the various caucuses and why the system is still used and the electoral college and generally displayed that he knew a good deal more about my government than I did. He seemed so knowledgeable of American sports and politics that he could probably debate my father on it.
Getting together with other Americans was comforting. Despite being from different sides of the United States, we understood each other. We got the same jokes and could speak naturally about things without extensive explanations.
We made American food together and reminisced on American pastimes. We were able to use Ukrainian and English interchangeably and be understood. It was comfortable to say, “Ya nesnayu” (I don’t know) and “shcho?” when an American asked a question, because it was such a habit and everyone understood.
We made fun of each other because we had all developed a habit of enunciating, using small words, omitting articles like “it” and “to her” and saying phrases that the Ukrainian children learned at school such as “It seems to me” and “I will go to you at this time.”
“I know English,” I would tell my friend Matt, who was notorious for sounding like a Ukrainian English-speaker. “You can speak to me normally.”
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No one at the train station spoke English and none of the train schedules were ever in English, except for some in Kiev.
While people strove purposefully past, and I avoided eye contact with taxi drivers and one-legged bums on crutches, I would stare stressfully at a train schedule to decipher the Cyrillic letters and figure out which track I should wait at.
The first time our language instructor gave us a tour of the train station, he explained the schedule board to us and moved on quickly like we all understood. I understood the schedule as well as I understood my dad when he started going on about testing a product at work using a fancy equation. I stayed behind and the foreign letters swam before my eyes. It was very clear that the next time I took a train, I would probably end up in Russia or Poland.
After training, I had to get used to traveling by myself. It was easier when there were five of us and we were always going to the same places and could help each other. Now, I had to be independent.
There were several different types of trains. Simple Elektrichkas were the slow crowded, economy trains and stopped in every village and town. We also had faster elektrichkas – called schivdky electrichkas – that were slightly more comfortable and quicker. The platzkart trains had sleeper cars and were more expensive. They were fast and didn’t stop at every tiny village. Kupe was the next step up and were private compartments of two that often had plug outlets. That was like being in the lap of luxury on a train. Peace Corps Volunteers could usually afford up to a platzcart train, but not for every journey.
I didn’t know about all the trains at first. After English Club Day, I had to get home. Tamara, my host mom, had written down two times of elektrichkas that would be available at the train station. One was at 2 p.m. and the other was 6 p.m. We were still on free Internet at the English library at 2 p.m. and, while it made me a little nervous to miss that train, I figured there would be something else available before 6:22 p.m. I would just ask. Since I knew the language and all.
I took a trolley bus back to the train station, and went into the main building. I studied the board of daily trains but it only listed the end destination; not what towns the trains would stop in.
I got in one of the shorter lines with the intention of asking the woman behind the glass about the trains, but since I was unsure, people kept pushing in front of me. In Ukraine, a queue is more an idea than a practice. Finally, I stopped a woman and asked her which window I should go to if I wanted a ticket to my town. She took me outside and pointed to a smaller building.
So I went in there. “When is the next train or elektrichka?” I asked. Next one was at 6:22, like my host mom had said. That was over two hours away. Depressing because I’d gotten up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the train that morning and I was exhausted and grumpy and nervous because I was by myself, and I just wanted to be in bed. Not in a train station waiting room for two hours.
I waited 20 minutes, trying to have a good attitude, and finally called my counterpart teacher. “Is there any other way to get back?” I asked.
“Go to the kasa (ticket window) in the main building and ask if there are any trains that will stop here on their way to another city,” she said. “Usually there are some, although they’ll be more expensive.”
Side note about kasa: I wrote “kaca” in a blog one time because that is literally how the word is spelled in Ukrainian since the “c” is an “s” sound. My family members had a field day with that one.
I went to the window, purchased a ticket on a train that would be stopping at my destination, found the correct track line by asking several different people, checked with the conductor to make sure it was going to my town, and was on my way 20 minutes later.
After we’d been moving for a few minutes, I asked the woman sitting across from me where she was going and she said “Krem,” Crimea. White-hot knifes of fear pierced through my stomach and I felt the most awful panic. Because I was pretty sure Crimea was way east and way south. And I should be going north.
I spent the next 10 minutes internally freaking out, going over the map in my head of what little I knew about Ukrainian geography. I knew of friends who, during training, tried to go to Chernigiv and ended up the opposite direction in Kyiv. And they knew Russian. And if I was on the wrong train, who knew when it would be stopping next? It was a platzcart train with compartments for sleeping and maybe it wouldn’t be stopping for hours and I’d be trapped on a train overnight going the wrong direction and end up in Crimea. I’d have to call Peace Corps, which meant every American in all of Ukraine would soon know about it because that’s how rumors were. “Did you hear about that volunteer from group 33 that tried to go home an hour away and ended up on the other side of the country?” And I’d have to call my host parents, who got nervous when I traveled alone as it was, and they’d never let me travel by myself again, and I should really learn more Ukrainian quickly so I understood what the heck was going on.
And then I got up the nerve to ask the woman again, “I’m sorry, I have a question. So you say you’re going to Crimea now?” She nodded and I looked wild-eyed because she asked me kindly, “Where are you going?” I told her and asked if it was the correct train.
She nodded and checked with her son and nodded again. “It stops there,” she said. “Yes.”
“Oh good,” I breathed in Ukrainian. “Oh thank God,” I said in English.
I learned later that my town is a large enough station that most trains stop there and that the train was going to Kiev first, and then on to Crimea.
I got to town in an hour and 5 minutes instead of the two-plus hours the electrichka takes.
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