I don't always drink beer - but when I do - I like to drink it in a dining car in a Soviet era train with mystery chicken and french fries.
So, I’m running along side a dark green train, in the rain. I’m pulling two gigantasaurus safari-pack type roller bags, one in each hand, with my Macbook in a backpack on my back and if we don’t find the right car in about 2 minutes the train will simply roll down the tracks for it’s 12 hour trek and leave us in Poltava Ukraine.
Us is my friend Sean Mathes, co-conspirator on the film we’ve come to Ukraine to shoot, who is loaded down like a sherpa with the same two roller bags (we bought 4 with different color trim at Costco before we left Denver – God, I miss Costco…) plus a fat and bulky camera bag with lights and a big yellow tripod, and his own laptop briefcase. He is sweating profusely and has been for the 3 hours of rapid packing, saying goodbyes to our new friends in Poltava and dealing with the odd reality that the taxi we called was such a tiny car it would barely fit 2 people in it, and the tiny truck was full of soccer gear and balls – incorrectly referred to here as football.
There’s something very unsettling about saying goodbye to people you’ve grown very close to very quickly when you are nearly dead certain you’ll never see them again the rest of your life. This is a cold fact as I look across my life at all the bands I’ve been in, towns I’ve played in for a month and gotten to know everyone then jumped in the van and disappeared, right on through towns I’ve lived in for a couple of years, and even sadder still, marriages with all the collateral in-laws, which always include that one relative of your spouse with whom you get along famously while the rest of the tribe hates you to your DNA.
The rain began about noon, the sun had not been around for nearly a week, and when we did finally say goodbye to the friends who showed up for a hug, it seemed like the temperature dropped several degrees, and the night got a little colder.
So this train is like forever long, and army green in the great tradition of the old Soviet Union who surely built this sturdy machine, and it smells. Not one smell, but smells plural. We drag our gear up on the steps and down the hallway through the tiniest hallway imaginable, squeezing past the local people who were smart enough not to be late, and stood now smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in the hall we had to drag out bags down to get to our compartment.
The thing about Ukrainians is that they do not give up their ground easily. The country has been conquered approximately 900 times since the dawn of history – a history that goes back centuries past good old America, with mongol hoardes like Genghis Kahn to the Communist Russian global expansion that started with it’s neighbors taking the place over and bossing people around, or killing them as Joseph Stalin did in 1932 by starving more then 2.5 – 7 million Ukrainians to death in an attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism. (The numbers vary because of the lack of records kept by people starving to death.)
So, Ukrainians on the street, in bars, discos and train hallways often act like NBA centers. They get their first and they are not moving, so deal with it. This has been a bizarre shift on the polite, excuse me, I need some space Americanism I’ve grown up with, but, now it’s just a pure pisser as my bag won’t fit past the surly guy ahead.
Finally in our compartment we smash our bags into the 4th bunk (we’ve rented the entire compartment in self defense) and collapse in a sweaty super humidified box on a train that will bang and rattle along for 14 hours on a scheduled 12 hour ride. It’s nearly snowing outside but the the temperature inside will go up to what I figure is crock-pot hot and stay there until we burst into the freezing cold on the other end in Odessa.
I swear to God, I don’t think I’ve ever had a more annoying travel experience, really all for the sake of the stifling heat in a dirty train car with a solid glass window that could not be lowered. I feel like the prisoner in the “hot box” in the movie Bridge over the River Kwai which I saw as a kid and surely began the phobia that ran through my childhood terrors about being locked out of the air conditioned house in the summer to swelter in the heat of the Ozarks in Southern Missouri – and now makes me nearly psychotic when I experience heat and trappedness.
Go South Young Man – and See The City of Odessa
It was a dark and stormy train station in Odessa Ukraine
We’d gone to Poltava to attend a social event related to the film and catch a confluence of people who would not be together again ever, and had planned to be there for about 8 days and then take this train to Odessa, a much larger port city on the Black Sea, and complete shooting interviews, edit the film and produce the beta. It is nearly impossible to describe the rapid series of events that pulled us into the little town of Poltava and kept us there for weeks, but the nature of the super-gravitation pull that bound us can be described in one word – people. Amazing awesome people who truly changed my life.
At the mid point of the 12 weeks Americans are allowed to stay in Ukraine with just a passport, an expat (expatriate – an American living fairly permanently in a foreign country) friend named Max Creel arrived in Poltava apparently to give us a huge ration of crap for attempting to make any movie about Ukraine, the largest country in Europe after Russia after only seeing about 4 square miles of a small town in the North East.
He was right.
The city of Odessa is amazing and has opened our eyes to an entire new level of the Ukrainian experience. It’s a by-gosh real city with malls and a lot more of the options and conveniences you’d expect in a larger city – or about any city in the USA, but don’t get carried away, everything in Ukraine is shaded differently than my myopic American experience.
In my next post I’ll share some of the paradoxical to the purely odd realities here. Hope you are enjoying this unusual information. Please let me know in the comments section below. If you encourage me I’ll likely get totally carried away!
