Day #15/31: Car

DAY #15: CAR

By the time I got to Ukraine, I expected that train was going to be the most popular/most reasonably priced mode of transport between major cities. What I didn’t expect was to learn that the train between the capital of Kiev and my closest train station would be 13 hours. There are plenty of major cities even farther (L’viv is a cool 24 hour train ride for me) but Kiev is the most major city that I would go with any sort of frequency. In the US, my train travel was extremely limited. In fact, I think that my train ride from Albany to Washington, DC to report to Peace Corps staging was the longest train ride I had ever been on up to that point. I certainly had never been on a sleeper car in my life. Luckily, the first time I took an overnight train I had Lenara to show me how to do it. She showed me everything from how to buy tea to where to put your used linens at the end of the ride. The etiquette is something that I am still learning about. From where to set your shoes after removing them to how to pack and disembark in the middle of the night so as not to wake others in the coupe up. I will surely be a champ at the end of service. It took me a while just to learn how to climb into the top bunk without falling. The shot was snapped on a trip I took when returning home from Kiev after Eleonora’s visit in October. What you cannot see in this particular train car is an identical lower bunk across the aisle on the left and two identical overhead bunks about 4 feet above this bunk. Your linens are included in every train ticket and if you know you will be getting off in the early morning hours, you can ask for the fee to be removed from the price. They serve no food on the train, so everyone brings a picnic of bread and sausages and hard boiled eggs. They do sell hot tea and coffee, but if you bring your own bags (or Ramen style cup-o-soup they will give you the hot water for free. There exist things called “sanitary zones” which means that when the train is travelling through a more urban area, they lock the bathrooms to prevent people from flushing their waste directly onto the tracks. In the rural areas you can see the tracks speeding by through the hole in the bottom of the toilet bowl. God, I loathe the train. But, at the same time I see why this is the most popular method of travel in the country. I just bought a ticket on a 13 hour train for the equivalent of about US$14. On my budget, I‘ll have to deal with it…or stop travelling. Truth be told, the bench bed in the photo is infinitely more comfortable than the original bed in my apartment (see the post called “Bedside”).