What do you get when you put a Jew, an Orthodox priest, a Ukrainian and a Russian in a train compartment? A REALLY GOOD BLOG.
Georgia left in the morning, leaving me to hang around Kiev and meet a few interesting people, and I began asking around how best to go around setting up a bit of tourism to this gorgeous city. After dossing around for a few hours and getting the most impressive t-shirt tan lines in history- it literally looks like I had walked into a spray tan salon (or whatever they call the orange factories) and forgot to take my shirt and shorts off- I finally dragged my suitcase out to the train station. Train stations in the Eastern bloc are difficult places to navigate. Not only are there all these tricky non English signs all over the place, but you have to be constantly aware of all the thieves and tramps who always sleep at the stations and are just waiting to rob someone who looks vulnerable or out of place. Train stations out here are pretty well known spots for vagrants, petty criminals, prostitutes and parking attendants.
The trains out here are reasonably decent, which is a relief considering I was having to spend about 15 hours in one to get to my grandparent's house from Kiev. The compartments themselves have two beds at the normal height on either side of a little space with a table by the window, with two narrow beds above them, supported tenously by some kind of chain on on both sides. Coming into my compartment, I was hit by a sense of confusion and the smell of sweaty men. Everyone looked at me as if I should be doing something useful and not just standing there like a gormless fool. I kind of clumsily introduced myself as Georgei Alexandrovich (I was really getting into this whole Russian thing now), lugged my suit case in the bit above the door and sat down with the 3 topless sweaty men. Not wanting to feel left out on this topless fun, I took my shirt off and totally forgot that it was permanently imprinted on my red and white skin anyway. We got talking straight away and I introduced myself, saying I was a student from Smolensk and was coming to visit my grandparents. The reason for this is pretty clear really: a foreigner travelling by himself is pretty much an open ticket and at this point I wasn't sure what kind of people these guys were. Though I didn't exactly relish saying I was from Smolensk (see all the bitching about it in pretty much the rest of this blog), I kind of had to explain why it was that I couldn't speak a word of Ukrainian when they started talking to me. Ukrainian is a weird mixture of old Russian, bits of modern Russian and a sprinkling of fuckknowswhatelse- for example the word for 'helicopter' is 'hylikopter'- it's kind of like they took some words from an assortment of European languages and just said it in a funny accent with lots of 'yh' type sounds. I used to be able to speak it fluently before I moved to England, and fortunately I found that I could still understand a lot of it, so I didn't have too many problems with that.
My fellow passengers turned out to be interesting enough people; one was a lawyer from Crimea, and the other two were firefighters from Kiev. The conversation moved from sort of general stuff about their jobs and whatever to more things like politics. We talked a lot about how they'd been fucked over by old presidents and whoever else felt like it (What a cunt Yuschenko was! I wish I hadn't been convinced so easily' 'What does it matter, they're all crooks anyway?') to how they didn't feel democracy was any good for their country. The most senior guy in the compartment was one of the firefighters, named Mihal, and made a pretty typical point for a person from this part of the world- namely that no country is really a democracy. He argued that the individual doesn't really have a voice and generally made himself sound like he listened to a lot of Immortal Technique and was pretty vocal at anarchist meetings... though he didn't look the type. I say this is a pretty typical view because the majority of people in Russia and Ukraine still remember Soviet Rule, and have still not got it out of their mentality yet, the result being that they are pretty hostile to the Western style of government, unlike their children. Personally I don't see the benefits of bringing democracy over here, seeing as all it seems to have done is rob the weak of any kind of safety and siphon money to the west, but I'm hardly a political commentator to be going into all this.
At that point feeling that the conversation had turned a bit heavy, the two firefighters started laying the table. Out came a loaf of bread, some tomatoes, some salami and, surprise surprise, a bottle vodka and 4 shot glasses. The lawyer tried to say 'no thank you, it's awfully kind of you but I really can't eat anything, I've just eaten' and the like, but of course he was roped in along with me. Every one of the men had a pretty nasty looking switchblade with them, including the one I was given as a going away present, and it definitely felt as though there was a subtext of 'my dick is bigger than yours' going on with how big and sharp the knife was, and I couldn't help but feel that my comparatively humble and skinny knife and me were losing this game.
After a few shots me and Mihal decided to go for a smoke, which was a bit of a difficulty considering that this was a non smoking train. Turns out what people did was stand between carriages smoking their cigarettes, and if a policeman (there were several on the train) came they simply threw them in the gaps between the carriages onto the rails. No one gave a shit, and late at night I even saw the train staff walking around freely with fags in their mouths. Clearly the Ukrainians had decided that non-smoking trains were a bad gimmick, but mullets are still great... go figure.
So our journey continued over vodka and food, which really only served as something to do between shots. The conversation was pretty interesting and I heard some pretty interesting stories, including how Mihal had to kill a massive bear one day when he was hunting in the forest. Far from being a cool story for him, it was a sombre recollection of how he killed an animal that they prized and revered above any other as a Slavic symbol. He explained how he came across it feeding and it turned and charged him, and he shot him straight in the chest at point blank range ('Huge as a lorry that beast was! He turned instantly on the spot and saw me and began to charge!') and then skinned it- he still has the pelt.
At one point, right after some shots, once we were thoroughly pissed, two policemen walking past popped their heads into our compartment and said 'you guys seem decent enough so I'll just warn you, you know you're not allowed to drink alcohol on this train?'. At this point we all blurted out how it was just mineral water, pointing to the various bottles of the stuff lying around the place. Mihal did his best to act sober but the minute he started talking it all went wrong for him. He seemed to forget how to talk as he slurred out 'h-h-h-hone-honestly this is juuussst wa-waa-water', screwing up his face in concentration and blinking like a rabbit in the headlights. This was too much for me and I burst out laughing, but thankfully so did the officers. They just said 'ok well just don't make it obvious and it doesn't matter' and walked off.
So we continued through three bottles of vodka, a few kilos of processed meat, a couple of litres of beer and a fair few hours of the journey. The conversation varied a lot and included stuff like talking about the greenhouse effect, the industrial revolution, the difference in Eastern and Western European mentality and evolution, and was actually reasonably coherent considering we were all pretty tipsy. This may seem pretentious to most people in England, but that is simply just the kind of topics people over here talk about when they get together and to be honest I would prefer that over talking about the fucking weather and moaning about our lives any day. At one point I started arguing with all of them about evolution, because all of them were Orthodox and didn't believe in it. Mihal said that clearly it couldn't be right seeing as we have developed a higher state of consciousness than any other animal and monkeys aren't turning into humans. By the way, the reason I mention Mihail a lot and not the others is that there was a strict hierachy in this compartment. As the most senior, Mihal represented the views of both him and his friends and was never interrupted or dismissed in any way. The lawyer guy was just a bit boring and shit. Anyway yea so they didn't believe in evolution basically because their evidence against it was the human brain and no matter how I argued it made no difference. However, all this religious zeal was suddenly stirred in Mihal as a result, and he decided to call in an Orthodox priest... who just happened to be strolling past our room at the time. The man came in pretty damn nervous- as would be expected if you're walking into a room filled with drunk men arguing heavily and a load of knives on the table- and sat down on the edge, near the door. He was dressed in a long black gown thing, with a long beard and long hair as is a traditional sign of wisdom in the Orthodox church. His hair fell over his tiny eyes that were so milky I wasn't sure if he was perhaps blind or something. 'Thank you for coming to sit with us, father. We're all very honoured and would very much like to know what the bible says about evolution' said Mihal as he held his hand and looked at him intensly. Whether it was the surroundings or maybe he was just like that, the priest mummbled his way through genesis and stuff like that. Mihal, convinced that guy was a certified big deal who knew everything about everything, was satisfied with having won the argument and moved on to asking him question like 'I smoke and drink, does that mean I will go to hell?'. As we all strained to hear his mumbling above the roar of the train, I could see a look of realisation dawning on Mihal's face that he was asking for life lessons from a twenty- something year old, overeducated virgin. And so, with much ceremony the priest was dismissed from our compartment and we continued to drink, eat and talk shit.
Eventually we all got pretty tired and climbed into our beds. I took the top bunk because by that point I was totally sober, whereas Mihal was still very much wearing a lashmina (I think there is about one person who is still reading this up to this point, so it's fine to make private jokes yea?), and we all passed out pretty quickly. At night I heard a massive commotion outside the door to our compartment, and noticed the snoring had stopped and I could tell from the everyone's sillouhetes that no one was asleep. Eventually there was a bit of activity and things calmed down, and I found out later that a few people were arrested for some reason in the corridor outside ours. In my half awake state the scene in the dark compartment was highly surreal. The window was open and there was loads of lightning outside which ocassionally illuminated everything in the carriage, as well as the railway. The train was speeding along and the clank of wheels and gears and whatever else coupled together with the thunder and sparks made it feel like I was in some kind of giant factory or something. From then on I had a pretty fitful sleep, with dreams of being sucked out of the bed and through the window, and only managed to fall asleep for the last hour of the journey.
I was woken up in the morning by a very hungover looking Mihal and packed my stuff up to the sounds of everyone moaning about how their head felt. I said goodbye to the lawyer (who was the Jew mentioned at the very beginning of the blog by the way), because he was getting off at a later stop, and the three of us left the train. At the station I said goodbye to Mihal and the other guy, and grabbed a taxi to my grandparent's house. I came in, ate loads and promptly fell asleep.
It's wonderful seeing them again, as well as my little cousin, aunt and uncle. I'll try to keep my blogs coming, and hopefully they won't just be about how I'm eating, sleeping and playing chess with grandad all day.
