2010 Tartu-Odessa-Tbilisi, Part6 / Warsaw Train Station - Warsaw - Warsaw Train Station

Text: Me
Photos and other stuff: We



Warsaw train station - Warsaw – Warsaw train station



Elusive Warsaw. I find it hard to write about you. You give me stories, yes you have, but you haven’t become a solid memory. There is something ethereal about you. As soon as I leave, your integrity, your oneness seems to evaporate.
There was a palm tree. That made me happy. Partly a reason for all of us, unconcealed, for to be on the road was the possibility to prolong warmth, for them for the length of the trip, for me - hopefully, to some extent - for the whole circle of the year. Now the sun was shining (occasionally) and a huge palm tree, a proof that we were doing all right as compared to all this chill and rain that had accompanied us until.
It was morning and we had to drink coffee. No rush, that was the general mood. We sat down at a street cafe from where the palm tree was reassuringly visible. The stupidest thing one can do in a new city is to try too hard. Run a museum marathon or pursue for a demanded adventure. And end up drained of energy, tongue hanging well down to a waist coat. Let it embrace you, let the pace happen. Drink coffee, chat, take pictures of each other. And go and get some beers. That’s a nice start for a day in a strange city. Start walking. Walk without aim, turn or not following local signs, impressions happening here and now. We ended up in the garden of the university. Wondered around, discovered unknown plants with huge blossoms, sat down at a balustrade with a beautiful view. Had some beer, scratched our initials next to names of lovers and those city space explorers who feel that their discovery, their arrival is as important as the ones before and after. The theme of the university library came up, He knew that this building is impressive. We figured out where it lies and took an aim to it. Bought more beer on the way. Reached the library. Said our “oo!’s” and “aa!’s”, the architecture is completely worth it, but didn’t want to go in. Wandered through the entrance hall, out again from the other side, on, up to the top of the building. There’s a garden. A wonderful lush greenery, diffused borders between up and down, on, around, next to and in the building. We stayed there for hours.
/I bought two postcards from this entrance hall. One depicted a man without a face, bent down under back full of masks bound to bundle. Other had a suited man from waist down on it, and a suitcase carried by this man. Suitcase was just falling open, autumn leaves and faces dropping out. I love them, postcards. It is a compliment, nowadays, if someone, for no reason of a red-letter day sends you a postcard. He or a she, this one, has spent one’s time to make this effort, for to produce a real thing, a piece of something, a value, what will then travel honestly through time and space and will surprise you, the recipient, with its tangibility. It’s not common for us to put anything else than money and effort of purchase into gifts. A postcard is one’s time and performance, an actual value turned, but not converted, to a token of value. One can’t buy time. Postcard carries a piece of presented time without the measured mediation of money. And yet it is an obsolete medium of message. /
We saw couples taking their wedding photos in this garden. This is always a sign that you have found a spot of local pride of generally agreed beauty (cf Colosseum). For us it wasn’t an alert for mainstream, no, we were by the side of it all, constant flow of tourists, we were sitting on a bench deep in the bushes and doing well with our beers and secluded in our bubble that we had brought along from the roadside. There was voyeurism around us and we gave it another angle.









We strolled on, finally; reached the old town. There’s a square on the edge of it. Every time I go there, I feel like visiting a place where I’ve maybe been to, this “maybe” being similar to what you inherit from dreams, or childhood travels. I can’t even tell how many times I have been there, really. There were breakdancers performing in front of the monument. This time and that I know, She took pictures of them with my camera. And yet, now, already later, I find once again my memories about and from this square being mostly evaporated. Solid pictures depicting those rather average breakdancers and that’s it. “There are nice houses there,” I could say, about my memories, but that doesn’t actually take visiting the place. Could be a lucky guess.
We somewhat wandered around the old town itself, inside it. I have pictures to prove it to myself. And ended up in a round-shaped bar. A very cute one, almost nonexistent type in Estonia – layers of history and traditions of past times mixed with modern details and tastes made up the interior, people making a contribution for the atmosphere. All kinds of people, young and old, local and foreign, some with fancy suits and some with oversized taste for trend. No seats, some bar-perches, most people were supposed to stand by the thin board attached to the wall at about chest level. That was a type of gulp-and-go place. Coffee, of course, selection of drinks - but a small glass of beer being a norm - and some light dishes on offer, sandwiches and the like. A perfect lunchtime venue, humane and with some temperate per-mills. Again, an interactive book I liked to read. We had some beer and sandwiches, me quietly reading and enjoying, made our explorer-initials on the wall amongst others, and went on.
Another aimless stroll ended up in a remaining part of Warsaw Ghetto. We passed through it on our way back to the train station. I don’t know how correct it is to call it “a monument”, nevertheless it is one of the most impressive monuments I’ve seen. A street sided by empty houses, in contrast with surroundings by their style, a cut in city reality. You walk this street and think; huge black-and white portraits of people, photography’s truth value at its best looking down at you from walled up window holes of the buildings, and if that could go unnoticed, then same kind of portraits hanging down from wires connecting two sides of the street hardly can. A history’s lesson to learn, I hear sometimes being said.
It started raining. That was no drizzle any more, that was a sound downpour. So we ran, and I, as little as I wanted to admit it, ran to meet my Comrade.
Might be that all this ethereal Warsaw-issue can be addressed as a task to overcome my first Warsaw memory. We were coming back from the Czech Republic, I think, another one of those bus excursions so popular back then. I was about 17. We were supposed to spend the night in the bus. It was during some kind of a pause when one of the bus drivers approached me and asked: “What do you do at nights?”. Confusing, for sure. Those drivers usually completely avoid dealing with people behind them. I said: “I sleep.” The thing was that he “had noticed” me being talkative, or social. Or something. Actually, I have no idea what had he noticed, but he asked me to give him some company during the night, to have somebody to talk to in pursuit of avoiding sleep. Not for all the night, of course, just as long as I want to, no sweat. The other bus driver needed some sleep to be fresh the next day. I agreed, although with serious second thoughts – I was sitting next to a girl I covertly (at least so I thought) adored, fairly to no avail. But there was some win-win quality to it. Getting some karma-credit from the bus drivers side and give more space for her, for more comfortable sleeping, and at that age a feeling of doing something for everybody’s benefit was much more of an ample cause.
When all others fell asleep it was time for me to climb to the front of the bus. There were limp limbs and an occasional head hanging to the aisle, pitch black shadows in the restless dim darkness of the road and its traffic. So we sat there for hours, like pilots of a space vehicle carrying the crew in cryogenic sleep through the darkness of the space. Car lights as passing stars.
We talked about everything. Very slowly, sometimes having gaps between the words for several minutes. Even if some sleepers close to us heard us, it most probably sounded like primeval Nordic lullaby.
I got a personal pee stop, somewhere along the way. Our dark starship, engine silently humming, waiting for me to get back from my spacewalk. I felt important.
Around half past four we were deep in Warsaw. Soviet apartment blocks passing by, endless rows of gray buildings lined up by broad gray lanes. And suddenly a statue of a bear standing on a rock, far, visible and gone again, all gray. The driver gave me a road atlas of Europe, where Warsaw was two to two centimetres stain, and asked me to help to choose a correct way out from the upcoming roundabout with five or six exits. We took wrong turn at least three times. It is not easy to turn around a full size bus, even with the somewhat more loose traffic rules of the night. The other bus driver woke up. Probably he felt seasick, finally - after all this whirling - in that weird coffin-like drawer they have for sleeping, and came to us, pointed the right way out (he was a pro of night-time Warsaw navigation), and let me go to sleep.
Grey and dark tones of block houses and a stone bear in the midst of a desolate night. Elusive, deeply surreal experience for and in a young mind. Seemingly harder to overcome than presumed. Fuck, compared to that trip, all other Warsaws are as real as a sci-fi movie.

2010 Tartu-Odessa-Tbilisi, Part6 / (Warsaw)

Text: Me
Photos and other stuff: We



Pleading for the defence of staying at a hostel in Warsaw (a hindsight)



/Alas! Hostels! A mystery you are to me.
Once I was in Oslo. A work trip. I was accommodated in a hotel. It was quite a shock. Middle class, up to the selection of tapestry and smell. I wondered for long whether the odeur of the room is part of the deal, and desired by some, or a weird heritage of previous lodgers. Heavy, peculiar, a very sweet smell. Couldn’t breathe, being afraid of inhaling a toxic amount of air fresheners, couldn’t smoke to kill it either, so the sign said, just next to a tasteless painting of flowers. Impression amplified, as this was the gist of all the places I stayed during that long pre-booked trip. I evacuated to the cold Oslo evening, lightly dressed, airline had lost my suitcase. I smoked and walked around the corner of the hotel building to find shelter from the wind. And I saw it. There was a hostel on the first floor. I was suddenly smoking behind a huge window of a hostel, just below my hotel. I saw some youth inside, an administrator wearing dreadlocks, and I felt a powerful feeling of misplacement in the world, a misplacement and injustice what might be felt by a little boy with no means in front of a showcase of a candy shop (around nineteen thirties, for milieu). These people, doing their simple evening things, maybe even boring things, at a place where they probably just slept for money, these people seemed for me, an abashed boy behind the window, smoking in the light snowfall and shivering from cold, like a unreachable world of abundance for Cinderella.
In Vienna I once tried to go to a hostel. But it was fully booked and I was sent to a cheap hotel instead. I watched those all prepared backpackers arriving, holding their LPs and having a reservation. I admit, I was somewhat proud of not having a reservation, of not having a compulsion to reach somewhere at all, but it sucked to leave. A year ago, I asked the price for somebody in Tallinn - for some tourist I picked up on the street with my offer to help – from one of the Old Town hostels. A simple question asked with shining eyes and I was gulping down everything I saw. I can remember entering another hostel in the Old Town, for as far as two steps, but I didn’t even have an excuse to get me as deep as the third or – fourth step inside. Clumsy me.
And, actually, She, when we met, was living in a beautiful art noveau building which had a hostel on the first floor. Now it is amusing to think how she couldn’t understand at all - whilst the first visits I had to her place -, how bewildered she was about why on earth I so badly wanted to see that hostel from inside. I was trying to make up excuses, reasons, whatever, let’s go and see if people will sit and play guitar in the evening! or could we go and check the prices? Cheap excuses. This hostel thing disconcerts me. I lose all my charm and self-confidence when things get close to hostel issues. A mystery, all those voices on the background, voices of my friends who casually mention all those reasons, good reasons, to enter a hostel, good reasons, like sleeping at one or a few, or living at those establishments down under, or wherever, or telling stories without even emphasising on – for me so obviously important! – setting of a hostel, be it washing laundry at their friends hostel, so casually they mention it, or sleeping in a bunk which has curtains which make a feeling of lying in a box, or getting stuffed with food by the Japanese.
It’s like reading about blow job from a book. I’m a virgin./

2010 - 2011 Tbilisi - Tbilisi Airport - Tbilisi

Text by: Madis Katz


The Ghost Train

This is about a train ride what I haven’t had. It’s about a train what I want to take just to make sure it’s there.

It all started back in September, when we arrived to Georgia. One of my travel companions had read from LP that there’s a train connection under construction between the Tbilisi train station and the airport. He made some calculations based on the given estimate of construction duration and the publishing date of this concrete LP edition, and concluded that this connection should be ready. We considered the “should be ready” factor of Georgia and didn’t get our hopes up but asked around, nevertheless. Most of the taxi drivers claimed there is no such a line. Some other people said there is a line but it works “maybe”.

It sounded somewhat unreliable, and an adventure of finding out the schedule for the “maybe” train in Georgia a bit too time demanding for the fun of it. So, when my companions had to leave, they did it using the regular “flag a taxi and bargain” way.

But I had a seed in my head, and it demanded some irrigation. After not so long I found a person who actually had taken the train. He told me how he went for it for the first time. In the middle of the night (as, for some reason, many of the planes depart and arrive in the middle of the night around here) he found himself behind closed doors of the train station. Locked inside of it. The train from the airport had brought them to Tbilisi all right, but seemingly, considering locked doors, it was hard to get away from the tracks and platforms. Nobody there to ask for advice.

He described the train (another time when he took it) as completely empty, standing there, at the station, lights lit, deserted. He entered, sat. Suddenly the train started moving. Ha sat alone in the lit railway carriage dipped in the surrounding deep darkness throughout the voyage. Even this person who was supposed to sell the tickets didn’t show up.

Soon I happened to be in the train station and as I was there I took the possibility for checking the schedule for this mysterious train. I found it, proper-looking printout, partly in English. I wrote down the times into my notebook. It felt so nostalgic, pre-internet era thing to do. This elusive schedule, when I looked at it there, fresh and written by my own hand in my notebook - it seemed so trustworthy and real.

And then I was given a reason – a friend, while leaving Georgia, forgot her Swiss army knife in her hand luggage and left it there at the airport for me to pick up. (They also had planned taking the train to the airport, but it offered them two hours of plain waiting, an extra time hard to substantiate with all the sitting around peculiar to flying.) I looked into this schedule, now with an evident aim. Trains wait there, at the airport, for ten minutes before coming back. That was not enough time, even if I would have run and hoped for no queue at the desk where the knife was waiting. Next step – interval. Between two to three hours during the night and early morning, then four hours up to noon and then six hours from there to the two-three hours interval of the evening and night period again. This particular knife-holding desk was opened only during the day. Early morning is not the prime time of the day for me, but, again, no trains between twelve and six. Anyway, just waiting for two to three hours? Because of a knife? Or rather for the sole reason of being able to take the train? I can manage considerable concessions for to have a possibility to prefer trains as transport, but that was a bit too much. Tbilisi airport is no special case amongst its kin - heavily expensive, no comfortable sitting places for non-paying customers, a building in the middle of nowhere, nowhere which is bleak. Park, please? Can somebody name an airport which would have a park next to it, where you could sit on a bench and read while surrounded by lush, quiet, friendly greenery? Asphalt and tasteless, overpriced bars – that’s the trend for the house of airports.

I took a bus instead and it was pain in the ass. Long and boring ride, “there and back again” as in real, prosaic life. Nothing remarkable happened for those pages.

Next chance came to me in January. I went to the airport for to farewell a friend. I delved into my tangible schedule again – if I kill some time, I can go for it, take the train back to the city that is. I felt this mixture of pleasure and anticipation when I was approaching the train station at the airport. Taxis slowing down next to me – I have to admit, I was alone walking there, and I had nowhere to walk to if you, as an average taxi driver, render this train solution and the accompanying fancy station building nonexistent –, me waving them to go with assured gesture of a platonic train lover. My eyes were locked at this end-of-the-line building, the airport train stop. A golden, curved form, a bit reminding a concha of a giant (let me remind – golden!) snail, accented arches descending from the arrival direction towards the ground. I reach it and step in through half opened sliding doors. It’s clean, it’s fancy and it’s completely empty. A little lady rushes to me from a small room where she was watching TV, and tells me there are no trains. What do you mean? Why? When will there be another one? We have a language problem, her Russian is bad, my Russian is bad. She says something somewhere is broken. That’s all she knows, that’s all I will know.

When I was walking back towards the airport taxi drivers who passed me did not slow down anymore. It felt like they were laughing at me. Miserable me, I went and took a seat in a bus, resentful and fully aware of what kind of pages were waiting for me.

And now, say three weeks ago, two quests were arriving from Estonia. I was thinking about going to welcome them at the airport. By train, of course - I could take a book with me and sit through my time of waiting in a best manner. But I felt some unease about just walking to the train station and decided to make some enquiries first. After all, I had collected four-five phone numbers of the train station from different sources. Just in case. Now it was the case. I started calling. One was a fax machine. None of the others answered. For an hour. I gave up with the train station, checked the airport web page instead. They had train schedule there online, checking and - same as mine. Still, better to be safe than sorry - I called to the airport. The schedule has changed, they said, but they don’t know it. Who might know it, I enquired. Train station. Somebody else, maybe? I didn’t give up. Information line 09. Ok, thank you.

I call 09. Can you speak English? She calls for someone by name. I can hear the sounds of an office on the background. The English speaker arrives and takes over. I start getting the information about train times. After fourth departure time - and the process of telling times is slow, like she would have to google each one of them separately - I understand that she can’t grasp the concept of “half past”. In Estonian, also in Russian, you say “half to” to signify the same thing. To say half past four you’d say “half five” or “half to five”. That insight made me careful, very very careful, and I started going over all the times I had written down thus far. Just to be sure. After I had five asked and checked, I stopped. I had the most usable ones and continuing (the initial plan was to write them all down) would have meant a huge phone bill for me and a glass of sugar water for her. Hard work it was. Some of those times matched with the ones I already had, some of them had seemingly changed.

For other reasons I finally didn’t welcome them at the airport. But I had a new schedule. What a success . I was proud. I mean, how many people actually knew that schedule? As a foreigner I felt as a very special insider.

I told those two Estonian quests about my little adventures around the airport train issues. They had also heard that there is a train connecting the airport with city centre, seemingly the rumour is very viable outside of Georgia. We planned to go to a myth-busting mission – just, notwithstanding, take the train, there and back again. And that would be that.

We didn’t do it*, though.

So, I didn’t know much more than I did three weeks ago when today we decided to go to the airport to welcome some friends. We would have had to play cards for two hours once there, but as we were three it sounded like an ok plan – a match of Rummy 500 in the middle of the night at the airport, why not. I had Information concerning train schedule, gained from the reliable and recommended source just some time ago. That didn’t sound like something one should have doubt in. As at the airport they had said that there is a new schedule I thought it’s quite safe bet to presume that it hasn’t changed again in past three weeks.

We were running late and rushed to the train station. Caused some confusion with our questions – where does it depart from? And reached to an old guy who pointed at airport train schedule. That was something different. Four trains, two in the morning , two during the day time. Nothing there what I had heard about. Four trains instead of eight, and departing at almost completely reversed times. Well. Is it new, I ask. Oh, no, the old guy says, it has been like that for the past half of the year or so.

I’ll bet if one checks the airport home page now, the train schedule is still there. The same worthless schedule what I have in my notebook - or I actually have a somewhat upgraded (or somewhere-graded) version of it - the trustworthy and real-looking schedule in it’s beautiful, handwritten and nostalgic form. Internet might be the fast medium for the information, but seemingly it can’t speed in solitude – I mean six months should be enough time to update something on the web, no? Especially if it concerns transport what people might actually want to take. (Yet, maybe it can speed in solitude – I just checked the web page myself. There’s a schedule there I have never seen before. Maybe this is a schedule for the better future, delivered beforehand? Or maybe I should start collecting them, different ghost-times for a simple trip of Railway station – Airport – Railway station.)

Here the fastest medium for the information about the train schedule between an international airport and the capital city of the country called Georgia is a A5 printout glued to the window of the ticket office on the third floor of the main train station building.

And yet this airport home page looks so modern, I think, there at the vagzal, while I write down the “new” schedule in my notebook. With a pencil, this time.

*The plan itself is alive, nevertheless.

April, 2011.

2010 Tartu-Odessa-Tbilisi, Part5 - Suwalki – Warsaw train station

Text: Me
Photos and other stuff: We


Suwalki – Warsaw train station


In this train, while I was awake, everybody seemed far away, including myself. I slept, and I was awake, if not to say I was in between. I was sleeping, and yet not, like a plumule in fall and not. When the train stopped, I woke up, looked around, somewhat registered people relaying, moving. I was tired, I was grumpy, I wished to be somewhere else, even if not quite certain where exactly. This place probably included fresh towels, warmth, possibly a sauna with naked people, free drinks on demand and no time limit for all that.
People moved around like gray shadows. Or like unaccented lives in reality - unnoticed, insignificant, incomplete; individual, but not pronounced as such.
I can remember experiencing the presence of powerful women once, in a train, from Tartu to Tallinn. Vituperate me, feminists, but those ladies walked by me, just went by the aisle, and it wasn’t even a question whether they were travelling in the first class or not, it was the fact that all the males watched them as they passed. I just had to. Maybe they where famous, I wouldn’t know, I’m way too ignorant, but they were something, very much pronounced something. I had to look, this presence was powerful. Sheer force what made me feel small and boyish, insignificant in comparison. Women. They were Women. Impressive, how some people Are and some cope with being. And yet they looked so ordinary.
In this train to Bialystok, dowsing in and out, everything was yon, off. I was absent from the environment. I wanted to have a cigarette. And dozed off again.
There was a stop, and I saw a red train from the window, parked on parallel tracks. Beautiful old train, with round lights and round corners. Pungent in this petulant morningness. I was thinking of taking a picture. And I was thinking that the train is too far. She woke up, seemingly, as She told me “take a picture!”, I said I can’t, it is too far. But I took the picture. Grumpy. I wanted a cigarette.
It was a surprisingly long train ride, this first one. I’ve seen those places on the roadmap of Europe, Suwalki and Bialystok, I’ve been to both, been in between them, going from one to another and vice versa, even slept in Bialystok somewhere in the mid nineties, when bus excursions where still very popular in this part of the world (“three star” hotel at the outskirts, with security guys armed with machine guns guarding the entrance). All that, and still I’ve managed to be thoughtless enough to be surprised by the amount of time it took for the train to reach to Bialystok.
I was weary. I can’t recall what was the case with the tickets - did we buy Bialystok-Warsaw already from Suwalki or what, or did we somehow know that we could buy tickets on the train, or was there, in the reality which didn’t include me anyway, an option nr 3.
But when we got out of the train, and I was silent as I contemplated all the best possible ways to have this long awaited cigarette and ways to let Bialystok – a new place – embrace me, He saw a train on the opposite tracks, and he knew something about time and schedule, and He claimed it to be our train, he claimed it to leave in any second. She agreed. I don’t like to rush. Especially if I want to smoke.
We ran. Only few words about that. Imagine - me running with my impedimenta. Or let’s cut it down to one word: fuck.
It was our train, yes. And they were right to run. We sat there, She, He and Me, a stump by the time. Now I have been a smoker for a while, but this was the first really serious case of a hunger for a cigarette. For the whole ride I had thoughts in my head about smoking, and about how my mother told me that it is hard to quit. And how, now, I myself had reached to understanding it to be true, an understanding elegantly plain and self evident. I wasn’t quite myself. I was narrow. My capacity was narrow. And I blamed cigarettes. Kids! Never start smoking! Or, maybe, only pipe. Or cigars.
This second one was a polite train, polite in everything. Rather new, spruce, quite comfortable, carrying a full load of polite, neatly dressed people to work. Polite smile or two from fellow passengers, polite was the attendant, if there was anyone like such. I felt like an addict, and I felt like the morning rain - the damp one who got it descended upon him. An uncomfortable feeling, a bit similar to sitting in a crowded minibus after a two days of a winter hike. Untidy amongst the tidy.
And I have a mental picture of Him smiling conspiratorially, from behind a newspaper he was reading. I’m quite sure the newspaper was in polish.
This weariness of mine lasted well until the first cigarette in Warsaw. When they were busy finding out options for continuation, I was ignorantly smoking. Grumpy and narrow me, broadening himself up again. I think I didn’t even say anything to them. As soon as the train arrived, I walked directly over to the main door of the railway station and out.
And smoked.
All that felt like an airport, rather than a train station. This place, messy portal of arrivals and departures; you, poor smoker, standing there like in a river, clasping against the wall not to be carried away by the constant flow of people. Observing taxis, observing this heavily controlled strain of transport, cars, buses, bringing in more people, taking some away. Suitcases on wheels, all trendy and modern, backpacks, in some variety. Again you’re an alien, different, again you’re standing there where everybody else are moving, at the intermission between coming and going - you are neither. It is not nice to smoke at a place like that. It’s like trying to enjoy a peaceful cigarette at the doorway of rush hour metro, psychologically speaking. And yet this is the place where you’re supposed to go, you relict of unhealthy times! This door smoking is mostly common for airports. Train stations tend to be more humane and offer a snug nook or somewhat looser rules. Airports! It maybe wouldn’t be so bad if you wouldn’t harass even the people who like to have their air without the filter – I mean your air tastes tired, mishandled, exhausted, worn. What do you do to it? Let it go through security checks also?
Istambul – I had to spend five hours there in this airless building and go through security check after every cigarette. Oslo – you couldn’t even smoke on the same side of the road with the door, no, under some overpass, in a corner with the tenderness of concrete above, under and around you. Feeling like a broken down car rather than a human being. Helsinki – after way too many days of almost constant flying, bit before home, a hopeful cigarette at the door with a lovely caress of heavy chilly wind. Tallinn – awful, but with benches and some puny plants in pots they are somewhat trying. I might mix them up, actually, those places and cigarettes. All of them went through my head though in Warsaw. And as I was remembering about those glass cubicles in some airports - I felt a shiver, and tried to be happy. To look at the bright side of this cigarette. So I looked up.
I’ve been in Warsaw for many times, but never there for her. Coming from somewhere or going, it is on the way. And now when I looked up there was one of my repetitious thoughts there, illustrated again. From the gap between two sides of roof in front of the station I could see few buildings, glimpse view of the city, a grand small view. Something I think about Warsaw – she has style. Mixing together old and brave new, managing to keep it intact and building budgets uncut, ideas taken to actual life. Warsaw has a city touch to it.
I entered the station building again and found them. They had been going between different desks, finding out the possible ways and routes for continuation, and now had some printouts with schedules on them. I took a picture of impressively huge main timetable, looked at the printouts and thought that we are lazy. We go and ask, let the information be printed out for us, and this revered timetable will soon be a relict of times gone by as I am as a devoted smoker. Minified but still there. I felt like another cigarette. I was still too narrow for all this information and decisions.
We walked out again, to the other side of the station. That was a more peaceful place for a cigarette. Backdoor facing a car park. Space and size again. Not like smoking in a river this time, rather like smoking at the edge of a huge pond with still, asphalt-gray, rotting water, some waste wrecks drifting around for to variegate.
I smoked, impedimenta scattered around me, and we discussed. Mainly between two options – to go on or to stay for the night. Warsaw is a transport hub already, inside Europe in railway sense. We had many possibilities. To go to Odessa, straight away – of course! possible! Could even take a train to Odessa coming from Berlin. Expensive though. And Lviv. And another route, different trains to Odessa, transfer options and straight options. Suddenly options, options, options.
To go or not to go? I was protecting the idea that we’d stay for the night. Leave our luggage at the station, get a cheap hostel, and take this deserved respite. Enjoy Warsaw. I hadn’t actually visited Warsaw, I said, and He seemingly knew a lot about this city, and so He could share, and maybe let’s just rest and have a wine in the hostel. I even said that I have never ever stayed at the youth hostel, and that could be interesting, all first times together in Warsaw, communicate to strange foreigners and try to figure out the nature of youth hostels. Seemed like a sensible side issue to solve for me. And pillows, blankets, beds, shower – have to admit, I’m getting somewhat comfortable.
I got voted out. Warsaw is not our aim, Odessa is our first aim, we could spend a day and take a night train and that would be enough. They used arguments that had my own touch to them. It was decided. We go. Mystery of youth hostels has to wait some more. And one gets a pillow on the night trains also.
We bought the tickets, after some more questions and running around the desks. You know how it is, you ask a question from one desk, get the answer from the other and then try to find the third one where you should buy the tickets. And this ticket lady, she made a joke. After all that, in this grumpy morning, she, who looked unbelievably grumpy - especially after we stated that we all want to pay separately and by card - she made a joke and got us off guard. We made a lot of fuzz around the issue of being able to be in the same coupe. Her English, nor her Russian, was good enough to keep up, somewhat of a confusion there. And then she says, while printing the tickets already: “Men can go, girl has to see how she can.”
???
He later said that he was thinking about Poland being a catholic country and maybe there’s a rule, or something, that boys and girls should be proper and separated. I had a plain “what?” in my head (still not particularly sharp), and She said “WHAT?” The ticket lady gave us a light smile, cracking the grumpiness, indicating a joke had just been made. We laughed, a bit strained laughter, while cursing in Estonian.
I was not sad to say my farewells to Comrade Suitcase, it was merely “see you later”.
Hello Warsaw, dear, we have one day.