Lemons and Beans

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A Train from Krakow to Lviv, Ukraine, Car 27, Passenger Compartment 6

Polish Nuns Quietly Talking in the next Berth

Lewis and Clark had their muskets and sextants and we have a high-powered, handheld computer and an advantageous exchange rate. I will take ready money and GPS over Manifest Destiny and bison jerky any day of the week. The food continues to be wonderful. We had a meal last night that even redeemed Polish wild boar, an act I would have considered impossible after spitting those dough wrapped bits of porcine agony allover Gdansk.

I was able to slip into the Czartoryski Museum as it opened this morning. I love museums in the morning, before the crowds show up, when the radiators are still ticking and the guards sleepily look for their second cup of coffee. You have the place to yourself and there is not much more likely to make you feel sharp and worldly than investigating relics and canvas in all that solitude.

My main interest in visiting the Czartoryski was Leonardo da Vinci’s Woman with an Ermine. I believe there are only four extant portraits of women by da Vinci and while Woman with an Ermine may not have the fame of Mona Lisa it cant be called shabby. As much as I love museums in the morning I dearly love old museums in the morning. Call me a traditionalist but I don’t want touch screen displays showing me a cross section of the painting or coloring book versions of the great works. Leave me in the room with nothing but a da Vinci on the wall and I am happier than an Old Master with a buxom subject to paint. And that is how it was: myself and Woman with an Ermine, nothing else in the room, no guard, no pamphlets in all the languages of the world, just that crackling and sly painting and an unwashed American with the time to enjoy it. I have been to a lot of art museums and stood in front of a lot of famous works, but this one was something special. It was internally luminescent, knowing, playful and almost swimming on its black background. Searching for this painting in your old college Art History book might not call up the same impression but, for me, it was the right way to say goodbye to Krakow.

Now we are on a train for Ukraine. The music in my earphones, the soft voices of young Polish nuns and the rhythm of the train cars whisper us ever Eastward. There are farms outside of the window again, interrupted only by the occasional but jarring violence of a train passing us in the other direction. With the windows open passing trains sound to each other like the world coming apart. This train feels like we are moving back toward a grittier past, the curtains and upholstery are red enough to make Lenin swell with pride and where earlier trains were walled in some off-white plastic, these are wood paneled, the window corners yellow with smoke and exhaust.

There is a cheerful steward who occasionally passes our open door with a tray full of teacups, Collin is asleep in the upper bunk, we rattle on toward Lviv, and everything is peaceful and well, except for my own occasionally boneheaded behavior.

After we left the station in Krakow the lights went out. Being an American who is put on edge when trains start to malfunction or maybe being a bit gun-shy from the recent periods without power following the hurricane, I walked down to the steward’s cabin to tell him that our lights were out. He smiled and patted me on the shoulder with the sort of expression reserved for explanations given to very stupid children and said, “Yes, no lights. It is day.” He then pointed to the sun, just in case I had missed what was responsible for the bright, light filled cabins. In my defense, it is overcast. I didn’t need the lights to be on, but I might, all of a sudden. And then where would we have been? In the dark, that is where. I mention this because long trips seem to be a process of letting go of yourself, your expectation and your demands, allowing the sometimes bumpy course of living alongside strangers to have its way. I suppose I have not given up totally yet, but that point is coming and when it does the real joy of travel comes.

A short while later the steward came down to our berth and told me the lights were “made on.” I guess the strategy of placating pointless desires works equally well for very stupid children and Americans (this one anyway). I was happy, I switched them on and off a few times, just to make sure. But until whatever last hold the world further away has on me are gone and I float lose in the waters of travel, I’ll repeat more Russian and Ukrainian phrases to my self, copy Cyrillic into my notebooks and read a book by the light of the eastern European sky.

Enclosed are pictures of me paying a nun at Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, Nuns in the Rain, St Mary’s Church, Krakow, Flower Vendors in Krakow City Square, A Street Performer in front of St Mary’s Church, my Cyrillic Notes (god help us) and some Ukrainian Hryvnia.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=253

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Train from Chisinau, Moldova to Bucharest, Romania

I was dreading this train ride like an amputation. We have had some wonderful train trips on this excursion but we have also had some ghastly ones. It might have been the crackling Ukrainian euro-pop that twittered out of some invisible speaker. It might have been the 110F compartment in which we were expected to achieve something like sleep. It might have been the smells floating back from the pressed aluminum weapon of awkwardness unworthy of the name toilet. Whatever it was, something prompted Collin to turn to me in a particularly low moment and confide that, “My mom couldn’t make this trip.” What he said went doubly for mine. She is a great lady but she doesn’t tolerate blankets threatening body lice. I have no evidence that the blankets we found in the bedrolls on these trains were lousy but that has not stopped me from reminding Collin of the imminent possibility. Now, he wont even let his luggage touch them.

So, we were happy to discover that our four-person sleeper compartment had no other occupants. Well, occupants other than a pair of older Moldovan men with enormous bundles swaddled in gingham nylon and trussed with bailing twine that we had to evict. Our state of mental preparation for this, our last train trip, had us in no mood for leniency. They shuffled off, cooperatively enough, to the compartment where their wives were already billeted. I would have spread out too; these compartments are hellish with four.

This is the beginning of one of those pell-mell rushes for the airport of international departure. When you try to squeeze as much as you can out of the time allotted for a trip. When your tastes in travel lean toward the profoundly out of the way. When you are averse to doubling back on yourself. Then you will arrive at a moment, two days before your ticket says you are headed home, when you have no idea how you will actually get to where you need to be. And that is why we are on a train to Bucharest, deep in Romania, a lovely country no doubt, but a country that we never intended to visit. For me it will then be a plane to Budapest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Memphis and finally dearest Baton Rouge. Oh well, you wont get me to complain about Romanian stamps in my passport.

This little spot of earth, Moldova, Dacia, Thrace, Bessarabia, whatever you want to call it has been fought over so many times, occupied by so many armies and so generally pounded flat that everything that the people build looks like it was assembled from parts left behind by those passing empires and armies. A little short of midnight we stumbled off of the train and into the Chisinau station, Moorish peaked windows courtesy of the Ottomans, Russian domed outbuildings and Austro-Hungarian whimsical pediments were all jumbled together. It feels like an outlier, a frontier, a dusty market city of piled carrots, wild dogs and streets lined with beech trees painted white about the trunk.

The Russian Army liberated poor Chisinau during World War II, which apparently means shelled and bombed it until nothing squirmed in the rubble. There is no fine “Old Town.” It will not be luring architecture students to sketch its graceful buildings. But, there is a sort of up-and-coming cheerfulness to the place.

The central bus station is also the location of a large, open-air market of the sort that I have an unnatural fondness for. In addition to the glut of sandals, slippers, brassieres, pirated CDs and other daily objects you find spread out on top of stacked wooden crates across the developing world there was the full bounty of this agricultural countries Fall crop. Beets and garlic still smeared in the soil from which they were dug this morning, tiny rust-colored onions, raw goats cheese, pyramids of pinto-spotted quail eggs, small and horny cucumbers, mushrooms, orange-yellow ears of corn and walnuts recently picked from under the trees that surround the rural fields here. It was a treat. I could spend the rest of my life in places like that, eating figs the size of a toddler’s fist with sun-wrinkled old women in headscarves and talking about the weather.

And you should have seen the grapes. Every color and size, in long full hanging bunches, piled in wicker baskets, tiny pale green and pearl sized ones and big purple jumbles lying on newsprint amid the flagstones. Moldova is wine country. One of the vineyards once boasted that they could give every Soviet a glass of wine with what they had in their cellars. They didn’t actually do it, they just wanted people to know that they could; a conceit of the command economy. Moldova is wine country and the grapes are coming in from skies and fields drawn from Van Gough’s pallet.

All of this is a sort of long way round talking about a trip we made yesterday into those vineyards, labyrinths of cellars with cobweb hung bottles by the thousands and sandstone cliffs cut into the hills by monks for some greater purpose. We hired a car in Chisinau, a rattling FIAT without any evidence of seatbelts or a thought for safety, and headed north for the winery at Cojusna. Words fail any further boosterism of this beautiful place so I’ll just say we drove through more fabulous countryside. More accurately we rocketed through it but the white knuckle, “I wish I had told my mom I loved her one last time” driving of the former-Eastern Bloc is a cliché that needs no additional flogging from me.

Suffice it to say, we were happy to stop for a light lunch and sampling of seven wines in a hollow, limestone hall decorated with chandeliers that looked like they had been built to Torquemada’s specifications, but was otherwise pleasant. Massive dark oak table to seat fifty-five with firm backed wooden chairs, wild boar heads, cases of dusty wine, suitably rustic wall hangings and… two place settings. It was somewhat difficult to relax and sample numerous wines in a room better suited to a medieval punch-up or parking a mid-sized jet, but a few glasses of the grape got us passed that.

From Cojusna we went northeast toward a 13th century monastery called Orheiul Vechi and through more of those swaying, verdant fields. A few minutes after leaving the vineyard and somewhat more unnerved by the hell-for-leather driving, I asked if we could pull over and take pictures of the vineyard workers. Collin (and this is odd for a professional photographer) gets nervous taking pictures of people. I have no such reservations. I don’t try to snap shots of people praying or crying or slipping into the toilet but I figure that if you are out in public then you are fair game. I did have a fist-full of clams thrown at me in a Shanghai market for making this assumption, but I am no worse for it and that fishwife is a few clams lighter, so who’s laughing now? Regardless, our pleasant Moldovan guide made sure our photographs would not prompt a shower of foodstuffs.

After a few words from her, we were welcomed into a sort of wild tumble of hands and apples and grapes and smiling country people. I will never forget it. A lady in a headscarf and three gold teeth (and few others) passed me bunches of sweet, small-seeded grapes. Grinning with the plain happiness of sharing a thing you are proud of. Down from a thick, heavy wooden ladder leaned against their truck a man began handing me compact, red and mottled apples. This may sound off putting but they smelled like horses and wine. Not like an unmucked stall but the smell of a horse’s neck and mane when you lean over to whisper to it after a sudden movement in the brush made the animal spook. If it is possible for a piece of fruit to smell strong and vulnerable and a little like the outdoors and like a wine cork from the day before, then this is what these apples smelled like. My god they were good. I eat a lot of a lot of different things but the purity and complexity of that apple in that green and yellow vineyard, on that blue sky day in Moldova will always be near the top of my list of the wonders of the world.

From then on it was pure joy at the great beautiful riot of the world, all smells and sunflower fields and light off of rivers that sliced canyons into the stone of the hills. We stopped at a monastery and bought thin myrrh candles from a lone, wild as the Baptist, monk with a few strands of grey hair and a brown cassock. We lit them in front of Orthodox icons down caves cut into the rock and trampled around a hilltop like a spine in that lush, river canyon. We ate walnuts off of the ground and sucked grapes by the mouthful straight from the stems.

It was a day unlike any other. And that is why we go to a place no one has ever heard of, in countries that seem not to exist. We go to get to that spot, far away from the television or the detailed brochure or the multi-media presentation. We go far away to eat apples with farmers in a field, thousands of miles away from anyone or thing we know. We go because this is when we feel most ourselves.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=265