DP World

One of the biggest problems facing me in the Ukraine is that I gave my jacket to my dad to take back with him to Canada. I assumed that by the end of March it would be warm enough for me to only need my spring jacket, and that summer would be upon us soon enough. This wasn’t such a naïve thought, too, because only months later structurally-sound young Muscovites were taking to the streets in bikinis and high-heeled shoes to beat the heat. With this in mind, and in spite of the icy winds through the streets of Kiev, I had pushed on to Kharkov, but decided to take a sharp right-hand turn to the south and the Crimean resorts on the balmy Black Sea. Not, however, before making a pit stop in Dnipropetrovs’k, partly because I wanted to break up a 20+ hour train ride, and partly because I had a hard time pronouncing the name and that intrigued me.

DP, as I like to call it, is a place that certainly almost never comes to mind when people think about the Ukraine, and probably wouldn’t even come to mind when one gets together with friends to play a rousing game of listing the most populous cities in the Ukraine. This is a mistake, because evidently it’s number 3. So why is this place so shrouded in mystery and anonymity? Partly the name is so confusing that no one attempts to pronounce or remember it. Part of it is because, believe it or not, many people don’t actually care about the Ukraine and spend hours poring over maps of it. But the real reason is because during the Soviet era it was a “secret city.” DP is famous throughout Ukraine and the former Soviet Union as the main production centre for nuclear weapons and spaceship components, but it was purposely left off the maps as though it did not exist. Until recently, on the highways leading up the city there were no indicators that a city of 2 million people was there until lo and behold a massive industrial giant materialised out of nowhere.

But for all its industrial and warfare-oriented pretensions, it’s actually quite a beautiful city. There Because of the large dam on the Dniepr to the south at Zaporizhe, the city is surrounded by [oily, chemical-laden] water and there are lush parks and a river walk all along the water front. Karl Marx Avenue runs straight through the town, flanking a large promenade and boulevard where a craft market has set up shop. In fact, say what you will about the Ukrainian oligarchy and their scheming and corruption, but they have made considerable efforts to up the game of their respective cities vis-à-vis the historical and European appeal of Western Ukraine and the political cachet of Kiev. There is nothing I like more than boorish coal and steel barons flexing their economic muscle and building opera houses in factory towns.

Evidently, however, DP’s success and rejuvenation hasn’t been purely due to the recent success of its industrial elites. As is well-known to any economic historian who has studied the collapse of the Soviet Union intimately, the concentration of military and industrial capital in Dnipropetrovs’k sired an elite who ruled the Soviet Union for much of its later years. The most famous scion, Leonid Brezhnev[‘s eyebrows], was groomed by the Dnipropetrovs’k Chateau Clique for an iron-fisted and in the end bumbling and almost incoherent 18-year rule of the Soviet Union. To my delight, my CouchSurfing hosts took me to a bar which featured celebrity shots of Brezhnev himself. You’ll also remember the Ukrainian Princess Leia, political super-babe Yulia Timoshenko is also from DP, and despite her Ukrainian name and her allegedly-pro-Western-lesser-of-two-evils approach to politics, she only learned the Ukrainian language in her later years and has intimate ties to the Russian state. She is a living example that with the right ties and hair style, anyone from DP can go from managing and later privatising a student-run video rental store to owning a massive steel and chemical conglomerate, and inevitably end up in jail on corruption charges. What fertile grounds for success and ultimately devastating failure! I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You may well ask what I actually did while in DP. Well, not a great deal. I was impressed by some of the architecture—evidently it had been a very small, old town and the centre preserved some of the shells of buildings that sustained heavy enough tank damage to render them useless, but not be torn down or replaced. I also enjoyed the parks, the $2 “Biznez Lanch” specials, a night of bowling (I had no idea 10-pin bowling existed—what a cultural shock! Ukraine taught me so much about myself), and the 6-stop metro that runs from the train station out to the factory districts in the outskirts, and I was fortunate enough to have my host, an American English teacher, take me on a metro station pub crawl, one that thankfully didn’t result in my getting beaten and left for dead in the suburbs. Owing almost entirely to this, I can count my time in DP as a success and recommend it to all.*

*One thing to note is that I am currently engaged in a minor impasse with the Ukrainian Postal Service. I sent three or four large packages of post cards from the central post office in Dnipropetrovs’k and I dropped them off in the post box outside, as directed. They have never arrived and I am starting to suspect that the box I dropped them into was merely a decorative feature. So if you’re going to DP, can you please ask at the post office to look in that box and see if my parcels are still in there? I would really, really appreciate it. I’m also considering writing a strongly-worded letter to their public relations department and that’s bound to go straight to the top, so it’s not a problem if you aren’t in the neighbourhood.

¡Special Post!: Top 10 Most Memorable Pizza Experiences of 2010

There has been a lot of buzz on this blog among my many readers about why pizza and its widespread appeal as the food of choice for today's up-and-coming adventurer. Reader "Gary" has raved about pizza being the universal comfort food, and wants to know why.  For me, pizza is not so much a riddle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery, but in fact the perfect food. What may surprise you, probably not nearly as much as it does surprise me, is that I did not take ONE single picture of the many, many pizzas I have eaten in Europe. I can count on one hand the number of times I decided to purchase a whole pizza in Canada, but for some reason it was the one thing keeping me going through the long winter of eastern Europe. Perhaps my words can paint a lovely picture for you.  This list is in no particular order, and does not pertain to the best pizzas, but simply ones that I remember and have left a lasting mark on my continual development as a human being and functioning member of society.  So this one's for you, Gar!

1. Nagorno Karabakh: This was awful. This was the worst pizza experience of my entire life. In fact I am not sure I can include this in a list of pizzas because I think, by definition, this culinary abortion cannot count as pizza. A round, spongy crust, a ketchup base, sliced hot dogs, and rubbery cheese does not a pizza make. This is why I am not recognising your country.
2. Kukes, Albania: omfg, this was the best pizza ever, partly given the circumstances, and partly because it was actually the best pizza ever. The chef had trained in an Italian pizzeria (and all North Americans blindly believe that anything Italian is the best when it comes to food and fashion, if not political or fiscal management). He held up various fresh ingredients from his table (the tables and seats were positioned around his work area) and then put the masterpiece in the wood-fired brick oven right before my very eyes. And after a long day of fleeing Kosovo by foot and dreaming of freedom and euros and pizza and showers and dubbed television, this is exactly what I needed.
3. Tirana, Albania, central park: Thin crust, about 52 inches across, fresh tomato sauce, prosciutto ham, arugula, fresh grated parmesan. If I felt I needed to say more I would. A little bit more expensive so you certainly pay for the privilege of dining with Albania’s elite and the company of a young, Harvard-educated dilettante.
4. Sarajevo, Bosnia: At 7 in the morning when my feet were wet, this equally soggy Quattro Stagioni pizza was not the warmest welcome for me to Bosnia. I had to ask for a touch-up in the brick over, which did cook the dough in the end, but it was memorable in its unmemorableness.
5. Dr Oetker’s Prosciutto. This is the best pizza in existence. These little discs of joy go for $9 in the Canadas but you can dine away for $2 in continental Europe, which is the main driving force behind my decision to live here.
6. Iasi, Romania: THIS WAS SO GOOD. This is exactly why pizza is the greatest food ever, because it actually tastes better cold at 3 am when you have to transfer at Dej Calatori and are waiting for three hours and you knew it would be a good idea to buy a pizza to take with you on the trip and because you got it pour emporter you received a 30% discount. Epic win!
7. Budapest, Hungary: Pizza King needs to watch his crown because it’s quite undeserved. The quality of ingredients-to-cost ratio are way off kilter and if the situation of me barging into their delivery-only establishment in the rain and sitting in their kitchen waiting for them to make me my pizza and hand it to me hadn’t been so comical it wouldn’t have made the list.
8. Tunisia: Comment tu dit “leave it in the oven longer. This isn’t cooked at all!” en francais? This was something I really struggled with for a long time in Tunisia, and it was really hard to make the cheese brown at all because I’m starting to suspect it wasn’t cheese at all.
9. Chisinau, Moldova: Andy’s Pizza. They really, really plug Andy’s Pizza. But here’s the thing I don’t like about Andy’s Pizza: the waiters don’t ‘get’ me. Something I would have left in the comments box (if they had one) was that the waiters should never question my ability to eat two pizzas in one sitting, and should certainly never tell me that I am not allowed to order two. Aside from a dry crust, the ingredients seemed quality enough for this connoisseur.
10. Sarajevo, Bosnia: My second attempt at pizza in BiH, up the hill from the first place, was an absolute success. Thin crust, ham, mushrooms, all for $2 and so good that I returned several times.  They also had beer and couches and let me nap upstairs.  Or at least they didn't know that I napped upstairs.   

Some interesting trends we can deduce from this well-researched list is that the best pizza experiences have been in Albania, which is reason enough to warrant a visit.  The worst, as we are seeing, is in the former Soviet Union, with the notable exception of Moldova, which is no doubt due to its ethnic Romanian status—they are shipwrecked Italians, after all.  Unfortunately, as I noted before, I don’t have pictures to accompany this list but this is what happens when I am so caught up in eating pizza—I completely forget where I am. But I can still remember the taste of each one and much like when I order a pizza, all I really care about is my own happiness in this regard.

Harking on Kharkov

Look at these attractive,
young Ukrainians!

While Kiev may be the political heart of Ukraine, and the west the cultural heart, there were still vast tracts of land left to cover before I could justifiably claim that I had “done” the Ukraine. Of course, I’m talking about the industrial heartland east of the great ribbon of commerce/toxicity the Dniepr River. The secret to any Russian Imperial, Soviet, and subsequent Ukrainian success has always lain in the rich coal seams of the Donbass and the enterprising, hardy spirit of the Steppes-peoples. Mammoth planned communities of equally gargantuan industrial capacity were thickly spread before me with such tantalizing and alluring names like Dnipropetrovs’k, Donetsk and Zaporizhe and Kryvyi Rih—well-known to any aspiring steel magnate. But before I was able to eagerly pounce, I had my heart and sights first set on the nerve centre of this industrial magnate, Kharkov.

Actually, it was just as much a surprise to me as it no doubt is to you that it is no longer called Kharkov, but Kharkiv. This is a name change I refuse to ratify for various reasons. First of all, why are cities changing their names? I have never accepted the legitimacy of Mumbai over Bombay, Istanbul over Constantinople and I am certainly not about to make concessions for Jakarta over the much more illustrious Batavia. While I’ve been known to be torn over whether or not to refer to the capital of the Slovak Republic as Pressburg, Pozsony, or Istropolis, I cannot in good conscious worry about minor changes such as an ‘o’ to an ‘i.’ The second reason for objection, of course, is the most important and Civ II enthusiasts the world over will bellow a chorus of assent: when you play as the Russians, the name is Kharkov. Until Sid Meier retroactively releases an updated version of Civilization II with a special note alerting us to these apparently sensitive and politically-motivated name changes, I will continue to use the 1996 edition as my benchmark gold standard in history, geography and diplomacy.

Fun facts about Kharkov that you’re free to share with your friends at dinner parties: 

1. It’s the second largest city in the Ukraine.
2. It has the largest 6th largest public square in the world Europe.
3. It was almost entirely rebuilt after the Second World War because whatever the Germans didn’t destroy on their push through, the Soviets surely did on their push back, hoping to make a nice, blank slate for centrally-planned urban space.
4. It’s really, really close to Russia. I could see Russia if I squinted.

I know, right—wow!  When I first saw this picture (in Wikipedia, obviously, which has been magnanimous in its supply of pictures) I thought “omfg I have to go there!"  But when you’re in the middle of this 119,000m² mass of concrete in late March and the winds are blowing in from the Urals, it’s actually quite cold and disappointing. 

I was greeted in Karkov by Maksim, a young entrepreneur who was my couchsurfing host. He lived in a flat with his girlfriend Nastia, a journalist, with another couple, Igor and his girlfriend. Igor was a graphic designer specialising in Adobe Photoshop. I told him I played around with a bit of graphic design too. He showed me his work, which was amazing and clearly required what I think people mean by “skill” when they list it on their CVs. I was a bit bashful when he asked me to produce an example of my work, which can be seen here. 



You had better believe this was in a square named after Taras Shevchenko.

I was charged with the tall task of preparing dinner for everyone. For every guest they have, they ask them to cook a meal that no one there has ever eaten. I naturally thought of sushi, but evidently it’s the Ukraine’s most popular dish these days. They had never eaten Mexican and while as a Canadian I am no authority on Mexican cuisine and how to properly make it, lest we forget that Ukrainians have no idea about a Canadian’s capacity to accurately prepare Mexican food, and thus my secret was safe.

We went to the supermarket for supplies, and fasten a Mexican meal out of Ukrainian victuals. Highlights included:

• Talking to an old man who asked why I was in Ukraine. I explained to him I liked the people, the history, and then a word which, to me, was “food” in Russian but ended up being a very unsavoury curse word in Ukrainian. Of course, with my bellowing and obvious Anglo-Saxon accent, the whole store heard me holler in their native tongue, “I LOVE UKRAINIAN _____” which sent them all—especially the old man—into convulsive peals of laughter and Nastia into a bright red orb of embarrassment.
• Discovering that you can’t buy bags of ice in the Ukraine. For a people who I was under the impression invented ice, it seemed to be in short supply. After I stared at Maksym in disbelief he shook my shoulders and said, “I KNOW! We can’t buy ice! How do we live in Ukraine!?” We settled on the fish department and to assuage the concerns of the fishmonger Maksym explained, “It’s for an American”—the universal catch-all to account for strange behaviour.
• Using shwarma wraps to make my own tortilla chips, and winning.

The old gang, back together again.

The surprise of the evening was that I wasn’t simply going to be cooking for the four of them, but in fact for a whole Cossack hoard—11 in total. Two were business colleagues from Russia, and other friends and relatives had showed up for the spicy fiesta. I enlisted the help of the younger brother and sister of Nastia by issuing imperatives such as “перемешайте!” (mix) and “сокращение!” (cut) after holding up different items to the obedient and extremely polite young sous-chefs. It was a fantastic success in every sense of the word. We had chicken fajitas, margaritas, tortillas and salsa and then we played mafia, which any former residence advisor is very familiar with. In all, a landslide success in Ostpolitik.

Keying into Kiev

Before leaving Chernivtsi we took a bus to Kamenets-Podolsky, which we later determined to be a sad and decaying town.  Unfortunately, we hadn’t read the Wikitravel entry on it, nor ran a quick Google Image search of it because it’s actually quite beautiful and historic.  Next time, I guess.  From Chernivtsi, we hopped aboard the night train to Kiev, which to my pleasant surprise was going to be 15 hours.  As I have come to learn, no matter where you want to go in Ukraine, it will take you 14+ hours by train.  That is because the trains travel at 40km/hour, but the good news is that they are always on time.  In each of the trains there is a schedule letting you know when we will arrive in each of the stopover cities, and for exactly how long.  What a dream job railway administration must have been for type-A personalities in the old system. 

Something I probably have never bothered to express via the medium of Web 2.0 blog postings is that I am really into metro systems in post-socialist countries.  Like, really into them.  It’s my dream to travel on, or at least gaze at from within, each one currently in existence.   Kiev’s metro gets a 6.  Out of 100.  But trying to figure out how to transfer at key spots is pretty tough, and don’t even think about taking a picture.  Unless, of course, you enjoy the idea of having five security guards suddenly emerge from inside the wall, surround you, and physically delete it from your camera.  God forbid I replicate this poorly-conceived public transit experiment anywhere in the first world.

Actually, I’m a bit hard on the Kiev metro.  I mean, it works, and it has some great reach, and it’s actually in the ground and there are trains.  That earns it more than Budapest’s Metro 4.  However, the painfully slow escalators that sometimes didn’t work (which left me stranded in Suburban Kiev because meaty-armed babushkas working for the transit authority would not let anyone into the station) have left it sitting pretty low on the list. 

We poked around Kiev, which has its share of churches and museums.   Naturally, of course, we had to stop by one of the hundreds of open air markets and blend in with the locals, in hopes of scoring free pickles and anything else the babas were vending.  We also saw the large motherland statue, affectionately known as “Tin Tits” in tourist brochures.  Say what you will about the inefficiencies of central planning, but when the necessity arises to procure enough sheet metal to build one of these in each of the republican capitals, it gets the job done.  And judging by this Slavic maiden’s piercing gaze and command of the landscape, it was well worth it. 

Kiev was lacking in something but it took me a while to really figure it out.  At first I thought it was an alternative, underground hipster scene, but I discovered all Po-So countries have those in spades and I was foolishly looking in the Podil neighbourhood, which was sadly did not live up to its 19th century reputation.  Then I thought perhaps it was the bars that were lacking, because from the outsider’s perspective the Kiev bar scene consists of kiosks on the street that sell “live” beer.  You bring your own plastic 1L bottle, they fill it up, and then you go join the hoards or people—homeless, students, businesspersons—in the park and drink it.  However, I discovered that there were plenty of suitable pubs that were simply disguised as other things, like a 1940s hospital/laboratory where you can drink shots out of test tubes and wear old German war helmets from the Great Patriotic War.

Just like West Edmonton Mall,
you can get Ukrainian food in Kiev.

I finally realised what it was that Kiev was missing: Ukrainians.  Aside from the Ukrainian flags and the enormous Hotel Ukraina in the centre of the town, there wasn’t a Ukrainian to be seen, except in “ethnic” restaurants peppered around the town.  Everyone spoke Russian, and the food was decidedly more bland than in the west.  The thing about the Ukraine is that all roads do not lead to Kiev.  For the most part, I don’t think all people in the Ukraine know that they live in a country called “Ukraine.”  If you’re from L’viv, then you’re a national hero and you are a true Ukrainian.  If you’re from anywhere east of Kiev, you’re probably a Russian and are unaware that a border exits between the two countries. 

Booking into Bukovina

In my second year of university I purchased a copy of the Time-Life Library of Nations: the Soviet Union from a thrift store in Vancouver and I’ve never looked back.  I loved this book and read it often, marveling at the pictures of people operating large machines that consisting of knobs and buttons with presumably no function.  There was also a picture of two old ladies cleaning the boulevards of a major Soviet thoroughfare or highway.  It gave some sort of statistic about the number of roads in the SU being 1:10 as compared with the US despite having twice the land area and the same population.  

Well, all that is sort of immaterial when the majority of land in the SU is actually barren and unpopulated.  What isn’t barren and unpopulated, however, is the Ukraine and consequently I was expecting the best of Soviet infrastructure to greet me as I crossed into my first former Soviet republic.  The road existed, certainly, but was not particularly wide nor was it smooth.  This of course didn’t stop the driver from racing as fast as possible to make up for the lost time due to my passport at the border, being certain to hit every pothole he could while sporadically eyeing me in the rear-view mirror and giving me a big, wide steel-toothed smile and an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Perhaps you saw my brother act this
scene out in Russian class for a
school play in the early 90s.

Perhaps I’ve never expressed just how terrified I am of Ukrainian border control.  They wear full body camo suits that I feel are appropriate for Arctic missions on, combat boots, large fur hats, and a look of disdain and unwieldiness.  I am also terrified about lying on anything that is even remotely official, so when I had to tell the Ukrainians where I would be staying I naturally panicked.  The driver told me that I should list the “Hotel Bukovina” as my place of accommodation.  The border guard looked impressed, which terrified me more.  Why would an illustrious patron of the Hotel Bukovina be travelling by common coach?  Nevertheless, we were off.  

At the Chernivtsi avtovoksal, a crowd of two greeted me with a sign of my name in Cyrillic, as expected.   We then proceeded to our hotel—Hotel Bukovina.  I heaved an enormous sigh of relief that I would not be tracked down and thrown in a Ukrainian prison, or worse.  In retrospect, I had no idea why I would expect anything but the absolute best.  Here we were in Chernivtsi, one of the farthest outposts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the colonising and civilizing influences of the Viennese.*   This was still “Europe”—or something like it—and there was no reason not totake advantage of the exchange rate.

And what an exchange rate!  At the time the gryvnia to dollar ratio was 7.5:1 and while it usually means that things end up costing a similar price despite an exchange rate, this was not the case in the Ukraine.  Everything seemed to cost 1/7.5^th the price of its equivalent in Canada.  Taxi rides, hotels, perogies, coffee, and it was all very high quality.  As it was St. Patrick’s Day, we went to a local pub for some beer and potato-based products.  Perogies of every filling filled our table: potato, cheese, mushroom, cabbage—the bounty of the harvest all rolled into neat little pockets and drenched in sour cream.  

After much merrymaking we got down to business to decide our plan of attack for the region.  We hired a taxi to take us to the town of Potochyshche (Поточище), where my great-grandmother was born.  Like most young girls at the time, she dreamed of city life and not marrying a local boy from the village.  I assume.  Actually, I have no idea what would make someone leave, but somewhere along the line the idea of leaving family and the only world you have known is outweighed by the possibility of immeasurable future returns.  This pioneering spirit, of course, might be responsible for the same attitude many North Americans share today vis-à-vis Europeans that when a child turns 18, they are out.  So, like many at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century, she saw a sign advertising free land in Canada and decided that she, a single, 22-year-old Ruthenian debutante, was ready to take on the world.

  

While I have been praised far and wide for my Russian skills, one variable oft forgotten is that until March 18, 2010, I had never actually seen a real Russian person, much less a Ukrainian.  So when we entered the town hall of Potochyshche and demanded that they haul out every record they possessed in hopes of finding out where the remaining 16 or so brothers and sisters of my great-baba were today, I was hopelessly inadequate.  Of course, the documents they had were hopelessly inadequate as well.  They had no record of any of our family in the city—despite the town clerk having the same last name, but flat out refusing to entertain the possibility of being related to us—and in a panic they called the oldest man in the village to verify.  In about 5 minutes he stormed in and began a rant the gist of which my many years of studying Russian definitely paid off for: the Soviets came.  Essentially, the Soviets came in and took the records, the people, and did whatever altering of the landscape was necessary in their vision of a glorious socialist future.

Of course, to be fair to the Soviets, they weren’t the only cause of upheaval in eastern Galicia and Bukovina.  Between 1918 and 1991 the region fell under roughly six flags—Austro-Hungarian, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, German, Soviet, and Ukrainian again—not to mention the many short lived republics that popped up in the chaos surrounding the end of WWI and the vacuum left by the collapse of the old imperial system.  Not that the majority of the villagers in the area particularly cared about these geopolitical manoeuvrings, rather just expressed annoyance at the constant stream of armies across their incredibly flat and arable land.  Nevertheless, after an hour or so, we could claim that we “did” Potochyshche and were on our way back. 

*Chernivtsi and Lviv were Austro-Hungarian bastions of culture and Ukrainianness on the Galician-Bukowinian steppes.  In fact the national awakenings of the 19^th century occurred in these cities and, as in Prague, Budapest, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Kosice and Krakow, all on the back of the firmly established and uniform Austrian education system and communication network.  My own grandmother presumably made it all the way to central Canada via Hamburg using the German she would have learned in school.  "And what have the Romans done for us?" indeed.

Zak Attack

I was as surprised as anyone to
 discover that eastern Europe receives
receives snow in March.

Finally, it appeared that my push towards the Steppes was going to pay off and that I would be in the Ukraine, or at least the historical polyglot of Zakarpattia, by nightfall.  I left Sanislau at a fairly late hour but I was so close to Ukraine that I could practically taste the starch-heavy culinary delights within.  The train took me directly to the border, and I assumed it was wholly reasonable for me to expect to be able to just walk across and into Ukraine—after alerting the appropriate authorities, of course—and receiving a coveted bright orange stamp.  At Halmeu, I was such a gathering force and things were going so smoothly that it seemed like nothing could stop me.  Until I was stopped.  Alas, it would appear that unlike Hitler and Napoleon before me, my invasion of Russia was thwarted by Romanian border control, and not the usual case of inadequate, non-season-appropriate clothing.   

Les Roumains told me quite pointedly that despite the wishes of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada on behalf of Her Royal Majesty QE2 to let me pass freely and without hindrance, they would not let me pass and instead would hinder me.  As for the section that asks them to provide assistance to me, they shrugged and said, “I don’t know.  Maybe wait.  Maybe try to catch bus.”  Far from the ceremonious greeting I was expecting from the local consul—“our man in Zakarpattia”—providing me with the finest in accommodation and hospitality that the British Empire afforded, I instead ended up wondering why we had signed up for this whole Commonwealth thing in the first place if I wasn’t being directly helped in a backwater border crossing in eastern Europe.  But nevertheless, I learned that walking across the Halmeu border is not okay, and I tucked that little nugget of information away for next time.  

Not to let anything get me down, I decided to go back to Satu Mare to see if there was a night train I could take across Romania and enter Ukraine from another point.  Of course, I had to be certain I was able to go back to Satu Mare at this point, as it was late and I wasn’t in a particularly renowned transit hub.  I caught the last train to Satu Mare and was heartbroken to find, upon return, 1) no trains to anywhere of use to me, and 2) to my gumbootless delight, a blizzard, awaiting me.  Naturally these are the things I live for: after briefing the Plecări (departures) board, consulting my weather-beaten Europe map, and looking really intense while talking to myself and molding my face into expressions that indicate to curious onlookers that I’m up to some pretty serious business, and that now was the time to not bother me (—or, alternately, to bother me and ask me if I needed a place to sleep for the night.  I was hoping my body language and facial consternation conveyed both messages.  I did take acting in high school, after all, and had starred as Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web in a very indie, underground 1995 production), it appeared that Satu Mare would play host to me for the night—a mere 50 km from my starting point in Sanislau.  

I could barely make it away from the station to find wifi to alert my father and sister of my inevitable tardiness due to the flurry of fresh falling snowflakes.  In March!  Three days earlier I had been wearing a t-shirt in Croatia and now it would appear I was going in wholly the wrong direction.  Through the whirling snow and fog, I saw a light for the Casanova Hotel—either a one star or a no star—and decided to see what the rate would be.  Surprisingly cheap, as it turned out.  A single was 60 lei, or $20.  The receptionist was excited by my evidently Russian name, and then they directed me to where my room was—just through the large lounge, around a couple of the tables, past the stage with the pole with the dancing, scantily-clad young lady on it, then through the door and up the staircase.  Everything sort of clicked together for me retrospectively why they had expressed surprise when I said I needed a room for the entire night.  

But no worries!  Vice and establishments of ill-repute are no stranger to me; in fact, one of my friends in Point Grey lives in a home that was formerly a brothel in the 1920s.  My environmental circumstances had little or no effect on me, except for a couple trying to key into my room at 4am and the pulsing club music that played throughout the evening.  Aside from that, I had a warm, dry bed, a shower, and I was right across the street from the train station so I could rise early and take the train to Moldavia, the other region that makes up the trifecta of Romania (along with Wallachia and Transylvania, of course!) at 6am.  

Surprise! –I didn’t.   I slept until 7 or so and then caught the 8am train.  Something about not being able to see anything out the window except whirling snow has that effect on me.  I opted for the later train which had a transfer in Dej Călători lasting three hours, connecting with the Timişoara–Iaşi  Express which did a formidable arc covering much of the country.  We crawled through the thoroughly snowed in Carpathians mountains, the landscape asserting to me exactly why there were no border crossings between Halmeu and at Suceava, and arrived in Suceava just after 7 at night.  Stepping off the train, a woman walked right up to me and said my name.  I was taken aback.  She had written down on a piece of paper my name, and the hostel I had completely forgotten that I had booked.  

Nothing could indicate more clearly my
eventual destination of the Ukraine
quite like the interior of this bus.

Evidently, in Dej I had managed to find some wifi and inquire about hostels in Suceava.  Not many, but the one I stayed at was definitely the right choice.  The lady picked me up at the station, drove me to the hostel which was considerably out of town, and had dinner prepared for me (soup, salad, cabbage rolls, a non-alcoholic beer, bread, and dessert).  I also got my own room, a large breakfast in the morning (including coffee that I drank out of the enormous Friends-style cappuccino cup that I was informed was meant for the cereal but “Americans always make that mistake”) and was driven to the bus depot in the morning.  Unaccustomed to this level of pampering, it was nevertheless exactly what I needed to get back on track and to the Ukraine on time to meet one half of my family.  I think the tab was $25, which at the end of the day is money very well spent considering I would have probably wandered around Suceava desperately and inevitably slept in the train station with still no clear plan for finding the way to the Ukraine.  Instead I got all the aforementioned and still had time to buy gogosi before boarding a bus for the motherland.  At the appointed hour, we were off, and the die was cast.  I was about to, quite literally, meet my maker.  

Sanislău Side

My first foray into Romania was in 2007 on a little single car commuter train that trundled along (see picture) from Debrecen, Hungary, to Valea Lui Mihai in Romania.  I shared this train with one other woman who began speaking to me in rapid-fire Hungarian, assuming I—like everyone the world over—understood.  Nevertheless, with a bit of English, Russian, German, French and Hungarian, we were able to have a conversation.  I was able to figure out that she was on her way to visit her mother in Romania.  When we arrived at VLM, I caused quite a stir because everyone wanted to figure out why I was here (the border guards took me into their little hut and asked, “Umm, are you OK?  Why are you here?”) and watched my every move, waiting to see what I would do next.  I was a human zoo exhibition to them, and as soon as I approached the ticket window and said the only recognisable city name in Transylvania I had committed to memory, everyone in the station sprung forward and starting screaming their proposed itinerary to get me there.  

If at any point any anthopoligist, linguist, historian, politician, or anyone with a shadow of doubt that Romanians are Latins, I highly recommend a visit to the Valea Lui Mihai train station in the middle of summer.  People were screaming and gesticulating, trying to get my attention and then arguing with each other.  One little old lady, half my height, fought her way through the crowd , grabbed my elbow flab and pulled me towards the Arrivals/Departures board where she then starting shrieking at it with such shrill resolve to—I could only assume—banish it to Hell once and for all.  The station mistress rose and emerged from her window booth and summoned silence with a firm and heavy hand.  Everyone froze in terror and waited with bated breath.  Speaking Romanian with authority and command, she told me exactly what I was going to be doing.  There was no alternative—she was the Margaret Thatcher of my Romanian destiny.  She told me in two hours a train would whisk me away to Cluj; there would be no transfers, no waits, no complex trip planning.  One train, direct.  She returned to her booth and the others came out of hiding and, satisfied with the results, began talking amongst themselves and waiting for the next big thing.  Marta was just getting on her train so she gave me her address in Budapest and told me to visit.

This time, however, I was heading in the opposite direction and going to the village of Sanislau of her mother (also named Marta—Hungarians have about 6 names per gender to choose from).  She was 84 and lived alone in a big house with a garden and orchard.  I arrived in Oradea to the south and assumed that Sanislau would be easy to get to.  The first thing I learned was that not only was it more difficult to get to than I had thought, but no one had any idea where or what Sanislau is.  I assumed that everyone knew exactly where every single village was in the area and could tell me exactly what to do.  It was off the grid for the most part and I was able to get a ride to the nearest village in a Maxi-Taxi and then walked the remaining 4 km into the village in the dark.

I rolled in after dark and Marta had a big pot of stew ready for me with mashed potatoes.  She then led me to the cellar where we got plum preserves and homemade wine from an enormous cask.  We also went and retrieved one bottle of homemade palinka from her ample collection, and then she set about drinking me under the table.  After I conceded defeat, she laughed heartily and showed me to my room.  Her house was a large, square farmhouse with six rooms and no running water.  There was an outhouse in the yard and a well next to the house.  She kept one room heated and did a lot of the cooking on a wood stove.  I chopped some wood for her the next morning and she made me schnitzel sandwiches for the road.  Our conversations primarily consisted of her teaching me the Hungarian and Romanian words for everything, and then giggling when I tried to pronounce them.  We watched the television specials that featured the 161st anniversary of the 1848-9 revolutions (the Ides of March being important for Hungarians as much as Julius Caesar enthusiasts) and then she taught me how to properly make a pörkölt, which is what I suppose us cretins living outside the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen would refer to foolishly as ‘goulash’:

Pörkölt 

3-4 tbsp oil or lard
1-2 onions, chopped
3-4 tbsp ground sweet paprika
Pork meat, cut into bite sized pieces
Water
Salt n’ Pepa

Heat the oil.
Add the onions and cook until translucent.
Add the paprika and continue frying.
Add the pork, and brown very lightly.
Add a bit of water, salt and pepper, and cover for one hour on low heat.

This is literally all you have to do.  I think it actually helps if you’re an old Hungarian woman.  Apparently just being one of these is the magic secret behind cooking pork because I have no idea how it is possible for them to make it as good as they do.

Kickin' it in Kikinda

Kickin' it.

 All the negative PR I have propagated against Serbian rail in the past had become so ingrained in my psyche that it gradually became accepted as given; Serbian rail was a constant, like an unchanging National Geographic photo in my mind’s eye and I factored this into all my transportation planning regarding the entry, exit and traversing of Serbia.  So imagine my lack of delight, as it were, to be dropped off in Belgrade on time rather than the usual 6 hours later.  Wholly unprepared for this massive paradigm shift, I could barely focus on the task at hand while the foundations of what I thought I knew about the world, about life—about myself—crumbled around me.  At this point, all I was certain of was that there was a train from Belgrade to Timisoara in Romania at 4am which would be the perfect base to launch an attack on the Ukraine.  This was true in 2007, so why shouldn’t it be now?


To backfill a bit of requisite information, from Repulika Hrvatska I had crossed with ease into Serbia.  I bought a ticket to the border and simply “forgot” to de-train when we reached the Croat border.  My eyes fixed on the Croat conductor who left the train in the town of Tovarnik and the border patrol came on to stamp my passport, I sat nervous and painfully self-aware as we left the town behind and the train rolled along the plains into the heart of my would-be captors and potential aggressors.  Instead, nothing could have gone more smoothly.  The Serb border patrolman entered my cabin and, so delighted at the prospect of stamping a Canadian passport, did not even look at it but placed a small, rectangular, Cyrillic-befonted stamp bearing the proud monogram for Sid, Vojvodina Autonomous Province, Serbia, and marvelled in my thorough knowledge of Serbian (‘thank you’ was back to ‘hvala’ at this point).  Serbia was my oyster—provided they let me out.

In Šid, I traded some euros for dinar (after being laughed at when I asked where the nearest ATM was) and settled into the Grill Kod Ljub for a chicken sandwich and some local entertainment.  Actually, I was the local entertainment as everyone tried to communicate me with me with little to no success.  One young student spoke English and he was on his way from Belgrade to Zagreb for St. Patrick’s Day.  He had forgotten his passport and was waiting for a friend from Belgrade to arrive on the train and bring it to him.  20 years earlier, a passport would not have been necessary, and now because of the regime change, Šid was experiencing an inadvertent tourism boom (after all, two people in one day were at the Grill Kod Ljub).  

In the Belgrade station I was as horrified as anyone to find that there was no train to Timisoara (accelerating my existential downward spiral), nor to anywhere remotely close to the Romanian border.  The tracks were laid and featured on the network map as if to tease me, but not so much as a parliamentary service existed to the eastern marches.  A woman approached me and was absolutely amazed that a Westerner had wandered into Belgrade at such an unseasonable time of year and insisted on advising me of the best place to eat for breakfast and how to find the bus station.  She said, “I will be your guide” as she took me to the bus depot.  As soon as we had exited the train station she said, “And now I kill you!  No! Ha! I make joke!”  It was exactly the welcome I wanted in Serbia.

Serbia, the outro.

I slept in an almost empty hostel across from the train station, ate salty goulash for dinner and opted for the breakfast recommendation in the morning, loaded my bag with cherry pastries and boarded a bus for Kikinda, which I assumed was a great launching point to get into Romania.  Surprise!—it wasn’t.  I assumed there would be the following things in this border town: a sign indicating the border; a bus to the border; a border crossing.  Unfortunately, people who live in villages in the Banat don’t really care about moving around much, even if they live directly on a border shared by Hungary, Romania and Serbia.  As such, I was in a bit of pickle in getting across.  After a bit of hitchhiking I learned that I needed to go to Ruskoe Selo, a village to the south, where I could cross.  I hopped on a bus and attracted a fair amount of attention from some teenagers.  One walked with me and tried to figure out what I was doing there.  Suddenly, a pimped out SUV came tearing down the road and an over-tanned young gentleman, presumably on his way to an audition for the Serbian version of Jersey Shore, picked us both up.  The two were friends and they were beyond belief that someone from Canada would ever be walking in this village at such a time of year that they insisted on driving me right to the border crossing and pumping some hot electro beats the whole way while they tore into the parking lot of the customs house and tore off, base pounding and the border guards perplexed.  I wouldn’t have arrived any other way. 

If you like flat, arable land and the opportunity to see Hungary, Romania and Serbia (and invading Turks) from one point of vantage, consider the Banat.

The border guards joked with me over who knows what and sent me on my way into Romania, where for some reason the border guard made me sit and wait in a little portable.  He was younger than I was and new to the border guard scene, I suspected.  He was overrun with work and it took a while to process my passport.  He also asked me lots of questions, not in an interrogating tone, but more of a why-on-earth-are-you-at-the-Jimbolia-crossing-on-foot-in-mid-March sort of way.  You know what I mean.  He asked what my plans were and where I would sleep.  I told him probably Timisoara if I couldn’t find a night train north.  Nonsense! he insisted.  He gave me his number and told me that I could easily stay with him in Timisoara when he got off work later that evening.  I thanked him and said I would contact him later after I checked the train schedule.  I continued my walk to Jimbolia and gazed out in amazement at just how flat and arable the Banat is.  So arable!  My eye also caught a large cluster of trees and a tower in the distant that I have come to learn was part of some sort of forest-gravel pit complex known as the “Babin Raj”—my dream to own a quarry had just come prophetically closer.  Walking into Jimbolia from the border, I was feeling entirely unstoppable, until I was stopped by a car driven by two men who offered me a ride.  They picked up some other guy as well and then they said in extremely broken English that they were charging me 30 euros.  I said no.  They said 30 euros.  I said no, I am a student.  And I don’t want to pay 30 euros.  They said they would take me to Timisoara for 30 euros.  I demanded to me let out of the car.  In fact, this was my dream situation.  I have always wanted to become entirely inconsolable and start screaming and swearing in rapid-fire English and thrashing about.  Unfortunately, they let me out after my third demand, but could you imagine how much fun that could have been?  Anyways, the good news was that they left me in the centre square, close to the train station.  I spoke with the station master who assured me a train would be leaving.  The “taxi” men returned to holler at me but the station master put them in their place.  And so he should.  Someone needs to keep order around here, and the Romanian national rail network does not need competition from these free-market upstarts.  

Old Romanian women have strong thigh muscles.

Upon exiting the station, a fat man hollered “Timisoara!” at me (story of my life) but I wasn’t to be swayed by their persuasive ways.  I was in search of something to eat when a young gentleman stopped me and started speaking German to me.  Surprised that he wasn’t aggressively offering to drive me to Timisoara, I ventured to find out what was amiss.  If someone in this village didn’t want to drive me to Timisoara, something was amiss indeed.  As it turned out, he spoke English (and French, and Serbian, and Romanian) but thought I was a German like himself.  He was from Bavaria but his family had originally come from this area—his father was a Banat German and his mother a Romanian who grew up in Serbia.  They met at medical school and moved to Germany where they reared this polylinguist who was spending his spring break visiting the village where his family was from.  And not to disappoint or stray from what I perceived at this point to be a well-honoured local tradition, he also asked if I was going to Timisoara.

The Timi Gara du Nord

He invited me to have dinner at the home of his father’s friend’s sister, who lived in a grand old estate in the centre of the town.  We entered through the former carriage doors, up the stairs and into the apartment she had carved out from this mansion.  Evidently, her family had been very prominent prior to the communist takeover and had produced the first prefect of Timisoara in Austro-Hungarian days.   She served up a delicious feast of traditional Banat food—aubergine spread, cabbage salad, stew—and homemade wine, and then Martin and I caught the rickety commuter train to Timisoara.  I called my border guard friend who was unable to host me due to working late, so I instead stayed with Martin.  He gave a personalised tour of the city, we saw the museum of the Banat and then made way for the brutalist train station to buy my ticket north.  Upon our tearful departure he asked, “What happens when you arrive in a city at night and have nowhere to sleep?”  I simply replied, “Oh, I drop a couple of F-bombs, drink a few beers and then find a place where I can curl into a ball and cover any exposed skin.”  He was and I think continues to be worried about me.  Then I clambered onto the train, wedged myself between two formidable babas carrying everything they owned in those plastic burlap bags, and plotted my next move.  

*Unfortunately, I seem to have lost all pictures that I may or may not have taken at this time.  It is possible that a battery shortage, or the sheer thrill of fleeing from Bosnia and evading the clutches of Servian border patrol led me to forget to snap any shots of the landscape, but unfortunately I am missing all my photos from this leg of the trip.  But for reference, perhaps a quick Google Image search of “Esterhazy, Saskatchewan in March” will paint a picture my words never could. 

Hvala Atcho Boi

Red shows my route as of 13 March,
2011, Green shows the impenetrable
wall of Schengen and Blue the border
of Serbia and the self-imposed
entrapment I managed for myself. 

One of the most pressing and important issues that my generation is currently facing is the task of updating one’s iPod.  As iPods get larger (and concurrently smaller), it becomes increasingly important that we consistently update our collections, while retaining tracks that we consider classics.  So naturally, the main problem for me by March of 2010 was that my iPod was stuck in the past, specifically summer 2009.  Of course, one cannot think that this is ‘retro’ in the same way as finding a mixtape from 1998, as the requisite amount of time had not properly elapsed.  This is why meeting up with Sally had been so fundamental to keeping myself sane, grounded, and connected to the Western World.  Being a smart, clever and liberated young woman, she brought her computer and I was able to upload the song that had been in my head since November: Edward Maya’s Stereo Love.  While it’s no secret that this is the greatest song to ever come out of Romania (and technically Azerbaijan, where its origins are), I think we need to start considering the wider implications for how important this song has been in defining ourselves.  Indeed, if I had to express myself through the medium of song, I would not hesitate to pick Stereo Love.  

So it’s no surprise that I was listening to Stereo Love on loop while I boarded a train north from Sarajevo towards Belgrade.  Of course, I assumed I could trick the rail services as in times past, by crossing the border by foot and reboarding the same train.  This unfortunately didn’t work as well as I had hoped, and I accidentally bought a ticket to the town on the Croatian side (—yes, we went through Croatia to get to Belgrade.  No doubt Tito had something in mind when he planned the rail services throughout Ex-oslavia) and paid the crossing fee.  Live and learn.  I emerged from the train on a snowy plain that was desolate, cold, and windy.  I knew immediately I was back in the former Kingdom of Hungary, because there is nothing that Hungarians love more than an endless flat plain. The Croat-Bosnian border, seemingly defined only geographically by the Sava River, actually reached back several centuries and for a long time was the frontier between Catholic Austria and Muslim Turkey; between Europe and Asia and in some geopolitical discourses it still is.  In fact, if it weren’t for the Sava River, I don’t think I would have even noticed I had crossed a border, except for the obvious linguistic switch from the Bosnian “Hvala” for the Croatian “Fala” (pronounced like “hvala”).

While the Dalmatian Coast was sunny and Mediterraneanesque, this corner of Croatia was bleak, cold, and decidedly ‘eastern.’  One problem with taking trains to the borders and walking is that when I arrive in a new country, I am usually without currency, and unlike the 100km radius on either side of the Canada-US border, these microstates in eastern Europe are wholly unprepared and unwilling to accept currencies that aren’t a reflection of their own hard-won independence and national pride.  So hard-won, in fact, that it necessitated instilling this pride and hatred in the next generation of Balkan upstarts.  Just a day earlier the bus ride from Neum to Mostar was a surprising flurry of ethnic tension.  A group of young teenagers on the bus talked with us in excellent English and asked questions about Canada.  Rolling into Mostar, they pointed out the windows and said, “The muslims live there, and the Croats live there, and there was a war and we *referring to himself and a few others* beat them. *gesturing towards some other kids on the bus*” They all seemed quite good natured and affable about the whole affair.  Optimistically I asked, “But you’re all friends now, right?” and they immediately assured me that no, they most certainly were not.  Despite their insistence that Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-Montenegrin was in fact the same language (to which I replied, “Oh, you mean Russian?” and only I laughed at), they were all raised to believe that they hated whatever ethnicity lived next door, undoing all of Tito’s 40-year iron-gripped suppression of nationalism.  Nancy—of dubious French Canadian descent—and I used this opportunity to note that we come from a country of differences too but that we live together peacefully, mildly resenting one and other—just like a real family.  

But solving the Balkan Question was not in the cards for me this time around.  As clear as it is to everyone in the diplomatic community that I know what is best for the region, I had bigger fish to fry at this point in time, specifically the biggest fish of all, the Ukraine.  I am not sure if you have ever looked at Ukraine on a map, but it is ginormous.  Everyone knows that Canada is big, Russia bigger, and the US and China to have well-endowed surface areas.  But until one’s eyes veer ever so slightly to the right on a map of Europe to see who or what is knocking at its back door that the true magnanimity of the Ukraine is brought home.  

Now, there are a couple of gaps that I should perhaps explain the buildup to me being deposited in a tiny village in Croatia waiting to get into Serbia.  When I docked in Sicily off a boat from Africa, the Italian customs officer informed me that I was over my Schengen visa time allowance.  I balked at this: me! A Canadian!  I am exactly what you people want in Europe, stacked with travel insurance and dolla dolla billz to burn.  There was no way they wouldn’t let me into Europe.  Europe was created with the sole intention of being my playground.  As it turned out, however, they weren’t going to let me into Europe, but they took pity on me and let me have a three day layover while I waited to board my plane to Romania—which is not Europe, lest we forget.  That was my only Get Out of Jail Free Card, however, and I had used it up.  So if Italy of all bureaucratically lethargic countries was not going to let me in, there was no way a country like Hungary or Slovenia, anxious to prove their worth in the new customs regime, would as well.  Europe-as-fortress stood before this intrepid young globetrotter.  

Behind door number two was Serbia, that great thorn in the Balkans’ side.  It is no secret that Serbia and I have had our differences over the years.  In 2007 I sent a scathing email to friends and family chastising the hopeless inadequacies of the Serbian rail network, and just a few days before I had been in Kosovo, de jure illegally entering Serbian territory.  Words of caution from Wikitravel and a light Googling of “Am I allowed to enter Serbia if I have three Kosovo stamps on my passport or will I be arrested?” suggested to me that is was a definite maybe that I would either have my Kosovar stamps crossed out, or in a worst case scenario I would be refused entry.  The third option, the least emotionally draining but by far the most irksome would be to return South through Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and then Romania—essentially retracing my steps and assumedly having the exact same adventures all over again.  Feeling particularly plucky and assuming my impish charm could spring me from any situation, I opted for Serbia.  We had been engaged in a delicate and elusive dance of brinkmanship for years, and I was not one to back down.  

As such, this is how I found myself on this endlessly flat plain in eastern Croatia on  I had to walk to the next town to a bank, but in that town there was no rail connection.  I hitchhiked for a few hours with little success and rapidly soaking feet to Vrpolje, with a nice young man who took me right to the station, where I was greeted by an even nicer train ticket salesperson who hooked me up with a Croatian train schedule, cheerfully informed me that the train I wanted to catch was leaving at that very moment, and advised that I had two hours to kill before the next train.  The silver lining was that I had more time to explore the immediate surroundings of the train station and eat a pita stuffed with meatballs and raw yellow onions, wash down the lingering aftertaste with a beer and a coffee, and write about my feelings as I nervously edged towards the uppity Balkan superpower that may force me to come to terms with my past. 

*A point worth noting is that I have, do and will continue to use a definite article when referring to Malorussia.  ‘Ukraine’ is merely the overarching state apparatus that currently occupies the geographical designation The Ukraine.