Training in Ukraine

by: Yuriy Diakunchak

There's a smelly drunken man who claims to be a big businessman but is dressed in Goodwill rejects and is braying folk songs at the top of his voice sitting on your bed. Quick where are you. If you said the 12 hour overnight express from Kyiv to Lviv then you've obviously been to Ukraine too many times for your own good. Drunken fools aside, the best way to travel throughout Ukraine is on the extensive train network. Everyone uses trains for inter-city travel and if you are the type who likes to meet "real people" the train in Ukraine is mainly the plane on which you wish to remain.

The Kyiv-Lviv haul is a good beginning point for people unfamiliar with train travel in Ukraine. Your chances of seeing other foreigners is good and the staff is hospitable if not overly flexible. Try ordering a tea without sugar in it and you'll see what I mean. The stuff is prepared in a big vat before departure and the sugar is a constituent part of the brew. Bring your own distillation equipment if you need sugarless tea. The cutest train is the "Vuhlyk" literally "Little Piece of Coal" which runs between Kyiv and Donetsk. Though it's an ungodly 18 hour ride, the staff is among the politest, most helpful government employees I've ever run into in Ukraine. The toilets are a notch above most train loos also (that's not saying much mind you).

But back to the characters you meet on a train. If you're travelling alone, book yourself into a four-bed cabin. Chances of having an entertaining cabin mate are much higher than if you book a two-bed "private" room. Avoid the platz cars (cattle cars as I refer to them) unless you enjoy the company of many, many entertaining people.

As wily as you think you are, you are going to get pegged as a foreigner as soon as you come within a hundred meters of the train station. Nonetheless it always surprises me how the locals want to protect your identity from the "bad people." I was in a cabin once with three people. When two left the third leaned over and quietly asked me if I was from the West. Normally I would lie but I judged the person to be sincere so I said "yah you found me out". We talked briefly until the other people reappeared and she clammed up. Funny thing is, the other two people did the exact same thing in their own turn later in the trip. Each thought they were the only one that knew I was a foreigner and didn't want anyone else to find. I wanted to tell them that the entire train was probably in on their little "secret" about two minutes after I boarded, but that would have spoiled my fun.

The best group I ever ran into were two exchange students from Peru. They spoke only Spanish, their translator spoke only Spanish and Russian, my guide spoke only Ukrainian and Russian and the other people I was with spoke only English. We all got nicely drunk together, but the entire conversation had to go through three translations which made anything but getting hammered totally out of the question.

Originally published in Zdorov! Winter 1997.

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