The Time I Got Stuck In Several Countries: Part 1 – Russia

Trams!

Trams!

This is the story I have retold the most in my life. And for good reason. It kind of sounds made up, yet not really epic enough to be worth the time imagining it. Maybe I should let you, the fearless reader, decide whether or not it is a tale worth continually spinning.

In 2008, I traveled to the small medieval town of Brno, in the Czech Republic. Now, if you’ve never heard of Brno, you’re probably far from alone. It’s a university town, in the West. Why in anyone’s name would I decide to make Brno, non-descript Brno, my first destination ever to travel to in Europe. I had no part in the decision making process. I acted in a play and the play was recorded and submitted to a festival in Brno. So I was in Brno. There I was. Like a dog after a bath. I raced all over experiencing firsts. Monumental firsts! Such as riding a train for the first time. As passengers sat looking at mobile devices or gossip magazines or dozing off, drool and mushed fleshed smeared against the windows, the most beautiful, living landscape wooshed by, only replaced with more beautiful scenery. I was shocked. I had not the experience of doing a daily commute abroad, so could not comprehend how people were able to refrain from constantly staring out of the window at the natural masterpieces. The train felt like a revelation. The passengers felt like a Tuesday.

Adventures through Czech Lands - walking through the mountains around Czesky Krumlov.

Adventures through Czech Lands – walking through the mountains around Czesky Krumlov.

The play ended and the options were endless. A friend and I traveled through the Czech lands, utilizing the infant couchsurfer project, finding amazing hosts throughout the country. An Irish dancer in Olomouc, a mechanic and his family living in a small town outside of Ceske Budejovice. We ended up in the capital. He left. I stayed. Stayed and taught English for four months. A contract ends and freedom once again is attained. I decide to explore my Jewish cultural heritage. Though I felt very little connection to my faith, I was interested in my history, interested in seeing the places where thousands and millions of my supposed extended family were imprisoned and slaughtered. There was other histories as well. And I was interested in them too. The stones of walls and cobbled streets narrated aloud. I travel along a zig zagging line across Eastern Europe on several chugging bullets. I see parts of Poland, the dark undertones of The Holocaust seep into every observable space. I continue on. I almost visit Belarus (a story), but end up in the Ukraine instead atop a tin roof, with one of the leading members of the Ukrainian Gay Rights Movement. We watched the sun ride over onion shaped domes and steeples. With Visa clutched tightly, I enter Russia. I spend time with family friends in Moscow and move onto to stay with a couchsurfer in the beautiful and ancient city of St. Petersburg.

Train to Russia

Train to Russia

On the day my Visa expires I hug my couchsurfing host goodbye and board a bus heading to Estonia. The bus, once a thing of beauty, sturdy as a mechanized colt, now emitted the sounds of a starving stomach, a machine on its deathbed. It breaks down and takes an hour to fix. We reach the boarder in the pitch soot sky of the next day’s morning. We are all made to exit the bus and walk through passport inspection and security. I haven’t noticed the time yet. There are no clocks on the walls. I hand a guard my passport. He squints to make out the dates on my visa. We stand still as steles. The line no longer moves as the guard calls upon someone else, another guard, who I can only presume is his superior officer. Broken English leaks from his mouth in a monotone fashion:

“I am sorry. Your Visa is no longer. You cannot leave.”

I stand, backpack still strapped to me, sweat stained, knees knocking, body burning. I stand for two hours. I am finally allowed to take a seat in a waiting room that reminds me of my childhood pediatrician’s office. I can see into another office space, where a woman types away on an old typewriter. Maybe it was a computer, but I see it in my mind as a typewriter, so that’s what it shall be. I have already pleaded in English to any passerby, telling them my tale of an unlucky experience with a rickety bus. The faces whizz by, not all too concerned with my gibberish, my babbling. I whip out my electronic translator and attempt to make a sentence. I think I am saying:

 

“My grandmother was kicked out of Russia one hundred years ago and now you are imprisoning me in it. Please, please let me go.”

Could anyone understand my butchering of the Mother tongue? At first, no. People went about their menial tasks like good Communist worker ants. Then I see the woman at the typewriter through the door. The old typewriter has stopped clanging. She is frozen in a still frame. She wears a pastel dress that looks very itchy. She is a still frame except for the tears streaming down her reddened cheeks. Yet there is nothing she can do, so she breaks from the trance and continues to type. I feel her. There is nothing that I can do either.

An officer approaches me and explains my crimes once more. I am frustrated and tired and really don’t need another explanation. The officer tells me I will be boarding a bus.

Great.

Where to?

St. Petersburg.

That is the last place I wished to go now. And yet, that was what was happening. My frustrations no longer could be contained. Be damned with the consequences of voicing my objections to the regime stoolies. What could they do? Throw me in jail?….Yes! But if I get caught wandering the streets of Saint P without a legit visa, I’ll be in the same spot. I air this concern with them. It gives them a good chuckle. I yell. I curse. I am now sitting on a tourist bus. A tourist bus heading to Saint P. It drops me off in a part of the large city that I don’t know. Think Ira. What are you going to do? I find the subway system and descend into the arterial tubes bellow the city. Somehow, I remember the directions to my couchsurfer’s home. It’s 4:30 in the morning. I don’t wish to disturb her, but my options are limited.

I pensively knock. There is an audible stir from within. The door creaks ajar and she stands there, hand behind her head, stretching, scratching.

“I am so sorry…..”

I unfolded my blanketed story. My former host stands there, looking lost, eyes mostly closed, body rocking. Yet her pause was one of consideration. Her solution was swift and to the point:

“Let’s have Port.”

“Um. But…”

“No but. Offices aren’t open yet. Only thing open is Port.”

I couldn’t argue. Port, port and more port. A call to the Canadian embassy provided no answers, but asked if I found some later to pass them on to this fine governing body, so that they can take credit from what I have learned from this plain shit-storm experience. Thank you tax dollars. As useless as national pride.

I bought a new train ticket and did a bit of snooping around for information on what my next move would be. Rumor has it that there is a phone somewhere in the St. Pete’s airport that you can call and contact a guy who you can bribe to leave the country. It was worth a shot. After six hours of searching the airport for the Where’s Waldo Phone and having some of the best damn sushi I had ever had (which threw me off, as the sushi maker was blonde haired and blue eyed), I found the mythical phone. Wheezing, an extended cough greeted me.

“Hi, my visa expired, I would like to get an extension so that I can leave Russia.”

“You buy plane ticket…”

“I bought a train ticket…”

“No….you buy plane ticket.”

“But I have already spent money on a train and bus ticket”

“You buy plane ticket”

“….THESE ARE STUPID RULES”

“These are student rules? THESE ARE RUSSIA RULES!”

And he hangs up. And I stand there. And my blood boils. And my eyes well. And I hold it in. And I pick up the phone. It was a red phone, like the emergency phone that Commissioner Gordon would use to contact Batman with. I pick up the phone and I call him back. I have no idea who this man is. I have no idea if he is also having a bad day. He is just following orders. Well…not really, as what he is doing is bribery, but….still. He’s just trying to make a buck.

“50 dollars”

50 bucks to be exact. 50 bucks for a visa extension. I looked it as 50 bucks for freedom. I am sure many others who do not have freedom would pay way more for it. And he was my only option. He told me that I needed a plane ticket and fast. I was original set to be in Estonia two days ago via bus, but couldn’t find a flight there. Instead, I flew to Tallinn, the capital of Finland. It was a ferry ride away to get back on track.

As I crossed the tarmac, the sun falling behind the outlines of shady watchtowers, I breathe deep for the first time in a few days. A final double peace sign photo op at the top of the stairs, then I duck into the plane. That duck was supposed to be like a Mario duck, leading me to safety. Mario’s not real and nor was my perceived safety.

Better times in Russia

Better times in Russia

 

 

post

Why I Travel Blog

Church of St. Alexander, Warsaw

Church of St. Alexander, Warsaw

There are the obvious reasons why one travel blogs. To share travel adventures, through photos and words, trying to encapsulate an experience to the reading and viewing audience. To imbue in others the same excitement, curiosity and inspiration that the blogger felt whilst traveling. To pinpoint exact emotional exaltation.

Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw

Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw

This is also the general sentiment of why I travel blog as well. The intricacies of it are way more personal. Solo travel for me only started at 24, with a trip to Brno, Czech Republic with a theatre show that ended up, with a very unexpected job in Prague and then a 4-month expedition, tracing my family’s heritage through Eastern Europe. I had never a train before and was thrilled with sticking my head out of the window, letting the wind make my eyes squint, a tornado of my brown hair, like a dog in a car ride. That same trip, I was introduced to couchsurfing. Travel took on an entirely new meaning, where it wasn’t simply placards and buildings and other travelers, it was local people, personal accounts, trans-ocean humour, Ipod music exchanges, one or two dance sessions, a game of golf in Dijon, foraging for dinner in Groningen. All I had read about travel came from books and those books laid out the foundational blueprints of how to travel. Yet there had to be something else, something more expansive and less focused on the MUST SEES and the MUST EATS.

Warsaw Uprising Monument, Warsaw

Warsaw Uprising Monument, Warsaw

So blogs. First big websites like Trip Advisor (which I still use as a base for exploration), then more obscure travel sites like Atlas Obscura (which, if you haven’t checked out, is the best source for Off the Beaten Path travel oddities), to the worldwide blogosphere of adventurers, trippers, dream followers and spontaneity experts. I was hooked to their words, as many of them weren’t simply telling me what they saw, but how they felt, how places impacted them or didn’t. Blogging is personal creative writing, an individual’s take on the world through their eyes, through their pens, through their keyboards. It can be laced with superlatives, poetics, judgment, digressions, failure, no words at all, all visual. I blog, even if only a few read it, to show them my version of cities and towns, of nature and of bike trips. They are my visceral accounts of the world. They are my endorsement of decorative language, trying to squeeze out the true emotion I felt in a singular moment, possibly written days after. I cannot prescribe nor would I ever want to, a reaction to what I write or how it effects where people decide to go. I hope that the few who do read it, have an opinion or an idea that sprouts from it. I hope, as that’s all one can do with putting writing into the public’s glance, that it pushes people to either travel or challenge themselves, ask questions, look unto other blogs to continue planning or imagining a more complete global sphere.

All You Can Eat - Japanese, European and......everywhere else in all time and space? Babalu's in Warsaw. Felt so so so sick after this.

All You Can Eat – Japanese, European and……everywhere else in all time and space? Babalu’s in Warsaw. Felt so so so sick after this.

I frequently embellish memories. I cannot remember exacts, so I shameless fill in the blanks. I blog because I love to write. I love to reimagine what I have seen, to reinvigorate the recollections with verbose imaculations and neologisms (such as imaculations). Though, recent travel, via bicycle gives me the space to write as I travel. I stop where I want and if I feel the urge, I jot down the day, in summation or elongation. I write in a blue tent, where one of the poles is partially snapped due to a crow landing on it, by the waning sun, drifting behind the red mountains just outside of Santa Monica. That is an actual memory. The things that I lock into my brain vault are sometimes obscure fragments. Sometimes, due to my prior habits during travels (drinking copious amounts at night), memories are literally slits of narrow light with broken and blurred images. I write as form of self-preservation, because one of my greatest fears is loosing it all to time. Not necessarily as a legacy of what I have accomplished, but more as something for myself to look back on and simply account for what I have done. Not as somewhat of a CV for pomposity, but more as a timeline that I existed.

Warsaw Uprising Museum

Warsaw Uprising Museum

While my travels include people and places, I also consciously set quests for myself. I blog to uncover gems, maybe not ones that were necessarily covered by layers of sediment, just ones’ that maybe overlooked, underappreciated, the map to get to them has been used as scratch paper or made into papier-mâché for a birthday piñata (what I am saying is that no one cares where this place is). Blogs and websites are full of hints and my duty with these hints is to test them out and confirm their validity. This description seems quite vague without an example. The city of Xian, China, was the ancient capital for hundreds of years. Tourists flock here to cycle the ancient walls and see the UNESCO approved Terracotta Warriors. What very few people know about, is that at the Tomb of Emperor Jingdi, a ways out of city, another burial plot was opened to revealed, miniature terracotta figurines, along with terracotta livestock and chariots. In total, over 50,000 pieces are on display. Along with this amazing experience, is a very beautifully set up underground museum, with large vaulted glass walls revealing the digs, but beside and below you, you are free to trapes around the tomb area, see several of the tomb gates, and watch an AMAZING hologram film about the history of the site (no 3d glasses required). This place is completely under the radar and when I got there, I basically had free range of the place (think Night at the Museum, minus the reanimation of historical items). There were a handful of different directions as to how to get to this place, since it was in an odd location of the highway, leading north of the city. Armed with a few of these Internet found directions, plus the Chinese characters to this place, I ventured out to confirm this place’s existence. Luck had it that the #4, the first bus I got on and was on my list, was confirmed by the bus driver to be the correct bus. For me, that could happen is I end up going somewhere else and possibly exploring something unexpected. So it’s a win win for me.

Warsaw Couchsurfing Dance Party

Warsaw Couchsurfing Dance Party

I blog to interact with people. Blogs are a dialogue, a community of shared experiences and responses, where the responses may come in the form of words or in exploration of what the blogs’ describe. I hope that as this site builds that this dialogue fills the forums and itinerary of the new site (which will be up THIS MONTH) with evolving dialogues and information that result in people testing the waters, unburdening themselves with limits by asking questions and seeing the blog reflect your inquiries, with maybe not always answers, but further explorations, adding points to the map that I will travel to confirm experiences and places or discover errors, saving you the hassle of a fruitless expedition to nowhere. My blogs and my travels will mirror your dreams, aspirations, desires, or highlight your wonderful memories, follow your deep incites, possibly making travel a more tangible possibility instead of something you do on free weekends or something you’ll do when your decrepitly old.

Babushka, Kiev

Babushka, Kiev

I blog, because it makes me feel wonderful. It’s me facing my fears as well. I travel around the world, yet I am scared of publishing my writing. I believe it is good, that it is informative and well written, but am afraid of it being said to be otherwise. This is my version of being bold and it holds more importance that what many would be considered a blip, not part of any creative career. But blips are my greatest assets. Microcosms are my favorite worlds. I am worried about not getting anywhere; I am worried about denouncing things in favor of acceptance.

Orthodox Priest.

Orthodox Priest, Kiev.