Dates: August 12-24, 2009
Locations: Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece
My lack of free time and internet connectivity, mixed with a pervasive disinterest in looking back on past events, plus an overwhelming number of experiences and an aversion to run-on sentences, like this one, culminate in today’s belated collection of pictures and anecdotes. Getting this update out of my head and onto the internet has been an epic struggle, the likes of which have been seen previously only in this stone relief.
Back in college, my class was discussing films that leave you feeling paranoid, persecuted, and stuck without options. Diving into his personal experience, my professor talked about traveling through Prague in his mid-twenties. He was riding in a mostly empty subway car late at night. Very tired, he put his feet on the seat across from him and closed his eyes. He was awakened by a strong hand shaking his shoulder. The man looming above him reached into his uniform pocket and retrieved a pen to write a ticket while admonishing his lack of respect for public property. While the officer talked, my professor began to get dizzy and his nose started to bleed. The blood splattered on the seat, which the policeman took as a sign of intentional insubordination. After a dramatic pause, he summed up the experience as, “particularly Kafkaesque.”
As I exited my first train in the homeland of the haunted author, that is the story that ran through my mind. Every face and every sign took on an intimidating slant. The escalator traveled at least twice the speed of any other I had ever ridden, rising at least five stories at a 45 degree angle. The curved ceiling had a sickly yellow glow leading to a darkness at the end of the tunnel. As I stared into the abyss above, I too began to get dizzy. The effect was similar to what is commonly called a Hitchcock zoom.
My exit from Prague left me feeling like the title character of The Prisoner or at least someone from an episode of The Twilight Zone. Thinking months ahead, I realized Prague was my last chance to obtain a visa for Nepal. Without one I would eventually find myself stuck at the Indian border.
After consulting a website that offered only office hours and an address, I spent a Friday afternoon trying to find the embassy. Previous embassies I’d visited featured strict security in the form of men with guns and concrete blocks meant to slow down car bombs. As I moved further and further from the center of town the likelihood of such a setup diminished.
There’s no way it is next to a rock climbing store.
I was right, it was actually in the rock climbing store. Well sometimes it was, just not during the listed office hours. This unpredictability is what caused me to spend an extra week in the Czech Republic and only four days taking trains through my next four countries. Unless I wanted to sit in the store for a nine hour block of time waiting for the Nepali consular to show up, he suggested I leave my passport with a cashier and hope my paperwork got processed while I was away. So I did.
When I returned at the end of the day, a new cashier was working who couldn’t understand my English. After a good deal of my pantomiming, he walked into a back office. Minutes passed before he emerged shaking his head. Less than an hour until I was to board a train to leave the country and my passport had been lost/stolen/donated to the Kafka Museum. Right as I accepted my indefinite detention in the Czech Republic, a different employee walked out with an envelope in her hand. In an attempt to restore my faith in paperwork, the bureaucracy gods granted me a properly filled out visa. I ran out the door and started a four day stretch in which I spent more time on trains than not.
My overnight train dropped me in Budapest, Hungary where I discovered that the national birthday was 24 hours away. There would be fireworks and stunt flying and drinking with dancing that went well into the morning. All of those are things that I love, especially fireworks, but in order to make a flight later in the week, I couldn’t stay to participate. I did see a helicopter, though, one of the countless displays of military might I’ve come across during my travels.
I found a train to Serbia that would arrive by 7:00 PM, giving me at least a few hours to explore before my 5:00 AM train the following day. Best of all, I might have a local guide in the form of my new friend Aleksander, who I met while traveling through Dresden. We shared an interest in the strange world known as North Korea and had a laugh while none-too-convincingly assuring a drunk German that Obama was not a “secret Muslim” ready to make “inside deals.”
An hour after the train was meant to depart, the cars remained motionless in the station. The couple in my compartment stared silently at each other while the girl across from me sent text message after text message. Despite all the noise on the platform, our car couldn’t seem any quieter. At the start of the second hour I noticed an old film camera in the text messenger’s bag. As she moved it to the shelf above her head, she handled it with the mixture of gentleness and familiarity that only an experienced photographer could.
Milica spent the next 8 hours telling me about pinhole photography, Monster Zoku, and living in Serbia. In a strange twist of fate, the train that ran 4 hours late, keeping me from seeing Belgrade in the sunlight, allowed me to learn more about the country than if I had arrived on time. We made a new friend (above) who had a modest pop hit on Serbian radio in his younger years.
As I walked from the train station to my hotel, I had my first taste of wild dogs. Every country I have been to since has featured regular doses of mangy mutts eking out a living from trash and begging. Their temperament changes from land to land, and I now know how to deal with them. In most places, you can ignore them. In Nepal and the Philippines, you can pet them. In Mongolia, you might want a rock in your hand. This first interaction, though, as they followed me to my hostel was the scariest moment of my trip, at least until I had to walk down a lightless pedestrian tunnel in Bulgaria the next night.
For the first five hours of the next morning’s train ride, I shared a room with a young German couple. We traded travel stories and snacks and tried to guess how long the border crossing would take. As we neared the first of three checkpoints, we noticed a lot of movement in the car. A very old, very wrinkly Bulgarian woman slipped into our room. Sitting down, she stuffed her bag under ours and held her index finger to her lips. Shhhhh.
More scurrying along the corridor as Bulgarians, Serbs and others darted back and forth. As one man walked toward the back of the train, I noticed a package in his arms roughly the size of a baby. When he strolled back toward the front a few minutes later, he was empty-handed.
Another man opened the door to our room and walked in backwards. He stuck his head back into the hallway to survey the action before shutting the door and taking a seat. He and the woman shared a knowing glance and a silent laugh.
The number of passengers walking around dwindled as the number of police officers increased. No one left their rooms except when they were being inspected.
An hour later, I had been kicked out of my seat twice and had my passport reviewed many more times. After the first round, the old woman pulled out a small glass bottle. She took a swig and pushed it into my hands. She sized me up and earnestly insisted that I drink as well. Adopting some of her renegade spirit, I happily tipped back before passing the bottle to the Germans.
More and more officers made their way through the train. Each round they employed a different tool, culminating with a powerdrill and tiny mirror attached to a long stick. Piece by piece they dismantled the walls and ceilings of the train.
Sometime during the second hour I began to wonder what sort of contraband they were looking for. Only international arms dealers could warrant this kind of manpower spread over such a long period of time. At the very least there must be some poppies making a roundabout trip from Afghanistan.
When I stuck my head out the window, I noticed dozens of white shopping bags on the ground. An officer emerged from a cabin with two more in his arms. He tossed them out the window and three cases of cigarettes flew out. Officers outside began to pick up all the bags. As the plastic tightened around the contents, the rectangular outlines of cigarette boxes took shape over and over.
After the last box was put in the squad car and the last inspector had left the train, we began to move. The old lady started to laugh as she reached for the shelf above her. From underneath the Germans’ duffel bag emerged a plastic bag filled cigarettes. The man who hid with us earlier returned and moved some more luggage. His hands resurfaced with two more white bags. Backing out of the cabin, he gave a little bow and a tip of his cap.
A quarter mile from our final destination, all the passengers emerged from their rooms, white bags in hand. One after another, they tossed the cigarettes out the windows. From the forest that lined the train tracks, family members and business partners jogged out, retrieved their packages and disappeared again.
My thirty-six hours in Greece lacked the narrative force of a good cigarette smuggling tale, but it did include crisp blue water, a beautiful sunset, and plenty of juxtaposed imagery.
