The road to Lviv...

I _think_ that my great-grandfather Joseph Karel (born Yael Karditsky, or something like that) was born in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. In the sixth grade, Miss Mooney had us do some sort of international family heritage project - for my project, I called my Grandpa Milt to ask about his family. Grandpa Milt responded by making a cassette tape for me of a story about his father, Joe. Of course, like the careless sixth grader I was, I promptly lost the tape once the school project was over. Oh, what I would give to have that tape. Grandpa Milt died a couple years ago at the end of a long battle with a Alzheimer's-like brain disorder, and I am missing that tangible memory of his voice and his speech and what he thought was important about his father's life. It's such a shame.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up, is that I _think_ Grandpa Milt said on that tape that his father, Great Grandpa Joe, was born in a town called Lubitz, Poland. Now, Poland's borders changed a lot during the 19th and 20th centuries becaues of aggression from its neighbors - the Prussians, the Russians, the Austrians, and later the Germans, all claimed pieces of what is now Poland at various times. This Lubitz place doesn't appear on any map, but my theory is that Lviv (a.k.a. Lvov) was part of Poland at the time that my great grandfather would have been born (late 19th century), and that it was called Lubitz in Polish or Yiddish or some other language that Joe Karel's family would have spoken. What do you all think? Am I making this up, or does that sound like it could be true?

Now, getting to this place was a royal pain in the you-know-what. Let's start with trying to get a hotel room in this town. We were in Krakow, lovely veggie-friendly Krakow, with hostels galore, and train tickets to Lviv in our pockets. Lviv doesn't have hostels, really, it has a few hotels, and reputedly there are also babushkas hawking sketchy "private rooms" somewhere, but we've yet to see any such hawkers. So, we reconcile ourselves to staying in relatively posh accommodations in Lviv and start dialing hotel numbers. Wait, what's the international code for the Ukraine? Ok. How about the city code? Yeah, okay, so how many calls have we already made just trying to figure that out? Don't even want to talk about it.

Turns out the international phone in our hostel lobby actually stunk - a couple times, we got through to real live people in Lviv, only to find the line static-y and get disconnected. In the lobby of a very shwanky hotel near the Wawel Castle which we were definitely not guests at, we burned through two phone cards and learned that one hotel was full, and one only had Ukrainian or German speakers at its reception desk. We finally succeeded in making a reservation at a way over-priced option, but hey, a bed is a bed. Who knew Lviv was such a popular destination??

We breathed a sigh of relief. It'll all be OK. But then came the train....oh, the train.

First of all, the train was delayed 90 minutes.

90 minutes later, we get back to find it on platform 2. Great. We wait at platform 2, and wait and wait and wait.

Upon hearing an announcement entirely in Polish, everyone else waiting at the platform gets up and runs with their bags to someplace, Heather and I know not. Heather politely asks a Polish girl in English, "where are you going?"
She looked annoyed and said "one." OK. We go to platform one. No one is there but us. Hmmm. Billie runs out to the main train station to check the monitor, and finds that the train is in fact at platform 3, and that it is indeed very late. But how late? What exactly did that monitor say about the lateness? Pondering this on the walk back to meet Heather, Billie apparently mixed up numbers and thought the screen had said 300 minutes late. 300 minutes! That's 5 hours!

Billie and Heather decide not to go to Lviv today. In fact, our words were, "fuck Lviv."

We put on our packs that were growing heavier by the minute, and trudge back up to the terminal to check the screen again.

Wait, it says 180 minutes late, not 300! (Billie, where the hell did you get that number?) Wait, shit, the train is leaving in 5 minutes!! So, we sprint, or rather, scuttle back through the terminal, across the platforms, up the stairs to platform 3, just in time to leap aboard the almost-completely-full train, sweating and stinking and cursing as we were, and crammed into a cabin with four other people. Grrreat.

Fast forward through 200 km or so of beautiful Polish countryside to the border town of Przmysl. (Don't ask me how to say that, I have no idea. Can I buy a vowel?). We get our passports stamped at the train station and are escorted by Polish military onto the platform. Trying to board the train, the woman taking tickets waves us back to the station, saying "kasu, kasu!!" It seems that the ticket agent in Krakow failed to indicate the date, train number, or seat numbers on our tickets....the station agent in Przmysl wanted us to go back to the station to get these things assigned. But we'd already officially left Poland, passports stamped and everything. And, because of the 3-hour delay of our first train, it was too late, the "kasu" was already closed up for the night.

So, we stood around looking plaintive and helpless. We smiled at the Polish customs/military people a lot, and showed them our poor number-less tickets. They took pity on us, and spoke to the steward of the first class cabin on our behalf. He let us on board, and assigned us to a cabin just next to a cabin full of drunk Ukrainian dudes with pot bellies, wearing no shirts. Hot. And it was, temperature-wise, very hot. We were sweaty. So were they. It was gross.

But, here's the catch - the train we were getting on had no locomotive just yet - apparently, that train was wicked late too.

So, in the fashion of young American women traveling abroad, we made friends with young men. We met a nice Dutch doctor and talked politics of both our countries. We also befriended one of the military/customs guys, a 23-year-old, very overworked young fellow named Peter. He was a good egg, he did his best to get us on that train, even though he couldn't understand most of what we were saying.

There were mosquitoes. Luckily, we had Burt's Bees herbal insect repellant. Pesticide free, baby!

We were hungry. Luckily, we still had the makings of peanut butter and nutella sandwiches that we'd purchased at a Tesco grocery store back in Prague. So, we pic-nic-ed, on the train platform, in the dark, and made the Poles and Ukrainians laugh.

Fast forward to our arrival in fair Lviv...at 2:30 am local time. Ouch. After a very weird cab ride from the train station, we checked in to our excessively swanky hotel, fumbled around with buttons on the teeny weeny elevator, and fell exhausted into our beds.

What a fucking day.

I can only imagine what Grandpa Joe went through going the other direction back in 1902 or so....there's a great line from Angels in America, when the elderly Rabbi is eulogizing a recently deceased immigrant from Russia or somewhere....and he says, "in our day, such journeys do not exist." Something like that. Even with all this hell, I'm sure it's true.