Tag: trains

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Episode I: The 141 to Union Station

For most Americans living outside the east coast’s metropolitan areas, riding a train is an event.  It is a luxury for those in surfeit of both time and money, and its inefficiency, especially in the vastness that is America left of the Mississippi, further relegates it to “vacation” status.  There is a reason Disney’s monorail – an absolute bore of epic proportions – remains one of the most traveled rail systems in the world.  If you are an American and you are on a train, then chances are you’re on vacation.

Mine, then, officially begins as I’m sitting on my backpack, fleece zipped up against the Baltimore chill on a Thursday morning, waiting for the 141 regional from BWI to DC’s Union Station while sizing up the Asian fellow next to me.  He sits down on the bench, two shopping bags, a shoulder bag and wheeled overnighter beside him, and strokes a few black, wispy hairs hanging from his chin.  Alan – his American name – is a Chinese MBA student in his first year at Penn State, and he’s returning from a Spring Break trip west where he visited LA, Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas, where he scored a pair of Timberlands at an outlet mall.

“How much do you think these cost,” he asks me.  I offer up $60 and he responds by raising his eyebrows and gently fingering a small “Gore Tex” tag sewed into one of the seams.  I do not bite, and stick with $60.  “Eighty dollars” he says, and though I feign surprise, lips pushed out and mouth corners turned down, he has a bigger point to make.

“Do you know how much these cost in China?”  I do not.  “Two hundred dollars.” He then exposes the tag on the tongue’s interior, revealing the words “Made in China.”  Alan laughs like this might be the funniest, most outrageous thing he’s ever heard.

A north-bound train approaches, interrupting Alan’s laughter, and he excuses himself as he stands up to take a picture of the oncoming engine.  “My first American train,” he says, quickly snapping photos.  He asks me to guess how many pictures he’s taken on his 5 day trip – Alan likes to make me guess things – and I err on what I think is the highside:  “twelve hundred.”  Alan pauses, then says “five thousand.” He follows with more raised eyebrows, sucking his tongue against his teeth in that Asian conversation filler that can indicate emphasis, assent, or the Chinese version of an American “um.”

After finding out I’m in the Army, Alan says he too was a Soldier, for ten years.  He also says he was in “IT,” and I immediately peg Alan for a spy.  I’ve been reading too much of The Atlantic lately, and am seeking adventure, so it is not a difficult leap for me to make.  Alan doesn’t help matters when he opens his laptop to show me his vacation photos, his screensaver an SR-71 Blackbird flying over the Sierra Nevada’s.  As any halfway decent spy, Alan must sense my shift in mood, and he explains away the rookie spy move with an “I like airplanes.”  He asks me what he should do in DC, and I start into a list of museums and monuments he can see for free and over a short time period.  The Smithsonian – there are eighteen, not counting the zoo – plus the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson memorials, the Viet Nam vets memorial, the Korean, one of my favorites.  Alan listens politely and then asks “how can I get into the Pentagon?”  I quickly tell him he’s not allowed, but my Walter Mitty imagination subsides as he begins cranking through his vacation photos.  The incredible tediousness of other people’s pictures spans cultural divides, I conclude, and I think that if Alan is a spy, he is either awful or exceptionally good.  He realizes the pictures are boring as well (“these are kind of boring”), and I think that if Alan wasn’t trying to hack into my computer, we might just be friends.  May we achieve peace by boring the snot out of each other with left clicks and mouse pads.

I leave Alan at Union Station, after first taking a few pictures of him with his camera, and exit out the west side of the building to DC Metro’s new bike station, a small but beautiful glass building that looks like the breaching back of the Loch Ness.  I go inside to take a look, and am greeted by a guy sporting a shaved head and a ridiculously good Mark Twain mustache that parts to reveal less than perfect teeth but a great grin when I mention the sifaka Lemurs, two-pound circus freaks that run in loping strides, arms longer than their legs and held erect above their heads whenever they’re on the move.  They leap between razor-edged spires in the Tsinghy de Bamarah nature reserve in northern Madagascar, where the bike worker has told me he just returned from two years in the Peace Corps doing “environmental stuff” – compost, gardening, water recycling – and he’s staying in DC to continue his efforts.  I wonder how hard it is to get to Madagascar, but then he’s pulled away by customers, and I suspect our conversation is as good as it’s going to get anyway.  Besides, I can see the Irish Times directly over his left shoulder, and with a day to kill, it is calling to me.

The permanently sticky table-topped Irish Times is what an American dive bar should be: sedate, local, cheap and decidedly irreverent.  Tacked up around the bar are what must be over a thousand patches from fire and police departments around the country, and though there is Guinness on tap, the only top-shelf liquor I spy is a dust-covered bottle of Tanqueray.  The chalkboard specials are Meatloaf, $10.95; Cold Meatloaf, $8.95.  I wonder if it will be free if I wait around until Monday.  An oil painting of John Wayne in an Indian chief’s headdress and a Warhol knockoff of Margaret Thatcher acknowledging a crowd, Crime Wave scrawled above the painting, frame a television, where Georgetown is about to beat Syracuse in the Big East tournament, and the heated rivalry explains the gathered Thursday afternoon crowd.  It is equal parts older drunk white guy and late-twenty yuppie black guys (Georgetown University: 6% black; Georgetown Hoyas basketball team: 82% black), but Syracuse is Syracuse and beating them brings many a DC foe together.

A DC dive bar is as good a start to a trip as anywhere else, but the next 72 hours do their best to dampen my spirit.  I am flying on the cheap – free military rotators to Germany, and maybe Kosovo if I am lucky enough to time them right – and I am getting what I pay for.  An eight and a half hour flight on a C-17, sitting upright on cargo-strap jump seats and facing south the entire time while my plane flies east; seven hours of German rigidity while I unsuccessfully attempt to get a cash advance on my credit card, sans a pin number; connecting commercial flights in Frankfurt and Zürich, where my lack of sleep and irritability get the best of me and I quickly tire of the uniformly cheap leather-jacketed, hair-metal band coiffured European youth.  My imagination, too, kicks in, and I suspect they are all heavies for second-rate Russian mobsters.  I don’t fear pleather-wearing western european youth, but I do Russian mobsters, second-rate or otherwise, and I put my nose back into my book.

Finally: a two am arrival in Thessolinki, Greece.  The town was named for Alexander’s half-sister, and he himself was born near here, prior to making almost all the known world his own.  Here too, I start my own adventure, mine north and west for ten days rather than east for ten years.  There are still arguments as to what incessant need drove Alexander to leave his home in Macedon, where he stood to inherit a kingdom and a lifetime of luxury.  Perhaps it was a determination to prove himself worthy to his father, King Phillip II; perhaps a need to justify his mother’s explanation of his birth as the product of the midnight visit of a God serpent.  Regardless, I find common ground in the need to explore, the need to experience life in order to justify it, the need for anonymity in an effort to somehow improve upon the familiar.

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Episode II: Tasos the Buffalo

Thessaloniki, Greece

Fickle are the emotional meanderings of solo travel, and touching down in Greece after almost two days of frustration elevated my spirits substantially.  I had only to get to the station to catch the next train to Skopje, and after talking to a security guard, had only to find a bus to take me there.  Outside, a double-length city bus is waiting, and as I get on as the only occupant, I ask the driver if this goes to the train station.  He smiles and gives half a head nod.  I am not confident.

“Train station?,” I ask again.  He downgrades the smile to a befuddled grin, adds a shoulder shrug and does away with the half head nod.  I try my limited German: “Bahnhoff?”  Again, same response.  Eff it; it’s late and I am tired.  I open my hand to reveal a stack of change, the first of many times I entrust my money to the honesty of strangers, and he gives the universal hand-and-arm signal, that touching of pockets usually reserved for able-bodied beggars and methadone addled youth that says “sorry, no change.” It is my turn to shrug and half-smile, and I take my seat for my own private ride to the I’ll know it when I see it Thessaloniki train station.

For the first ten minutes, I am alone.  But the airport is on one side of the second biggest city in Greece, the train station on the other, and two a.m. on a Sunday morning in any big city can quickly turn into a side-show.  There are the typical black leggings and mini skirts, plus face piercings and fake leather jackets, faux-hawks and vodka residue emanating from twenty-something pores. Admittedly, this is just a single, long stretch of road in a big city, but she is not pretty.  Graffiti is the theme of choice, and it blankets the square, angry stanchions holding up building after building of six- to eight-storey cut-out structures on either side of this main drag.  It is a bit shabby, I suppose, to personify a stanchion, but if you saw them you would think that building is mad at something. Through the windows and opened doors of the bus I see a man driving his moped the wrong way down the narrow sidewalk; a giant dog lays sprawled in front of a store entryway, guarding it through intimidation more than skill; a young man and woman, she a midget and arguably a cross dressing one at that, board the bus at one stop and get off at the very next.  The city outside the window goes by in stops and starts; nothing on this road seems to be built outside of the 1970’s and they are a blur of geometrical, unspirited grayness.  Even the dilapidated government buildings look more Disney Land Haunted Mansion than Foundation of Democracy.

It turns out I do not, in fact, know the train station when I see it, and the bus driver unhappily stops a block and a half past my stop after I muscle my way to the front of the bus to tap him on the shoulder.  It is nearly 3 a.m., and the train station, battered and dirty, is not open.  Dated font Greek block letters above the entrance doors foreboding, a few homeless men and apparently at least one other early traveler, she with an old hardside suitcase, gather under the overhang and out of the wind and chill. In front there is a plastic-blanketed shop selling snacks and porn, the man behind the narrow sliding plexiglass window confirms for me that this is the train station. I ask if I can catch a train to Macedonia from here.

“Yugoslavia?,” he bellows.  He is portly and bearded; an unkempt but kind face. “No,” I answer, clearly missing my cue, “Skopje.”

“Skopje is in Yugoslavia,” he says sternly, though I have no doubt he understands my intent. He is giving me a lesson.  “This is Macedonia.”

Though we stand (he sits) in current day Greece, this was once Macedon, home of Alexander the Great and the kingdom of one of the greatest empires to ever govern the earth.  Greeks are justifiably proud of their history – Herodotus, perhaps the father of history, was from here – and so me calling Macedonia “Macedonia” has touched a nerve.  The new Macedonia, or the more geeky “FYROM” (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been a country only since 1991, and the Greeks, or more specifically the Macedonian Greeks, are not happy about it.  I buy a beer, an Amstel Light tallboy, exchange introductions, and then ask Tasos about Kosovo.

“Yugoslavia?,” I ask.  He answers yes.

And Bosnia? “Yugoslavia.”

“Montenegro?” He looks at me over the top of his glasses.  “Yugoslavia.”

I ask where Alexander the Great was from, and he answers “that goes without saying.”

I laugh, crack open my beer, dig my fleece cap and gloves out of my backpack, pull them on tight, and look over the newspapers.  I have noticed, in the short time I’ve been in Greece, that all the anglicized versions of Greek words look to me like some variant of “Vasili Tasikos,” prior to five minutes ago the only Greek guy I knew.  I drink my beer quickly and buy another, again holding out a palm of coins to Tasos and letting him take what he needs.  I stand next to the ice cream refrigerator, cold but out of the wind so warmer than anywhere else.  A homeless guy and I share a 10 meter cheers over our Amstel Lights.  There is warmth in unity. I pepper Tasos with questions until he finally, during a pause, says “Jack, come inside and get warm.”

Tasos Vouvolis – he says his last name means buffalo – has been working here at his uncle’s shop for almost ten years.  He is also a plumber, but says business is not always good, so works here on weekends. His English is good, his voice the temper of an ascetic rather than a non-native speaker reaching for words. Tasos talks about the Greek economy; his concerns that because Macedonia has unfairly taken the name Macedonia (Tasos prefers they left it to history), who knows what else they will take; about Gypsies; about America and our wars.  A man buys a porno mag, Tasos first puts it in a clear bag but then switches to a non-transparent black bag because the man “is shy.”  He comments softly on each customer: he is a country boy, he is a methadone addict, he is a taxi driver, he doesn’t know what he is.  I count the different number of cigarettes Tasos has for sale, and come up with 267.  He teaches me “neasa kala” as a farewell – be good, be well – I teach him “keep it real.” It matters not that I never talk like this; “keep it real” will leave Tasos in good stead whether he travels to America or sits here for the next ten years and talks with the occasional American.  I run across the street to buy Tasos and I a snack. I do not know how Europeans continue to get away with putting a fleshy pink hot dog in a croissant and calling it a breakfast pastry.  Tasos serves me Russian tea, and then it is 5:30 a.m. and the train station doors open and though I am already feeling only goodness, the opening of doors has lifted me.  I am on my way.

**************

I count six people waiting for the Thessaloniki to Belgrade train, though I will get off in Skopje, Macedonia.  The train waits for us, so covered in graffiti I mistake it for scrap, cars waiting to be cannibalized for other, functioning trains.  An official looking man directs me to stop taking pictures and then tells me this is the train to Skopje.  It is a rolling museum, urban modern art on the outside and communist bloc remnant in.  But it is clean, and empty, and I can sprawl out in the darkness facing forward, my shoeless feet resting on the seats in front of me, marking the beginning of the rows of seats facing towards me, ambidexterity on rails.

I drift in and out of sleep, I am a moderate insomniac despite, or because of, two bedless days on my feet and closing my eyes only on airport and airplane seats.  I wake to slivers of sunlight coming in through the right hand windows, cypress trees outlined against a rising sun.  A man comes through the train to ask us for our papers, and as I begin to shuffle through my back pack he lazily throws his left hand at me, letting me know not to worry about it.  He is a universal bureaucrat, not a greenhorn looking to make his name but a man beaten down by years of repetition and nepotist supervision, he is a casual participant in the process.  He does not need my ticket; he practically regrets his authority.  I am clearly a foreigner and a paying customer, and there is no reason I would be sneaking into his country when his experience says I should be sneaking out.  At the lonely Macedonia border I spy a Nirvana poster and hope it is both the literal and the figurative.

Two hours later I deboard in Skopje, and a man immediately accosts me and offers a taxi.  He says he was a translator for the Americans and KFOR for ten years.  I tell him I would rather walk, that I like the feeling of a pack on my back in an unfamiliar city.  He asks if I need a hotel, I tell him eventually, and he says he is not familiar with the Hotel Eventually.  This is, I think, a good beginning.