Buying Train Tickets in Ukraine – Is There a Name for That?
“Laryssa” is a very odd name for someone growing up in a small southern town in the mountains of Virginia. I remember being in kindergarten and having my sweet teacher, in her thick southern drawl, asking me to explain my name — which is a complicated question for a little kid. My mom fielded these questions with the blanket statement, “It’s Ukrainian. Her grandfather is from Ukraine.” My last name is even worse, but there’s no cool explanation behind it. It might be German, it might be Italian. Let’s just say it starts with an E and is pronounced like Amy. Adventures at the Train Station Taking a train is the most efficient way to get from Kyiv to Lviv. At only 197 UAH ($25 USD), it’s also cheap. The catch? Surviving the train-ticket-purchasing process. I’d been warned that buying train tickets in Ukraine is… an experience. It’s guaranteed to be a nightmare, regardless of how much you try to prepare yourself. I’d heard story after story of the ticketing agents being rude to foreigners, and that no one speaks English. I tried to be clever and get around the process by buying the ticket online, but of course when it came time to process payment, the website kept crashing (ah Ukraine, at least you’re trying). I mustered up some courage, wrote out what I wanted in Russian with my ideal departure time and the date, and marched to the Central Station in Kyiv. There’s no main ticket counter at the Kyiv train station. There’s about 30 ticket windows, all selling specific tickets, each labeled in Russian — and thanks to last year’s EuroCup, the windows are also labeled in very vague English. After trying to puzzle together the weird English into something that could possibly mean “Local Trains”, I finally gave up and picked a random window. It was the wrong one, naturally. But they did direct me to windows 8 and 9. It would happen that windows 8 and 9 were labeled as “international trains”, which made even less sense to me as Lviv is definitely in Ukraine, but whatever. The woman at window 8 looked to be mid-40s, but had a very stern and distracted look. She didn’t want to be bothered. Even still, I went up to the window, and in my best Russian, squeaked, “Proshu, Kyiv Lviv?” and handed over my little piece of paper with my details. “When? What class?” the lady barked at me in English, stone-faced. Irritated English is better than no English at all! “Tomorrow. Night train. Second class.” She typed in some numbers on her antiquated computer. “Full. No...
Dealings with a Second Hand Clothing Pimp in Kiev
My grandfather, for the sweet man that he was, had an extremely thrifty side: he loved to haggle. It was a part of his upbringing in Ukraine. Get something at cost or lower, if at all possible. So, when I was invited to visit one of Kiev’s largest second-hand flea markets to find a jacket, I was overjoyed to give my bartering chops a go and make my grandfather proud. What gems would we unearth in the second hand wonders of Kiev? I envisioned myself strutting around Nashville in a large fur coat and ushanka that I’d score for $5. We stepped off the subway and into second-hand heaven: an endless sea of countless shirts, jeans, jackets, belts, shoes, bathing suits, and even wet suits spilling out. The options were unlimited. We finally picked our store, in search of a jacket that had both personality and practicality to suit Alex’s needs for his upcoming trip to Finland. (It took us longer than it should’ve to talk ourselves out of going through the long rows of 90’s-style leather jackets.) We finally found the winner that possessed functionality and a little bit of color. As Alex put it on, a pretty young girl sporting a fanny pack approached us. I’d seen similar young girls manning the other stores and found it to be strange. They were essentially attractive shepherds, watching over the used merchandise. “Can’t I just hold onto this and look around?” Alex muttered. The girl was now hovering right next to us. It was time to haggle. We asked how much in broken Russian. She whipped out her cell phone, opened the calculator app, and handed the phone to me. She wanted us to give the starting price. “10 hryvnia?” I suggested. My cheapness knows no bounds, even when dealing with a currency that is worth about 1/8th of my own. “I don’t want to insult her,” said Alex sensibly. We settled at 50 griven. I handed the phone back to the girl. The girl laughed and shook her head. “Ni, ni!” She typed in 100. Now this is real bartering, even if done through a sad cell phone calculator, I thought to myself. We were about to counter-offer at 70 when a slick looking man with dark features and well-fitted jeans approached us. He gave us the once-over and muttered some things to the girl in Russian while giving us disapproving glances. The girl answered with submission and skirted away. He was the Boss, I realized; the Clothing Pimp in charge of all these young girls. When you start asking too many questions and disrupt the process and...
What DO you pack for 1 month in Ukraine, anyway?
I’m currently meandering around Ukraine and Germany in an attempt to explore the lands and cultures where my grandparents came from to honor their past and pass on their heritage! As usual, it’s bound to be an adventure with a fair share of misadventures… I’ve been met with a lot of enthusiasm and support when I explain to friends and family of the upcoming Motherland Tour and the hunt for learning more about the culture my grandparents came from (thanks, y’all!). Then there’s the occasional “You’re doing what?!” that I try to let roll off my shoulders but can’t help but wonder for a split second if the whole thing is actually crazy. When I started packing for this I finally accepted that I am not a backpacker and I should stop pretending to be. After spending 3 months on the road for work, I got into a groove living out of my small rolling suitcase. It would throw off my packing equilibrium to switch to my awkward toploading-pain-in-the-butt 40L North Face. “Packing for shoulder season is difficult” — my excuse for overpacking. Also trying to learn from past mistakes here… I figure it’ll be nice to only do laundry once a week instead of twice a week when I went overly minimalistic on past trips! Clothing 2 tank tops 2 3/4 length shirts (for autumn) 1 light 3/4 sleeved sweater (for autumn/Orthodox churches) 1 dressy top 1 pair jeans 1 pair leggings 1 black ruffle skirt 2 casual dresses 1 scarf (for covering head in Orthodox churches) undergarments 4 pairs of socks 1 bathing suit rain jacket Shoes Sandals (kinda dressy) Merrells Flip flops (for shower) Chuck Taylors (that I hastily wore to the airport and am hoping Frankfurt’s banking district won’t judge as I saunter around on my layover) Electronics Canon T3i (with awesome PVC pipe pistol grip that my dad made! Thanks pop!) 0.45mm wide angle lens Kindle Unlocked iPhone 4 HP Mini Memory cards 1 TB Passport hard drive (I LOVE THIS THING.) Toiletries Shampoo, Conditioner (full-sized, too much hair to justify travel sized!) Face wash Hair jazz Sunscreen w/ moisturizer Razor Deodorant Wrinkle-release spray First Aid Kit / Medicine Bug spray Allergy medicine Pepto Bismal / Imodium Alka Seltzer Cold Medicine Advil Misc Quick dry towel Silk sleepsheet Elastic travel clothesline Passport / Credit cards Notebook Ukraine travel guide & phrasebook Ancestry Stuff Copies of paperwork: My grandma’s family tree (in German), my grandparents’ certificate of marriage in Wiesbaden, my grandma’s address in Mainz, instructions for their travel to Mainz-Bremhaven-New York City. Screencaps from my grandfather’s trip to Ukraine in 1992 ...
Announcing the Next Adventure: The Motherland Tour!
Let’s be honest: Planning a trip rarely pans out when you work in freelance production. The joke in the industry is, “If you want to get work, buy a plane ticket.” There’s always this fear that by being unavailable for work, people will forget about you completely and you’ll never work again. A dear friend recently reminded me that it isn’t true, of course. There rarely is a right time to travel; you have to make it happen. And so, with no immediate prospects, I pulled the trigger… I’m going to Ukraine. I leave in less than two weeks. I’m just a little terrified. Why Ukraine? The short answer: My grandfather grew up there, and he’s a large part of who I am today. The detailed answer: I was definitely raised in an American home (my parents ARE from New Jersey after all), but I was exposed to Ukrainian culture on a regular basis. For Christmas Eve, we would eat borscht, pierogis and holobchi; sometimes I’d be forced to wear traditional Ukrainian dress. My grandfather never ceased bragging about his homeland (to the point of driving everyone a little crazy, particularly my German grandmother). He passed away when I was 16, and after college, I took a vested interest in Ukraine and my heritage. I began reading about the intense Russification that Ukraine endured, and my grandfather’s passion made all the more sense. The Rough Itinerary I have a 14 hour layover in Frankfurt, and then I’m arriving in Kiev just in time to celebrate Ukraine’s Independence Day on August 24th. I’ll spend a few days there before making my way to L’viv, the city closest to where my grandfather is from. I’m going to hole up here for a couple of weeks and take my first stab at language classes, hopefully making a weekend trip to the Carpathian Mountains. I must visit the village where my grandfather grew up, but I’ll probably need a guide. And for some reason, I keep envisioning it playing out like this: (Everything is Illuminated is a hilarious and fantastic movie– you should absolutely see it, especially if you’re planning a trip to Ukraine. I may download the soundtrack to play as background music to my own adventure.) After L’viv I have 10 more days to travel around the country before my flight to Germany. I may jettison down to Odessa if I have the mental stamina. Germany I have a 6-day layover in Frankfurt before heading home, which is key in the Motherland Tour as Frankfurt/Wiesbaden is where my grandparents met and married. I’d like to get up to Bremerhaven, as that’s where they sailed from for a new start. And then, back...
What to Expect When Visiting Oak Harbor, Washington
Oak Harbor, Washington is nestled on Whidbey Island, one of the islands amidst the waterways of western Washington. If you’re driving to British Columbia by way of Seattle, you should absolutely take a detour to Oak Harbor. The sunlight is always up, it seems. Full sunlight would spill through my hotel’s curtains every morning at 5am, and every morning I’d wake in a panic that I’d overslept. The sun wouldn’t dip beneath the horizon until after 10pm. The best parts of Oak Harbor are right off the highway. It felt like I was in a painting. To be this far north in the winter must be brutal, but Oak Harbor in the summertime is enchanting. And apparently, the Puget Sound is one of the best places in the country to become a raw oyster fanatic! While I enjoy oysters Rockefeller, the thought of raw oysters makes me gag (the only time I’d tried one was in Charleston — and it was gross). I wasn’t the kind of person that ate raw oysters before visiting Oak Harbor. One of the guys on our crew is from Washington, and promised I wouldn’t regret trying an oyster from his homeland. I learned that the Pacific Northwest provides the sweetest oysters in the country, specifically the Baywater Sweet variety — which are farmed in the nearby Thorndyke Bay. I had my first raw oyster from the Pacific Northwest at Fraser’s Gourmet Hideaway. We sat at the chef’s bar and got to talk a little with the owner and head chef, Scott Fraser. We watched him prepare each dish with scrutiny; every plate a masterpiece. As soon as I took a sip of my glass of Maryhill Viognier paired with a raw oyster, I knew I was in for one of the best dining experiences of my life. Each appetizer was better than the last. The crabcakes were delicious, the calamari was perfectly breaded and tender — but the tapas plate was my favorite. Have you ever had a bacon-wrapped date? It is absolutely exquisite. After an excellent meal, we walked to the nearby shoreline. It was almost ten o’clock at night, and the streets were quiet as somewhere behind the clouds, the sun finally began dipping beneath the horizon. It’s hard not to think about the infinite when staring into an endless canvas of blues and dashes of a fading sun. There is a LOT of driftwood on the banks of Oak Harbor – I’d never seen so much in my life! If you’re headed to Victoria from Seattle in the summertime, I highly recommend a night’s stay in Oak Harbor. It’s a hidden gem in the United States, a...
Stranded and Freezing in Minneapolis (in the name of free travel)
What have you done for free travel? Friday afternoon, while debating if I really wanted to shell out another $200 to rent a car for the week, I decided to take a gamble and see if I could get lucky on a discounted last-minute flight. The lowest fare I could find for roundtrip tickets from Los Angeles to New Orleans was $700. What if I could find a ticket for half as much? SUCCESS! My price was accepted. It was with Delta. It had a layover at their Minneapolis hub. That was a letdown. It was the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day, and I flew to Minneapolis. Once I arrived, I was greeted with snow and a crowded gate. There had been a cancellation of an earlier flight, passengers were annoyed, and the agents were in a frenzy. “This flight has been oversold. If there’s anyone out there with any flexibility, we need four volunteers,” one of the agents was saying. “You’ll get a four hundred dollar travel voucher, we’ll put you in a hotel, and you’ll get to New Orleans by 10:30am tomorrow.” In past experience, those travel vouchers go quickly, usually before I have time to process what’s happening. Today, no one was making a move. Everybody just wanted to get the heck out of Minnesota. I wasn’t keen on hanging out in the arctic tundra either, but I began thinking of all the ways I could utilize a $400 travel credit. A few minutes passed, and they made the announcement once more. Again, no one volunteered. After consulting Gunner, we decided it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, since it would cover the cost of my impulsive flight. I volunteered to get bumped to the following morning. Then reality settled in. It was eight o’clock at night, it was 20 degrees outside, and ten inches of snow from yesterday’s blizzard was still on the ground. I’d been expecting to fly from one palm tree destination to another palm tree destination, and did I have a jacket? No. I’d spent so much of the last two months in warm climates that I’d forgotten winter was still going on in most of the country. But I had the prized $400 voucher, $22 in meal tickets, and a hotel room. No luggage, but that was only a minor inconvenience. “You’ll be OK,” the attendant assured me, as he handed me a little overnight kit. “We’re on the warm side of winter now.” I laughed at him. “It’s twenty degrees here!” “Yeah, but you won’t die if you’re outside for a minute or more,” he stated plainly. He wasn’t making fun of me for being...
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I'm Laryssa, and when I'm not working in film or television, I'm attempting to travel -- or I'm here, providing resources for working in film or travel. Read more Elsewhere on the internets
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