When I told my co-workers at Polstage, a small software startup where I was interning for the summer, that I was going to Belarus to see my friends, Tomek rolled up his eyes: “You are going to hell!” Not knowing what to say, I just mumbled ‘really.’ Later I asked the students from IAESTE Gliwice for means of transportation to get there, Michal, Marcin and Tomek all shook their heads and shouted ‘no’ at the same time, stamping off any enthusiasm I might have. “Do you want to go to a place where you don’t know the local langue? It is not safe there. They will rob you, and the police will cause trouble. You know the difference between Americans and Communists? You’ve just told us that you didn’t want to go to Ukraine because it wasn’t safe. Hah! Belarus is even worse.” Marcin continued: “Do you see the difference between America and Poland? Imagine much more between Poland and Belarus.”
What the hell?
These nice Polish boys didn’t mean any harm; they just tried to help me.
The recent terrorism in Beslan (*) did not help one bit. My proximity estimation disorder made it worst as I thought to myself: “Oh my lord, the village is in Russia, and Russia and Belarus are nations of the former Soviet Union, so they are close to one another.” I held on to this ridiculous approximation even after looking at the world atlas. Normally, I’m not the type who is easily paranoid, but I seriously considered whether I should go ahead with my travel plan after hearing warnings from many local people. I used this terrorist’s act as a sign telling me not to go, but in the end, I packed three pairs of clothing in my small backpack and left, hoping for things to be alright.
Now thinking about my trip to Belarus, I am not sure whether it was my stubbornness to prove conventional paranoia wrong, my wish to see friends or my guilt for having paid a lot of money to secure a visa into Belarus.
Oh hell! Who cares?
My train from Gliwice would depart at 17:10, change at Katowice and later Warsaw, where I would catch a night train to Minsk. After handing me the ticket, Michal assured that the train from Warsaw was a direct one to Minsk and reminded me to ask for bed when I got on the night train. I thought to myself that this should be a piece of cake.
I arrived at Warsaw around 21:00 without any major incident except that my back and legs were sore from sitting too long in a crowded compartment. I walked about the train station looking at Polish and newspapers’ headlines hanging in kiosks. At that moment, my curiosity dial was switched all the way to zero because I was already here last month with my friends and checked everything out. ‘My train’ finally arrived after being 20 minutes late. Following other people, I got in line waiting for my turn to hop on the train. The old train conductor looked at my ticket, shook his head and waved his hand at other people around me. I stepped out of the line thinking he was letting in first-classers. After a while, I showed him my ticket, and again he shook his head yelling something in Polish. Usually, I would try to say something in Polish though no one could understand, then I was in no mood to be funny as I frantically bombarded him in English. I ran around and speed-read anybody whom I thought would speak English, pointing at one after another: “Do you speak English?” With the help of one local student, I learned that my ticket was only worth 23 euros while the cost for this train ride was 35. However, the train conductor wanted me to pay the full 35 instead of the difference of 12 euros. Where would I find that amount of money? Believed that everything was taken care of, I brought with me only 20 zlotys (1 euro ~ 4 zlotys) to buy food along the way. It would be crazy to carry a lot of dollars or euros in the pocket. Even if I chose to be stupid and ran to the nearest ATM to withdraw 35 euros, I would not be able to because the train had started leaving, carrying with it this grumpy, old man whose face I wanted to punch. “I’m entitled to be on that train, you idiot!” I screamed so loud, but no one could hear me since that scream was only in my head.
I was on a raging path for more than 15 minutes thinking I would buy a ticket back to Gliwice right away. My superstitious culture had rubbed on me well. I thought that this train incident was another sign to warn me not to travel to Belarus.
The next train would not arrive until 6:00 in the morning, leaving me at the Warsaw train station wondering what I was going to do in the next hours. I contacted my friends from the dormitory, and they told me to come home. Frustrated, hungry and superstitious, I considered their advice for a brief moment, but I had already decided. I went upstairs to the main hall where they sold tickets since it was brighter and probably safer, wanting to rest through the night there. I didn’t last too long there because it was chilly and getting colder by the hours when people opened the door to get in and out.
First I sat at a table, and then I paced about for a couple of hours trying to solve my next dilemma: finding a toilet. Public toilets are not common in Poland. Fair enough. But the Poles, like many other Eastern Europeans, expected that overnight train riders had the ability to hold their gallbladders or did their deed somewhere else. The only toilet in the train station closed two hours ago. It probably doesn’t make any sense to you why they bother to install a public toilet only to operate it at certain times. It’s because these public toilets are not free. There is a toll collector who guards the toilet and takes your money. These people don’t work overtime, overnight to accommodate your natural need.
There wasn’t an opened business or restaurant nearby, so I frantically rushed back and forth, walked up and down to the underground while holding my bladder and hoping for a solution. You don’t need me to tell you that you can’t continue the same approach to finding a solution knowing that approach led to nowhere. What the hell was I thinking, passing the same WC for the fourth time didn’t mean I would trigger the Alibaba effect “Open Sesame!”
But something else happened. I caught the attention of a Vietnamese fast food owner who has mistaken me for a poor, starved immigrant who came here illegally from Russia. I told him I was in dire need of a toilet. He told me to follow him down to the basement storage where he kept stocks for his restaurant. Let try to picture this. The underground is already below ground. The basement of the underground is two levels down. There were only the man, I and a couple of other sellers from other snack bars. As I followed him down the dark staircases leading to the basement, my head was filled with a negative thought: a newspaper headline about a young Vietnamese found dead in a basement at a train station in Warsaw. But my gallbladder saw no other option. I determined to walk down the stairs and concentrated to prepare myself for a hypothetical fight. I visualize martial moves picked up from my childhood. “Ah da…chachacha, right leg kicking in the head, another kick to the balls, followed by another hand squeeze for a complete neutralization, left punch on the face, another right punch on the other cheek for dizzying effect, both hands slapping on the ears for buzzing effect and so on.” At the same, my paranoid continued working full stop: “Vietnamese found locked under the basement in Warsaw,” combined with the instinct to defense myself “..Ahhh….daaaaa…leg kick on the ball…preparing to scream… punch him in the face.”
We finally arrived in front of a big, thick iron gate probably built since the medieval time when walls were usually three meters thick to keep prisoners from escaping. This is Europe after all, the birthplace of kingdom and knighthood and castles and fortresses. But when these kings and queens died, and their stories are remembered only in fairy tales, what good are these buildings?
The man opened the door and said: “Do it inside, I’ll wait here.” I could not hold anymore. I walked in hearing him close and lock the iron door behind me. The storage contained produce, meat, and other foodstuffs. I found sewage behind a stack of empty containers and did my deed. I looked up to the wall in front of me and saw a huge poster of a naked blonde showing off her an enormous bosom, what else. So here I was, staring at this make-shift porno, listening to the sound of my natural call and worrying about my voluntary kidnap and my hypothetical demise in this old basement by a gang looking stranger.
I came to the door and knocked-knocked. He opened. We walked upstairs.
I was still alive.
This Vietnamese bistro worker, Hung, used to live in East Berlin until being deported for illegally selling cigarette. Instead of returning to Vietnam, he traveled to Poland on cars and foot, at some point through the woods and had been working under fake identification here in Warsaw while waiting for the right time to go to Ireland. Despite the fact that he was hiding from the police, he told me everything about his illegal activities in Berlin, including the code words he and his buddies used over phones knowing their phones were bugged by the German police. He needed someone to vent.
Hung prepared a small plate of chicken rice and a side of consisting of pickled carrots and cabbages, the kind of vegetables served with food in Poland. He said that he thought I was a Vietnamese from Russia because there were many of them trying to escape from Russia through Poland, perhaps en route to another country further west. They often stopped at his bistro to ask for food.
Before I left for my morning train, he shoved into my hands a plastic bag containing a cup of vermicelli soup.
What do we trust? Do we trust the first impression that a stranger standing in front of us is up to no good or hold on to the faint belief that he could be a helper in disguise? Are people inherently evil or naturally good at heart? Or there is no such thing pure good or bad. Maybe good and bad are two facets of the same coin. Maybe the devil and the angel exist in each and every one of us.
If I had stayed in Western Europe from the beginning, I would not have hurt my little head as much for having to install many new concepts and images of my ‘Europe.’ My conceptual image of Europe was the replica of America, childhood pictures and my memories of Paris, Rome, and London. Europe represented grandeur, romance, and intellect. I was beyond excited to travel by train because I was looking forward to seeing green hillsides and mountains, sparkling lakes, blue seas, green trees, thick forests and royal buildings along the route so I could utter ‘WOW.’ But boy-oh-boy, my head would soon explode!
The Warsaw-St. Petersburgh Express train took me through one of the most depressing sceneries I’d ever seen after leaving Vietnam. There was no mountain since the rail route lied on the flatland. There were only small hills with scorched stomachs dotted along the trail in oblivion. There was neither sea nor lake except puddles, darkened by mud and dirt, sparkling under the relentless sun though it was late summer. The sights of trees offered a little consolation; after the rain, they turned greener and soothed the eyes of tired travelers. After passing Poland’s border and entering Belarus, the landscape transformed incredibly. If I thought buildings and fields in Poland were black, dirty, and ruined, those in Belarus were much worse. I passed many vacant destroyed houses with tattered paint or without paint. They had many holes of various sizes on the walls. Uneven woods were strewn everywhere. But if no one lives here, where did the logs come from?
When I traveled by trains with friends, I felt like a kid running around here and there and chit chatting non-stopped. Now I was on this train all by myself, sitting on uncomfortable wooden instead of leather seats and seeing old men and women, and spotting absolutely nothing worth to see outside the windows, I still smiled and felt utterly delighted. This train had longer and bigger wagons than Polish trains. Perhaps wooden chairs were cheap to afford many, and the train needed space to load as many people who wouldn’t care less about wooden or leather, pretty or ugly.
An old man who sat across from me held a plastic bag of meat on his lap. After settling in his seat, he took out from the bag package after package of meat and cleaned them with a rag. I watched and waited to see when he would stop, but after cleaning all of them, he re-took the meat from the bag and cleaned it again.
I told the two men, one of whom was my meat-cleaning old man, next to me that I was going to Minsk and would like to know when I had to change train. With limited English, they promised to let me know once we arrived at the station. At Brest, the meat-cleaning man enthusiastically waved his hand at me shouting ‘tu’ meaning ‘here.’
When I got off the train, I witnessed one of the funniest scenes I saw in my entire life. Old men, old women, and young women carried big black plastic bags —I think they were meat bags because they looked similar to the bag the meat-cleaning man had—rushing from everywhere to the custom control. Once finished, they rushed away as if they were chased after by wild dogs. Who knows? They might have been smuggling Polish meat to sell in Belarus. Everything is possible at the border.
On the new train, I sat on a wooden chair again. My bum was numb after few hours. I felt an urge to take a shower because I was itchy from head to toes. However, I resisted going to the toilet because the smell and the sight there made me want to vomit. It was fortunate that I didn’t have to share my seat with anybody, so I slouched on the chair, put my head on the backpack and dozed off.
Last year, when we chatted about housing in Minks, Tahna explained in a childlike manner. “I live in a big city, small flat. Misha lives in a big city, big flat. Sveta lives in a small city, big house, and Irina lives in a small city, small flat.” The sizes of their flats and cities cover all permutation cases of 2. How cool is that?
A few days before my train to Minsk, they emailed me informing that I would have the honor to live in a big city and a big flat with Misha. Misha’s flat was located in the suburb of Minsk, about 30-minute bus ride from the city center. It was on the third floor, having a balcony open to a small wood surrounding the building complex. The wooden balcony was small and had enough space for only two chairs, a dry pile of clothing, some junks, watermelons and two ropes for hanging clothes. Each night, before going to sleep, I brought the clothes I wore during the day to hang outside and stood for a few minutes to inhale the fresh air. It was so quiet I could hear the buzzing sound in my ears. Here in Misha’s flat, I slept right a way unlike the dormitory in Gliwice where I had to turn about, looked up the ceiling and counted sheep. Usually, the sun had already risen by the time Misha woke me up. I tottered outside to collect my clothes. It wasn’t cold, but I shivered.
Misha’s father taught Criminal Justice at a nearby college. He laughed all the time and every night tried to start a conversation with me in English. Occasionally, I squeezed my brain to spit out a few Polish words after realizing Polish and Belarusian pronunciations for some words were familiar. It was understandable because Polish and Belarusian have the same Slavic root, and part of Belarus used to belong to Poland. Misha’s mom worked in an office in the same city and responsible for my nutrient intake during my four-day stay. She was very kind, cooked for the entirely family and sometimes asked me questions with Misha being the translator. Misha’s sister studied biology and worked part-time in the school’s lab, collecting grass, flowers, and small plants in the wood around the flat. She never talked to me once during my entire time living there. She reminded me of my old self, an extremely shy kid in Vietnam. My mouth was often clam shut, and I had a serious face of a funeral mourner. My mom scolded many times, “Your face won’t bring any luck to your father and me. Try to smile so people won’t think we neglect you.” Now my facial expression improved a bit. I think it’s a hybrid of the face of a bride in her first wedding and a silliconaire who just lost his stocks during the dotcom crash.
Misha woke me up at 6:00 every morning, put away the bed bunk and performed the morning ritual: showered, shaved, and ate breakfast her mom had prepared for us. Her dad and sister had already left the flat. It was only her mom, she and me with the family’s silly dog barking at everyone and eating every piece of watermelon we threw on the floor.
I didn’t have to spend money at all for food during my stay in Belarus being fed tasty homemade Belarusian food three times a day. At breakfast, I ate toasted bread with butter, grilled cheese, and salty sardines, too salty as if somebody spread an extra layer of salt over the poor fish. Salty fish was a popular dish in the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. My Ukrainian roommate in Poland Mariana ate plenty of these salty sardines for her meals while we lived together in Gliwice. The other Russian girl at the dormitory did the same. Misha’s mom cooked rice mixed with carrots, bell peppers and other vegetables I couldn’t tell which from which. The taste was very different from my Asian cooking, but it was excellent. There were always sweets, mostly chocolate, and tea with every meal. If I had known Misha and her mom liked chocolate, I would bring a lot from Gliwice. I also learned that the potato pancake dish Michal prepared for us during our mountain trip in Poland was a Belarusian dish, not Polish. If I had stayed longer, I would have the chance to eat this yummy potato cake with the family. They planned to do it the upcoming weekend.
At dinner, we drank a couple of glasses of red wine and chatted more since there was more time. By then, I was somewhat used to the drinking culture of Europeans, so I wasn’t surprised seeing kids, teenagers and adults drink beer and alcohol as if I drank sweet beverage.
I lost count of how many times I was sandwiched between a big fat belly and a big fat ass in a 40-maximum capacity bus which loaded nearly seventy plus bellies and asses. Buses in Minsk were the oldest among all the buses I rode on where I’d been. There were many occasions I felt the bus would sidetrack and I would crash to the side. If there was a bus accident, the injure rate from people crashing people stomach on would be 100%. Misha and I couldn’t talk to each other since we had to either hold onto the handle for dear life or breathe like pigs because of the body heat. One time, at a bus station, we stood behind a typical old heavy-weighted woman who was trying to get on the bus. She tried a few times but could not because the platform was too high for her ages and weights. Standing right there, Misha held out her tiny hand, directly at the center of that lucky woman’s butt and successfully pushed her (more like her butt) onto the bus. The old lady smiled and was not at all bothered that she might have just been sexual harassed. I couldn’t stop laughing and told Tahna and Sveta about that incident.
In the evening, when the bus was not crowded anymore, we sat down on the bus and talked nonsense. Tahna and Misha kept on ridiculing their president, Alexander Lukashenko. “You see, presidents from other countries are lawyers, businessmen, powerful big men. And the president of our country was a former agriculture director. He isn’t respected by Europe.” Agriculture plays an important role in Belarus’ economy, more important than industrial. This fact is emphasized by the picture of grain plants on the Belarusian flag. “Focusing on agriculture now is insane,” they complained.
Lukashenko wanted to change the Constitution to run for president again. He’s known as the last European dictator. For this fact, I think it’s why he isn’t respected by other European countries.
Sveta was currently working as a correspondent for a newspaper in Minsk. She had just finished an article about juvenile crime and needed to bring it to the local police to double check the facts before publishing it. Police were someone who scared me before my travel to this country, and now I was in a place full of them. A young policeman, whose name I forgot, wanted to know about American police, especially their salaries. I felt bad and did not want to say anything at all because Sveta told me that police here earned about 300 dollars per month. But he kept asking, so I quickly told him the annual $40,000 and emphasized that police were hated in America because they worked for the government and other negative things about the police to negate the whopping 40,000 grand. I asked him about crimes in Minsk and learned that people died mostly from stabbing wounds or from being beaten to death. Before I left, I asked him to visit the US sometimes, but he said it would be impossible. At first, I thought he had trouble traveling because of stricter traveling custom between America and Eastern Europe. However, he explained that he had too much information about the government. Thus they wouldn’t let him travel abroad especially to America. I was extremely surprised encountering no problem with the police as previously warned by my friends and online travel tips to former Soviet Union countries.
University students received 30 dollars per month from the government for their schooling. For most of them, this was the only income besides their family’s allowance. Almost everybody owned a cell phone which cost 10 dollars per month, a third of their monthly earnings. Clothes were expensive. T-Shirts, tops, pants, and jeans were no less than $20, and classy dresses had price tags of around $100.
Like their neighbor Poles, Belarusian girls were overly stylish. Most of them wore flashy tops and pants in addition to high heels, glittering pointy-toed pumps. Mariana, my Ukrainian roommate in Gliwice, showed me her wardrobe consisting of colorful silk tops and pants in bright colors like red, purple and orange. She told me that they were typical Ukrainians styles which similar to what I saw here in every shop. During my walk around Minsk with Sveta, I mentioned the cost of clothing; she made a flicking sound with her tongue and shook her head: “It is a sad illusion. The girls wore expensive clothes they couldn’t afford and must have begged for money from their parents.”
Without healthy hobbies and real purposes in life, sometimes women fall prey to shopping addiction as it does bring momentary pleasure which the brains interpret as happiness. It’s also that women have more pressure than men to be well-dressed.
On the bus to her dormitory, Sveta told me about her wish to come to America. Her triplet sister, who lived in Wichita Fall, Texas, wanted her to come because she felt lonely, not having any relative besides her husband. Sveta was worried about being in the United States, afraid that she would work forever as a waitress at McDonald and have no future because she didn’t have any other skills besides journalism. I assured and told her about many of my friends who came to America in their mid, late 20s, 30s and were still able to make a place for themselves in their second country. It made sense for her to be worried because a few of her friends ended up working at dead-end McDonald when they came to America.
Last year, after completing her work at the camp in the US, Sveta took Greyhound bus to Wichita Fall and worked illegally for a month in a Mexican restaurant. The natives exploit the immigrants, and the older immigrants exploit the newcomers). You wouldn’t believe how much they paid her. They paid her an exploiting wage of 2.5 dollars per hour.
Still, she was able to bring back home $800 including the amount earned from working at the camp. I never told Sveta that she impressed me in many ways. At the age of 19, the girl seemed to have figured out everything. Graceful, beautiful, ambitious and insanely romantic, I don’t think she would have any problem succeeding in America. She emailed me recently telling me that she was going forward with her plan to go to America in five years. Hopefully, things will work out for her.
Among many Belarusian girls who dream of leaving for America, Sveta might be one of the few lucky ones to be successful at doing that. One of her friends, after coming to America to work at a summer camp through Camp USA, decided to stay and worked at a McDonald while applying for schools and plotting to stay permanently. I asked Sveta how she would manage that if she didn’t have anyone there to help. “Yah, Cindy. That was exactly what I told her;” Sveta said, “She studies languages and very smart.
I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Misha, Tahna, and Sveta, missing only Irina who was still somewhere in America doing a McJob.
I was not closed with these Belarusian girls when we worked together at a US summer camp last summer. However, I liked them because I was curious about anything international. I didn’t expect much before coming to Minsk because everybody warned me about how boring it was. However, Tomek from Poland, the one who commented that I was going to hell when I told the Poles I was going to Belarus, assured me: “They are poor but they are very hospitable. They’re willing to take the food from their mouths and give it to you.” He was right. The Belarusians were hospitable. I was in Belarus as an American who had dollars available anytime from ATM machines, but I didn’t pay for anything except for my train ticket. I was not allowed to pay for myself because I was a guest. My then friends were extremely mad at me when I kept shoving the money in their faces trying to pay my due. It was strange to be pampered by a bunch of 18, 19 years old who bought me bananas, bread, ice-cream and ballet tickets.
My Vietnamese acquaintance and friends may think that I made a big deal out of the Belarusians’ hospitality because Vietnam and Vietnamese have plenty of that. There is nothing impressive about it. I know. I was born and spent most of my teenage years in Vietnam. But for the past 8 years, I’ve lived in the US and have gotten used to the distinction: “You are my guest, and this is where it ends.” There isn’t any privilege being a guest in America as in Vietnam, Belarus or poorer societies. My Slovak friend Marta told me about her short stay at the house of an American co-worker who worked at the same camp. After breakfast, that person asked everybody to give her a dollar each for the breakfast cereal. Marta told me the story while munching on her bread and shaking her head continuously with disappointment “One dollar?” This ‘culture’ difference also happened to Irina. She was seen as cheap because she didn’t want to spend a lot of money, and the poor, unknowing girl ate food from the host’s refrigerator and didn’t restock it. “You know what Cindy, in my country guests don’t have to pay for food (now I know why). Why can’t we eat at McDonald? Why make me eat at an expensive restaurant and pay from my own pocket? I don’t need to eat good food. I just want to see the world.” “Irina I know. I know. If you come to my house or my country, you don’t have to pay either.” That was all I could say to her.
The end
This is from me to all of you who are cursed to an afterlife of damnation; you should not worry too much. Go ahead! Do sin because once you decide to go to hell, you will have abundant Vodka, tasty potato pancakes, food if not cheap then free since you eat them in a hospitable Belarusian family. You will ride on overloaded buses, being a hamburger sandwiched between two buns: a fat man belly and another fat woman ass and feeling as if you are about to lop-side. You probably won’t see what you have dreamed before: those pretty photos of Europe on calendars or travel flyers promoting tours in Europe. But is it important really? Beauty is not always obvious; the definition of beauty is not universally defined. You should know what you want to see. If what you see are not what you have expected from the beginning, are you able to view them in different lights?
I left Minsk at 23:00. I looked through the window to see Minsk for the last time before the wheels started cranking on the tracks. The only thing I was able to see was my vague reflection on the dirty glasses. I changed into my pajamas and tried to get some sleep. In my dream, I recalled and re-constructed the images and memories of my recent passage into hell.
8/2004
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
