A Christmas Saga (aka stranded in Belarus) Part 1

Christmas vacation in the Ukraine…uh, I mean Belarus
This one’s really long, but very interesting about our not so legal trip into Belarus. Read on for marriage proposals, getting kicked of a train by military men, almost freezing, being stranded in a country with a dictator that’s anti-american and more… I’ve broken it down into several parts, so scroll down after each section until you’ve read it all.

Last Monday, Kara and I set off on a train to spend Christmas in Odessa, Ukraine. Five of our friends from language school in South Carolina were going to be there and we were going to celebrate together. So Kara and I bought our tickets (only $60 round trip by the way) and set off on our 36 hour train ride. Here’s the first picture of me outside our train…looking happy and brave! By the way, I should mention that everything in this story happened in Russian – we didn’t meet anyone who spoke English, and all of the signs and directions, conversations and explanations and ticket buying were in Russian – so keep that in mind as you imagine our journey.

So now I should define for you the Russian word “platzcart”. There are a few different types of train tickets you can buy for a long distance train ride. The first class is the best of course, with two beds in a compartment…The second class has four beds in a compartment, and is relatively different. The third class is called “platzcart”, and when you travel in platzcart there are no compartments, but 54 beds stacked along all the walls of a train car… Here is a picture of our platzcart train car (and a few of our traveling companions.)

So we were a little worried at first, all we saw were men men and more men, and for awhile we thought we were the only women in the whole car. Later we realized that a lot of the men were just seeing people off, and they got off the train before we left, and we started to see more women around. Our bed situation was interesting…Kara and I had the two worst beds in the train…the beds themselves were fine, just along the train wall so there wasn’t any privacy, and when people got up to use the bathroom or smoke they walked by the entire length of our beds (I’m not sure if you can tell from the picture or not, but the place where the man is sitting turns into a bed – that’s where I slept, and Kara slept on the bunk above. Also the bedding left a lot to be desired, but we shook the dirt off it, rented clean sheets for a few dollars and dealt with it.