I bought three train tickets in Zhytomyr for my trip: Zhytomyr to Kharkiv, Kharkiv to Poltava and Poltava to Kyiv. By the end of the trip, not one would be used and a fourth would be eaten as well. It's a comedy of (Daniel's) errors.
THE FIRST TICKET:
The first ticket I ate right away. I hadn't realized it at the time, but the train between Zhytomyr and Kyiv is more than four hours, and from there it overnights and arrives in Kharkiv at 9:00 in the morning, a 16 hour trip. The marshrutka to Kyiv takes only 1.5 hours. Figuring I'd cut two and a half hours out of the trip and cash in on a dinner Carrie owed me, I hopped the marshrutka to Kyiv intending to catch my train on its way through.
Because I was slow in getting to the marshrutka, I arrived and met Carrie with only an hour to get to a resturant and eat dinner. In a Ukranian restaurant, it can take an hour just to get your order taken and the food brought to you. I'm not kidding.
Carrie, guru of train times, told me of an express train leaving the next morning for Kharkiv at 6:00 AM. Because it only stopped in Poltava, it arrived in Kharkiv at 11:00 AM, two hours after mine and eleven hours shorter a trip. They wouldn't let me exchange my ticket, so I ate it and bought a new one.
Carrie took me out to Tequila House, an expensive ex-pat Mexican restaurant in Kyiv, where I had fajitas for the first time since leaving America. It was so good that I ate every scrap of food on my enormous plate, even ordering more tortillas to finish it off. It was, quite simply, a culinary orgasm. I crashed at Carrie's place and, the next morning, went to Kharkiv.
THE SECOND TICKET:
I was supposed to leave from Kharkiv for Poltava early in the morning the day after Independence Day (the night it was three guys, seven girls and not a single kiss amongst us). When Sean had suggested going back to his town of Chguiev, I had traded in my ticket for a train leaving in the afternoon. Chuguiev being 20 minutes from Kharkiv, I alloted an hour to get to the train station. The next morning, exhausted from all the running and dancing and, well, I admit, drinking, I dragged myself out of bed with a little over an hour to go. Getting up to leave, Sean finally woke up, looked at the clock and said: "there's no way you can make it." "I have an hour," I said. "It will take you an hour and a half."
The metro from the marshrutka stop to the train station, it turned out, would take nearly an hour in itself. As I couldn't concieve of an hour-long metro ride, I thought I had more than given myself enough time to get to the train station. Wrong. Sean was trying to explain this to me as we were half-running to the Chguiev station, me convinced I could still make it. Sean did not want to be hauling ass. In fact, Sean did not want to be anywhere but back in bed. One block from the marshrutka station, he had me convinced there was no way to catch the train, so I stopped, turned back around and walked back to his place. "Thank God," he said.
I ate that ticket, had breakfast with Sean and Mike, and then left for Kharkiv to catch the next available train to Poltava. Well, no trains were leaving for Poltava for four more hours, so I paid 30 hriven to catch a marshrutka (the train was 9 hriven) to get there. Believe it or not, the marshrutka beat my train there.
THE THIRD TICKET
After a great night of clubbing in Poltava with the entire group that had converged there, the PR campaign to get Daniel to eat his third ticket began. Everyone was leaving Poltava on Sunday, save me, who had a ticket for Saturday night. Carrie, Erin and Sean mounted an offensive to get me to stay, but I was not to be swayed. I had eaten two tickets, I said, I was not about to eat a third.
They were cunning, they were. A poker night was planned, one with cigars and beer and betting until dawn. This still did not sway me. Then Sean got very cunning. He challenged me to a game of chess. Sean is a ranked player who kicks my ass with regularity. But I soon found myself not loosing, a rare thing against Sean. The time to leave to catch my train was creeping closer, but I was in a position to win the game. Finally, still deep into the chess match, the time to catch the train went by. I had just eaten my third ticket. But I did win the game. Damn him.
THE FOURTH TICKET
The next morning, Carrie and I rose bright and early after playing poker all night to catch an express train to Kyiv. Once again, the fast train would beat my slow, overnight one, but at twice the cost. Carrie, who had won enormously at poker, offered to buy me my ticket. My ticket cost 53 hrivna, her exact winnings.
Right before the train was about to leave, though, Carrie began to frantically look for her ticket. She couldn't find it. "Did you give it to me?" I asked, because a mental itch was telling me that she had. I searched my pockets, but found only my ticket. "No, I had it," she said.
She rushed back in to buy another ticket before the train left. I pushed money at her, as she had bought mine, but she pushed it back, annoyed at herself for loosing the ticket. Another ticket in her hand, she began going towards the train when I picked up the magazine I had been reading. Inside was her ticket.
She would later say that she would have sworn on a stack of bibles that she had not given it to me. But, thirty minutes earlier, she had. It took some bit to recall because, remember, this was after a long night involving a lot of beer, but she had handed it to me without thinking while she went to the bathroom. As I was in the middle of reading and the world does not cognizantly exist when I read, I simply placed the ticket in the magazine without paying attention.
When I discovered it, with five minutes until the train left, Carrie raced back inside to get a refund on her newly bought ticket, but it was too late.
She ate the fourth one.
THE MORAL: Don't buy your tickets ahead of time. Or perhaps you should, because readers of this blog will remember me buying a 200 hrivna ticket in Lviv because all but the highest class on the train was sold out. So perhaps the moral is to have so much money that it doesn't matter either way. Yes, that's it. Make lots of money. That's my new goal. Hence the addition of marrying a supermodel who will leave me her millions now being on the five year plan.
All interested, please submit a recent photo and last year's 1040 (or 1040EZ, as applicable) to my email address. You could be my next sugah momma!
Next blog: What happened between the third and fourth tickets, AKA the poker night. It involves iron babucias, abusing orphans and me dancing in a pair of speedos. With pics. Scary, scary pics.