The Color of Rabbits

I think I’m in Asia, but there’s no way to tell for sure. There was no grand ceremony marking the epic milestone that this beast of steel and iron officially crossed the boundary dividing Europe with its gigantic distant relative to the East. No voice calling out over the intercom (not that I would have entirely understood it anyhow) that the known, more or less civilized world had been abandoned in our wake and we were now, like it or not, subjects to the exotically barren expanse of the Siberian tundra, in all its romantic, intimidating mystery.

Asia could use a welcoming sign. Nebraska has a welcoming sign. They even include a fun fact about the state’s character on the sign greeting drivers eastbound from Colorado: “Welcome to Nebraska: the Arbor Day State.” Its a genius of a sign, actually, because there are, everyone knows, no trees in Nebraska and thus, one would presume, no apparent reason for the entire state being named after a day that exonerates the deciduous. It may screw with your mind but it’ll at least give you something perplexing to think about; the alternative being suicide by sudoko, which some road-weary passengers have been driven to in maddening attempts to ease the boredom of the tortuous drive across Interstate 80.No ceremony, no announcement, no sign. But I’m over it. Asia. I’ve gotta be in Asia by now.

Conversations With Russian Grandmothers

The archway is silent as I approach, slowly, peering around corners like a secret agent from Mission Impossible. There are no people. I wish there were people. Someone to hear me yell when the mob pulls up in their jet black tinted-window conversion van and someone with a hooded mask jumps out and throws me in the back. At least then someone will know what has become of me. But there isn’t a sound, except for the periodic distant rush of a car out on the main avenue of Leninsky Prospekt. There’s a full moon. That’s a bad sign, obviously. The sky is clear, crisp, full of stars. At least it’s a nice night.

The park in the middle of the U is empty. The guy with the hand in his pocket is nowhere to be found. I puff out my chest—thinking this will definitely help deter potential attackers—and walk down the parking lot road towards the entrance to my apartment. There’s movement ahead. Shadows behind a rusty compact car next to the dumpster. I approach the car carefully, making slow, deliberate steps in a wide-sweeping arc away from the car’s front end. It’s just a cat. I’m safe. Home free. I’m at the door and I press the metal tab on my keychain against a similar tab on the door and a bell rings, allowing me to open the large, brown, steel door.

The door to the tiny foyer opens without objection and I see that the inner door is now wide open as well. They had to take the whole lock off the door.

Natalia Alexeyevna is still awake and is talking to two of her friends in the kitchen when I walk in. I smile and introduce myself to her friends, not really sure if I want a language immersion lesson at this time of night.

But they are fascinated with me. They ask what I’m studying, where I’m from, what life is like in America, what my family is like. The excitement of the attempted break-in and subsequent door-opening fiasco is forgotten.

“Well, I’m taking language courses here in Moscow. At the Moscow International University. Do you know it? This is my last semester of university.”

Gecko Tails

It takes three hours for the police to remove the door. Near midnight, we finally get a call at the apartment that I can go back. No one broke in. The door’s lock was too strong for the crow bar and the would-be intruder had mangled it in a failed attempt to break in. Probably to get me, right? Why else would someone break in there? They have nothing. Everything in the apartment is at least forty years old. There are no beds. Natalia Alexeyevna and Kirill and I all sleep on couches in different rooms. I sleep in the study, Kirill has the bedroom and Natalia Alexeyvna converts the living room hard foam couch into a bed by placing a single comforter on top of it.

Kirill is a biologist and works at the university. He studies butterflies. There are hundreds of cases of dead butterflies pinned in rows and rows in cabinets in the apartment’s only hallway. He has all of his butterfly pinning equipment in his room, including a huge jar of the most awful smelling clear liquid I’ve ever encountered, which I assume to be some sort of formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde? Really? People can have that contained in glass jars in their apartments?

Flirting in Czech

The narrow walkway runs down the length of the car, separating our enclave from the others. On the other side of this walkway is another bench/bed and above that is another bunk (in which the four-year-old is now thoroughly tucked in). So each “compartment” potentially accommodates six passengers and there are nine compartments making up this third-class car. Essentially, traveling in third class Russian trains is like one big slumber party with 54 of your friends minus the fort-making, chocolate chip cookie eating and the fact that they are actually all strangers—nice strangers, mostly, but still strangers and Russian strangers at that, meaning strangers who don’t shower (not that there are showers in third class to give them the option to shower anyway).I twist and kick until I’m on my back again, staring up at the blank white underside of the luggage rack an arm’s reach away. My right leg is turned awkwardly at the knee to avoid the chain attaching the bunk to the wall at my feet. I’m still wearing the lightweight khaki hiking pants and 100% polyester T-shirt purchased by my mother at a specialty backpacking retail store that I’ve had on since I boarded last night and it’s still too hot to lie under the only covers I have: a single, hospital-ish, plain white sheet. I try not to move around too much so I stop sweating, but that’s been a lost cause since I stepped onboard. I also have to pee but there’s a line for the bathroom and I don’t feel like going through the ordeal of hoisting myself back up here just yet. Russians have an innate talent for bunk-hoisting. I have already been shown up by a pair of four-foot-tall, eighty-year-old Russian grandmothers whose gravity-defying leaps into upper bunks would qualify them for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not if one of the producers of that show ever decides to take the Trans-Siberian railroad and happens to witness the feat. Maybe when it’s all said and done, I’ll be able to hold my own but for now I’ll just hold it and remain staring at the luggage rack above my head.

Sideways

A bell is ringing.Shut up bell.Ring ring ring.Shut up, I mean it.Ring ring ring.Hey bell, stop it.Ring ring ring.Are you—Ring ring ring.—f—ing serious?!?Ring ring ring.My eyes open. There is a round sideways woman staring at me. Two seven-year-old boys sitting next to her, also sideways, also staring. She has two gold teeth. I know this because she is also smiling while she is staring. One of the gold teeth is the left front tooth. An incisor. The other is a pointy tooth, oddly pointed, not at all appearing in any type of organized formation with its fellow yellow-brownish brethren.Ring ring ring.The boys have empty eyes. They’re wearing the same faded yellow shirt. Not twins though. Their feet don’t hit the floor.In an act of sheer courage, I’m sitting up and the sideways people are no longer sideways. My brain is a bit slow catching up with this move, swishing back and forth in my skull like a pair of jeans in a washing machine.Ring ring ring.Oh. China.

The Great Hanoi Hangover

The memories started coming back. Tom. The bartender. Shots of rice wine. Ohhh, shots of rice wine. Those were not good. Dear liver: I’m sorry for that. And all the rest, too. Don’t hate me. We’ve got a long way to go.Vicky, Tom and I had headed out with Tom’s Chinese girlfriend, Chin, and another bartender with long wavy brown hair who told us to call him “vegetable head”. Clubs in China are different than anywhere else I’ve been to. They don’t really have big dancefloors. Instead people stand or sit around tall tables and play drinking games, turning them into a sort of dance. I’ve never felt more like a celebrity in my life. Every club we went to, people smiled and said hello, calling us over to drink and play these games with them because we were Westerners. I went to the bar to order a drink and immediately the guy next to me poured me some of his. They just love drinking with Westerners. And I happen to just love drinking for free. It was a perfect match… So. That explains something. The cross-city bus arrived at the out-of-town bus station and I soon found that I couldn’t buy the $1.25 bus ticket because I had spent all of my money trying to buy a round of expensive drinks at the club the night before. Nice move. No one knew where to exchange dollars and there were no ATMs. So I jumped in a cab and told him “bank China” using a phrasebook I had bought on the street a week before. At the bank, the ATM was out of money. They filled it up. Then it was broken. They took me to the main counter. After another 30 minutes of paperwork I had money for the bus. The bus took 3 hours to get to the border town of Pingxiang. I’d have to walk from there over the border. I mixed ramen noodle mix into a package of smashed noodles and ate it dry. My head was pounding. I tried to sleep. Then tried to read about Vietnam. Then tried to listen to some music.The rain came down, battering the bus in steady waves. Limestone karst peaks showed themselves periodically in between patches of low, sweeping storm clouds.Vietnam. I can’t believe I’m heading into northern Vietnam… I can’t believe I’m heading into northern Vietnam like THIS. Somehow, I had imagined it a bit differently.