Notes from a Soviet Train

There are only two rules for picking a seat on an old Soviet train: Firstly, choose one closest to a window that opens (these steel boxes don’t have A/C, old sport). Secondly, the seat should be in the car that smells the least like cigarettes.

Since every car on the train from Budapest to Romania reeks of cigarettes, I settled on car two. I like it for its windows, which slid fully down like those in a car, and also for a cute button of a girl with long braided hair who sat with her nose in a book.

My imagination is still in the wonderfully absurd stage where it seriously believes that I could strike up a conversation with this girl and 24 hours later, be riding horseback with her through the lush forests of Transylvania in search of a legendary sword still sung about in taverns today.

Ideally, we’d be riding those horses naked.

Ahhh, youth. How can one miss something that they haven’t yet lost?

I dust the crumbs off my seat and plop down. It’s more uncomfortable than it looked and it looked as comfortable as an electric chair. Ten long hours stand between me and my stop, and the only entertainment I brought is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and a collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories.

I left the tech behind because I didn’t want to fight the urge of churning out an essay or editing a video. That’s a fight I rarely win. Sometimes you need to unplug.

Boredom is the gateway to imagination.

I’ve been living in Budapest for the past couple months and every day has roughly looked the same. Wake up, pray while the coffee is brewing, write until it gets ugly, drink another cup of coffee, push the writing more, finish the pot of coffee, go to the gym, and then eat the easiest and cheapest meal one can: sardines with raw white onions (sliced thin) and a squeeze of lemon.

The afternoons and evenings are usually spent in the company of books at either my favorite jazz club, or the Russian cafe down the street. Both are full of old furniture and both play tunes that don’t break my concentration.

My schedule is less rigid than most, but it still resembles a routine and routines do to time what Pac-Man does to those little yellow circles. The only thing that stops Pac-Man is the colored ghosts. In the game of time, those ghosts are spontaneous side-quests.

Key word: spontaneous.

One day you’re eating your boring but consistent can of sardines, the next your on an old Soviet train slicing through the tree-covered hills of Transylvania, sitting alongside babushkas and old men sporting 50-year-old leather jackets who carry on conversations in yet another language that your ears decide is as decipherable as the stories your drunk uncle tells after his fourth vodka on the rocks.

That’s how you do it.

You can’t think too much. This isn’t Mission Impossible. This is an adventure. Elaborate plans are only good for setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations. If there aren’t any unknowns, you are doing it wrong.

All that I know is that I’m supposed to meet a man by the name of Bogdan in a city called Alba Iulia. One of my restaurant coworkers set it up. I called her last night, remembering she had family somewhere in the East of Romania, and she phoned him the same evening to arrange a meeting.

Now, the risk you take by not planning anything is that the quest will be a flop.

You may end up in a small village hours away from the nearest major city. There may be no one your age around. Perhaps there’s not a single tourist attraction within an hour of driving.

If you find yourself in this situation, congratulations, you are in the place where all the best stories begin.

Stripped of tourist to-do lists, you are forced to create your own adventure. Boredom is the gateway to imagination. Imagination pursued with action is what the best memories are made of.

I get off the train and see a man waiting.

“Bogdan?”

It’s a silly question. He’s the only man waiting and I’m the only man who got off the train.

We drive to the center of the city where two old churches stand side-by-side: one Orthodox, the other Catholic. The Orthodox church is the site where King Ferdinand and Queen Marie had their coronation in 1922. The Catholic church is over 700 years old and is the resting place of the great Hungarian warrior, Janos Hunyadi, who is most famous for stopping the Ottomans from pushing further West.

This stop lasts less than an hour. Apparently, I’m not staying in Alba Iulia. We are headed further north to an even smaller town: Aiud. Bogdan has a brother there and it’s been arranged that I’ll be crashing with him and his family.

We drove through all of Aiud in less than 10 minutes. It looks like most other places in the Balkans, with the churches and tobacco shops being where most people congregate.

Andrei, Bogdan’s brother, is waiting for us at his apartment. The whole family welcomes me, immediately offering homemade cakes and dark beer.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the generosity of strangers. I hope I don’t.

As a token of appreciation, I brought Andrei the best sausages my butcher had. The Hungarians are famous for their sausage and rightly so. Not that size is everything, but the links I brought were so big that they barely fit in my bag. They also were so pungent that my bag still smells like meat and paprika as I write this a week later.

Andrei’s wife adds this sausage to the dinner spread of a variety of other sausages, cured pork fat, a half loaf of sliced white bread, and in-season vegetables from the garden. The onions were the best I ever ate. The green leaves were sweet like sugar but every bite towards the bulb intensified with a wonderful spice.

Simplicity is good.

The next morning we join Andrei’s father in his village for coffee.

Life is slow in villages. All villages. Maybe that’s because all the youth have left for grander dreams. Maybe that’s because there’s still a sense of moving in accordance with nature. Everyone’s houses here are smaller than their gardens. That seems right.

Old men with rounded bellies sit outside their homes in plastic chairs talking about what all old men with rounded bellies talk about all around the world: the weather.

Their wives also sit in their own circles on the street. They discuss the village’s latest drama (which is just as exciting as it could be in any major city of the world) and how their tulips are coming along.

I’m sitting across from Anton, Andrei and Bogdan’s father. If you are thinking these names sound a bit Latin, you would be correct. Romanian is a unique language that shares both Latin and Slavic roots.

“Andrei, would you ask your father what he liked about living under communism?”

Andrei translated and the old man with the rounded belly took his time to think. Maybe that’s something special in the villages too. People still feel comfortable in silence.

“He says that under communism we had money, but nothing to spend it on. Now, we have everything to spend it on, but no money.”

My American-trained mind quickly decides the latter is better. At least there’s a shred of opportunity.

“What did he do for fun then?”

Less time thinking for this question.

“Films, sports, and a lot of table.”

He pronounced ‘table' like ‘tableh' (I’ll continue to write it as tableh because table is confusing to the English wired brain).

“Tableh? Sounds like the Turkish word for backgammon: tavla.”

“Da. It’s the same.”

Anton was studying my face.

“Does he have a set laying around here?”

“Da.”

“Does he want to play?”

Like an assassin’s daggers before a job, Anon’s eyes noiselessly sharpened. A smirk hid behind his stone-cold face.

“Da. I think he does. But I have to warn you Zane, he plays for money.”

“Very well.”

And very well it went up until Anton’s first cast of the dice.

The way you judge a character’s ability in backgammon is the same way you judge an F1 driver: speed and precision.

Anton moved flawlessly. A blind man would be able to see he knew this game better than most mothers know their own child.

I played with dice in my hand to stall for time while I studied the board. I was looking for an edge. Anton laughed and said something to his son.

“He says this isn’t chess. Play.”

Damnit. He knew exactly what I was doing.

I let my dice rattle against the backboard and moved with as much confidence as one can in the face of inescapable defeat.

I can hardly blink before he’s moved again.

Backgammon is perhaps the only thing that moves quickly in villages.

Zane Jarecke backgammon — Sorry babe, in a boss battle. Can’t talk.

Towards the end, all my practice with the Persians and Turks in the cafes of Istanbul returned to me but it was too late. The damage had been done. I was bleeding out.

Anton didn’t seem surprised. We shook hands and he poured me another glass of the white wine he bottled (in plastic bottles) last season. It was cool like the spring breeze and eased the feeling of defeat.

I ask him if we can play again tomorrow.

“Da, da.”

Tomorrow couldn’t come sooner.

But tomorrow was still far away. That night was the Orthodox celebration of Easter (or Pascha as we call it). Every Orthodox Church in the world this evening would be having a very beautiful, but very long, midnight vigil. The church back in Aiud was no exception.

Mănăstirea Dumbrava: An Orthodox monastery we visited earlier in the day

We stood with our candles outside the church in the middle of the crowd. I wanted to pray but there was so many interesting faces that I found it hard to concentrate.

To my left, benches were lined with faces that carried fate in their wrinkles like others do on their palms.

To my right, there was a young girl with a scarf wrapped around a face so focused and devout that you’d think she was already a nun.

Two boys dipped and dove through the crowd breaking my already broken concentration, but the girl looked on, quietly chanting the divine hymns that carried her soul above the world of distractions.

——

Part two can be found here.

Notes from a Soviet Train

There are only two rules for picking a seat on an old Soviet train: Firstly, choose one closest to a window that opens (these steel boxes don’t have A/C, old sport). Secondly, the seat should be in the car that smells the least like cigarettes.

Since every car on the train from Budapest to Romania reeks of cigarettes, I settled on car two. I like it for its windows, which slid fully down like those in a car, and also for a cute button of a girl with long braided hair who sat with her nose in a book.

My imagination is still in the wonderfully absurd stage where it seriously believes that I could strike up a conversation with this girl and 24 hours later, be riding horseback with her through the lush forests of Transylvania in search of a legendary sword still sung about in taverns today.

Ideally, we’d be riding those horses naked.

Ahhh, youth. How can one miss something that they haven’t yet lost?

I left the tech behind because I didn’t want to fight the urge of churning out an essay or editing a video. That’s a fight I rarely win. Sometimes you need to unplug.

Boredom is the gateway to imagination.

The afternoons and evenings are usually spent in the company of books at either my favorite jazz club, or the Russian cafe down the street. Both are full of old furniture and both play tunes that don’t break my concentration.

My schedule is less rigid than most, but it still resembles a routine and routines do to time what Pac-Man does to those little yellow circles. The only thing that stops Pac-Man is the colored ghosts. In the game of time, those ghosts are spontaneous side-quests.

Key word: spontaneous.

That’s how you do it.

You can’t think too much. This isn’t Mission Impossible. This is an adventure. Elaborate plans are only good for setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations. If there aren’t any unknowns, you are doing it wrong.

All that I know is that I’m supposed to meet a man by the name of Bogdan in a city called Alba Iulia. One of my restaurant coworkers set it up. I called her last night, remembering she had family somewhere in the East of Romania, and she phoned him the same evening to arrange a meeting.

Now, the risk you take by not planning anything is that the quest will be a flop.

You may end up in a small village hours away from the nearest major city. There may be no one your age around. Perhaps there’s not a single tourist attraction within an hour of driving.

If you find yourself in this situation, congratulations, you are in the place where all the best stories begin.

Stripped of tourist to-do lists, you are forced to create your own adventure. Boredom is the gateway to imagination. Imagination pursued with action is what the best memories are made of.

I get off the train and see a man waiting.

“Bogdan?”

It’s a silly question. He’s the only man waiting and I’m the only man who got off the train.

This stop lasts less than an hour. Apparently, I’m not staying in Alba Iulia. We are headed further north to an even smaller town: Aiud. Bogdan has a brother there and it’s been arranged that I’ll be crashing with him and his family.

We drove through all of Aiud in less than 10 minutes. It looks like most other places in the Balkans, with the churches and tobacco shops being where most people congregate.

Andrei, Bogdan’s brother, is waiting for us at his apartment. The whole family welcomes me, immediately offering homemade cakes and dark beer.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the generosity of strangers. I hope I don’t.

Simplicity is good.

The next morning we join Andrei’s father in his village for coffee.

Life is slow in villages. All villages. Maybe that’s because all the youth have left for grander dreams. Maybe that’s because there’s still a sense of moving in accordance with nature. Everyone’s houses here are smaller than their gardens. That seems right.

Old men with rounded bellies sit outside their homes in plastic chairs talking about what all old men with rounded bellies talk about all around the world: the weather.

Their wives also sit in their own circles on the street. They discuss the village’s latest drama (which is just as exciting as it could be in any major city of the world) and how their tulips are coming along.

I’m sitting across from Anton, Andrei and Bogdan’s father. If you are thinking these names sound a bit Latin, you would be correct. Romanian is a unique language that shares both Latin and Slavic roots.

“Andrei, would you ask your father what he liked about living under communism?”

Andrei translated and the old man with the rounded belly took his time to think. Maybe that’s something special in the villages too. People still feel comfortable in silence.

“He says that under communism we had money, but nothing to spend it on. Now, we have everything to spend it on, but no money.”

My American-trained mind quickly decides the latter is better. At least there’s a shred of opportunity.

“What did he do for fun then?”

Less time thinking for this question.

“Films, sports, and a lot of table.”

He pronounced ‘table' like ‘tableh' (I’ll continue to write it as tableh because table is confusing to the English wired brain).

“Tableh? Sounds like the Turkish word for backgammon: tavla.”

“Da. It’s the same.”

Anton was studying my face.

“Does he have a set laying around here?”

“Da.”

“Does he want to play?”

Like an assassin’s daggers before a job, Anon’s eyes noiselessly sharpened. A smirk hid behind his stone-cold face.

“Da. I think he does. But I have to warn you Zane, he plays for money.”

“Very well.”

And very well it went up until Anton’s first cast of the dice.

The way you judge a character’s ability in backgammon is the same way you judge an F1 driver: speed and precision.

Anton moved flawlessly. A blind man would be able to see he knew this game better than most mothers know their own child.

I played with dice in my hand to stall for time while I studied the board. I was looking for an edge. Anton laughed and said something to his son.

“He says this isn’t chess. Play.”

Damnit. He knew exactly what I was doing.

I let my dice rattle against the backboard and moved with as much confidence as one can in the face of inescapable defeat.

I can hardly blink before he’s moved again.

Backgammon is perhaps the only thing that moves quickly in villages.

Towards the end, all my practice with the Persians and Turks in the cafes of Istanbul returned to me but it was too late. The damage had been done. I was bleeding out.

Anton didn’t seem surprised. We shook hands and he poured me another glass of the white wine he bottled (in plastic bottles) last season. It was cool like the spring breeze and eased the feeling of defeat.

I ask him if we can play again tomorrow.

“Da, da.”

Tomorrow couldn’t come sooner.

But tomorrow was still far away. That night was the Orthodox celebration of Easter (or Pascha as we call it). Every Orthodox Church in the world this evening would be having a very beautiful, but very long, midnight vigil. The church back in Aiud was no exception.

We stood with our candles outside the church in the middle of the crowd. I wanted to pray but there was so many interesting faces that I found it hard to concentrate.

To my left, benches were lined with faces that carried fate in their wrinkles like others do on their palms.

To my right, there was a young girl with a scarf wrapped around a face so focused and devout that you’d think she was already a nun.

Two boys dipped and dove through the crowd breaking my already broken concentration, but the girl looked on, quietly chanting the divine hymns that carried her soul above the world of distractions.

——

Notes from a Soviet Train | Pt. 2

I’m Not Religious, I’m Spiritual

Zane Jarecke