Next Stop: The Rails Between Vienna and Krakow

A Ukrainian, Berliner, and Chinese-American walk onto a train...

The Highlights

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I’m on an 8am train from Vienna to Krakow. A young woman is sitting in front of me in a teeshirt and shorts. She looks a bit like Britney Young, the actor who played Carmen "Machu Picchu" Wade on the Netflix show, GLOW. Someone with a friendly smile who could mess you up if they felt like it.

For most of the journey, I’m in my own world. I doze off, stare out the window, and listen to podcasts. At Ostrava, a backpacker with bags wrapped both in front of and behind her approaches the seat next to me. She’s got a reservation and is politely kicking the woman out who’s been sitting there. The backpacker is speaking American-accented English. This seems to catch the ear of the Britney Young type sitting across from us. They exchange a few words while I try not to eavesdrop, though I learn that the woman sitting across from me is named Alisa and from Ukraine.

Eventually, the backpacker goes to the bathroom. She returns and takes one of her bags down from the above storage compartment, gently bumping me in the process.

“Sorry!” she says.

“No worries!” I say, revealing my own American accent.

“Are you from the US?” she asks, thus pulling me into her ongoing conversation with Alisa.

I learn that the backpacker was born in China and lived in Shanghai, but California is now home. She’s mid-to-late 40s, if I had to guess. Maybe early 50s. (I’m terrible at guessing ages.) The backpacker references a daughter back in California, how she should be looking for a job, but with the state of the world seeming ever so fragile, she wants to travel while she can.

Mentioning Shanghai piques Alisa’s interest. This 20-something Ukrainian woman worked in film production, which led her to Shanghai for a project.

“It is so beautiful,” she says of China, her smile echoing her sincerity.

The backpacker smiles back and agrees, sharing that she was supposed to move back to Shanghai for a job before the pandemic. But things didn’t pan out, so much so that she ended up giving up her Chinese citizenship in favor of a US passport. How that all spilled together wasn’t entirely clear, but I’m not one to pry into a stranger’s business.

The backpacker asks me the usual questions. Where am I from, how long have I lived in Germany––that whole rigmarole. But I’m more interested in their story.

Alisa talks about fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She ended up in Vienna, but is now on her way back to Kyiv to get some documents before turning back to the Austrian capital.

“It will all be over soon,” she says, her hands clasped together. “I hope… I hope.”

It doesn’t take long in Alisa’s presence to sense that she’s something of a unique, remarkable character. Not only has she traveled to Shanghai to work in film, but she’s seen the basketball courts of Europe as, what sounded like, an accomplished athlete. She definitely had the look of a center you didn’t want to fuck around with near the boards.

“I do everything!” she says, throwing her hands up in the air. “I film, I actress, I basketball––and I am funny. I am entertainment!”

She left enough of a mark on the backpacker that by the end of the journey, she asks Alisa to share her Instagram in case their paths might ever cross again. A bit of a linguistic hijinx ensue in which Alisa spells her name using the German pronunciation of letters. The backpacker types in “Alesa” instead of “Alisa” and can’t understand why her name isn’t coming up. Alisa repeatedly spells her name before finally just taking the backpacker’s phone.

I mention this not because it’s a riveting anecdote, but because in her short time in Austria, Alisa already speaks better German than plenty of folks I can think of in Germany. And she seems to take pride in her linguistic skills, which include Ukrainian, Russian, and English. She’s gleaming when she tells me, “Ich heiße Alisa” (my name is Alisa) and “Freut mich” (nice to meet you). It’s quite the contrast to the kvetching I hear from some who just simply won’t make an honest effort.

But I guess that’s the world. Refugees, like Alisa, are forced to be adaptable and make the most of a horrendous situation. Others, winners of a kind of birth lottery, get to cruise through linguistic barriers simply because of history and where they grew up.

—

Earlier, we found ourselves sitting in middle-of-nowhere Czechia for at least an hour-long delay. Something with the engine and needing another to come in. It was hard to follow updates with limited English going around.

Truth be told, the train has been rather chaotic this summer with everyone trying to make up for lost time over rails that are in desperate need of repair. Still, this is one of the many reasons I’ll always vote for taking the train. The cliché is true: You never know who you’ll meet.

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