ON THE ROAD TO UKRAINE
From Krakow to Lviv.
We were waiting to pick someone up in the parking lot of a supermarket opposite a small airfield on the Polish side of the Ukraine border when our driver beckoned me from the car, no English, and asked me to join him on the side of the building, where he was finishing his cigarette. When I approached him, he adjusted my shoulders so I was turned around, facing away from the airfield. Then he said something, smiled at me, and pointed upward. We were in the flight path, and passed the time beneath so many roaring descents.
A half hour later, we left the supermarket parking lot for a nearby gas station and convenience store parking lot. I don’t know how no one bothered us, Polish police were stationed at one end, waving on any car that idled too long eying the flatbeds that pulled in, white canopies over factory fresh camouflaged armored vehicles in the rear. We were there so long our driver fell asleep on a picnic bench.
Once it was clear someone else wasn’t joining us and we had no time to stop at McDonald’s, we pulled up to the border, first exiting the EU, then driving another few hundred feet and entering Ukraine. It was a good day, and those stops were measured in minutes, not hours, unlike the half-day it would later take to return to Poland, even with the right paperwork to cut miles of cars.
I loved our driver. My faith in him grew as I observed his boredom with each step of our journey. It became obvious he had done this a million times before. I trusted him so much that when we finally pulled over at a Ukrainian gas station, and I returned double-fisting a $1 whiskey sour and an ice cream cone at 10am, and I found him smelling the gas pump, pouring some fuel in the tank, then some in his coffee cup, smelling the gas from the cup, then throwing the cup in the trash can and lighting a cigarette, I knew he knew what he was doing.
We hit the road, and I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to see everything, and it didn’t take long until traffic slowed to a halt at a small town outside Lviv. Our driver got out, stood leaning on the side of the car as we watched a funeral pass. A whole congregation from the look of it. The priests, so many women and children, an army band, bookended a station wagon, trunk open, coffin in the back. There was a drone attack nearby one week earlier, but we were told the funerals were an almost daily occurrence.
I forgot we lost an hour once we crossed the border, and between the time and the traffic, I was hopelessly late for my first interview by the time we pulled up to our hotel.
You can read my first two stories from Ukraine: “How Sangrita Became a Wartime Staple for Ukrainian Hospitality,” on VinePair, and “Ukrainian Refugees Are Building New Lives – And a New Scene – in Neighboring Warsaw,” in Conde Nast Traveler.
And if you missed our last post, we shared what happened when we took Ja Rule to dinner at Torrisi where he spoke about his partner who inspired an episode of SVU.