Life got crazy.  First there was a terrorist bombing in the Moscow Metro.  Then the entire government of Poland crashed into the still frosty ground.  Now Icelandic volcanoes are spewing ash and soot miles into the atmosphere, leaving Russia alone but isolating her from the rest of Western Europe.  Somehow, life in Belgorod wobbles on, nonchalantly oblivious to the havoc that the world wreaks around it.  There is a sense of timelessness, despite the changing season, as though what has already happened has no relation to what is happening now, and what happens now will not impact what will happen in the future.  Maybe that’s just for me, the little American thinking about what this year in Russia means in the grand scheme of her life, but sometimes I really do believe that Russia as a state-of-mind has no concept of forward thinking.

With this in mind, I’d like to expose my own lack of foresight and tell the story about how I almost missed my train to the Ukraine a few weeks ago. 

There’s a minute before you are late in which you are not late.  That minute stretches for infinity, and I often find myself wandering around through that minute, getting so completely lost in it that I forget that that infinite minute has a real time equivalent of sixty seconds, and that while a minute can last a lifetime, a second is always a second.  I don’t even know where I go during that minute.  It’s as though all of eternity happened in it, but afterwards I have no mental access to it whatsoever.  Poof!  The final dimension will never be conquered by a girl named Nicky because she is too much of a space cadet to report back home.

I woke up on time to catch the 7:50 express to Kharkov.  I woke up well before 'on time,' and promptly fell back asleep.  When I woke up again, it was 7:10, exactly ten minutes before I was supposed to meet Aillie and co. at the train station.  Usually it takes me two real minutes to get myself ready, but often that translates into two real minutes and three minutes of infinity.  I was in the elevator and traveling nine floors down by 7:15, and by 7:16 I was already hurrying along the walkway to the bus station.  My steamy breath fogged my view of the bright blue onion domes of Orthodox church to my right, but the piercing early morning sunlight reflected off of the golden dome of the university’s observatory and shocked me out of my dreamy Russian reverie back to the harsh reality of my lateness.  I urged my sleepy legs to move faster.

I passed the fountain under the cold gaze of the angel Gabriel, skipped across the street, and jogged first up the steps to the bus stop platform, then down into the underground crosswalk.  I emerged on the other side to find no buses.  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and before the receiver was even at my ear I could hear Aillie’s frantic voice asking me where the hell I was and why was I so late.  She told me to grab a taxi, because unlike normal trains where you can hop on just seconds before they pull away, this train had to be boarded thirty minutes before departure so that the officials could check passports and visas.  It was now exactly thirty minutes before departure.

I ran back down the stairs, through the underground crosswalk, up the stairs to where there is usually a long line of taxis just dying to be of service.  On this blissful morning, there was not a single car.  And just at that moment, my bus, the number 13, pulled away from my stop across the street.  My phone buzzed again, and at this point the half of me that was conscious was panicking; the half of me that was still lost in eternity-time was having an existential experience.  I ignored the call and took off running after my bus, hoping to catch the next 13 at the next stop, or maybe another bus that comes from a different direction but ends up at the same place.

Perhaps I have mentioned this before, but running is not a particularly popular or common pastime here in the land of the Rooskies.  Running in your Sperry topsiders and patchwork jeans, your purse flailing behind you, is even less popular and common.  But a late girl’s gotta do what a late girl’s gotta do.  I sprinted past the eight ATMs on a single block, gasped for breath at the crosswalk (and watched another three of my busses go by), and flagged down a trolley bus at the stop.  Trolley buses are notorious for moving slower than a snail, but I took the time to catch my breath and prepare for the final sprint.

When we finally pulled up to the train station, I shoved my fare at the driver, leapt from the bus, and hightailed it to the platform.  My phone buzzed again, and I managed to snag it out of my pocket and answer it while weaving between morning commuters and the Muscovites recently deposited from the Belogorye train.  “Where are you!??!  Our boys are waiting for you at the entrance!”  I changed course, my hair falling from its elastic and my coat flapping in the wind.  I barreled into the boys, mumbling what I hope was, “I’m an idiot” in Russian, and we all ran together across three lines of train tracks and then down the platform to our car.  Reaching deep into my bag, I fished out my passport, visa, migration card, registration, and train ticket, only to realize that my train ticket said not “Ouellet,” but “Kurzavina,” the last name of my good friend Anya, who wasn’t on the train yet either.  Still running, I called Anya, who dreamily answered that she wasn’t coming.  Now all of me panicked.  Would they let me on the train with the wrong ticket?  It’s Russia!  No!

But at this point, we were already on the train, and just as I was asking about the ticket mix up, the doors slammed shut, and the conductor shooed us to our assigned seats.  Aillie’s face was a wash of relief, but when I explained that I had Anya’s ticket and she wasn’t coming, that beautiful, shining expression died into a smoldering scowl.  She pushed her way back to the conductor, who crossly listened to our dilemma before saying, “And?  What difference?  Go sit down.”  What luck!  We wiggled our way back to our seats to find Anya shoving her way through the door at the other end of the compartment.  Somehow she had jumped into the first car before we took off and worked her way back to us.  We had done it!  Seven of us, all coming from different places, half of us notorious for being infinitely late, had made it onto one train for a day trip to a foreign land.  Well, mildly foreign.  Foreign enough for me to get a stamp in my passport!  It’s orange, and has a little picture of a train on it.  When we went home late in the evening by bus, I got another stamp with a car on it.  Now if only I could stamp my forehead to not be quite so late all the time…