Poor Adam, with whom I have shared a compartment on the ride from Kraków, is still hung over from a night out with a few Scots. He has slept just about the entire way, having decided to forego a night’s sleep at his hotel and head for the station for the 6:20 a.m. departure directly from the nightclub. Adam, who is from Bath, England, is in town for private Polish lessons. He is among the very few foreigners in Lublin. What an adjustment this is from the international flavor of Kraków. The largest city in Eastern Poland, Lublin’s perimeter does not impress; it is an ordinary mix of mediocre apartment buildings in shabby neighborhoods and abandoned warehouses. The center of town is much more eye-catching. It has a bustling commercial zone of large businesses, hotels, banks, ... read more

I awoke this morning to what must have been the most brilliant day of the year, if not the decade. The sun shone bright; it was warm and breezy and floral perfume floated in the air. What a great day, the kind of day you remember come winter. However, with train ticket in hand for Oświęcim, is there ever a fine day to go to Auschwitz? Do you roll out of bed look outside and say, “Gee, this would be a splendid day to see the camps, so much better than yesterday?” But, what of people who live in Oświęcim? They must travel a bit and see the world, right? The remnants of the camps must be but a minor distraction for them, as they lead normal existences; they go to work, have families, and root ... read more

little more on my mind than to be on my way, I called a friend of mine in Lviv to inform him of my arrival the next morning. For the past few days, we had been exchanging mails; each time he reminded me that he was waiting for me to call and let him know when I would be in town. I called him from the post office in Odessa, the only place phones are consistently reliable, and all was in place. The advantage of train number twenty-six is that, while it arrives in Lviv at first light, is that it pulls out of Odessa around 6 p.m. This affords me to peer out the window and absorb some of the scenery, people, and landscape of Ukraine. Between intermittent stoppages, the train sped north, splitting bountiful ... read more

At first glance, it is easy to observe a sharp disconnect between Ukrainians’ understanding of the world and the means by which they live. Their comprehension of history, geography, and particularly technology, does not correspond to their inferior surroundings. Ukrainians are seemingly denied the chance to prosper in a society lacking in the basic ease in which Western Europeans thrive. Electrical engineers accept jobs as taxi drivers. Mechanics toil daily on unwanted second hand vehicles from Germany dating back to the days of Brezhnev. High-level skills abound, but there is nowhere nearby to apply them usefully. A walk around the neighborhood unveils the state of disrepair in which ordinary people carve out a living. Suburban residences consist of mammoth, nine story rectangular eyesores, the first floor of which in some areas serves as a modest (read: ... read more

A great number of people choose to travel where bad news is a rare occurrence: Las Vegas, Yellowstone National Park, South Beach, and San Francisco. When was the last time you read about a tourist-induced riot on The Strip or a coup d’état on Hilton Head Island? Others make for those destinations so obscure from where only bad news escapes. How long has it been since you read an in-depth exposé about the new opera house in Sierra Leone? Or the brand new species of orchid discovered in Rwanda? Ukraine, other former Soviet republics, and the emerging countries of Eastern Europe, pertain to neither category. Rather, they belong to an unfamiliar abyss from which practically no news reaches the pages of The Times of London or The Boston Globe. Recent political change aside for the moment, ... read more