The Most Expensive Day Trip to Warsaw
- Aaron Schorr
- Sep 13, 2021
- 10 min read
This was meant to be a paragraph at the end of the previous post, but so many things went wrong that it demands a dedicated entry. I said goodbye to Bilal and boarded a tram to the train station in Lviv. I bought a ticket but didn’t know I had to validate it, which resulted in a 200 UAH ($7.5) fine despite my pleas of innocence rendered via pantomimes and Google Translate to the two ticket inspectors. This was a near-repeat of a very similar incident on the Berlin subway in 2016, only then they had mailed me the €60 fine which I never paid. Lviv and Kyiv had surprisingly atrocious air connections to New York, and the only decent flight I could find was Krakow-Frankfurt-Newark, which meant I needed to get to Krakow by the next morning. There was a Ryanair flight which was a little expensive, so I initially tried sharing a ride through Blablacar, but the drivers were all charging exorbitant sums. The last option was a bus, but my bank thought the reservation was a fraudulent charge and kept blocking the purchase. Fortunately, Oleksii had spoken to the coach operator on the phone and they were holding me a seat.
The tram crawled through the Lviv rush-hour traffic and let me out at an intersection that was a 10-minute walk through the rain, dragging my suitcase over rough cobblestones. Without a ticket, I didn’t know exactly where to go, but I eventually found the orange and green bus and paid for my seat. Coaches in Eastern Europe have a driver and an operator, a position I dubbed the semiconductor, and this one was very concerned about my Israeli passport. I whipped out my American one which got an enthusiastic thumbs-up, at which point I made the decision to enter Poland with it.
Europe’s Worst Border Crossing
Instead of using the main motorway, we drove west on a terrible side road, clearly getting close to the border when we started seeing masses of parked cars and trucks on the roadside. The Ukrainian-Polish land border is known as one of the worst in Europe, the only thing separating millions of Ukrainians from Schengen nations with wages 10 and 15 times higher than theirs. Kyiv and Lviv mostly don’t give it away, but Ukraine has a GDP per capita of $3,984, just between El Salvador and Egypt. Just as the bus left, Oleksii texted me to tell me that some of his friends couldn’t make it through the border, which made for a rather tense ride as I frantically researched the most recent entry requirements whenever I could get a signal.
We arrived at the outermost border gate at 9:00 pm to find it buzzing with activity and surrounded by little kiosks selling alcohol and cigarettes like the stations along the Trans-Siberian. Nearly the entire population of the bus got off to smoke as we waited for our bus to move forwards. The border crossing could only handle one bus at a time alongside cars and trucks, so this took a good two hours, during which the poor Ukrainian soldiers manning the heavy gate had to swing it open and closed before and after each vehicle that passed through.
The gate finally opened for us and we creeped forward around 100 meters, where we waited for a quarter of an hour until we were told to disembark and retrieve our luggage. We entered a dark customs hall and lined up in front of the empty counters until a gorgeous female soldier appeared 15 minutes later to stamp everybody out of the country. I was told to stand aside and wait for her supervisor, and then had to stand very still as the two women examined me intently, trying to determine whether I was the same person as my passport photo. It took us another 45 minutes to advance the 200 meters to Polish customs, passing by dozens of cars being inspected inside and out by Polish guards in the dead of night.
The border guard was predictably befuddled by my American passport when my turn came, and slowly flipped through it despite the fact that it literally only had two stamps in it. The verdict? “Now you must sit on the chair and waiting for my boss”. I did as I was told until a more senior woman arrived and made some inquiries about my situation. She eventually emerged and flatly informed me that I could not enter, as foreigners could not enter through land borders unless they had a dedicated visa. This was very different from the official government rules I had seen when I had decided to travel through Poland, which I showed her on my phone. She couldn’t quite understand the English, but I eventually found the Polish translation which quite clearly noted the many types of travelers allowed to enter Polish territory. Section #23 reads:
Foreigners who stays, upon arrival, on the territory of the Republic of Poland for no longer than 24 hours and holds an air ticket confirming departure from the territory of the Republic of Poland within 24 hours of arrival on the territory of the Republic of Poland, counting from the moment of arrival on the territory of Poland. I showed her my plane ticket leaving Krakow in less than 10 hours, but she refused to budge. She claimed that the Polish word przylocie meant “landing”, but a quick linguistic search revealed that that was entirely baseless and it meant “arrival” - "landing" would have been lądowanie. I tried explaining my situation in more detail, begging to be allowed to travel to the Krakow airport, but it was a futile effort. She had been instructed to not let foreigners cross her border without a visa, and that’s what she was going to do. Her colleague started yelling at me for not “checking all information before leaving”, but I failed to see how checking an official government website didn’t meet that definition. I asked her what I could do in order to get permission to transit and received the cold answer “not my problem, call minister.”
I quickly looked up flights from Lviv to New York and saw that there was one seat available at a reasonable price on a flight through Warsaw, but it was leaving Lviv at 6:10, only four hours away. I understood that there was no chance of being allowed in and asked for my passport back, but not before my bags were absurdly X-rayed to prevent me from not bringing contraband into Poland. She escorted me and a Ukrainian man whose documents were not in order out of the customs building and unlocked a gate to a dark path leading back the way we had come. Knowing that I was really screwed if I didn’t make it to the Lviv airport in time, I practically ran the several hundred meters back to Ukrainian customs, and came face to face with a very confused border guard. She couldn’t understand why she was dealing with a panting Israeli carrying a Ukrainian exit stamp that had barely dried at 2:15 in the morning, but it was probably the most interesting thing that had happened to her all week. I finally had a stroke of luck, though, and probably stumbled upon the nicest border guard behind the Iron Curtain. After making a quick phone call and looking at my vaccination card, she stamped me right back into the country. I was technically supposed to have Ukrainian medical insurance covering COVID, too, and I am eternally grateful that she asked about it once and never asked to see any documentation, because I knew from experience that my credit card would decline the purchase and I would have had an exceedingly difficult time purchasing it while I was already on borrowed time to begin with.
Back in the USSR
I walked through fences topped with barbed wire and emerged at the parking lot with the kiosks where I had arrived over five hours prior. I had no idea how I was going to get back to Lviv at 2:15 in the morning, but I hoped I could get a ride with one of the vehicles still trickling across the borderin time to catch the flight that I would book during the ride. A man approached me and offered to take me for €100; I countered with half that amount. We negotiated back and forth, but I wouldn’t budge from €50, figuring he would take it at this hour of the night. He made a final offer of €70, saying that he had to drive there and back - 100 km in each direction - and I must have looked so exasperated that he took pity on me and called another man over who was heading to the city and would take me for €50, or 1500 UAH. The other refusenik also boarded the van, and we set off at full speed towards Lviv on a now entirely deserted road that still had waiting vehicles parked along its sides for miles to the east. I had never seen any border like this before, and I hope I never will again.
I got to the Lviv airport and breezed through the check-in, surprising myself by how easy it was considering I had literally booked the ticket less than an hour previously on the way to the airport. I had no idea that it was even possible to get a ticket on such short notice, certainly not to the paranoid US, but I was learning a lot of things that night. I found a secluded bench and took a nap for the 90 minutes or so I had before boarding. All in all, I spent less than two hours in Ukraine from the time I was stamped in at the Polish border to the time I was stamped out to board a flight to Poland, but the border control official didn’t find that suspicious in the least bit.
I landed in Warsaw and got in line for passport control with everyone else. This flight may have been relatively cheap, but it came at the price of a ten-hour layover of the rare daytime variety, and I was going to try and spend it anywhere but the airport terminal. The official looked at my passport and my boarding pass to New York, apparently not seeing anything out of the ordinary from the debacle several hours earlier. “Do you want to stay in airport or go out?” “Go out,” I quickly responded. He nodded and STAMPED ME IN. The whole interaction had lasted less than 90 seconds and I wanted to scream with rage at the sheer idiocy of the Polish entry restrictions. I always get agitated when I fly, but this was a whole new level. A specter of Communism was still very much haunting Europe, carrying on the legacy of a million apparatchiks who bamboozled half the continent into accepting arbitrary rules at face value and tolerating dysfunctional governments for fear of attracting undue attention.
One Final City
Warsaw was cold and gray as I took a bus into the city. It wasn’t even 7 am when I got off at Starówka, the old town, and walked around completely deserted streets lined with colorful houses, Latin inscriptions, and cute cafés which were hours away from opening. Srodmescie is a real Central European architectural gem, and I basically had it as a private photography studio to myself. Everything outside this postcard-perfect area, however, is a grim sprawl of excessively wide boulevards and ugly buildings that could have been called “50 Shades of Gray”, exactly how I remembered it from my previous visit in March 2016.
The previous visit had been a school trip, which meant that I had been deprived of riding the Warsaw subway system. I now rectified that by riding two stops from the edge of Starówka to the central train station, noting the very no-frills but clean stations and comfortable trains. Since I keep track of such things, I smiled at reaching the milestone of riding subways in 20 different countries on 3 continents.
Above the central train station is the Palace of Culture and Science, a 30-floor tower gifted to Warsaw by the Soviets in the 1950s that has sadly become a symbol of the city. It is a hideous creation, made worse by the clashing glass skyscrapers erected in the city’s new and adjacent financial district, and it continues to house multiple theaters, a cinema, and XYZ. As if to complete the picture, there was a line of East German-built Trabant taxis parked outside the entrance. I took some photos and found a café to satisfy my needs for WiFi, caffeine, and electricity.
I couldn’t visit Warsaw without having some pierogi, so I did some research and found a nearby place that specialized in them. They served about two dozen kinds, both fried and boiled, and I settled on a mix of 9 kinds served with sour cream and compote. I think my favorite was actually the sauerkraut one, and I’ll be attempting to recreate it myself.
I still had some time to kill before returning to the airport, so I went on a brief monument tour, the best way to get to know any formerly Communist city. There was the predictable huge monument to the Polish resistance in WWII, so abstract that it looked like a building wall and could have symbolized anything, across the street from a camp set up by some pro-democracy protesters who weren’t around to respond to my snooping about. The more interesting memorial, however, was dedicated to Ronald Reagan, and depicted him emerging out of a slab of rock like a pagan deity behind a presidential lectern. As an enemy of Communism and supporter of the Solidarity movement which spearheaded Poland’s democratic transition in the late 80s, Reagan is something of a national hero in the country, as the monument made clear. “One of the most important presidents in the history of the USA” was lauded for standing with the Polish people, and the collapse of the USSR was essentially ascribed to him: “the start of the Reagan presidency marked the end of the Soviet Union”.
The rest of the journey was as uneventful as international air travel normally is, and I arrived at my new house in New Haven just before 1 am Eastern time, 38 hours after leaving my hotel room in Lviv. The one interesting tidbit about flying LOT, besides the atrocious food, is that the German in-flight map scandalously shows the German names of Polish cities: Warschau (Warsaw), Danzig (Gdańsk), and Stettin (Szczecin) were all on the map, but Königsberg (Kaliningrad, Russia) notably wasn’t. The diversity and emotiveness of the passengers of the New York subway were a shock to me after growing accustomed to the impassive white travelers of Eastern European public transport, as was the couple drinking pink sparkling wine out of the bottle on the Metro North to New Haven. The events at the Polish border notwithstanding, I had thoroughly enjoyed this trip to the eastern fringes of Europe, which had made for a highly memorable finale to a turbulent summer. Thank you to everyone who followed along; I trust you found my ramblings fun to read and hope to get back on the road at some point in the not-too-distant future.
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