Pat Took Picture of Gena, Andre and Me
Loved Of The LORD, We paid the porter for our Chi (Tea) then and for the next morning and got comfortable. Pat and I got the bottom bunks and the two young men, Gena and Andre were happy in the top two. There was a fold down table under the window. We left it up all the way, as it was stacked with our provisions for the trip.
We sang to The LORD and laughed about many of the crazy situations and issue involvements that it took to get this far. I have no doubt that they would have made Pat & I hang it up had it happened back home.
We had all just fallen asleep when we made the first border crossing into the Ukraine. The stopping of the train had us almost awake when Immigration banged on our compartment door. Pat understood most of the conversation between the Officer and the … let me just refer to them as ‘The Boys’ for now on. I was catching the gist, by the inflection of their voices and the body language. I knew there was a conflict developing and informed later that the Officer wanted to go thru our bags. This is where Pat put his foot down, because of the effort to exploit a share of anything found as payola to let us pass. Here was a reminder of my several adventures crossing into Mexico again.
After finding out that, we were not to be intimidated and his time to check all the passengers for pass ports and visas running out the Officer move on to the next compartment. It was an hour later after the boys explained everything before we got back to sleep.
Waking up early and taking turns with all the passengers on our car to toilet privileges, the porter had brought our hot Chi and we partook of some of the provisions we had brought. BTW! The bath had a sink with cold water and the toilet itself was a straight hole to the railroad ties below. I took note not to be walking along side of the tracks outside of town when a passenger train was passing.
Later that day we crossed in to Moldova and stopped again for Immigration. Remember that Pat and I did not have a visa for Moldova. The citizens of the former USSR only needed their passports and had access to all the Confederacy of Independent States. i.e. Called the CIS for short.
We opened the door in response to the rap and were in anticipation of anything that could possibly happen. When the, older this time, Officer asked for our passports, he glanced at the other three and when he got to mine he did a double take on mine as he looked back at me a couple times with a smile on his face. My passport picture was of me clean-shaven and now I had a full rap around beard. He wished us all the equivalent of, ‘Have a pleasant trip’, as he handed us all back our passports and then said, Das ve danya, as we closed the door.
The boys were incredulous at Pat and I having skated through that issue so smoothly! Pat & I, aware of the boys un-belief played it for what it was worth and gave everybody the look that we expected it to happen that way. To GOD be The Glory! Later when we were alone, Pat & I discussed how surprised we were too! Nevertheless, we BOLDLY ENTERED Moldova and were inspired to believe GOD for anything. We will talk about some of those things next time. … … © 2008
