I decided to take the train from Yerevan up to Tbilisi to visit some old Counterpart friends. Armen, our driver, took me to the train station to help me buy a ticket. The train station was like being magically transported back to Armenia, or anywhere else in the Soviet Union, 20 or even 50 years ago. The building is huge, with cathedral ceilings and marble floors. There are statutes of a workers, stars, and abstract scenes expressing ‘unity.’ It could be quite grand with some paint and elbow grease but now it just seems neglected.
The first time we went, we waited in line for 25 minutes while the cashier helped the person (one person) in front of us. When it was my turn, we stepped up to the counter and the woman promptly turned the sign to close and got up to leave. We were all of 2 feet away for nearly half an hour but she didn’t feel any need to tell us she was leaving for lunch.
We came back the next day and joined the ‘line,’ which forms in a radial radial rather than linear fashion. Armen and I stood in the heat, occasionally rolling our eyes, watching the lady sell tickets. The process involved writing names down in an old notebook, the kind with the black and white marbling on the front. Then she would look at the seating plan, a packet of stapled together papers, and write your name on your seat. Then she took a booklet of tickets, and this is the part that really killed me, and cut the ticket out with scissors, like making a paper snowflake. No ticket would be complete without a stamp so she picked some special letters and numbers out of the box and loaded them into the ancient machine, like you would with an old fashion printing press. And with that, I was booked for Tbilisi.
The first time we went, we waited in line for 25 minutes while the cashier helped the person (one person) in front of us. When it was my turn, we stepped up to the counter and the woman promptly turned the sign to close and got up to leave. We were all of 2 feet away for nearly half an hour but she didn’t feel any need to tell us she was leaving for lunch.
We came back the next day and joined the ‘line,’ which forms in a radial radial rather than linear fashion. Armen and I stood in the heat, occasionally rolling our eyes, watching the lady sell tickets. The process involved writing names down in an old notebook, the kind with the black and white marbling on the front. Then she would look at the seating plan, a packet of stapled together papers, and write your name on your seat. Then she took a booklet of tickets, and this is the part that really killed me, and cut the ticket out with scissors, like making a paper snowflake. No ticket would be complete without a stamp so she picked some special letters and numbers out of the box and loaded them into the ancient machine, like you would with an old fashion printing press. And with that, I was booked for Tbilisi.
0 comments:
Post a Comment