The Halitosis Express

The Halitosis Express

Eighteen hours is a long time on a bus. We loaded the bus at 8pm in the capital of Moldova. Moldova, in fact, is a country. They have a president, a Parliament, X million citizens and even a flag. The capital of their nation is called Chisinau. I would try to explain how to pronounce it but I'll be honest, I hope you won't ever go there so why bother. Plus I get weird looks when I say the name to Eastern Europeans. Maybe because of my poor pronunciation or maybe because they don't understand why we would chose that place to spend New Years. And
they shouldn't understand because neither did we--it just worked out that way.

We were about to load a bus bound for Ukraine's second city, called Lviv. Unlike Moldova, Ukraine has a lot going on. Four years ago the country united against the evil whatnots and had a revolution. The accommodation is nice, the beer is cheap and the people wanted us there. But to get there, we had to take a bus. No room on trains and we needed to get out of Moldova before we froze into place....from either the below freezing temperatures or complete lack of external stimuli. The bus itself seemed fine, although I noticed at once that the seats were closer together than a budget airline's...and it smelled a little odd. People, a lot of people, were smoking outside the entrance. No big deal, this is Eastern Europe--smoke rises out of everything from cigarette's to the ubiquitous concrete factory smokestacks that seem to linger in the background of our photos.

Kori takes the window seat, me in the aisle, legs stretched out both sides. This is a common bus arrangement for us to save me from having to stand up on cramped buses. Which is to say, nearly every bus we have been on in the past 10 months. I recognize that I am a solid foot and half taller than 5.9 billion people in the world, but many Moldovans are actually really tall? I dismissed this as another subtle element of Soviet imposed unnecessary suffering and sat down dreading a night trying to sleep sitting up. We start to pull off and the bus stops suddenly. The doors swing open. An tiny old man with a long white beard limps on. If santa were a grape, he'd be the raisin. He is followed by a large woman made larger by the indescribable amount fur of wrapped around her body. Fur cap, long fur coat, fur scarf thing wrapped around her neck and leather boots with fur trim. She walked slowly, maybe because she was carrying the entire cast of Bambi on her shoulders. And it started to smell a little, nothing alarming, just stuffy. Following her were two kids, maybe twelve. One of them was carrying a 2 liter bottle of what I thought was beer. In retrospect I wish it had been. After that, they just kept coming. A couple
with a huge suitcase, a woman with a baby buried somewhere in a pile of a dozen blankets, more old men and more old women. Ahead of me there were clearly no seats available. Behind me, same thing, not a single empty seat. But people were still piling on. At first I thought they were all onboard to see their families off. There were no seats and the aisle was now completely loaded with people from driver to the very back. And the smell had become stronger. I was sure that I smelled alcohol. But not just alcohol, alcohol breath. Some people had beers, Moldovan beers which are bitter, and bitter beer makes bitter beer breath. But these smells were temporarily forgotten about when the doors of the bus shut and it pulled off onto the ice covered street. The stander uppers started to squeeze and smash their belongings into the luggage space above our heads. Yes, they were settling down and getting comfortable.

We were only three weeks out of India where this sort of thing is common place. We managed
to avoid the goat on the lap/baby throwing up fresh breast milk thing throughout our time there. The Greyhound can be bad, buses in Morocco or Kenya can be bad...but I would not have expected anything like this in Europe. It was there that I realized that not all former USSR countries have crawled themselves out of the Russian dug hole. The bus driver let as many
people on who could pay. With 48 seats full, the aisle had an add'n 25 people, plus three drivers and a conductor--we were a little over the legal limit if there is one. Not even a clown could squeeze in if he tried. We went through stages: a little denial (that that woman could wear so much fur), a little anger (that we paid $30 a seat for this), a little grief (that I would likely lose sensation in my butt for a week) and finally acceptance (that even if I wanted to complain, I don't speak Moldovan...and there is no way to reach the bus driver anyway). We accepted the situation and tried to laugh it off. Then the heat came on. Its minus 15 C outside...so a little heat was welcome. The driver wasn't into to moderation apparently. He cranked the heat to a point of confusion. People started to sweat, the beer drinkers drank more beer to cool down and the vodka drinkers breathed more bad air. The heat kept coming. The two dozen people in the aisle, tired of standing up, started to waiver. Elbows of standers hit heads of sitters. The
smell too went through stages like the storm before an oncoming tornado in Kansas. First it was musty, then it was stuffy. With the heat still on full it started to feel like a prehistoric rainforest--moist with smells of things you don't quite understand and hope don't hurt you. Before long we simply passed out from the heat. I woke up a few minutes later to a bus full of Moldovans, passed out and covered in fur and sweat. At first I thought I was having a bad dream--that I was shrunken and stuffed into an oven with a forest load of drunk squirrels. The standers were now all leaners. The Soviet Sasquatch had an arm over my seat and the left side of my face was lost in fox fur. In the aisle the aforementioned kids were the only others still stirring. They were passing their 2 liter bottle back and forth and pushing each other, air arm wrestling and dancing to a shared mp3 player. I could smell the drink on their breath--it was not beer (good thing because they were not more than 12) but smelled like low budget redbull (bad thing because they were they were 12 years olds drinking liquid crack)..and they were almost done with the whole bottle. They were bouncing all over, elbows slamming ears, stepping on people who were sitting in aisles. This continued on for hours until they just seemed to just crash....the reds must not have perfected their Redbull recipe before the iron curtain fell. Every once and awhile the bus would stop for a break and fresh air. The Moldovan people enjoyed this fresh air by lighting up a smoke. The smoke would waft into the open door and fill up the bus. Doors shut, heat on full, down the icy road we go. We eventually made it to the border of the Ukraine where customs officials took the 77 passports and disappeared for two hours and while we sat on the bus roasting. Dehydrated, exhausted and simply grossed out, the the bus started up again, drove 2 minutes and stopped at the Ukrainian border. We spent two more hours in the halitotic convection oven before we saw our passports again. Eventually the aisle dwellers dissipated but before going they clearly marked their territory. The bus smelled awful. Halitosis had infiltrated the entire cabin. There was nowhere to brush teeth and most people had no water to drink. The smell? Somewhere between catpoo and the vapor you get from pulling the plastic off the top of a Salisbury Steak TV dinner. We arrived at our destination in the Ukraine to even colder air and the smell of coal fire emanating from nearby power plants--but we were brought back to life after an 18 hour stretch of hot stinky tosis...and to deboard the halitosis express.