from the annals of transportation

Thursday night, a little after midnight, I boarded the LIRR from Jamaica, headed for Penn Station. A youngish guy walks up to me and says, "Can you help me get to Ocean City?" He has a thick accent, and he seems a little scared. "It is 100 kilometers from New York," says the guy. New York City? New York state? Is it on Long Island? He doesn't know. I promise I'll help him find information once we get to Penn Station, and we get to talking. It turns out he's Kazakh and studying math at Moscow State (a good school). He's a sophomore, and he'd come to the US to work I think... his reasoning seemed ambiguous. All he had with him was a small backpack full of notebooks and a jacket stuffed in a plastic shopping bag. As we're killing time on the train, he says, "Have you seen this film, Borat?" "Oh!" I say, "We all know it was shot in Romania, don't worry." But he did worry, and he set out to convince me he didn't actually live in a village and share a bed with a cow, or sodomize his sisters, or chase Jews around town. I assure him we Americans know better.

When we get to Penn Station, we wander around looking for the information desks but they're all closed. It's now 12:45, and still we don't know where Ocean City is. His English isn't very good and I felt like I couldn't abandon him. I translate some stuff when he doesn't understand, but mostly we spoke in English. "Is Ocean City in New Jersey?" I ask. Finally his eyes light up and he says, "No! Maryland!" My jaw drops, I cuss a little, and I stomp around the Amtrak offices looking for help. Eventually the Kazakh guy pulls out a guide book to the United States (state by state!) in Russian. We find Ocean City on a map, it's a tiny little speck on the coast, 130 miles straight south of Wilmington, Delaware. I'm amazed someone bothered to put it on a map. I stomp around some more, but no one's heard of the place. I decide that he should go to Philly and pray that there's a connecting train. I tell him this, leave my phone number and email address, and leave. It's 1:30 am by this point. He swears his undying gratitude.

I'm worried about the poor kid. I think he only had $100 with him. He was going to meet Kazakh people out there, but only had an email address for them. Isn't that weird? What was he even doing in New York? How was he so helpless? I hope the Amtrak people were nice to him.

The weird thing is, I meet people like this dude all the time. It's like I'm flypaper for profoundly clueless men. [most dramatic example was the South African man in Xi'an who hadn't eaten in days and needed to buy window parts in bulk even though he didn't speak a word of Chinese. It took two days to shake him, but we did find window parts.]

The other update of randomness was that I think I've made peace with the insane woman who lives in the apartment above me. She'd thrown a hissy fit over laundry one day and had pounded on our door, yelled at me, then gone and yanked all my clothes out of the machines and strewn them on the floor of our basement. Well, she turned up a few days ago with a massive bag of Indonesian shoes for me and my roomies. Yes, you CAN buy my forgiveness with sandals from Bali!