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30/05/2011

Aleksandra # - My favourite means of motion

This is not a very important statement in any way, but I love trains. So much classier than riding a wonky city bike home from the club or a third-class seat in a low-cost rienair flight. I never met the love of my life onboard or witnessed a murder on the Midnight Express or anything like that, but I heart the beauty of banal travel details. The odd co-passengers, saints and sinners, newspaper readers, egg eaters, doggies on the way to the sea. The smell of coal when you pass an industrial town (or cabbage near Korsnäs paper factory, welcome home to Gävle). The sound of speed as we accelerate through never-ending meadows and sudden night in the tunnel. The modern dandy listening to sorrowful 80ies ballads a bit too loud and you can only imagine the kind of person broke his heart. Godforsaken idyll where some older ladies get off at a station with rusty signs. Ajaccio-Bastia that felt like a roller coaster, ride interrupted by sheep resting on the rails. Changing trains in the middle of nowhere in Morocco on a star-spangled night. Having the compartment all to ourselves. Or sharing it with an obese Ukrainian who snored through the night so I could enjoy the sunrise on the nighttrain from Ivanofrankivsk to Kyiv. Life in a dining-car - pretty good title for a memoir?







Freeze frames from the film "Pociąg" by Jerzy Kawalerowicz

2 comments:

  1. These films are fantastic, yes. But Pociag was directed by Kawalerowicz, not Skolimowski.

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