Iulia (her name is essentially the Russian version of Julie: first thing in common) and I met during a moment which was not good for either of us. We’d missed a train. The guy in the ticket office had given both of us the same wrong information, and we sat at a track while our train pulled away on another track. Silently. We never heard it
We complained long and loud, but it was only when I said, it really doesn’t matter whose fault it is, please help us fix this, that he did, suggesting that we talk to the supervisor of the next train going in the right direction, which we did, and she let us on the train. And he changed our tickets to Kalambaka for us, so we would have a train to change to.
Iulia and I spent the whole train ride talking and getting to know each other. We are terribly different: she is in her 40s with a child still in school, and one out in the world, we are on basically different ends of the spectrum in handling Covid, me vaccinated and wearing a mask religiously, and she being the Russian equivalent of a vaccine denier who basically refuses to wear a mask (at one point she accepted from me one of my cloth ones, because she liked the pattern, and the conductor was getting real testy about it, but she still took it off when he was out of the way.
But we bonded. And we ran into each other the next day at Agios Triados (Holy Trinity) Monastery, and I asked her to join me for dinner, which we did, and enjoyed each other. Now she has an invitation to the US when all this mess is over, and I have one to visit Russia (though she lives 16 hours by train east of Moscow, so it might be a while until my travels take me there.)
Strange and wonderful; we have been connecting with each other via WhatsApp since.
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