Tuesday, 16 February 2010 22:35
If you're going to take a road trip across Eastern Europe, one thing you can always count on is being entertained by the Ukranian police. In the Eastern half of the country, they are truly audacious; they're everywhere, and they don't need a reason to stop you. We're especially susceptible to being pulled over and investigated because of our car's Russian license plates. Here's how the system works:
The policeman stands at the side of the road and waves a black and white-striped stick at you, and you have to stop. He then examines all your documents and all the car's documents. If anything is out of order, he tells you he has to fine you. Sometimes, he'll demand a ridiculous sum of money, and you have to counter-offer until you reach an agreement. If he can't find anything to pick at with your paperwork, he's apt to invent something. One cop, finding all our paperwork in order, fined Tim for not using his blinker when he pulled him over. Another fined him for not having an oval RUS sticker on the rear window: a fun new law he had just made up. Since we had no sticker, and nowhere to buy one, we made one. I scribbled out the letters on a scrap of notebook paper, we slipped it inside a plastic bag, and Tim duct-taped it to the rear window. Needless to say, we weren't fined on that score again. 
We like to think there's nothing a Mainer can't fix with duct tape!
At the Ukraine/Poland border, one official told Tim he wouldn't be able to process our paperwork unless Tim gave him a case of vodka (which Tim naturally declined to do.) Another one made him fill out the same form 3 times--finding fault with it each time, until the form finally came back to him with money attached.
On the way home, at the Ukraine/Russia border, one official called both Tim and me out of the car, then dismissed Tim back to the car and questioned me for about 15 minutes about everything under the sun (What kind of English classes did I teach in Russia? How much did they cost? What did my children want to be when they grew up? What kinds of professions are considered prestigious in America?) The whole time, he was sitting in his nice, warm, customs-official booth, leisurely stamping the family's passports while I stood in a bitter, whipping, below-zero wind outside, at midnight, shouting my answers through the little window at him, certain I was going to end up in jail before the night was out. It turns out, he was just being friendly. See? I'm so conditioned to mistrust anyone in a uniform that I don't even recognize it when one of them is being nice. After experiences like these, I'll probably come home from Russia an embittered anarchist who jumps at sudden noises and can't sleep without a nightlight.
Oh well: there's no cloud without a sliver lining: The great thing about the Ukranian police is that they make you thankful for the Russian police, and that's saying something!
