About last night

Today’s theme tune comes to you straight from Tony’s pondering mind (this conundrum kept him up at 4am last night!).

The restaurant bar was the only room open when we arrived in Chelm.

Chelm/current location

We walked into a large, tiled room with just three tables and a few cheap café style chairs. It was basically a cheap and cheerful typical truck stop/transport café and the stench of chip fat struck you as soon as you walked through the door. There were few people around: a Polish waitress behind a counter; a beautiful-looking woman sat in front of a series of post-its, next to a charging phone plugged into the wall; and two teenage boys sat at a separate table, hunched over their phones. The atmosphere was calm and the menu incomprehensible(!).

We asked the waitress if she spoke English and one of the lads came to our rescue, asking if we needed help translating anything. He explained he was Ukrainian. And he was coming to our rescue…

We spent the rest of the evening chomping down some very oily (but really quite delicious!) chicken noodle broth and chicken schnitzel. With Elena (the elegant blonde lady) and her two sons.

Elena was running on stress and, as we spoke more and more with her, it became clear she was a (rather glamorous) mother of three boys (from a seemingly wealthy background). She explained to us, in her broken English, that her car had caught fire owing to an electrical fault with her headlight and she had stayed here in the trucker stop (that had rooms) the night previous. Her car still functioned but she needed to fix it and was considering what she would do next. She’d reserved parts in Warsaw that would be ready on Monday and she was thinking about whether or not she could drive the 4 hours there the same night. We were two groups of people, both with car electrical problems, but how different the rest of our circumstances were.

Elena explained her car was all she had now. She woke to the sounds of bombs in Kyiv, with her bed jolting suddenly. Her sons ran into her bedroom and told her that her city was being bombed and that they had to leave. She explained how her boys were looking after her but now she really needed to look after them. Whilst we were sat chatting with her, she mothered over them (insisting the 16-year-old puts on his coat before going outside, for example, putting his coat on him herself). She made light of the fact that the most important things for the boys was where their watch or powerbank was in her bag.

Despite her resilient jokey tone, she was clearly very scared. She explained she felt she had nowhere to run and that Putin was a maniac who was seriously psychologically ill.

Elena was born in Russia and moved to Ukraine later in life. She explained her family (namely her sister) is still in Russia. I asked Elena why people choose to live in Russia and she explained that the pension and state benefits are much more interesting to the people than those in Ukraine.

Elena spoke of the 12 apartments she had in Kyiv, of the house she’d been building for her family for the last four years, of her husband who left for Tunisia just the day before the bombings. She showed us her luxury apartments and explained she was receiving messages from guests all across the world that had stayed in her apartments previously. Her apartments were being booked out by charitable individuals wanting to do something too.

After Warsaw, Elena will heading to Italy, to join her mother who moved there a few years ago. Elena smiled as she told us about the delights of Italy - the cuisine, the people, the culture. How she could still be so positive. She trusted in God. We hope to catch up with her in a few days.

It was an emotional night and we all went to bed feeling pretty melancholic (Tony and I stayed in a twin trucker room).