This month’s Blogger Carnival asks bloggers to post their best travel adventure and potentially win a sweet language course from LiveMocha. (If you take the 2 minutes to sign up — for free — using that link, you can actually hook me up with some free stuff from LiveMocha. Just saying…)
Given that 85% of my awesome happy times involve travel of some sort, I instantly declared this the best Blogger Carnival ever. Some of you might think that since I have never actually participated in this before, I really can’t make a fair judgment. My love of this particular Blogger Carnival over all others is significantly more rational than my contempt for Anna Paquin, Converse One Star shoes, and people who place their toilet-paper so it pulls under instead of over. (That last thing is really just for the benefit of my former roommate who does not actually read this blog but is a fellow supporter of irrational annoyances)
My unjust reverence for this prompt aside, I spent all weekend thinking about it. I need to take a break from all the road trip blogging. I also decided to pass on the slew of international family trips I could pull from. I was really trying to write about something from my semester abroad but everything felt either out of place in this blog or personal in a way that just made me uncomfortable. (We’ve discussed my feelings about feelings…)
This meant that my EurRail backpacking adventure with my little brother was definitely the place to start. If this ever came up in a conversation (because I often find myself sitting around with people who will suddenly halt the conversation to ask, “What was your best travel adventure?”), this is definitely where my brain would go, so why shouldn’t that trip be the place to turn for this post?
The question is: what story do I tell?
I dug out a photo album (yes, an actual tangible photo album containing printed photographs — ridiculous, I know) and my half-completed travel journal (because I lost interest in the project around the time we reached Berlin) hoping to find THE STORY TO END ALL STORIES.
There are just so many things to talk about. Like some of the hostels we stayed in. The place in Dublin looked like it had recently survived a bombing (which I later decided is the mark of a quality hostel — it survived). The cheap beds at our hostel in Copenhagen put us in what looked like a giant warehouse with approximately 70 other beds arranged in little cubicles of two sunken bunk beds with century old pieces of foam serving as mattresses. We felt kind of like Katrina refugees, minus the fact that we were on vacation and not waiting for word that we had just lost all of our worldly possessions… (The real highlight here came from all the shushing that transpired. You know what you’re in for with a “room” like that; either invest in some ear plugs/an mp3 player or spend a couple bucks to upgrade to a room with fewer people.)
In Barcelona (and again in Budapest) we had serious concerns as we ventured down a series of alleyways that appeared prime for a good mugging. On the train from Marseille to Barcelona, Derrik spent a good hour on the phone with different hostels, and ultimately made several calls to this particular hostel to secure our price and the availability of beds. Once we actually arrived in Barcelona, late at night, it got a little tricky. As luck always seems to have it in these situations, the guy was no longer answering his phone. After wandering around the alleys just off Las Ramblas, we found the address we wrote down matching what appeared to be a standard residence. We had to be buzzed into the building and after walking up and down narrow stairs, we were given the key to the small studio apartment that we would call home for the next couple days. This was in the beginning, before we had become conditioned to the quirky realities of cheap-hostel-hunting (which is why it’s really good that Copenhagen was one of our last stops).
Then there are those other locations where we spent so much time (and on occasion slept in): train stations. We took late night power naps at St. Pancras in London between Dublin and Paris. We were lucky enough to find a restaurant booth to sleep in (and a janitor who was nice enough to let us alone as long as we promised to be gone by 5am). Aside from how intolerably cold it was, that was the high point in train station sleep. The one night that we tried to sleep at Gare du Nord didn’t really involve any actual sleep for me. I failed to include this in my travel journals, but being sexually harassed by a group of Parisian teenage boys at 3am is not something I’ll soon forget. (Fortunately, there were enough other people around so it never got out of hand — it was just annoying.)
The poor station in Ljubljana had to put up with us for a lot longer than it rightly should have because we decided our one day stop over in Slovenia wasn’t worth paying for beds at a hostel. After a couple hours wandering the streets of Ljubljana, absorbing the bleak Communist architecture, and visiting the castle, we decided that alcohol was necessary in Slovenia. We hunkered down in the empty train station locker room with our cheap vodka and gross juice, waiting for it to be late enough to justify public drunkenness. (This, my friends, is the real reason other people hate Americans; I am certain that American college kids on vacation do more damage to our reputation abroad than anything else.) This magical public drinking time, however, was not as soon as we wanted it to be.
We killed more time than should be reasonably possible by making our contributions to the graffiti and hiding in the lockers (because after a few drinks, I was convinced that we were being watched and of course, the locker was the logical place to hide. Duh.)
Derrik and I seemed to be broke all the time. We got money wired to us from generous family members and it vanished about as quickly as the ink dried on our signatures at the Western Union. I still don’t understand where our money went, but we never had any. When we stopped in Hamburg, I tried the ATM (a masochistic hobby I developed wherein I allowed myself the slim hope that we weren’t broke, only to be punched in the face by the “DECLINED” message on the screen. At least I understood that.) and by some banking accident that I of course had to pay $35 in overdraft charges for later, the machine gave me fifty euro. I actually squealed a little and started bouncing up and down before I realized that this is not the way one is supposed to react when the ATM gives you your own money. Stupid Americans.
Obviously, we spent 10 of that on sandwiches and croissants because we weren’t sure when we would eat again. Food was always a high priority when we happened to acquire money. In fact, forget everything I already said about the hostels we stayed in: the way I truly judge our hostels in retrospect is based on the availability and quality of breakfast. By the time we reached Amsterdam we had just enough money to pay for our beds and although the hostel had free breakfast, it was probably the shittiest of all the free-breakfast-providing hostels. Wrapping up leftover bread in napkins to eat for lunch and dinner was definitely a low point of the journey. We tapped into my student loan money when it finally cleared at the end of our time in Amsterdam (which is probably for the best). The only picture we have from Brussels is of our waffle leftovers. I don’t have journal entries for this part of the trip, but I am certain that this picture pretty much summed up our feelings on Europe and travel and life at that particular moment.
Our lack of funds of course contributed to some of the more memorable moments. Wandering across Copenhagen to Christiania might never have happened, had we had the money to do anything else. I would not trade the sight of police officers being chased off by drugged up high schoolers for anything else we could have seen in Copenhagen. (No disrespect intended to police officers, mind you, but this is not exactly something I see all the time in Jefferson City.) The rowdy kids aside, it was also interesting to take in the different sides to this small enclave in Copenhagen. It was not only distinct from the rest of the city, but was internally quite varied between the aging hippies that started it and the younger generation who couldn’t seem to decide if they cared about a cause or just wanted to get high. (But now I’ll tread carefully because I know relatively little about Christiania so I can’t pretend to be some sort of expert on its social dynamics.
I wish I had kept up the travel journal until the end. There are some awesomely snide remarks I retroactively wrote to myself on certain entries “20.05.08: “I still want to see Avignon though…” 31.05.08: (arrow pointing to that sentence) “Too bad you slept through it.” Or adjustments to the calendars I meticulously created (which, on a geeky note, are actually my favorite part of the journal. I drew out a calendar every few days that we used to regroup and decide the trajectory of our little journey. It’s interesting to see how we changed our minds over time, to make our conception of the trip come closer to the reality of it.)
The first entry that I wrote was on a train somewhere between London and Dublin. In this entry I talk a lot about transitioning from my semester in Ghana to backpacking Europe with my baby brother.
“While his presence doesn’t make me stop missing everyone else, I feel more at home than I have in months.”
And that, my friends, is the big sappy aww moment that brings me to my point (I know you were wondering if I had one): it’s not where you go or what you do, but who you’re with.
There is not a single friend that I would have chosen over my brother to haggle with Spanish hostel owners. Short of, perhaps, my older brother, there is nobody that I would have preferred by my side venturing down sketchy alleys in foreign countries. When you are certain that you have trekked the whole of Budapest, employing all transportation methods available, and getting ripped off by a dubious official, all in your quest for a museum you aren’t really sure exists, good company is a must. On a trip like this, there were times where I went several days between substantive conversations with people who were not my little brother. It’s pretty damn important that you like your travel buddy under those circumstances.
So my best travel adventure was actually the entire trip. Only my little brother remembers the special hatred we acquired for the Hungarian man who ruined our one sleeper train by coming by at 30 minute intervals to shout, “DON’T SLEEP, GYPSIES!” There is one other person on the planet who shares my feelings on Borzoi vodka or the sheer awesomeness that lives in a man named Lorenz (if you ever find yourself in Vienna in need of good conversation…)
And really, if you’re going to watch anyone lose their mind in Amsterdam, who better than your family? Oh, did I not tell that story? Right. Well, a good travel buddy knows that what happens in Amsterdam…