First Taste of Travel in Europe

 

After months of planning, the trip was finally happening. I was thirteen years old and excited to be traveling outside the U.S. for the first time. Things did not exactly go as expected.

Our first destination in eastern Europe was Estonia. We had friends who invited us to their little countryside village, and would pick us up in Tallinn. For reasons still unknown to me, we couldn’t get a direct flight. But, we discovered, we could fly into Stockholm and take an overnight ferry to Tallinn. That seemed like it would be fun, I thought. A fitting start to an adventure. And so it was.

Having boarded the ship, the three of us—my mom, my aunt, and I—along with our two suitcases apiece, dutifully took the tiny elevator to the right level and clunked down the dark hallway to our assigned cabin. Erm…

Not that we’d expected a luxury stateroom, but this was a rather dark and miniscule cube, mostly occupied already with the bunks at one end. The wet bath took up most of the rest, leaving a table and a couple square feet of floor. Now it was clear why the woman at the check-in desk had laughed when we’d asked for an extra mattress. Having loaded the bunks with all our luggage, one of us still had to stand in the bathroom in order to shut the hall door. The room was lit by a couple of dismal-looking lamps which did not help brighten the windowless, airless space.

Then the ship must have gotten under weigh, because the noises started. Prolonged clanking noises, almost like—chains.

“Oh my God,” the realization hits. “We must be underneath the car deck.”

“That’s why there aren’t any portholes,” is the second revelation. “We’re under water.”

This reminds us unwillingly of the ferry accident that had been on the news earlier that year, 1999. We all concur on needing some air.

On deck, I zip up my too-thin fleece against the cold, wet wind, and watch the Swedish isles float past, green ghosts in a foggy, rain spattered sea. So this was to be the start of our three months living in eastern Europe, making our way from the Baltic nations of Estonia and Latvia, to Belarus, Ukraine, finally back through Belarus to Lithuania.

And it was an adventure indeed. I never knew it was possible to fit two people on one narrow bunk. Or to sleep listening to the creaking, banging weight of cars shifting above you. Our Estonian apartment was in the newest building, the envy of the village, which included such luxuries as a balcony threatening to fall of the building, and chunks of concrete that already had. We discovered that you have to pay extra for bedding on sleeper trains; in case you neglect to do so, you sleep on wadded-up clothes, and find yourself glued to the vinyl at the end of a night being jostled across two countries. I learned such essential phrases as “where’s the toilet” and “I don’t understand Russian.” McDonald’s became a delicacy—after plain boiled potatoes French fries are a taste of heaven. We became proficient at roach-hunting since our flat in Minsk was infested with them, down to inside the tiny, partially operational refrigerator. Not that there was ever much in it anyway. Our Russian phrasebooks were not very helpful on grocery shopping. Nor, for that matter, on any other topic.

 

Being only thirteen, this was all extremely educational for me. I hauled luggage that weighed as much as I did, learned to navigate public transportation and took in a confusing new language on the fly. I saw castles and monasteries and catacombs. I learned how, underneath our cultural differences, all people want the same things. We all love, we all dream, we all hope for a better life. I have traveled internationally several times since then, but that was a summer vacation I will never forget. And I will always be grateful for the experiences I encountered there, for the people I met, for the countries I saw, for an expanded perspective that taught me to appreciate the truly important things of life.

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