This will all make a little bit more sense if you're looking at a map.
I flew into Durham Tees Valley Airport in Britain, which is a very small airport in North Yorkshire county, where my uncle lives. I spent a week with him and my cousins, and saw three castles, two abbeys, and quite a lot of fog. I also washed a car, went to the library, went to a baptism, ate out, ate in, went to Church, rode a pony and generally loafed around the house with my cousins. It was a leisurely time and I was sad when it ended.
I spent half an hour in London, switching trains. All but one minute of that was underground. I took the Eurostar train across the Channel to France.
In Paris I met N and we started our tour: four countries and six cities in two weeks. It sounds like a death march but somehow, by sheer force of will, we managed to make it mostly just a two-week extended process of loafing around, with a few train rides thrown in. It helped that we had a lot of cool people to meet: we stayed in hostels half the time, and the other half we stayed with my cousins, my friends from BFTF, a friend of my brother's from when he served his mission in Germany.
The breakdown:
Three days loafing around Paris, and then three in Belgium: an afternoon loafing around Brussels, a day where I loafed around Leuven with family (my cousins and their cousins) and N. went to Ghent. Then a night with family in Antwerp and a day loafing around Bruges. Another day loafing around Antwerp for N, and I went to Church and then caught a train to Darmstadt, Germany, where I caught up with a some friends from BFTF. N came in later that night, and we spent two days loafing around Darmstadt with Laura and Cristi before heading on to Berlin. Three fabulous days in Berlin, and then on to Prague, where we spent another three days loafing around.
N. flew back home from Prague, and I got on a train to Poland, where I met up with Kryzsiek and Martyna. We spent three days in Wroclaw before going to Warsaw, where we got on a plane to Bulgaria. We spent three days in Sofia, with more BFTF alumni showing up every day, before catching a bus to Blagoevgrad, the site of the BFTF reunion.
Blagoevgrad seems to have been carefully chosen for having absolutely no attractions other than American University in Bulgaria, where we stayed. So it was a week much more about people than about sights.
After Bulgaria I went with some Laura, Cristi, Isidora to Valbona's house in Skopje, Macedonia where we stayed for two days, and then on to Isidora's place in Zrenjanin, Serbia, where we stayed for a week. And then I flew home.
It really wasn't until I got home that I really had time to think about my trip at all, and within another week I was on my way to college, where there wasn't much room for the past either. And so I write here to try and keep alive a few things that I know are important, to try and tease the lessons out of this list of places that I traveled to.
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
23.12.09
Why I Went
I realized that I've been posting a lot about the details of my trip without having ever given the broad picture. I'd like to fix that now, so this post will cover how I ended up going to Europe in the first place, and my next post will give a broad overview of where I went and what I did while I was there. Then I'll go back to posting about the details, because those stories and pictures make up most of what I really want to share.
I ended up in Europe through a series of coincidences and tremendous luck, or rather through one stroke of tremendous luck. My junior year in high school a teacher handed out an application for a program called the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellowship. The short description mentioned that it was a month-long international relations program held at Wakeforest University and funded by the State Department. Forty students would be accepted, and thirty of them would be from across Europe and Central Asia. The main goal of the program would be to connect youth across the Atlantic.
That sounded really exciting, and for the first time in my life I actually applied for something. I had to work fast because applications were due one week from when I'd gotten the flier, but I had some teachers kind enough to offer to serve as references, and I managed to write the required essays and fill in the required forms.
I got accepted. And during the first year, in North Carolina, I found out that there would be a second year of the program: a reunion somewhere in Eastern Europe the following summer. And now I had friends all across Europe.
In January, BFTF announced that the reunion would be during the last week of July in August, and the flight costs of the American participants would be paid by the State Department. Then they told us that if we wanted to travel before or after the conference, we could, and the State Department would still pay our airfare to and from the continent but we would have to pay for the traveling in between.
And that was my stroke of luck. I couldn't quite believe it was real.
I mentioned this to my friend N., and he said that he'd be saving up money from his job, and that he'd come and travel with me if I wanted the company. By April, I realized this trip was actually going to happen, and N. and I laid out a rough plan for our trip while we were at a Model UN conference together. I also planned some other travel with friends from BFTF. By the end of May, I had arranged a six week trip across nine countries, with the BFTF reunion conference in the fifth week.
It was great. It changed my life and didn't. I'm glad I went, someday I'd like to go again. I can't thank the State Dept. enough. If you thought that the US government never did anything for ordinary Americans, I am living proof otherwise.
I ended up in Europe through a series of coincidences and tremendous luck, or rather through one stroke of tremendous luck. My junior year in high school a teacher handed out an application for a program called the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellowship. The short description mentioned that it was a month-long international relations program held at Wakeforest University and funded by the State Department. Forty students would be accepted, and thirty of them would be from across Europe and Central Asia. The main goal of the program would be to connect youth across the Atlantic.
That sounded really exciting, and for the first time in my life I actually applied for something. I had to work fast because applications were due one week from when I'd gotten the flier, but I had some teachers kind enough to offer to serve as references, and I managed to write the required essays and fill in the required forms.
I got accepted. And during the first year, in North Carolina, I found out that there would be a second year of the program: a reunion somewhere in Eastern Europe the following summer. And now I had friends all across Europe.
In January, BFTF announced that the reunion would be during the last week of July in August, and the flight costs of the American participants would be paid by the State Department. Then they told us that if we wanted to travel before or after the conference, we could, and the State Department would still pay our airfare to and from the continent but we would have to pay for the traveling in between.
And that was my stroke of luck. I couldn't quite believe it was real.
I mentioned this to my friend N., and he said that he'd be saving up money from his job, and that he'd come and travel with me if I wanted the company. By April, I realized this trip was actually going to happen, and N. and I laid out a rough plan for our trip while we were at a Model UN conference together. I also planned some other travel with friends from BFTF. By the end of May, I had arranged a six week trip across nine countries, with the BFTF reunion conference in the fifth week.
It was great. It changed my life and didn't. I'm glad I went, someday I'd like to go again. I can't thank the State Dept. enough. If you thought that the US government never did anything for ordinary Americans, I am living proof otherwise.
21.10.09
Three Pictures From Trains
The station in Zgorzelec, Poland.
A tunnel somewhere in Germany.
Windmills.
14.9.09
Sleeping
Despite the fact that I have no classes before 10am, I haven't been getting nearly enough sleep in the last week, which leads my thoughts back to happy memories of better days during the summer... carefree days when I could sleep as much as I wanted.
These days are mostly a fiction, a trick of the mind, a mirage brought on by the aforementioned lack of sleep... with three days or less to see most places I visited, I didn't sleep much at a lot of the stops.
A specific memory comes to mind: my first night in Sofia, I stayed up until four am trying to help a friend figure out whether it was feasible for him to board a train to Istanbul-- I had my doubts, but he loved the idea, and when I went back upstairs to the room he stayed awake for the rest of the night, researching timetables and talking to the hostel's night clerk.
The last days of the trip, though, were fairly restful... we had all been traveling for weeks, and it was so hot in Serbia that there was almost no point in going out during the day-- so we'd sleep until noon, then loaf around, reading and watching movies, and then go out only in the evenings when the sun was low in the sky.
Moving through timezones did some damage to my internal clock, but I find that these lines are far less disruptive than the personal timezones of the hosts I stayed with-- the routine of a place has power more power to shift a sleep schedule than such an arbitrary thing as the rising or setting of the sun.
These days are mostly a fiction, a trick of the mind, a mirage brought on by the aforementioned lack of sleep... with three days or less to see most places I visited, I didn't sleep much at a lot of the stops.
A specific memory comes to mind: my first night in Sofia, I stayed up until four am trying to help a friend figure out whether it was feasible for him to board a train to Istanbul-- I had my doubts, but he loved the idea, and when I went back upstairs to the room he stayed awake for the rest of the night, researching timetables and talking to the hostel's night clerk.
The last days of the trip, though, were fairly restful... we had all been traveling for weeks, and it was so hot in Serbia that there was almost no point in going out during the day-- so we'd sleep until noon, then loaf around, reading and watching movies, and then go out only in the evenings when the sun was low in the sky.
Moving through timezones did some damage to my internal clock, but I find that these lines are far less disruptive than the personal timezones of the hosts I stayed with-- the routine of a place has power more power to shift a sleep schedule than such an arbitrary thing as the rising or setting of the sun.
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