End Chapter One

“You know, there are very few places in the world where I am at home. Isn’t that pathetic? And there are actually fewer of them every day, too. And they’re shrinking. Does this happen to you? There is going to come a time when there will only be a very small space. And that’s all I’ll have. I’ll have to remain very still and look only in one direction, but then I’ll be okay, actually.”
-Arthur Phillips, Prague

Ah, metaphors relating life to a book. I’m so creative I can hardly stand myself. So here I am, 3 months, 19 countries, approximately 59 cities, 15 showers (kidding), 3 loads of laundry (not kidding), one attempt to jump off a moving train (successful), and a separate attempt to jump on moving train (failed) later, I have said goodbye to western Europe. And I must confess, though there were times I was ready to move on, it hurt just a little. While I had plenty of time to prepare myself emotionally for my departure, it really only hit me in the last week that my eurail pass was coming to an end, thus somewhat explaining my itinerary which went something as follows: BarcelonaMontpellierGeneveMontreauxLuzernBernZurichInnsbruckMunichDammitDammit GrunauVienna….all of this, in the course of a week. So, just for the record, it can be done, but it is rather exhausting and it takes a lot of walking, lots of trains. Still, with all the moving, I’ve managed to meet some very nice people this week, more than usual-maybe this could be attributed to my feeling that it was almost over and being excessively sociable/needy/I don’t wanna go, whiny type of mind frame. Who knows. So, without too much detail (or we’d be here all day), I’ll go through it with a bit more explanation.

We begin our story in Barcelona, where Blair was last heard from, trying to head eastward with the final goal of making it to Vienna on the last day of her eurail pass, so as to provide easy transition to eastern Europe. Well, I had booked a train out of Barcelona into France, but the metro had some technical difficulties, causing me to miss that, and spend the day stuck in Barcelona (not that I’m complaining). Finally, later that evening, I board another train to Montpellier. I find the hostel with some difficulty, but help from a girl who I met in Barcelona who ended up on the same train as I did. She’s been studying there, and speaks french, which is quite helpful, as I do not. She invites me out later that night, but looking around the town and the location (alley) of my hostel, I decide it would perhaps be a bad idea to walk back alone too late. Instead, I do go back out to the main square just to have a look around and say hello (and subsequently goodbye) to my old friend, the kebab. It’s a lovely city at night, but there are indeed some sketchy characters lingering about. If I am correct, I was followed by 3 such people (separately) that night on the way back to the hostel. Luckily, I have learned a very simple trick for such situations. A little vigilance goes a long way. Of course, it would be different if there was no one else on the street, but at this time, there were still people walking around. I have found that if someone is following you in such a situation, the absolute best thing you can do is to let them know you know you are being followed. This may include anything from numerous backward glances or something so overt as stopping, turning around, and staring them down. This has yet to fail me. It is also important, however, to stay on streets where there are other people, and not turning down your actual street until you know for certain, they are gone. It also helps to have a few tricks up your sleeve–in the form of a Swiss army knife. Anyway, long story short, France is lovely, but I have found no other country so bounteous in crazies/questionable personae, the former being largely harmless, the latter…well…questionable. But onward.

The next day, I am delighted to find I have arrived just in time for the second annual regional wine festival, so I look around there before heading to Geneva. Here, I meet a very friendly South African girl who I really would have liked to hang out with more in a sort of very pathetic, please be my friend scenario, but even had I not had to move on, she left for London the next day anyhow. So, the next day I take myself for a walk around the old town, finding I have arrived there just missing a bit festival commemorating Geneva’s successful defense against an attack from the duke of Savoy. The great thing about this holiday is that the celebration involves large chocolate cauldrons filled with candy, which they break open with a sword and then eat. I was truly, truly sad to have missed it. The second part of the day, I head to Montreaux, where there is a medieval fortress with origins as far back as 1160. Walked and marveled around there for a while, and then, thanks to my large, imposing backpack, became physically stuck in the crowds as the Christmas market there. A note on Christmas markets: They are everywhere here. Every city has one. I like them on occasions where I am not trying to get somewhere and can meander about really feeling the Christmas spirit, which for whatever reason, I associate with America. So I go to get a little sentimental, but when I stumble upon them and they impede my progress, I become very angry. Anyway, that night, I go to Luzern, and since my guidebook is a bit outdated, find the hostel I was aiming at to no longer be in existence. I get vague directions (“Take this road” the woman says, as she drags her finger over the road on the map to an area outside of illustration) to another place slightly out of town, and decide that if I walk long enough, I’m bound to find something. You’d think I’d learn. After a bit of walking a nice lady on a bicycle stops to help me and I finally find the place and have dinner there with 3 very friendly education majors from somewhere in Pennsylvania. Next day, I decide it’s worth it to backtrack a bit to Bern, where there is an exhibit on Einstein’s life and work, as well as his old place of residence. Then on to Innsbruck, where at 10pm I could be seen running full force through the snow with all my gear on down a quiet, quaint little cobblestone street in order to make it to the hostel while the reception was still open. I do.

Next day, I intend to go to a place called Grunau, but there is a train to Munich leaving first, and I feel antsy, so I go there instead. Once there, I find I am still antsy and wish to go further north to a small German town who’s name I can’t remember, but my book said it was nice and obsessed with Christmas. Thanks to a high number of confusing connections and inaccurate information, I travel an two hours in vain before giving up an returning to Munich. I like Munich a lot. This was my third time there, so it was nice to be in a city that feels familiar and you know which direction to head for a place to sleep. Also, there’s a really good bagel shop there, that I have visited every time I’ve been. Mmm, lox. I meet a really friendly Finnish girl there and we hung out the rest of the night, and she even let me wear her jeans because mine were in the laundry and shorts in the snow is just sort of a bad idea. The next day, I try to visit a castle in a place called Feussen, supposedly the castle that the one in Sleeping Beauty is modeled after. Well, I leave Munich and travel three hours to Feussen, where I find it to be snowing heavily, and decide that the castle was not all that important to me anyway and I was really enjoying the reverie brought on by the combined powers of the scenery and my mp3 player. So I go back to Munich. At this point, I have decided to head to Grunau, Austria for the last day of my eurail pass, but the man in Feussen tells me it’s an 11 hour trip. However, I think I am smarter then him and believe I am capable of finding a faster route on my own without the “help” of his little computer with all the train timetables in europe. Surprisingly, in this instance, I am correct, and I arrive in Grunau around 7pm. My book made it out to be a fairly small place, so I figured I could just walk a ways and would eventually hit the right street for the hostel or find an open pub or something to get better directions. Wrong and wrong. I give up and call the place and somebody comes to get me. The place I stayed was a little joint called The Treehouse, and it was just great. Not only was it a hostel, so the price was low, but they had a ton of english movies, english speaking staff (Aussies), homemade dinner, free breakfast, and free use of ski gear should I wish to use it for the ski lift, a 5 minute walk from the front door. Also, there were only 2 people staying in the whole place, myself included, so that was pretty cool. That night, was spent in the in house bar, which is open to the public and on this particular night, hosting someone’s birthday party. So that was fun too, even though I do not speak German. But it is the next day, the last day of my eurail pass, that I am especially proud of.

If you had asked me a year ago…even a week ago…one thing I would never do, my answer would be “ski again”. This is due to an incident occurring almost 2 years ago exactly, where I and 3 other Texans piled into a car for a trip to a place where Texans do not belong, snow-capped, mountainous regions. Without the ability to stop, let alone slow down, I manage to do some real damage to my right knee on the first bunny slope and am bed ridden the rest of the week, glued to 24 hour marathons of Law and Order SVU. When I get back home, I am the last patient seen by the doctor on Christmas Eve, so you can imagine how interested he was in my injury. So, now and then, it slips out of joint, I fall down, everybody laughs, I die a little on the inside. But this has not happened in a while, so I decide to try my hand at snowboarding, which I believe would not involve the same muscles, so therefore may not trouble me. The woman at the ski place feels differently, however, and encourages me to ski instead. I think it’s a bad idea, but as time has told, I like that sort of thing, so I go for it. I did not know the effect it would have on me, but I found, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, that I was seemingly conditioned to a fear of skiing, specifically concerning momentum, the laws of inertia, and that ever-nagging fear of immanent death. I don’t want to pay for lessons, because I was only skiing for a half day anyhow, my motto for the day being “Don’t push your luck”. So instead, I depend on any remnants in my memory from last time as to how to do it. This failing, I finally trip over myself like some intoxicated snow beast decked out in 80s ski garb towards an unsuspecting group of people my age whom I ask, trying to maintain as much dignity as I have remaining, “Do you speak english? How do I stop?”

I do eventually (by accident) once find myself on a blue slope, but I spend the majority of my day going down the kiddie run, muttering obscenities and cursing loudly/uncontrollably in the presence of children. But not in German, so I think it should be excusable. Still, as frightened and mismatched as I was, as many times as I fell of the ski lifts, causing the whole ski lift system to shut down (4), as often as I could be observed screaming like the apocalypse while traveling at 2 mph, this was one of the prouder moments of my life.

My friends at The Treehouse ask me to stay another night, and as tempting as it truly was, I went on to Vienna, my last train ride courtesy of eurail. Today, I hitched a bus ride to Bratislava (which, might I add, has one of the finer Christmas markets), where I currently have booked the next 3 nights. In two weeks, my parents and sister are coming to meet me in Prague for the holidays, so I have to be there then. Between then and now, I plan on seeing Bratislava, Cesky Krumlov (Czech), Krakow and possibly Warsaw. So, while I’d like to say I’m leaving the highly mobile life by the wayside for a while (I haven’t spent more than 4 nights in the same place for over 3 months, and that only happened once) I cannot do so until at least after New Years, when I’ve literally nowhere to be (unless a job in Damascus pans out). These two weeks should provide a nice transition from the amenities of western europe, while I explore the very western lifestyle of central europe before heading on to Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc, where I am less certain of what to expect. The guidebooks say Sarajevo is nice, but DON’T LEAVE THE CEMENT. Should be interesting.

P.S. Apparently, I have reached my limit as far as pictures are concerned, so I’ve have to start a new account for more pictures. You can find them here: http://community.webshots.com/user/blairlampe. Sorry about that.