And Then I Cried for the ONLY Time Ever in Public...And it Worked!

The first time I ever left the country, I was twenty-one. I had convinced the powers that be that no self-respecting literature major would ever graduate without doing a study abroad program in the UK. I was mostly broke (though I know in an emergency my parents would have bailed me with extra money, but they were not so "pro" this trip to begin with). By mostly broke I mean clearly I had come up with the money to take the trip, but there was no money to spend on the trip. As soon as I got approved for the study-abroad trip, I booked a plane ticket that arrived two weeks before I started classes and then departed a week after I ended classes, with the departure from Madrid so that I'd have to see Spain no matter what anybody said. And I went on this trip entirely on my own.

And I came back a totally different person.

I've never really written about the amazing, adventurous, incredible stories that came out of that trip anywhere. Part of that is because, even though I am now 33, my mother will read them and the terror that her little girl lived some of this will still strike her heart. In fact, I've actually edited many of the stories out of this journal entry because her stomach would drop out. I was broke and twenty-one on my own in Europe, people. I got into a lot of trouble. And you know that by "trouble" I must mean TROUBLE because I don't think I've ever edited something entirely out of this journal before because I was worried that my mom would have a fit.

But anyway, onward.

Damn Gypsies.
Because Pookie and I have always felt a calling to our homeland, the first place I wanted to go, at 21, alone, in Europe, was Budapest. So I immediately got off the plane and started hopping trains across the continent to Hungary. I found an evening train out of Luxembourg that arrived in Budapest around midnight and decided to take it. While I was in the train station in Luxembourg, I meet another girl who was nearly my age and traveling alone. Her name was Chelsea and I still adore her to this day! She had just finished a stint as a nanny and was just kicking around Europe, so she decided to come to Budapest with me.

We got on the train and immediately met two Canadian men. One was just doing a summer backpacking tour on his own. The other was on his way back to Budapest where's he was studying at a monestary. True story, people. Also a true story: The four of us are sharing a train compartment and I started to make fun of how Canadians are so ... Canadian. I cracked a joke that I wouldn't have been surprised if at least one of the two Canadian guys was carrying a full-sized Canadian flag with him.

And the one...he reached into his back pack, and...

People, this moment is so shocking to me still that I dug a photo out of a photo album that was in a storage unit fifteen minutes from my home just so that I could scan it for you. HE REALLY DID HAVE THAT FLAG.



Ah, memories.

Anyway, the train arrived in Budapest. It was midnight. Nobody had a lot of cash, and nobody wanted to hunt around for a place to stay in a seedy Eastern European city. I wish I could remember those guys' names, but the one kind of looks at Chels and I and is like, "I mean, how do you feel about sleeping in the park tonight?"

Oddly, we felt fine about it. So we all made our way to the island that's in the Danube between Buda and Pest and slept there. That's how I spent my first real night in Europe. Sleeping in a park full of gypsies and thieves in Budapest.

I woke up at the crack of dawn and got it in my head that I wanted to watch the sunrise over the Danube. Welcome to being twenty-one and in Europe for the first time. Oh, hell, who are we kidding? It would take about a hot minute for almost every story I'm telling here to play out exactly the same way again now, in my early/mid thirties. Anyway, I woke up one of the Canadians and said, "Hey, can you watch my pack? I'm going for a walk." Said Canadian took my pack and slid it under his head as a pillow. I took my day pack and headed toward the river.

I'm sure you've figured out where this is going.

Sunrise was stunning. Beautiful. I can still vividly remember it. It was the best first sunrise in Europe that a young woman could ever have had. In fact, here it is:




I got back to "camp" about an hour later.

Dumbass Canadian has rolled over, some gypsy has opened my pack and 3/4 of everything I had with me had been pulled out and stolen.

And please remember that one of the words I used to describe myself on this trip was "broke."

You know what though? Oddly, I never got all that upset about the situation. I was bumming for about ten minutes, and then Chels and I looked at each other and were like, "Well, I guess we'll have to go shopping."

And so that's how I spent my first full day in Europe. Shopping to replace my stuff in strange, Hungarian stores. The good news was that it was Eastern Europe in the mid-nineties so I could replace about $300 worth of stuff for about $70. The bad news was that I spent the rest of the summer dressing like I was from Hungary, by which I mean dressing like a hooker.

My favorite part of shopping in Budapest involved jeans. To this day, the Eastern European women wear their jeans TIGHT. I own one pair of sexy tight jeans, which I wear out when I need to feel pretty. The rest of my jeans are usually about a size too big and drop off of my hips a bit. So, Chelsea and the Canadians and I would go into a store, and they would pull out a pair of jeans in something that I would need to paint on myself, and I would pull an appropriate size off of the rack and put it on. And then the salesgirl would look at me, make a face, shake her head and shove the same jeans in a size two sizes smaller into my hands. She would try to convince me that I wanted jeans that I would have to lay on the floor and pull on instead of comfy jeans. In one store, I bought a pair of jeans in a size six or something. I even checked the size tag at the register. When I got back to the place we were staying, I found that the girl had put a size two into my bag. That girl! She was so committed that I would celebrate my inner Eastern Eurpoean hooker that she kindly switched my jean size out for me.

Budapest was fun. We had a great time there. We almost didn't want to leave and start working our way back across the Continent, but...

Traveling with Chelsea
Traveling with Chels was super fun and we have lots of great memories. I'm going to do them in bullet points though.

- We only spent a day in Venice, but it was our most singular favorite day of the part of the trip that we spent together. We got there at the crack of dawn and left on a midnight train that night and had the most perfect day.

- Except that sometimes with think that this totally random day we spent in Innsbruck was better. That is all. It's a debate.

- Going back to the day in Venice, so we took that midnight train out to Nice, and we paid a little extra so that we could have a train compartment to ourselves. So that we could sleep. And as the train takes off, the ticket checker comes into our compartment, where it's clear by the way we've arranged our backpacks as pillows that we're about to sleep. And he musters up his best English and says, "No, you two don't fall asleep. Bad things will happen to you two if you fall asleep, even with the door locked."

We didn't sleep that night. And at least three times during that night somebody tried to open our door, and we kicked it. Good times.

- In Nice, we stayed in the most beautiful place ever, but Chels almost beat up an old woman because she pushed her out of a bus seat. But here's a picture of Nice!



- The day before I needed to be in London to start classes, I ran entirely out of money but didn't realize it until I got to the ferry station and the Amex office was already closed. Screwed? Not so much because I convinced some kids who were panhandling to get enough money to cross the channel to let me panhandle with them. It's really amazing how many people will just give you money to shut you up.

You Know It's a Good Trip When the Most Boring Thing You Do Is Spend Three Months in London
I mean, I have awesome stories, like about how one night we literally stole invitations and crashed Boy George's birthday party. Or about how a sheep tried to actually attack me in St. Ives. It was a great time. I drank lots of beer out of very lady like half-pint glasses. I saw just about every production that the Royal Shakespeare Company did. I passed out in the tube one night and my friend Shelly woke me up by yelling, "There are Spanish men on this train!" This was 1995, or as you may remember it, "The Year of Whitney Houston's 'I Will Always Love You'" and my neighbor wouldn't stop playing it 17 times an hour. There was a lot of clubbing and even more pubbing. For some reason I really poignantly remember Freud's house. Which is strange because I remember not so much caring if we went there but getting dragged there by my roomies. It was a good summer.

And Then Chelsea Showed Back Up and We Went to Spain...
So, for whatever reason that I can't remember (like she had taken a full year off to travel or something), Chelsea's return to the States was at the same time as mine. So we had decided that we would meet up in Calais and then go to Madrid together for a couple of days. She was flying out, like, on a Wednesday and I was on a Friday. And this, this ladies and gentlemen, is my favorite story of the trip.

So we take a couple of days meandering from Calais to Paris, and the plan is to take a train from Paris to Madrid. While we're hanging out in the Paris train station, we meet this guy from Ohio who is also backpacking around and who decides to come to Madrid with us. We all buy tickets to Madrid. The ticket has a transfer element because you have to de-board in this tiny, tiny town on the French/Spanish border and go through a customs check BEFORE you enter Spain (or at least that's what you had to do in 1995). And everything is fine until we get to said small border town.

I hadn't actually checked my ticket after I bought it.

Of course you see where this is headed. The ticket agent had forgotten to give me my transfer. And though I was holding my credit card receipt that said I had purchased the transfer, nobody was letting me on that train without the actual transfer.

"It's fine," I say to Chelsea and Marc (I can't believe I remember his name). "I'm sure I can just buy a ticket from here to Madrid in this station."

NEGATIVE. I could purchase a ticket for that leg of the trip, but I'd have to go all the way into town, which was actually half an hour away, to do it unless I was paying in cash. Ha ha ha ha. I think we've probably figured out that by this point in the trip I had NO AVAILABLE FUNDS. But if I went down into town to buy a ticket, I wouldn't make it back in time for the train and I'd have to find a way to find Marc and Chelsea once we hit Madrid.

So in truth, it's not like that was such a horrible plan. We knew what train I'd be on. It wouldn't be too hard to meet up. But I was determined.

Let me preface what comes next with the following:
a. You can count the number of times in my life that I have cried in public on one finger, and I'm about to tell you that story

b. The only thing I despise and think is more pathetic than a woman who cries to get what she wants is a woman who cries in public, at all. Every time a woman cries in public, I make another two cents less on the dollar than my male counterparts and every stereotype ever about women being weak is endorsed. When you are a woman and you cry in public, I lose respect for you and so does everybody else. And then they lose respect for me via you. So unless it's the death of a close family member, keep it together in public, women.

That said, I wanted on that train and I'm a smart enough girl to understand the effectiveness of a girl crying.

"Go ahead and get on the train," I said to Chels and Mark, "but whatever you do, don't act like you know me. That train conductor, he needs to think I'm totally alone."

And so Chelsea and Marc wander off.

And, really, honestly, I'm not a crier, nor am I a very talented actress, so I have to take a solid ten minutes to get my act together. And then I walk up to the train conductor with my best "I'm just a lost girl in the world" look on and just start talking as fast as I can about how the ticket agent forgot to give me my ticket and I have no money left and I HAVE to get to Madrid so that I can go home and how I'm all alone and I don't know what to do, and then...

yes, then...

I start crying.

And, as sad as it is to say, it's a done deal the minute I do that. The conductor tells me that he'll let me on the train, but that I'll have to sit up front in the first car near him because when we get to Madrid he's going to walk with me to the Amex office so that I can get cash to pay for my ticket.

And I'm a happy girl, because I'm on the train. And that story would be awesome if it ended there. But it actually gets so much better.

We've been on the train for about an hour, when suddenly there is this BEAUTIFUL MAN WHO SERIOUSLY LOOKS LIKE HE JUST STEPPED OUT OF A RAPHAEL PAINTING OF BLOND ANGELS is standing there looking at me, and as though God were really sending me an angel, he says, "Somebody back there told me that there was a cute American girl crying because she didn't have money for the train. That must be you."

And while normally I abhor Prince Charming complexes in men, this man was SO LOVELY. And he paid for my ticket and then we collected Chelsea and Marc and traveled the rest of the way in his private compartment with good Spanish wine and bread. Because of course he was American and his parents were wealthy and they had a house in Madrid where they were spending the summer. And that's also where we stayed when we got to Madrid. In his parents extravagant house. And he took all three of us out each night to places with amazing sangria and wonderful desserts and the air was warm and we all laughed a lot and went to the Prado and Reina Sofia and the Palacio Real. And it was perfect. That whole summer had been an adventure and then it ended with this wonderful, amazing adventure that made everything perfect.

So, then, how did I change? Well, it's not exactly like, though I grew up in small town America, I had had the most sheltered upbringing. We traveled excessively. I saw more operas, symphonies, ballets and attended more Shakespeare festivals by thirteen than most people do in an entire life. I saw the West through the back window of a car. But I'd done all of those things with my family and in very structured environments. And I'd done everything that you were expected to do to be a super star in high school and in my first three years of college. And I had a PLAN. I was going to get my PhD. A nice safe ten year plan where I could then spend the rest of my life living in the nice, safe, repetitive world of academia.

And in Europe, on that crazy summer backpack trip with no money and the fun of meeting equally adventurous people who didn't think twice about getting into equally adventurous situations, I realized one thing very clearly:

I did not want to spend my life reading about other people's stories. I wanted to be out collecting my own.

And people who have known me who met me a little later in life, I'm sure, have a hard time imagining that I was every any other way. But I was. I was very content with the idea of a safe life, and I'm SO GLAD that I got my first taste of wandering adventure when I was young enough to realize that that "safe life" isn't the person who I am.

I often wonder, if someday I have a daughter and she is in her early twenties and wants to run off to Europe on her own like I did, would I let her? Or would I make her take friends and sleep in hotels where she had reservations instead of hostels or people's couches or parks or train stations? Would I make sure that she had enough money to bail herself out of any situation she may get in? And I can imagine a parental instinct that would want to do that, because I know EXACTLY how many REALLY BAD spots I got into on that trip (that as I said will not even be mentioned here because I love my mother). The number of times I probably should have been at a minimum violently raped and in a worst case scenario murdered on that trip would need two hands to count, but I have always been very good at talking myself out of bad situations. I don't know what I would do if it were my daughter. I would want her to have her own chance at an adventure that changes who she is, or at least shows her who she is. I think that I would want her to go, because I know that I am only as happy and confident and eclectically open as I am because of that trip.

Then again, as Wooderson said when we were having this discussion tonight, "It wouldn't matter what you did. She'd trick you into it anyway or sneak behind your back."

It's true, and I hope she would, because that would definitely mean that she was my daughter!