blakspring

A little while back GeekHiker asked me about how I deal with the language barriers when travelling.  Recently, when I mentioned that I backpacked through Europe after college, he also made a comment that he would’ve travelled after college too if he had the money.  So I figured I can tackle these two topics together.  (And if the post sucks, feel free to blame GH.)

One of the first things you have to understand is that my love for travel is probably part genetic and part coping mechanism.  In high school I dreamed of being a squatter, falling off the grid, and roaming around the world with nothing tying me down to it.  It seemed like the only way to be free.  I never believed that a lot of money is essential for travel but obviously you need some.  I got a job when I was 15 because by then I already conceived of this plan to traipse around Europe’s hostels, and at $4.00-a-week allowance from my parents there was no way to accomplish that.  A few months before graduating college, I bought an open-ended ticket and still had four grand in the bank.

My original plan was to go by myself, but then Ultra said she wanted to go too.  She had money for a plane ticket and not much else, so the four grand for me became two grand for each of us.  We figured we’d have to find a way to make it last, and we did (even had a decent amount left over).  I left NYC at the end of May (skipping my college graduation because I couldn’t wait to get started on the adventure) and returned in mid-October having visited about 15 countries.  We went around with our belongings on our backs and a guidebook in our hand, taking overnight buses, arriving half-asleep at 6:00 AM in places like Amsterdam and Edinburgh, often off the map, trying to find a hostel.  Wherever we could, we crashed on couches of friends and family, usually staying longer than anticipated and finally doing laundry.  Fallafel became the staple of our diet because every city had a Middle Eastern section, with cart food galore.

We walked all day long, seeing museums, churches, monuments, bridges and chilled in plazas and squares.  In the evening we would often collapse.  It wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t Paris Hilton, we weren’t clubbing or having drinks every night but we were laughing our asses off.  And it was freakin’ memorable.  In Prague, our “hostel” was in a school on an island in the Vltava River.  The gym had been filled with loads of bunkbeds and one night an American guy hovered over my bed as I was drifting off to sleep and drunkely called me a bloody bloke, in a bad British accent.  I told him to shut up, turned over, and went to sleep.  In Budapest a drunk older Polish guy kept coming into our room and looking very confused.  In Berlin, our hostel was a giant circus tent where you laid out your sleeping bag wherever there was room.  I woke up early one morning to find the sleeping bag next to me gyrating.  I guess the nerdy boy who occupied it got lucky.  We also happened to be in Berlin on the weekend of the Love Parade.  Thousands of club kids trek to Germany every year for this crazy parade/rave and we stumbled across it.  Kinda like how we stumbled across the Pope in Paris.  He had been saying mass at Notre Dame and we saw him through the throngs, riding in the Popemobile.

In Dublin we were expecting to stay with our friend’s brother Daragh who we never met.  It turned out he was between residences at the time so we all stayed with a family that he knew.  The mother lived by herself in the basement after her husband, who was a conductor in an orchestra and had a penchant for cross-dressing, ran off with one of the violinists.  Her kids lived upstairs.  There was a punk rock daughter who was 90% blind, watched TV through a jeweler’s loop, and had a shaved head except for ten skinny braids that reached her butt.  Her brother was a skinny nerd with a red nose; Ultra is convinced he rearranged out underwear as it was drying.  There was a dog named Tess who reeked so much that you smelled her before she walked into a room.  The neighbors had a parrot that imitated Tess’s bark.  The Chinese take-out was the best I ever had in my life and we ate it every day for two weeks, after which Daragh always wanted to hit the pub.  One night he was so drunk that he let me pour candle wax on his bellybutton and rip the hairs out.  He said he wondered at work the next day why his belly was stinging and had a red splotch.  Ultra used to tease him and sing, Daragh has a girl’s name Daragh has a girl’s name.  One day he almost left her in a sheep meadow because he was so annoyed.  When the three of us finally got the boot from Casa Nutty, we went to the suburbs to stay with Daragh’s parents.  One evening he showed us the video of his sister’s crazy Vegas wedding, Elvis impersenator, strung-out maid of honor, and all.  We had to promise that we’d never tell his parents that he showed it to us.  Yeah, good times.

Whoa, I seem to have veered slightly off course.  I guess my point is that you don’t need a lot of money to travel.  You just won’t be staying in a luxury suite and eating lobster every night.  You might instead be eating fish-n-chips in a park talking to a half-crazy hobo.  As for dealing with the language barriers, I think I’ll save it for another post because this one is already out of control…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 1:37 pm and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.