EuroBlog Part 1

Atlanta, Chicago, Brussels, Helsinki, Prague. Nonstop. A little over 24 hours of travel time, total. All with the goal of eventually getting me to Prague in time for my Kafka class to start. Where am I now? Currently I'm cruising at some bullshit measurement statistic. (I mean, do you know how high airplanes tend to fly? You do? Fuck off, no one likes a know it all.) Anyway. I'm on this plane to Brussels and I want to jot down all the crazy shit that's been popping into my head since this journey began this morning. My morning started at a quarter of seven after a fitful night of restless sleep filled with anxiety dreams about the wake up call to our hotel room mysteriously failing and single handedly ruining my entire day's travel plans. Mom and I were in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, and in the tradition of a young girl's first European trip on her own, a fight shortly followed our wakeup call. The topic? Quick, if you're a girl and the clothes you wear are too tight to feasibly put anything bigger than something really small into your pockets, how do you carry around all your shit in a foreign country? A purse? According to parents, every person currently on the ground in a foreign country is well trained in a multitude of skills including jujitsu, CIA level profiling, and professional thievery (I mean, all universities over there offer thievery as a major so it's only natural that everyone there will have taken a class or two in pilfering). So no purses, because in Pilfering 101 all Europeans learned to carry a switchblade on them at all times to maximize purse strap slicing efficiency.

So what, then? A backpack? No, silly American girl! Europeans (Let's just call a spade a spade, okay? Thieves.) always travel in packs of at least three burly men or at least German lesbians so they can pin your arms back from behind and grab your backpack to run.

Okay, how about fanny packs? Were you planning on getting any over the next six weeks? Or at least earning some semblance of respect from people around you? Yes? Fuck fanny packs. They're like visual chastity belts.

The solution my parents came up with is this money belt thing that fits under your clothes. Like a ninja fanny pack so people don't throw rotten vegetables at you. Perfect! Right? Let's go over the inventory of a typical ninja fanny pack, shall we? Passport. Credit cards/ATM cards. Traveler's checks. Katana sword. (In case you run into any Bulgarians. I hear they're vicious.) Suddenly your ninja fanny pack looks a lot like a normal fanny pack, except it's under your clothes, so you look extra fat and also somewhat lumpy and block shaped. Winning plan!

I finally promised Mom I'd wear the lumpy ninja pack so she'd stop yelling at me, and we decided to unwind by getting into Atlanta traffic. After letting our first expletives of the day loose, we congratulated ourselves on making it so far in the day with clean language. (We'd probably been up a little over an hour at this point. Victory.) We made it to the airport and Mom dropped me off so I could get checked in. The cheery Puerto Rican man who handled all my shit kindly wished me luck on getting my 49.5 pound suitcase through all FOUR of my connecting flights. Great. I met up with Mom and we got a nice bagel and some drugs for me to take on the plane (something I should probably do soon). I hugged her goodbye and gave her shit for looking like she was about to cry. “Don't cry. Don't do it...” Then I turned away and walked towards security, finding myself repeating those very demands to myself.

I should probably explain. Though I want to spend my life traveling the world, and all of my classmates have already done seven bazillion global trips on their own in their time, I really am pretty sheltered. This is hard to imagine, I'm sure, but bear with me. I grew up in a tiny town, and even though I've clocked more backcountry time in my short life than pretty much anyone else I know my age, I've spent very little time in big cities, even with my family. Having such a close, small family means that those people travel with you everywhere. I've only been on two trips in my life with other people's families. I've been on one road trip without at least one member of my family present, and we didn't even leave the South. I've been to Mexico, France, England, Scotland, Belize, the Caribbean, etc. with my family, but it's a totally different experience on your own. Or so I'm learning. I seriously need to not miss my next two flights.

Anyway, I got through security (FINALLY GOT A HOT TSA AGENT, HELL YEAH), and made it to my gate. When I got there, I started reading Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being for class, and instantly got sucked in. I have to say, it's got to be one of the best books I've ever read. Maybe I hit it at the right time in my life, but I found myself nodding obnoxiously at different parts, and completely connecting with Sabina's character. For those of you who haven't read it, Sabina starts out seeming like the villain mistress of Tomas. She's a crazy whimsical artist who writes him passionate letters about wanting to have sex with him in public. But as we get to know her, we find a depth to her character and her struggles with herself that I totally get, namely her serious problem with commitment to men who truly love her and her difficulty reconciling both her admiration and instant boredom when one of her lovers (who is ready to leave his wife to be with her) tells her that he's gentle with her because love means giving up your strength. I completely get that. On one hand, we all want to be loved and treated as well as any person could hope, but on the other there's this need for adventure and a little bit of wildness that love like that can't really touch. Not that love isn't fun and everything, it just fulfills a different need. And some of us just don't have that need (at least not yet). I've been in love, or at least the kind of love that being 17 allows, and it makes you into something different. You're a part of someone, not two people who are together alongside each other's lives. I've looked into someone's eyes and literally heard the rest of the crowded room around me go quiet as the edges around the other person blurred like a vignette from a cheesy movie, yet within months I threw that relationship away on flimsy, long term excuses and lusty feelings for the single most toxic hookup relationship I have ever experienced. I don't blame Sabina for steering clear of that kind of intensity, at least as someone young and strong and full of promise. 'Cause I'm full of lots of things, and I'm pretty sure promise is one of them.

I got to Chi City and had a four hour layover. I made a beeline for the Field Museum Store and talked myself out of buying a King Tut excavation kit and a giant wooly mammoth stuffed animal (both targeted towards people about 10-15 years my junior). I made my way to the food court and migrated from the Burrito Beach line to the deep dish pizza place line, then finally decided on a place with an Irish sounding name where I proceeded to buy the least healthy meal ever and get disgusted with it about a quarter of the way through and throw it all away. I then realized that my iTunes download for four movie rentals the night before had failed miserably, so I sucked it up and bought 24 hours of Internet to try again. Of course, this led to the unavoidable issue of my laptop battery wearing out, so I literally walked around about half of the international terminal AND the entire food court before finding a place to plug my laptop in. Of course, it was taken by a determined looking business woman (this fucker in front of me just reclined his seat so his head is practically in my lap I swear to God I might punch him) so I had to sit a few tables away and keep watch until she left. I did this for almost an hour until she finally got up, so I headed over and politely asked if she was leaving. She remarked that my timing was excellent. I decided not to tell her I'd been watching her like a crazy stalker for an hour. I only got all of Sucker Punch downloaded before I had to go to my gate, and I boarded my flight to Brussels, excited and naïve. We sat on the tarmac for almost two hours before they informed us that they'd closed down our entire section due to weather so every flight bound for Europe was temporarily fucked, and they were going to reroute us and hopefully have enough gas to get there. Seriously that's what they told us. So I called Mom, rather frustrated because I know I'll have to go through customs in Brussels before I can catch my flight to Helsinki and if I miss that flight I'll DEFINITELY miss my flight to Prague because it's super tight...

We finally got up in the air, to immediately experience the worst turbulence I've ever been in. I managed not to Linda Blair all over my fellow passengers (who looked TOTALLY unfazed, by the way), and get food for the first time since noon (it's like 8 by then). They offered me this cheesy pasta that looks and tastes exactly like vomit, and some dry crackers. I ate like a member of the Mongol hordes, famished from a day of tiresome raping and pillaging, and thirty seconds later my food was gone. I looked around and saw that most of the plane had just gotten their food open. Classy, T.

I took some drugs and had almost four hours of really interrupted sleep. During which I froze my balls off. Did I mention the Nigerian guy next to me was carrying a giant gold purse? Like, that was his entire carry on. A big gold ladies' purse. The American guy next to me noticed I was shivering and offered me his blanket, but I put my big girl panties on and just dealt with the cold. We started to descend, and I got excited. Everything is more awesome when it's exotic. There's turbulence, but it's okay because it's Belgian turbulence! We landed and I entered the airport, talking to myself. “You're in Brussels! By yourself!” People started staring so I shut up and tried to find my gate. So apparently they only tell you what gate you're leaving from 45 minutes before departure. Which means that even though my plane is boarding in ten minutes, I have no idea where the gate is. It's like they force you to be more laid back and it's stressing me out, Goddammit. I used my free time to try to find a phone card to call my mother and wake her up at 4 AM, and I used French to do it. The guy either humored me or thought I wasn't American, either of which was very kind, and spoke French back. Unfortunately what he said was unhelpful, so I got the most horrific exchange rate possible to use a pay phone to call home. (5% commission. I was desperate.)

I had to go through security again. European security is the best, I've decided. They tell you which shoes you should take off, and if you don't do it they just wait until you beep and make you take them off. They have this fun little animated video that plays on a loop, where a guy is going through security and does stuff wrong. The TSA agent (or whatever the European equivalent is) is this MASSIVE hulking black guy, and he makes huge gestures when the guy does something wrong. He pats his pockets in exaggerated motions and the passenger empties his out, dumping a shitton of wrappers and other stuff into the bin. SO REALISTIC. Then a woman comes along, sees the huge security guard, and (smiling) starts stripping. Well, she just takes off her jacket but still. She's also dressed like a prostitute. Best video ever. By the way, I took that stupid ninja thing out of my shirt because I was sick of it, and just put it on the outside of my clothes so I could get my shit out. The woman at security tried not to laugh as she reminded me to take it off to go through the line. FML.

Also, I can already see the trend where European men dress like gay hipsters and it makes me sad. I don't need to see your balls through your neon jeans. Really.

I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and got ready to leave. I then realized that I didn't know how to leave. All the doors looked exactly the same, and there wasn't one set apart from the stalls or anything. So I walked around, trying different doors, looking like a complete and total moron (people actually were staring), and finally saw a woman come in so I lunged for her door before I forgot again. USA! USA!

On my flight to Finland: I flipped through the magazine and saw an article on Finnish summer sports. They include: mud soccer, which moves so slowly that the goalie just hangs out and drinks beer, a wife carrying competition (with a best costume component), and an air guitar contest. I officially love Finland.

Now I'm in Prague at my hostel and I'm starving to death. Tomorrow I move into my dorms. I'm currently talking to a nice Aussie about Absynthe. Praha!