Valentine 2008, I found myself going Dutch. Nadira, a friend and a former colleague during the days in Sarajevo, invited me over to the Hague, where she worked as a researcher for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It’s a mouthful I know. Saying in layman term, the tribunal is a court set up by the NATO to catch big criminals during the war in the early 90s in what now Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. There are more countries in the Yugoslavia, but these were the main players where the war escalated.
I found myself returning to Brussels four times now, beating any other European cities I had visited. It wasn’t out of sweet desire for Belgian chocolate, creamy mussels or seeing European Union at work. Rather, all the visits were due to severals low-cost airlines’ executive decisions made in secret boardrooms to choose Brussels as one of main flight hubs for Europe. Planning my routes to navigate to all European countries became a little easier. If I couldn’t find any direct flight from Prague to my destinations, I simply changed my departure to Brussels.
They’ll eat me. They’ll eat me not.
A few serious discussions with friends from Sarajevo effectively crossed out Albania from my summer trip. Why would I go to a place where local people told PG-10 rated stories about how unsafe the country was, how dangerous people were after many years closing their country to the outside world during Communism, how our school bus tour to Greece had to change route heading to Macedonia instead of crossing Albania. Thinking that Muslim countries sympathize with one another, I told my friend I would pretend that I spoke Bosnian so they’d be friendly to me. “No. Then you sound like a Serbian, and they will hate you even more.” My friend laughed and joked that they might ‘eat’ me. (For those who don’t keep up with events in this region, Serbia and Kosovo had been fighting for years for the independence of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians made up the majority of the population.)
I finished my job in Bosnia and planned to cruise around the Balkan coast. Montenegro somehow seemed to fit the description for a cheap, relaxing and exotic destination to hang out for the rest of the summer before leaving Europe.
Cheap, yes. I could go on for days replicating the same cuisine style in Sarajevo, wine and dine on Turkish coffee (well not exactly wine), burek, cevapi, and soup for a few euros. Relaxing, of course. I’ve never spent my entire vacation at the beaches before. Exotic yes. Any place not well-known on tourist radar is exotic to me and pretty much everywhere in Eastern Europe.
Before heading to Sarajevo where I would spend the next year working, I made a brief stop in Zagreb to visit a few friends I met in Poland the year before. Unlike most European capitals, Zagreb is very dull. I bet few tourists intentionally travel here unless they are drunk out of their minds the night before and got on the wrong train. Croatia’s tourism jewels aka tourist traps lie along the Dalmatian coast, or as the Bosnians say the seaside. Let not think that this a blatant attempt from the Bosnians to usurp their neighbors’ territory. It is an old habit to refer to something which used to be theirs when Bosnia and Croatia were part of the same country, the Yugoslavia.
I returned to the US after spending the summer in Poland and posted on a Vietnamese forum about my trip; from this forum, I met two Vietnamese who lived in Paris. After a year resettling in US, I got antsy again and decided to go back to Europe. My obvious stop was then Paris.
Vietnamese don’t travel much, but if given the option, they likely choose France for the obvious reason that France is the only Western culture which is closest to Vietnam. 100-year colony must have counted for something. Many things which we encounter in our daily lives: food, vocabulary, ritual, etc. are taken from the French.
What does a backpacker do when he/she visits a country which has the highest GDP per capita? What does he/she do in a country known only for its gambling business boasting the casino for which to enter one has to dress like James Bond or his girls?
Easy. He/she stays in France, sleeps in French beds, and takes a 1-euro-fare bus to Monaco for a day trip.
Taking the 1-euro bus ride from the French Riviera to Monaco is a travel experience on its own. The bus takes you through some of the most beautiful coastline views in the world.
If you’re a backpacker, chances are you did or will do all of the above. You don’t have the kind of income that needs to be wired off to hide in Monaco’s treasury. You might gamble in the Grand Casino, but you might not stay in the hotel offered by them. Just because you entertained the idea of entering Monaco’s famous casino doesn’t mean you will do it. Instead, to save the entrance fee and the effort of dressing up, you decide that the second-class American casino next door will do justice.
Monte Carlo casino
The American casino
What else?
I’m not sure if my first trip to London can be considered a visit given I had only half a day to see the city.
I didn’t remember anything except for the arrival at the busy Victoria train station. Then I hauled my over-packed backpack from street to street around the station looking for accommodation. Everything was booked out. The available ones were too expensive for a student who had just return from an internship in … Eastern Europe. I had vague images of the Thames and the London Eye. I might even ride it without remembering anything. I remembered joining a group of Malaysian businesspeople to walk around the red-light district and then ditching them later not having enough energy and mood to socialize with complete strangers.
“You should come to Vienna to see Chris. It’s only 2 hours by train from Bratislava,” said Rick after hearing about my plan to visit Kosice, Slovakia and from there taking a train to Bratislava. It was not a bad idea even though I had literally no time to add another destination to my trip. On the other hand, this was my first trip to Europe, and I wanted to see ‘everything’ and believe that I could see ‘everything,’ I squeezed in Vienna on my last day before taking an early morning flight out from Bratislava to London.
Through IAESTE, a large international group who sends student overseas on technical internship, I spent the summer of 2004 working in a software start-up in Gliwice, a small city in Silesia, Poland. I lived in a student dormitory with 30 other trainees mostly from Europe. We almost always visited other places in Poland during the weekend: former royal city of Krakow, Austwick Nazi concentration camp, Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and the reconstructed Old Town, Zakopane, Gdansk…
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
