So, I spent a little more than the entire month of May traveling in Eastern/Central Europe. I spent two weeks in Istanbul, and then traveled north, through Bulgaria, Romania, and the Ukraine. Then off to Poland for a bit, before hitchhiking back to France (well, the wrong Basel train station) by way of Slovakia, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. In order to disrupt your intrinsically violent attempts at creating a simplified linear narrative of my life, I present a series of self-contained anecdotes, thus positing a plural, noncausal schema of personality and experience.
FAST TIMES AT ISTANBUL’S CHEAPEST HOSTEL
One night, the guy who played banjo and read tarot held an impromptu yoga workshop. This was in the middle of the night, and a black-out-drunk Yorkshire teenager trying to stand on one leg fell into a window and destroyed it. I made him pose for a picture next to it afterward, but it didn’t come out too well. The next morning he said, his face in a pillow, “I litch-rilly want to kill myself.”
ISTANBUL’S LESS INTERESTING SCAMS
This scam happened to me twice in one hour. A man walks in front of me carrying a shoe-shine kit. He is theatrically oblivious as the brush falls off. I know this is a scam, but on the .001% chance it isn’t I get the brush and chase after him and hand it over. His gratitude is so effusive he’s practically on the verge of tears. He must — must! — repay me by polishing… my ratty old New Balances. He tells me what a gentleman I am for my generosity. When I resist he starts on a sob story about his sick kid, or something equally manipulative.
NO WAL-MART IN THE CITY OF SIN
Istanbul is full of specialty shops. You’d pass shops full of telescopes, for instance, or piping.
TREATISE ON THE LANGUAGES OF EASTERN EUROPE
Bulgarian is just Franglais written in a Cyrillic alphabet, y’all. The emperor has no clothes. And Romanian is like Italian, kind of.
BULGARIAN HAIR-DO’S
Chicks in Bulgaria are totally doing the super-huge-hair thing now. It’s actually really rad.
MOVIES I SAW ON BULGARIAN COACH BUSES
I took the bus through Bulgaria, swinging through Plovdiv to Sofia, and then all the way back to Varna. I saw three movies on the Blaupunkt entertainment systems. Mannequin on the Move is a cheesy eighties movie about a sexy mannequin who comes to life (she was put under a spell by an evil wizard). Some Ferris Bueller type falls in love with her and things become super wacky. Frozen Impact is a TV movie that doesn’t even have a wikipedia page — how they got a Bulgarian version of it I don’t know. Freak hailstorms rock a small mountain town! A family is separated and must use heroics to reunite!! Jackie Chan Presents: Metal Mayhem is a bilingual English/Chinese movie about… wacky secret agents, or something. All these movies were pretty terrible, though Mannequin on the Move had some funny quotes. Like, the guy gets the mannequin some Diet Pepsi. “It has no fat, no calories, and no sugar!” She responds: “We had something like that back home; it was called water.” He says: “Well, this Pepsi stuff is much easier to get.”
Ha!
ON VELIKO TURNOVO
Veliko Turnovo was gorges! City of stray cats and loud frogs. The day I checked out of my hostel, a chick with really big hair was like, “You’ll need to leave by 10, as we have someone coming in to spray for bedbugs.” But maybe that wasn’t what she really meant to say.
ON THE ROMANIAN LEV
It’s made out of plastic and impossible to rip. It’s like trying to tear a laminated worksheet.
STRANGE ENCOUNTER ON THE BUCHAREST METRO
Guys, I totally saw Tim Faust’s sosie on the Bucharest subway. It was uncanny. I would have taken a photograph, but that would have been too weird.
IS ROMANIA IN THE EU??
Yes, and they won’t let you forget it either. We get it, Romania! Somehow you joined the club! It’s like an EU Pride Parade 24/7. They probably have as many EU flags in a square mile as can be found in the entirety of France (and that includes Strasbourg). Ugh. You stay classy, Romania.
UKRAINIAN HAIR-DON’TS
It’s fashionable nowadays for the 18-35 Ukrainian male demographic to wear mullets. Not discrete tecktonik mullets, but actual 1980’s-style permy-looking nappy weed-sacks. I was tempted at one point to furtively take photos of all the mullets I saw and post them all in a themed Facebook album. But I never went through with it — the thought just depressed me too much. Plus I wanted to enjoy my time, not spend every minute cataloguing the dozens of mullets I came across during my short stay. One life, you guys. Maybe if someone wanted to give me a grant to do it…
GET JEALOUS
I was chatting with this Cameroonian woman in a hostel in Lviv, and she assumed I was French.
THE DEATH CAMPS
I took a French-language tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau. There was one woman who was on the verge of tears for much of it. She finally broke down in the extant gas chamber. Auschwitz is a complex of dorms converted now into individual museums, most of which are dedicated to specific demographics who populated the deathcamps (the Roma, Polish Jews, German Jews, etc). One of the museums just had piles of things. An enormous pile of children’s shoes. An enormous pile of suitcases. An enormous pile of pots and pans. A good-sized pile of twisted-up spectacles. A HUGE heap of human hair, which would have been converted into textile products had the Nazis not been thwarted. Birkenau was largely destroyed by fleeing Nazis. A railroad track, lines and lines of brick chimneys, and two piles of rumble where the main crematoria used to be.
LIST OF SONGS STUCK IN MY HEAD DURING VARIOUS PORTIONS OF MY TRIP
Bad-ass Strippa (Jentina); I Loves You Porgy (Nina Simone); Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out (Derek and the Dominoes); Ride ’em Cowboy (Juice Newton); Seven Year Ache (Rosanne Cash); Never Forget You (The Noisettes)
My gift to you.
GENERAL NOTES ON HITCH-HIKING
One of the most striking things I found about the process of hitch-hiking was how it changed my perception of time. In Altkirch, I was excruciatingly aware of time, in an unproductive angsty way. I can hear the wind whistling past my ears as I speed on my arrow-straight trajectory toward death. I tend to think of my life in terms of chunks: right now I’m at the end of my youth, the beginning of my twenties, the short lull before my actual working life, etc. These types of thoughts preoccupy me during my normal life. Hitch-hiking was totally a moment-to-moment experience. I’d scratch out my new sign on a notepad, pick a spot, pop my collar for good luck, and stick out my thumb. Then someone would pick me up. Then I’d relax, because I was on my way. Then I’d get out and do it again. When night came, my thoughts turned to where I was going to sleep. My only worry was these little microgoals — “I’d like to get to Vienna by nightfall,” “I need to look at my atlas and check the route I ought to take from Salzburg, and then choose the optimal place to stand,” “I need to find a place to sleep where nobody will come and kill me.” — that were necessary and fulfilling. I think this was one of the first times that I really experienced the rolling stone lifestyle — “I’ll just take what comes today, tomorrow leave it all behind” — because even in hostels you’re making Facebook friends, and you need to see the sights, and whatever. Hitch-hiking it was just, “I’m in a car now. In half an hour I’ll be back on the side of the road.” It’s like the anti-introspective. I can see the draw, and also how such a lifestyle, if extended too long, could take on a numbing and desperate ring.
MY SPECIFIC HITCH-HIKING EXPERIENCE
Here’s a map of my route. I’d say I probably had ~14 rides over the course of three days. I slept in large bushes both nights, and was rained on probably three times total (though never while I slept). I found that approaching rain actually helped goad people into picking me up. I’d cast desperate glances to the clouds to aid in the process.
LOTS OF OTHER STUFF HAPPENED TOO
But whatever, who cares.
Came to my senses & I chilled for a bit 