Canada (many times), Finland, Russia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Italy, Slovenia (3x), Croatia (2x), Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Norway (2x), Sweden, Poland (2x), Czech Republic, and France.... Netherlands in 2020.
That's the order in which I've visited other parts of the world since 1989. My first international trip, to Vancouver BC was for a swim meet in 1988. Didn't really see much of the city except for the drive from my host family's house to the pool and the bitterly cold morning practice at the Kitsilano pool before our flight home. The most exciting part of that trip was getting to see some of the 1988 Olympians swim with my own eyes!
So, ultimately, not much of an international trip, but an eye opening adventure nonetheless!
My first real international trip would be a year later in the summer of 1989 between my junior and senior years in high school. I quit swimming in March 1989 after a surgery on my knee and a very intense dislike for my new coach.
I had decided to focus on school and have a normal social life for basically the first time since I was 8. After the shock of quitting wore off for my parents, they got behind my desire to focus on academics.
As part of this deep support my parents offered, they got me onto this trip that would take me to the U.S.S.R. We spent several months taking lessons on Russian and Soviet history and culture before we left in late June 1989.
The trip took us first to Helsinki, Finland where we got to experience the suuuuuuuuuuper long days of late June and get a taste of something new culturally before we were thrown headlong into the culture shock that was experiencing the Soviet Union.
First stop Leningrad. Not St. Petersburg... Leningrad. In 1989, we were all struck by how beautiful the city was, but equally struck by just how alien life in an oppressive Socialist state is. There were bugs (literal and figurative) in our hotel room. The water flowing into the bathtub looked like iced tea! We had a KGB agent following us around. Kids on the street wanted to buy our shoes and blue jeans... right off our bodies! We all amassed huge quantities of Lenin pins by giving young children gum. We learned about the Russian black market and how to exploit it.
Leningrad was fucking insane! Yes, we saw lines for food and goods. Not nearly as bad as American public school would lead you to believe, but they existed. We saw some very traditional Russian kids beat a young Russian punk with a Mohawk within an inch of his life... just because he was different. We saw a circus with a killer band, but the show was basically torturing highly trained animals.
We saw incredible wealth and opulence and abject poverty.
From there we went to Tallinn, Estonia. RADICALLY different place from Leningrad. My first time in a medieval city. It was beautiful but the patina of Communism created a thick stain on the city. I got to spend the day and evening with a really cool young Estonian woman who worked at the local amphitheater. She took me to see PIL and Robert Cray... weird right? I got to briefly meet Johnny Rotten!
Tallinn was great. Such a beautiful, historic city! I really want to go back and compare my memory of its Soviet stained walls to its modern equivalent.
From there we went to a little town on the coast called Narva. We stayed in a summer camp for Communist Youth, where I assume they played in the Baltic when they weren't reading Marx, Lenin and Trotsky while being taught the value of work.
We were coupled with a local kid our age in every city we went to in order to get a feel for how locals lived. In Narva, I was paired up with a gorgeous young Estonian woman who spoke only Estonian, Russian, and French... so we had to speak French. Her French was as rusty as mine, but we spent the better part of a day wandering around the beach and speaking really basic, broken French. It was a blast! She was getting ready to go to college where she would study engineering. I was getting ready for college where I was convinced I would study creative writing and linguistics. I'm sure she's been an engineer for nearly 30 years now whereas I'm a freelance video editor and filmmaker after working in the print and web world as a graphics production artist, and a photo lab operator. Radically different trajectories.
After Narva, we headed to Minsk, Belarus where the showers in the state run hotel smelled intensely of rotten eggs and the meat at lunch was 18% grey and you could white balance a camera with it. At our hotel, from our room many floors up, we could see two nuclear cooling towers in the distance as it rained and Toby and I listened to Zeppelin's "The Rain Song" on our balcony.
We were in Minsk during the 45th anniversary of its liberation from the Germans. While we were downtown, after getting lost trying to find a Jewish war memorial, we were all gorging ourselves on the local food because we were all starving from our terribly meals in the hotels.
Also in Minsk, we ran into a group of American kids from South Carolina that we'd briefly met in Leningrad. We compared notes on our travels and noted how disappointed we all were that we weren't going to get to go to Georgia on this trip because of some strife there.
Minsk was insane because we got to see firsthand how Soviet citizens really lived. Not what Moscow wanted us to see. Giant Stalinesque tenement buildings with saggy ceilings and paint jobs that hadn't been touched up since Stalin was still alive. It was eye opening and really gave me an appreciation for how good we had it back home despite Bush 1 being in the White House.
One night in the hotel lobby a cover band put on a show. They did Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, KISS, etc. etc. They were really good. Being the rock music junkie of the group, I introduced myself to the band to compliment them. They were REALLY good. Talked with the guitarist for a long time. He played a knockoff Strat through a knockoff Marshall head and cabinet. His big dream in life was to own an American Strat and a real Marshall rig, so he could get that "Metallica" sound. He was astounded that I'd seen Metallica a handful of times by this point and almost fainted when I said that I'd seen Cliff Burton play twice... once while opening for Ozzy!
I'd love to revisit Belarus, but let's face it, that place is a mess now. A dictatorial state.
Then... Odessa, Ukraine. On the Black Sea. Early July. It was beautiful! We had been trading on the black market on this trip. Official exchange rate was $1.67 to 1 Ruble. We were getting anywhere from 12-18 Rubles to the dollar.
Basically... we had money!
We went to a farmers' market down by the water. We were all starving. Everyone in the group was losing a lot of weight. We'd go to these stores that only took non-Russian currencies, so we would pay in Dollars at these places. They sold stuff pretty cheap and they had stuff that you couldn't find at your friendly local Soviet corner store. We'd all buy those huge tins of Danish butter cookies and all the bottled Coke or Pepsi we could get our hands on because the tap water in most of the places we visited was non-potable.
Fun fact, Pepsi in Southern Ukraine taste radically different from Russian Pepsi in Leningrad!
Danish butter cookies do not make for a pleasant daily diet.
At this Odessa market, we found a dude selling rounds of super dense dark rye bread for 30 Kopeks, basically less than 2 cents to us. They must have weighed 40 pounds and they were delicious. To this day, one of the best loaves of bread I have ever eaten! I think we all gained back a bit of the weight we'd lost over the last two and a half weeks. I remember all of us sitting quietly in a bus station chowing down on these loaves of bread... before someone decided to test out the bread as a projectile. Scrunched up... the bread made for a painful impact!
Next... Moscow. The Russian capitol and seat of Soviet power. I had never been in such a massive city before. I'd been to LA before. I grew up in San Jose and spent a lot of time in San Francisco. Nothing like this though. So giant. So filled with history crammed up against stark, Soviet design. The Kremlin is RIGHT NEXT TO St. Basil's Catherdral which looks like candy even up close!
We spent the 4th of July 1989 in Red Square. Where were the fireworks?!
Moscow was a surreal experience. We met some American women who were studying abroad who offered to speak Russian for us at a fancy Indian restaurant where you could pay in Rubles if you spoke Russian. That meal would have cost us each about $300 if we had ordered in English! To this day, still one of the best Indian meals I've ever had!
We traded packs of Camels for cab rides. Ate tons of these hamburgers that were basically infused with caramelized onion. We learned that Russians really really really like cognac. Several rolls of toilet paper can get you a flag stolen from the Kremlin. The changing of the guard at Lenin's tomb is downright creepy. You can't go into Lenin's Tomb if you're wearing shorts. There's a giant canon at the Kremlin that was never fired because the canon balls that were made for it were too large to fit in the barrel. Russian taxi drivers are content to drive 100mph in residential zones. Gum (goom), the "mall" right off Red Square is nothing like an American mall in the 80s. It was waaaaaaaaay cooler! I bought Brendan Bigley a nice furry hat there!
As we were leaving Moscow to head home, many of us realized we had thousands and thousands of Rubles from trading on the black market. When we got home, this would basically be worthless. I kept some for a souvenir, but as we were walking in an underground walkway to catch a train to the airport, I saw a homeless woman with her child asleep on the ground. She had a cup out to accept donations. I had something like 1500 Rubles on me, so I stuffed it into the can. That was the equivalent of about $2500... a lot of money. It's what a Moscow doctor would make in a couple of months. Several others in the group did the same. There was A LOT of money in that cup.
We walk away when I hear this deafening scream echo down the tunnel. I assume the woman woke up to find that she'd just won a lottery of sorts. Hopefully that money got her a roof over her head and a lot of food. I'll never know. That baby would now be 30 or 31!
We said goodbye to Moscow and took a flight on Aeroflot... don't do it... just no... to Frankfurt. There was still a Soviet Union, West Germany, and East Germany at this point! Guards carried uzis. They checked our passports constantly!
Past Frankfurt, we flew home to SFO! Slept off the jet lag.
First thing I ate when I woke up? A Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carl's Jr.
I would be a vegetarian for the next 8 years following that meal.
Ah! Home! I had returned to The Shire. The buildings were all familiar and the people looked unchanged, but it would forever be a new place to me after this experience.
Three weeks in the Soviet Union when I was 17 was a very eye opening and life changing experience. It would be far too long until I traveled internationally again, but now that I have traveled to Europe a fair amount since 2011... I can't get enough. I'm not entirely sure why I'm not somewhere on The Continent right now!
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