My Travels (thus far)

Me in Athens

I had a pretty crazy spring break. I wanted to use my Eurail pass as much as I possibly could; I have the “global flexi pass” which means that I have 15 days to travel within a period of two months. Even a day before my spring break began, I had little to no plans, except for a flight back to Prague from Athens.

It was both exciting and exhilarating and terrifying to have nothing scheduled other than the end, and to travel mostly alone. Although I had the freedom of being able to decide what to do at any moment, there was a huge amount of responsibility that came along with it. I made a ridiculous amount of lists and possibilities for how to get to Greece using my eurail and little else. I prepared for an aching back from hours spent in a train. I prepared not much else, and tried to tell myself to accept whatever would be presented in my path.

It would take pages for me to recount the entirety of my actions and reflections my journey, so I will spare the reader. In summary: I began by taking a bus to Berlin with my boyfriend who had come to Prague on the last day of my midterms. When he flew back to the US, I took a train back to Prague to collect a few things before departing on another train two hours after I got back. I wanted to get out, rather than spending another night; my building was eerily empty, and there was a train from Vienna, Austria to Zagreb, Croatia at 7:36am. So I booked a hostel in Vienna for the night and prepared to wake early and then fall back asleep on the seven hour train ride.

I got to Zagreb hoping to find an internet café so that I could stay the night in Rijeka, another Croatian city but on the coast, and a few hours away by train. But the hostel that I was planning on booking was suddenly full – I was alone and had no knowledge of what to do, or where to go. I was across the ocean from anyone who I have always counted on to “save” me in times of trouble or anxiety.

I searched for nearly 45 minutes for a hotel in Rijeka, and couldn’t find anything for that night under 79 euro. I started freaking out. I wrote emails to strangers who owned cheap hostels and hotels that were unavailable. I wrote emails to my parents telling them I was safe, mostly to reassure myself.

While looking through my papers I got an idea. I had written down the name of a fishing town that I’d planned to take a day trip to while in Rijeka, called Opatija. I entered the town’s name in “booking.com” and found a hotel called Hotel Kvarner, which was advertised as “the oldest luxury hotel in Opatija”. It was the cheapest option, 36 euro a night. I hastily entered my credit card number and left the internet café to wander around Zagreb until my train.

The train ended up stopping halfway through the ride and the entirety of the passengers were moved to a bus. I was looking out the window at the Croatian countryside, entranced by the fields and mountains that looked so foreign and yet so comforting. A man in my car (who kept insinuating that I was English, rather than American) told me about beautiful things to see on the Croatian coast, and his own travel stories of going to the Grand Canyon and other places in the world.

I was surprised by the amount of kind strangers I met along my journey. The bus that I took from Rijeka center to Opatija ended up dropping me off more than 2km away from my hotel, and a kindly old nurse who was waiting for her husband to pick her up, and could barely speak English, gave me a ride to my hotel. The semi-english speaking man on the train/bus made sure that I was taken care of.

After Opatija I went back to Zagreb to catch a train to Venice, and then to Ancona, where I would take a ferry to Patras, Greece. I watched so much along my trip, becoming more and more introverted and smiling at the memory of my friends and family. I began to speak broken English in order for stranger to be able to understand me.

Everyone’s warnings that I would be unsafe if traveling alone through foreign countries were taken with a grain of salt; I met so many amazingly kind people who went above and beyond to help me. No one took advantage of me. They only wanted me to appreciate their country and remember it with good memories.

I was helped so much when I got to Greece by an amazingly kind 26 year old Turkish girl who drove me to Athens with her and ended up inviting me into the home of her Grecian friend who she’d met in a Masters program. They took care of me as if they’d known me forever. I wondered what I did to deserve all this blind kindness and the wisdom they bestowed upon me, a younger fellow-traveler.

In the end, I will always remember the moments and people that I encountered. Being alone was definitely scary, but I feel like I grew up more in a period of five days than I did in five years. That might be an exaggeration, but I highly doubt there will be anything to compare to the time I had on my spring break 2009.