Coming Soon: Letters From Europe

Over the next three weeks, I will be traveling through central Europe. Berlin, Prague, Slovenia, Milan, Switzerland and Amsterdam are names that hold a magical appeal to me and live in my memory only as old National Geographic articles that I used to read in my parent’s garage. As a child I would page through the musty magazines, analyzing the photographs, marveling at imposing castles, the snow-capped peaks of the Alps, and villages that looked like the setting for a fairy tale. They all seemed so impossibly foreign, accessible only to retirees or debonaire millionaires or adventurous hippies with rucksacks and rich parents. Europe was but a fuzzy concept. Growing up, travel took place in a automobile, and the road ends at the ocean. Never did I think I would actually travel to those distant, exotic lands, much less at the tender young age of 31 (and far from a debonaire millionaire), and even less with my mother and sister. Yet here the three of us sit in the airport in Newark, where we will board a flight shortly that will take us to Berlin. For my mother and sister, this will be their first trip across the pond. The anticipation leading up to this moment has been great.

Half the fun of traveling is the anticipation. You study the map and research possible destinations like randy singles browsing a dating site. You buy new clothes, get ready, pack your bags and find out as much as possible about where you’re going. Mild curiosity crescendos into a consuming anticipation as the takeoff date approaches. Once you check in at the airport, it’s like a final phone call: Hello, Berlin, I’ll be stopping by shortly. I hope you’re ready. I know I am.

I asked my mother how she slept last night.

“Gosh,” she said. “I don’t think I slept a wink. I was just too wound up.”

“Yeah,” my sister Marija said. “I didn’t sleep too much either.”

I, of course, am much too cool to admit that much. “Huh,” I said. “I slept fine.” I am the International Traveler, the Tripmaster, after all, and I have a reputation to uphold. It is also true that my sense of anticipation has dulled slightly over the years, as I travel internationally several times a year. And yet there I was, wide awake at 2am, wondering about the language barrier and strange foods, about moving about, about currency conversions and train rides and strange lunches and cramped hostels and crowds bouncing to techno music and fresh rolls and…

And then it was 6am and the alarm went off. Like the National Geographic-reading boy on Christmas morning, I scampered downstairs to see what the day would bring. The difference now, I guess, is that I had to stop to make coffee. And I didn’t unwrap anything. I’ll do that in about 12 hours, when I finally unpack in Berlin. Christmas is unfolding slowly, and the sense of anxious wonder only grows. I look forward to celebrating soon.

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