The Fifteen Year Old and the Terrorist (part three)

This week I am recounting the beginnings of my travel obsession. Our story begins with parts ONE and TWO.

I am a child of the Cold War. I remember hiding under my desk during drills. I remember worrying that the Russians would bomb us. I remember laying in bed and praying to God that Ronald Reagan beat President Carter on election night because my dad didn’t like “the Dirty Democrats.”

I remember being terrified of the Russians.

And that fear hadn’t dissipated in 1989. Thinking back on it now, I am very surprised my mom let me go to the USSR with my grandparents. She is, too. But they were my grandparents. They thought it was a good idea, so she agreed. And off I went.

On the Aeroflot jet from Finland to the USSR I sensed the changes, and I was nervous. When we arrived in Moscow and went through customs, I started to panic. The customs officials, dressed in fatigues and armed with machine guns, separated me from my grandparents. They then opened my suitcase and started to quiz me:

“Where is your money?” My grandfather had it. He didn’t want anything to happen to it.

“Why do you have 5 pairs of blue jeans? Where are you going to sell them?” Sell them? I was an American teenager. I secretly idolized Madonna. I had 5 pairs of jeans because I was going to wear them. I wasn’t about to sell my wardrobe.

Over and over again they asked me the same questions, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They spoke to each other in Russian and pointed and laughed. Now I know they were just having fun with a clearly scared teenager. But at the time: I was just terrified. I had read Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, and I imagined bright lights and sleepless nights in my future.

Fortunately, the customs guys tired of me before it came to that. I zipped up my suitcase and fled to my grandparents who were waiting for me outside. And there were our Russian hosts -- representatives from the agency we were there to visit – with arms filled with red roses for us.

They took us to our accommodations: an apartment somewhere in Moscow. Huge mounds of garbage were piled outside the building, sending a sweet stink throughout the neighborhood. And our apartment was infested with bugs. It was just too much for my sheltered American-girl self. That night I wrote, “I have to go to the bathroom, but I’m afraid to go into the WC. I don’t want to go to sleep – something might get me… I don’t want to be here now. Here I sit complaining, and there are people who live here – like this – every day and don’t know any better.” I was tired. I was scared. I was hysterical.

But things improved over the next few days. I fell in love with Elizabeth, a Russian physicist and one of our hosts. She became my “Russian mother” and invited me to come to live with her and study in Moscow. I was shocked by the absence of things in the USSR. One day we went shopping, and that night I wrote, “The shops are all empty! They have goods on display in the windows but nothing really to sell. Everything is of such poor quality. The toys in the toy store were cheaper than the worst toy at M.E. Moses [our local dime store]. The dolls had blue, orange and yellow hair. Their clothes are so cheap – you can see through them.” My young American heart softened thinking of the beautiful Madame Alexander dolls I loved at home.

And the lines were shocking: “Unless you are a tourist, you must stand in long lines for everything – bread and food lines are around the block. Shoes are very expensive and very poor quality. The people don’t know any better though. The state stores advertise in newspapers what will be where and when so that people line up hours before the shop opens in hopes of getting some.”

Actually, I was wrong. The people certainly knew better. Our hosts would not let us purchase anything from the state stores. Instead they asked what I would like to bring back. I wanted Matroyshka dolls for my friends – the traditional Russian nesting dolls. So our hosts took our American dollars and shopped the black market for us. They brought back a bag of dolls for me – beautiful wooden dolls that were painted in bright colors. They were far more beautiful than anything I’d seen in the store windows.

We traveled from Moscow to Leningrad by train, and I was more taken by Leningrad. It was clear that Russia’s most European city had fared better under Socialism. “We went shopping today. Most of the stores with anything good in them only take foreign currency,” I wrote. I was amazed that our great national enemies preferred to conduct business in our currency.

In all our ten days in the USSR were wonderful. We visited the Hermitage and the Tsar’s Summer Palace. We went to a circus, which would not have met with the approval of animal rights activists. We ate borscht at Russia’s first privately owned restaurant in the basement of an apartment building. I brushed my teeth with Pepsi. And by the time we boarded our plane back to Finland, I’d totally fallen in love with travel – despite the customs officials, the bugs, and the filth.

I wasn’t afraid any more, and I was hooked. But that nearly changed in the space of one short flight…

To be continued.

The Fifteen Year-old and the Terrorist (Part Two)

This week I am recounting the beginnings of my travel obsession.  The story begins here.  

On Monday, June 5, 1989 “the adventure of my life” began. That’s what I called it in my little blue and white journal. I’d never been good at keeping a journal before, but the characters in my favorite books all kept journals, so I knew it was time to try it. My daily life may not have been journal-worthy, but my trip to Europe was going to be!

Our first stop: Finland where the long summer days and sunny summer nights were so lovely. I was served alcohol, but I didn’t drink it (I am very clear about that in my journal – over and over again). I saw Gone with the Wind in a Finnish bookstore and was delighted to see that the Finns enjoyed my favorite novel, too. The Oulu Library was showing “The Wizard of Oz” that week. The pervasiveness of American pop culture made me feel a little more comfortable as I settled in to a country where the sun just never set.

I had one great failure on my first trip abroad: I didn’t do well with jet lag. I was exhausted. Now, teenagers need as much sleep as toddlers, and I was no exception. And I had never done the trans-Atlantic thing before. In fact, my journey was even more complicated: Dallas to Los Angeles (to meet my grandparents and spend the night). Then Los Angeles to London to Helsinki to Oulu. And I really hardly slept on the plane. I was too excited to be flying Business Class to take advantage of those lovely seats (spoiled me for life, and I’ve never done it since…).

So, by the time we arrived in Finland and set out to explore, all I could think about was taking “just one more little nap.” It took me a week to feel human, and I may have been a little whiney about the whole thing, too. Oh, I hope that’s not true!

Whiney or not, I thoroughly enjoyed Finland. My little journal is full of naïve observations like “they sell Dr. Pepper here” and “today we went to a mall which was really three supermarkets which sold clothes, too!” And, my favorite: “our bedspreads have scenes of San Francisco.”

But my greatest Finnish experience was truly Finnish: a sauna. We were staying in Oulu – a coastal city in Northern Finland. Our hosts took us to a spa on the coast. It was a beautiful place with traditional-looking buildings, forests, tall grasses … quite idyllic. They treated us to a feast and had arranged for folk dancers to entertain us. My fifteen year-old self was quite impressed, “The music was incredible, and the dances were so original. The dancers were dressed in traditional costumes. Each city has its own color (Oulu is forest green) so you can tell where a dancer is from.” My poor, jet-lagged self had trouble staying awake through the long dinner, and I kept fantasizing about just laying down behind the table to sleep through the conversation. I was nodding off over my fish and potatoes. Even the berries and cream – something I loved – failed to wake me up. But then over coffee our hosts suggested that we all take a sauna.

Suddenly, I was wide-awake.

I knew enough to know that generally Europeans got naked to take a sauna. And here I was with a bunch of strangers and my grandparents. And I was supposed to get naked with them? I was terrified. But, the suave and sophisticated traveler that I was… well, I wasn’t going to be the only person not to do it.

We walked through the woods to another little building – a rustic cabin on the beach. It was late at night, but the sky was gorgeous – a perpetual sunset. We went inside where there was a dressing room for each gender and then the sauna itself. I made my way into the ladies room, nervous and excited. I didn’t know anyone at home who had had this kind of adventure, and it was just what I’d hoped – something to spice up my vanilla life. I opened the door to the ladies room. It was a small room lined with benches with pegs on the walls.

Several women were in the room in various stages of undress. I snuck a look as they were undressing. I felt fat and ugly and misshapen. How could I possibly get naked in front of these women? And how could I walk into that sauna where there were naked MEN waiting? I’d never seen a man totally naked before. And certainly no one had ever seen me. And then there were my grandparents… my heart started racing. And I turned around to leave. There was no way I could possibly do this.

And then I saw it. Not far from the door, sitting on one of the benches… a pile of big, fluffy white towels.

In my head, a nude sauna was literally a group of people sitting around totally naked together. I know that sometimes that is the case, but I just couldn’t imagine sitting around in the buff with a bunch of physicists and my grandparents. But then I realized that we didn’t have to sit around naked. We would all be wearing TOWELS.

I muttered a prayer of thanksgiving, grabbed a towel, and stripped down to sweat with the crowd.

Now, when I told my friends this story at home… a few of the details may have changed, and I certainly made it sound like I was fearless. Even in my journal I wrote, “I was hesitant about the sauna, but I’m glad I did it. It was nude, small, and very hot, but lots of fun.”

Two days later, though, nudity would be the last thing on my mind as we headed into the USSR. 

To be continued...

The Fifteen Year-old and the Terrorist (Part One)

I was a seasoned traveler by the time I was a teen. My family lived in Dallas, but my extended family lived everywhere but. We had driven and flown all over the country visiting cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles. I had never been to Disneyland, but I knew the buffalo grazing at Fermi Lab as well as my own back yard; that’s where my grandpa worked. For my tenth birthday I got a trip to Minnesota. I went to camp in Wisconsin. I had been to visit my cousins in Tenafly, New Jersey with a side trip into New York City. I knew how to pack as well as I knew the flight attendant’s safety spiel.

I read voraciously, too, and my head filled with the sights and sounds of far away cities: Florence, Chicago, London, Paris, New York. Nothing was written about Dallas. It was the most unromantic, unglamorous big city on the face of the planet. And as I traveled mentally, I longed to travel period. I was a trapped gypsy.

My friend, Amy, who had, in my estimation, an inferior imagination and an even more inferior desire to travel, went to Paris for a week with her mother. She didn’t even really want to go. Her mom thought it would be good since she was taking French.

I died inside. My mother didn’t have enough money to take me to Paris, Texas let alone Paris, France. And Amy didn’t even have the courtesy to bring me a present back. Goes to France and no gift? Some friend!

So, there I was trapped in hot, sticky, stinky Dallas reading and dreaming and scheming.

And then the phone rang.

I was in the kitchen. Mom was on the phone. It was my grandparents. “Blah blah blah Aunt Judy blah blah the schnauzer down the street blah blah report cards blah blah blah Angela, your grandparents want to talk to you.”

Um. Ok.

This was a little odd, and I thought perhaps I was in trouble. I knew and loved my grandparents, but we didn’t talk on the phone much. I mean, they lived in Illinois and long distance phone calls were expensive, so generally we just wrote thank you notes and the occasional card or letter and then chatted it up when we were together twice each year.

But, ya know, I would talk to them.

“Hi, Grandma. Hi, Grandpa.”

“Hello,” they both chimed in. I could just see them – Grandma on the phone in her kitchen, and Grandpa on the phone in his office.

“Say,” Grandpa said, “We have been talking with your mother.” Yep. I am in trouble. I started going through my list of recent transgressions trying to figure out what I’d done most wrong.

“We were wondering if you would want to take a trip with us this summer?”

Oh.

“Um, sure!”

“Well, your Grandpa has some meetings in Finland and in Russia,” my grandmother said, “so we wondered if you would like to come along to keep me company. It would be your birthday present.”

I just about peed my pants, fell over, and screamed all at the same time. But I was fifteen. That wasn’t cool.

“That sounds great!” I could hardly contain the urge to leap around the room. In measuring the moments in my life since – graduations, our wedding, holding my own book for the first time – THIS might be the most excited I’ve ever been. I was beside myself.

“And we thought we would stop in London on the way home,” Grandma said.

In a Victorian novel I would have fainted at this point.

“Finland, Russia, and England… we are going to Europe?” My heart thudded in my chest.

And so it began.

(To be continued...)