Eclecticism

In the summer of 1990, just after my junior year of high school, I was accepted into the People to People program as a “student ambassador” and got to go on a six-week trip across Europe. Starting with a few days in Washington, D.C., we travelled through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece.

Going through boxes the other night, I found my photo album for the trip, and have just scanned them all in and posted them online. There’s a small selection on Flickr, and the entire collection in our family photo gallery.

It’s both funny and frustrating to look back on these now, for a variety of reasons. One of the most frustrating is that I ran out of film in Austria and (being my ever-absentminded self) didn’t manage to get traveller’s checks cashed quickly enough to have the right currency to pick up more film until we hit Italy, so I’m missing the middle few weeks of the trip (it’d be so much easier these days with the proliferation of networked ATMs worldwide, but this was in the dark ages of the early ’90’s, after all).

Often what really strikes me when I look back on the trip is the simple fact that with the jaunt through Hungary and Yugoslavia, I’ve visited countries that doesn’t exist anymore, or at least don’t exist as they were back then.

We were only in Zagreb, Yugoslavia for one night, but a small group of us decided that we didn’t want to just sit around the hotel room and ended up going out to a discotheque. About eight or ten of us went, and I quickly got frustrated with the group — they were slightly freaked out at being out and about in a Communist country, and just bunched up with each other. I thought this was more than a little silly, and ended up striking out on my own, wandering around the club, and peoplewatching, the same as I’d do in any other club. Far more entertaining for me.

I don’t know what Budapest, Hungary looks like these days, but I will always remember it as being one of the most beautiful cities that I got to visit in Europe. The city is actually two old cities on either side of a river, Buda on one side, and Pest on the other. I don’t remember anymore which side we were on, but our hotel sat high on a hillside overlooking the river and the city below, and I spent one very pleasant night sitting out on my balcony, listening to my walkman and watching the city below. I even knew when it was midnight (or possibly one in the morning), as that was when the lights on all the government buildings automatically turned off, suddenly letting those landmarks sink back into dark anonynimity with the rest of the city.

The pictures themselves aren’t the greatest quality, between being taken with a fairly cheap point-and-shoot and being fourteen years old (yikes!). Still, it’s fun for me to have them around. Feel free to browse through either the short version or the whole shebang.

Good night last night. My friend Richard is in town for a week, vacationing from Anchorage, and I met him outside the Vogue just a little after 9pm. We hung out outside for a few minutes until Valindria came out, harassed me (I didn’t realize she was there already, so we had been waiting for her to show up), and we headed in. She’d brought Ross, a gaming friend of hers, so the four of us settled in at the table closest to the entrance.

I always have fun introducing someone to the Vogue for the first time, as I always end up stepping back a bit mentally and trying to look at the club from an ‘outsider’s’ point of view. At one point, I just started laughing a little bit, Valindria asked what was up, and I had to take a moment to try and explain that I wasn’t really laughing at anything — rather, I was just enjoying the club itself. The dark club, good music, pretty people, seeing the colored lights flash across the face of a pretty brunette in a full-length black vinyl dress, my arm around Valindria as she stood next to me, watching Richard dance (and then proceed to come back to the table and half-seriously bitch because he hasn’t been out dancing to decent music in far too long)…I just love the club, the atmosphere, and the friends I have there.

It’s a good thing.

Eventually we all wandered off (aah, the joys of working at 8am) — Valindria and Ross a little after 11pm, Richard and I just a bit before midnight — and now the week begins again.

Richard and I have plans to hang out today after I get off of work. We’ll probably wander around downtown Seattle for a bit and see some of the sights that are within easy walking distance, do general catch-up and all (and if we’re lucky, this fog may lift enough to actually see some of the city by then…though, of course, the sun will have gone down by then, so we’ll just have to see what happens). Should be fun to play tourist for a while.

“We Are Free” by Doof from the album Return to the Source: Deep Trance and Ritual Beats (1995, 7:19).