Why I am crap at travel

I have never really been very good at traveling.  The whole "It's out of my hands" is so not my thing.  I fret about my luggage getting scanned and then getting lost.  I worry that I will lose my carry-on or that someone will steal something of mine when I'm distracted (as I tend to be when traveling, since worrying about the plethora of smallish details takes so much of my focus).  I'm always certain I'll lose my tickets, or my passport, or I'll be bumped from a flight and this will cause problems for whoever is supposed to pick me up.  Basically, I'm a wreck until I reach my destination and then I need a little time to recover from it all.

I'm inclined to believe that this is really just my OCD aggravated by stress and, therefore, that I've always been like this, but my adventures in Eastern Europe in 1993-1994 did not help anything.  I had a series of really strange things happen to me in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania that certainly didn't help me feel in control while traveling.  I kept a "diary" of my daily goings on while I was abroad - really, it was copies of letters I wrote to this guy I was obsessed with.  I've been planning for awhile to transcribe some of that stuff here because it's the first-hand (and most accurate) account of that time, but, honestly, reading it is so excruciating, that I can't bring myself to do this.  I can't peruse more than a page or two before I want to die of embarrassment.  My 22-year-old self is so contrived, so manipulated, so presented, and so emotionally heightened, all for the benefit of this guy, that I wish I could go back in time and stuff her in a writing implement-free incubator until she is a bit more fully hatched. 

So since I can't read it - and I mean it, I CAN'T read it - I'll just sum up from memory.  

1st leg of trip - my luggage gets lost in Warsaw.  This wouldn't matter so much except that I packed exceedingly carefully because I could only take a few bags and I had to fit in everything I'd need for a year, including my teaching materials.  Fortunately, it was eventually found.  

2nd leg of trip - we cross the border, and the Russian guards paw through our stuff. (I am in a group of about 11 people.)  Anything and everything is subject to confiscation.  Imagine that whole crappy go-through-the-x-ray-machine-at-the-airport on steroids in Russian, and that's it.  Again, fortunately, I didn't lose anything.  

Arrival in Russia - my housing situation falls to pieces.  No one has any idea where I will teach or live for several weeks.  When the date of my practice homestay arrives, a rep from the school who had promised to employ me takes me instead to a little resort on the Baltic Spit.  In Soviet Russia this was sort of the place to stay, I'm told.  Unfortunately, the accommodations are not luxurious in the Western sense.  They drop me off in a room in a sort of bathroom-free shack, tell me that a teacher from the school should be along, and leave.   I spend the night locked in my room with all my belongings listening to the mother of all drunken binges going on around me and thinking about where I should pee.  Eventually, my escort returns with her teenage daughter as she realizes I know no one and don't even know where I am geographically (and have no way of contacting anyone since there is no telephone).  

1st big trip - Warsaw/Krakow.  This was actually a really cool trip, except that I was the only person in our little group who spoke adequate Russian and we were, in fact, in Poland (where they speak Polish).  I found that if I approached people speaking Russian, they would ignore me, but if I approached speaking English and then switching to Russian, they would talk to me (in Russian).  I have some good memories of this trip, including traveling by bus through the Polish countryside seeing the regular flash of a series of cemeteries, lit up with candles for All Souls'.  Krakow was beautiful, and Auschwitz made a permanent impression on me.  My biggest challenge?  Arriving in the Krakow station at midnight with no map, no Polish, and no idea where we would stay or how we would get there at that time of night.  Honestly, there are times when I can't believe I actually did these things.  They are so unlike me. I completely could have been raped or killed.

Complete Clusterf*ck (i.e., New Year's trip to Vilnius) - a friend of mine and I decided we would go to Gdansk since we had significant time off around the holidays (Russia shuts down everything for the first couple of weeks in January), but he had left his passport in the city we lived which was east, not west.  So we went to Vilnius, Lithuania, instead.  At the border, right around midnight on the 1st, the Russians confiscated my multi-entry visa which made it possible for me to enter and exit the country at will.  When they walked away with it, I thought they were going to check on something and bring it back, but then the train started again, and my little adventure with Russian travel bureaucracy began.  I had brought about $80 with me for this weekend trip, and suddenly I was stranded in Lithuania during the holiday shutdown with no assistance given whatsoever from my travel companion (who spoke only incomprehensible Russian and was irritated with me, I think, for not wanting to hook up) and little support from my program director.  The American embassy wouldn't help me.  I got shaken down for money by the bus patrol because I forgot to have my ticket stamped.  The photographer I went to for new passport photos suggested I pay in a non-monetary currency.  I had to throw the most embarrassingly bitchy hissy fit at the Russian embassy and physically refuse to leave the building to get them to look into the details of my visa confiscation.  It was like a surreal nightmare with a soundtrack in Lithuanian.  Eventually I got out of there, re-entered the country at the same check point - where they were waiting for me with my original visa, having realized they'd screwed up - got home, and went to bed for about 3 weeks where I cried and huddled in a fetal position.  It had occurred to me, as I rode this dismal journey back alone, my travel companion having abandoned me to go back to teach, that it would have been so easy for me to be pulled off the train by some official, killed, and dumped.  And it would have been weeks before anyone would even think to investigate my whereabouts because communication was so impossible.

That was the low point, I think.  I did go on some trips after that, to Gdansk, to St. Petersburg, to Tallinn (and some charmingly remote Baltic island offshore), to Kaunas.  But I made sure to travel with other people who spoke Russian too - girls who spoke Russian and were neither interested in me romantically nor passive-aggressive - and I had occasional problems with panic attacks, esp. when dealing with officials at borders.  And instead of staying on in Eastern Europe to travel after my term was up, I left early and just came home.  

Then I just avoided going anywhere which would require a visa or a passport.  I held out, in fact, for 10 years until the time when we went to pick up Max.  And that trip is its own little story.