Rescuing Some 80's Travel Slides

They're not ALL buildings and scenery, anyway

A couple weeks ago I wrote Travel Disasters, an article about some would-be-terrible things that have happened to me while traveling. I promised to follow it up with some good or at least not-bad things, and here they are! I used to shoot Kodachrome slides and have slide shows when I got home. Who even looks at slides anymore?

Nonetheless, I went to 9 countries in 1982, and took tons of slides. In 1989 I went to Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong over 7 weeks (this was on a sabbatical, back when companies actually offered those). Surely some of that is worth looking at?

Well, there sure are a lot of shots of the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge, and temples in Thailand (every village has a temple, it turns out). You don’t want to look at those, and neither do I. So my filter here is not, “Oh, look! There’s a Buddha!” but rather, “Is there an interesting story here?” I won’t bore you with shots of every place I went if I don’t have a good photo or at least a story about them.

I’d forgotten that I already owned this thing:

With a little study of the manual, I got the slide feeder (not shown) working, and I was in business.

1982 Trip

My first trip to Europe. Naturally I went overboard with the planning, buying books, making packing lists, the whole thing. I was afraid to just go there, so I started with a group trip and then went on my own after that. The trip was with Globus Gateway, and it was a guided trip through Eastern Europe. Maybe that seems gutsy, given that it was still Communist then, but hey, the guides would take of me. I had to go to a special office in Los Angeles where you got a visa for Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The Iron Boot

We started in Munich, and then went to Prague, my first European capital city. Prague has gotten very trendy since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but back then, it had been only 14 years since Russian tanks rolled in and crushed their revolution. We were required to change a fixed amount of cash into Czech currency at the official exchange rate each day, but everyone you walked, people would whisper, “Change money? Change money?” I didn’t really need any more Czech money, since our meals were covered, so I didn’t want to risk arrest with black market transactions.

Everyone on a bus trip like this is old; I was the only person under 40. Mostly what they would all do whenever the bus stopped was look for souvenirs for their grandkids. There was one guy in his 40’s and he and I went to U Fleku one night.

That’s a historical old pub and biergarten. At one point, the crowd became boisterous and started singing and standing on tables. Then two policemen walked in, and the singing stopped. We can’t have the workers getting too happy in the Workers’ Paradise, can we?

Nice Communism

I’ll skip over Vienna. Nice city. Good cafes. I went to my very first opera, Fidelio at the Staatsoper.

Then we went to Budapest. Such a change. There was life on the streets, and while they didn’t have freedom, exactly, they didn’t act at all oppressed. The food was good.

To my tourist eye, anyway. Obviously they had no political freedom, but I’m certain anyone in Novosibirsk would have changed places with them in a heartbeat. Russian citizens might not be able to get a tourist visa to the West, but they could usually get one to a Warsaw Pact country like Hungary.

Besides seeing the capital city, we had a trip to the country, to Kecskemét. What a nice place! We saw an exhibition of horse-riding skills

and ate at this lovely cellar restaurant

where the dessert was some kind of crepe with orange sauce, which I still remember fondly. I promised these aren’t the standard tourist photos of buildings, and here’s proof:

The Former Yugoslavia

After World War I, a country called “Yugoslavia” was created by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler occupied it, as did the Soviet Union later, and it persisted after World War II. Josip Broz Tito emerged as a hero and a leader from the war and ruled it with a constant display of independence from the Soviet Union. It was “socialist” without the grey face of Stalinism. You could feel that.

It seems funny now to say that Yugoslavia was a nice place, but it really seemed that way to me, naive as I was. We know now that it was an uneasy coalition of ethnic groups who hated each other, and Tito was the only thing holding them together. Once he died, that became all too apparent as it dissolved into murderous wars, atrocities, NATO bombing, trials at the World Court, and separation into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. As near as I can recall, we only went to Slovenia and Croatia. I think this is Zagreb, which is now Croatia.

The book Balkan Ghosts (Robert Kaplan) details their ancient grudges and just how much they hated each other. This book was apparently influential with President Clinton at the time, as he tried to understand why the first European war since WW II was breaking out there.

Of course, as tourists we didn’t see any of that.

Back to Munich

After Zagreb, we went to Ljubljana, Salzburg, and back to Munich. I don’t have any good photos or stories about those. Slovenia is a perfectly beautiful place and I’d love to go back there.

On My Own, to Rome

After the trip was over, I took the train down to Rome. I’m going to break my promise about pictures of buildings here. You have to go to the Colosseum when you’re in Rome, right?

Rome was crowded and dirty, and full of tourists. Great food, though.

In the Sistine Chapel I met up with another American, and we travelled together to Florence and Padua. Another broken promise here: a photo of Michelangelo’s David.

Florence was also full of tourists. There was never a time when I couldn’t hear English being spoken somewhere. The museums were all crowded.

Pisa

Every tourist has to take this stupid picture, right?

Padua

Padua is about 20 miles from Venice. There’s a lot to see there, and my companion and I were going to go to Venice the next day. I was getting sick of him, so I took the train in the other direction, to Switzerland.

Switzerland, Paris, London

In Switzerland, I went to Bern, Lucerne, and then to Grindelwald. It’s a spectacularly beautiful country, as everyone knows.

It’s also full of smug, nasty people who are interested in you only insofar as they can get your money. Switzerland is the only country I’ve ever been to that I have no desire to go back to.

I’d been thinking of going to the South of France, but I was overcome with a desire to go to an English-speaking place, so where else would you go but London? I changed trains in Paris, and contrary to the stereotype, I found Parisians perfectly nice folks. My advice: just don’t act like an Ugly American.

All my slides of London are boring. One story worth repeating is this:

I was at a train station and fell into conversation with a couple blokes. One said he was dreaming of going to America and visiting all the places that are mentioned in blues songs. He told me he wasn’t using his flat, and I could stay there if I wanted. I could just lean on the door and it would open.

Amazingly, I went there and it did. I slept on the floor, and I remember the bathroom walls being so narrow I could touch both elbows to opposite walls at the same time. He left me a note welcoming me and inviting me to call if I needed anything.

I told my older brother about this later, and he expressed horror: “You don’t know what he had in mind! It could be some kind of setup!”

Well, I probably wouldn’t do this now. But hey, I was young and it was an adventure.

I really wanted to go to Parliament and watch Question Time. Usually this is boring and there’s no problem getting in, but this was May, 1982 during the Falklands War, and Mrs. Thatcher was having an entertaining time with the Labor opposition. I didn’t manage to get in.

Back to Munich

I took the train back to Munich for the return flight. On the train, I was with some Japanese students, and one of them had something wrong with his ticket or passport, I don’t remember what.

The German train conductor looked at it and said, “Nichts! Nichts!” I don’t remember what happened next, exactly, but he wasn’t thrown off the train at least.

Next Week

In 1989 I went to Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong, for seven weeks total. Some good slides there.