Remembering first trip to Europe in 1983

Family was talking travel yesterday and my sister+brother in law compared visiting Dubrovnik in 1980's Yugoslavia with a more recent visit made by my parents.

For me looking at old photos, I miss my gorgeous thick dark hair, gone now. In fact I looked quite Mediterranean in my younger days.

I fondly remember the old Italian train compartments with the opposing benches that pulled together for a couchette arrangements. Interesting times at night.

We've only been going to Europe since 2008 - but I'm always amazed at how many new buildings there are in London. We usually get over every other year and in that time there has been the 'cheese grater'...the 'walkie talkie'...the Shard. If I look at photos I took whilst at the tower of London towards the Gherkin, the landscape has really changed. Now the work at Waterloo - that will look totally different in a few years.

We lived in Germany 1957-1962 (I was young). During this time, we visited a town in Serbia where my Grandfather was born. We have some pictures, especially some of my grandmother looking for graves in the cemetary.

I was looking at an old photo album a few months ago and trying to decide to scan into Shutterfly or not. My first trip (1993) was a Globus if this is Tuesday this must be Belgium type of trip. I learned several things during that trip that I still use today.

1. I am not a group tour type of gal. It drove me crazy to have to be out the door, limited time in a place that I loved and there is always an ugly American or two in the group.

2. I don't like changing hotels each night or two.
3. I like really seeing one region and would rather do that region well than see several countries through a bus window.
4. I was so innocent about how to travel, what to expect etc. but it gave me the travel bug that I don't want to swat and get rid of.
5. I bought so many souvenirs. Now I just take photos and make an album.

A memory yes and not as much a fond one, about a train couchette and three unrelated couples on an overnight trip. Who makes the first suggestion to convert the bench seats into a sleeping platform and then the other decisions that must be made?

I love reading my old journals and noticing how unprepared I was for travel!
In 1990 I wrote:

Paris: "First night in the Latin Quarter hotel - shoebox size room with a window opening onto a decaying courtyard. Next time book an early reservation somewhere else."
"Spent two hours on the metro trying to figure how to get to our friend's apartment."

Zermatt, Switzerland "Unfortunately we didn't have enough Swiss Francs to ride the lift up the Matterhorn, but after several tries at various shops we succeeded in cashing a travelers check."

Nancy,
Completely agree with your comments. Our trip was 5 countries, 13 people (a few that were just annoying) all 1-2 night stays, mostly in hostels, lots of souvenirs (still have the music boxes I bought in Florence), and way too many hours on a bus seeing the gorgeous countryside through windows, and a German bus driver that was always lost, asking directions in German and expecting to understand Italian or French? But. The travel virus for Europe I caught that trip stayed with me and must have been contagious, as my husband has it too.

My first trip to Europe was in 1975 for a month and I was by myself. I sure gained a lot of confidence in that trip. Right off the bat, I handed the train station clerk my Eurail card. I should have written the dates on a piece of paper and got the clerk to agree with the dates. Instead I just handed the card to the clerk and of course she wrote the wrong dates in. When I told her she was wrong, she crossed out the dates and wrote new ones above the crossed out dates. Now it looked like i had forged the pass. I had to take two train trips using the pass before I got to Munich where a sympathetic Eurail employee believed my story and issued me a new pass. She told me I was very lucky that the conductor didn't stop the train and kick me off. On he way home, my plane (a 747) had fires in two engines. We were over the Atlantic and declared an emergency. There were storms in Greenland and on the East Coast and the pilot thought it was too dangerous to land in a storm with only two engines, so we tried to fly around the storm. Unfortunately, we were too low with only two engines, so we flew thru the storm and landed in Chicago.
I learned that a 747 can fly a long ways with just two engines, even in bad weather.

I was trying to remember how I got from Chartres to Brussels on my first trip abroad in 1972, so I dug out my journal.

I was a little shocked at how little I seemed to know, and at what an Ugly American I was at times. Here are the two paragraphs:

"Finally got the 11:47 train for Paris, after spending an hour getting traveler’s cheque changed. Train station guy wouldn’t change it, just waved me away, typical. Also typical was “man on street” who led me blocks to the (only) exchange. Got to Paris at 12:45 and took until two to get across town. North station, not East. So I walked over there. Guy at window, again, just told me “North,” not how to get there.

Then, nobody would tell me what to do with my bicycle. I finally found the place, tucked off in a corner. But, too late to put on train with me, so put on train after mine, at about 7. I left at 3:26. OK trip, arrived at Brussels at about 6:30 PM. My bike, however, couldn’t be picked up until the next day at 2 or 3. I threw a fit (no luggage and having to start for Cologne that late.) "

I did learn a lot on that trip, and have continued to fine tune my behavior, so my missteps are fewer and more amusing, rather than embarrassing.

I fondly remember the old Italian train compartments with the opposing benches that pulled together for a couchette arrangements. Interesting times at night.

LOL, David! I remember those from my trip in 1972! Very disquieting to a naive University student from MN.

My journal from that trip mentions:

• British hotel clerk who asked what time my friend and I wanted to be "knocked up" in the morning!
• Arriving in Ostend after an overnight trip, a group of us, who spent the night in one of the couchette arrangements David mentioned, order "Parisier Toast" at for breakfast. We thought "Oh good! French toast!" We received, basically, hot ham-and-cheese sandwiches. We were stupified!

We slept on trains a lot to save money. Not these days: I want my bed and shower!

Hi,

I went over a year later than you. After a seven year pause, I went back solo in August 1984 at 34. It was my third trip, flew Condor SFO to Frankfurt, and had planned as a short one of three weeks but on the third full day I got sick, ran a temperature, lasted a week, and I didn't bring my usual OTC meds to deal with this. In spite of being ill, I made it back to (West) Berlin by flying in from Hannover, which I had not seen in 11 years, returned to Paris, went to Brussels and Waterloo. Being sick with a fever was no fun, especially on a short trip to start with. I took slides with my simple Konica 35 mm camera.

My first vacation in Europe was a summer-long trip in 1972, when I was 20 I was better prepared than most young travelers since I had started reading guide books in my mid-teens. However, the weather was cooler than I had expected in northern Europe and I really needed a warm layer of some sort. Instead of buying a sweater I soldiered on. I didn't have much momey, and it never occurred to me that I could buy something that would make me more comfortable. How dumb was that?

The final weeks of the trip are sort of hazy since I had a bad cold and was really dragging. I do, however, remember the incredibly bad food provided on the 2-week student trip to the USSR--the only affordable way to see the USSR at that time, because all the hotels were state-owned and grotesquely overpriced. The student tour group was housed in dorms with cot-like beds. We were taken to a surprising number of Lenin-related sites only to discover toward the end of the trip that our minders incorrectly assumed we were members of some sort of young-Communists organization!

Even aside from the time in the USSR, that wasn't a terribly comfortable summer: straw mattresses in a London hostel and meals taken in the cheapest places I could find. But I think it was a very good first experience, because I am happy to this day to stay in small, simply-furnished hotel rooms as long as the basics are provided. But I am very happy that I can now afford decent food.

Karen, I too took my first trip to Europe in 1983. Like you, I was surprised to see signs in German & English. I too tried to get into a disco in one of the hotels I was staying at but was denied access (not sure why). I was in my early 20's and traveling alone and like @Nancy I took a Globus Gateway tour. Unlike Karen, our bus driver was very good and always amazed me how he fit that bus through some of the narrow streets we went through. I was also amazed to see cars passing each other on 2 lane roads with oncoming traffic. The car being passed and the oncoming car moved over to the shoulder and the over taking car went up the center. Sadly, I no longer see that discipline on German roads. After my tour was over I had a rental car for 5 more nights. My tour stayed exclusively in Germany and since then I have not taken another tour on any of my trips back to Europe. The funny thing about souvenirs is that I bought some family members a cuckoo clock but not one for myself. I do not know why. However, I now have my parents clock. I have always driven on my return trips except for the last trip over this past December when we took the train for the first time. I really do need to dig out my old slides and take a trip down memory lane.

My first trip was to Italy in 1989, I was stationed in Southern Italy with the Air Force for four years. I visited Rome in 1991 for a few days and finally returned in 2014. The big difference I noticed was the amount of people/tourists in Rome itself as compared to 23 years prior. I toured the Vatican both times and the crowds were much larger this time, but I seem to noticed that I toured more rooms in the museum in 1991 then in 2014. It felt like only about half of what the Vatican holds/has was available for viewing this time. One of these days I plan on returning to Southern Italy so I can visit my old haunts & see the town I lived in, San Michele Salentino.

I have a shelf full of unfinished journals, too (now trip reports take their place).

My first trip: I was seven. I remember it like it was yesterday.

My first trip on my own was many years later. After perusing the country-guide brochures from the national tourist offices (remember the big brown envelopes?), I flew standby in and out of London for $200 each way. Standby was different in England, I went to the airport very early in the morning to get on the standby list, but instead I had to reserve a seat three days later! I used my 30 pounds sterling very carefully to last three days (B&B was 10 or 15, with breakfast), and went to lots of free museums. I remember a very nasty swan at the Serpentine.

I rode in the six-seat compartments as described in a previous post. I bought a Biglietto Chilometrico (3000 kilometers in 60 or 90 days), maybe two of them, and covered Italy by train. The fast train was the Rapido (the "R" symbol for the Rapido is now the Regionale symbol).

I spent four months in Italy (pre-Schengen) and it was a fabulous trip, and I had done it all by myself (with the help of those TI brochures).

My first trip to Europe was between my junior and senior year of high school as a summer AFS student, the first from my school. I spent 10 weeks with a family of five outside of Oslo.
The scariest part was getting from the airport in New York to the hotel where we met with the group going to Scandinavia. No airport pick ups. We needed to learn to be self sufficient.

We were restricted on the amount of spending money we could bring so that we didn't act like the rich Americans. Hah! My AFS brother and sisters had much more spending money than I did. It was on this trip that I learned to appreciate fine wine, good beer and cognac. It was quite an education for a small town girl.

I made baked beans, the food of my people in Maine, and was asked what type of wine should be served with them.

We spent time at the farm that had been in the family for hundreds of years, by then only a summer home. We got a call from the working farm down the road, owned by another AFS host family, that their cows had escaped and they needed help driving them along the road the six miles back. Not a problem. I had a bit of a crush on their oldest son.

Family from Munich visited for a week. Around the dinner table there were those who spoke German, Turkish, Norwegian and English. Only a very few spoke more than one or two of these. The jokes definitely lost something in translation.

I watched Nixon resign and listened to my host father say that only in America could there be that peaceful transfer of power. He explained that in any other country such events would result in violence. I learned that you often need to see your own country through the eyes of others to really appreciate it.

This was a transformative summer. Thanks for making me remember.

My sister just remembers paying the equivalent in Lire of 5 EUR per night at a pension in Venice. She wishes she kept the receipt.

I was in my early 20s (1975) and was stationed in Germany. I remember the awesome exchange rate for dollars to Deutchmarks (sp). Most of my travel within Germany was by train, loved them then and still do. On a trip back to the US for family emergency via commercial airline, was shocked to see police and military personnel with dogs and machine guns strolling the airport. This was the age of Baader-Minhoff (sp) terrorists and kidnappings. So really nothing new there.

Days when a rail pass was really a rail pass. Just hopped on a train and went.

In B&B's, the bathroom and toilet were always down the hall, with an occasional stall shower (the old flimsy things) in a room.

Having to exchange currency at the train station in each new country and how beautiful the bills were.

So few American tourists in general.

Sex bars (bars with porno movies) located in the business district as well as the so much more relaxed attitude about nudity.

Hi,

Traveling in Europe in the mid-1980s was still basically the same as it was in the 1970s in manner and style. If you went to commie East Berlin, you would have noticed that the Doric columns and buildings were still black. On that 1984 trip, I took a guided bus tour from west Berlin, ie, Kurfüstendamm, that focused only on East Berlin, the show case of the DDR, went through the commie red tap with the passport check on the tour bus at Checkpoint Charlie, obviously no one was permitted to get off, saw the Brandenburger Gate , the eastern side, only from the tour bus. We were allowed to get off at Museum Island, enter the museum, and also at Treptow, where we could walk the grounds of that huge Soviet military cemetery and memorial. It was stunning, to say the least, and I noticed a group of French soldiers all in their dress uniforms also visiting this site.

My sister just remembers paying the equivalent in Lire of 5 EUR per night at a pension in Venice. She wishes she kept the receipt.

Me too, Sam! We did Europe on $5 a Day and spent about $1000 each for 7 weeks, including air, Eurail passes, souvenirs and family gifts. Luckily we had a few nights of free lodging due to relatives of relatives we stayed with in Sweden and Germany. How we sweated every dime we spent!

@Fred, thanks for the reminder. My Globus Gateway tour had us stay 2 nights in East Berlin in September of 1983. we passed through Checkpoint Charley also and were not allowed of of the bus. East German police gathered our passports and searched the underside of the bus as we awaited clearance. I was surprised at how bad East Berlin looked 40 years after the war. The best way I have been able to describe the difference between East & West Berlin at that time is to picture yourself as Dorothy opening her front door when she landed in Oz. Her surroundings went from black & white to color. We were allowed to walk around our hotel if we wished. Not only did I get to see the Berlin Wall, which I knew about, but I also saw the tall fence with guard towers in the countryside separating East Germany from West Germany. Quite an eye opener.

@ John...That was my first time in East Berlin by way of a guided tour in August of 1984, mainly I wanted to see the Brandenburg Gate from the east side. When you see the historical photos and paintings , they are depicting Berlin seen always from the eastern side. This is prior to 1933.

Three years later in August 1987 I went for day again solo to East Berlin by way of Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. This time I was on foot. Of course, no photos were allowed, stumbled on to the changing of the guard event (Wachablösung), with the troops (NVA) doing their goose-stepping routine. Like other tourists watching, I stood there too clicking away with my 35 mm camera. I just walked around Unter den Linden, Pariser Platz, Friedrichstraße...all the time you knew some Vopo was watching you. You may not see them but they could always see you and I knew that.

Even when no other tourists were around, ie, you were the only one and I came across a Vopo, I was never stopped and questioned, never asked to produce my passport and that one day visa you were required to get to cross over to East Berlin.

Good, fitting comparison between B/W and color with Dorothy. Language -wise there was no English at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, or anywhere else, cafes, etc. Everything was in German, menus, even in that big international hotel on Friedrichstrasse where the Westin is today. I went there once to blow the money on lunch since it was worthless once you were in the West. It could not be exchanged and no one wanted it In that hotel the waiters knew you were a tourist and automatically started speaking German to you. If you want that similar linguistic experience, visit the towns in eastern Germany or the outer eastern districts of Berlin today.