Getting Started

Life has just gotten in the way of putting serious effort into establishing and starting a blog to share, and to archive, our sights and experiences from May 19 to June 5, when we traveled to Eastern Europe and enjoyed a river boat cruise on the Danube.

And this is truly a retrospective, because right now I'm sitting in Vail, CO, on July 6, and realizing, looking back, that this is what they now call a "teaching moment." You'll find, in the following narrative, that we thoroughly enjoyed the firsthand experience of seeing the lovely art and architecture of Eastern Europe. And you'll find that we were not totally enchanted with everything we felt along the way.

One of the major things we've learned, and especially with a few weeks and days back home and in Colorado, is that nowhere we traveled did we feel the absence of tension, the joye de vivre, the open friendliness, the feeling of relaxed social equality, lack of animosity, the feeling that we're just a couple of nice people traveling through this space and time, that we feel in all the places we've traveled in the U.S.

What is the lesson here? We wonder. Because throughout this trip the citizens we encountered, with little exception, gave us the distinct impression that they would be very happy if we just disappeared. And you know what? I actually don't blame them....although we (tourists) are bringing a lot of money into their economy and into their lives, we're concurrently destroying their way of life. Small villages of little over 1,000 permanent inhabitants are seeing over a million tourists annually tramp through their home areas, small cobblestone streets, narrow sidewalks, postage stamp size shops, all within a 4 month timespan. We carry the picture in our minds of what must have been an 85+ year old woman, struggling with difficulty through the crowds on a cane, walking through a village probably doing her daily shopping, and we carry the feeling of sadness for her and those like her, who probably feel little economic advantage from our being there. Imagine if that happened to us? And in large cities like Prague, the volume is exponentially just as huge...town squares and cafes are swamped with people demanding fast service, often requesting food/drink that is totally out of sync with the culture and customs.
How would you maintain a cheery, hospitable demeanor in the face of all this?

So, having procrastinated long enough, here goes....and HOW it will go is yet to be determined. I've considered a number of different approaches to adequately capturing it all, and finally decided to just jump in and set things down in a chronological timeline. It's been a real learning experience in many ways!