(September 11, 2023: Frankfurt am Main)
For years we talked about going to Europe together, but life always got in the way. We would talk about places we would visit, the friends we’d drop in to say hi to, the food we would try — but nothing would ever come to fruition. At least we had two trips to Japan together — where I realize in retrospect we weren’t good travel partners because I was too pushy and overeager, and she wanted very regimented and curated experiences., and even in our travels we found ourselves wandering apart more than we would be together. But for Europe? We didn’t have the money, and then when we didn’t have the time, and then eventually, we no longer had each other.
I was going to do this for myself, then. Why not? This was going to be my way to prove to myself I could move on, I could get by, I could be a stranger in a strange land and find myself on the other side of the planet in some weird quixotic ideal of reverse-colonialist fervor, a random Filipino-American bouncing across the European countryside, chasing rare bird alerts, hopping couches and stopping at hostels, taking my forty-four-year-old recently divorced ass across the continent in search of Dulcinea, and maybe a windmill or two to tilt.
But of course, I had to get there in the first place. See that date up there?
Yeah, folks, we’d all, of course, been holding off on everything for two long years thanks to COVID, and that meant I’d scraped up a nest egg of savings and PTO days from my social services work by assiduously masking, not spending my stray funds on avocado toast and Twitch streams or my Steam deck or whatever the hell the media tells us “elder millennials” are supposedly spending money on, and I was still completely in the weeds and trapped in Austin. Not everyone who lives in Austin realizes you can get to Europe nonstop using one of three airlines (four back in 2023), with three destinations available: Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt. I knew I wanted the continent. I wanted quick access to the European rail network, and I also wanted to be dumped in a country where my default languages (English, Spanish, and Japanese) weren’t going to be the default.
And then a dear old friend got wind of my plans and said he had miles to burn and he would be happy to spend those miles on me.
The very first lesson of this trip, which must be addressed and acknowledged before I even set foot out the door to take the first step to Europe is that at no point in time did I do this “on my own“. Without the coworkers at my nonprofit who covered for me while I was out for three weeks, the housemates who gave me a place to stay without paying exorbitant market rent, and then many, many friends and family who encouraged me to go and do this at all and gave me so much of the time, space, and resources with which to do it — without all of them, none of this happens.
And then it’s just hurdle after hurdle and even with the ticket in hand and my rail pass booked, it still looked like this trip was doomed. My passport had expired, so I apply months out. I get my passport, but it’s a close call, just two or three weeks before the flight date. The Friday before I leave, I manage to not only get myself rear-ended on my rental e-bike (barely avoiding injury), but I lose my wallet along Town Lake on a different rental e-bike that afternoon. Somehow, Austin PD manages to contact me and I’m able to get my wallet back on Saturday, though not until most of my cards had already been cancelled. So I would have to do this trip with cash on hand and continuously shift money from my main bank account to my backup (which I had been using for DoorDash) to make anything work. Friends offer to float me small loans to get out there.
I get out to the airport. I have my backpack full of clothes and medications and travel toiletries and my BIPAP bag. I’ve got an eSim card set up. This is happening. By chance, there is a small unit temporarily based out of Austin that morning visiting from Saguenay, Quebec — a couple of sleek jets scream into the foggy Texas sky to go mock-dogfight with our air force trainees. They’re AlphaJets — a French / German collaboration.
I close my eyes, and I’m on a Lufthansa 787-9, cruising across the Atlantic. I can’t plug in my BIPAP, so I watch movies and TV shows as you do when the in-flight wifi peters out as it inevitably seems to do if you’re in economy.
I close my eyes again. We land. There are … air stairs. And a bus? What the…
Frankfurt Airport is, charitably speaking, not what I would consider an ideal welcome to Europe. Rather, it is the nightmarish chaos of lines seemingly in triplicate, full of passengers from all over the world who are panicked because half of them have to catch a flight in another terminal, at least a few of them are extra nervous because every other damn American still grouses when they have to travel on The Anniversary of That Day, and none of this is helpful when you are confronted with a byzantine array of corridors, many of which somehow manage to still not be marked in English.
Throw everything you’ve been told about “German efficiency” out the window, ’cause this ain’t any of it. I manage to find my way to the right line and get my passport stamped and also manage to get my eSim card working. At last. I can access my Eurail Pass and get out of transit hell, and after I drop off my backpack and most of my gear, it’s still mid-afternoon and I am next to delirious from sleep deprivation and jet lag, and badly in need of my daily meditation and centering.
I walk out the door of my hostel, and down a concrete path to see a small, manicured park. Gateway Gardens. Chattering away in a massive oak tree, are tiny songbirds. Eurasian Blue Tits. Great Tits. A Short-toed Tree-Creeper.
All right. There we freaking go.
Look, I am gregarious and I can talk your head off about damn near anything, but please do not mistake this for being extraverted. I love talking to individuals, but people, especially in herds, exhaust me.
No. I recharge with birds. I’m part of that tribe.
If figure, all right, let’s keep going. I have my wallet, I have my camera and binoculars, might as well jaunt over to the best game in town.
Just like that, all the fog of chaos parts, and I have my path laid out before me like a beacon.
I was going to be fine. I was there. I had, for now, traded H-E-B and Randall’s for REWE and LIDL, taquerias for donerias, kolaches for the treats at the Bäckerei.
The day had just begun, and I was as refreshed as if I’d had a full night’s rest. It was time to explore.
Stories That Are All True 