European Adventure (or Misadventure?) Part 2

The next part of our adventure was starting, but it looks like I was not too impressed (or maybe not happy?). On a postcard to my Aunt Jackie I wrote:

Bonjour! We were at Versailles but weren’t too impressed… We have a real weird lady in our room who keeps on making statements such as the Mona Lisa is a man, and the crown jewels are fake, believing them absolutely. ..I don’t know how long we will take up north, but it is supposed to be expensive, so probably not long...

Postcard from France

This part of the trip is a bit hazy in my mind. I think we went to Denmark first, where we were greeted by the Little Mermaid. We could see it from the shore. Then we travelled to Oslo, and finished up in Sweden where we caught the ferry to East Germany. We didn’t stay long in any place.

Wikipedia notes that “The Little Mermaid is a bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen, depicting a mermaid becoming human. The sculpture is displayed on a rock by the waterside at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is 1.25 metres tall and weighs 175 kilograms.”

We wandered through the streets in Denmark, and I believe it was there that we purchased a most amazing Danish for breakfast from a bakery, accompanied by cold milk. It was so delicious I never forgot it. My postcard was a cartoon to John and Lisl with a policeman holding back people to allow a duck and its ducklings to cross the road. I wrote the following:

I am sleeping in bunkbeds all the time and having a pretty good time. I miss you all very much, and think I will be home before Christmas as Europe does not really have what legends in Canada say. But I wouldn’t have missed coming for anything. We came to Copenhagen on a night train and go on to Oslo by a big boat. Love Laurie

Postcard from Denmark

Notice the “pretty good”. Talk about faint praise. My time in Europe was full of emotional turmoil and uncertainty. We never stopped to settle and create a life, we were constantly “visitors”, and the trip taught me that I didn’t like being a visitor. You don’t get to actually get to know people, and I wanted closer connections.

I wrote about my visit with the family in Oslo, our trip on the ferry to Germany and missing the stop for West Berlin in my Response to Anne’s European Adventure earlier in this blog. But I never showed you the pictures of the time we were in Berlin. One of the first things we saw besides the train station was an old bombed out church. By this point the Germans had cleared away all the damage from the bombings in the war, but they left this one church to remind themselves and the world of how terrible war is. Note: It doesn’t seem to have worked, but it was interesting to see.

I mentioned Checkpoint Charlie in the same entry above. Below is a postcard of that area which we walked through to get into East Berlin. I remember we had to change our money into a small amount of East German money. Margaret bought something, but all I found was a birthday card for my brother John. I wrote to my mom on this card, saying:

Don’t be too upset about the depressed letter I wrote from the North, for I am feeling better now. … We have really fallen in love with Berlin. This is the place where we crossed the wall to East Berlin. It was a real experience to cope with officialdom there. I had to spend 5 marks so I bought John a Birthday surprise… I think we are coming home on Dec. 14, I hope you don’t mind.

Postcard to Barbara Thornber

I’m not sure why my mother would mind, but nevertheless, after Berlin we travelled to Munich, in the south of the country. There we had some fascinating experiences. We visited Dachau, the Concentration Camp just outside of the city. This was a sad place to go to, but I don’t remember it much. Just rows of well-kept small buildings. There were also some exhibits well curated, but I have no recollection of them now.

We were there in October, so it was Octoberfest, which we joined in on happily. We heard about a Beer factory tour which we joined, and that is where I learned to like beer. They had nothing else available, and it was offered free. The public Beer Halls were enormous, and we did enjoy ourselves there. You could relax and feel a bit invisible as no one paid any attention to us.

And after that we went east to Austria. I believe it was in Vienna that I was approached quietly by an older woman (probably younger than us now), saying in English “You want a place to stay?” I spoke to the Margaret and the other people there, and we asked her the cost. We went to her home where they provided us with a couple of bedrooms. It was a nice place to stay. I felt bad as I knocked a small framed picture off the wall, but the husband reassured me and soon had it back in place.

In Vienna we actually did see the famous white horses, the Lipizzaner horses. We didn’t see the show, but saw the horses exercise. We also didn’t get to see the Viennese Boys Choir, as there were no concerts happening. How embarrassing that the only things I knew about were the things profiled by Walt Disney. I was only 19, but my world knowledge was very limited. What we did get to do was go to the Opera in Vienna and see a full length opera. I’m not sure which, but what I do remember is that we bought standing tickets, which means you stand at the back. We lined up behind a crowd, and when ushers removed the rope guard everyone started running upstairs as fast as they could for an enormous number of stairs. I couldn’t believe it, but ran with them. Then we were stopped, until finally they allowed us to run upstairs again to the very top of the theatre rows. And then people kept running, looking for the best place to stand to see the stage. After that the actual performance was anticlimatic, although I think I enjoyed it.

The other thing we did in Austria was go to an area of Vienna where we were told you could buy very green wine for very low prices. Of course we had to check it out, and had a very nice night there drinking wine. Green wine can also make you very sick the next morning so be warned.

Moving on to Switzerland, we decided we didn’t want another city. So we chose Grindelwald, a small village in the mountains. There was a lovely Youth Hostel there, but they had 3 levels of bunkbeds in rooms with maybe 3 or 4 sets of bunkbeds. We were young, and slept fine in them, but now I wouldn’t want to do itThe first night there was a man planning to make a Swiss fondue. A bunch of us chipped in money, and 12 to 15 of us sat around eating a genuine Swiss fondue. The next day we went climbing up one of the mountains. Locals passed us by, but we enjoyed being out in the fresh air.

What I remember about Switzerland were the small wooden sculptures. I bought one to bring home, and this postcard to remind me of the ones I had seen.

Somewhere in there Bing found some new friends and said goodbye to us. He was a friendly, quiet and unassuming fellow. What I remember most about him is how he was asked to open his suitcase as we passed the border somewhere. Margaret and I were not asked at all, and we decided it was because the soldier was a man and wanted to see what North American men carried with them.

We took the train down into Italy where we went to Rome and Florence. An Italian man sat in our compartment, and talked with Margaret all night while I slept. He taught her Italian.

Rome wasn’t that interesting. We went to see and hear the Pope speak, but I couldn’t believe how people cheered and acted, standing on chairs to take his picture. I regret now that we didn’t get to Venice, but Florence was amazing. The David sculpture by Michelangelo overwhelmed me. When I looked at the sculpture I could see every vein in his body.

We also saw the Sistine Chapel, which was fascinating, but it didn’t touch me in the same way. In a world where wild paintings and bright colours were scarce, it must have been fantastic.

Our next stop was Spain, and again we hooked up with a bunch of travellers our age. We stopped in Madrid where I had hoped to visit the Prada Art Gallery, but one of the women with us got extremely sick. We were only there for a few hours for a transfer, and we stayed to get her some help and look after her. So we missed the opportunity to see the Prada (Spanish Art Gallery) but she was very grateful.

Our final stop before returning to England was Malaga, on the coast in the south. There markets full of all kinds of fish, pink and green, and all very strange. We separated at a market there, and that was fine except I was followed by a strange man. I got nervous, but heard a couple nearby speaking English, and I asked to join them. They let me walk along with them for a while, and the man disappeared. In that entire trip that was the only thing that happened that scared me, but it was quickly solved.

We returned to London, and I took a trip up to Sunderland where my Grandpa McGuigan had a cousin and his family. I called them and travelled north to see them, thinking I would stay one or two nights and go north to Scotland. But they were so hospitable, it felt so relaxing to be looked after by the wife, and I was so tired of meeting new people that I stayed with them until I had to return back to London to catch our plane home. Their son took me to the bar and introduced me the Shandy, a drink women drink, he said. However, I never saw the two places I really wanted to see, Scotland and Ireland. I thought I would someday return, but that is not looking too likely now.

After we returned I only spoke to Margaret once more. We were very different people with different needs and desires, that became evident as we travelled. Once we moved on to working and education, our ways parted. I think I was a difficult travel companion for her, but she was the wrong companion for me too. I only took 3 pictures. Here they are:

The Eiffel tower, Bing and Margaret and a ship we stayed on in Sweden.
It was a converted Youth Hostel.

This is the first time I have ever written or talked about the entire trip. It has been interesting to explore my memories. I had never understood where my interest in visual art came from, and I see from writing that one of the main things we did on our trip was visit Art Galleries. Combining that interest with my time in publishing and performing groups explains a lot why I gravitated to the arts once I had to find a job.

We never had any of the adventures I was expecting, but I am very glad that I had the opportunity to take the trip. And I think now that the trip introduced me to the history of the Western world. I never felt the trip. had been an actual success, and as you can see the ambiguity I felt as we travelled and returned home. However, looking at the entire three month trip, it was actually quite amazing that Margaret and I, two young Canadian women each 19 years old, took such an enormous trip with limited cash and one travel book. Travelling to Europe was something many young people did at that time, and I am glad that I had the opportunity to join them. I learned about myself and my interests, saw an enormous number of places and people, and built my personal, emotional and political being on the experience. It made me what I was to become.