romania russia ukraine
Earlier this week, I resumed an old habit of mine that I had missed; I went to the library for the first time this year. Where I used to live the local library was in easy walking distance of my place and I took great advantage of that quick access. Sadly that is no longer the case where I currently live, but on my two quick visits to this new library, it also seems to be a worthwhile place to spend some time. I am not sure if I will resume my weekly habit of reading the current issue of Astronomy magazine or maybe an issue of Popular Photography, but I enjoyed knowing that it was there for me if I wanted it. Plus I was able to get some guidebooks on Romania, Russia and Ukraine.
Despite the warning that diarrhea is a guarantee when one visits Ukraine, I think that that country is my first choice for my sojourn this year. Russia certainly has an allure, but sometimes the sheer expanse of the country seems to overwhelm me even though I know that I would probably restrict myself to just Moscow and St. Petersburg. Then there is Romania who cannot decide whether or not to love or hate its Dracula heritage.
I can’t say how much trust I put in what I read in travel guidebooks, because what I see when I get to these places seldom matches what I was told in the books. Oh, the famous attractions might be the same, but my personal experience is usually quite different from the helpful tips and anecdotes found in the books. For example, nothing that I read in a guidebook fully prepared me for the experience of dragging my luggage through the JR station in Kyoto. I knew full well that my hotel was located just a couple of floors above the tracks, but that foreknowledge does not suggest a sweaty journey of weaving through crowds with kilos worth of luggage looking for a sign with my hotel name on it. Once I had been there a day or two, the layout of the building started to make more sense to me, but that initial exposure was quite confusing if not frustrating. For a moment, I began to doubt that I would ever find where I needed to go. Nor could I ever have predicted the quaint and touching limited English exchanges that I had in various JR stations when I needed to book various passages on trains. To this day, I am grateful for the patience of the Japanese staff that I met in the JR stations who were more than willing to help the American man who spoke no Japanese except for a handful of words gained from pop culture. All that I could say was thank you once the transaction had finally been completed.
Perhaps I sound somewhat angry about what happened, but that is not my intent. I learned so much about the Japanese people and myself from these experiences. Until the day I die I will never forget the young attractive Japanese woman in the hotel restaurant in the city of Hakata who literally carried the poster board size menu from the front of the restaurant over to my table so that I could point out what I wanted to order. It might have been slightly embarrassing at the time, but it solved our limited communication problem and I did not walk away hungry.
