ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 2).

Ostrava, 1989.

Having resolved to resume contact with my Czech acquaintance Ladislav in the post-Velvet Revolution, pre-Internet winter of 1989-90, I counted myself fortunate to still have his postal address. It had somehow survived unscathed when most of my belongings were stolen in Madrid the previous November. In January, I took pen in hand to congratulate him on the wonderful transformations in Czechoslovakia.

In those archaic times, mail could take ten days or more each way, back and forth across the Atlantic, and so it wasn’t overly alarming when no immediate response was forthcoming. Perhaps the seismic shift in Czechoslovakia had impacted the recovering country’s mail carriers, or more likely, Ladislav’s obvious connections to a now discredited ruling order were such that he wasn’t in a good position to answer.

Granted, there’d been almost no violence during a remarkably peaceful, orderly changeover in Czechoslovakia, hence the revolution’s “velvet” descriptive tag, and yet … who really knew? It was a long way off, scores were being settled in various ways, and communications were not instantaneous like today. Even phone calls could be difficult to place to a country where the totalitarian structure had routinely monitored them only a short time before.

Twice more in early 1990 I wrote to Ladislav, each time enclosing souvenirs from Indiana and Kentucky, including American beer coasters for use in his Tiki Bar, but still there was only silence in return. Soon an entire year had passed since our chat, and the usual stressors of everyday living gradually displaced the glories of my 1989 journey to Europe. Back into the workaday grind I sank, and memories of Ladislav grew increasingly dim.

One day in July, my roomie phoned to announce that the mail had included a letter from Czechoslovakia. Upon closer examination, the return address was mysterious, and the message inside, written by an English-speaking friend of Ladislav’s daughter from a small town near Ostrava, was unexpected.

She thanked me for the letters and gifts, but regretted to say that Ladislav had died of a heart attack, aged 65, in July – of 1989! Remarkably, his sudden death had come less than a month after I departed Ostrava for a wedding in Prague, and then to Moscow.

I was crestfallen to realize that he had been denied the chance to witness the change he’d been so sure was imminent. With sadness, I drove to Sportstime Pizza for a few rounds of Pilsner Urquell as an impromptu memorial.

---

Still reeling from the bad news, I arrived home the very next day to find yet another letter for me. This time it was a big manila envelope from an organization called Education for Democracy (EFD), and inside was the information I’d supposedly requested, which was fine, except I’d never, ever heard of EFD and assuredly had not asked for anything to be sent to me, but just the same, quite soon my heart was racing with excitement.

This unsolicited letter described the outline of an unprecedented opportunity for Americans to volunteer for placement in Czechoslovakia as conversational English instructors. No licenses or credentials were required, although previous teaching experience of any sort was a plus. It was a development made possible by the cooperation of American and Czech academics, who sought to take advantage of the Velvet Revolution’s opening by bringing people together ... to learn and speak English.

The words, the ideas, the sentiments – all of it had been discussed with Ladislav that night at the Tiki Bar in Ostrava, with shots of Havana Club in hand. Now with the providential mailing spread before me on the table, my immediate reaction was to thank Ladislav profusely for referring me to the organization, and yet there was a small, nagging problem: He was dead.

Not only was he dead, but he had died five months before the abrupt success of the Velvet Revolution made the EFD program and others like it possible. He could not have known, and yet there was no rational explanation for the unsolicited mailing. It made me pause. I’m not the sort to believe in ghosts, but there are exceptions for everything, and this one handily fit the bill.

My lethargy jolted, I wrote back to Ladislav’s daughter, thanking her for telling me about his death, and then phoned the EFD office (in Mobile, Alabama, of all places) to put my name on the list. Planning immediately began for teaching English in Czechoslovakia in 1991. It was to be the fruition of a dream for me, and in my addled mind, albeit irrationally, I knew Ladislav was the man to thank for it.

---

In the end, rationality was restored, in the form of a telephone call a week or so later from a Floridian with whom I’d stayed in touch after we traveled together in a group to the USSR in 1987.

A teacher himself, he remembered that I’d been a substitute and had an interest in the East Bloc, and when he caught wind of the EFD program’s advent, he’d taken it on himself to send the organizers my address. In turn, they’d forwarded me the manila envelope, and its arrival a day after learning of Ladislav’s passing was a mere coincidence, nothing more.

But as you can imagine, it always will be more than a simple fluke to me. These events rekindled my fighting spirit, and for the following twelve months, working two jobs and saving as much money as possible, an expedition took shape.

In early September, 1991, I was on the ground in Košice, the second largest city in what now is independent Slovakia, almost the farthest point east in what was then Czechoslovakia, and a very long way from both Prague and Ostrava. My assignment was to teach English to medical personnel in the city’s university hospital.

And so, Ladislav, here’s a tipple to your memory. It’s a shame you didn’t live to see it, but the plot worked out just the way you predicted.

Thanks.

(This story was originally published in October, 2011. This winter I'll be digitizing the slides from the time of the teaching gig in Košice)

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Recent columns:

November 28: ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 1).

November 21: ON THE AVENUES: Rest in peace, Kevin Hammersmith. Eight years later, you're very much missed.

November 14: ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

November 7: ON THE AVENUES: Pay attention, students, because voter turnout went UP in New Albany.

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 1).

Ostrava, 1989.

Ladislav was a trim, polite, vaguely aristocratic older gentleman who lived in a peculiarly oversized flat amid a modern suburb of Ostrava, the epicenter of communist Czechoslovakia’s steel making and coal mining industries. If I correctly recall the circumstances, he was a retired educator, discretely moonlighting as an English tutor for my immigrant Czech friend’s mother.

We had been invited to his place for a social evening, perhaps because in that particular socialist neighborhood, visiting Americans were rather rare in 1989.

Knowing there would be drinks served, we didn’t dare drive, choosing instead to board the handy tram, and wind through the industrial landscape of the municipality. Ladislav answered the door promptly, and after pleasantries and the ritual exchange of small gifts, he escorted us back outside and downstairs, to a semi-detached building with garage doors.

Right there in landlocked, socialist Central Europe, taking up precious square meters normally reserved for a Czech male’s single most prized possession (his Škoda automobile), Ladislav had constructed a genuine Tiki Bar, complete with bamboo and plasticized tropical plants. But his equatorial showplace, while initially puzzling, actually made perfect sense in the Bloc’s skewed international scheme of things.

Ladislav had traveled to Cuba as part of a cultural exchange program, and the journey made a deep impression on him. Cuban “guest” workers lived and worked in Ostrava; one afternoon, I drank beer with one of them. Like most Czechs, Ladislav grasped the irony of the enduring blockade that kept Cuban goods, which were available throughout both European geopolitical camps, safely out of American hands, and so a bottle of Havana Club rum was sitting on his back bar alongside an array of Cohibas, all earmarked for the occasion of my visit. It was a reverse black market, and a much appreciated gesture.

Sufficient storage space remained in the garage for Ladislav’s bicycles, for he was an avid cyclist. Apart from his set of metal dentures, and what appeared to be a rather hopeless nicotine addiction, he looked the lean and ruddy part of an athlete. The countryside was hilly and rolling, with mountainous areas nearby: Jeseniky to the west, and Beskydy to the southeast. Apart from Ostrava’s wretched air quality, it appeared to be appropriate terrain for challenging riding.

Specific memories of this long evening at Ladislav’s Ostrava Cubano Tiki Bar are fleeting. The revel extended so far into the cool, wet June night that we came very close to missing the last tram to the Motyčka home, located all the way across town, adjacent to the sprawling Nové hutě Klementa Gottwalda – the steel mill named for Czechoslovakia’s indigenous, long-dead, personal Stalin.

However, one part of our conversation never left my mind in all the years to follow, because after all his other guests except for my escorts had offered their goodbyes, it emerged that Ladislav – whose lifestyle plainly suggested an access to privileges of the sort enjoyed by party members – was disinterested in the past. Rather, he wanted to talk about the future.

He engaged me at length about hope, openness and reform, and about Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new” USSR, with glasnost and perestroika breaking out within the bastion of Czechoslovakia’s imperial overlord to the east. He was highly complimentary about my desire to visit the remainder of his country outside the boundaries of Prague, and thought that when westerners did so, and were able to meet normal working Czechs and Slovaks, artificial political barriers irrevocably fell no matter what his or any other government might say about it.

Ladislav, who of course spoke perfect British English, passionately believed language aptitude to be the key to furthering the fall of impediments to good relations between the diverse peoples of the world. He described his vision of the coming time when Americans exactly like me would come to Eastern Europe as English language instructors, and by doing so, further the process of reform and regeneration.

Granted, it was 1989, and the rigid and toadying Husak regime would never permit such linguistic and cultural incursions, but Ladislav was certain that Gorbachev’s revitalization movement eventually would spill out from the Soviet Union, into the satellite nations, and when it did … well, when it finally did, he fully expected to see me again, this time as a fellow teacher, working alongside him in his homeland.

I enthusiastically agreed, dumbstruck at the ease with which Ladislav, a complete stranger, managed to read my mind. While never an accredited teacher, I’d dabbled in education as a substitute. Back home in a file cabinet was a bulging folder of information on various ways to get “English as a second language” teaching certification. My long-held fascination with East-Central Europe was a given. How did he fathom my innermost thoughts?

We said our goodbyes, and a few days later, it was time to depart Ostrava on a roundabout journey to Moscow for Russian language instruction of my own. Weeks passed, life and travel went on, and by late November, I was home again in Indiana, watching CNN with amazement as the last bits of the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly thereafter, tearfully gladdened when the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia.

The playwright and intellectual Vaclav Havel, whom Ladislav had described to me in glowing terms as the impetus for Charter 77 and a hero of the opposition, suddenly became president of Czechoslovakia. It was incredible to imagine that Havel had been imprisoned as recently as April of 1989, just before I entered the country. Truly, all things seemed newly possible, and as a new year of 1990 dawned, I started wondering what Ladislav had to say about it.

I’d write to him, and find out.

(Part 2 next week. This story was originally published here in October, 2011)

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Recent columns:

November 21: ON THE AVENUES: Rest in peace, Kevin Hammersmith. Eight years later, you're very much missed.

November 14: ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

November 7: ON THE AVENUES: Pay attention, students, because voter turnout went UP in New Albany.

October 31: ON THE AVENUES: In which Team Gahan's looming appointment with unemployment is examined.

ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

Earlier in 2019 you may recall my promise to regale readers with tales of my travels three decades ago, and to illustrate these stories with freshly digitized slide photos from the trip,

Life got in the way and as has been my lifelong preference, I chose instead the path of least resistance -- otherwise known as social media. The photos were posted at Facebook with truncated commentary, and now it's a good news/bad news proposition. On the one hand, I failed to make time to do the writing necessary to properly spin the yarn. On the other, there's actually an outline in place to do so.

Consequently, there must be a new plan. During the forthcoming cold weather season I'll begin writing, illustrating and posting chapters. Concurrently the next round of digitization will begin, these being the slides from my travels and teaching assignment in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) in 1991-92.

In the meantime, in an effort to fulfill at least a smidgen of my discarded promise, here's the story of my life-altering day in Madrid, early in November of 1989. 

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Thirty years ago at the beginning of November I arrived in warm and sunny Madrid after a grueling 40-something-hour textbook budget traveler’s Eurailpass journey by Atlantic Ocean ferry and French trains from cold and damp Ireland.

This is the sort of insane connection I wouldn’t even consider attempting nowadays, and if I did, just use my iPhone to book a $50 budget airline ticket and be done with the transfer in a single morning.

The better weather in Madrid was tonic for a building malaise. Only in retrospect could I see this patch as deep, pervasive exhaustion from more than five months spent on the road -- and with another month and a half scheduled to pass before returning home. Winter’s approach, as exacerbated by the claustrophobic Irish climate, might also have induced a measure of seasonal depression.

The object all along had been to stay in Europe as long as possible in 1989, dipping into January of 1990, and I had budgeted for this goal. However, traveling on a shoestring wasn’t always easy, or at least it wasn’t for me. I had a certain amount of money to spend, and no more; this meant discipline, diligence and adherence to a routine, with little margin for error.

Or, qualities for which I’ve never been universally known. It can be tiring.

But in fact I proved adept at budget travel, and for the most part this challenge of connecting the dots was fascinating. At the same time, having traveled in Europe for 12 months spread over three visits, I’d been lucky. There had been hundreds of inconsequential daily actions, almost all of which were smooth. Apart from losing my hat in Italy in 1985 and being accosted by a drunk Hungarian outside an eatery in Budapest in 1987, nothing much bad had happened to me.

In the fall of 1989, my luck started turning.

The misfortunes began in Vienna, where I somehow managed to lose my debit card, which didn't become apparent to me until Rome. A scofflaw already had used the card to purchase $1,500 of jewelry in Venice, but this was resolved satisfactorily, although it required a few phone calls on my dime from Rome and a fee or two.

Getting a new card without a fixed mailing address was a thornier issue, and as of my arrival in Madrid I hadn’t quite resolved it yet. This was not a burden because traveler's checks remained the norm at the time.

A few days later in Paris, while at the American Express office to change a few of those remaining traveler’s checks, my pocket was picked of cash while crammed into a crowded elevator. The loss wasn't severe, just another pinprick, a further inconvenience, and a few more meals down the drain.

Now finally I'd made it to Spain for the first time, and three or four pleasant days to roam before heading off to Portugal, where I hoped to stay for a far longer term owing to it being a very affordable country. Lisbon would be the place where I resolved the debit card issue.

In Madrid I took my meals in a budget cafeteria near Puerta del Sol, and it was there one evening that I chose a seat next to a talkative man approximately my age who said he was Greek. We struck up a conversation, and he made it a point to record his address on a scrap of paper in case I made it to Athens later as intended.

He invited me to meet him for a couple of beers the following day, as I’d have ample time to kill before boarding the overnight train to Portugal later in the evening. It would be the usual travel drill for me: check out from my dingy room, stow the pack in a train station locker, get a couchette reservation while at the station, then loiter in Madrid until it was time to leave.

My new Greek friend suggested we loiter together, buy some bottled beers from a shop and drink outdoors in the park. Obviously it would be cheaper this way than a bar, and after all the weather was drop dead lovely.

So I ran my errands and we met as scheduled around lunchtime, taking the subway to a large park, purchasing beers and sandwiches, and setting up a picnic. It was a sensible plan, even if today I don’t recall the exact location of the park, except there was a nearby subway stop, all the better for me to get quickly to the train station when the time came to depart.

Or, conversely, as a quick GETAWAY for someone who’d never found an easier mark than me for slipping him a mickey and robbing him of his train station locker key, cash and traveler’s checks. That address in Athens? Non-existent.

I remember almost nothing, awakening at dusk to the feeling I’d consumed twelve beers and a bottle of hootch, not just one lager, lurching first to the subway, then riding to the train station and stumbling into the locker area to find mine long since cleaned out. In reality my belongings were worthless to my assailant and surely ended up in a dumpster within minutes. Fortunately my passport, railpass and other documents were in my back pocket, untouched.

All I had left was my day pack, camera and the clothes I was wearing.

I found a policeman at the train station, and providentially he had lived in Los Angeles for ten years and spoke perfect English. He was kind and helpful, taking my report, sadly noting a recent wave of similar crimes, and referring me to the American embassy.

In 1989 our embassy in Madrid had a loan fund to assist people like me, and I was able to rent a room for the night and sleep off the drug, whatever it was. I didn't bother with seeing a doctor. The next day Am-Ex justified its good reputation by promptly refunding the stolen traveler’s checks, and after a trip to the massive El Cortes Ingles department store, I was duly restocked with another change of clothes, toiletries and a gym bag to carry them.

I’d already called home and given instructions to Mary Pat at Bliss Travel. She had my plane ticket changed. Instead of a month and a half, I now had two weeks left until returning home and 45 days of budgeted funds to use. Now I could relax and let loose as I departed Spain not for Portugal, but Denmark, my new return flight departure point and a place I could stay with my Danish friends.

I'd had some very bad luck in Madrid, but the most bizarre thing about the experience was the highly atypical, almost Zen-like way I felt coming out of it. This memory is very clear to me. I was not angry at all. If anything, I felt a measure of relief. I may have been drugged and robbed, but not injured or killed, and it seemed to me this was a sign to return home early and do something with my life. There'd be further travels, some other time.

This “something” proved to be Sportstime Pizza, where I started working in late November, just in time to watch Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution on CNN in December, and of course from Sportstime grew the subsequent quarter-century of co-ownership at Rich O’s Public House and later, the omnibus New Albanian Brewing Company. In short, post-robbery, the rest was (my) history.

Meanwhile, seated on a train from Madrid bound eventually for Paris and then Munich, my chosen route to Copenhagen, I understood that what had happened might change the trajectory of my life. Unbeknownst to me, a far more transformative event was about to occur in Berlin. I’d soon be in a comfy Munich beer hall, watching as the Berlin Wall started falling.

Europe changed a lot after this, and so did I.

---

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ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to traditional Danish lunch in Copenhagen, September 1989.

There was a faint glow, and an aura of something flickering amid the barely discernible sound of people conversing in an alien language. Apparently a herd of elephants reposed somewhere to the rear, occasionally bellowing fair warning.

Flat on my back and shirtless, but providentially still wearing pants, I felt sore all over, like I’d just finished running a marathon or boxing a couple rounds with Mike Tyson.

It seemed I was marooned in a foreign land, emerging from a mysterious coma, but in fact the coma was self-induced and the destination purposeful, even if the precise whys and wherefores remained elusive.

24 hours earlier I’d spent a final evening in rigid East Berlin, drinking voluminous quantities of Wernesgruner Pils with my friend and workmate Jeff prior to departing on the overnight train to Copenhagen.

In the company of a few dozen westerners, we had spent three weeks in the German Democratic Republic (otherwise known as East Germany) working as employees of the East Berlin parks department, followed by another week of quasi-touristic revelry in Rostock and Dresden.

Now it was September 2, and I’d been in the East Bloc for the better part of three months, first in Czechoslovakia, then the USSR, and finally East Germany. Experiencing communism in these places was like taking a graduate-level university course in sheer weirdness. It was exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure, and I was ready for a wee bit of exuberant capitalism in Copenhagen.

Up to this point, my 1989 travels had been largely routine given their specialized locale, and nothing had gone seriously wrong, but the law of averages was about to catch up with me over the three-month coda to come, and it all began that final evening in East Berlin.

I’d sensibly checked my backpack at the rail station’s left luggage desk, all the easier to drink beer unencumbered until the time came to reclaim the bag before boarding the train for Copenhagen. It was a tremendous buzz kill to return to the desk at 21.00 and discover that I’d lost the claim ticket.

If you think the TSA’s invasive bureaucracy is bad here in L'America during these times of permanent terrorism alert, try imagining the 1940s-era, by-the-book-you-idiot-foreigner approach to verifying one’s identity and ownership of belongings amid Stasi-infested East Berlin, on top of being royally intoxicated and on the verge of missing the train.

When did my entry visa expire, anyway? If I didn’t leave the country ahead of the deadline, there might be … shall we say, difficulties.

It worked out, but only after somersaulting through numerous hoops and signing one document after the next to the dull accompanying soundtrack of cascading rubber stamps. Sweating, I regained the bag and boarded the train on time. It was a few hours north to Warnemünde, then onto a rail ferry across the Baltic to Gedser, Denmark and the final link to Copenhagen.

East Germans may have been dirty rotten commies, but they hadn’t neglected the utility of a profitable duty-free shop on the boat. I took the fateful opportunity to score an inexpensive bottle each of Zubrowka Buffalo Grass Vodka, an infamous Polish treat, and Korn, the latter a colorless moonshine from East Germany made not from corn, but rye and wheat.

I’d be an American bearing gifts.

Drinkers learn early that it’s challenging to move directly from inebriation to hangover without the grace period of intervening sleep. Absent sleepers or couchettes, my “bed” on the East Berlin-Copenhagen route was an upright 2nd class seat in a cramped compartment, and shuteye was hard to find. Naturally the timetable refused to acknowledge the condition of my condition, and I was released into Copenhagen’s spacious central station at 8:00 a.m.

The adrenaline kicked in. The first priority was to change money; purchasing coffee with my fresh kroner, I found a pay phone to call Little Kim for instructions. Unexpectedly a disembodied voice answered in what sounded like Boris Karloff’s dialect of English.

He turned out to be the chosen representative of my friend’s answering service. Remember those? Stammering, I identified myself and was told to relax; I definitely was expected, but because Mr. Wiesener had an “emergency” the plan had been changed. Rather, I was given the number of a bus and a street address, which brought me to the apartment of Allan Gamborg, who laughed when I asked the nature of Little Kim’s emergency.

“He has a family gathering, and he’ll come by later. We have more important things to do, because (Big) Kim Andersen is coming for lunch.”

He paused: “For Danish lunch.”

The slightest curl of a tiny smile could be detected on the infamous sandbagger Allan’s face. Much later, when it was far too late to escape my fate, I understood the nature of their planned ambush.

It was 9:00 a.m. at the latest, and I had no idea what was about to happen, although it all began gently enough. Allan and I went to a bakery down the street and bought pastries, returning to his flat for more coffee. Big Kim phoned, and Allan issued foraging orders.

Looking around Allan’s pad, food could be seen stacked in all corners of his tidy, small kitchen, or at least in those spaces not otherwise filled with bottles of beer, liquor and more bottles of beer, to which my two doses of liquor were gleefully added.

We were expecting a huge crowd, right?

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It was my third visit to Copenhagen in 1989, and it was gratifying to have befriended these three wonderful fellows, all of whom lived there at the time. However the concept of “Danish lunch” was as yet unfamiliar to me. To better explain it, here’s a random 2019 offering from the Restaurant Kronborg.

The “Traditional Danish Lunch” is the classic Danish lunch menu, like the one your grandparents would eat (had they been Danish), pure comfort food and a great way to experience the intangible Danish concept of ‘hygge’ (best translatable as ‘coziness’).

The lunch is served on platters in three servings

• Old-fashioned pickled herring with onions and capers
• Curried herring with ’smiling egg’, onions and capers
• Pan-fried fillet of plaice with Greenlandic shrimps and ‘dillnaise’
• Kronborg’s gravlax with fresh herbs and lime crème

xxx

• Liver paté with bacon, beetroots and mushrooms
• Roast pork pickled red cabbage and cucumber
• Roast beef with ‘remoulade’, crisp onions, horseradish and pickled cucumber

xxx

• Very mature cheese served with rum, meat jelly and onions

Includes rye bread, white bread, butter and duck lard

That’s a solid and delicious overview, indeed.

In 1999, a decade after today’s tale of Allan’s home-cooked version of traditional Danish lunch, Barrie Ottersbach and I were joined by "Boris" Lawrence as Big Kim took the four of us to Danish lunch at a local joint near the harbor.

In my memory the eggs, fish, and beef were raw (not a complete exaggeration, by the way); most other items were pickled or adorned with horseradish; the beer and schnapps were consumed with an atypically judicious temperament -- we were older by then -- and the early afternoon hours soon passed into late evening, enlivened by a long chat with a pair of crusty ancient Danish merchant mariners.

In its more respectable form, Danish lunch surely is a civilized institution, 1989’s affair notwithstanding.

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The American and Big Kim.

Sunday, September 3, 1989.

Big Kim arrived bearing even more food and alcohol, and it was determined that Little Kim would drop by later in the day. I may have been sleepless and a tad hungover, but I was looking forward to the mounting spread.

Allan’s Danish lunch began with salty snacks and a crate or two of serviceable mainstream Danish lager, including Tuborg Gold and perhaps Carlsberg’s Sort Guld (Black Gold). Allan didn’t stick to the exact script, but offered multiple courses of fish, eggs, meats and a main course of chicken.

As the meal escalated, so did the consumption of alcohol, which soon shifted from beer to “the hard stuff,” beginning with akvavit -- was it the Aalborg brand? -- before moving to my bottles of Korn and Zubrovka,

Remember, there were only three of us.

The vodka came last, as a chaser for chocolate ice cream. It was dark outside at this juncture, and I’d surrendered any concept of time. I was stuffed full of food, beer and booze, and the ice cream played the role of Monty Python’s wafer-thin mint.

I recall the room spinning, and being helped to the orange-upholstered couch in the living room of Allan’s small domicile. There is a vague recollection of becoming violently ill, miraculously keeping the vomit off Allan’s furniture by keeping it on me – hence the severely soiled shirt. The necessary purge lasted quite a while, and I apparently returned to the couch to become unconscious. Allan and Big Kim fell asleep soon after, hence the elephantine snoring.

I awoke around 9:30 p.m. to the faint glow of the television set, flickering amid the barely discernable sound of talking heads on a Danish current events show, with Little Kim calmly seated in a nearby chair, slightly wide-eyed, surveying the unwashed dishes, chicken bones and empty bottles as though he’d wandered into a war zone.

As he wryly noted, it seems he’d missed the party. Little Kim had arrived, although the lunchers had long since departed, especially me.

In the 30 years since that day, stories of my epic Copenhagen arrival have not abated. It took multiple washings to get the smell out of my shirt, and a full clip of Tums to calm my innards.

Several years later, when the FOSSILS homebrewing club was established and my official title was “President for Life (PFL), Allan sent a postcard and asked if the acronym wouldn’t be more accurate if it stood for “Puking Fountain Lurcher.” He was promptly knighted as Keeper of the Couch. It was a sad day in the 2000s when he finally ditched it.

September 3, 1989 was the metaphorical halfway point in my six-month-long journey through Europe, which began in late May peering across the Berlin Wall at East Germans with guns, and ended in November on the very same orange couch in Copenhagen, in the company of the same good friends, watching on television as East and West Berliners came together to tear down that wall.

I came home anyway, and I’ve never understood why.

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The afterlife of the Trabant, 30 years on.

Later in 2019 it will have been thirty years since the Berlin Wall fell. At some point in late September of 1989 I passed back through Prague with friends. We were walking near the St. Nicholas Church in Mala Strana and came upon dozens of Trabants with DDR plates parked three deep by the curbs. Why? It wasn't even tourist season.

Only later did we understand that our stroll took place as crowds of East Germans were climbing the walls of the West German embassy nearby, seeking passage out of the Bloc. East Germany was in its death throes, and the cars we saw had been abandoned.

Trabants are a component of modern cultural history. I'm not an aficionado cars by any stretch, but I'll make an exception for these little guys. 

30 Years On, the ‘Worst Car Ever Built’ Has a Fervent Fan Club, by Laura Kiniry (Atlas Obscura)

Made in the former East Germany, Trabants have inspired many a mean joke — and a devoted community.

In the 1991 German comedy film, Go Trabi Go, a family from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) goes on a road trip to Italy in their beloved Trabant 601—the most popular car in East Germany before the collapse of the Iron Curtain. At one point their vehicle’s head gasket blows, and the father makes an emergency phone call. When he tells a mechanic over the line that he’s driving a Trabant 601, the mechanic chuckles and says, “I hope you’ve got some sticky tape.”

Over the years, the “Trabi” (as it’s affectionately known) has been the butt of endless jokes associated with East Germany. With its bare interior, oddly-designed stick shifter, and an exterior made of Duroplast—a rust-resistant, cotton-reinforced resin plastic that’s lighter and stronger than steel (and more importantly, could be manufactured in the GDR)—the standard four-seater Trabi sedan has been referred to as one of the “worst cars ever built,” and “East Germany’s terrible car that will never die.” Add to this its two-stroke engine, the same kind used in lawnmowers and Asia’s tuk-tuks, and it’s understandable why there are quips like “Why does a Trabi have a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm while you push.”

Produced from 1957 until 1991, the Trabi has earned the nicknames “spark plug with a roof” and “cardboard racer” because of its seemingly shoddy design. To many Westerners, Trabis remain a prime example of East German repression and the governing Socialist United Party’s archaic ways. Trabis had no fuel gauge, air conditioning, turn signals, or brake lights, and could only reach a maximum speed of 62 miles per hour. Once the Wall came down, Trabis just couldn’t compete with Western vehicles, and seemingly overnight East Germany’s most coveted car became almost obsolete.

Europe’s advanced emission standards mean you’ll see few original Trabis on the road today, though there are believed to be around 34,000 still registered in Germany. For collectors of this smoke-spewing, motor-sputtering vehicle, the Trabi is their pride and joy. It’s a car that calls to mind memories of Cold War-era holiday road trips into Germany’s Thuringian Forest and nude beaches along the Baltic Sea; one that some GDR families waited up to 16 years to receive, and that could be fixed using household tools. Trabis provided some independence in a country where independence was almost nil ...

ON THE AVENUES: I'm a citizen of the universe, but I can't take a photo to save my life.

While lounging at Pints&union on a recent Saturday afternoon I found myself chatting with estimable local photographer David Modica. Upon returning home to the lair and glancing at the mound of old travel slides waiting to be scanned and digitized, it occurred to me how much a practiced lensman like David could have achieved in the East Bloc during the late 1980s.

However a second thought arrived quickly on the heels of the first, this being the vague memory of conditions on the ground that rendered an already poor photographer like me even worse at shutter's snap -- this in addition to my prior observation that when you're carrying enough cheap slide film to last through a six-month trip, there does not exist the luxury to squeeze off dozens of shots from which to select the best.

Of course there’s no point denying that my wretchedness as a photographer was exacerbated by a reticence to be intrusive by pointing my camera at people who might conclude this well-heeled foreigner was seeking unflattering angles. Americans tended to be well-received within the communist perimeter at the time (a Polish man once told me the only person more popular in his country than Pope John Paul II was Ronald Reagan), but matters could get complicated if they thought you were laughing at them, as opposed to commiserating with them.

I've forgotten something else during the subsequent three decades of post-communist life. There was a certain measure of self-imposed restraint felt by many visitors based on advice in then-popular travel books to the effect that visiting a “police” state meant risking problems if you photographed taboo objects or potentially embarrassing social conditions.

As an aside, friends always used to ask me if it felt dangerous to holiday in the Eastern European worker’s paradise, and I'd say no, quite the contrary; it felt very safe if the word “safety” were to be defined by the absence of violence directed against us as tourists – as opposed to pervasive bullying by the government against people living there.

In fact while abroad in 1989 I was pickpocketed, drugged and robbed, and also had my credit card stolen -- in France, Spain and Austria, respectively, not Czechoslovakia, East Germany or the Soviet Union. The one time I can recall feeling disconcerted while traveling was in 1985 when soldiers with machine guns were posted on street corners throughout Istanbul, Turkey -- a capitalist country, by the way -- because there’d only recently been a military coup. Too much Midnight Express, I suppose, although it proved to be a delightful stay otherwise.

Being a westerner in a communist country meant that one way or another, we were supplying the regime with much needed hard currency, whether via an official change bureau or by means of the helpful conduit of a black marketer. Either way, like water running downhill, “real” western money was destined to find its way to the government in the end. Acordingly, we were encouraged to spend it.

Still, there were behavioral boundaries. Only the universally adored Australians could get away with rowdiness without apparent consequence. It’s just a gift they seem to have. Addressing photography, I can remember being told not to take pictures of people waiting in line to buy things, a common sight in the USSR (less so elsewhere in the Bloc). Military installations were verboten, too, along with other locales and buildings of strategic significance, with the precise definition being left to the government’s whim.

Much of this was bluff, and yet it could be daunting. Did hospitals count? Sports stadiums? Breweries? There was no way of knowing. Once in Moscow we happened upon a tangled pile of exposed film on the ground. It was very easy to imagine it being yanked from a camera, even if we didn’t witness the policeman in the act.

How would the gatekeepers have reacted to a tourist with a camera documenting the exterior of the central prison in Prague just down the street from where I stayed in 1989 with the family of my friend, where Vaclav Havel had been incarcerated for what proved to be the final time only a couple months before I arrived? I knew what the building represented, but I left it alone. The simple point is that I didn't want to risk it, and we can add a high degree of self-editing in terms of shot selection on top of my other inhibitions.

Besides, I was born to take lousy pictures and to live vicariously through the practiced eye of artists like Modica. Had he been along for the ride, he’d have found a way to capture the essence.

---

There’s a quote I’ve been trying to locate for years.

At this point I’m forced to concede the words I recall may or may not have been spoken, even if I continue to insist they were uttered by the track and field star Edwin Moses during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

It was a hideous spectacle, the Games of the XXIII Olympiad. Good intentions notwithstanding, the modern Olympics have been politicized from the very start, as I suspect they also were in ancient Greece. Apart from the year 1984 serving as a convenient pretext for rereading of George Orwell’s novel of the same name, it also was an election year and the very pinnacle of the Cold War, Reaganism and Thatcherism.

Not unexpectedly the Hollywood filmmaker David Wolper was enlisted to “produce” the Olympics for global television, with every last movie gimmick trick from the arsenal of the Ben Hur generation in La La Land duly deployed and exaggerated for patriotic effect. Unfortunately for the RayGunners, all this mind-boggling garishness was not witnessed in person by the Warsaw Pact nations; they all boycotted the Olympics except for Nicolae "Conducator" Ceausescu’s Romania, for which the US State Department happily rewarded the dictator with enough slack to oppress his own people for another five years.

At some point amid the propaganda extravaganza Moses won yet another medal and was interviewed by a fawning broadcaster, who was no doubt scandalized to hear the athlete comment that he considered himself a citizen of the universe – or something like that.

I can’t actually prove Moses said it, but no matter. If he did not, someone else did, and either way it was a light bulb moment for me. I’d long been arguing about the impossibility of “proving” irrational religious beliefs, but it suddenly became clear that mankind’s enduring instinct for sectarianism and tribalism, amplified to deafening pitch with the inception of the modern nation state’s industrialized toolmaking, predates religious superstition. Religion is a mere symptom, not the disease.

Consequently, for me this notion of mindless patriotism in the sense of publicly demonstrating one’s “love” of country in knee-jerk, childlike ways is pure nonsense, every bit as much as the blind worship of objects, whether they come in the form of a saint’s toenail, a totem or a flag. Humans have brains, and it might be helpful to use them on occasion. Love might be a many splendored thing, but it’s better directed at other humans and not debatable abstractions that serve primarily to reinforce existing power structures.

That’s because we’re humans first. I was born the same way those guys on the “other” side were, and ultimately I’ll die in precisely the same fashion as someone from Tibet, Chile or South Africa. The rest of it is sheer serendipity, and should be regarded as such. Surely we have better things to do with the brief time we have.

Yes, “go back to where you came from” has returned to the news cycle.

Sentiments like this always have been primeval screams favor an abysmally ignorant point of view, especially as they pertain to “love” of a nation state founded on the basis of welcoming humans from elsewhere to come slaughter and enslave the ones already here.

It’s even less defensible from the perspective of humanity as a whole, although in this as in most all similar circumstances, the eternal imperatives of capital accumulation, and the concurrent preservation of wealth and privilege for the few, depend on the reinforcement of arbitrary divisions.

The disease isn’t limited to Americans, although we seem to be in the process of perfecting it. It’s neither a Republican nor a Democratic affliction, as it flourishes across the political spectrum. When you rant at another human being to conform to your precepts or else get the hell out, the sound you’re hearing off in the distance is the One Percent laughing uproariously all the way to the bank. The fewest with the most simply adore the ease with which you are distracted.

Some readers are red-faced: But what about our brave men and women in the military, fighting to preserve our freedom?

Well, wouldn’t it be great if the deprived weren’t compelled by threat of violence to preserve wealth and power by killing others who are in precisely the same predicament?

Since the dawn of civilization wars have been fought by humans who quite honestly are chosen to die for someone else’s money, property, status and religion, not their own. Violence is an abomination at any level of the human experience, but it doesn’t get much worse than when it is amalgamated and wielded at the nation state’s massive economy of scale.

I respect the soldiers quite a lot -- so much so that I’d like to join with other fellow humans to determine ways of making their sacrifices less predictably common. If this requires a certain redirection of pitchforks, all the better.

Today’s column closes with the thoughts of Jason Williamson, one half of the Sleaford Mods, an English punk band.

“Racism is not the answer to your misery or feelings of alienation. It just isn’t. It never was. It’s just one of the many tools to keep you locked in a small room for the entirety of your life. Thank you. Look after each other. If you can.”

---

Recent columns:

July 11: ON THE AVENUES: Trieste, New Albany and the meaning of nowhere.

July 4: ON THE AVENUES: The 2019 remix, "You want some fries with your redevelopment?"

June 27: ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

The 1989 travelogue has commenced with photos at Instagram and Facebook.

The time has come. Jeeebus knows I've been dropping hints for long enough.

REWIND to 30 years ago today: The aftermath of the 1987 European jaunt, and many changes on the road to 1989.

ON THE AVENUES: In 1989, six months of traveling fabulously in Europe.

Finally the process of scanning my slides from 1989 has resumed. Somewhere around 800 slides from my (almost) seven months in Europe that year are being manually processed, four at a time, and organized into a semblance of coherence.

(That's because I didn't want to pay the price for the more advanced model of scanners.)

Obviously this is going to take a while, so what I've decided to do is make public this gradual process of scanning, gathering information and note-taking. I'll be posting scanned slides and observations at Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenewalbanian/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roger.a.baylor

My Instagram posts also are copied to Twitter: https://twitter.com/newalbanian

It will be a rough draft in the making, because each picture tells a story (understandably some stories have been forgotten, or aren't worth repeating), and the small chunks will add up to a larger narrative, which will appear here at the blog periodically.

At some point I'll dive into the banker's box of trip artifacts and ephemera. The biggest difference between this undertaking and my 1987 revival is the absence of a day-to-day diary of places and events, which was lost when I was robbed in Spain in November of 1989. Consequently, the finished product should be a tad more impressionistic.

Phase One is West Berlin and Czechoslovakia, late May through late June of 1989. The trip began with three days in West Berlin before transferring across the formidable Berlin Wall to East Berlin with a transit visa, then heading for Prague, Czechoslovakia. I returned to both Berlins later that summer. The time in Czechoslovakia was spent with my friend George's family. He had defected and could not return without being arrested and jailed.

But as we know now, and couldn't know then, the Berlin Wall had only six months to live, with all the other European communist countries save Albania falling like dominoes in the wake of the wall's collapse.

ON THE AVENUES: In 1989, six months of traveling fabulously in Europe.

For me the year 1989 was a time when those pesky dialectics came smashing together all at once, and gratifyingly so -- except when the results were utterly appalling.

A roller coaster analogy doesn’t do it justice.

Those twelve months just might have been my crowning achievement in life apart from the overriding sense of having experienced an undiagnosed nervous breakdown. My best and worst qualities competed for equal billing, and I looked more than one gift horse squarely in the eye, leaving a smoldering bridge or two in my wake. 1989 was a profound turning point, and I’m still sorting through the aftermath.

Maybe it’s because at the time I simply wasn't cut out to be a well-adjusted human being and didn't know how to be happy. 30 years ago at this precise moment I had two steady jobs, one of them full-time at the best pay scale I’d ever known up to that point, and the other part-time for cash. For more than a year I’d been existing off the nighttime cash and bankrolling the daytime wages.

This was possible because living was ridiculously cheap and expenditures few. I shared a house in Floyds Knobs with my pals TR and George. Working a lot and living a little translated into an imposing war chest for future budget travels, preferably sooner rather than later.

I also had a girlfriend, a shocking banner headline that hadn’t been applicable in a long while, but this is a whole other story, a saga of subsequent highlights that included travel, marriage, business ownership, divorce first from the one, then the other, as well as a variety of highs and lows associated with the ride.

Simply stated, it is my inability (read: unwillingness) to write the story of this relationship that continues to impede my promise to produce a travelogue of Europe in 1989. I’ve hemmed, hawed, delayed and prevaricated, but the calendar pages keep turning.

So it’s time to start writing this narrative as straightforwardly as I can and see where it leads. Excuses, be gone. There’ll be the scanning of slide photos not viewed for decades, and rummaging through boxes, with further clawing through the attic of my cluttered cranium, in search of what I’m willing and unwilling to divulge about my state of consciousness during the pivotal year's travels.

I want to take responsibility for being truthful, and yet some wounds remain open. Did I learn anything about myself from these experiences 30 years ago? As Chinese Premier Chou En Lai may or may not have said when asked about the lessons of the French Revolution, “It’s too early to tell.”

---

At some point near the end of May, 1989 I was on my way to Berlin with the stated intention of remaining in Europe for at least seven months.

Berlin was not the capital of a unified Germany in 1989 because the country was not together. There remained two Germanys … and two Berlins. Bonn was the capital of the Federal Republic, known to us as West Germany. West Berlin was a municipality entirely surrounded by the territory of the German Democratic Republic, or communist East Germany, of which East Berlin was the capital.

Berlin remained divided into zones of occupation, as administered by the triumphant Allies of World War II, which had concluded 44 years before. The western side included American, British and French zones, and representatives of the three countries still met at regular intervals to discuss their stewardship of the city. An empty seat was maintained for the Soviet emissary, who ceased attending some years before.

Both Berlins were maintained by their nations as showplaces of their respective ideologies, with East Berlin enjoying perhaps the highest standard of living in the entire Soviet zone, which began at the Brandenburg Gate and extended eastward all the way to Vladivostok.

The Berlin Wall was the line of demarcation between the Allied zones and the sovereign territory of the GDR. It had artsy graffiti on one side and gray machine guns on the other. David Bowie was looking right at the wall while recording the album “Heroes” at Hansa studio, and the title song came to mind often that summer.

In short, it was the Cold War in everyday life, although those first few days in May were intended only as a teaser. A return was planned for August, when I’d arranged a month-long “working” stay in East Berlin.

I’ve written previously about my experiences toiling for the greater good of Herr Honecker, and of course these and numerous other vignettes will be reprised (with photos) as the current 30th anniversary year progresses.

For now, I’ll merely sketch the 1989 trip’s overall parameters.

Quite early in the morning of June 2, 1989, I tiptoed out of my West Berlin hostel dorm and took to the street, where I caught the first bus of the day into the center of the city. At Zoo Station (later immortalized by the U2 song on Achtung Baby), there was a suburban rail (S-Bahn) train to catch a few stops east, then above the wall and into the Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin.

Clambering off the train, I found myself standing on a sealed platform. It was possible to transfer to other commuter trains (and subways) headed to destinations in West Berlin, but not to walk out onto the street outside without passing through passport control and customs. Such was the bizarre transport arrangement reflecting the city’s division.

I had a time-sensitive transit visa for East Germany, allowing me to pass through the country without stopping. My ultimate destination was Prague, in the nation then known as Czechoslovakia.

After a brief orientation stroll and gut check (the streetscape in East Berlin was so different from what I’d experienced less than a mile westward that it might have been another planet), it was back onto an “Ossie” S-Bahn to a different train station, and my rail connection via Dresden.

---

For the next month Czechoslovakia was my home, courtesy of the family of my dear friend George Hrabcak, who at the time was a criminal defector. He’d have been arrested and incarcerated for so much as setting foot in his homeland. There is no telling how many miles I walked during two weeks in amazing Prague, followed by the same amount of time exploring Ostrava, then the Pittsburgh of Czechoslovakia.

Pork, dumplings and delicious Pilsner beer were consumed in abundance. It was an intensely educational time, culminating with the wedding of George’s cousin, the daughter of his uncle the communist party official, who was a charming and witty host throughout.

In early July came the long-awaited 36-hour “express” train from Prague to Moscow. “Back in the USSR,” indeed. In theory, my time in the Soviet metropolis was to be spent learning conversational Russian as part of a program at Moscow State University. It was an experimental teaching method, and it didn’t much appeal to me, especially considering the lessons (and foment) waiting to be learned outside the classroom during the high point of Gorbachev’s glasnost.

When the program concluded and it was time to leave Moscow, several of us were headed the same westerly direction, and our sponsoring organization helped to arrange train tickets back to East Berlin. First we had to obtain a Polish transit visa on our own. Three of us arrived at the Polish embassy, only to find a block-long line composed primarily of Soviet citizens and foreign students from socialist countries (i.e., Cuba, Ethiopia and Vietnam) seeking visas.

After standing stationary for a very long time, some English-speaking Russians nearby politely introduced themselves and advised us to walk to the front of the line and ask (in English) to be allowed to skip the long queue and enter. We shrugged it off … for about another hour, and then we took their advice.

The communist Polish military guards were delighted to see capitalist Americans, and we were ushered inside to be processed within minutes. It was a valuable metaphor about imperialism, and how in those days it ran in both directions.

---

After another week in West Berlin with my cousin Don (where we celebrated my 29th birthday) it was August, and time to cross into East Berlin for my work assignment. By early September, I was in Copenhagen visiting my Danish friends. Amy met me there. We activated rail passes and headed for Oktoberfest in Munich, where my friend and erstwhile East Berlin workmate Jeff Price joined us.

The path led to Vienna, Prague and Budapest. While in Prague the three of us walked past a square filled with Trabants parked two and three deep. It was puzzling, and only later did we realize the cars were abandoned by occupants scaling the walls of the West German embassy nearby, seeking asylum.

Jeff left for home and the two of us traveled through Italy, France and Ireland. She flew back stateside from Dublin, and I made an insane two-day ride by boat and train to Madrid. Having already lost my credit card (imagine coordinating a replacement with no fixed address) and been pick-pocketed, now I was drugged and robbed during an afternoon drinking bout the day before my scheduled departure for Lisbon.

The monetary loss proved negligible and the traveler's checks were swiftly refunded, although the thieves made off with all my belongings including the trip diary. It was November, with at least six weeks yet to go. Once the pounding headache ceased, I realized just how exhausted I'd become.

An itinerary reformat was in order, so new clothes and a gym bag were purchased at a Madrid department store. I called Mary Pat Bliss, who changed my plane ticket for the flight home. Now I had two weeks to work my way back to Copenhagen for a finale with my Danish friends, and enough money to splurge.

Unrest in East Germany escalated during these final weeks abroad. One night the four of us gathered snacks and beers at Allan's to watch on television as the Berlin Wall started being pulled down by triumphant Berliners from both sides.

Briefly our quartet debated the idea of boarding a ferry and taking a train to go to Berlin and join the celebration. It was only seven hours away, and visas were easily obtainable in Copenhagen. In the end, we decided against going. Three Danes and an American rightly concluded that while it may have been a fine party, it wasn't ours. It belonged to the Germans.

Back home again in Indiana, December arrived, and with it the chance to watch the other Communist dominoes fall, especially in Czechoslovakia with the Velvet Revolution. It was as peaceful as the revolt against Ceausescu in Romania was violent. In January of 1990, Europe suddenly was a very different place.

There’d been a lot more to the trip than what I’ve sketched here, but as the New Year dawned, it was clear that for me in my own life, certain realities had come to an end and others were just beginning.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I'll always question returning home, given the many opportunities for English-speaking expatriates amid the transition. There are no answers, just nagging doubts. Maybe it's time to send these ghosts packing even if I've grown quite fond of them over three decades' time.

I’ve made 36 European excursions since the one in 1989. None of them have been quite like it. Perhaps in the months to come I’ll finally be able to explain why, and I hope it’s an entertaining and educational experience for blog readers.

---

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February 22: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL: Take your cult of personality and shove it, Dear Leader.

REWIND to 30 years ago today: The aftermath of the 1987 European jaunt, and many changes on the road to 1989.

Moscow USSR, 1989.

It has been only a year since I wrote the words below, and since then, I've not been very diligent in the follow-through. No slides have been scanned, whether from 1985 or 1989. Much time has been spent drinking and thinking, with little of this preparation devoted to anything of substance.

As you might guess, this is indicative of my time-honored, last-minute, panic-driven sloth -- but I can hear the clock ticking. Consequently, my spare time during the remainder of February will be devoted to two gargantuan tasks: the categorization and itemizing of Jeff Gahan's campaign finance reports since 2011 donation by donation, line by line -- and scanning about 750 slides (maybe more) from the 1989 Europe trip in 1989.

So, with your indulgence, allow me to explain it a second time.

1988.

All 72 chapters are collected at this link. Complete list of links to the 1987 European summer travel series (30 years ago today).

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Introduction

I always strive to write for a broader readership, rather than myself, alone. If only a handful of other people are reading, that’s great. However, my travelogues from olden times function more as personal reminders. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll forget them completely. 

In 2017, I recalled my travels in 1987. Next to come is 1989. A mere 20 months passed between the end of the 1987 trip and the beginning of the one in 1989, but these proved to be of critical importance for my life, right up until this very day. 

Consider the essay below as summary and segue. For those of my readers who tolerate these digressions, thank you.

---

In halcyon days of youth, slide film was the chosen method for documenting my travels. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Let’s start with the basics: what is slide film? In simple terms, it’s the opposite of color negative film. Instead of a negative, it makes a positive. This is why it is also called color reversal film. When you develop it, you see a tiny photo - no print needed. Think of it as bizarro world color film, or opposite day color film if you prefer. If you were born before 1990 there is a very high chance you were forced to watch old slideshows of your parents’ vacations from the 1960s. In fact, the term “slideshow” comes from the ancient practice of subjecting one’s friends and family to sit in the dark and stare at images projected on a wall for hours while they drone on and on and on about that camping trip to the Grand Canyon that one time.

In a plea of self-defense, allow me to say that any of my friends and family sitting in the living room’s shadowy gloaming were properly bribed with beer and snacks, and they were allowed to leave any time they wished – with explicit permission from the lectern, of course.

From the occasion of my first trip to Europe in 1985, and even as late as 1994, I stubbornly insisted on using slide film, which worked fine until the world went digital overnight, sometime around 2002.

It didn’t help that the family heirloom, a 1970s-vintage slide projector, eventually became balky -- and replacement bulbs with a life span of a few short hours started costing $50 a pop (and boy, did they ever).

Although slide film still exists, modernity eventually intervened. Decades later, left with a few thousand slides and no effective way of viewing them, I finally broke down in January of 2017 and invested in a scanner for digitizing the historical record.

No longer possessing a valid excuse to dither, it became a matter of organizing the project, and as such, it might help to know that organizational skills aren’t among my strongest suits.

Consequently, I suddenly awoke one morning in May of 2017 seized with the revelation that if I acted quickly, certain of these newly revealed photos from 1987 could be posted on the blog with scintillating commentary, exactly 30 years to the day they’d been taken.

This would improve on the approach of being held hostage in a darkened house, but a full month of commemorative opportunities already had elapsed before the idea finally occurred to me.

It was necessary to dive into the task without delay.

The banker’s box repository of trip relics was hauled from the basement, and the cataloguing began, with increasingly elusive memories being helpfully supplemented by photos I hadn’t seen for more than 20 years.

Ten weeks later, on the 30th anniversary of my return home from Brussels, the 1987 project finally was finished – except it wasn’t, because I’d somehow neglected the entirety of Yugoslavia. Back into it I went, and now the job really is complete, at least until the next revision.

In short, “30 years ago today” became its very own long, strange trip. It was filled with diversions, updates and surprises. The poetic symmetry of U2’s Joshua Tree 30th anniversary concert in Louisville stands out (I’d seen the band in Cork in 1987), as well as the chance to exchange messages via social media with at least a few folks I hadn’t seen since we said goodbye in Warsaw.

If just a few of you found these images more interesting than camping in the Grand Canyon, it’s fine by me. They reawakened all sorts of memories, most of them wonderful.

But it also got me thinking about 1989, a crazed, exhilarating and messy year of transitions, upticks and downfalls.

---

First, we’re compelled to rewind to the evening of August 16, 1987. The return flights from Brussels had been endured, and someone was at the Louisville airport (Bob? Barrie?) to pick me up and take me home, again, in Indiana.

I was proud of myself. I’d planned and managed a four-month-long encore to the 1985 European debut junket without suffering from any semblance of a sophomore jinx.

There were unexpected problems, and yet dates were kept and connections made, often through the good offices of Thomas Cook's amazing book, without the luxury of electronic homing devices that didn’t yet exist. It had been an uproarious good time, and I was overwhelmed and humbled by the intensity of my experiences, particularly the stays in Eastern European lands.

There was no turning back for me. The 1989 Mach III trip would be bigger and better than ever. The planning for it began long before I returned home from the 1987 expedition, perhaps in Prague, Budapest or Skopje -- or most likely, every waking moment.

In part, this was because I’d gradually been made aware of opportunities on both sides of the Iron Curtain to volunteer my time to help with worthy objectives (clean-ups, archaeological digs, beautification) in exchange for lodging and three squares.

These were exciting possibilities, fully worthy of consideration. They’d stretch travel dollars even further. In the meantime, funding this future trip's budget was the issue. The immediate question in 1987 was much the same as in 1985, but possessed of an even greater urgency.

Now what?

I had the same two flexible but modestly paying jobs to resume, working days during the school year as a substitute teacher, and nights at Scoreboard Liquors selling beer from foreign breweries I’d now actually visited.

Would it be enough? I didn't want to sell a kidney.

---

The working grind began anew, but my life and times in America were about to change irrevocably. Ironically, a similar process was underway in Europe. We just couldn’t see it at the time.

The act of most lasting impact occurred immediately after my return stateside. My old pal TR called for a catch-up chat. I was woefully depleted of gossip, so he suggested lunch at a new joint called Sportstime Pizza, apparently recently established somewhere near Grant Line Road. I couldn’t form a mental picture of the place until he resorted to a past-tense directional comparison: “It’s where the Noble Roman’s used to be.”

In other words, in August of 1987 I first walked through the doors of what eventually became the New Albanian Brewing Company. Now it’s January of 2018, and I’m still waiting for my tab to be settled so I can leave.

Check, please.

A few months later, Barrie Ottersbach got married. Our European revels in the summer of 1987 always had been intended as an extended, 50-day-long bachelor’s party. Our next trip together wouldn’t come until 1993.

It was an entertaining turn of events just after Christmas, when two of the three Danes we’d met during the summer came to visit Kentuckiana (or Indyucky). Ominously, in four scant months I’d become enough of a Sportstime Pizza regular to host the inaugural New Year’s Eve party there, which Kim Wiesener and Allan Gamborg attended.

Along with “Big Kim” Andersen, they went on to become forever friends, and I’m grateful. Barrie and I also took them to the legendary K & H Café in Lanesville, where I’d spent roughly half my life in the early 1980s.

The two Danes handily drank us all under the table, but it was bittersweet in retrospect. Owing to the changes about to occur, there was to be gravitational pull in my social life, away from the hill and into New Albany.

Consequently, I returned to the K & H only a handful of times before the owners Kenny and Straw retired, circa 1993.

Just after the New Year, now entering 1988, Bob Gunn got a respectable, well-paying job in Louisville. After about month, UNI Data Courier hired me, too, thanks to Bob’s recommendation.

I kept my evening job at the liquor store and began bankrolling 1989 travel money. Shortly thereafter, Bob, TR and I rented a house in Floyds Knobs.

Each day I’d drive a few miles and meet the TARC bus for the trip into Louisville, using cheap tickets subsidized by my employer. Once there, most of the periodicals I abstracted were British, focused on politics, geography and world affairs. The corporate atmosphere was bleak and soul-crushing; the education was absolutely priceless.

In August, Scoreboard Liquors moved from West Spring to East Spring on the other side of town, with the store’s cantankerous manager Duck taking this opportunity to retire. Scoreboard lasted a while at the new location, and fresh friendships were made as a result. However, it never really was the same for me.

Meanwhile Bob got married and moved out, and our friend George, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, moved in. He already was famous for his valuable public service of convincing Sportstime’s owners to stock $1.75 bottles of Pilsner Urquell.

As the pre-digital calendar’s page turned to 1989, the metamorphosis was completed when I awoke one morning to a hangover and the surprising information that for the first time since college, I seemed to have an actual girlfriend. By this time, the itinerary for Europe 1989 was largely set. My life had become confusing.

Now what?

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Looking at oneself in the mirror, resolving to be completely honest, might be the hardest thing in the world for any person to do.

There are many reasons why I was an emotionally dysfunctional basket case as a young man. They’re so numerous that the full self-lacerating confessional will have to wait for a multi-volume series, one I have no plans to write any time soon.

It can suffice to say that hating yourself probably isn’t the best platform for interaction with a wider world. It took many years and a handful of visits to the vicinity of rock bottom (not the brewpub chain) before it got better, and the process of recovery is ongoing.

And so it was that in the 1980s, I fell head over heels in love – with Europe.

I loved traveling in Europe, learning about Europe, and using Europe as self-medication.

My life was an unsolvable mystery; Europe made precise sense. Travel seemed an ideal way to displace the anger and angst, to forget for a little while how ridiculously slight my self-regard really was, and to discover the sense of purpose otherwise missing from my life.

Travel allowed me to stall for the time required to understand myself, and to be at peace with me. Travel was the crutch, and also an evasive maneuver. Tellingly, I still resisted giving myself over to it with any semblance of permanence, and I merely pretended to be an expatriate.

I went away, and always returned.

It may seem tacky to a millennial, but when Bono said he hadn’t found what he was looking for, I could relate. Here I am, three decades later, still trying to explain it. I’ve learned so much – and nothing at all. None of us are promised a rose garden, after all.

Beginning in 1983, the European obsession expanded exponentially, allowing me to avoid growing up, or so I imagined. However, by 1989 -- with a magnum opus of an extravaganza on the horizon -- my carefully interlocked edifices of predictability and stability were crumbling.

None of these changes would be allowed to alter my plans for 1989, and yet the outcome would be far different than I ever imagined, both in personal and geopolitical terms.

The established orders at home and abroad simply couldn’t survive Vladimir Putin and Roger Baylor crossing paths over lager beer in Dresden, and the walls all came tumbling down.

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Here’s where I stand, today.

The plan for 2019 is to begin by moving backward. The 1985 travel narrative previously published two years ago at my Potable Curmudgeon blog will be updated and republished at NA Confidential, with the first-time addition of digitalized slide images.

When this project is finished, preparations will begin for 1989. In all honesty, the prospect of documenting 1989 is more than a little daunting, and it might take a while.

For one thing, there is the sheer length of the trip (more than six months) and the commensurate number of slides to scan.

In a more conceptual sense, the 1989 journey was like the ambitious, flawed album that follows a flurry of hits. Think of it as my personal Be Here Now by Oasis, minus the cocaine. In 1989, perhaps precisely because the reference points all seemed in flux, my reach exceeded my grasp.

The logistical law of averages also caught up with me. For example, on one memorable occasion I somewhat idiotically decided to mail home a package of valuable keepsakes from East Germany. It never arrived.

I hope the Stasi agent of record enjoyed them.

At various times during the trip, I lost my credit card, had my pocket picked, and was famously slipped a mickey and robbed. The latter episode resulted in a splitting headache and my backpack being stolen, and with it my trip diary, the absence of which will make a day-by-day rendering of 1989 difficult.

Moreover, having at long last arrived at the ideal juncture for meeting female Europeans – the Hungarians, Czechs and Russians, duly boggling male minds and libidos – I had a gal back home, later to be both wife and business partner.

Not only this, but she eventually joined me on the trip, and so to discuss the 1989 trip is to come to grips with this ultimately failed relationship, both personally in the years to come, and later as it came to impact the business.

Unsettling isn’t an adequate word for the encroaching trepidation, though it’s probably better resolved before penning the story. After all, I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.

In the spring of 1989, I flew into a continent divided into “cold” warring blocs, and much of my summer was spent behind the lines of America’s presumed enemy. By the time I flew home in November, the Berlin Wall was down and everything was changing.

I’ll probably spend the rest of my life mulling over how well, and badly, I reacted to these changes.

Such is life.