In My Time

Hunched up against the cold windowpane of my midnight bus, I doze in and out of a restless sleep, watching the hills of the countryside lurched forward in the darkness. A few hours into the journey, a woman wakes me with heavy shakes and a flashlight (at first, I am almost certain that this is a drill from Arriel for our IPE exam and I am about to blurt out what the Stolper-Samuelson theorem is- thank you Professor Moon). Drowsily I find the energy to descend the bus, get my passport stamped at the border post, and await my arrival to Bulgaria as the sun pierces through the mellow blue pallet, relieving the dark storms that plagued the evening’s ride. After a three-week reprieve I am back in post-Soviet territory, and it becomes evident almost immediately. The mundane Soviet Realist monuments are disarrayed throughout the parks, the apartment blocs tower over the newly constructed businesses as an eerie reminder of time gone by, and the Slavic origins of the Bulgarian language seem much more reminiscent of Russian than Georgian or Armenian.  Unlike Turkey, the air in Bulgaria is still chilled and I wear a winter jacket as I stroll the streets in search of cultural discovery, which comes in the form of the Early Christian church of St George constructed as a rotunda in red brick in the 4^th Century, the much more extravagant Byzantium Hagia Sophia Church, which mimics its counterpart in Istanbul well with large onion domes and high vaulted ceilings, the National Gallery of Foreign Art where I marvel at countless masterpieces ranging from Italian Renaissance painters to immaculately naturalistic Russian colorists, and finally a conversation (or rather a monologue in Bulgarian) with an elderly woman on a park bench. Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of my time on this side of the Black Sea was my host, an Economics student, with whom I visited the rock-climbing wall, tried tea in a unique apartment-turned café, and traversed the rest of Studenski grad, a student section separate from the main part of town that houses over 40,000 university students.

En route to Zurich, I had a lengthy layover in Vienna where I quickly zipped through the suburbs to the center of the city via speed train. While there, I made my way to Mozart’s apartment, which has been renovated and turn into a museum. The baroque building consists of two portions: the first is strictly a museum stuccoed in white plaster and lined with display cases that illuminate the grand composer’s freemason activities, gambling, and social life (accompanied with an audioguide filled with Mozart’s monumentally baronial compositions). A few floors below lies a replica of the rather large apartment that Mozart lived in between 1784 to1787, which he shared with his wife, two children, at times his father, two servants, and a seemingly endless flow of guests. Being in the same room where masterpieces like The Marriage of Figaro were conceived was a truly inspirational experience and provoked a new appreciation for the scores that I have grown accustomed to from pop culture and choir rehearsals. Before racing back to the airport, I had time to visit St. Stephen’s Cathedral, or Stephansdom, a colossal combination of Romanesque and Gothic architectural aspects originally constructed in 1147. With its multi-color tiled roof, soaring towers embellished with elaborate floral patterns, and bas-relief depictions of apostles, it was fascinating to compare this cathedral with those of Byzantium that I stood in awe of just a week before.

Zurich itself is perhaps as different as can be to almost every other city I have visited; Tbilisi and Istanbul were muddled with insane drivers, a labyrinth of unlabeled streets, and covered with a sheer, undetectable layer of anarchy; Yerevan and Sofia were soaked in a dark undertone of their poor and oppressed history; the diversity found in Tel Aviv among Arabs and Jews and in Athens between Greeks and North African migrants created an uneasy tension that, though not acted upon, was undoubtedly a tangible sensation. Zurich is, in a word, perfect. The trains and trams run on schedule to the second, every pedestrian waits patiently at the crosswalk for the blinking green light (a nightmare for someone who grew up jaywalking on nearly every corner in New York), and even the ‘self-serve’ fountain drinks have a line on the cup where by customers meticulously measure out their Coke. Though crime rates are low and fairness is the rule of the land (save perchance for women’s equality), the city with its majestic bell tower, cobble stone bridges, and swans elegantly swimming in a nearby lake is too perfect that it seems more like a country in Epcot (Disney) rather than the real thing. Despite the fact that our visits to both the history museum and the art museum gave us some reprieve from the precision, after a few days the cleanliness and exactness was overbearing for someone who has spent the last month on couches in gritty sideally apartments. Taking refuge from Zurich, we went hiking through the vast countryside of Switzerland. Our trekking brought us up muddy mountain trails canopied by a thick layer of pines and leaves, through wide, open meadows of wildflowers and cows jingling happily with rusty bells, and even through a ferocious snow storm as we made our way up towards the summit of Jungfrau deep within the Alps. Thankfully our extensive hikes made up for the amount of decadent Swiss chocolate, fondue, and rochlette we feasted on throughout the week.

Six years ago was the first time I had left America on a plane bound for Europe with forty other high school students I had never met. Coming from a family that hasn’t left the East Coast, let alone the country, I would be lying if I claimed that I wasn’t terrified of what laid beyond the watery depths of the Atlantic as the rest of the travelers slept silently through that fateful journey. I like to remind myself of that trip more often than I probably should, of spending worry-free nights watching the sun set over an olive orchid in Spain, of frantically sprinting down the steps of the Eiffel Tower to catch our bus already half-way down the boulevard, of the conversations after our first concentration camp visit around a table in some long forgotten restaurant hidden in the forests of Germany, and, most importantly, of the inexplicable passion for exploration that those adventures ignited that I’m still yearning to feed so many years later. A few days into my time in Switzerland I traveled to the Rhine Falls, the largest plain waterfalls in Europe, with my companions.  I watched the water cascade over the mighty rocks, the streams of water avalanching in white surges of pure force to the melodic orchestra of crashes and plunges. Nothing had changed since the day my host family took me across the border to visit these falls six years ago. The water still pounded relentlessly downstream, the eroded rocks still stood sedate among the chaos, even the fish in the lake below resembled those I had fed bits of bread to with my younger home-stay brother as he dangled his hands over our boat, never quite reaching the watery mirror.  Back in Zurich the same jeans I wore at 15 are stuffed untidily into my canvas bag, and that passion for exploration still follows dutifully in my shadow as I venture onward.

 In a few weeks I turn 21, something seemingly unimaginable as I stood in the same spot as my 15-year-old self, looking out onto the falls as eternally unchanged as the Great Pyramids. Though my clothes and, grudgingly, height may be the same, I know that I am not like the water that forever flows below the austere stone castle perched high on its cliffs. Before boarding that plane in 2005 I had every intention to become a veterinarian, attend Cornel, and go on to work at some exotic zoo or conservation clinic. My fears were far and few in between, save for the occasional anxiety of being caught for our misconduct of playing Uno into the wee hours of the morning (Erica I hope remember that night of having to hide in the bathtub). Those memories now seem like someone else’s story as I begin my work with Sub-Saharan refugees in Morocco and talk with Erica about what will come of us after graduation next year. Boarding trains and busses so often I tend to, consciously or unconsciously, neglect the fact that I’m growing up; that I’m no longer afraid to immerse myself completely alone in a town where I know neither the language nor the customs. I am no longer terrified of what lays beyond the watery depths of the Atlantic like I was six years ago, but instead panic at the thought of what lays beyond the cap and gown a year from now. For one last moment I take in the view of the falls, feel of the mist in my tussled hair, smell the sent of earth and moisture intertwined: it all looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. In the end, I realize what’s changed is me.