Saying Goodbye to Europe

Tomorrow we board a Cruise Ship for a slow trip back to the US. Roughly speaking, we’ve spent a month on ships, two in Turkey, two in Armenia, and two traipsing through Georgistan, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Italy and a day in San Marino. Lots of languages, religions, food, transit systems, AirBnBs, and hikes. 

I can’t say I’m looking forward to returning to the US, with its tremendous uptick in corruption and state-sponsored violence. We’re also headed for Massachusetts in winter, which leaves me cold. But it’ll be very good to see family and friends and familiar places. Other countries have their corruption and violence too. Since we left Turkey, they’ve started a crackdown on LGBT activity, and two freighters were sunk off the Black sea coast of Bulgaria a week after we disembarked from our crossing. But the US has such a long record of being a beacon of hope that it’s sad to see an empire commit suicide. 




Somehow we’ve managed to travel half a year without boarding an airplane. Kristen sees every public transit system as a new challenge to conquer, and so, armed with google translate, maps, and ChatGPT she figures out how to get from hither to yon on busses, local trains, high speed trains, the aforementioned freighter to transit the Black Sea, and Lada taxis in remote locations. 


We made good contacts with Armenian Volunteer Corps, but in retrospect I wish we had more interpersonal meaningful interaction with more people. It’s part of the Nomad’s dilemma, where you travel around and meet people and then leave them. We plan to return next year, so hopefully we can do better on this front. 


We totally lucked out on climate change. While Europe and Persia were baking under record high temperatures and low rainfall, the Caucus mountains enjoyed a fairly normal summer. Being 1000 to 1500 meters elevation certainly helped. Let’s see how the AMOC and El Nino shape up over the next year. 


Favorite places? Definitely Armenia, Georgistan, Transylvania and Austria, although Austria is quite expensive. In general, we found that the cost of living increased dramatically as we traveled westward through Europe. We’re looking forward to trying our hand at re-creating some of the food we’ve sampled along the way. 

 

We've also seen problems along the way. Countries that erase select parts of their history. Large cities with no functional waste water treatment infrastructure. Legacy pollution from former Soviet times. Young people looking forward to a bleak future. And finally we joined a protest in Ravenna Italy. While many concerns were visible: LGBT, corruption, Unions, but the main focus was that the shipping port of Ravenna is being used for sending armaments to a country that is engaged in genocide. The people here, some of whom work at the port, don't want to be complicit. Of course it was all in Italian, so the challenge for us was to translate the signs and slogans.


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