The Black Sea

A little more than twelve years before The Boy was born I was given a trip to Europe as a gift from my dad to celebrate my imminent transfer to UC Berkeley. He’d paid for me to go to Europe before, but my previous trips, though awesome in more ways than I can count, usually ended up with me working at a bar, behaving in a debauched manner and avoiding as much of my life back home as I could muster.

So my trip in 1997, an overly generous gift from my devoted dad, differed in that it had a definite end-point – my moving to Northern California, as well as also having a very real reason for happening – I had actually accomplished something by being accepted to university. So although I was incredibly grateful to Dad for shelling out the cash for me to visit the continent that would mean so much to me academically and personally(Hubs is, after all, British – they don’t actually consider themselves European, but never mind) I didn’t have the same underlying sense of guilt in going over there that time that I did during my previous trips.
During that trip I backpacked for a few weeks with a friend, fell in love with a boy from the north of England and lived with him in Brussels and finally got the chance to show Dad my beloved Prague.

Along with all that, I started to read a book – The Black Sea by Neal Ascherson. I never got very far as I was too busy getting my heart broken and drinking Stella Artois to concentrate on reading. I picked it up a few days ago and found that my old bookmark is still there, hovering around page 50. I’m sad to report that my memory has not been jogged – that fourteen years ago I read about the chemical composition of the Black Sea, the topography that surrounds it, the many waves of migration to its shores and its roll in the Russian Civil War and collapse of communism and I don’t remember reading any of it. And my freakin’ senior thesis was about the Russian Civil War, so that’s a spectacular memory lapse on my part.

Aaanyway, there is no real point to this post except to remind myself that before The Boy there was grad school, and that before grad school there was undergrad, and through it all there was my freaky love for Russians, Eastern Europeans, Central Europeans and, for that matter, Western Europeans.

I haven’t been back to Brussels since that trip, and I’ve still never been to Russia, but I gotta say I’m really looking forward to(hopefully) getting to both places with Hubs and The Boy. I mean, as intimidating as travel seems with a toddler – short trips to San Diego or Palm Springs notwithstanding – I’m really looking forward to creating traveling memories with The Boy. More than a decade with Hubs means that we’ve got a good amount of travel under our belts together, but there’s something totally different and magical about the idea of traveling with The Boy – seeing him toddle around London and people gush over his cuteness with English accents, drinking hot chocolate with him in a Left Bank café in Paris. Or even hanging out in the Grand Place like I used to do when I lived in Brussels or visiting the Lenin’s Tomb like I’ve always wanted to. I’m stoked for all of it.