A Cornwall young adult has been living his best life in Europe
My name is David Kramer, and I’m a recent CCHS graduate. I deferred starting college until fall of 2024, and I spent this past summer and the beginning of fall working long hours at 2 Alices and Cosimo’s, and saving money. I’m not into material things (except for fast cars, big houses, and private yachts) but since I hadn’t made that much money, I decided to travel. To where?
It was easy to decide. A couple years ago I had gone on a school trip to Spain, and couldn’t wait to return. It’s one of the most affordable Western European countries, and the inhabitants speak Spanish. I may be taking a year-long break from my academic studies, but there’s no reason to let my brain turn to mush, at least not yet. I figured if I went to Spain, I’d learn to speak Spanish. It wouldn’t be that difficult because I’d already taken six years of Spanish in the Cornwall School District, and was fluent… más o menos. Traveling to Spain would be a good opportunity to brush up on my subjunctive, irregular imperfect, and expand my vocabulary, which was that of a first grader in Panama.
As my flight to Barcelona took off from Newark, I didn’t have a master plan, because I knew it’d immediately change as soon as I landed. I’m also a big believer in flânerie. Translated from French, a flâneur is literally a person who strolls. But flânerie? That’s a somewhat overly-romanticized movement started by the French poet Charles Baudelaire that advocates that the best way to learn a city is to wander around it without a final destination in mind. You explore and you saunter, discovering interesting places that might not necessarily be on the beaten path. Flânerie is worthwhile, but I made sure that at each city I stopped in I saw the “one big thing” for which the town was famous.
That first day getting to Barcelona was the longest day, literally.
Because of the time zones it lasted somewhere around 36 hours with tiny catnaps intermixed. After that I was gold, Ponyboy. Well, I was alone in a foreign nation, 4000 miles from my family, and only 18 years old.
But I didn’t think my adventure was impressive, just mildly distressing.
I got over all my remaining worries shortly. After all, many families in America have an origin story that involves someone in the family who showed up at age 14 with only the clothes on their back, or sometimes even less. Meanwhile, I was arriving in Barcelona with a backpack that carried, golly, at least seven days worth of clothing, in addition to the clothes on my back. Oh yes, and a couple credit cards, just in case.
You meet wonderful people traveling. On my first day in Barcelona I met Raul, an 89-year-old retired philosophy professor who’d also been friends with my grandma in the ‘60s (before she was a grandma). He barely spoke a lick of English, but after that point, I wasn’t alone on the continent. I mean, I still slept in the hostels at night by myself, but in the day we’d adventure across Barcelona. He’d take me to dusty museums, soaring mountains, and even once to his old university. He had no incentive to do any of this, except for kindness. But, I couldn’t stay too long. After about a week, I took a bus to Zaragoza, Spain.
I’d never before taken a public bus from one city to another, not even in the US. The Spanish bus was clean, fast, and cheap. I suppose I’ll have to cross compare with a bus in New York sometime.
Zaragoza wasn’t as thrilling as Barcelona. Its enormous basilica was a pleasure to visit, but there was too much crime. Admittedly, it might’ve just been the part of town I was in. To my point, on my last night in Zaragoza, there was a fight in the street outside my hostel and the Spanish police paid a visit.
So I took a bus to Toledo. That’s an ancient city, which at one point was the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom, among other things. It’s your quintessential European city, full of tiny little alleyways and streets that turn sharply, darkened by the architecture of centuries and centuries of history.
Toledo was a small town, with a circumference that could be walked in half a day. After several days, I’d seen it all. I took a bus to Madrid. I only stayed one night in Madrid, but it was a much more lively city than Toledo had been. I was sad to leave so soon, as I’d bought a non-refundable train ticket for the next day, but I promised myself I’d return.
I had planned my budget to allow expenditures of about €50 a day. I’d often exceed that limit on days that I took transportation, as a bus ticket would usually cost around €15-€30, and a hostel for the night would cost about the same. Add in a couple meals, a museum ticket, and that’s a pricey day! However, on days that I didn’t travel to a new city, I found it quite easy to stay below budget. Overall, I am pleased to say my adventure averaged approximately €50 a day, or about $55, in the United States.
On the day I went to Cordoba, I took a high speed train. I talked to the engineer up front as we were boarding, and he showed me around the “cockpit.” It turns out there’s only one person in control of the train, which is slightly unnerving. It wasn’t the fastest train in Europe, but for an American, it sure felt fast. We got up to 267 kph, or about 165 mph.
Cordoba is a quaint little town compared to Madrid. Its most iconic landmark is the Mezquita, which is a cathedral that once was a mosque.
Cordoba has changed hands more times than a €1 coin. It’s been held by the Romans, the Visigoths, the Caliphate, the Crown of Castile, etc.
After almost a week, it was time for me to leave.
I returned to Madrid on a night train, arriving a few minutes after midnight. This time I was able to visit El Prado (the Spanish equivalent of the Louvre), and El Museo Arqueologico Nacional, which is just a nice archeology museum. I’m not technically a student right now, but I brought my expired student ID from CCHS, and most places let me in for free. I’m not morally conflicted about this because many of my (former) teachers have said we’re all “students-for-life.”
I flew on a high speed train back to “Barthelona,” as the Spaniards would pronounce it. Another week with Raul yielded even more admiration for the almost-nonagenarian. He restricted my flânerie with his overwhelming knowledge of Barcelona, but I was content. We drove around often in his twenty-year-old Skoda, which is a mid-size European car manufactured in the Czech Republic. Sometimes it’d be a little scary, winding around on tiny mountain roads at blistering speeds, but I figured he knew what he was doing. We’d drive to mountain-top restaurants on Mount Tibidabo (where Jesus once met the Devil, locals say), or visit the old 1992 Olympic facilities (slightly decrepit), and we even tried to get into Parque Güell (a masterpiece of a park created by famed architect, Antoni Gaudí), among other places.
Over the past month I’d greatly improved my Spanish. Thus, it was time to leave Spain. So, I took a 10 hour bus to Lyon, France. Remember Baudelaire? He went to boarding school in Lyon.
I watched the film Napoleon while I was in Lyon. It was slightly surreal, watching an American movie made with American actors about French history, in France, with French people. And, French subtitles.
I’m not sure what the French in that theater thought of the film, but based upon the general mood leaving the theater, not much.
A couple days later, I boarded a morning train to Paris. By this time, I had coordinated a plan. My father would fly into Paris in a couple days, we’d rent a car, drive around the French countryside, visit Paris for half a week, and then fly back.
But first, I walked and rambled around Paris for a couple days by myself. I discovered neat little bakeries, the existence of the “plat du jour,” and I took a gratuitous amount of photos by the Eiffel Tower. On one of my last days in Paris, I was ambling around the Montmartre area and came across a synth repair store that had a $60,000 modular synthesizer that took up half the room. I certainly never would’ve found that if I’d researched the top destinations in Paris.
Across the Seine, in the Eiffel Tower area, I discovered scammers perpetrating the cup and ball scam (also known as “the shell game”).
Since my family wasn’t there to impose common sense, I put myself right in the fray. I didn’t play, of course, but I watched people lose hundreds of dollars. It was pitiful. Even though I was intentionally putting myself needlessly close to criminals, I felt safe, as the French police were nearby the whole time watching the scams unfold.
I felt like a local expert when I took the RER B (a train) to meet my father at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and in the loosest sense of the term, I was. I’d been living on my own dime, in foreign countries, without any familial assistance, for about a month. Except for when Raul and I ate together, I’d scraped and scrounged for my every meal. I’d done my laundry, and none of the washing machines spoke English. I was an independent man, if you can believe it.
After a week in France with my father touring Normandy and Paris, it was time to leave Europe. Our flight landed at Stewart Airport on a dark and cloudy December evening. I’m glad to have returned to the USA, but I won’t be here for long. I bought a round trip ticket, Paris to New York to Paris, and I’ll be returning to the “City of Light” in late January.
Here are some insights I had while traveling:
You meet wonderful people traveling, and you also meet creeps. At one hostel, I was typing an email when a middle-aged man pressed his belly against me and told me that he’d given an Italian boy at the hostel a massage, and he’d like to give me one too. I pretended not to speak Spanish and declined. Later that night in my hostel room (with ten other travelers) it got weirder. The middle-aged man walked around in tighty-whities to and from the shower (he kept forgetting things). He tried to talk to me, but I just sort of grimaced and looked away.
There are an awful lot of people who will try to take your money and possessions. Heck, one time I was in a cafe and a middle-aged woman tried to steal my phone. I yelled at her instead, and I think she got the gist.
More than anything, I learned the importance of family and friends. I know, it doesn’t get more mawkishly sentimental than that, but it’s true!
Walking around empty streets full of thousands of nameless people, people I could never have the time to know personally, instilled in me a sense that the few people I do know, matter a lot.
Overall, this trip was mostly unremarkable. Were I five years older, it’d be entirely unremarkable. However, I was in Lyon, France, when I met a 33-year-old former French Foreign Legionnaire. He was Irish, but had earned his French citizenship by serving in the somewhat exclusive French Foreign Legion. He gave me advice. He often asks traveling students if they are proud of themselves. According to him, they usually mumble a neutral response. This is how he responds, as told to me:
“Twenty years from now you’re going to be freakin’; proud of yourself for setting out and traveling solo across a continent when you were only 19 or 20. So why wait twenty years? Be proud of yourself now”.
He might’ve used a different word than “freakin’.”