The Prologue

Hallo!

That's what the flight attendant said to me when I first boarded Lufthansa's Boeing 747 almost exactly a month ago. The flight was to Frankfurt, and Lufthansa is a German airline, which meant that the entire flight crew was bilingual, with some level of accent. Up until that moment, I had never been on an airplane that big. I had never boarded a plane that would leave Boston and go east. I had never even been in the international terminal of Logan airport, but there I was, and I was getting ready to go further than I'd ever gone before. And that greeting was the moment I realized I was actually going to Europe.

I should probably back up. Several months ago, back in February, my grandma in Rhode Island emailed my parents with an idea she had had. She was the middle of her third month living alone after my grandpa passed away in December, and had been talking to some of her friends from the local chorus she had sung with for over thirty years. The chorus had taken three international trips in the past, the most recent one nineteen years ago, and was planning another one in July, for ten days in three different countries. My grandma stopped singing with them about five years ago, but still knew most of the members, and had a lot of people asking her if she was going to go. After looking over the destinations and what the group would be doing, she contacted my family and explained the situation. Then she asked me if I wanted to go. It would be a musical tour, she said, in great cities with amazing people. If we scheduled things accordingly, I could fly out to meet her and we could get back to Rhode Island the day before my parents and brother arrived from Oregon for our usual two-week trip to the east coast. And that's how I ended up going to Prague, Vienna and Budapest with the Chorus of Westerly.

For me, this was actually a dream come true. I had spent the majority of middle school talking endlessly about Europe, connecting castles and sights I planned to visit someday into all of my essays and projects. In seventh grade, I did a project where I planned out a dream trip to Europe, right down to the exact dollar. According to my itinerary, I "went" to France, Germany and Austria and saw some amazing things. I also learned a lot. I'm the kind of person (or maybe it's just me) who has an idea of what Ireland or France or whatever looks like in my head, and then sticks with it and pretends that I know what I'm talking about. I did tons of research for this project, and it became my dream to actually travel to Europe someday. I live in Oregon, 6,000 away from these places. For all I knew, the rest of the world didn't really exist and I lived in a bubble like The Truman Show or something. I needed to get out there and see it. When this opportunity came up, it was so surreal that I almost didn't believe it. The first miracle.

I told everyone I knew or thought would care, of course, and then everyone who asked me what I was doing during the summer. My best friend freaked out with me, after saying that it was "almost as good as Disney World," (her family's spring break trip) and that I would have to bring her back something. My violin and band teacher smiled knowingly, thinking of the rich musical history in all of the cities. I looked up the temperature for central Europe in the summer, panicked because I didn't have that many summer clothes, and went to Goodwill to stock up. I checked on my passport every day to make sure it was still there. I listened to recordings of meetings that were going on in Rhode Island so I would be up to speed on my information. Everyone told me that I was going to have the time of my life, and even though I was really nervous to be away from home for so long and go off to another country for the first time, I was extremely excited.

On July 9th, I said goodbye to my dad, brother, dog and the beautiful place where I live and drove with my mom to Portland so I could catch a red-eye flight to Boston. We stopped at my great- aunt and uncle's house in the city for dinner, and walked around the campus of Lewis and Clark College (I'm going to have to start thinking about that whole college thing at some point, and I guess that now is better than later). Around ten, we drove out to the airport, which was still pretty busy considering it was late at night, checked in, and went to wait at the gate, from where my plane would depart after midnight (gotta love those overnight flights.) Even though I've been on countless planes in my lifetime, most of them to Boston, I had never been on one alone, and never overnight, and was terrified out of my wits as we waited around with the rest of the people I would be stuck with in a metal tube for the next six hours. When it was time for me to board, I took a deep breath, hugged my mom goodbye, and walked down the walkway thingie, by myself in one of those things for the first time ever.

After I got on the plane, things didn't seem as bad. I got an aisle seat, which was nice, and Jet Blue provides nice televisions, which I didn't actually watch, but were a nice amenity. I tried to fall asleep, which made the long flight go back a lot faster, and when I woke up, it was light outside and we were descending into Boston. I was born outside of Boston and lived there for the first six years of my life, but I had never been there without the rest of my family, and it was actually terribly exciting. I followed the signs (#1 rule of the airport, according to everyone who told me about traveling alone) down to baggage claim, where I met up with my 20-year-old cousin, a student at Tufts University who's living in Boston and working as an engineer intern. After retrieving my bag, we made our way to the train station via public transportation, and then took a detour through Chinatown and the financial district so that she could drop off a box for work that had been haunting her for the past twenty-four hours (it's a long story). We made it back to the train station about fifteen minutes before my train arrived, and she told me everything I would need to know about railway travel. Fifteen minutes later, I was on a train to Rhode Island, so that my grandma could pick me up, and the while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm doing this more or less ALONE!"

Nothing too exciting happened after that. That is, until the big trip started. My grandma got me from the train station and we spent the next day and a half sorting out foreign money, dropping off plants at the neighbor's house, reading up on the countries we'd be going to, and running errands. I knew my perspective on the world was going to change in a few days, and in a way it kind of already had. Either way, I couldn't wait. Those days in suspense, wondering what the future would bring, were like I was Maria von Trapp leaving the abbey for the first time and singing about confidence. Except the US was my abbey, and Europe was the von Trapp's estate.

Here's my dresser in Rhode Island with some random essentials, and then all of the money I had, in different currencies.

I'll continue in the next post with the day we left and onwards to Prague.

More about the Chorus: http://www.chorusofwesterly.org/site/PageServer?pagename=deploymenthome