Bad Backpacker Back in Bavaria

Bad backpacker! Bad, baaaaad backpacker! Bad backpacker who sits in a hostel common room and barely even stands up for two straight days!

Well, that's not true. I bought some doner kebabs. And Friday night I got so sick of the drunken American teenagers filling the common room of the Wombat's Hostel Muenchen that I decided to up and get myself some dinner and entertainment. After all, the Munich Film Festival is going on! That'll be all sexy and cultural and fantastic, and surely there will be something ludicrously sophisticated to see there! Upon getting home I'll be able to casually drop phrases like "Oh, yes, the Lithuanian film about the French dwarf who survives Auschwitz because of his forbidden homosexual affair with a kapo? I saw it at the Munich Film Festival. I found it fanciful yet ponderous. Goodness, are we out of Camembert already?"

Of course, the only film that was not sold out by the time I rolled down there was Stop-Loss. And the only neighborhood restaurant that I could afford that sold something besides doner kebabs was a Cantonese place called Kleine Chinese. So really, the night went like every Friday night where I refuse to go out because I say I'm working on a paper: ending in eating greasy Chinese food and drooling at Channing Tatum movies.

Yes, the reason I haven't been out in Munich is because I have this massive paper due on Monday, the paper for the class that brought me to Germany in the first place. It's a pretty interesting topic for historical memory studies, which is to say that for the average person it's about as interesting as hearing about the bowel movements of your co-worker's new cat. Suffice it to say that my thesis concerns the use of empty space in Berlin countermemorials. I've spent fifteen pages and two days writing about empty space, so no, I don't feel badly for taking a spring roll and war movie break.

But enough about that! You want to hear about what it's like to take an overnight train ride through Sarajevo! Well, it's horrifying, thank you. But all in good order.

So after watching the sunset in over Sarajevo I wandered back down to the old town for yet another dinner of cevapi and coke, sweating the whole way. It seems almost quaint to remember now, from the relative cool of Munich, how absolutely miserably hot it was in the Balkans away from the coast. Sarajevo reached 37 the day by the time I woke up at 11, just in time for the tour of the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum.

Between 1992 and 1995 Sarajevo survived the longest siege in modern history thanks to this 800 meter-long, 1 meter-high, 1.5 meter-wide tunnel that stretched from the airport to a house at the far eastern edge of the city, which bordered the only access to the outside world not blocked by Serbian troops. The Serbs knew it was there, of course, and continued to constantly shell the house and surrounding areas, but the line of defense was strong enough to keep access free and NATO was encamped at the airport, ensuring it was a safe haven. We were driven out to the museum along major war landmarks, taking Sniper's Alley out past the famous yellow Holiday Inn where international media had camped during the siege.

The museum itself is privately run by the family that lived there during the siege and lives there still. You're taken to their backyard to watch a twenty-minute movie on the life in Sarajevo siege and the use of the tunnel, not a silent movie but with essentially no spoken dialogue-- the first half is Bosnians running for their lives down deserted streets, dodging mortars and sniper fire, and the second half is Sarajevans shuttling supplies, arms, refugees and the wounded through the tunnel, too exhausted and focused on getting through the tiny space unscathed to speak to the camera. The little old lady who owns the house appears in the film, standing at the top of the stairs as weary defenders trudge up the clanking steps and offering them cups of water poured from an empty water jug. As we watched the video I saw a bubushka-ed head peek through a curtain covering the entrance to a shack at the back of the property and recognized the same papery, lined face and quiet smile. I wanted so much to speak to her-- to thank her for allowing us to invade her home to witness history, to ask her banal questions I'm sure she's been asked a thousand times before-- but she withdrew back in and left us to poking around her yard and basement.

After the museum the guide drove us back to Sarajevo and I split off with a very nice Canadian girl who worked for the Ottaw equivalent of the OMB to show her where I'd found some Sarajevo roses and to get some off-brand Balkans Coke. Cockta is... interesting. Fruitier than Coke, to be sure, and yet somehow more bitter. We walked around Sarajevo together talking about politics in our respective capitals and musing how great and how sad it was that more Americans didn't know how great Sarajevo was.

At least, until the train.

That train. I've ridden on bad trains before, and have no doubt that there are worse trains out there. But for sheer filth, fear factor and bad conditions, this one takes the cake so far. I detest traveling on southern European overnight trains as a single woman, but this one was made worse by the fact that

1. There were no locks on the cabin doors
2. There were twenty-two stops between Sarajevo and Zagreb
3. There were enormous amounts of swarthy Bosnian men, cigarettes dangling from spittle-drenched lips, roaming the corridors of the train in packs leering and looking for seats. Even scarier were the ones by themselves-- for, as much as one does not care to get gang-raped on a train, the odds of having your stuff stolen are infinitely higher, and that tends to be done by the single operators. There was one little guy in an open-collared shirt and filthy ponytail who passed by my cabin door no less than five times before we even pulled out of Sarajevo, making me shudder each time he loped by.
4. It was still 34 degrees C even at 10 PM.

So how do you deal with these circumstances?

1. Be a bitch. An overnight train in the Balkans is no time to mind your manners. Spread all your crap out all over the car and take up space so it looks like you're already bunking with people, possibly five very protective professional boxers. If someone comes a-knockin' looking for a seat and you don't like the cut of his jib, don't smile apologetically and say that you don't have room. Yell "NO! MY FRIEND IS HERE" and gesture to the University of Amsterdamn sweatshirt, the most masculine piece of clothing you own, lying across the opposite seat. This is the one time of your trip when you are not only allowed to be an Ugly American, you should be one.
2. Get a roommate, preferably another single girl. I saw mine as she ambled past, looking as hunted and tense as I did. I ran after her and stage-whispered "I'm a single girl too! You want to bunk with me?" The look of relief she gave me was so palpable I felt like I'd cured a terminal disease she'd been suffering from.
3. Room next to people like you. I was lucky enough to be next to a couple my age from Wales who I'd met that day on the tunnel museum tour. We all stood in the hallway outside our cabins, the guy in the middle so it wasn't quite clear who he was with, until we left Sarajevo and people had more or less chosen their seats.
4. Ready your gear. This has three stages:
a. Ubervalaubles (passport, cash, credit cards, train ticket). These go in your Rick Steeves travel wallet which is then strapped around your middle, under a tank top, wife beater and t-shirt.
b. Valuables (iPod, travel journal, cell phone, converter): these go in your purse, which is wrapped up in a scarf wrapped up in a hoodie and will serve as your pillow.
c. Pack. You will set it on the rack above you, untie every strap on the thing and then double knot then back looping around the bars of the shelf. You will then padlock the whole thing to the rack. Granted, someone could still slash it, but they would have to stand on top of you to do it, it would take a good few minutes and all they would get is a sackful of dirty socks and tank tops.

You then curl up with your Swiss army knife in your hand (not open, of course, but it makes you feel good knowing it's there), close the door (no lock on it, natch), draw the drapes shut and wait for sleep, which of course will never come. You're on an overnight regional train through Bosnia, and every time the train slows down to creak into the next tiny town you jolt awake, convinced that Slavko the Terrible or Ivan the Molester has just boarded, looking for new victims.

n a perverse way it was almost enjoyable, this lurch of adrenaline that shot through my veins, because I really wasn't in any more danger than when I walk home from the Columbia Heights Metro at 2 AM with my purse bouncing at my side and a few drinks in my system. I don't know anyone else who has been on an overnight train through Bosnia, and doing it gave me a feeling of having survived something challenging, the kind of Real Experience that so many backpackers strive for. Like my foray out to the Munich Film Festival, where I ate beef with garlic and saw a movie I once decided against seeing at home in favor of a romantic comedy about the Clinton campaign, it sounds a lot more exotic than the reality actually turned out to be. But if that's not the essence of backpacking through Europe, I don't know what it.

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