Recovering from the Baltics

So for the past week we embarked upon a field trip and a kind of traditional farewell trip to Estonia and Latvia. We were all looking forward to multiple aspects of the trip, including receiving a stipend for the entire trip and having the whole thing funded as a part of the program and the fact that Gürtler planned it all so we wouldn’t need to worry about narcissistic train conductors with superiority complexes telling you that you are on the wrong kind of train going in the wrong direction or barely making your airplane back after getting lost from horrible airport directions from the overenthusiastic incomprehensible Japanese woman sitting at the front desk of the hostel. We were all looking forward to escaping the stress of the end of the semester work in Innsbruck and relaxing on the Baltic sea, a place that we all agreed we would probably have never thought of going before. I don’t think “relaxing” would really be the best term to describe the excursion. We spent most of our time in the past week trying to keep up with Gürtler’s disturbingly breakneck pace. After a day of marathon five hour city tours in German, awkward embassy visits, and mind-numbing university lectures Gürtler would encourage us to go out and experience the local nightlife even though we had to get up the next morning at times so early, I forgot they existed, to start the whole cycle again. As such, we spent most of our limited free time passed out on whatever somewhat horizontal surfaces we could find. And free time was very scarce, a few days we didn’t have time to stop for lunch and Gürtler told us that if we really thought we needed to eat lunch (which apparently to him is a foreign concept) we could steal food from the hotel’s breakfast resulting in vicious glares from hotel staff as we tried to secretly wrap up our improvised sandwiches in napkins. I think we all figured why Anita, his wife, prefers not to travel with Gürtler. But maybe I am being a little too critical, we did have a lot to see and little time to see it. I have definitely matured in my traveling and at the beginning of the year would’ve thought that our pace was frustratingly slow, but now I feel like I get a better feel of a city by slowing down a few times a day and relaxing at a café or watching people from a park bench. So overall conclusion: I enjoyed the trip but did not get enough of the aforementioned moments to get a feeling like I truly experienced the countries.

If I have enough time in the next few weeks I will hopefully document a few more of the specifics of the trip.