A trip with an indelible stamp: 'It was the first time I felt without a network'

Here I am, again, retracing paths... Without realizing it, or yes... Going over and over again, straight and backwards similar stories.

I was 21 years old, it was 90, and for some reason that little I will know, to my long-awaited trip to Europe I would invite my brother. I could say I got along well, but I don't know if it was accurate at that age. But something made me add it up and they would be summations to infinity.

Perhaps it matters the reason for my desire to know the old continent, reassemble the family puzzle and see for the first time what I had heard so many times from my grandmother: "My Asturian Heidi", between mountains and animals.

Tickets. Passages of Andrea and his brother of the metro for different trips through Europe.

At 18 of him and 21 of mine, the 45-day trip resembled a real odyssey. There was no euro, no cell phone, let alone no internet. Saying this to a millennial or centennial is the same as proclaiming that you are going to cross the ocean with three boats, like Columbus in the discovery. Seen from a distance, I almost sit in a caravel, but with reverse destination. Having to change money in each country, when we did not go alone or to the corner store, when we did not receive an allowance because it was very Yankee and the closest thing to our own administration was to take $ 5 to buy a pebete at school, being a month and a half off the parental radar was 100% a utopia.

You put so many coins on the pay phone to call your house that it seemed like you were emptying the coffers of the country where you were. Not to mention that the student hostels had not liked my brother and a friend with whom we were going, so our "planned" trip was disarticulated to the second destination and in each place we arrived we began to look for accommodation: under the cold, the rain, the sun or as "horn" was the "forecast" and the budget. In the end, we were just teenagers arriving in cities we didn't know. Just in case I clarify that Google Maps in the 90s did not exist ... In case anyone unsuspecting didn't know.

In Brussels. "I review the pages of my notebook through my children's handwriting and my need to immortalize in detail what I lived, is that I was very afraid to forget. I didn't know it at the time and I didn't know until much later, that that trip already had the stamp of indelible on it," Andrea recalls.

Thus, our parents who in a false sense of security had written down the address and telephone number of each and every one of the student hostels where we would go, from one day to the next had breakfast that they had no idea where their only two children on the other side of the world would sleep. The most serious thing at that point was that we didn't know it either and we were there.

Maneuvering the budget, looking for housing, amalgamating personalities, negotiating tastes, was a daily menu, but necessary, useful and above all the decisive things to live together. It was the first time in my life that I felt without a network... It was us or us. When you have such a narrow dichotomy, agreement is inevitable. There were no mediators or plan B, we had to agree because nobody would rescue us from an argument. It was wonderful! What I do not know if we were so prepared was to eat hamburgers 30 of the 45 days, I can say without fear of being wrong that we did a strict tasting of almost all the mcdxxx of half continent.

Over the years there were different trips to Europe, but none like that... The initiator. Over the years there were also... 50 years, I can hardly pronounce it, that young woman gave way to the person of today. Close to turning half a century, at the beginning of the year I decided to celebrate it in Ibiza in August, any resemblance to a program mixture of bursting and experiential revenge is pure chance. A meditation session led me to wonder if it was the message I wanted to give to my next years. If that was my essence, if that was what I wanted to transmit to myself and others. The answer was no. That he wanted to honor me in another way.

Rome. Reverse of a museum ticket in Florence.

That is why today, 29 years after that first trip and having turned 50, I undertake another journey to the old continent, this time with the children of that brother who accompanied me, my nephews, with cell phone, euros, cards and with so much connectivity that they can track us from the Moon itself. At times I wonder if they are old enough to know Europe, if their 15 years will help them to understand it, I keep for me the illusion that people and spaces know how to communicate, each at their level, each in their own time, each in their tune.

They in their own way will know how to talk to each other. I can't help but feel strange, I can't help but remember the first steps I took with my brother – his father – in the same places, embodied in that little travel notebook that he wrote obsessively every night. More than a quarter of a century later I still have it, torn, old, yellow and full of notes.

I review its leaves through my children's handwriting and my need to immortalize in detail what I lived, is that I was very afraid of forgetting. I did not know it at the time and I did not know until much later, that this trip already had the stamp of indelible printed. The adult woman of today ventures again on another journey, with the hidden hope or not, that this time it will be the notebooks of my nephews that are sealed, surely it will no longer be on paper. Bon voyage!

Andrea Bernaldez / abernaldez@ab-abogados.com.ar

THE EDITOR'S COMMENT

By César Dossi

Pipo Pescador already said it

A journey begins every day, with the adventure of living and with that imprint that each one gives to the routine. We open our eyes and a world already stalks us, impatient and dizzying. We can also look back and try to determine which of all the trips was the one we told as an anecdote in all the meetings with friends, and discarding those that were only a collection of postcards. There are times when you have to decide: either continue with the life you have or give it a final turn.

Because life is not a single moment, it is a set of situations and planning a trip to enjoy alone or seek to create memories with someone else is not about being perfect, but about risking to plan something different. That is why the reader Andrea (50) and her brother Sebastián (47) undertook the adventure of their lives: "It was us or us", recalls of their wanderings in Europe.

So suitcase in hand they knew different places, languages and cultures. They found new sources of leisure and pleasure. They were filled with culture with that sense of freedom in their hands to "savor the first bit of independence and above all things dive nonstop into the unexpected... in what may not go as you thought, in what is nothing like what you planned, but for what you end up discovering that you were always prepared.

April 8, 2023 marked the 29th anniversary of the first digital Internet connection in Argentina. Although at that time other countries in the region such as Chile, Brazil and Mexico already had access, it took our country more than 4 years to connect. The general lack of knowledge about technology and the lack of resources made the path to connection much slower. Finally, in 1994, Argentine universities connected to the Internet for the first time through a digital link.

Even without knowing what real impact tablets, or cell phones and social networks would have in the future, a lifestyle was changing, a paradigm that was going to come to connect the world. And chau, we lost that freedom that made us feel with absolute autonomy.

Today, Andrea embarks on another adventure, no longer with that old notebook but with the connectivity to the stick. Continue with your excursion through life without settling for the prominent epigraphs of the postcards of travel agencies. He is going to celebrate his golden years as a family. Travel alone or accompanied, with suitcase or backpack, round trip, or travel the world without return ticket. By plane or train, or "in Dad's car, traveling is a pleasure, which usually happens to us," said Pipo Pescador.

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