We arrived back from our trip last Tuesday evening, and we're almost normal again! It was a wonderful trip, certainly worth doing. It would be fun to go back and spend more time in each of the countries. Each seemed to have a slightly different character.
Traveling on a bus with the same group of people for two weeks was an interesting experiment in human behavior. The experience is so intense, you begin to see these people in your dreams! There must be a name for the effect, and if I knew just what it was, I could probably find it in something that's prohibited by the Geneva convention!
Fortunately for us, most of our fellow travelers undertook this group experience with a good dose of politeness toward their fellow travelers, but we did have a couple of people who were "off" with their behavior.
One older guy (I'll call him Jake), who really wasn't well enough to travel, should have been sent home the moment he arrived in St Petersburg (our trip's beginning) and he realized he couldn't walk from the bus to his hotel room.
To have been sent home because of his medical condition would have been reasonable. His behavior toward his fellow travelers, as we went along, should have mandated an enforced departure from the tour. He was demanding of everyone, unwilling to take any seat on the bus except the one he wanted for himself, and he barked at the tour director as though he had hired him as his personal servant. Why would someone sign up for a group tour when what they really wanted was a private experience?
Jake has emphysema, and he knew it before the trip started. He didn't carry oxygen with him, which would have been the one concession he should have made to make the trip doable for his physical condition. He ended up in the hospital with pneumonia about half way through the trip, gave the hospital tons of problems while he was there, and finally secured his release on the next-to-last day of the trip. He demanded to be flown from wherever he was (Was it from Russia? The time line is blurry now.) to Helsinki so he could fly home with the bunch.
He actually wanted to attend our farewell supper the night before we flew out of Helsinki, but we were all (unashamedly) glad that he didn't make it. Anyone else would have flown directly home instead because the trip was over by the time he was permitted to leave the hospital.
There were many in the group who would have shown him compassion except that he was so demanding and uncooperative with everyone who was there. Even in retrospect, many had some measure of compassion for him, but no one wanted to be verbally assaulted by Jake again.
There was one other couple who didn't want to play nice with others, and the husband of that pair (I'll call him Bob, though I never bothered to figure out just who he was) created several little skirmishes during the two weeks we were all together.
As you can imagine when you put 40+ people together at random, 40+ people who have no prior knowledge of each other, you should expect a divergence of religious and spiritual ideologies and be ready to make concessions for your fellow travelers. Bob, however, was politically insensitive and hypercritical, and he wound up in a shouting match with one of the women (I'll call her Sally) when she said something (clever?) about the current US government administration and the policy on Iraq.
I was sitting just in front of him; and to prevent myself from getting involved in the fray, I turned my iPod up loud and tried to concentrate on an NPR podcast. The ensuing discussion behind me was really, really loud and really, really ugly.
Bob is retired (I presume) military, and he took Sally's slightly off, but meant-to-be light, remark as though it were a personal attack on him; and then he proceeded to give us all a strong and loud berating lecture about the merits of Bush's plan. If he couldn't shame us for having any anti-Bush administration thoughts, he could certainly do us physical harm with the language and volume of his vocal outrage!
Yeh, Sally, a liberal modern woman from the east coast, traveling alone, probably should never have made a political comment except to her closest allies, but most of us would have had enough sense to let it go.
To make things fair for the entire group, our touring company uses a system of seat rotation. You and your seat mate rotate, clockwise, around the bus, each day sitting two seats beyond those you were in yesterday. The group made a concession for an elderly woman (age 92!!!!) and her daughter to have the front passenger-side seat and a group of singles to have the back row, but everyone else was to rotate. Bob, the husband in the infamous couple above, decided on his own that he was a paying customer and, as such, had a right to sit wherever he wanted. Huh?
The first time, we thought he was just confused (along with his wife), and we didn't say anything. His less than intellectual verbal outbreak about the Bush administration, with little or no provocation, had convinced us that he was something less than totally stable; and after all, we're all getting a little along in years. So we just unconfused ourselves and found a new order of seating.
The second time, we had a little trouble figuring out just who had mistaken the proper seats and thrown us off, but we all became pretty convinced that it was Bob and his wife.
The third time, when caught (we were getting pretty practiced at figuring out beforehand just where we should be the next day), he gave his "paying customer" speech, and I (of course I didn't have enough sense to keep my mouth shut) asked him how he thought that was supposed to work because we were ALL paying customers and we had formed a community. How was that supposed to be a good community participant. And then, as an aside, I made mention of certain people who didn't know how to play well with others. I think he and his wife sulked the rest of the day because they sat away from us when we stopped for lunch, and she wouldn't look me in the eye for at least 24 hours. But maybe I'm wrong about that thought because ...
They decided on a new seating order one more time (and mind you, we're on this bus only two weeks - 14 days, so that means he messed up, on purpose, more than 25% of the whole time - that we know about). The last time, though, we all just quietly made the adjustment and went about the business of having a great time together. We weren't going to play his little boy game.
Wow! Some people's kids!
Those are the colorful stories about our the people on trip - and they concerned only two people. Not bad, eh? Out of 43 people, 40 were absolutely wonderful, were on their best community-building behavior, were interesting, shared experiences, kindnesses, considerations. I met some people I will remember fondly for a long, long time, and there are a few I will stay in touch with and hope to travel with again some day. How did we luck out!
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