Eastern Europe Didn't Ask Me to Love It, So I Had No Choice

Eastern Europe Didn't Ask Me to Love It, So I Had No Choice

I arrived on a train that smelled like diesel and wet wool, and when the doors opened, the cold hit my face like a slap that woke me up from a dream I hadn't realized I was having. The platform was gray—gray concrete, gray sky, gray coats moving past me with purpose I didn't have. I stood there with my bag at my feet and my chest tight, thinking, What the hell am I doing here?

I'd left behind a life that was falling apart in slow motion. A relationship that had turned into a performance we were both too tired to keep staging. A job that paid my rent but hollowed me out one meeting at a time. Friends who loved me but didn't know how to say it, and me not knowing how to ask. So I bought a ticket to a place I couldn't pronounce and told myself it was an adventure. But the truth—the one I wouldn't admit until later—was that I was running.

The first city I landed in had cobblestones that made my suitcase scream every time I dragged it over them. The buildings leaned into each other like old friends holding each other up, and the streets curved in ways that made no sense to my American grid-trained brain. I got lost three times in the first hour. Ended up in a square where a tram sighed to a stop and a woman with a headscarf sold flowers from a bucket, and I stood there, breathing hard, wondering if this was a mistake.

Then a man—older, with a face that looked like it had been carved from the same stone as the buildings—stopped and said something in a language I didn't understand. I shook my head, helpless, and he switched to broken English. "You lost?"

"Yeah," I said, and it came out like a confession.

He smiled, not unkindly, and pointed down a street. "Walk slow. You find."

I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because no one back home had told me to walk slow in years. Maybe because I'd spent so long moving fast, trying to outrun whatever it was that was chasing me, that I'd forgotten there was another option.

So I walked slow. And the city started to show me things.

A bakery where the windows fogged up from the heat inside and the bread smelled like something my grandmother used to make, back when I was small enough to believe that warmth was permanent. A market where vendors shouted prices and a woman pressed a warm roll into my hand and refused payment, just waved me off with a smile that said, Take it. You look hungry.

I was hungry. Not for bread, though I ate it standing there on the street, tearing pieces off and letting the steam rise into my face. Hungry for something I couldn't name. For a version of myself that didn't feel like a machine running on fumes. For a place where people moved at a speed that matched my heartbeat instead of demanding I speed up to match theirs.

Prague gave me mornings that tasted like fog and coffee. I'd wake up in a hostel that smelled like old wood and other people's dreams, and I'd walk to the river before the tourists arrived. The Vltava moved like it had all the time in the world, and I'd stand on the Charles Bridge with my hands in my pockets, watching the water and thinking about how a river doesn't apologize for its pace.

The city was full of bells. They rang at odd hours, not on the hour like clocks but according to some older logic I didn't understand. And every time they rang, people would pause—just for a second—and I'd see it: the way a stranger's shoulders dropped, the way someone's face softened, like the bells were reminding them of something they'd forgotten.

I started pausing too. Not because I understood what the bells meant, but because everyone else did, and I wanted to be part of that—whatever that was. A city that remembered something I'd never learned.

Vienna was different. Colder. More elegant. The kind of place that made me feel underdressed even when I wasn't. But it had cafes where you could sit for hours with a single coffee and no one would rush you, and I needed that. I needed to sit in a room with high ceilings and watch people read newspapers in three languages and feel like time was something you could stretch instead of something that was always running out.

I wrote postcards I never sent. Sat in museums where the art was so old it made my problems feel young and small. Walked through parks where statues stood like they'd been waiting centuries for someone to notice them, and I thought, I see you. I don't know what you mean, but I see you.

Belgrade hit me sideways. It wasn't pretty in the way Prague was pretty. It was raw. Concrete buildings with scars from wars I'd only read about in history books that made them sound like something that happened a long time ago to people who weren't real. But here, the scars were still visible. The city hadn't tried to hide them. It had just kept building around them, over them, through them.

I met a guy in a bar—late twenties, tattoos, the kind of eyes that had seen things but were still laughing. We got drunk on rakija that tasted like gasoline and friendship, and he told me about growing up during the bombings. About how his mom would pull him under the table when the sirens went off, and how they'd sit there in the dark, waiting, and she'd sing to him until the all-clear sounded.

"You think that's sad?" he said, grinning. "It's not. We survived. We're still here. That's not sad. That's winning."

I wanted to argue with him. To tell him that surviving isn't the same as winning. But I didn't. Because maybe he was right. Maybe surviving is winning, and I'd just spent so long thinking I needed to do more than survive that I'd forgotten how hard surviving actually is.

I took trains that rattled like they were held together with hope and duct tape. Buses that smelled like diesel and someone's lunch. I got directions from people who didn't speak my language but drew maps on napkins with such care you'd think they were drawing blueprints for something sacred. And maybe they were. Maybe showing a stranger how to get where they're going is a kind of sacred work.

The Danube followed me through cities like a thread stitching them together. In Budapest, it split the city in half—Buda on one side, Pest on the other—and I stood on a bridge at night watching the lights reflect on the water and thought about how some things are divided but still whole.

In winter, I went to the mountains. Not because I'm a skier—I'm not—but because I wanted to see what cold looked like when it wasn't just an inconvenience but a landscape. The Tatras rose like teeth biting into the sky, and the air was so clean it hurt to breathe. I rented boots I didn't know how to use and walked trails where the snow crunched under my feet and the silence was so complete I could hear my own heartbeat.

A family passed me—parents, two kids, a dog—and the father nodded and said something I didn't understand but that sounded like good morning or safe travels or maybe just we're all doing our best out here. And I nodded back, and it felt like a conversation.

I ate food I couldn't pronounce. Pierogi that burned my tongue because I was too impatient to wait. Goulash that tasted like someone's grandmother had been making it for fifty years and knew exactly how much paprika meant love. Trdelník from a stand in Prague that I ate while walking through the snow, sugar sticking to my fingers, and for the first time in months, I felt something that wasn't sadness or anger or exhaustion.

I felt here. Present. Like my body and my brain were finally in the same place at the same time.

Markets taught me that generosity doesn't need a language. A woman selling apples gave me an extra one when I fumbled with the coins, and when I tried to give it back, she pressed my hand closed around it and shook her head. Keep it. A man at a cheese stall let me taste six kinds before I bought one, and when I apologized for taking so long, he laughed and said, "Is okay. Cheese is patient."

I started walking differently. Slower. Looking up more. Noticing things: the way laundry hung from balconies like flags, the way old men sat on benches and watched the world without needing to comment on it, the way children played in squares that had seen empires rise and fall and didn't care because children only care about now.

I visited memorials that made my chest hurt. Walls with names. Shoes cast in bronze along the Danube—small shoes, children's shoes—and a plaque that explained why they were there, and I had to sit down because my legs wouldn't hold me. History here wasn't something you read about. It was something you stood inside, and it asked you to be quiet and remember that cruelty is real and so is resilience.

On my last night, I sat in a park in Kraków with a bottle of cheap wine I'd bought from a corner store. The sky was going dark and the streetlights were coming on, and somewhere nearby someone was playing guitar—badly, but with commitment. And I thought about how I'd come here running from something, and now I was leaving carrying something, and I wasn't sure what it was but it felt heavier and lighter at the same time.

Eastern Europe didn't fix me. But it reminded me that the world is bigger than my problems. That there are places where people have survived worse and still wake up and make bread and sell apples and help lost strangers find their way. That kindness doesn't need to be loud to be real.

I flew home a week later. And when I landed and my phone buzzed with all the messages I'd been ignoring, I didn't feel the same dread I'd felt before I left. I felt tired, yeah. But also steady. Like I'd found a rhythm I could walk to, even when everything else was still trying to rush me.

Eastern Europe didn't ask me to love it. It just existed—stubborn, scarred, generous, real. And somehow, that was exactly what I needed.