Wish You Were Here

One stupid Canadian’s story of travels

By Camara Miller

There is a blue box under my bed filled with European plane, train and ferry ticket stubs, postcards, wrappers and receipts from all over Europe. They lay together because, when I am feeling nostagic, they are all the physical objects I have to look back at.

Luckily for me, the worst part of my trip to Europe was that my camera went missing.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much physically to show for four of the eight months I spent getting lost, robbed and fat. A pair of destroyed jeans and a bunch of pages with scribbled down thoughts wondering why a stray dog in Greece would ruin a perfectly nice picnic by the beach, or whether my Lithuanian friend might actually be correct in the Italian spelling the famous sculpture “Dovid” instead of “David” (mostly because she was almost ready to sell her soul as a token to prove that she was right ---- she was wrong.)

The first half of the trek, I was living in Vienna where I have plenty of pictures – mostly fueled by bad choices – to look back at (And, of course, the subsequent photo time lapse of my unavoidable and hilarious weight gain. Oh, I know it’s happened to you too.)

After studying and living in Austria, I set out for a few more months of solo backpacking. First destination? Holland. I landed in Amsterdam, and after a few days, took a train to Maastricht to visit a Canadian friend named Ben. At this point, my camera still remains my trusty sidekick along with my new travel companion, shin splints.

When my friend Ben moved into his house, he found in a tickle trunk in his attic a superabundance of costumes left behind. Amazing costumes including two full bunny suits, a plethora of mixed disco, pirate, royalty and clown pieces and some religious icon masks. This all came in handy because I was coming out for Carnaval, which in Maastricht is a behemoth of a party.

Carnaval is a three day costumed celebration...though, now that I think about it, I remember wearing costumes for much longer than three days. Odd.

Though the bash was in Dutch, I wasn’t able to find much of a theme other than that of the Random. The Dutch costumes were a little different than the North American equivalents. For instance, because plenty of people follow a masquerade theme, I didn’t see many Superman’s running amuck. And to my surprise, the sexy-costumes don’t translate into Dutch either, even amongst the young ladies. Like, as many notice in North America, anything can be a costume if you add ‘sexy’ in front of it. Sexy cat? Easy! Fishnets, heels and cat ears. Sexy cop. Fishnets, heels and officer hat. Yes, Carnaval didn’t take place in a warm month but the end of October isn’t usually beach weather either.

And I don’t want to hear anyone getting on my case about how I am generalizing North American costume choices. Case-in-point. Recently I spent a Halloween as the Hulk which is quite possibly one of the most unsexy costume choices. Dry, peeling body paint with skin-tone peeking through the green around my mouth as I enjoyed another spilly drink. And when I was bragging to co-workers about going as the Hulk, one actually asked, “Sexy Hulk?”

Though my memories of the events during Carnaval are a little murky, I don’t remember seeing a sexy nurse, sexy pumpkin or even sexy bag of compost.

The first night, Ben threw a party, and I was trying on some costumes for the celebrations. Allow me to describe the exact moment my camera abandoned me: I had on a jester jumpsuit with a 3-D Ganesh mask and was probably caught up telling, from what I can only assume, was a regal anecdote of something stupid I had done recently. This was when the official standing of my Dear Sidekick went from ‘in my possession’ to ‘m.i.a.’

But, as hard as it was, I partied through the loss. I tucked away my traveling uniform which included a dilapidated pair of jeans and whatever was clean from my pseudo home around my back, and hopped around Holland for longer than was apparently necessary in a light brown bunny suit. Though hopping isn’t the best description. The costume, outrageously, wasn’t tailored for a 4’11” lady, so about five inches of fabric sat crumpled at my feet. Yup, I fell a lot, it wasn’t even very funny.

And no, I was not a sexy bunny. Check my passport, I am Canadian but I wasn’t donned in fishnets or heels.

For weeks, I traveled and waited for my camera to simply turn up. Lazy? Sure, some might call it that... but how could it go missing in a house party. Nothing bad usually happens when you invite a bunch of drunk and stoned strangers into your home and let them meander around unsupervised.

Somewhere around Scotland, I had given up hope for my camera assuming it was stolen. At a police auction in Glasgow, I got a cheap camera to get me through the rest of my travels. Of course, it needed batteries and a camera card.

Clearly, my brain wasn’t clicking at its usual capacity. I didn’t make camera equipment my first priority... until I got to Munich where I spent some time looking for the camera necessities. (Don’t ask me why I waited to be in a country where I barely spoke the language to request things like “Lexar 8GB SDHC Memory Card.”

Eventually found a card. Which didn’t fit.

By this point, I have already spent about two months without a camera or any physical evidence of my accomplishments abroad (read: Bragging rights.). So I gave up on the whole idea and decided to just stick to a very detailed play by play in my journal. With doodles too. I won’t

deny the presence of flowers, hearts or stick-people.

Months went by and eventually I was one stop away from Canada. As I sat in my hostel in Sweden (smelly, sick, fat and probably washing underwear in a sink), I received a text message from Ben.

It read: Camara, I found your camera in my vagina.*

I was so close to the finish line that I just dejectedly asked him to mail it back to my place in Canada.

When I did eventually reunite with my camera, it was a tad sticky, the battery was dead and the card was filled with various recent pictures of nights out around Maastricht. I don’t know how my camera could have ended up in the vagina, or even where it would have staked out within the suit for so long, but at least it made it home to me, though a tad gluey. (God, I hope you read the footnote regarding “vagina” before reading this last paragraph containing adjectives such as “sticky”...)

* Oh, Ben goes to any costume-related event in a homemade, award winning and obviously painfully inappropriate giant vagina suit.