PalenQ

I would be interested in hearing about folks who are old enough to have penetrated the Iron Curtain - Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe - and their experiences.

I made many such journeys behind the Iron Curtain and though all were interesting many were just not that pleasant - travel there was much tougher than western Europe in many ways - even though it was cheaper often you could not even find things to spend the often required daily money amount exchanged as there was often very little to buy!

And store clerks - talk about the complete lack of customer service and even caring about customers - I remember a take it or leave it attitude with clerks, who uniformly seemed to be plump grumpy ladies in not so pure white uniforms - with these perfunctory robot-like clerks literally throwing things at you over a counter - there were very little self-serve stores.

In future posts I'll relay some of my more memorable experiences but I'd like to hear what others experienced in places like Poland, East Berlin and East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the USSR, etc.

Any interesting stories to tell?

nytraveler

Sorry - my visits to Russia were both after the wall fell.

But there were about 12 years between them - and there was a massive difference. The first trip was a tour - had to be either a tour or a private guide, the hotels were incredibly (monty python) bad, the food was awful, there was no free time, and "shopping" for junk in special tourist stores was required.

The second trip was independent - and although the tourist infrastructure was still poor - even compared to central europe - the rules/regs were barely noticeable (but you did need a visa to get in and out), you could get decent food (but expensive) and you could go anywhere (although we didn't have enough time to get far off the beaten track).

Seamus

I did a lecture tour in the USSR in the mid 1980's. Pretty rigidly orchestrated. Best meal was on a collective farm. Ice cream everywhere was delicious. Best scenery was Leningrad and Pyatigorsk. Aeroflot of that era was pretty darn scary. Strongest memory from the trip is being offered - as an honored guest at a health spa - a balneotherapy session with radon waters. Yep, radon - I confirmed with our guide/translator. I graciously declined, went for the smellier but safer sulfur water.

Cathinjoetown

I was in Budapest in 1969. My friend and I had to apply for a visa in Vienna and take a 3-day all-in tour out of Vienna run by the Hungarian state tourist agency.

We were the youngest people on the tour. I remember it as being fairly well done. The food was good, but our standards were pretty low, the hotel sort of a dusty old relic from the early 1900s, worn carpets and crystal chandeliers with the power of a 10-watt bulb. The pollution from whatever was used to fuel the streetcars was horrendous.

The bus tours of Budapest focused on war memorials, I remember a large square and of course listening to the party line version of the uprising. I was surprised we could buy "Newsweek" in the hotel.

I don't remember many consumer goods but we had very little money having shopped the leather markets in Florence a few weeks before.

We wanted to go to Prague as well but it was the first anniversary of the supression of the '68 Prague Spring and the word was young people couldn't get visas.

Marija

Fulfilling my widowed mother's deathbed directives, I went to Lithuania in 1975 with three teenaged siblings to meet, for the first time, my grandmother, 9 aunts and uncles and 15 first cousins. We were allowed to stay only for 5 nights in an approved (bugged) hotel in the capital Vilnius and could not go further than 15 miles outside the capital. There were strict limits on what could be brought in: eg. 3 pairs of blue jeans, 5 woolen scarves. Customs in Moscow thoroughly searched every suitcase. To circumvent the scarf limit (for some reason a most desired item), I made a slip out of 24 woolen scarves which I wore on the 20 hour journey. I didn't think about how hot it would be. Into the belt of my dress I sewed in $100 bills. Everything was gifts for the bus load of relatives who came to the airport to meet us. They brought food but there was a shortage of silverware. Fortunately silverware wasn't on the prohibited list so I had brought place settings for 18. Anything not on the forbidden list I had!

Although it was against the rules, we decided to take a taxi a long way outside of Vilnius to visit my grandmother and the relatives gathered at her house. Trying to avoid detection, we took several different taxis and got out a mile before her house. As we were walking to our destination our relatives came to meet us, telling us that the cab driver had come to their house to let them know that we were on our way! For some reason, the authorities looked the other way for us, though one of the other tour members (you had to be on a registered tour) was tracked to her relatives house in another city and severely reprimanded.

What an adventure that was!

IMDonehere

It is not an Iron Curtain country, but we spent 6 months in Franco's Spain.

The Guardia Civil would march up and down the aisles of trains with machine guns, their menacing presence apparent in rural areas. They were what Garica Lorca called the "Men with the patent lather hats and the patent leather hearts."

The country was extremely poor due to his fascist restrictions. Blind Civil War veterans sold lottery tickets for their benefit in the streets. Ironically this lottery for the blind has blossomed into a $2 billion successful business in Spain.

In Madrid if you returned to your hotel after 9 PM, you would clap your hands in the streets and a sereno, an old watchman, would come and open the front door.

The Valley of the Fallen was built with slave labor and it still a very very controversial place today.

The longest street in almost every town was named after Franco and the second longest was called Jose Antonio named for the founder of the Falange (fascist) party.

The reading material of course was restricted although you could get the International Herald, Time, and Newsweek but all the works of Hemingway were available because he had elevated to a literary deity.

Franco stomped on regional languages and dialects.

But my fondest memory was dancing the Sardana in front of the Cathedral in Barcelona on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. For some reason Franco allowed this traditional Catalan folk dance to continue, so dancing was an elegant form of freedom and protest in which we participated. And whenever we are in Barcelona on those days we go over to watch them dance.

Grandma

The Iron Curtain almost fell on our necks! My husband and I traveled from Germany thru Czechoslovakia (sp?) and Hungary in Sept. 1989. A friend in Munich lent us her car since it was impossible to rent one to take into the Eastern Bloc. What I noticed was that when we crossed the border from West Germany into Czech. the atmosphere changed immediately. Even the grass looked dirty. At our hotel in Prague someone immediately asked my husband to exchange money. We had been warned of this so didn't follow thru. The hotel left a lot to be desired but was on Wenceslas Square. The old town was still beautiful and the Charles Bridge
was not crowded. Had a delightful dinner at a restaurant just beyond the bridge. I remember they were thrilled that we paid our bill with American $$. My husband almost sent an officious
lady newspaper seller into a fit when he asked for the New York Times -

Budapest didn't leave as much of an impression. We stayed at a once grand hotel… the
Astoria I think. Had some good food, enjoyed a tour of the castle (even tho the martinet guide left us behind when we were just a little tardy returning to the bus.)

After that we drove on to Venice… a great antidote.

But, when we were in Munich my friend's husband (who's German) told us that people were being shot trying to cross the wall… and most times it was not reported. Also, on a tour we
took to Bavarian castles he talked with an older couple who were on a tour from East Germany. He managed to slip them some money since they were only allowed to bring a certain amount on their travel (with a group).

We went on our own to St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1983. September again…. the Korean airliner had just been shot down. We were the only people on our Intourist bus.
When out of sight and earshot of others our guide wanted to know all the information.
The atmosphere was definitely oppressive and the food was dreadful. Our travel agent
booked us in Copenhagen on the way home because she said we would want a good meal.
Boy, was she right!

St.Petersburg in June 2001 was a different story. Had a wonderful time with a great tour
operator (no longer in business unfortunately.)

nukesafe

Because of the business I was in I was not allowed to travel behind the curtain, and had to jump through all sorts of hoops to visit some countries outside of it, like Egypt.

I, however, had exposure to the Guardia in Spain, like Imdonehere. As a member of a party of specialists examining a potential coastal site for a nuclear power plant near San Sebastian we had to have a heavily armed escort because of the threat of Basque ETA terrorists. The escort was made up of military with automatic weapons and Guardia.

People peacefully protesting the plant, called "Deva", were on site when we arrived. They were trying to hand out pamphlets saying "DEVA NO!". The Guardia immediately rounded them up really roughly. They then made some of the leaders each chew and eat one of the pamphlets on their knees in front of us.

None of our party had ever felt so ashamed in our collective lives, we agreed, but we could do nothing but stand there grimly and glare impotently at the Guardia as the protesters were further humiliated and loaded into vans.

BTW our report said it was the crumbiest site for a nuclear power plant on the planet. It was never built.

Grandma

IMDonehere, my fondest memory of Barcelona is seeing the dancing of the Sardana in front of the cathedral. Guess that was in the 80's also. We had a hotel room with a balcony right across from the cathedral. It wasn't luxurious, but oh my what a location! I was especially intrigued by the musical instruments the band used. There was an unusual one I think was a forerunner of the clarinet. Do you know anything about this -

Dukey1

Grandma, that hotel, The Colon is still very much there!

lavandula

My big fat Cold War experience was East Germany, about the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had a scholarship to Göttingen, then West Germany, from Nov. 1989 to Jan. 1990. This was an area close to the 'deutsch-deutsche Grenze' (the German-German border), and I was billeted one weekend to stay with a family who lived in a town near Kassel. It was one of the first weekends that West Germans were allowed to visit East Germany and so my host family took me to a border town, Bischhausen. There we parked the car and on foot we walked to its East German companion, Bischhagen. We parked in open fields, and crossed the border, which was a grassy strip and high wire mesh fences and barbed wire. An eye-opener for me: apparently only a few weeks earlier, a man had been shot dead trying to escape via that border crossing. In Bischhagen there was a street party put on by the town welcoming their long-lost neighbours, with much festivity and food and drink. The atmosphere was super, everyone was happy. Over the months I was in Göttingen, a steady stream of people kept coursing into town from the east, and information caravans had been set up to help them. Göttingen was one of the first ports of call because of the proximity to the border.

I went into East Germany again twice more during that trip, via East Berlin. The first time we had to go via U-Bahn, and I remember the sea of people from the West all waiting their turn to go through passport control. They gave you a transit visa which was a loose sheet of paper which was to be collected by them at the end of your time there, and you had to change 25 marks, to be spent in the east. Well, I had trouble spending it - I think I bought a guide book to Berlin and a map and had some small amount of cash left over. We did not venture very far in and mostly just walked around. Later, after my scholarship I came back to Berlin with a friend and on the train through East Germany the border guards gave us a hastily scribbled transit visa, which on the way back they no longer bothered to collect. No-one seemed to care about protecting the border any more. I still have it, along with my 5 Ostmarks.

During my postgrad studies in the 90s I had many opportunities to return to the neuen Bunsdesländer (the new federal states, as they call East Germany nowadays), mostly Jena, Leipzig and Halle and surrounds. In some ways it was like entering a time warp - in rural Thüringen the rail infrastructure was like from the 1930s, signs painted on the sides of buildings were peeling and there was a general feeling of decay, which disappeared a little with each visit. I liked the time warp feel - I felt like I was seeing something that was ephemeral, and indeed things have changed greatly in that part of the world. In the last couple of years I visited Dresden, Weimar and Berlin for work and although all the infrastructure is there (shopping centres, pedestrian zones), somehow the vibrancy of the west's shopping experiences is lacking. However, I still find it an interesting experience visiting the former east and would go back any time.

Lavandula

surfmom

I remember traveling to USSR in 1987 - being asked on every street corner to change money... Being asked for my sweatshirt (college logo) and the little kids asking for chewing gum and pens. Pens? Yes, ballpoint pens.

I remember getting change in a variety of foreign currencies from the official tourist shops. This was an organized "Intourist" tour - flying Aeroflot was frightening. We landed in Moscow an hour early, but they had to find someone to turn on the lights so we could go through customs.

On the way out, something in my bag looked funny, so they unzipped it and dumped the entire thing on the belt and went through it item by item... I remember the waiter at the hotel restaurant asking me for AC/DC cassette tapes - yes, it still strikes me as odd now. And how you had to ask the little lady minding your hotel wing for your key. And how "monitored" we all felt the entire trip (I roomed with an English girl).

Grandma

surfmom… I forgot those women monitoring the hotel halls.
After our trip in '83 my husband had a favorite joke vis a vis the "best" restaurant we were
sent to by our Intourist guide : Q: how do they kill chickens in Russia ? A: they starve them to death.

IMDonehere

Grandma, this occurred in the early 1970's, Franco died in 1975. What you heard could one of three instruments-the fipple flute, tenora, or tible. Or all three. The band called a cobla, does not always have a full complement of musicians.

Glad you found the experience so wonderful. The same thing happened to us the first time. We stayed in a very cheap hotel near the Cathedral and suddenly we heard music and we raced to the street. That time we spent a month in Barcelona and went at least once a week and at times we would dance. Most Catalans were accepting but there was always one or two did not like the fact you were out of step.

gertie3751

I travelled from London to Yokohama in 1976 via the Trans Siberian. 4 weeks.
After we got across the Channel, we found the Moscow coach (only one) on the train waiting at Ostende. This contained people from all over Europe and stopped at all kinds of places. I remember chatting in French to a woman who was going to Vilnius.
We got off at Berlin for a break for a day or so. were met off the train and escorted to our hotel, some not-very-fancy place. We were let off the leash in East Berlin but had to change a certain amount of westmarks into ostmarks which were not refundable. Once we got lost in the underground stations and ended up on a platform on the U bahn we shouldn't have been on and had rifles pointed at us.
Next we got back on the train to Moscow and spent several days there. Again, met at the station and taken to our hotel. Managed to get around Moscow OK ( I had been before, in 1974), so had a bit of an idea about the place and had a bit of Russian.
Next to the Yaroslavl station for the Big Train. I remember miles and miles of silver birch trees, flat land, acres of farmland, mainly uncultivated and desolate. Occasional stops where local people ran alongside the train with produce they were eager to sell.
We got off at Novosibirsk for a few days, Lake Baikal for a few more and finally Khabarovsk. All the while the train stayed on Moscow time and the landscape and faces got more and more Asian.
From Khabarovsk in those days you had to change for Nahodka because Vladivostock, the actual end of the Trans Siberian, was a closed port because it was the headquarters of the Soviet Pacific fleet.
From Nahodka we got the MS Baikal to Yokohama and into Japan.
Lots more to say about this.....impressions of Russia, eastern Europe, the train, the people we met....

Grandma

gertie3851… I bet you could write a book! Plz do so.

StCirq

I spent the better part of the summer of 1983 traveling in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. I have loads of stories, but I'm not willing to let Fodors own them, so sorry, not going to share.

flanneruk

Two memories:

- in 1979, a combination of bad weather and pre-Thatcher British strikes made the only option from London to an urgent Luxembourg meeting in a flight to (West) Berlin, train across East Germany to Frankfurt, then another flight. Entering and leaving the East was a painless exercise with polite Communist officials full of "pleases" and "thank you's" (and transport running with an efficiency unheard of in Britain's then state-owned trains or planes).

Re-entering the West was a nightmare of rude free-world officials and an hour long security check by the Federal (West) German police. And London was still strike-bound when I got back.

- Ten years later (June 1989), in an East Berlin pub (great beer: inedible food) two days after the Tiananmen demonstrations, reading a fierce editorial by Erich Honecker (then Party Secretary) in the Neues Deutschland (Party propaganda sheet). Unless Socialist governments work together to exterminate capitalist dupes like these silly students, he argued, fascist regimes like the one in West Germany will conspire to destroy all our achievements over the past 40 years. Action must start now.

Three months later, Honecker was overthrown by a lily-livered moderate. Two months later, Communism was overthrown. Honecker might have been a bastard. But his prophecies were 100% accurate.

nukesafe

I can't vouch for the second part of this, because I did not go on the Russian jaunt, but in the 1980's the Russians sent a team of scientists to the Nevada Test site to set up monitors for detecting underground nuclear weapon tests. The Russian scientists were astounded at the opulence they saw and even accused us of "faking a Walmart" in Las Vegas, where they were taken on a tour, because there was not that much consumer goods in any one place in their country.

They also were impressed at the food they were served at the test site. They said that when our scientists came to their test site we could not expect that level or variety of food. We should bring what we needed, they said. With that in mind, a C-5 was loaded with a great variety of food and off the party went to the remote Soviet test site. Once there the food was turned over to the Russian cooks.

The cooks were unfamiliar with some of the items, so for the first night the Americans were served boiled lettuce for dinner. At the risk of causing an international incident someone had to diplomatically explain the concept of "salad" to them. Thereafter the crew was served salad at breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. Not wishing to offend the salad was dutifully and politely eaten at each at every meal. No wisecracks allowed.

I had some doubts about that story, but it was confirmed years later when one of my friends, working in one of those formerly closed nuclear cities in Siberia, married a Russian rocket scientist. (Really) They landed in Seattle and Zina spent her first few days in the U.S. in our home. I was making lunch and Zina looked at me putting lettuce on sandwiches. "What is that?", she asked. She, a well traveled (in Russia)senior scientist, had never seen it before.

Odin

I have loads of stories from Russia, first visit 1986, next 1989 and yearly until 1993. Then lived there 1997-1999, have been back several more times since then. Have been very close to Russians so have a very different perspective. For instance, Siberia being so cold doesn't have an abundance of lettuce or salads as we know it, so it is not remarkable that a Siberian would not be familiar with the western style of it. Russians make the most delicious salads using other ingredients. They knew perfectly well what a salad was, in Russian it is even the same word as in English, but they would not have any idea about a western style salad with the awful limp lettuces they have in the UK.
But I'm not going to share the stories, too long, too personal.