Giving Eastern Europe a chance

WHEN I was a little girl, I used to lie in bed at night, eyes closed, trying to imagine how the room would look if my feet were where my head was. My recent travels in Eastern Europe have been a little like that for me, an exercise in intentional self-disorientation that has allowed me to see things from fresh angles.

Last spring, I started work on a series of articles about Eastern European destinations: Serbia; the old spa towns of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) and Marienbad (Marianske Lazne) in the Czech Republic; the Danube River delta in Romania; and Budapest, Hungary, for its Art Nouveau. On each trip, I made some discoveries.

Since the end of the Communist era, tourism in Eastern Europe has boomed, but I encountered few other Americans, except in Budapest. Western Europeans have led the way east; Russians crowd Adriatic beaches and Czech spas; atop Gellert Hill in Budapest and at Kalemegdan Fortress in Belgrade, Serbia, I was surrounded by Chinese tour groups, increasingly drawn to Eastern Europe.

Immigration from Asia has also increased since the lifting of the Iron Curtain, which may explain why the first thing I saw when I drove across the border from Germany to the Czech Republic was an Asian market.

It was enlightening to be the only American around. A Budapest cabdriver told me he wanted to visit the U.S. but couldn't get a visa. An elderly Serb paused when I asked him how he felt about my country, then politely replied that he loved it before the 1999 American-led NATO bombing of Belgrade. A friendly but misguided young Romanian on his way home to Bucharest from Paris made my blood run cold by complaining about the way Jewish people run the U.S.

I had been to Eastern Europe about 10 years ago, choosing Sofia, Bulgaria, and hoping to find it as beguiling but less crowded than Prague, the picturesque capital of the Czech Republic. But Sofia's streets were empty and cracked, the museums closed, the hotel choices grim.

Like most Americans, I continued to think of the former Soviet bloc as a region shrouded in mystery, far away and exotic. It is not so to Western Europeans. They, of course, share a continent and, in some cases, the European Union, with countries that now include Poland and the Czech Republic. Most of the eight Central and Eastern European nations that joined the EU two years ago are expected to adopt the euro by 2010.