One of the great thrills of traveling used to be the different kinds of ice creams and candy you’d see outside your own country. Never have I eaten an ice cream as exciting and exotic as the Swedish popsicle with two wooden sticks instead of one I had in 1978 in Huddinge – a southern suburb of Stockholm, not far from the spot I landed in with my green Nike bag twenty years later.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that modern traveling makes us dumber. We’re not using our brains the way we used to, back in the, oh, 1980s.

Because we’re not forced to.

For one, candy is the same everywhere. You have the Mars and Snickers bars, the Kit-Kats, the same Magnum ice creams, and let’s not even go to the beverage section. Magazines are a little different, but that is a small consolation because I can’t read them in Italian or Spanish, or Polish. I am writing this at the Warsaw airport.

Paradoxically, the little variation for us traveling in the economy class comes from the little snacks we’re served onboard a plane. Finnair, the Finnish airline, sometimes serves sandwiches made of pretty dark bread and LOT’s ham-pickle sandwiches (two times two, return ticket to Minsk, stopover in Warsaw) certainly took me to Eastern Europe in a flash.

Another thing that has disappeared for us European travelers is different kinds of money. Sure, the euro may be convenient, and good for business, but I miss exchanging money before traveling. Going through the bills was like a history lesson, too. “Oh, I wonder who this guy is … a former King, maybe? Nice! And see, here they have that huge wooden bridge, isn’t it the longest in the world? Wait! There’s a hole in the coin!? Why?”

And then there were the math problems. “Hmm, let’s see, if 10 dollars is 50 krona, then that weird-looking ice cream they sell for seven krona must be … three bucks? Sweden is so expensive! Wait.” And we’d look up, and mumble, count in our heads, mouth the numbers, squint our eyes, and then declare, “No, it’s actually just 1.50 or so.”

Of course, you can still get that experience, but it’s just not as easy as it used to be. I had to go all the way to Minsk, Belarus, to feel it again. First of all, there’s the language barrier, which is almost total. I know seven words of Russian, and with those, I can get (up to) three of something, and be very polite and thankful.

And when a ten-minute cab ride costs 20 000 Belarusian rubles, you lose sight of the zeroes fairly quickly. I did, anyway. A three-course dinner for five, with a bottle of wine, cost 481 000 rubles. Is that a lot? I still don’t know, but it was exciting and, yes, funny.

When you don’t know the language, you can’t ask those important questions, like, “what is that?” Or, even if you can, chances are you won’t understand the answer.

Sometimes you get lucky, and the salad turns out to be a Caesar salad, the next time, when you think you ordered a Caesar salad, you get a mixed salad with ham, tomatoes, creem cheese, olives, grapes, and five potato chips for good measure.

The meat pastry at the hockey arena turns out to be filled with, not meat, but quark. And of course you pay by giving the salesperson the biggest note you have, say, a 50 000-ruble bill, and get a bundle of money back, including a few ten-ruble bills which you have no idea of what they’re worth.

(When I say ‘you’, I still do mean ‘I’).

Sometimes it’s the little things that really make a difference. It’s the little things that are not like at home that force you to think different, and challenge the age-old truths you hold so dear.

Sometimes reality forces you to open your mind.

It can be, for example, such a little thing like that in Minsk, to get hot water in the shower, you have to turn the faucet to the right. Cold water is left of the center.

Nothing like an unexpected cold shower to get the blood going all the way to the brain.