While in high school in the summer of 1990, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Europe and part of the U.S.S.R. with other students from the area.  It was 7 months after the Berlin Wall started to come down, 3 months before the unification of Germany and over a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The month-long trip began in Washington, D.C. and then to East Germany, West German, Poland, the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria.  To be in countries that just a few months or years later would not exist anymore was very special.

The photographs have been digitized from nearly 40 year-old photos, taken by a 16 year old with a point and shoot camera – so many are not great.  None-the-less they are a great digital memory of what the world once looked like.