Definition: In this task, you are given a Reddit post as a text. Your task is to generate a title for this text. The title should start with "TIFU by", followed by a situation that caused humor. The title should contain 7-12 words, ideally.
Input: Text: the year was 1989: kindles were called books, mp3s were called cds, the cold war was still on even though there was gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost policies, and cameras shot on film.  

earlier in the previous year i was selected to be part of a student exchange delegation to the soviet union and we had been prepping for months with classes on rules, protocol, and learning as much of the russian language as we could.  june 1989 finally arrived and we were off!  we landed in copenhagen and had enough of a layover we got to go into town and see some sights.  i used my first roll of film walking around with my traveling companions, later dropping my camera in a town square.  i noticed a small bubble in the seam of the camera towards the bottom and didn't think anything of it.

next we flew to helsinki and stayed for a couple of days.  it was white nights so the sun was up almost all the time.  i vividly remember riding a roller coaster in the daylight sometime after 11pm.  of course, i'm taking plenty of pictures the whole time.

the next day the real adventure began; a train to leningrad.  we pulled out of helsinki heading for the soviet border, and it did not disappoint.  there was a barbed wire no-mans-land with a gate across the tracks and guard towers.  uniformed soldiers opened the gates and the train slowly pulled forward and stopped.  i finished taking a few photos and then stashed my camera.

the most beautiful woman in a soviet uniform accompanied by two soldiers with weapons came through to check our passports and visas and then the train continued.  i couldn't believe the stark contrast on the soviet side of the border; it was like riding into a sad black and white silent movie.  i took some photos of the bleak countryside as we made our way to leningrad.

the soviet union did not disappoint.  we saw leningrad, estonia, petrozavodsk, murmansk, and moscow.  white nights, palaces, wwii mass graves, museums, pioneer camps, party mixers with communist youth groups, trading our bluejeans with the black market, lenin's tomb, the kremlin.  we were even supposed to get to meet gorbachev, but there was some emergency about hungary opening its borders (we didn't know for sure because we didn't get outside news, but the communist sphere of influence started to collapse while i was there).

what an amazing experience it was, and i had 50 rolls of film i shot and i couldn't wait.  developing film was expensive but my mom let me bring in all the rolls at once.  i got back a few ruined shots from copenhagen, and then every other single frame i shot was exposed by that crack in the camera as the film fed through.

in the end i have just a few bad shots from denmark.  in those days, the soviet visas were just an insert for your passport and they pulled them when you departed.  so, in the end, i have no real proof i was there other than a few souvenirs i could have bought on ebay.

 

update: yes, cds existed and were quite prevalent in 1989. just ask my cd collection which is stuck in that era. also, the soviets at that time stamped the loose visa, not the passport, so when they pull the visa when you exit you lose your stamp.

TIFU by shooting 50 rolls of film in the former Soviet Union through a broken camera.