Monthly Archive for February, 2009

Je ne parle pas français

On February 28, 2009 from France. 3 Comments.

We’ll always have Paris.
—Casablanca

Paris smells like cigarette smoke and sounds like coughing and polite conversation and impolite drivers and hurried footsteps. It is larger, denser, and grander than London, full of overblown monuments to French achievements like the Pantheon and the Arc de Triumph, but it’s more like a hundred small towns than one big city.

Each arrondissement has its own orientation, its own landmarks, and its proudly patroned open markets, pricy cafes, and cheap street food. The Champs Elysées, the Latin Quarter, and the old Hemingway haunts are overrun with high fashion chains and American fast food, but most of Paris has retained its independent boutiques and markets.

I can’t afford any of it. Everything in Paris costs what it would in a US sports stadium. I saw a slice of pizza for $9, and most sandwiches cost $7. I think this is why Parisians work so hard, are so bitter, and eat so much bread and cheese – a healthy if unsatisfying diet. One Frenchman in my hostel warned me that my American stomach would not be able to handle the cheese I bought, but I thought it was very good.

Parisians have a reputation for stuck-up rudeness, but I think they’re just in a hurry. It’s an expensive city to live in, and between making money they have to navigate the labyrinthine metro. Everyone in Paris has been very nice and helpful, as long as I punctuate my combination of mispronounced French and overstated English with a “Bonjour” and a “Merci, au revoir” – everyone except a man at the post office.

“Eh? You don’t speak English well. Here, write it down. Jon Moordonaargh… I can’t read this. Oh Mac-Donald. Here, this is how you write it, see? Do you speak French? No? You can’t talk, you can’t write, you don’t know French – you must be Australian, or from Texas. Oh, Oregon. Yes Oregon makes good wine. The white wine is best. You can buy it a few blocks from here. It costs 20 to 30 Euros.”

It was raining the first day I got into Paris so I went to the packed corridors of the Louvre. The Mona Lisa is the most over-hyped work of art, and I had to guess what all the antiquities were since the signs were in French. When the rain stopped I came outside and looked at the statues in the Jardin des Tuilerios. I had just taken a picture and put my camera away, and out of the corner of my eye I saw some guy in a dirty green jacket pick something up out of the dirt and bring it over to me.

“Look what someone drop,” he said. “It’s a ring, solid gold ring. Here, I want you have it. It your lucky day.”

“I don’t want it. You keep it.”

“No, no, you have it. I am muscle man, you understand? I can’t keep it.”

He put the ring in my hand and closed my fingers on it. It was big and light and looked like something you’d get out of a Chuck E. Cheese vending machine. I offered it back to him, and he grabbed it out of my outstretched hand and put it in one of the pockets of my bag.

“Look dude I don’t want the ring,” I said, retrieving it from my bag. “Just keep it.”

“No, no, you must take it.” He grabbed my hand and physically put the ring on my pinky finger, then walked away saying, “Lucky day.”

In my mind I ran through all the potential scams. Would he report my theft of his ring to the police and threaten to press charges, or would his fake cop buddies come and fake arrest me? I decided to take the ring to one of the assault-rifle carrying Louvre security guards. Then the guy came back.

“Give me change for Coca Cola.”

“Sorry, I don’t have change.”

“Come on, it’s just two Euros. Give me it for Coca Cola.”

“I’m not giving you two Euros. Why don’t you just take this gold ring? You can probably trade it for a Coke.”

He grabbed the ring and I swear yelled, “Stupid gringo,” as he stormed off.

On Tuesday I saw the Pantheon, the Latin Quarter, and Paris’ Chinatown, which had good Pho thanks to France’s Vietnamese imperialism. I visited Montparnasse on Wednesday and saw the Catacombs, an old stone quarry 20 meters underground where Paris stacked the bones of 6 million people like firewood behind walls of artistically layered skulls and fibula. The entrance says, ”Halt, for this is the empire of the dead.” It looks like an Indiana Jones set piece.

I also visited the awesome Rodin garden, the Charles de Gaulle shrines at the Musée de l’Armée (de Gaulle apparently won the Second World War and liberated Paris himself), Napoleon’s ostentatious tomb and seven-layered coffin, and the view from the top of the Eiffel tower.

English Cops Shows & Karaoke

On February 22, 2009 from England. 8 Comments.

I found that most people who live in Newcastle are untouched by the Norman castle there, the one that looms over the River Tyne between the rail station and the Guildhall. To them the antiquities that all the tourists take pictures of are just rock walls.

They want American culture, not this half-rate British ruralism. They are charicatures of the American college student: They drink a lot and start early, and they appreciate the finer parts of cops shows (including domestically produced versions, which are in some ways more violent since nobody has guns so they just beat people senseless with sticks).

I stopped in Newcastle for a day on my way back south from Edinburgh to see the castle and the squat remains of Hadrian’s Wall. None of the buses were running out to the best sites in the downs, so I settled for the Roman forts in the city itself.

The British built a road over Segedunum before they knew it was there and never bothered to move it. It still covers half the buildings and who knows what else. The rest of the foundation has been dug up, pathed, and marked so it looks like a blueprint made of stone and gravel. 20 feet of the 74 miles of Hadrian’s Wall are across the street, so reduced they look like a sidewalk.

In a rebuilt bathhouse on the fort ground a big man in lorica segmentata inducted 30 elementary school kids into the Roman Legion VI. First Spear Centurion Maximus showed them their new equipment and included all the gory details about face-stabbings and just how a Roman javelin bends or breaks after it goes right through an enemy’s back. The kids jumped back when he gave his war cry and demonstrated how best to skewer a Pict.

His presentation over, Maximus ripped up a tarp and pulled out leather vests, helmets, swords, and shields for everyone. They all dressed up and marched around in a bad turtle formation while their parents threw plastic balls at them and giggled. One four-year-old girl stood out front waving her gladius like a baton while the Centurion shouted things in Latin so it looked like the world’s most fascist entry into a pre-school parade.

I crossed the Tyne on a ferry and went to Arbeia, a resupply fort named for the Arabs who manned it. It was more complete than Segundum and had a pit and a few columns still conspicuous. It was closed so I had to hop the fence to take a few pictures.

On Sunday I took an overnight bus from Newcastle to Bath, which was patriated by the same angry poor people who take the night buses in the states. It’s a small, quaintly English town with the ruins of a Roman bath house and a Jane Austen museum. They run tour buses out to Stonehenge and the village where the BBC shot Pride & Prejudice and sell lifesize posters of Colin Firth.

I came back to London on Thursday and noticed immediately that the British are terrible at naming stores. Either go with the arcane (Forp, a clothing store), the obscene (Get Shitty, Dirty Dick’s, The Bad Ass, all bars) or the uninspired (Eat, Tea).

Walkabout is an Australian bar in West Hamstead, London, just down some stairs and streets from the hostel. I went to the karaoke night there after I got back to London this week. It was terrible. Everyone who sang was awkwardly sober, and the bar closed at midnight. I don’t think the English know how karaoke is supposed to work.

I leave today for Canterbury, then go to Paris on an overnight bus.

Scotch Whisky & Irish Breakfast

On February 15, 2009 from Scotland. 6 Comments.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
—Freya Stark

Most of the people in my hostel are Aussies or Kiwis on their walkabouts who are staying and maybe working in Edinburgh for several months. They say “Cheers” and “As you do,” and only a few of them can afford a plane ticket home.

At a whisky store on the Royal Mile I bought a bottle of Islay scotch called Caol Ila that tasted like smoke and seawater and shared it with a New Zealander named Paulie who said it was alright but that the smoothest whisky he had ever tasted a Scotsman doled out from a flask secreted in his belt and had made himself.

At an Irish bar, where someone ordered a pint of Guiness at 9:30 Sunday morning, I finally enjoyed a full English breakfast, with bacon, pork sausage, mushrooms, a potato scone, hash browns, baked beans, black pudding, tomato, eggs, and soda bread.

The hostel has a kitchen that always smells like exotic cooking, and it makes eating a lot cheaper. I ate a 50 pence can of baked beans with sausages. The sausages had the consistency of tofu only I knew they were made of some kind of meat. Now I’m sticking with pasta, which is universally cheaper.

On my third day there I took a tour of Edinburgh Castle, just up the rock from my hostel. It says something about Scotland when a military fortress is the center of their capital.

It’s an old city and a city in flux. Up through World War 2 the British Empire employed Scotsmen in making ships and fighting wars. Now tourism and whisky are the biggest industries, and the government is the largest employer. Most Scots have moved abroad, and the remnants are die hard nationalists.

Edinburgh is very modern. I saw indoor malls, something unheard of in Southern England, a gang of bikers on 4-wheel ATVs who revved their engines under the red lights, and another on mopeds. Everyone in a kilt was asking for change.

The most engaging sight on cold nights in Scotland and Northern England are the skinny British girls, who insist on wearing spaghetti straps and maybe a light cardigan in spite of the wintry 30 degree weather. Their high-heel sandals somehow find footing in all that snow and ice, and they don’t shiver or turn red.

Summer would be a much better time to visit, when the air is clearer and warmer and highland tours easier. Edinburgh holds a very California-like festival in August that fills the city with music, street performers, and hippy crafts.

London, Leeds, Newcastle, and Edinburgh

On February 10, 2009 from England and Scotland. 3 Comments.

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
—Dagobert D. Runes

I took to travel life pretty quickly. I live out of a backpack that I leave in the hostel under clothes hung up to dry. I wash clothes in the sink. I take my iPod, camera, and passport with me everywhere and aim for one meal a day, after eating breakfast in the hostel.

I wanted to start in the UK because I knew I would experience very little “culture shock.” It is very similar to the US, and the two-way cultural influence is obvious. Still, I’ve gotten used to looking the wrong way before I cross the street.

On my last night in London I went to Leicester (Lester) Square, where they had set up a reader board to tell drunks about bus services so none ended up sleeping in the gutter.

On Saturday I took the train from London to Leeds to visit a friend who is going to theuniversity there. The college is definitely the town’s biggest feature, but it also has a long history of industry and religion. Many of Leeds’ surplus old chapels have been converted into dorms and even nightclubs.

I took a bus from Leeds to Edinburgh. We drove through the snowy downs of Northeast England and had a one-hour layover in Newcastle, where I met an old man and couldn’t understand 90% of what he said. I had to pick out the words I could understand and respond to those, an awkward trade learned from conversing with people who speak English as a second language.

I think Edinburgh is the San Francisco of Great Britain. The city is not really a cultural hub, at least not in the winter, but it is proud of what it has, namely Scotch, tartan, and bagpipes.

It’s also very hilly. A big gash runs under Edinburgh Castle, itself on the crag of an inactive volcano, and right between Old Town and New Town in the city center. Steep roads run up and down away from these landmarks, down towards the bay to the north, and up around Blackford Hill and Hollyrood, with King Arthur’s seat on top and a gold course underneath.

My hostel, the Castle Rock, is right under Edinburgh Castle, just off the Royal Mile with all the tourist spots, haggis restaurants, ale pubs, and the Scotch Experience museum, complete with an It’s A Small World raft ride in a busted open whisky cask.

I’ve been in Edinburgh for a day and a half and haven’t seen much of that, but already I’ve encountered the last thing I expected to see here: a Scottish Hare Krishna.

Map of London

On February 4, 2009 from England. 4 Comments.

There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren’t worth what a pin can spit
and it goes by the name of London.
—Sweeney Todd

Since arriving in London, I’ve spent two days in the British Museum, all morning in Hyde, Green, and St James’s parks looking for Buckingham Palace amid a hundred half-finished snowmen, fifteen minutes trying to grok a conceptual slab of metal at the Tate Modern, an hour in the middle of a Sri Lankan protest, an evening in the King’s Arms pub, and not enough time sleeping — all on less than $40 a day.

London is surprisingly diverse. On the subway to and from the shops in Soho, the royal parks in St James’s, the touristy sites on the Thames, and rooms full of antiquities at the British Museum I heard French, Spanish, and a plethora of languages out of Eastern Europe.

The city has blocks of Korean, Japanese, and especially Indian restaraunts. The modest Chinatown was crowded when I arrived on Sunday with the last hurrah of Chinese New Year. Under Big Ben and Westminster Abbey I saw 2,000 Indians protesting the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Half the travelers I’ve met in Palmer’s Lodge are staying in the hostel while they look for work, preferably the live-in kind since London is so expensive, only there are few available jobs and more people looking for them, between all the immigrants, visitors, and unemployed. One guy from France went to a bar where fifty people had applied for three positions.

London is a weird juxtaposition of antique and swanky. A block away from the bright lights of glossy restaraunts, neon clubs, and ubiquitous Starbucks in South Bank are the solid walls of Charles Dickens houses on narrow roads with a church on one corner and a pub on the other. The pubs are packed from 5 to 11, the nightclubs from 11 to 2.

A statue of Nelson Mandela looks at Oliver Cromwell across jogging Londoners in track suits, tourists with cameras, and old men in three piece suits smoking pipes on the corners of Parliament Square. Uptown shops and bars are built under the arches of stone bridges that slope off the Thames. Construction is everywhere as the British do their best to modernize or at least keep functional their proudly decaying city.

On Monday it snowed more than it had in 16 years — six inches — which wouldn’t be a big deal to any normal northern city. London shut down. Half the city just called in sick, including all the people who were supposed to be running the subway, then the other half of the city couldn’t get to work because the Tube wasn’t running.

The almost universally awful London papers abandoned celebrity gossip and filled their pages with sensationalized stories of the frosted crisis: Rubbish piles up! Rowan Atkinson catches cold and cannot perform! If it snows as much tomorrow as it is supposed to, then this may be the most dangerous leg of my trip.