Archive for the 'Northern Europe' Category

I Like Vienna

On April 7, 2009 from Austria. 0 Comments.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
—Lao Tzu

I think my opinon of a given place is related directly to the weather when I’m there. As a result of this equation, I really liked Vienna. It was sunny for all five days, and I spent half of those lounging around in parks with a newspaper.

One good park was in the Museum Quartier, which has no fewer than 1,000 museums. One end of the district is a strip mall of modern art warehouses. Across a busy but charming Viennese street, a lawn passes between two big domed structures, museums of natural and art history, and sidles up to the crescent-shaped Hofburg Palace and its galleries. To the left is another garden, a half-finished Temple of Theseus, and the gothic spires of the city hall. When I arrived construction crews were piling up dirt into ramps in front of the building for the Bike Festival on Saturday, which was awesome.

On the other side of the city, Schönbrunn Palace has all the baroque grandeur you would expect from the Habsburg’s summer house. The tree-lined gardens and hedge mazes unfurl past a grand fountain of Neptune’s entourage, up a grassy slope that rises above the city. Sun-starved Austrians tempt rabies by holding out nuts to the fist-sized, sharp-eared squirrels, and a grey-haired sentry rides around the park on a bicycle. The bike has a “Stay off the grass” sign under the handlebars which is identical to the ones on all the lawns, and the guardian blows a whistle and yells like the Fuhrer whenever he sees any picnicers trespassing. You can see the brick and pastel city sprawl from the wooded top of the hill. This is decorated by placid ponds and the Gloriette gateway, now an expensive café.

On Friday I trekked out from Grinzig, a hokey tourist village, northwest into the Sound of Music hillside. It’s all posh wine country and budding woodland up to the forested top of Kahlenberg, then back down to the blue Danube and south to the city.

There is a lot to do in Vienna. The bloc of 25 bars and nightclubs near Schwedenplatz is called the Bermuda Triangle, although the hippest spots are under the eves of the rail line between Thalia and Nussdorfer Strasse. It’s spring and all the European students and the Americans studying abroad are roaming around here for their break.

I went to the Vienna State Opera house for my last night in the city of music. The show was l’Eliser D’amor by Donizetti. Tickets are usually sold out, but plebs can get standing section tickets for €3 by linging up an hour before the show. I could still see at least half of the stage from my railing, and the acoustics were great. The hall has screens in front of all the seats and all the sanding spots that show a translation of the lyrics, kind of like subtitles in a movie.

I don’t know much about opera, but the lead singer sounded really good toward the end. Long scaling arpegios and all that. After one song about how he would die for one day with the girl, everyone started clapping and yelling, “Bravo!”, and the Americans whooped and yelled, “Yeah!”, because they didn’t know opera etiquette.

The lovestruck actor was slumped on a bench and palming his head like a basketball, but after five minutes he got up and gave a little nod. The band started playing again, only they didn’t play the next song. They played the lovestruck song again. The actor laughed and sang the whole thing over again. Only time I’ve seen an encore in the middle of a set. Or a reprise or whatever.

Monday I made the pilgrimage to the tombs of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and both Strausses in the Zentralfriedhof, then took a cheap bus down the Danube and across the Hungarian border to Budapest.

The Sound of Music

On April 5, 2009 from Austria. 0 Comments.

Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
—George R R Martin

My plan was to hitchhike from Berlin through Bavaria, Austria, and Slovenia to Croatia. This didn’t work out for a couple of reasons, but most of them are that I am a guy and was soggy wet and Germans did not want me in their BMW.

Hitchhiking in Germany is relatively safe and common, although not so much in winter. Still, I wanted to try. Last Saturday I picked my route — the Autobahn 115 goes all the way from the western edge of Berlin past Potsdam, through Liepzig, to Munich in the south of the country. I shaved so I looked like less of a bum, then unfolded my map of the labyrinthine Paris Metro and wrote München on one side and Potsdam on the other with a permanent marker.

Then I watched the passing license plates and looked for Munich’s M or Potsdam’s PM. Germans are very orderly with their license plates and put city codes at the front. They’re generally a very orderly people. This worked in my favor in one of the spots I picked.

It was a busy intersection next to a busy onramp onto the A115 and A110. The traffic lights did not work, and German drivers did not know what the fuck to do.

There’s a point where courtesy becomes an obstacle. It’s when everyone wants to hold the door open or bend down to pick up the same object, or when all the Germans stop their cars in the intersection to let the other Germans pass and it just becomes a polite standstill of people waving each other through.

Well, they were going really slow when they came out of it, and there I was smiling and flipping my Paris Metro map back and forth. Most people just glared at me and the people from Potsdam and Munich looked away. After an hour at two different onramps, when it started to rain, I gave up. Nobody wants to pick up a wet hitchhiker.

I went to an Internet café and sought a Plan B. Here are my Plan Bs:

  1. Go back there and hitchhike like a man.
  2. Walk 10 miles through the wilderness to a rest stop on the A115. There, get a map of the Autobahn and ask people for rides. They will like you because you are American and adventurous. If you fail, walk another 10 miles to Potsdam. Also, it will be raining.
  3. Meet someone from the German ride-sharing site and drive with them. Only available driver is Ivan, maybe Russian, who is driving to Munich with his friend at 10 tonight. “Meet me at Zoo station. It will be good.”

Actually that one sounds awesome. That sounds like it should have been Plan A. But Ivan, like most of the ride-share drivers, wanted €30 for the trip. And it was kind of sketchy. I’m pretty sure hitchhiking is safe, and that I wouldn’t have arrived in Munich in pieces, but I don’t want to test the limits of that theory. Or even just have my camera stolen.

I could have also stayed another night in Berlin and went with a less dubious ride-sharing German in the morning, like Florian or Romeo Love. Instead, I went with Plan C: I totally copped out and bought a train ticket. The overnight to Munich was a little more than ride-sharing, but much less than another day in Berlin. (On night trains in Germany: the seats all smell like beer, and the bathroom lights are a charming blue that keeps addicts from finding their veins.)

I slept on the train, dreaming of the fair-weather hitchhiking adventure I would pursue in warmer climates, and cursing the Germans, who are fascists. Even at that busted intersection, the pedestrians refused to jaywalk. They just waited like the light would come back on.

This is why I was so anxious to go to Bavaria. Bavarians are no more Germans than Texans are Americans. If you ask a Texan where he’s from, or if you see a Texan and ask an American, “Where is that guy from?”, neither of them will say America. They will say Texas, only one will shudder and one will tip his cowboy hat and shoot his guns in the air and ride off into the sunset.

Bavarians are the same way. People in the rest of Germany hate Bavaria. When outsiders think of Germany, they don’t think of the hard-working industrious volk, they think of red-faced Bavarians in leiterhosen laughing with a beer in each hand, and the other Germans hate that stereotype almost as much as they hate the French.

Despite my excitement, I only spent one night in this part of the country. I got in at noon last Sunday and it was cold and raining. I saw the Dachau concentration camp, then went to an Augustiner beer hall for dinner, which was a weird combination. I listened to German polka, drank homemade beer served by an aproned frau, and hung out with a Bavarian who looked like Gary Oldman. He spoke English, but his only way of communicating was to yell and wave his hands around and slide around on his bench with a beer.

After my flash tour of life in Bavaria, I met a group of High School students from Ohio at the hostel, who were so impressed with my traveling that I was impressed with it, too, until I remembered that High School students don’t know anything. I told them I was going to Salzburg, and they were going there as well. Their teacher chaperone offered to let me in on a group ticket. I accepted, and got cheap passage to Salzburg and entrance into the overbearing castle there: the Festung Hohensalzburg.

Salzburg is the hometown of Mozart and the place where they filmed The Sound of Music, and one of those things draws really annoying tourists. I saw the house from the movie and the gazebo where Julie Andrews danced around. The Austrians recently had to encase the thing in glass to keep out tourists after precarious emulation led to an 80-year-old woman breaking her ankle.

Luckily, Austrians are pretty close to Bavarians culturally. They are friendly, can cross the street by themselves, and want to talk to everyone. The valley was beautiful. There’s a hill above the town with nothing but cedar trees and hiking trails between beer-producing monastaries. Everything was misty and covered with snow, so it looked more like The Lord of the Rings than The Sound of Music.

All of Salzburg is painted in pastel colors that would better fit a nursery room — robin egg blue, puke yellow, acid-washed pink, etc., under salmon tiles and long gables with white windows. There are Döner stands and German beer and Mediterranean cafés. The gardens were nice, even though everything was dead, and the sun came out on Wednesday. That was my last day in the city. After two days in Salzburg, I took the slow trains to Vienna.

Check here for pictures of Cologne, Berlin, and Dresden.

White Russians & Chili Peppers In Dresden

On March 27, 2009 from Germany. 3 Comments.

Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.
—Kurt Vonnegut

It was snowing when I came into Dresden, but the city was nice. The Altdstadt on the south side of the Elbe has all the pre-war fire-blazed buildings, and the Neustadt is a mishmash of ugly modern, ugly Soviet, and cool old buildings, 200 of which are bars, most of which have awesome themes.

Play has old 8-tracks and tape decks wedged like bricks into the bar and the tables. The Living Room is all couches and coffee tables and dim lighting. Lebowski has a mural of the Dude and the Stranger painted on the wall in front of bowling lanes, and I got a White Russian there.

Every once in a while I like to make a big meal myself. Since the hostel kitchens aren’t much, this is usually pasta. I found a market hall in Dresden with a nice grocery store, a butcher, a baker, and all that and got some pasta, sauce, mushrooms, and onions, and found some spicy sausage and four red chili peppers. German stuff can’t possibly be as hot as the American equivalent.

I cut up the onion and tossed the bad core. Whenever you buy a bunch of onions there’s always one bad one. I sauteed what was left with garlic, added the ripped up sausage, diced and threw in two of the red peppers (which I found by experimenting were kind of hot), then put in the cut up mushrooms and the sauce.

“That looks good,” said Yo from Thailand.

“Yeah,” I said. It did look good. After I served it, a big plate of pasta and the chunky, spicy sauce, with a little plate of bread and Brie and a glass of black Dresden beer, it looked so damn good I took a picture. I started eating it. Jesus, it was hot. I kept eating it.

I thought of the New Zealander I met in Edinburgh. His dinner was pasta, plain spaghetti sauce, and a bunch of Jalapeño pepper slices from a jar. He didn’t even have anything to drink with it. Just kept spooning it in, red-faced and crying.

Pretty soon that’s what I was doing only I was sniffling too. I always liked how hot stuff cleans out your sinuses.

“It’s good for you,” said the German physicist. “It kills all the bacteria in your stomach.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s definitely killing something.”

I decided not to make the joke about bacterial genocide, since I was still in Germany.

When it was all eaten, I sat back, finished my beer, ate an orange and some chocolate, and relishing the hot coals of indigestion in my stomach I thought, That was good. Next time I’ll need more peppers.

Berlin’s Somber Zeitgeist

On March 23, 2009 from Germany. 0 Comments.

One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.
—Charles Dickens

German people are kind of fascists. They have so many rules and are dead serious about every one. “Wear your bag on the front.” “You can’t bring that bottle in here.” “That bag is too big.” “You can’t carry your coat in here. Put it back on.” “You have to ask before you use that sink.” “You can’t lean against that wall.” “You can’t drink that beer in my Millennium Bar.”

They yell at you, and then if they ever catch sight of you again, they glare at you. And this is in Berlin. To be fair, it’s really only the security guards and bartenders that are part-time Gestapo. Everyone else is really nice, although they will not ever cross the street until the light says it’s okay, no matter how empty the street is. One of my professors once told me, “Before they protest, the Germans ask the police if it’s not too much trouble.”

Everything in the city is so nice and new, with space age modern architecture alongside old buildings rebuilt after the war. There’s a vibrant art scene, high-tech industry, and a lot going on. It’s dead quiet though. Everyone but the tourists keep their heads down, and even on weekend nights things stay pretty well sedated — except on Saint Patrick’s day, now as riotous everywhere as it is in America. FACT: Ireland used to prohibit drinking on Saint Patty’s holy day, only letting up when they saw how much fun the Americans were having.

I walked around the Tiergarten, saw the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Tor. The Berlin Wall still stands along the winding River Spree alongside industrial streets and disheveled construction yards. Graffiti murals cover each side of every concrete segment. On a cloudy day I visited the Pergamon Museum. The huge collection of transplanted Greek and Babylonian architecture, including the Pergamon altar and the Ishtar Gate, miraculously escaped bombing during the war.

On Wednesday I went to the Berlin Zoo, famous for panda porn and baby polar bears. For a while, the sun was out. The elephants were wrestling, the wolves howling, the rhinos rolling in the wet top soil, the tiger and Knut the polar bear pacing back and forth on the rocks, the lion growling at tourists, and the monkeys shaking their branches. Then the clouds came back and everything went and hid in the corner like you’d expect them to do in wintry Germany. The sagely bison, as tall as I am and ten times as heavy, didn’t move a muscle even when birds started pulling out his hair for a nest.

Food in Berlin is the best. Beer is cheap, and so is the döner. This Turkish import is the Mexican food of Germany, and little restaurants mark every corner. They shave chicken or lamb off a huge kebab roast rotating in front of an oven, and put that in a pita with sauce and salad. It’s kind of like a gyro, kind of like schawarma, and really, really good.

Two Days In Cologne

On March 13, 2009 from Germany. 2 Comments.

Each day I go outside and sniff the air and say, ‘That way smells bad,’ and that’s where I go.
—Some firefighter from Canada

I have free access to a computer in Cologne, so I thought I’d write more specifically about what I’m doing for once.

I took a train from Amsterdam to Cologne and got in late Thursday afternoon. At the station they told me there was a backpacker’s hostel right around the corner, and it was. I could see the trains come in from my room on the fourth floor, and the wind carried German announcements fom the station floor. The hostel has a sign next to the window that says not to throw things at the restaraunteurs below, and they set up a net like the one at a driving range just in case people forget.

After I checked in I found a donor kebab restaraunt and ate there. I went back to the bar at the hostel and talked to some people from Japan who spoke a little English and something that no one could mistake for German. You meet strange people in hostel bars.

I met a student from Frankfurt named Adrian, a translator from Paris named Audrey working on her German, a food chemist from Munich named Niclas, and a firefighter from Montreal who spoke five languages and got a six month vacation after a house fell on him. He went to the airport and said, “Give me a ticket. I don’t care where it’s going. Just give me a ticket somewhere. Do you speak English? I said give me a ticket!” and ended up with a ticket to Frankfurt.

On Friday I did laundry in the sink, secured my bed for another night at the front desk, and got a pastry and coffee from Back Werk down the street plus a sandwich for lunch. I wandered around Cologne, using the spires of the cathedral as a reference point. It’s a huge gothic mess of buttressed terror that you see right as you come out of the central station. I walked around the shopping streets and the market squares, then went to the Museum Ludwig of modern art and tried to understand the Picasso paintings and the ones that are just solid colors with a line through them.

The clouds cleared late in the afternoon, so I walked around the parks on the Rhine. On my way back to the hostel I watched a street show by a German jackass named Theo Teabag, who after a ten-minute buildup demonstrated his talent by juggling torches on a unicycle while the German punks behind tried to topple him by popping balloons. I made dinner in the hostel kitchen and ate with a cute Bulgarian couple, Christine and Martine.

Yesterday Adrian of Frankfurt invited everyone to an electro club in downtown Cologne. Niclas wanted to leave at 10, but Adrian said he had to sleep until at least 11 if he wanted to party until 5 am. So tonight I’m going to check out the German techno. You really have to play it by ear when you travel this way.