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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Say what is that?
An iPod.
Does it just do music?
Yeah, I’m old fashioned. I don’t need a phone or video or anything like on the iPhone.
Oh wow. I’ll have to swipe me one of those later. Hee hee hee.
—Man on the Amsterdam tram

In Europe I’ve talked to more homeless people than I ever thought I would. Eating street food alone on a bench or a wall is the best way to draw them out. It also helps to appear poor with a hint of disshevelment. If you can manage all that, so many homeless people will try to talk to you that you’ll wish you brought your tin foil hat.

They come up and candidly tell you things you never wanted to know ever and never asked about, and they help you with things you did not need help with until you feel like you’re pals, and then they spring the question — “Do you have any change” — and you feel bad if you don’t and taken advantage of if you do, like if a girl shows you a good time and then asks for a check, only the girl is a man with no teeth and never more than a dozen long hairs on his chin.

My favorite homeless people are the ones who practice Shakespeare, or something like that. They walk onto a subway car or stop still in the street like the Devil is taking hold and then belt out a fiery harangue that makes Mussolini look like Don Corleone. I never know what they say since it’s in French or Dutch or German, but it always sounds really impressive. I would probably put money in a cup if they had one out. When their vituperation is finished, these preachers of a ragged order just turn and leave, and nobody but me says a word or looks at them or even claps.

Amsterdam lies between Bruges and Las Vegas on at least several spectrums, but to see them all you’d have to take everything on the Smart Shop menu, from ‘shrooms to sleeping pills. It’s more adult than Vegas, with fewer restrictions and less family-friendly frosting on the cake of debauchery. Yeah, there’s pot. Yeah, there’s hookers. Yeah, those twenty Danes are singing and pounding the table with their fists. Who cares?

Every Amsterdam local is totally chill with the whole business of their city, and they will talk to you about anything at the drop of a hat — a mellow disposition at odds with the grating number of tourists and the sometimes wild streets.

Most cobblestone avenues lack lanes, painted lines, and sidewalks, so the only way cars can move is to barrel through pedestrians like bowling balls. On these streets rove packs of feral frat boys — the same no matter what country they come from — especially in the alleys around the Red Light district and the nearby Warmoesstrat of weed cafe “coffee shops,” Irish pubs, shantytown hostels, and the ivory storefront of Condomerie that sells exactly what you think it does.

I liked Amsterdam. I skipped the museums and tried to see as much of the city as I could. Houseboats tied up and half-sunk on the canals between the streets. Sunny flower and flea markets and book stands. Seedy bars and alleyways. Wood-paneled coffee shop hot boxes that share the same playlist: Bob Marley and Air.

Today I came to Cologne, on the Rhine in Germany. I’ll stay here a few days before going across the country to Berlin, then Bavaria (Deutschland’s Texas). I was going to visit Hamburg, but vivid tales of the three mile-long street of strip clubs deterred that plan.

Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.
—George Carlin

I forgot to mention a few things:

Between Paris and Brussels I stopped to visit a friend in Lille, right on the border of Belgium and France. There are cannonballs stuck in the walls of the Flemish apartments, and the city boasts that its museum’s collection is the largest in France after the Louvre (though I don’t think anyone knows how many facts are bent to make that claim).

My friend’s parents showered me with Italian hospitality, even though their English was rusty and he had to translate both ways. I tried to learn a few words like “Grazie” to help out. They opened two bottles of wine to accompany a big Italian dinner, then invited me to help start a resort in their hometown of Acquapendente in Latium, Italy, which must be the nicest place in the world.

My last day in Paris was also very gratifying. I walked up to the top of Montmarte, a nice neighborhood and the tallest point in the city. From under the Sacre Coeur I could kind of make out the Eiffel tower against the glare. It was a sunny Saturday, and an American jazz ensemble played “Georgia On My Mind” in a square next to a carousel while all the Parisians clapped.

The city’s surly inhabitants came out en masse to enjoy what was probably their first nice weather weekend all winter. They packed the lawns of the Jardin des Tuilerios under the Louvre and didn’t mind having to leave their coats on.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
—Paul Theroux

Brussels, Belgium, is a turd with a candy center. The web of narrow avenues around the Grote Markt are very nice — beer halls, skinny Flemish buildings, and cafes with heat lamps — and outside of that are the gleaming mirror-faced buildings of new office parks. If you walk past that, though, you find dirty streets, abandoned construction projects, and filthy Soviet bloc-style tenements with prostitutes under blacklights in the first floor windows.

You can see the Rue d’Aerschot, the main drag for less than reputable window shopping in Brussels, when you come in by train to the north station. The ladies of the night pull back the blinds in mid-afternoon and pose smiling in bikinis like its a beauty pagent, or sit on stools and text on their phones.

From what I could tell, shoppers are either swaggering Belgian locals who chat up the girls or nervous-looking businessman who can’t fully conceal their bespectacled heads in their hats no matter how hard they try. On the side streets are all the less popular prostitutes, who slap the window like trained seals when people walk under them.

I saw all I needed to of Brussels in one day and left for Bruges last Tuesday.

Bruges redeemed the nation and made Belgium the best place ever. The center of the town is an island surrounded by canals, with windmills and parks on the perimeter. It looks like a toy city of cobblestone and Flemish brick houses two windows across. You can see the whole thing from the top of the Belfry tower, and the chimneys and wind turbines of modern industry beyond.

Bruges is also likeable cheap. I pay 14 Euros a night for my bed (after 24-30 in Paris), got a huge plate of spaghetti with a mound of cheese for 3 Euros at a family restaraunt run by an Italian with Freddy Mercury’s mustache, and picked up a tub of friets from one of the two dueling fries stands in in the Markt square.

While the French focused their culinary talent on wine and cheese, the Belgians wisely perfected beer, chocolate, fries, and waffles. Fries are the greatest snack food, and here you can get them with a random sauce. They have invented 5,000 different sauces and gave each a funnier name (Stoofvleessaus), although sometimes you can end up stuck with the weird fish mayonnaise.

The beer is the best, though. I went on a tour of Bruges’ only remaining brewery with some people from the hostel and learned a lot about making beer, but mostly about how much Belgians love to drink it. The woman leading the tour held a passion for hops and malt that transcended alcoholism. She was offended by the idea of non-alcoholic beers and “gassy headache” cans like Budweiser. She humored me by naming some good Portland brews (Full Sail and Fat Tire), brewed in the Belgian tradition – but only real Belgian beers can be ambrosial.

Four percent table beers are for kids, she told us, and real Belgians enjoy the triple brewed 12% blondes and the dark beers made by Trappiste monks with holy water, which have the nutritional value of “four liquid sandwiches.” I have to believe her, because for two nights my only supper was hearty black beer, and I woke up feeling good as new.

One bar in Bruges has 300 Belgian beers, organized by the area their made in, their color, and their alcohol content. We just asked the waitress, who brought out Malheurs and Golden Draaks and other brands of liquid sandwiches in glass goblets and brandy snifters. The Belgians like a tall head on their beers. At De Garre, a nook in an alley the size of a hallway, they serve a strong beer called De Garre from the barrel, with three times as much frothy head as amber liquid.

I saw a few other sites in Bruges, but mostly the streets, canals, and squares of the city itself. I rented a bike on Thursday and took pictures of half of what I saw — and also knocked the chain off and one of the pedals by jumping around like an idiot. There’s a basilica in town that has Jesus’ holy blood, recovered during the Crusades. A priest put a gold-rimmed vial on a satin throne for people to touch, and I impiously thought it looked like the black pudding I had in Scotland.

Saturday was some kind of holiday in Bruges (although nobody seemed to know what it was for so maybe they hold parades every weekend). The parade started in the big Saturday market square, where stands sold deep fried meat wrapped in bacon and hamburger patties wrapped in bacon and other foods not worth mentioning.

The floats – all of them blared a different house beat, some of them were animatronic, and one of them smoked – barely fit down the narrow cobblestone avenues. The Belgians riding on them danced and drank beers and bombed tourists with confetti and candy. They wore medieval costumes or cowboy hats, all the colors of the neon rainbow.

Railroad work put a series of wrong, missed, and missing trains between me and Amsterdam, but I arrived safely tonight.

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

So I thought a technical devil destroyed all the photos I took between London and Paris — all of them except the last one I would have chosen to keep:

However, the missing photos (500 of them) were miraculously uncovered on one of the hostel computers in Paris after I left. It will probably take a month or two for me to unveil them. In the meantime, here are some pictures of Lille in France and of Brussels and Bruges in Belgium.

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.