Archive for the 'Northern Europe' Category

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Red Lights of Amsterdam

On March 12, 2009 from Netherlands. 2 Comments.

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.

Other Things I Saw On the Way

On March 9, 2009 from Belgium. 0 Comments.

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.

In Bruges

On March 8, 2009 from Belgium. 1 Comment.

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.

Paris Fried Chicken

On March 5, 2009 from Belgium. 0 Comments.

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:

pfc

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.

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.