Wandered

After a restless couple of months, I’ve finally set up shop in Berlin, my home away from my home away from home. The former East has been a little gentrified since my last visit, but the city’s overall funkiness is intact. Walking the streets, you pass by all sorts of bizarre curio shops, watering holes, and bouquets of graffiti, and the sidewalks are full of people who have nothing more important to do at 2:00pm on a weekday than sit at a cafe and people-watch. It is a city where even the pharmacies have happy hours. This must be what San Francisco was like before it priced out fun.

Returning to Berlin has allowed me to rediscover my favorite spectator sport: people running to catch the subway. When someone is entering a station and hears the distinctive brake whine of a train approaching the platform, everything else in their brain suddenly shuts down and they take on the panicked expression of a gazelle fleeing the hunt. Even if people are hundreds of yards away from the train and have no chance of making it, this will not stop them from pushing people into the wall, sliding down banisters, and sprinting hundreds of yards in high heels in a desperate effort to save about 5 minutes. In some cases, I’m sure these people are genuinely in a hurry, but, putting aside all jokes about German punctuality, I suspect that they are usually motivated by the same sort of visceral impulse that compels people to circle a parking lot five times to get a better space.

The island of Rügen, in a corner of the Baltic Sea, is home to the town of Prora, which was handpicked by Hitler to serve as a spa resort for vacationers (once he had sewn up a few “loose ends” with regard to the rest of the Western world, that is). Needless to say, it is the most unappealing “resort” you could imagine. It looks much more like a prison, consisting of immense, featureless concrete buildings housing tiny dormitory rooms. When the Soviets occupied it after the war, they found it was easily converted into a military base. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the complex is that it won a grand prize for architecture at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, further evidence that you can win an award for anything, especially when the French are involved.

One rule that I try to live by is, “Don’t willingly enter an arena full of German people wearing the same uniform and chanting,” but I made an exception to attend the first home soccer game of the season for Hertha BSC, Berlin’s perpetually mediocre soccer team. The game was at the Olympiastadion, the same place where Hitler famously “got served” by Jesse Owens in 1936, and was filled with a “capacity” crowd of 46,000. Finger quotes are needed because the stadium, with a capacity of about 76,000, was not nearly full, but the organizers get around this on a technicality by simply deciding that the seats that go empty are tickets that are not for sale anyway, thus ensuring a sell-out crowd at any size. I can’t complain about the team’s lack of popularity though, because it enabled us to get prime seats, 5 rows up, for $20. The police presence on the day of a game is formidable. All the major subway and tram stations towards the stadium have complements of riot police who are forced to wear extensive body armor under their normal uniforms, making them all look like militant cousins of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Once you reach the actual stadium, there are more riot police, rows of paddy wagons waiting to be filled, and several dozen police on horseback. What this last group hopes to accomplish is not clear to me, unless the Three Musketeers show up and happen to be Stuttgart fans.

The weather in the city has been disappointingly erratic, with uncomfortably wet interruptions into uncomfortably hot days.* Last week, I was enjoying the sunshine on the edge of a lake south of the city, but, as I walked to the train station, the sky was hastily erased by a uniform grayness. As soon as the train lurched forward, it started to hail. A few minutes later, the hail gave way to massive raindrops carving tiny tributaries onto the windows, and when the train pulled into the station ten minutes later, the sky was clear and sunny again. That night, there was a lightning storm.

A fun fact about Berlin that few people know is that it is the homeless newspaper capital of the world.** You can hardly go five minutes on the subway without a new ostensibly homeless person getting on and giving a sales pitch for his particular publication. Some of these newspapers are essentially low-quality local rags, but most of them are filled with news concerning Berlin’s homeless population. I don’t know why anyone would assume that just because people want to overpay for a newsletter to help the homeless, they also want to read about the homeless. Nobody who buys these papers is homeless, and they are pitching in a Euro or two precisely so that they don’t have to think about the homeless. It seems like a gross miscalculation then, that buyers are rewarded for their contribution with poorly proofread stories on which local restaurants don’t padlock their dumpsters.

Waiting for my food at a coffee shop one morning, a woman sitting nearby asked if I was American. She was a thirtysomething publicist from New York in oversized sunglasses named Carol who had noticed the very American book in my hand. Actually, I don’t remember what the hell her name was, but she was definitely a Carol in the abstract. Anyway, Carol was considering moving to Berlin despite knowing nothing about the city. She seemed to have decided that she wanted to move to Europe, and when I asked why she responded, “Well, y’know, it’s like…I just feel like I should, y’know?” Indeed. She went on to assure me without my asking that she was very successful in New York and had friends. LOTS of friends. Really, believe her, this is a woman who has friends! She told me the two areas where she was thinking of living, and I explained that she was currently debating between Berlin’s gay district and its Turkish district - these being relative distinctions, since every district in Berlin is both a gay district and a Turkish district. She reacted as if she had almost bought an apartment in North Korea by mistake. When it suddenly dawned on her that she was in over her head, Carol had a lot of questions. She interrogated me as I waited for my food, which remained cruelly unmaterialized, until at last she seemed satisfied that she had identified a sufficiently sterile, white, heterosexual place from which to complain about all the Turks and gays in Berlin. Then she hopped on her bike, off to go make the world a worse place. Godspeed, Carol.

* The Uncomfortably Wet Interruptions will also be the name of my next band.
** As declared by me.

When you sweep through a dozen countries with 20 official languages between them, your brain starts to process languages in a very different way.* By immersing myself in the consonant orgies of Croatian, the drunken murmurs of Swedish, the self-parodying gutturals of the Swiss, and the language spoken in Ireland, which is English in name only, all in quick succession, I’ve thoroughly addled my brain. I am always a country or two behind, and I end up instinctively mixing pleasantries from different languages together into some sort of overpolite pidgin. I don’t get used to saying “thank you” in Swedish, “excuse me” in Italian, or “no thank you, I would not like any hashish” in Portuguese until I’ve already moved on to somewhere else. This leads to a lot of blank stares.

Every conversation in a barely-known foreign tongue turns from an exchange of information into a game. You rehearse your opener in your head, and you try to pre-imagine every logical follow-up question so you won’t get caught with the helpless, sputtering expression so common to Americans traveling abroad. It’s more bull ride than discussion: all you need to do is hang on for about 8 seconds. There is one way to win the game - get the information and get out, without being dressed down as a foreigner - but there are plenty of ways to lose. Failing to get the words out properly, being patronized with a response in English, resorting to a third-party translator - all of these are “game over.”

Two pet peeves I’ve developed concerning exchanges in non-native languages:

• The American who, when speaking English to a foreigner, speaks far too quickly and chooses obscure words, and then, when he or she is not understood, repeats himself without slowing down or simplifying the request at all.

“HelloIwaswonderingwhetheryousellnoncomedogenicsunscreenhereorifyouknowsomewherethatdoes?”
“Um…I-”
“Iwasjustwonderingwhetheryousellnoncomedogenicsunscreendoyousellit?”

• The person who stares at you, totally befuddled, as you repeat a word six times and then, after the seventh, looks at you with a sudden comprehension and acts as if you were speaking gibberish before, pronouncing the word to himself exactly as you’ve been doing.

“Wissen Sie wo der nächste Bahnhof ist?”
“Wie bitte?”
“Der Bahnhof? Wissen Sie wo das ist?”
“Bitte?”
“Der Bahnhof?”
“Um…”
“Der Bahnhof? Train station?”
“Er…”
“Bahnhof?”
“Ooohhhh, der Bahnhof!”

Body language is indispensable. You spend a great deal of time miming basic activities like the use of a fork or the removal of money from a wallet as if you’re some kind of idiot man-child lost in a foreign land (which is not necessarily far from the truth). You nod blankly as a speaker rattles off a series of instructions from which only the proper nouns are intelligible: this is the international signal for “I understand that you have just finished a sentence.” You derail a lot of conversations with your hand held loosely in front of your face, mouth hanging slightly open at a loss for words: this is the international signal for “my country does not place a high priority on foreign language education in its secondary schools.”

* 21 if you count Luxembourgish, which, of course, you shouldn’t.

In the interest of balancing out the warlike temperament of the former Yugoslavia, I headed to Switzerland next, which some of you may know as the country where Volvos are not made, because that’s Sweden, not Switzerland, and we’ll thank you to stop confusing the two. During a brief stopover in Munich, we passed by a military surplus store with a window display that featured the following items for sale:

• Army helmets
• Military-issue boots
• Camouflage pants and jackets
• Combat knives
• Survival gear
• 1993 Chicago Bulls NBA Champion t-shirts

No comment.

Interlaken, a city nestled in the heart of the Swiss Alps, offered a perfect home base for trips into the mountains. The town itself is a bit surreal in that it’s given over entirely to adventure sports. You would have an easier time flagging down a helicopter or a whitewater raft than a taxi. The sky above the town is constantly dotted with brightly colored constellations of skydivers, paragliders, and hang gliders drifting down lazily from the mountains. I hope the Swiss have not gotten too inured to this sight, though, or they may have to roll back the parliament building’s “75,000 days without an invasion” sign to zero when someone recognizes the loophole and slips troops in undetected under cover of very festive camouflage.

Sitting at the window of our lodge in the forest one night, I heard the unmistakeable riff of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” wafting through the window. Eventually I realized that I was being treated to a halting, gutteral sing-along by the patrons of the nearby bar, which I couldn’t help but smile at. Who needs an iPod when you can listen to drunk Swiss businessmen turn American rock standards into an adventure in diphthongs?

On my way out of Interlaken, I ran into someone who had lived across the hall from me in my freshman dorm while I was waiting for my train. Then, as if the odds of this sort of encounter were not already vanishingly low, I ran into Hans Christian Andersen again two days later, sitting on a park bench with his family. I hardly recognized him with other clothes on over his dismayingly immodest sleeping attire.

Zurich showcased a billboard for the Homeless World Cup, which is exactly what it sounds like. It turns out, they even play Homeless Person Rules; the games last 14 minutes, with only four players to a side on a small, some might even say “dank alleyway-sized,” pitch. I still have a lot of questions, though, like do they use real goals, or overturned dumpsters? Does last Sunday’s newspaper make a regulation shin guard? And so on. I just hope that hobo soccer hasn’t sold out and gone corporate. And while we’re on the subject of strange sports, Switzerland also boasts Alpine Wrestling tournaments, which, as far as I can tell, consist of normal wrestling, with the one added requirement that participants must dress like Swiss farmers in twill shorts and suspenders.

My train out of Zurich carried several Swiss soldiers, each of whom was traveling with his assault rifle propped neatly on the seat next to him and petted every so often as if it were a small child. Why they couldn’t store their weapons in a less intimidating manner, I don’t know. People love to point to Switzerland as evidence of America having a uniquely violent culture because, they say, all men in Switzerland get issued rifles that they keep in their homes for civil defense, and they don’t go around shooting one another over crack deals gone bad or astronaut love triangles. Putting aside the fact that Switzerland has no space program and that crack would probably cost forty thousand dollars an ounce in their economy, it’s still not really a fair comparison. You have to look at it alongside somewhere with the same demographic profile, and last I checked, Sonoma wasn’t beset with raging gun violence.

On the same train, I met an American who, when he heard I was from the Bay Area, explained that he worked in San Diego for six months one time, and then looked at me with an expectant slack-jawed grin as if this meant we shared a deep eternal bond. This is a common phenomenon. Travelers adrift in a foreign land are usually so overeager for a morsel of familiarity and connection that they treat the most negligible commonality as a blood pact. “Oh, you’re from around San Francisco? I visited a cousin in Pasadena for a week when I was 8!” “You worked for Google? I use Google! Man, small world, huh?” “You went to Stanford? How funny, I went to Illinois!” “Oh, you’re reading All The President’s Men? I read a book in high school once!” At first I tried to derail this inanity by responding far too earnestly, but my undetected sarcasm only encouraged them, so now I just nod, let my eyes glaze over, and wait for the storm to pass.

One bookstore I visited had a section devoted to English books about Switzerland, all with titles like Why Switzerland?, What Makes Switzerland Unique? and other vaguely desperate pleadings that all seem evidence of some national youngest sibling complex concerning a lack of attention. The Swiss have perhaps figured out too late that abstention from wars is a good way to get left out of the history books. It was fitting then, that one of the books they sold in this section, entitled What Every American Needs To Know About Europe, listed every single European country in its table of contents, all the way down to Malta and Cyprus, except for Switzerland.

After a few hours staring out a train car window at the hillside vineyards and the sun-kissed waters of the Rhine, I arrived in Cologne to catch a plane to the Dalmatian coast. My time in Cologne (official nickname: “The Cleveland of Europe”) was uneventful, but it was highlighted by the sight of a crippled boy who had circular beer advertisements attached to both wheels of his wheelchair. Due to a 5:00 a.m. departure time, I spent a night in the Cologne airport, but any attempt at actual sleep was thwarted by the woman who buffed the floor right in front of me with a frequency that could only be considered malicious, and the two children who spent the time from 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. competing in what sounded like a Pulling Duct Tape Off The Roll Olympics.

Coastal Croatia is one of those places travel books call an “undiscovered gem,” this despite the fact that they all seem to have discovered it. Several different people recommended it, which usually tells me that I will hate something (although, for those of you who know me, this is not a total loss, because one of my great pleasures in life is holding grudges about misguided recommendations). But in this case, they were right. It is a captivating, beautiful place.

The first thing that hits you when you get off the plane is the smell. Unlike Western Europe, the air is thick and earthy, wrapping you a humid embrace that feels more like Mexico or the South Pacific than a future European Union member state. A half-second later, you notice the heat. When we arrived at 7:30 am, it was already approaching 90° and the worst was yet to come. The landscape is dotted with old clay buildings and palm trees, and the sea is filled with the most intoxicatingly blue water, dotted with swirls of emerald and sapphire. Everywhere you go, you can hear the sea crashing softly against the rocks and the cicadas’ rhythmic chirp that makes every tree sound like a car that won’t start. Everyone in the entire region seems to be at play at any given moment; that the economy functions at all is something of a miracle.

Our cab driver from the airport wore overtight slacks and a patterned button-down that would not have been out of place in my parents’ college photos. When I asked if he had any recommendations for things to do in Dubrovnik, he immediately launched into a listing of all the “swingingest” clubs in the area. For those of you who have seen the “Wild and Crazy Guys” sketch on old episodes of Saturday Night Live, he was a dead ringer. When he dropped us off and gave me his business card, I found out that his name was “Ivan Chocolate,” which is either the best real name, or worst assumed name ever.

Dubrovnik’s old town is a medieval walled city, filled with countless alleyways and only a few proper streets. It often gets compared to Venice, erroneously I think, since all they really have in common is a lack of cars. If that’s the only criterion, then the Epcot Center and Bangladesh are both remarkably Venetian. The alley stairways are filled with cats that are malnourished and lazy enough to look dead at all but a few glancing moments, and the street corners are filled with barkers who try to entice you to lunch or a boat ride with the sort of tenacity usually reserved for car dealerships and strip clubs. Just outside the city walls, on the rocks overlooking the Adriatic, the city boasts an incredible bar, where I spent the better part of an afternoon losing myself in the view. Afterwards, I walked past a group of Croatian kids playing Monopoly on the steps. Upon further inspection, I saw that it was merely a translation of the classic American edition, and not full of Croatia-specific locales and concepts. Still, it was probably more fun than the earlier Yugoslavian Monopoly, where every other space sent you to jail and the Monopoly money experienced 500% inflation every time you passed “Go.”

Despite its idyllic atmosphere, the region is not without its imperfections. For one thing, there is the Speedo hazard that accompanies any European beach town (whatever you do, don’t look directly into the bulge). Another danger is the sea urchins that blanket the rocks near the shore, something I found out the hard way when I stepped on one, causing my foot to look and feel like Dick Cheney had mistaken it for a pheasant.

But there are also occasional reminders of the area’s not-so-distant wartime past. Dubrovnik boasts a rather pointless, extremely detailed map that shows every building in the entire city, with black triangles over the ones that were damaged during the war. Here’s a hint: all of them. There are also some structures that have yet to be restored, like the radio building on the hill overlooking the city. On the way back to the airport, our driver, who made the cliffside roads much more interesting by treating the guardrails as more of an invitation than a safeguard, offered to take us on a brief detour up to the hill. When we reached the top, he explained that the closest Bosnian town was only a few kilometers away. I said that I hadn’t realized the border was so close. “Yes, during the war, this was nightmare,” he said, looking down at his feet and shaking his head. But then he added, taking on a sudden gee golly folksiness, “But now…it’s kind of nice!”

When I went to a tour company stall to inquire about the price of their buses into Montenegro, the woman behind it explained matter-of-factly that I did not want to Montenegro. Ignoring what was generally a strange response from someone in the business of selling bus tickets to Montenegro, I again asked how much it was. She explained again, this time through gritted teeth, that I really did not want to go to Montenegro. She then added, with a look in her eyes that said the matter would be closed for further discussion, that she had fought against Montenegro in the war, and that even though her company offered transportation to Montenegro, she could not sell it in good conscience because Montenegro was a horrible place filled with monsters, murderers, and war criminals. There was an awkward silence. I asked how much their other bus trips were, and she merely told me that most of them were overpriced and that I should avoid them. An effective saleswoman, she was not.

Some pictures here.

After another lively Ryanair experience - our plane repeatedly bounced off the runway during landing, drawing a sarcastic round of applause from the passengers - I recently found myself in Luxembourg, which is a bit smaller than Rhode Island and a good deal less culturally significant. It’s probably best known to you as one of those tiny countries that gives assholes a chance to stump you with questions about what country has the most or fewest of something per capita. This is of course cheating, since it’s barely a country at all (and if you want to get pedantic about it, it’s a Grand Duchy) - it has fewer people than Albuquerque. Although if they are ever feeling insignificant (because someone like me says as much), Luxembourgers can always soothe their bruised egos by reminding themselves that their country still dwarfs Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City, and all the other ones seated at the U.N. Kid’s Table. Incidentally, if anyone ever asks you a trivia question and any of these places is the answer, you should punch him in the ear.

Other than its remarkable smallness, there is not much else to note about Luxembourg. It is a clean, quiet place with no real criminal element and lots of high-end cars, as you might expect from the richest country in the world (per capita!). It doesn’t have any culture or cuisine or language of its own to speak of. Some people speak French and others German, and the signage follows the same pattern. There are German bäckereis next to French patisseries, and you can find tchotchkes of both varieties. There is even some detectable Swiss influence. But nothing bleeds together. A few different cultures just happen to have staked out the same chunk of land, and while in America people would be stepping all over each other to open chintzy fusion restaurants, in Luxembourg there is quiet coexistence without cooptation. It’s a melting pot that somebody forgot to stir.

Perhaps the only interesting thing I noticed about the country was their apparent infatuation with the Pink Panther theme music. I heard it no less than three times in a day, in three wholly unrelated contexts. A quick fact check confirmed that it is not, in fact, the Luxembourgian national anthem. The same fact check also taught me that Luxembourg has a third official language (besides French and German) called Luxembourgish, but if I ever heard this spoken, I never knew it. Perhaps this is because it is described as “essentially identical to nearby German dialects.” I guess this means that someone speaking Luxembourgish might not know it either.

The circus was in town one night, so of course I went, and I learned that Luxembourg has more creepy German clowns, and fewer circus restrooms, than any other country in the world per capita. Afterwards, walking back through a park, I saw a group of German teenagers trying to play American football. Every time someone scored, he shouted “Oakland Raiders!” at the top of his lungs. This was confusing until I realized that they were playing with an Oakland Raiders souvenir football, at which point it switched from being confusing to just being ridiculous. Aside from playing quite poorly, they also played quite incorrectly. All the players, offensive and defensive, just tackled whoever seemed strategically important at any given time, and they had no concept of offsides. There’s a lesson in there somewhere about how a few twentieth century wars got started, I think.

I wish I could tell you that Belfast is a fascinating city in transition that still bears the scars of its recent sectarian past. But I can’t do that, because Belfast just sucks. The whole city looks like a low-income housing project. It’s filled with low-rise brick buildings, vacant lots, and random pieces of furniture strewn about the sidewalks. The one thing it isn’t filled with is people. When we arrived at 6:00 pm, all of the businesses were mysteriously shuttered, and the streets of the city center were completely empty. Walking around, we couldn’t find any signs of life except for the obligatory group of skateboarders wearing hooded sweatshirts and dour expressions. The wind whistled past, carrying stray sheets from the morning paper, and every so often a bus with no passengers would barrel by. I have seen enough movies to know that, in a scene like this, the zombies usually come next.

After two days, it became clear that nothing is ever open in Belfast, and no one ever goes outside. I am exaggerating only slightly. This seems to have created a labor market imbalance, since every third building is a recruiting agency with windows displaying job opportunities on index cards. Judging by the billboards, the only real industry native to Belfast is violence. On every road, and in every bus shelter, there are public service announcements from the desperate-seeming city government with such helpful (paraphrased) tips and requests as:

• “Don’t carry a knife.”
• “Don’t rape anyone.”
• “Carrying a knife will get you stabbed.” (What?)
• “Seriously, we mean it. Don’t rape anyone!”
• “Watch out for creepy Irishmen following you home at night.” (The one comes complete with hilarious illustrations)
• “We would very much appreciate if you would refrain from murder, but in the event that you cannot, please confine your murder to your intended targets rather than blowing up a church. Thank you.”
• “Please don’t rape anyone?”

Don’t ever go to Belfast.

Fortunately, we got out of Belfast with no open wounds or major burns to speak of, and things were looking up when we arrived in Dublin, which recently edged out Oakland to be named the “old men muttering at you in train stations” capital of the world. We were in particularly high spirits due to the fact that I managed to con our way into a free stay at the Four Seasons Dublin (ask me how!), and so we naturally spent our first few hours in Dublin jumping on our beds and drinking the free shampoo, just because we could. After a nap and some stomach-pumping, we set out to explore the city, which promptly introduced us to the Irish concept of summer: rain, wind chill, and the swallowing of the sun by a single grey cloud the size of Minnesota. Still, the city was quite pleasant. The streets were abuzz, and everyone seemed to be in a generally good mood despite the weather. Parents even projected a sunny demeanor while cussing out their children, which I have gathered is Ireland’s national sport.

We discovered that Ireland has a chain of American-style diners called Eddie Rocket’s that is indistinguishable from its obvious American counterpart in everything but the name. I can only assume it was founded by Johnny’s underachieving younger brother who was banished to Europe after an embarrassing incident with the Rocket family milkshake machine. I couldn’t resist paying the place a visit, and when we sat down to eat, we discovered that every single employee in this most American institution was Russian. This is probably the sort of thing Cold War politicians had their nightmares about: a congressman sits down at the counter and the waitress with a heavy Russian accent tells him that there are no hamburgers, only boiled potatoes, and then he wakes up in a cold sweat when he tries to play “Louis Louis” on the jukebox and the Soviet national anthem comes out instead.

After walking along the coastal cliffs one morning, we paid a visit to the mammoth Guinness Brewery in western Dublin. Despite its excitingly Wonka-esque exterior, the inside was depressingly sensible, with few midgets and not a single river of beer. What it did have was an entire floor called the “Choice Zone,” an area dedicated to education about responsible drinking. I expected this would be good for a laugh, and it did not disappoint.

In the “Choice Zone,” you sit at a monitor with headphones and can choose from a variety of short films, most of which consist of a group of friends at a pub, telling scare stories about how things can go wrong if you drink too much. The characters were, of course, drinking throughout the video, but I’m sure they would tell you that they don’t have a problem and that they “just like to have a beer to unwind while they narrate.” These videos were theoretically a hard-hitting look at the negative consequences of drinking to excess, but the consequences were never really strictly negative. Nobody ever got pregnant, arrested, divorced, or dead. Instead, they were stories about hilarious mishaps and hijinx that ensued because one of the characters got drunk. In one video, and I swear I am not making this up, the “problem” that a character had because he drank too much was that he met a beautiful woman, and he was too charming. He hit if off so well with her that their first sober encounter was awkward, but only for a few minutes, after which they lived happily ever after, and, it is implied, had lots of consequence-free Irish sex. So remember kids, alcohol can be…dangerous?

Finally, a quote from Sam:

“I know that when you travel to other countries and see how other people live, you’re supposed to acquire cultural relativism, but all I’m acquiring is prejudice.”

We recently arrived in Edinburgh, and after starting our first day with a youth hostel breakfast of muffins that I can only describe as “muffin-flavored,” we paid a visit to the National Whisky Heritage Centre [sic]. Our tour started off with a tasting of a whisky that our guide described as “a great whisky to start your day with,” a piece of praise probably better left unanalyzed. We were invited to smell it and take in the “rich bouquet.” It smelled like whisky. We were told to swirl it in the glass to determine the “feel” of it. It “felt” like whisky. We held it up to the light to analyze the color. It was the color of whisky. We were finally invited to taste its “complex blend of aromatic sweetness and hints of fruit.” It tasted like whisky.

While on the tour, we were treating to several cheesy whisky propaganda videos, and we even got to take a ride in a cut-out whisky cask through dioramas depicting the history of the drink, a sort of Mr. Toad’s Wild DUI Ride. We learned many things, such as:

• Scotland makes a lot of whisky.
• They are very proud of that fact.
• You stupid Yanks don’t realize how hard it is to make good whisky.
• Whisky is the perfect drink for any occasion.
• Seriously, any occasion.
• Whisky has “proven health-giving properties.”
• And did we mention Scotland makes a lot of it?

On our way out of the centre [sic!], we learned that one of the town’s tourist attractions, the Edinburgh Dungeon, includes a theme park-style simulation of Edinburgh’s Great Fire.  From the brochure:

“It is November 1824, and Edinburgh is burning for the fourth night. With flames just inches from your face, you are trapped by the swearing heat, smoke and chaos of Edinburgh’s Great Fire. Will you perish in the flames or will you keep your wits about you - and run the gauntlet of flames to escape?”

Now, if I remember correctly, that fire killed a bunch of people and burned down their homes, so seeing visitors invited to relive it in between stops at souvenir shops seems like a special brand of insensitive. I wonder if, once I get to Dublin, I can pay to get locked in a room without any potatoes.

Late one night, we went in search of food. Someone recommended a particular greasy spoon up the road, and told us to ask for Hussein. When we got there, we discovered that every employee present was named Hussein.

A trip to the Scottish highlands was highlighted by a sighting of the Harry Potter train and a visit to a town that had set some kind of record with 311 days of rain in a year. We also stopped at various inns along the way for some bland, starchy meals. Scottish cuisine is impressive in that it manages to be both totally flavorless and yet still obscenely unhealthy. They serve french fries with everything, and then they put up signs advertising their “heart-healthy” status because they serve low-salt french fries. In Scotland, you can get a deep fried haggis pizza for dinner, and then a deep fried Mars bar, with french fries, for dessert. Did I mention Scotland has the highest rate of heart disease in Western Europe?

In Edinburgh, we walked by the Scottish Parliament building, which was completed a few years ago and is apparently rather controversial among the locals. It’s one of those insufferably abstract public buildings that only an architect could love, and the project, which was initially scoped to cost £40 million, ended up costing £410 million. The citizens were so outraged by this that they ordered a formal inquiry, which took a year, cost an additional £65 million, and didn’t really determine anything other than that the building was, and I’m paraphrasing here, “pretty expensive!” Then, adding insult to injury, it became clear that the building’s ridiculous design was also unsound. The basement floods with groundwater from time to time, the MPs’ office windows leak when it rains, and several of the main chambers are off-limits because the ceilings have collapsed. But hey, at least admission is free.

We spent our last night in Edinburgh at a pub quiz night, staring dumbly at each other after every question about British pop stars, TV shows, and “football” teams [sic!!!]. I am, however, proud that I was the only one in the bar who correctly identified the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song from a half-second snippet. At the end of the competition, there was a three-way tie. “There’s only one way to settle this,” the MC boomed over the loudspeaker. I was expecting “tie-breaker question” or “lightning round” or maybe “polite discourse on the future of a common agricultural market among Western European nations.” Instead, I heard “…dance-off!” And that’s the story of how I ended up watching a bunch of Scottish university students doing the “funky chicken” at midnight on a Wednesday.

After several weeks on the razor’s edge of youth hostel bedsheets, communal showers, crowded public transportation, and vitamin-free food, the other shoe finally dropped yesterday and I began getting very sick very fast. If you need me, I’ll be under the covers somewhere in Glasgow, lying completely motionless and popping sleeping pills (with a side of fries).

I am standing in a sweaty, writhing mass of over 3,000 people crowded into an alleyway at dawn. There’s no room for even the slightest movement; my arms are pinned at my sides. Garbage trucks are crawling through the crowd, trying to remove broken bottles from the street. Trucks with air blowers mounted on them are doing the same, trying to dry the river of spilled booze underneath us. Anytime someone acts up, whether by displaying a camera, climbing a wall, or being too drunk (all three against the rules), the police slide in between us, grab the person with black-gloved hands, and administer a dose of pepper spray and a baton. Along the street, the balconies are filled with locals leaning over the rails and laughing. I don’t think they are laughing with us. In exactly one hour, a rocket will be fired, signaling that the gate is open. About a minute later, another one will be fired, which means that nine tons of hooved muscle is barreling down the street with two dozen sharp horns pointed straight ahead. In other words, that it’s time to run like hell.

An hour is a long time to wait, especially in an understandably tense crowd. The words “gored” and “trampled” are overheard a lot. An hour is a long time to wonder what kinds of health insurance they accept in the Pyrenees. An hour is a long time to wonder what the hell you’re doing here.

My mind flashes back to two days earlier. I was in San Sebastián, a pleasantly Basque town with spastic weather patterns, sitting in a crowded bar at 7:30 in the morning. I was fixed on the TV, waiting for the first encierro to begin. A man sitting next to me asked if I was American, and then complained that Americans were in the process of ruining, or had already ruined, the Sanfermines (Spanish verb tenses from my high school days tend to blend together now). I asked, in my misconjugated way, why everyone still watched. He flashed me a toothy grin and said in English, as if the answer should be obvious, “to see them be hurt.” Ulp.

—

I arrived in Pamplona at night, and no description can prepare you for the raucous, filthy scene of the Festival of San Fermín, an event known to foreigners primarily for its Running of the Bulls that takes place each morning for a week in July. The population of the city goes from 150,000 to 1,000,000, and just about all of those million are drunk. The streets are choked with people stumbling around, barking at the moon, banging on doors, and relieving themselves wherever the impulse strikes them. All of them are dressed like an alternative tribe of Smurfs. Anywhere you go, the ground is more trash than cobblestone, and the air offers you plenty of nauseating scents, some easy to identify as a particular bodily fluid, others harder to place in their disagreeable source. Everywhere you step, broken glass crunches under your feet. It looks like a garbage dump celebrating the arrival of Marines to liberate them from Nazi occupation.

At about 11:00, a light rain started. This seemed unfortunate, as wet cobblestones are an added challenge that the encierro does not need. But it was hard for me to get mad - every woman in the city wears the same flimsy white outfit, so rain turns the Fiesta de San Fermín into the world’s largest wet t-shirt contest. I took a stroll down the course of the next day’s run to get my bearings. It was filled with Spanish men plying their accents on American women, and American men plying their lack of VD on Spanish women. A group of people was playing “Spin the Bottle” in the street, but I don’t know that the bottle ever got spun, because all their time was spent shoving out unwanted participants who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. As I walked around a corner and onto the longest straightaway that the bulls (and I) would take, a bar was blaring AC/DC. When the chorus started, the whole crowd joined in, 5,000 voices screaming the words to “Highway to Hell.” The significance of the moment was not lost on me.

Booths in the parks sell food that’s more or less like American carnival food, except that the Spanish have somehow found a way to make it more fried and less healthy. Worth noting for their sheer caloric audacity are the churros you can buy that are as wide as a soda can and covered with chocolate cake frosting on all sides.

During the festival, there is nowhere to stay. The hostels and hotels are booked months in advance, and all the residents escaping for the week and renting their apartments can barely make a dent in the demand for beds. So, to the extent that anybody sleeps, people do so in the parks and on the ground. Some people have tents or sleeping bags, but most don’t. Bodies are lying everywhere, sometimes in rows, sometimes in piles, but never in a position that looks anything close to comfortable. Think refugee camp.

—

It is 7:30. I am now reviewing all of the different advice I’ve received in the last eight hours. Like opening a ketchup bottle or curing the hiccups, everyone has their own folk wisdom about the right way to run with the bulls. Travelers anxiously trade the results of their research, and the tips they’ve heard from friends of friends. Everyone thinks they know exactly what to do. The truth is, nobody has a clue. That being said, there seem to be a few general points of agreement on how not to die.

First, a clarification is in order: You’re running with the bulls. You’re not trying to beat them to the end of the course. If you wanted to, you could do it easily (and many people do), because you get a big head start. But if you let the bulls get close, you will never outrun them. What you’re supposed to do is, pick your spot, and then take off at a sprint when the bulls get close. They’ll catch up quickly, and as soon as they get too close for comfort, you bail out into a doorway, over a fence, behind another runner with a less valuable life, etc. So, everyone is advised to pick out what stretch of the course they want to actually “run” in.

Unfortunately, this information is totally useless. You won’t really know how fast the bulls are, and you won’t know how fast you can move or where you can escape to when 3,500 other random variables are in your way. They say that the other runners are more dangerous than the actual bulls, and this is true. The bulls are not out to get anyone, they are just moving from Point A to Point B. The trouble comes from the chaos of so many people in a small space occupying limited escape routes and tripping and pushing each other. The scariest thing that can happen during a run is a “pile-up” that gets hit by a bull like a rack of bowling pins.

Now, the rules:

• If you fall down, stay down. Although being trampled by a bull is probably not much fun, it beats getting speared by one. When people die, it is almost always because they fall down, decide they have enough time to get up and run away from the bull behind them, and are wrong. So, stay down.
• Stay on the inside corner of turns. Bulls, as you might imagine, do not have a very nimble turning radius. There is one sharp turn on the course, and it turns to the right. When the bulls go around this particular corner, they usually slide hard into the left wall. People also die is because they are up against a brick wall when it gets hit by an animal that weighs about as much as a subcompact car. So, stay to the inside.

I keep this all in mind and practice my fetal position curl-up in my head. Then I hear a rocket.

The crowd lurches forward, slowly at first, but faster and faster as it spreads out. I jog up to my pre-imagined starting point on the straightaway and wait, trying not to lose all forward momentum. Another rocket. Total chaos. Everyone is running and screaming, and it is never clear what they are running from or screaming about. I wait for what seems like another hour, but is only about 10 seconds, and then the noise of the crowd suddenly stops in my brain, which focuses in on the sound coming around the corner. It sounds like a gathering wave about to break on my head.

“Here they come!” someone shouts with an Australian accent. I take off at a jog. I look back over my shoulder once and see wide eyes and a horn. I sprint. People are running at all angles, climbing walls and fences, slamming into doors, and grabbing other people by the shirt to move them or speed them up. Coming around the last corner, I hear screams behind me. I don’t turn to see what all the fuss is about. I grab the slat of a fence on the left side and fling my body through it, tearing some skin off my knee in the process. When they go by, it’s a blur, a little sinewy streak of color on a white background.

—

The run finishes at the arena, the Plaza de Toros. When you enter, the thousands of spectators filling the stands are a little jarring. Once the bulls are corralled, the Spanish do what to them must be the only logical thing: release more bulls. This time, though, the bulls have their horns taped up, so your organs can be tenderized with a blunt object instead of run through with a sharp one (a little variety is always nice). First the bulls come one at a time, and then in groups of two or three.

The doors to the arena are closed, so now you have a few thousand people and a handful of bulls crowded into a pit about 100 feet across. The runners generally give the bulls a decent space cushion, and the bull looks more confused than anything, but it quickly gets aggressive when someone taunts it, and someone always does. People try to run by and slap the bull, or stare it down and duck to the side. I have to say, I don’t find traditional bullfights that interesting - it doesn’t seem like a fair fight - but this “open mic night” approach to the sport is endlessly entertaining.

The crowd cheers and boos, and there’s a fine line between the two. When someone gets hit hard, but it looks like the punishment fits the crime, they cheer. If the bull doesn’t let up or someone on the fringe gets too much attention from its horns, they boo. When someone cleverly dodges the bull and gives it a slap on the side, they cheer. When someone does something disrespectful, like hitting it when it’s down or trying to ride it, they boo. The biggest roar of approval comes when a man wearing an Australian flag as a cape looked the bull in the eyes, and then, as the bull charges, jumps straight up in the air and kicks his legs out, clearing the bull entirely. Another man, seduced by the seeming ease of the display, tries the same trick, and is not as lucky. I don’t know whether they’ve perfected tailbone replacement surgery yet, but if they haven’t, he may want to donate to a foundation.

When the last bull is corralled, there is a collective exhalation. Everyone walks out of the ring slowly, drained by the release of so much adrenaline. Sleeping on a piece of grass covered with God-knows-who’s God-knows-what suddenly seems much more appealing than it did four hours ago.

The city looks different in the harshness of daylight. You finally notice the thick brown sludge on the ground that has been there all along. The people who were so full of life the night before are walking with their heads slumped, searching for breakfast, a nap, a bathroom, some source of comfort. You step over the passed out bodies that didn’t wake up in time for the run. Uniformed crews attack the accumulation of garbage with rakes and hose down the streets, knowing they will have to do it all over again every day for a week. “After a day, you will want to get the hell out of there,” a friend wisely warned. The city has a hangover. After witnessing this, I realize that the Running of the Bulls is something I am very glad to have done, and will be even more glad to never do again.

Madrid, a city where you can get a four course meal and a bottle of wine for about 10 dollars, was a breath of fresh air (or rather dirty, exhaust-choked air) after Norway. Drunk with newfound purchasing power, it was hard not to buy everything in sight. When I got breakfast for less than 2 Euros, I wanted to jump over the counter and give the elderly woman with the horn-rimmed glasses a bear hug.

At one point, we stumbled on an “ethnic” grocery store that specialized in American food. The items I noticed for sale were:

• Pop Tarts
• Pillsbury frosting
• Barbecue sauce
• Easy Cheese
• Kool-Aid
• Dr. Pepper
• Aunt Jemima Maple Syrup

They also stocked adult-onset diabetes in a can, but you had to ask at the counter.

The first thing that surprised me about Madrid was its sheer size. When we reached what we had thought was the edge of the city and looked out from a balcony, it kept going for untold miles. The second thing that surprised me was how clean and well-organized it was. I was expecting a disorderly, dingy counterpoint to two weeks of IKEA sterility. Fortunately, every people has an endearingly backward neighbor that they can look to for an ego boost. France has Belgium, Germany has Austria, and America has the Deep South. Spain has Portugal.

Lisbon is an amazingly raw city, filled with loose cobblestone, winding alleyways, and fading pastel colors. The smell of seafood envelopes everything and you get the sense that no actual work is ever done there. The city is extremely hilly, and so they have several elevadores to take people between neighborhoods. In some cases, these are wedge-shaped trolley cars, but at least one of them is an actual elevator, a Gothic wrought iron monstrosity in the middle of Baxia. Lisbon isn’t a place you find your way around: you just wander into the city and eventually it spits you out at a place of its choosing.

One morning, we came across an elderly blind woman who was standing off the curb of a wide, busy, unregulated street. A bus driver was stopped and futilely trying to stop the entire morning commute with an outstretched left hand. I took the woman by the arm and proceeded to lead her tentatively across the street, not certain that she would be any better off in a city this ill-suited to the blind. This caused her to spill a great deal of Portuguese out of her mouth, which I can only hope were words of thanks and not a cry for someone to save her from the mysterious foreign assailant with hairy forearms.

We spent an evening in a Fado club, a type of dinner lounge where they perform soulful songs in Portugal’s native musical style. It would be hard to describe the sound, but if you can imagine a concert put on by the bastard lovechild of Billie Holiday and one of the Gipsy Kings, you’re getting warm. I have no “formal education” in Portuguese, but fortunately the songs contained enough recognizable keywords that I can offer a near-perfect translation of a verse here:

I am singing Fado in Lisbon,
Lisbon is the capital of Portugal,
Portugal is great, especially Lisbon,
Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon!

We also spent one afternoon in Trafaria, a tiny town across the harbor from Lisbon that was largely empty except for a troubling number of stray dogs. Sitting at a cafe, we saw a Portuguese woman and her daughter dining on a heaping plate of snails, sucking them straight from the shells. Feeling adventurous, or perhaps just emboldened by the $1 beers, we decided to get a plate of our own. When they arrived, we began noisily sucking them from the shells as we had observed. After a few minutes, a Portuguese man from another table came over and explained in the international language of hand gestures and anti-American scowls that this was only how you ate caracóis if you wanted to be like that loutish woman over there, and that toothpicks were the appropriate method. Following this embarrassment, we proceeded more daintily. The main downside to eating a snail is that there is no way around how formerly alive it is. Unlike a steak, it is a whole animal with what looks like an expression of surprise fixed on its face, and you have to grab it between its eyes and rip it out of its shell. Still, I got over this pretty quickly, and can report that they were quite good, tasting more or less like clams.

The highlight of the Lisbon experience was a bakery near the waterfront that focuses all their energies on one item. It’s a Portuguese specialty called a pastéis de Belém, a small, sweet custard pastry named for its neighborhood of origin and served hot out of the oven. When you enter the café, you walk past a take-out counter that looks like a stock exchange trading floor. Throngs of people are pressing against the glass with outstretched hands trying to get their orders heard so they can take home a few dozen fresh pastéis. A handful of bakers are shoveling them into boxes like a blur. You wonder how a little egg tart could produce such a frenzy. By the time you leave, you will understand.

When you sit down in one of the many dining rooms, you notice that, instead of salt and pepper, the table has cinnamon and sugar shakers. This is always a good sign. A waiter comes over and stands at the table without a word, waiting for you to tell him how many you want. Of course, the only sensible answer is “muitos.” Once you bite into one, you are hooked. On your way out, you get a dozen fresh ones to take home.

I won’t bother with any synesthestic description of the taste, because it wouldn’t do them justice. All I will say is this: I’d like to tell you that we didn’t go back twice in the next 24 hours, but I would be lying.

Finally, a note on punctuality:

In Germany, the national rail carrier, Deutsche Bahn, will often plot and sell you an itinerary with transfers that only give you a 4 or 5 minute window in which to switch trains. This is generally not a problem, since the trains are always on time, and they are coordinated to arrive at adjacent tracks.

In Spain, when I tried to book two trains in succession that left an hour apart, the ticket agent explained that this would not be enough time, because that train was always late. He was right.

On the way to Sandefjord Airport, our cab driver got on the subject of beer.  Glenn asked him whether it was legal to drink in cabs in Norway.  He responded with the sort of pained, drawn out “Weeellll…” that signals that some inappropriate behavior is about to be rationalized.  He explained that it’s not exactly “legal” (finger quotes his), but most cab drivers allow it to get better tips.  He also told us that in normal cars, it’s legal to drink, but only in the backseat.  This may not be the most exploitable loophole ever, but it’s on the short list.

We were flying Ryanair, a budget airline that offers a travel experience even a charitable sort can only call “character-building.” They’re famous for tight restrictions on baggage weight, and the moment you book a ticket on Ryanair, you start looking at the world differently. You eye all of your material possessions with suspicions of their subtle massiveness. You bounce objects up and down in the palm of your hand, trying to imagine them in terms of some familiar unit of weight, like cans of Coke. You wonder aloud things like “Can’t I just take a vitamin every other day and pour the other half out?” and “Do you think they’d let me wear my other pair of jeans as a turban?”

We checked in at an automated kiosk, which proceeded to ask me a series of “security questions” before it would issue my boarding pass:

Did you pack your own bags? Touch YES or NO.
Did anyone give you anything to carry in your luggage? Touch YES or NO.
Have your bags been in your possession at all times? Touch YES or NO.

Now, these questions have always been inane, but I actually laughed out loud at having to answer them on a machine. More importantly, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if I answered suspiciously. If I suddenly remembered that a friendly auto mechanic in Beirut had asked me to take a birthday present to his cousin in the Pentagon, what would happen when I pressed the button? Would a trap door open? Would a bell go off? Or would the screen simply explain in a calm, sans serif font that it is not advisable to transport packages from strangers, especially those with dark skin, and would I please re-insert my e-ticket and try again?

With Ryanair, departure times are more of a “stretch goal” than an actual timetable. The appropriate mental image is of a scheduler in a thin red tie sitting at their corporate headquarters, pen between teeth, thinking “You know, if everything broke just right, that plane could even take off at 9:30!” On this particular night, in this particular airport, Ryanair was 0/5 on flights leaving within an hour of their stated departure time. However, this gave me plenty of time to explore the terminal, where I learned the following things:

1. Norwegian foosball tables are backwards.
2. Not only do they offer hot dogs with a piece of bacon wrapped around them, but they also offer a “hamburger” which is actually just a rod-shaped piece of hamburger meat, served in a hot dog bun. Based on smell and appearance, I would not recommend either.

Once on board the plane, we were greeted by a flight attendant who looked like Pee Wee Herman in the middle of a three-day bender. As he prepared to go through a series of safety demonstrations, a chipper British voice came over the PA to narrate. “Your safety is our primary concern,” the voice began. This claim was undermined by the fact that they had replaced the safety information cards with abbreviated pictograms that were taped to the seatbacks and starred a listless young cartoon man in a green sweater who I am quite certain made a cameo in my high school Spanish textbook. He seemed to be in a generally foul mood as he evacuated in various ways, but I was never convinced that the recent plane crash was the cause; it could just have easily been una problema con su novia.

As we taxied to the head of the runway, the pilot came on the PA and gave his “sincere” apologies for the delay (finger quotes mine). He explained that an air traffic controller strike in Oslo was the primary source of the delays; he said this as if to be reassuring, but I certainly found it anything but. I’m no expert on these matters, but I generally consider air traffic controllers to be a key piece of what I call my “non-death” approach to air travel. The pilot never did elaborate as to whether the flight crews were just winging it, or perhaps using minor league third base coaches as scabs during negotiations. I can only hope no games of chicken were involved.

Because the seats were cut several inches shorter than the norm, I passed most of the flight staring at the flourescent light gleaming off the bald, freckled head two rows up. In the end, despite all the debasements, I actually quite enjoyed my Ryanair experience, and I think I know why. The shared frustrations create a certain fellowship among the passengers, all of whom knew what they were getting into and were rowdier than your average passenger load (the circulation of lots of cheap wine is a big help on this front). Commiserations are exchanged, eyes are rolled, and sarcastic applause is offered up. It felt like a class banded together in its distaste for a substitute teacher. I guess the only difference is that I never worried that my substitute teacher would hurtle me into a mountain at 600 miles per hour because the principal was on strike.