mediocre-blog/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md

---
title: >-
    Mr. Worldwide, Pt. 1: Europe
description: >-
    Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love tomatoes.
---

## TODO

## Outline

- The Second Leg
    - Munich
        - No more pictures, no more tourism
        - Diet
    - Belgium
        - Brussels
            - Communism and french fries
            - Comic book museum
            - Drawing
        - Bruges
            - Beer
            - A fucking expensive fairytale
            - So cold, so scarfed
            - Camina Del Santiago
    - UK
        - London
            - Cost of museums, theft of culture
        - Dublin
            - Housing problems
            - Glendalough
        - Edinburgh
            - Reading/Writing
            - Harry Fucking Potter
    - Amsterdam
        - Pub crawl (partying vs ...)
        - Van Gogh
        - Weed
        - Sex (museum)
    - Copenhagen
        - Freedom (Christiania)
        - So many chairs
    - Stockholm
        - Tradition
    - Berlin
        - History
        - Movie
    - Prague
        - Wandering
        - Planning
- The Third Leg
    - Munich
        - Alps, Olympics
        - Passport
    - Venice
        - Beauty in spite of tourism
    - Rijeka
        - Hitchikers
        - A strange beauty
    - Vienna
        - Riches and empire
        - A day at the palace
        - The Couchsurfing Cult
    - Athens
        - Culture
        - History

## Munich, Germany

On Febrary 14th I returned to Munich. Having been on the road for a little over
3 weeks, I was utterly exhausted, and neglected to take any pictures at all. In
fact, I hardly remember _what_ I did there, except go to the library a lot.
Munich has a fantastic public library, which I spent a considerable amount of
time at every time I was in town. I'd create my rough plans of where to go next
there, as well as do miscellaneous coding and writing. I was through being a
tourist.

After Rome I had begun really putting my strategy of "wander around and see what
calls out to me" to the test. By the time I was in Munich it had really sunk in,
and the only thing which really called to me in Munich was the peace and quiet
of the library during the day, and hanging out with Caitlin and her friends at
night. For the rest of the trip I wouldn't take so many pictures as I had been
doing, and wouldn't go way out of my way to see something which didn't truly
interest me.

After I left Italy I had begun eating differently too. Italy is, obviously,
known for two foods: pasta and pizza, and I had a lot of those while I was
there. At one point I had the awkward experience of an Italian guy asking me if
Italy had better pizza than the U.S., and me having to try and find a way to
both be honest and not seem like too much of a dick when I told him: "no". It
would be fair to say that, in Italy, your money goes a lot farther in terms of
quality than in the U.S.; or, in other words, their average quality is higher.
But it's not like Italians know some secret the rest of the world doesn't, and
you can easily find a good, crispy, thin crust, wood fired pizza anywhere, if
you look for it.

That was the real lesson for me: it's not that Europe has _better_ food across
the board than the U.S., it's that even their cheapest restaurants will be
pretty high quality, whereas finding good but cheap food in the U.S. can often
be quite difficult. So someone like me, who's on a spend-as-little-as-possible
budget, can still enjoy pretty good food anywhere.

All the same, I would largely stop going out to eat at all from this point in
the trip onward, and instead I began visiting grocery stores frequently. During
the day I'd always have in my bag: a bottle of water, a loaf of bread, a block
of cheese (usually gouda), almonds, and dates or dried figs. These I would munch
on throughout the day, and for dinner I'd make something simple like pasta or
rice with veggies and tofu. Having a kitchen would become a requirement for me
to stay at a hostel, and many hostels have a "free stuff" section filled with
food items people had left behind, like garlic or salt or whatever, so I often
didn't need to go shopping at all.

Of course, I didn't abstain from eating out _completely_. Every country has some
claim-to-fame food item, which I'd try once or twice while there, if it didn't
mean going way out of my way. But food wasn't a primary concern of my trip, and
so I tried my best to spend as little as possible on it.

Having spent a few days in Munich, recuperating and figuring out my next steps,
I continued on... to Brussels!

## Brussels, Belgium

The bus arrived in Brussels super late at night, and I woke up to the voice of
the bus driver over the intercom: "Welcome to Brussels! Donald Trump says it is
the shithole of Europe, and he has it right!" So it was a warm welcome. I only
stayed in Brussels for two nights; it was more of a pit-stop on the way to
Bruges than anything. My hostel was, apparently, on the site of one of Van
Gogh's old studios, but that fact was played up in favor of actually making the
hostel any good. But the city was nice enough, and despite the bitter cold I
enjoyed myself.

{% include image.html
    dir="mr-worldwide" file="brussels-2018.jpg" width=556
    descr="Comic murals like this can be find all over the city. Brussels, 2018"
    float="right"
    %}

Besides being the capital of the E.U., Brussels is also famous for its history
of comics. Not just superhero comics, but also political, children's, humor, and
historical comics too. While wandering around I visited a number of comic stores
with huge selections, almost entirely in not-English (Belgium has three
official languages), and there were huge comic murals all over the city.
Brussels' comic history would also provide me with my favorite museum experience
of the entire trip.

The majority of museums I went to in Europe were only loosely ordered. Large
collection museums would organize be era, and maybe by year within the era, or
perhaps by artist. Those museums are fine for wandering around, but the really
good museums are those that tell a story. The Escher exhibit in Lisbon, the
Picasso exhibit I went to in Barcelona, and the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam
tell the story of a single person's life, and by having that focus can be really
compelling for the visitor. Those with a more broad focus have more difficulty
being as compelling, but the Belgian Comic Strip Center nailed it.

The museum started with a walkthrough of how comics are actually made, from
initial blocking, to pencil sketches, to coloring, and finally inking. It
covered materials used in past and present, and how digital tools like
Photoshop and 3D modeling, which allow the entire process to be done digitally
and quickly, have changed the landscape.

From there the museum opened up into different sections, some focusing on
specific countries, others on a particular artist, others on a theme. Each had
a series of wall texts guiding you through the section, not just by giving
information on a specific piece, but giving overall information on context.
There were sections on specific Belgian artists, famous comic characters, a
whole section on comics in propaganda, chinese and japanese comics (_not_
manga), and much more. There were sections on the different mediums that comics
appeared, e.g. newspapers, comic books, and posters, and even a whole section on
the Smurfs. Overall it was one of the most thought out, well designed museums
I've ever been to, and it made the trip to Brussels worth it on its own.

After the Comic Center I didn't have much else I wanted to do. I wandered
through the tourist-y area, saw the statue of the peeing kid that's apparently
famous, and ended up walking a long while to visit what is, according to _the
internet_, the best belgian fries joint in the city. It was pretty good (though
the best belgian fries I'd have would turn out to be in Amsterdam), and I sat
down in a little plaza to eat them. While there I caught the eye, for better or
worse, of a guy coming out of a bar, and he immediately bee-lined for me. His
English was not solid, but that didn't slow him down in the least.

He opened by telling me he was waiting for his taxi, and then immediately
launched into a tirade against capitalism, in favor of communism. I told him I'm
from the U.S. and we (mostly he) talked about consumer culture, the plight of
the working man, and the like. After a few minutes his taxi showed up, he wished
me a good trip, and we said goodbye. It was a fun but extremely odd interaction.
"Are all Belgians so eager to espouse communism to random passerby?", I'd wonder
to myself.

After wandering a while longer I decided to just catch a bus back to my hostel.
A woman walked by with her two kids while I was waiting at the stop, and turned
back to tell me something, though she didn't have hardly any English to work
with. After some struggle we managed to land on "no bus". Damn. So I walked down
to the metro station to take the train instead. While waiting for the train I
overheard on the intercom: "Train delay due to worker strike". Which explained
everything instantly. The Brussels public transit workers were on strike, so
there was no bus, and no train, and a man (I'm betting one of the workers) was
drinking in the middle of the day, waiting for a taxi, and super primed to talk
about worker's rights.

While it was a funny situation, in a way, it did make my life quite a bit
harder. Once I finally got back to the hostel I stayed in for the night, and the
next day headed on to Bruges.

## Bruges, Belgium

I'll be honest and say that 90% of the reason I wanted to go to Bruges was
because of the movie, _In Bruges_, which is one of my all time favorites. The
movie was shot almost completely in the city, and makes a lot of fun out of
tourists coming to see it. "It's a fucking fairytale" is a common refrain in it.
Bruges always had a pretty solid tourist game, but after the movie it really
took off, so that most of the other people in my hostel said they had only
really heard of the city from the movie too.

{% include image.html
    dir="mr-worldwide" file="bruges-pano-2018.jpg" width=1492
    descr="View from atop the the Belfry of Bruges, 2018"
    %}

The city itself is actually beautiful. Once out of the busy tourist area,
centered around the Belfry, the streets and canals wind around through quiet
neighborhoods and small parks. Bruges is sometimes called the Venice of the
North (though Amsterdam also calls itself this), due to its history as an
important historical commercial port built on top of a maze of canals. There are
many canal boat tours available, but I was too ~~cheap~~ poor to spring for one,
so I took a free walking tour instead.

"Free" walking tours are a fairly common business in European cities. The tour
guides collect people from various hostels they have arrangements with, and walk
them around the city, talking about whatever is worth talking about. Most that I
took were quite good, weaving together the history of a place, its culture both
then and now, and current events, all while giving you a good lay-of-the-land
and two-ish hours of being out-and-about. At the end of the tour the guides ask
for tips/donations, and most people give between $5-20.

On the tour of Bruges our guide had pointed out a sea shell cemented into the
pavement. This was part, he said, of the Camino De Santiago. In the middle ages
the Catholic Church considered pilgrimage to be a suitable form of atonement for
sins/crimes, and so many people throughout Europe were sent away from their
towns to travel by land to the Santiago de Compestela Cathedral in northern
Spain. Over time the various routes materialized into a network, denoted by sea
shells or sea shell symbols, which stretches throughout Europe and which people
continue to use today.

Even as the guide was telling us about it I knew I wanted to do. As the trip
wore on I talked to a few people who had done the pilgrimage, and for every one
I became more and more convinced that I must do it.

{% include image.html
    dir="mr-worldwide" file="bruges-canal-2018.jpg" width=1920
    descr="Canals of Bruges, 2018"
    %}

I made a few friends in my hostel, our friendship having been forged in the
struggle of trying to find an affordable meal in Bruges. Every restaurant in
Bruges, it seemed, did "full" meals, where you pay a fixed amount and get two,
three, or four courses. But the fixed amount was never lower than €45, and so we
spent a lot of time searching for alternatives. After a lot of searching we
found a couple places which were reasonably priced for the couple nights we were
all there, and one of the group knew of a hard-to-find pub which made and sold
13% alcohol beer for a few euro. After all that Bruges wasn't as unaffordable
as it first seemed, and was a lot of fun, but it took a bit of work to make it
so.

After Bruges I took a bus back to Brussels, where I hung out for a while waiting
for my next bus which would take me across the pond.