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

title	description
Mr. Worldwide, Pt. 1: Europe	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.

London, England

Getting to London was honestly one of the most exciting parts of that trip. The Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel", runs from France, underneath the English Channel, and pops back up in England. In the tunnel is a giant train which ferries cars and buses through the tunnel. Taking the Chunnel was as easy as buying a bus ticket from Brussels to London, and passing through three passport checks along the way (the UK check being the most intense passport check of my entire journey, for whatever reason).

While the London Underground (The Tube, as the British call it, in their very endearing habit of giving everything an endearing nickname) was easy enough to use, though very expensive, so I spent a lot of time walking in the bitter cold. London is a huge metropolitan city, filled to the brim with shops and restaurants and plenty of other attractions to grab tourists. But despite their best efforts, none were more grabbing to me than the museums.

{% include image.html dir="mr-worldwide" file="london-steg-2018.jpg" width=1920 descr="Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum. London, 2018" %}

All the major museums in London are free to enter. This includes the National Gallery, exhibiting paintings and art from the world over, the Natural History Museum (my favorite), with its seemingly infinite halls of fossils and stones and pre-historic artifacts, and the British Museum, which exhibits many of the archeological treasures the British have stolen from other cultures throughout history.

There's a significant amount of controversy surrounding the British Museum, and whether or not it's right for it to keep artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, and sculptures from the Parthenon of Athens. The argument is that the British were not really given these artifacts by the peoples/cultures which originated them, and so the museum is effectively parading stolen property.

The British Museum argues that, in fact, it's encouraging the spread of culture and understanding by collecting these artifacts from around the world and displaying them in context to each other, and that its mission is charitable to the cultures from which the artifacts are taken. And additionally that: "[the] restitutionist premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an original geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other great museums of the world".

The argument that they're actually spreading culture is pretty patronizing, as if the people they've stolen from don't know how to do this best for themselves, and as if they should obviously want this to be done for them. As for the argument that restitutionism would empty the museum, I can only imagine a restitutionist responding: "Yes, that's the point". It's one thing for a museum to be given or loaned an item for display by another people, but quite another to assume the right to take an item regardless of its peoples' wishes.

Besides some very good fish and chips, London didn't have all that much else for me. The museums were insanely crowded, with everyone pushing over themselves to fill out their selfie-with-famous-objects-bingo-cards; my hostel was weird (all of my hostels in the UK were weird, in fact; more on that in Ireland); and everything was quite expensive. I wasn't too sad to leave.

Dublin, Ireland

My bus dropped me off at a small ferry terminal in Holyhead, a town in Wales. From there I took the couple-hour ferry ride to Dublin.

I spent only a couple of days in Dublin, but one of those days I struggled to be a living human while fighting off the flu. I still managed to walk down to Trinity College to see The Book of Kells and the college library's Long Room, but the memory of it is fuzzy. I'm sure I looked as dead as the people who wrote those books.

That day I mostly hung out at the hostel. Hostels in the UK have a very different atmosphere than everywhere else; there's a fairly bad housing crisis occurring in most major cities (like the three I went to), and often it's cheaper to live in a hostel than to rent an apartment. So the hostels I stayed in were filled with people who'd been there for months, some of them working, others trying to find work, others just lounging. But the dichotomy between people who were just passing through and people who were there long term made it a less than stellar experience. The long-term residents all knew each other and formed cliques, and generally took up the common spaces, so if you weren't already traveling with others (like me) it was pretty easy to feel excluded.

On the second day I decided to go on a day trip out of Dublin. The city was neat, but I wasn't finding all that much I wanted to do inside of it. I found a bus company which did day trips to Glendalough, a valley which holds the ruins of a 6th century monastary, a beautiful lake, many hiking trails, and some sheep. I spent the day hiking, wandering around the ruins, and escaping an incoming snow storm. By the end of it all my sickness from the previous day was completely gone, and I slept the whole bus ride back.

Edinburgh, Scotland

I left Dublin just as the Beast from the East made landfall. A giant cold wave brought in tons of snow and unseasonably low temperatures, stretching all across Europe. My plane must have been one of the last ones to land in Edinburgh, because for the next 2 days the entire city was completely snowed in, and most stores and attractions were closed.

The tourist industry heavily plays up that Edinburgh is the city where JK Rowling wrote most of the Harry Potter books, and you can see its influence clearly. The towering gothic cathedrals, castles on cliffs, old graveyards, dense cobblestone streets and dark alleys all feel like something right out of the books (though really it's the other way around). There was a cafe only a few blocks away from my hostel where JK Rowling apparently first started writing the books, a piece of trivia which the cafe has not failed to cash in on.

The city was quite peaceful, probably because everything was closed from the storm, but it felt like it might always be like that even in good weather. Most days I'd find a spot to hunker down and draw for a while, then in the afternoon go explore some sight or another; the castle, the royal mile, Calton Hill... Or I'd go in search of decent groceries, which were strangely difficult to find. The city is (said to be) built on seven hills, like Rome, and between the many steep stairways and narrow alleys navigating them, and packed snow and ice, it was quite difficult to explore too far.

While I spent five whole days in Edinburgh, I don't have much to talk about for it. It's probably one of the most unique cities I visited, with a lot of beauty and history and things to see, and I absolutely would love to go back. But despite all that, there was definitely a feeling a depression while I was there, like I was totally alone. When I got onto a plane and took off, I was more relieved than anything else.