clouds move quickly here

dragging my heels ’til my day is done

2009 May 25

by zoe

My brother comes here in two days and I am so excited to see him and to show him Amsterdam. It’s going to be so strange. The Mackey siblings in Amsterdam. The Mackey siblings in Paris, Venice, and London. The Mackey siblings conquering Europe. I wish I could forget about school when he gets here, but right now I’m in the middle of the most repulsive finals of my academic career.

Finals are bringing me down. More so than usual. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in Amsterdam, and daylight lasts until 10:00 pm, and it’s beautiful and warm, and I just want to stand outside in the endless afternoon with a beer in my hand and old school Beck (when he was a real human being and not just some corporate Scientology amalgamation) in my ears. Live life how (the best of) Mellow Gold sounds, dirty blues, funk, folk, mingling like the last gurglings of your soda machine suicide from Fresh Choice. Drinking your coffee with a hubcap, you know, that sort of stuff. Not like some completely bored and utterly uninterested student. Not like some frustrated, thankless mother who washes and vacuums and mops and scrubs and then, in typical passive-aggressive fashion, complains to the internet that she does everything around here. Not like the disgruntled American who just wants some damn super center convenience, and that if she must be casually harassed in public, to be harassed in English and not Dutch. Or if it’s because finals are really that heartlessly bad. They are relentless this semester, and relentlessly pointless. They swarm around me like bats, charging at my face and tearing at my hair and cackling when I scream and duck and cover my head. They follow me everywhere, recruiting unrelated, long-term, and even existential anxieties, and tying them to my fingers, my wrists, my ankles, so that every movement is caught and tangled and weighted by endlessly varied worries. Some are left on a line, dragging far behind me, snagging in the bushes, catching around corners and in doorways, knocking over chairs, tripping passers-by. I close my eyes, I cover my head, I turn on Paul McCartney Unplugged, and I rock back and forth whispering, “Die, school, just die.”

But Paul McCartney’s charm only goes so far.

Really, it’s not so bad. I turned in the most horrible 18 pages ever to spill out of my head on paper today–the most ghastly essay you could ever hope to write, ever, is on global financial regulation. Trust me. I never want to touch political economy again, to see words like “monetary” or “securities” or “derivatives,” to smell that ungodly scent of finance–but no, wait I have a 3 hour exam on June 15, the day before I leave Amsterdam, so it will be in the back of my mind until I leave. It’s that and all the more pressing exams and papers of the moment. Me without my protective tinfoil hat, dumb assignments, group papers, and awful exams with their sophisticated tracking technology. All I want to do is enjoy Amsterdam, and focus on organizing my trip with Blake and planing for summer–but I’m stuck with these awful school assignments. Bringing me down, I tell you.

Don’t worry, though. I’ve started on a new tinfoil hat that will get me through my last semester in college next year. I will tolerate the dying screams of school in Amsterdam, resist their beckoning to join them hell, and successfully complete my final assignments and exams despite my philosophical objections to their purpose. I will shoot them damn bats one by one and I will dismantle their anxiety knots and tow lines, so that I might go back to feeling organized in my anxiety, comfortable that every fear and uncertainty is properly labeled and filed. I will focus on the more pressing issues of the trip with my brother and plans for summer, and I will take advantage of the good weather. I will meet Blake at the airport in two days. I will enjoy my last days in Amsterdam, before I go back to America. I will see Paris and Venice and (Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen in) London. I will pack up my life here in some suitcases and say goodbye. I will come home, and it will be summer.

I’m going to miss Amsterdam’s random thunder and lightening. As much as I hate school here, and as painful as it is right now, when I’d rather be focusing on other things, there are these constant reminders around me that it is so completely worth it–and that I am so lucky to have gotten to be here. I’m sitting here at my window watching the sky flash white and purple, listening to the hail on my roof and the thunder in the distance. I can feel the cool air of the storm and the energy of the sound resonate in the building. I’ll fall asleep tonight listening to it.

This is what the global money and finance course is like.

2009 May 5

2 Comments

by zoe

You see the guy who gets up and calmly exits the room, without screaming or tearing his hair out? That’s me.

Oh, wait.

A presentation, a 15 page paper, and a final in political economy of global money and finance. Plus all the readings I have to read and classes I still have to attend. Plus the work of my other courses. That’s all I have to get through before my brain melts. No sweet, lazy, hedonistic enjoyment of my last month in Amsterdam, no. I am in school, after all, and as my mom likes to remind me, that is what I’m paying euros for.

Don’t fail me now, Brain, don’t fail me now.

You know, one of my favorite things about The Simpsons is the running gag they have in which a character (typically Homer, but sometimes Lisa and maybe Bart) conducts an internal negotiation between himself and his brain, as if it were a separate entity. They cut a deal with their brain to help them get out of something, to temporarily suspend its beer-soaked moratorium of TV irradiation so that it might produce an intelligent thought, or, in need of its powers after a period of unwelcome neglect, when they come crawling back. “All right, brain, I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but let’s just do this, and I can get back to killing you with beer.”

It’s hilarious. It’s one of those things you can pick at, relate to other things, extract meaning from despite the lack of real life relevance–but that all belongs in an essay for a humanities major to write. That and that whole random shoe-box memory mess I wrote yesterday, working until realized, wait, wait–what’s this actually for?

How terribly I miss you, Humanities. Your pretentious and irrelevant to real life intellectual pursuits. But I’ll come back to you!

It’s getting close to the one-month-remaining mark. I’m walking around here with one foot in the future. Makes it hard to focus on regulatory reform issues, which, though impossibly distant, are arguably more relevant to real life than funny jokes from The Simpsons. But this whole political economy thing also suffers from the dual abominations of utter dullness and appalling complexity, so a little apprehension about going home probably doesn’t really make a difference in my concentration.

You know, Near-Future, I would really appreciate it if you’d give me a good job when I show up in a couple months. Don’t make me suffer the blight of unrequited cover letters, of reading about jobs internships I’d love, but won’t get and shouldn’t bother applying to. But I want you to pay me, too–don’t stick me with some volunteer position where I learn an incredible amount and gather perspective on what I actually want to do with my life. Oh wait, that’d be okay too. But don’t make me placate the Brain so that it might put up with the assault on human dignity that is a shitty summer job, in which I shove food or other commodities at people in return for the payment of currency, or call people on the phone with offers of goods and services in return for the payment of currency, or yell at screaming children so that they may eventually shove goods and commodities and services at each other for the return of currency.

Well, I guess I’d do that all, too, for the summer. Near-Future, I wouldn’t mind getting some crappy job for the summer, as long as I get paid, and as long as Slighty-Distant-Future agrees to get me a really good job. Just…gimme some monies.

Desperate times.

Wish I had some brilliant theoretical concept behind a piece of art that required absolutely no skill to produce–brilliant in the sense I might convince all the snobs who handle that shit that it’s brilliant. Something like a concept album with weird synth and shitty poetry. Something where I could throw a bunch of soggy wads of paper against the wall and document their drippings as “art”. Something where the process is a big deal, not the outcome. Where the supposed meaning or theory behind it is the point, not the product, and, if they really wanted to, someone could extract a deep, writhing commentary on the pained existence of post-modern, middle class woman in western society, you know, after they’ve analyzed it to death. I’ve been trained enough in pretension (as well as the whole analyzing to death and extracting an invented meaning thing) to be able to put something together with at least the appearance of artistic or philosophical meaning, which, remember, is very different from merit. But I’m not enough of a con artist–I’m not enough of a schmoozer to get by with something I know isn’t real, unless, maybe, it’s all part of my post-modern ironic joke, which I suppose is close enough to truth.

So anyway, tonight I need to organize everything I’ve collected about global financial architecture–the last reforms in early 2000s–into a coherent presentation, with some sort of idea, which is more precise than “In regards to financial regulation, globalization presents many difficulties.” That’s not only a poorly constructed idea; it’s a poorly constructed sentence.

Doesn’t it sound appealing? I’d have started an hour ago, but I just can’t handle any more of their damn acronyms. I’d be pleased to introduce some of these time saving acronyms, would you be pleased to meet them? OESCO, IMF, BIS, SDRM, IRS, FSAP, IIF, CP1, CP2, CP3, BCP, CAD, IRB, F-IRB, QID…They’re endless. They contribute to the clarity and brevity of a paper with absolutely no danger of detaching from their original namesake and meaning or blending together or languishing in obscurity as one is mistaken for the other. Yeah, I’d have started an hour ago, but I also had to listen to This American Life and play some crazy fast tetris.

As long as my brain doesn’t melt, I’ll do just fine. Brain, just get me through this, and I’ll get back to killing you with youth-inspired hedonism–I mean sustaining you with intellectual pursuits within the humanities. You can work with more interesting ideas like that Simpsons joke and fantasize about producing some dumb concept art instead of gettinga real job once you’ve gotten this whole global financial architecture thing out of the way. Oh, and then we can really panic about the Future, too.

Put it in a boat.

2009 April 22

Now I’ve been smiling lately.

2009 April 8

1 Comment

by zoe

Dear money and finance pig,

Before you send me a pissy email detailing your gracious advice not to travel in early June, you should probably just work on scheduling the final examination instead. I am aware that you, apparently along with every other teacher in the world, do not take the travel plans of students into account when scheduling final exams and that it would be “my fault” if I were to miss it. You should realize that I’m simply asking to know the end date of the course so I can plan and buy tickets that do not conflict with the exam. And maybe you should take into account that early June is the only period in which it is possible to travel with my brother, who will be visiting me in Amsterdam as part of a once-in-a-life-time experience, and that I am only waiting on the date of your final exam to purchase tickets. Your presumptuous hatred of exchange students, who, I think you forget, are not necessarily able to travel around Europe any old time they want, makes you seem kind of like an asshole dickbag, as does your unsolicited travel advice. Also, you should learn to catch your numerous typos because your failure to fix them makes you look lazy and unprofessional, and so does the fact that you wear green turtlenecks with pink suspenders. Finally, I do not understand why it was necessary to remind me (in parentheses) that your title is (Professor) when you signed your email, as I addressed you as such in the beginning of my original email and, in my subsequent re-reading of my note, I cannot find any tone or request deserving of your condescending, shit licking, pigfart attitude.

Sincerely,

(student) Zoe .

If only I could actually send that. I emailed a professor to ask about the final exam date, and he wrote me back all huffily, claiming I’m expected to be available any time he wants to schedule it. Not knowing the date of this exam is the only thing standing in the way of me buying travel tickets, and it’s terribly frustrating. But I have to go to class tomorrow and talk to the guy in person, and through my artful conversation–and the honest moral superiority of my argument–I will jab a fork in his presumptuous snobbery and maneuver an acceptable final exam date that does not conflict with me and my brother’s travel plans. At least that’s the hope.

Fraught with minor inconveniences and frustrations like this pissy email, this week has not been going well. On Monday, a bike break-down on my way to school caused me to miss a class with professor bunghole and started this whole frustrating email exchange–which probably would have been avoided if I had been able to talk to the man in person, like I’d originally planned. Also, in my attempt to discern the problem with my bike, I of course managed to set off a noisy domino knock-down of several nearby parked bikes. Depending on your outlook, this was either a vicious gesture of rage or embarrassing display of clumsiness–but either way, it was public. On Tuesday, there was the aghast realization of having completely forgotten about an assignment with less than 5 minutes before class. I never forget about assignments–or if I do, I remember the night before and still manage to turn them in on time, with nobody the wiser. But yesterday I squirmed under the the stern glare of my art professor, too honest or too much of a goody-goody to tell her I simply hadn’t printed the paper out yet and would put it in her box after class, like all the other kids who hadn’t done the assignment yet. Oh, the pathetic scramble to write this thing and turn it in later that same day (in the next two hours), rushing back and forth several times between the home and school because of a forgotten print card. And then the wry irony lending this print card to another kid who hadn’t done the assignment and had also forgotten his print card, so that he could print his paper on my dime instead of riding half way across the city and back, like I did. The nerve! Today, of course, it’s just been the rain that arrived to greet me directly after class and escort me home in cold, wet misery. And hopefully nothing more than that.

To cope with these minor inconveniences, I sit listening to Cat Stevens, mindlessly shoving handful after handful of M&Ms into my mouth, and writing this when I should be reading for class. Cause I’m waitin’ for a peace train to come take me home again.

One more thing, six or seven hours later: I went to see Alela Diane tonight in this club called Paradiso. It used to be a church, and inside there are tall architectural ceilings, arches and columns, and glowing stained glass windows looming above the stage. I stood up in the rafters–balconies?–and giggled at the ridiculous grooving of the bassist and the cheesy drum tricks, intrigued by the pop effect live playing seems to render on her songs. Pleased that she does indeed tour with her father and that he does indeed seem to wear the same thing on every occasion, I was alone, leaning against the rail, looking down on all the people, and I heard every component of her songs, and felt what it was like to be there, to be inside that old church, and remembered what it was like to be outside in the sun, chasing shadows through tall grass, climbing hills and pulling stickers out of my hair and my shirt, what it was like to kneel in a garden and press my fingers in the dirt, to feel still and lonely and quiet in the snow, to feel drawn to the ocean and to crush the grit of the sand in my fist, to walk for hours and hours thinking only, “my tired feet, my tired feet.” She makes me think of some idealized, hippie vally image of my childhood. As if I didn’t hate the Miwok village my mom dragged me to, or recoil from the threat of bugs and spiders when we went camping–as if I appreciated all the things my parents did to encourage a love of nature in me while I was actually living them. It was beautiful. I couldn’t stop smiling on the ride home. The moon was huge and it was perfect company.

Time, heat, and pressure.

2009 March 18

2 Comments

by zoe

Starting to think a lot more about going home. It’s three months away. Holy fucking shit.

I’ve been here six months, but Amsterdam is not really “home” the same way Fairfax or parts of Point Reyes and San Francisco are. I’m an outsider who can’t say much more than “dank u wel;” I surprise myself by saying “twee uuro” when I mean “two euro” and then I strut around the rest of the night like I own the place. Riding the streets on my bike, it has all become so familiar and so sweet to me that it has also become a little sour, like when you eat an entire bag of Skittles in a single sitting. I still experience those perfect moments, where, out of the corner of my eye I’ll catch the symmetry of a bridge and its reflection in a canal–but it’s increasingly fleeting and philosophical.

It’s still exciting to be abroad, and the experience is far from over, but, Amsterdam has lost some of its glittering innocence. I’ve lost my empathy for oblivious tourists who walk in the bike lane without realizing it’s a bike lane. Irritation at cars who drive too close to me on my bike tends to overshadow the grateful exhilaration at having survived a near-collision. I know the game, now. I’ve become arrogant. Get the hell out of my way, you tourist. Learn to drive, you shitty driver. And you Dutch men, with your bright and easy demeanor, those greasy curls falling over your eyes, that gigantic shiny watch, those spotless, suspicious shoes, your sneakily salacious manner, your painfully one-noted laughter–get the hell away from me.

It’s the flatness. It’s the weather. It’s the lack of open space.

I miss open space. I miss the ocean. I miss hills and valleys and mountains. It may seem arbitrary, but there’s something about the geology here in the Netherlands that doesn’t suit me. There aren’t any rocks here. It’s all just sand. Soft, swampy dirt, sinking into the ocean, blending into the sky, pushed by clouds that blow quickly across the atmosphere and simply cannot help themselves from dribbling all over the soggy landscape. I love the sky, I love the light, but the landscape is unfulfilling. That’s why, on the train between Berlin and Prague, those big, black, geometric rocks were such a big deal to me–if you remember, I think I even posted pictures from the train window. I miss the physical evidence that the earth is alive, shifting beneath our feet in a process as old as the planet itself. As solid as it seems, nothing is ever still. It’s time and pressure and heat, all on an unimaginable scale, and the realization that you are made of the same atoms as everything that once was, that will be–that nothing is ever new.

Excuse me, we’re getting a little abstract.

There’s a sense of displacement here that sort of sneaks up on you every once in awhile. You realize what’s supposedly normal here is actually really weird. Like the outdoor urinals. Okay, I’m sorry, can we just talk about the urinals for a minute?

There are two types of outdoor urinals in the Netherlands. Let’s say type 1 is the grey hunk of plastic, with four ports for pissing–optimum efficiency, less than optimum privacy. Type 2 is this sort of phone-booth looking thing made from a piece of green sheet metal shaped into a sort of walk-in spiral to provide some semblance of privacy. I know this is hard to imagine, so here are links to pictures. Pictures of urinals.

type 1: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/82/219269496_e6d7fce464.jpg

type 2: http://www.saynotocrack.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/amsterdam-female-outdoor-urinal.jpg (Notice it says female urinal in the link–that’s incorrect, unless you want to piss all over your legs or you’re a completely retarded female.)

Anyway, these didn’t seem so odd to me when I’d first arrived so many months ago. Most people don’t even notice type 2s. I’d glimpsed men’s faces behind the grating of a type 2 as they pissed on the ground between their shoes, and thought, “Well, it’s better than pissing into the canal without some sort of cover.” But a few weeks ago, as I passed a man emerging from one of these, zipping his pants in broad daylight, it struck me: these outdoor urinals are fuckin’ weird. Why would a city provide men with TWO types of outdoor urinals–permanent metal structures with a fancy tile block design to piss on, and portable plastic quadri-urinals, with nothing to obscure the activity except the users’ haphazard sense of modesty? These are out all year, regardless of whether there is a big public event. There are no female pissing station equivalents. If you’re out and you need to pee, well, find a cafe, but you might need to pay 30 cents to use the toilet, or at least buy a coffee. Men, however, can just piss on the street behind sheet metal or into plastic boxes, courtesy of the city of Amsterdam. (It might have something to do with the fact the windows of certain buildings in certain neighborhoods are lit with red lights, meant to attract male customers, and whenever you see what’s behind the glass, you’re always sorry you looked. A certain catering to the male appetites. But I’ve never asked, so I don’t really know.)

Maybe these outdoor urinals seem convenient. And sure, I guess they are, for men–especially drunk men. But they’re gross. They’re a moment of intimacy with a stranger who is too lazy to go find a toilet with a door to obscure what should be considered a private activity, or at least one not to be displayed publicly. They’re an awkward moment of eye contact, where you think, “That guy’s peeing,” and the guy thinks, “That girl is watching me pee.”

Would these outdoor urinals catch on in the US? No. If you need to pee, there’s bound to be a mall, a Starbucks, a store, a gas station, a port-o-potty with a door, a bush for you to hide behind. But chances are, the reality of prostitutes advertising themselves in the windows of brothels as a legitimate profession would never stick either. It just seems crazy.

So many local oddities. The concept of the grocery store. The idea of serving sizes. Rounding change to the nearest .05 or .10. The sharing of bike paths with motorcycles, tiny electric cars, even personal scooters for the handicapped, which, by the way, go fast and are not just intended for old people to drive around the mall on Sunday morning.

Despite this sour arrogance, this longing for a change of scenery, I’m not done with Amsterdam. I think I might just be sick of constantly wearing winter coats. But I don’t really have any clear feelings about going home, except for that whole compulsion for evidence of time, heat, and pressure in the geology of the landscape. I think going home might be difficult. The immediate picture looks a bit painful–the idea of looking for housing again in San Francisco, living in Marin with limited access to transportation and few job prospects. It seems a bit like going backwards, but it also seems to have forward momentum, with graduation looming, distant plans to move somewhere else, study something else, get some sort of “job,” some sort of “adult life.” And when I’m so far from them, I do crave American conveniences. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but the big, diabolical masterpieces–the supermarkets and department stores, the highly-organized consumerism I’d been so quick to condemn for its corporate evils and the modern, eroded individuals it nurtures…it’s all still true, but damn, it’s convenient. I miss American cultural quarks, the intuitive understanding, expectations, relaxed speech, english, informed cultural repulsion and belonging. I want to experience it again, with the newly-discovered soft spot I’ve had all along for the country, buried beneath acrid and close-minded liberal criticisms. But I think I might miss the threat of getting run down by the handicapped, maybe just a little.

“Shoulder” and “soldier” are the mispronunciations of the same lost word.

2009 March 1

2 Comments

by zoe

No matter where you are four in the morning is always the same. Groups of people stumbling drunkenly home, couples arguing on the street, isolated figures who walk with their eyes trained on their feet. Salacious cackles that rise from dark doorways and dissipate in a sky pressed close to the earth by the weight of dawn. The distinct sound and posture of a man peeing, usually contained in one of the many outdoor urinals Amsterdam provides its men. They are all points of incomprehensible human drama you watch safe within the silly constraints of your drunken appraisal of the universe, in which everything is a bizarre version of some ancient original you’ve never seen. Your only company is the lonely familiarity of passing headlights, and you grin to yourself as you coast through the night, smoothly running red lights through empty intersections and enjoying the cool metallic sensation of your jeans against your legs in the cold before morning.

School’s been busy lately. Lots to read. Or lots to skim quickly, drawing stylish little arrows beside sentences that seem like they could possibly be important–but you really don’t know because you never memorized your times tables and you’re still counting on your fingers. I think I miss my humanities courses.

So being in Amsterdam and all, Sarah and I decided last night to take advantage of the infamous drug policy and buy some fancy space cakes. The level of production of with these cakes is somewhat shocking—not clingwrap and hand-written labels, but a fancy plastic case with spork included in built-in spork clip, like a snack you’d buy at Starbucks. And of course, the packaging includes a short professional warning on the label to wait a couple hours before you decide it hasn’t worked and ingest more cannabis product, as well as advice from the girl behind the counter to eat half and wait 45 minutes before deciding whether eating the rest is necessary. But why should a fancy ice cream coffee cake seem too good for the 0.4 g hash they dump into it—why expect edibles to have the flavor and consistency of weed turds? Because no matter how you dress it up, edibles still have a distinct weed residue running throughout the flavor; your intent is not to enjoy this cake, but to enjoy its effects. And ice cream cake is a weird thing to eat for its effects.

Nothing happened for a long time. We sat around. We felt tired. And then I felt it sort of rush up around me, a wave of quicksand that poured through the door like the blood rushing from the elevators in The Shining. It began to pool around my feet, rising slowly and lapping at my cartoon outline, wearing me away, smoothing me over the way the ocean works to erode a footprint in the sand. From all directions, rushing in my ears, the sensation of being cold without actually feeling cold.

So today has been a bit of a haze. It’s hard to crawl out of the swamp, once you’ve been dissolved. You have to find all your molecules and reassemble them. Naturally I laid around for a few hours, exhausted from the effort, and then decided I needed physical activity to clear my head. I went for a ride on my bike, heading far west to a more modern area of the city I’ve never even seen, probably because it is terribly depressing in both architecture and design. The interesting thing is that the modern parts of Amsterdam seem to be designed not around roads, the way American cities are—the roads are almost an afterthought, cutting inefficiently through open space, leading ineffectively to block after block of what seems to be public housing, where the laundry hangs to dry from the balconies, or to industrial or corporate mega centers that seem to be imitations of real life, built with legos and placed there haphazardly by the hands of a gigantic child. Cold air on my face, the staccato accompaniment of rain drops, the perfect soundtrack-of-my-life playlist on my ipod, today was the first day I’ve noticed flowers growing in the grass. Tulips. How sweet.

I can’t wait for spring, although I don’t believe it will do much to stop the rain or the general threat of rain that seems to impose itself so frequently on this city’s atmosphere. But the suggestion itself was beautiful.

I’m a number, not a name.

2009 February 12

2 Comments

by zoe

So I’m sitting by the windows with a cup of candy sweet tea Erin sent me. My feet are on the radiator and I’m wearing my broken old man sweater that makes me think of Daniel Plainview at the end of There Will Be Blood. It’s cold outside today. This morning I drank my coffee in the warm company of a bright, clear sunrise, which from behind the window gave me some hope that today it would not rain–that maybe it’d even be sort of nice. Of course, those telltale tendrils of blue clouds that I thought were so pretty in the pink glow of morning unfurled across the sky and eventually overtook it, drowning the hopeful light of the sun as they drenched the atmosphere in a dismal gloom. I was just locking the bike in front Oudemanhuispoort–the school building in which my “Political Economy of Global Money and Financial Markets: An Introduction” class (they don’t skimp on the titles here in Holland) is held–when those dark clouds began to float light, listless snow through the air. Pretty snow. The type that’s blown about on the wind, that makes everything look magical during its fluttering journey to the ground. The type that, unless you’re on your bike and it’s blowing in your face, you can appreciate. A few times throughout class I’d look out the window and notice it had stopped or started again, but by the time I was leaving, the sky was once more empty of any dark hints of disgruntlement. It was almost enough encouragement for me to go and do something with my day, maybe visit a market to get some cheap produce, finally buy a new purse or maybe some boots, go for a jog–you know, something better than going back home and taking a nap and/or avoiding the steadily increasing pile of reading I’ve yet to conquer. But it was shockingly cold. I could have snapped my fingers in half. Plus my bike, like the weather in Amsterdam, is temperamental, and for various reasons I’ve yet to discern, the difficulty of pedaling sometimes varies inversely with the temperature outside. (It might be the wind.) Really, I was tired and just wanted to go home. Later the sky would darken again and it would hail, and I would wake up from my nap, look out the window, and go back to sleep instead of going out for a jog in Westerpark like I’d (wink, wink) originally planned. Sick to death as I am of the cold, the rain, the sleet, the snow, the wind–let’s just say winter in general–Amsterdam weather does not fail me its characteristic moodiness. I’ll give it that.

I am desperately ready for winter to end.

I’ve been tired since school started. For the past few nights I feel as if I’ve lain in bed all night with my eyes closed, feigning rest and relaxation because that’s the normal thing to do when its dark outside. It’s tiresome. In the morning I am exhausted and cannot bear to look at the world beneath lead-weighted eyelids. I’ll fall asleep perfectly easily if I want to take a nap during the day or in the evening, but once it’s all been settled for bed, for the long haul, the nocturnal 9 hours, my brain seems to decide against restful sleep. That, or it produces nasty dreams that imprint nothing on my memory but residual feelings of unease. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I think something like this always happens at this point in winter, when I’m wishing I could just skip the next month or two and bask in the warmth of spring already.

So anyway, about school. I’m a bit terrified of my schedule this semester. Its very un-humanities. That global money finance markets crisis whatever course, that’s terrifying. What am I doing in a political economy course? I don’t know, I know nothing. (At least it’s interdisciplinary, yeah, humanities? Yeah?) It doesn’t really count for anything, but I guess I want to learn something about the economy, something that is tangible yet intangible in real life in a much more technical way than “culture” is. But with money and finance, I have very little intuition, and this is difficult because I am accustomed to relying on my intuition. I lack sufficient background knowledge and feel as if I am always just a step behind the professor in his lectures. But this professor is a wonderfully dry old bitter man who wears dumb turtle necks and oddly colored, wide-stripped sports coats and very frankly accuses all of us students (without excusing himself) of being terrible greedy pigs within the economy. What I’ve learned already in three sessions about money has more than tripled my knowledge of what money actually is. Perhaps by the end of it I will understand the mysteries of life, as well.

My second course, too, is problematic. It is an overview of the European Union. Since it’s officially titled “Introduction to European Integration,” I thought it’d have some cultural (therefore humanities-esque) elements to it, but it’s almost entirely political, economic, and law based. This is a problem not only because I am mostly unfamiliar with these subjects within college courses, but because I was going to bend it to count as a humanities course by adding on an extra project–I was hoping I could somehow use what I’ve already written in this blog for some “European Experience” bullshit, and already be half done–but I will have a terrible time arguing for it at home. In this course I also lack background knowledge and frequently find myself thinking that the inner workings of the EU may be interesting from a political or law perspective, but do not much affect me in my daily life, as I am a simple American, with simple ideas about federalism and political unions.

Last course is 20th Century Art. No problem there, of course.

I am glad to be learning about something in the real world. Ish. Cause, you know, money is a big deal. The EU–well, that’s got less of an impact on my personal experience of the world, but at least my appetite for pointless technical details can in some way be fed there instead of by uneducated medical or psychological evaluations or attempts to understand the mechanics of my and others’ bicycles, even if I am for the most part completely uninterested. In truth, it is no replacement for my ignorant diagnoses.

So that’s school so far. That’s winter. Let’s hear it for spring. Because winter, like this post, is getting boring.

Give me all your money and three cheeseburgers to go

2009 January 28

Berlin and Praha.

2009 January 25

2 Comments

by zoe

Berlin
First let me say that it was silly of us to have taken the train from Vienna to Berlin instead of from Vienna to Prague to Berlin, I know. But we did a lot of silly things that at the time seemed sensible, and besides, foreign geography is not a typical American strength, so suck it, traveler critics.

The train ride from Vienna to Berlin lasted a drudging 9 hours, with a brief stop to change trains in Breklov, a small Czech town that had an immediate depressive effect on me. Desolate, icy, and unwelcoming, it confirmed many of my suspicions regarding the Eastern European urban space with its crumbling communist architecture, frigid cobbled streets and distant puffing smoke stacks that together culminated in an atmosphere of sad emptiness and failure. One point of interest, though—in Breklov, we managed to break our train. In our rush to exit the train, we ripped down a large narrow light cover that runs beneath the overhead luggage rack. It wasn’t our fault, though. The luggage rack was very small. And international trains don’t stop for long at the station, so when you need to get off, you better get the fuck off. We were in a bit of a hurry.

Standing on a seat and trying to coax my bag out as Mike stood panicking below me, tearing at my bag with one hand and at his hair with the other, I became disgruntled. What the fuck was with this fuckin’ train’s luggage rack? Who designed this? Finally, though, God took pity on us in our frenzied struggle against His maniacal grip, and one fateful yank liberated both my sweet little carry-on bag and the long plastic light covering, which was actually about as tall as me. It clattered noisily to the floor as bored passengers looked over to see what all the racket was, and for a brief moment, as Mike and I exchanged horrified looks, I was unsure of what to do. There was no train attendant in sight, and even if there had been, I doubt my apologies in English would have been sufficient. So sorry I broke your train, sir, but I really must be going now! What else could I do but step delicately down from the seat and, stopping first to rub Mike’s head where it had been struck by the bit of train interior on its loud, rattling journey to the ground, pick up the evidence and leaned it against the seat next to us? Mike, we just have to play it cool and get off the train. Let’s just get off the train. It’s not our problem. If anybody gives us shit, it’s not our problem.
So we coolly exited the train without a trace of guilt–and no one gave us any shit, because really, it wasn’t our problem.

Berlin’s Hauptbanhof was as Jan described it—large an imposing, entirely composed of glass without much visible support—but when we arrived was in no mood to admire the snooty modern architecture. By this point a cold I’d caught in Vienna had settled in for the long haul, and having been on a horrendously uncomfortable, deny-your-humanity train for the last 9 hours, I was desperate to eat and then lie down for a bit—I just need to rest my eyes for a minute, no, I’m not falling asleep. So after a pained search for the S-bahn (these metro trains run through the sky and offer wonderful bright morning light views of the city) and the regulation argument with Michael, we arrived in our hostel, settled in our lovely clean room, and went out to find something to eat before crumbling into sweet sleep. The next morning my cold was in full terror mode, but I was going to brave the freezing temperatures and see Berlin, damn it.

Unfortunately, my body simply rejected the frigidity of the –8° atmosphere. Despite gigantic snow boots and multiple pairs of wool socks, the scarf twisted tightly around my face and neck to disbar any cold air from entering my jacket, my hat, my hood, my gloves, and the profusion of layers that turned my body in to a large, shapeless potato—I was cold. It became difficult to feel my feet, and I felt my core muscles pulling inward, tensing painfully as I began to shiver. Standing in the middle of the monument to the Jews that died in World War II and wiping my nose with my last tissues, I began to worry about pneumonia. Michael, just leave me where I fall and let me freeze to death amid these great black blocks of the monument; I am going to get pneumonia and die in Berlin. Just let me die in Berlin. I made it a little farther to some sign where I guess Hitler’s bunker used to be before I gave up and left the death throes of pneumonia out in the cold. I went back to the hostel and crumpled into the welcoming covers of a warm bed where I sniffled as I watched CNN International’s manic coverage of the Gaza conflict for the next 36 hours.

I can’t believe how cold it was. Being sick, I didn’t have much else to do but stare out the window as people walked through the snow to the S-Bahn station and watch CNN. I gathered all the blankets in the room and piled them on top of me, alternately kicking them angrily away and pulling them back with strained and desperate apologies. Me and my buddy CNN talked about Israel for two days straight, I swear, but by the end I was so sick of term “humanitarian crisis” I couldn’t even listen, especially because after an hour I’d already heard everything they knew. I understand the situation is complex, but I’m sorry, what the fuck is a “humanitarian crisis?”

I was terribly disappointed to be so sick. God damn the cold! One of my dreams was to experience urban snow, and while I can certainly say I got it, I can’t say I much enjoyed it. Snow fall is still magical, winter is still beautiful in its silent onslaught, but for most of my trip, temperatures outside between –8° and –2° which is something like 16-28° F. In Munich it was supposedly as cold as –13° C. Even when I wasn’t ill, it made being outside almost unbearable. It turned your nose into an inconsolable faucet; it froze your fingers and toes into painfully useless stubs. Your words fell from your lips in frozen chunks, reducing conversations to the garbled grumblings of ice machines, devoid of any frivolous commentary besides the repeated confirmation that is was, indeed, fuckin’ cold. You pulled your scarf around your nose and mouth to conserve your warm breath; you jammed your gloved hands deeper into your pockets, desperate to avoid the pain of exposing them to the frigid outside world; you stamped your feet to make sure they still existed at the end of your legs and were not dragging grotesquely behind you, numb and forgotten. It wasn’t windy, but the cold air pushed insistently through your body on its own, bursting through in an icy exit wound and shoving your muscles tensely inward. You didn’t realize their gallant attempt to save you from the grubby thievery of the arctic atmosphere until, as you removed your jacket and other layers, you felt the lingering strain in your exhaustively stiff and overworked body.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling much better the next day and it was just as cold as ever. I took a long time to get out of bed, to shower, and to work up the courage to go do something indoors—the German history museum, detailing events from Roman times all the way up to the present. But having not eaten all day, I felt terrible and learned nothing at the museum. The trip on the S-bahn was worth it though, if only to look at the city from pigeon territory and to close your eyes like a cat in the sun as the light flickered through the windows. I think the S-bahn was my favorite place in Berlin.

On the way home, I bought some delicious looking cheesecake—I’d been craving it—but was severely disappointed by the fact that it resembled cat barf in both consistency and flavor. However, I was temporarily consoled by the Dunkin’ Doughnuts next door—“an American Bakery,” they assured me, just like home. But when I bought some doughnuts, I found out it really was just like home and not in a good way. Those doughnuts fuckin’ sucked.

I can’t remember what I did on the last day or if there even was a last day. But I loved Berlin nonetheless.

Prague. Praha.
On the way to Prague, I felt slightly better, but our arrival there was probably the most stressful of the entire trip. My immediate impression was that I hated Prague. Different fucking crazy money, no automated subway machine to tell you which ticket to buy in English, an unbearably packed tram (we’re talking muni style), and terrible directions to the hostel that both Mike and I were unable to correctly interpret for over an hour. Walking through the cold on the streets of Prague, though, listening to the clattering wheels of my little suitcase and the hushed mysteries of strangers’ conversations—I realized, I’m in fucking Prague. I am thousands of miles away from home; fate has changed or doesn’t exist; I am doing it; I am living it. Zoe Ariana Mackey, this IS your life!

Finally, after walking up and down the same street for the fourth time and the pissy climax (note: not resolution) of an argument about whether or not to ask someone for help, I reread the directions and found our hostel high up in a strange old apartment building with tall imposing doors, time operated lights, and big, romantic keys from the 19th century. Mike remarked that it was like the set of a horror movie because of its strange mixture of scary impersonal architecture and obscenely creaking floorboards and the odd, seemingly useless modern touches like linoleum wood flooring and the abundance of ineffective Ikea style cabinetry. But we were comforted against the thought of horror movie style murder by the man who was there to greet us, who spoke breathlessly and smiled merrily at my stiff and unnatural handling of Czech crowns.

The next morning we headed to the old part of town, stopping in the Jewish section to find our way inside an incredibly beautiful Spanish synagogue, though we were disappointed by the entrance fee and ban on photography. I feel like we walked for hours in the freezing cold. We crossed a bridge to climb dozens and dozens of stairs up a mountain, where the views of the city were quiet and distant and smothered in a winter haze, and we broke the smooth layer of snow with our solitary footsteps. We made our way to the Kafka museum, paused at the oddity of the pissing statues, and, rare for Europe, were touched by the sweetness of the museum employee who wanted to make sure we knew where to put our coats and that we would not go through the museum backwards. We found a lovely if completely “unauthentic” restaurant—Bohemia Bagel, where they played American music from the 60s and served whatever food you might guess would go along with such an atmosphere. I got blueberry pancakes—AMERICAN PANCAKES—for the first time in Europe, complete with watered down maple syrup (!), and coveted no one.

At one point in our wandering, I bought a large coffee to hold for my hands, which had begun to loose feeling beneath my flimsy but pretty white gloves. But O! Europe, woe to you with your leaky take-away coffee lids! After taking a sip, the coffee lid began an onslaught of maliciously unpredictable drips all over my pretty white gloves and I became terribly distressed and cursed Europe for all its shortcomings. What the hell is with their coffee cup lids? You grow up in a small town in California where everything was built after the 50s, and you imagine Europe as being magical and perfect no matter where you go because it’s all so old; it’s all so beautiful and beyond the ugly utilitarian sieve of modern architecture, and nothing can go wrong. But they fuck up their coffee lids so bad here.

In truth, a lot of big cities aren’t that old. Many were rebuilt after WWII—except, the rumor is, for Prague. Despite its “authentic oldness,” though, Prague lacked that enchanting sense of standing outside time. It was beautiful, certainly, and the art nouveau everywhere charmed me to death, but there was something empty to its cobbled boulevards and lovely mountain castle. Maybe it was the hazy depression of winter, but I felt it lacked soul and I resented the insistent entrance fee for all its sites—even churches, synagogues, and graveyards. Someone there asked us if we wanted a joint about 10 meters in front of a police car; the homeless sat on the edges of the sidewalks, their hands cupped in hopeful emptiness; people stared at you and you stared at them; waiters were brisk and gave bad advice; men stood outside tourist traps to prey on unsuspecting foreigners; and when a person surprised you with his concern for the piece of paper you dropped a few feet ago, and it was all expressed without sharing any words, you smiled the rest of the day. Pretty standard fare for a city, but I just never really felt at ease there.

Still, I fell in love with Vienna the moment I arrived and I treasured Berlin for being so scrappy and youthful, unable to conceal its terrible past but demanding life in the present. Imagine the exuberance of construction after the fall of the Berlin wall, how much the city has grown and changed in the last 20 years; imagine to be reborn and still in the midst of youthful hope and excitement, but looking backward towards such darkness. I loved Berlin. Prague and I just didn’t fully connect, I guess, though I’m not sure why, because the architecture of the city was just so fucking beautiful I couldn’t stop looking at its buildings.

To conclude with the travel memoirs, I’ve got supplemental comparative observations:

Europe doesn’t have enough benches. Not many in the train stations, and even fewer scattered about outside. Do they not want us to sit down? What is this crap about Americans work week being much so more strenuous than Europe’s, how they value their leisure time so much more, yet we’re the ones with more benches? Get more benches, Europe. I need to sit down.

Some places in Europe charge a fee to use the bathroom. In Amsterdam it’s rarely more than 50 c—usually more like 20, but the train station in Cologne had the audacity to charge 1.80 euro to use the bathroom. Oh, don’t worry though, if you’re a dude, it was only 60 cents to use the urinal. How appallingly, unbearably modern. How dare they charge me that much—how dare they charge me in the first place! For what my body creates and must dispose of without my conscious willing of it; for a natural function in which everyone engages? The least they could do is pick up the tab to keep the place clean in a public space. I’ll shit on the floor if I have to, before I’ll pay 1.80—they’ll clean that for free, won’t they? Besides, if you charge a fee, you should at least provide the false security of seat covers. I mean, come on!

Similar to the fee to the bathroom—European restaurants do not like to provide free water with meals, and if you ask for tap water, you get a disgusted sigh and a dirty glass half full of lukewarm water shoved at you. Although, if you order an espresso, they’ll happily provide you a small glass of water to wash it down, which is confusing if you ask me. But espressos are kind of stupid anyway.

Though you’re expected to pay for the bathroom and for water, tipping is not mandatory. In some places it is more customary than others, but you almost never leave money on the table—everywhere I’ve been but Amsterdam and Brussels, the waiters come to you and make change in front of you, and you must suavely slip 10% of the bill back into their hands, or tell them directly how much you want back. 10% if you’re totally happy and can brave the awkward quick math of tipping someone standing directly in front of you.

You must seat yourself in many places, but it never seems to be clear whether that responsibility is up to you or the waiter. That you’re almost always greeted and seated by someone even in crappy restaurants in the U.S. also seems to be a sense of luxurious entitlement left over from the 1950s, the same way having someone at the supermarket whose main purpose is to bag your groceries is.

Finally, Starbucks. Starbucks is everywhere in Europe except Amsterdam. It was shocking to see it on every other street again—I’d forgotten how deeply entrenched it is into the landscape, the Starbucks sign littering the city like the awkward smattering of acne across a teenage boy’s face, and just as strongly you wish it wasn’t there—if only for his sake, or for the city’s sake. It’d be so much more confident, less awkward without it. But there’s nothing you can do, but wait, wait, wait and indulge in the useless hope that Starbucks will go away on its own like the acne. When you step inside a European Starbucks, there is nothing to indicate you are in Europe except perhaps explanations on the menu in German or Czech or whatever crazy language they speak that isn’t English—it looks exactly the same way it does it home, with the same overpriced food and same overpriced coffee, the same stupid yuppie furniture and vision of pseudo-unique comfort in a café, the same stupid music. But bizarro, because it’s Europe.

Kind of an awkward conclusion, but that’s all for the travel memoirs. Maybe some pictures later.

München und Wien.

2009 January 22

1 Comment

by zoe

Munich
On New Years Eve, a man from India ran up to me and shouted “HAPPY 2009!” before, in a stunning encroachment on the personal space of a complete and utter stranger, he picked me up and spun around with me. Drunk and shrieking in the arms of some strange man as I watched the world rush past me in a sick blur, I knew I’d remember this above all things from Munich. Happy 2009 to you, too!

Earlier that night Mike and I discovered a sort of carnival of “discos”—the kulturfabrik, where clubs were arranged in mid-way style, block after block of them blasting their own brand of music into the icy cold air in an futile attempt to differentiate themselves from their competitors. But excesses of mulled wine and store bought pre-mixed “Jack and Cola” did not persuade us to wile away the last few hours of 2008 in the drunken sweaty excesses of a club—I wanted to spend my New Years outside beneath the fireworks—and at midnight, we were amid the rowdy crowd in front of the “new” town hall.

Though built in the early 1900s, this town hall looked more like an old cathedral, looming before us in a mess of gothic spires and governmental opulence. The world’s biggest glockenspiel (I guess?) is located prominently beneath the clock tower; every morning around 11:00, it issues sounds suggestive of Klingon battle music and its little mechanical figures dance in memory of both some joust at a royal wedding and, somwehat incongruously, the black plague.

Anyway, unmediated by public safety officials or even sober judgment, dozens of young men launched rockets from empty wine bottles as the rest of us, swigging from our own bottles, watched the improvised show and cheered happily each time something exploded. Crushed in a mass of people with smoke in my eyes and in my hair, I forgot about the cold as I watched the sky burst above the cutesy German architecture and tried to ignore the psychotic paranoia of getting some sulfur drenched scrap of explosive packaging stuck in my eye. It was a perfect send off to 2008.

Oddly, though, I spent the last day of the year walking around a concentration camp in Dachau. I felt guilty sitting at its entrance eating my breakfast of yogurt and fruit—how dare I eat here, where thousands of people starved, were subjected to medical experiments, collapsed and died in their place during the outdoor roll call?—but I ate anyway.

You know, it took shivering across some snow-dusted Nazi compound to realize exactly just how immense of an operation the holocaust really was. Six million (and that’s just the estimate of Jewish victims) was before an unimaginably large number for which I had no point of reference or grounding in reality. Of course I knew the general story—a systematic undertaking to destroy entire groups of people, it was one of the most atrocious demonstrations of human cruelty in recent history—but it wasn’t until I until I stood shuddering in this camp that housed 60,000 prisoners, walked through the workshops and gaped at the mass bunks that were required to be kept spotless but neglected any sense of privacy or even human decency that I felt the horror of it. Not until I came and went through the same gate through which prisoners had only been able to stare, walked the same route they took to get to their cramped bunks where just the noise of people breathing at night must’ve been deafening, kicked the same gravel, stood whining in the same awful freezing temperatures they’d endure for an hour or more during the daily roll call. Not until I peered inside the crematoriums and the showers and listened to the sound of my heels echoing through the empty halls, touched the wall of a room prisoners were told to wait in before their deaths and another that had been used as storage for dead bodies, did I ever realize just how fucking big it was. Dwarfed beneath the Catholic memorial built in the 1960s (to be honest, it looked like a crematorium itself), I was startled by the gigantic bell that began ringing as I assume it does everyday around noon, and as I heard it echo throughout the rest of the compound, I was struck by how horrifyingly complete it was all intended to be, how unimaginably cruel and brutal it was—and I think for the first time I was truly shocked at the reality of it. It is so easy to say, yes, yes it was an atrocity, but without intimately knowing the definition of the word, I can’t say I ever really knew what I meant until I’d felt the eerie residue of it there at Dachau.

As for the rest of our stay in Munich, I was relatively unimpressed. What I liked best were the outdoor fruit and nut stands, which were everywhere. Stunned by how good the produce actually was, I cradled the little paper cone the fruit woman had packed with a kilo of tangerines, naturally chilled by the freezing temperatures, for us as if it were the infant son of god. The problem was that everything in Munich was modern; it had been destroyed in the war and built within the last 60 years, but without the exuberance of Berlin—and I don’t think that’s what I wanted in Munich. I was glad to move on.

Wien
I was immediately struck by the neoclassical opulence of Vienna and by the touches of art nouveau scattered about in the city’s architecture—it was beautiful, and I was charmed to death. Classical statues everywhere. Beautiful Christmas lights still hanging about. Everything was so ornate, so classy, so detailed, so…Viennese. Even the modern buildings. I loved it.

However, we found our stay at the Vienna hostel to be severely disturbing—upon our arrival, the door appeared to be locked and the entrance unlit, but after an awkward miming exchange with the guy who worked there (we called him JoJo), we found ourselves in what appeared to be the living room of a residence. JoJo stood before us without speaking, the TV flickering some Asian programming behind him, until Mike said, “Uh, I think we had reservations here…”

Oh, so that’s why you guys are standing in front of me with bags and suitcases? He told us which room we were in and left without exacting payment or providing an explanation about breakfast, lockouts, bathrooms, showers—or even the fact that since this was like a home, we were expected to take our shoes off in respect of their custom, which is something I realized a day later and choose out of bitterness to disregard. One positive thing, though—our room on the first night was occupied by two other Americans, which was really nice, if it only lasted a day. It’d been awhile since I’d found strangers with whom I could settle once more into the old linguistic and cultural rapport, free of the sanitizing attempt to be clear. The half-eaten “I onno” instead of the enunciated “I don’t know” between strangers, treasure it!

The second night in the hostel we were slated to move to a private room. First, though, JoJo told us he had to clean the room and, presumably, change the sheets. Unfortunately, JoJo didn’t count on my eagle eye for hygiene, and after moving into the room that evening, I noticed immediately that the sheets hadn’t been changed most likely in several days. There were solitary hairs dispersed throughout the covers, and the bottom sheet was ruffled appallingly by the weight of a sleeping body, not to mention dotted with several sinister looking stains. I was terribly disturbed. Michael as well acknowledged the horror of sleeping in an unclean bed, but found it still to be within his tolerance, whereas I whined and paced about the room like a worried dog, unsure of what to do. I couldn’t sleep on those sheets. I just couldn’t. But could I face JoJo, who had so sweetly assured us that he’d cleaned the room?

What would a normal person do in this situation? I asked myself. No, what would my asshole academic adviser from State do?

I had to confront him. But unlike my lecturer, I do not have the “I don’t give a damn about your pathetic human limitations or basic concerns” attitude down in dealing with people. I was not about to chicken out and pay this JoJo so I could sleep on dirty sheets, though. This was a test I could not fail.

So I went to find him in the common area, with Mike standing awkwardly in the background to act as both backup and moral support. Meekly I asked him, “Do you have any new sheets we could use for our room? Like…sheets we could rent to use instead of the ones you’ve provided?”

Real confrontational. Direct and clear. You go.

JoJo looked at me blankly as I yammered on politely about hostel bedclothes policy, until finally he asked, “You want new sheets?”

I grimaced and nodded, thankful that he seemed genuinely upset I’d noticed the sheets were dirty. But it quickly became evident to both JoJo and myself that within the entire hostel, there were no clean sheets. Unsure of what to do, he said, “Wait just a moment, please” and wandered off, leaving me wide eyed and frozen in my shock. Moments later I heard what sounded like the sloshing of water in a large tub, and half an hour later he presented me a set of still damp sheets with some lame excuse about how the person who normally cleans hadn’t been here for a few days. And he was very, very sorry.

How awkward. How terribly awkward.

Anyway, on the first night in Vienna, we found ourselves in the old city center in front of my favorite church I’ve seen thus far in Europe. Inside, you could smell the smoke from the hundreds of prayer candles and the incense of the nightly masses (though that bit might be an imaginary supplemental memory), and the arched walls were warm in the flickering light. The next day we came back to see it again, and I was swept up in the lure of a “catacombs tour”—to crawl beneath the floor of the church through the opulent cemeteries of royalty and the mass graves of plague victims, how cool! In some rooms, human bones were in the same tangled mess in which the bodies must have originally been discarded, and in others they were arranged in orderly stacks so as to cram the maximum number of bodies into the smallest area possible. I touched the same bricks undertakers must’ve brushed by to dispose of the dead, breathed the same stale crypt air, climbed the same stairs to emerge in daylight—and, of course, pay the tour guide with his cute accent his nine fifty. Not exactly worth it, but I did fulfill the random dream of seeing piles of browned and aged human bones, I guess.

The first museum we visited, The Leopold, was filled to the brim with Egon Schiele. I’d only just heard of him a few weeks ago, but I’d taken an instant liking to his work—no “this is why it’s good” explanation required. Some Klimt was included, of course, but he was saved more for the second museum we found ourselves in—the straight out of the 19th century Belvedere. The Secession Exhibition Hall, where only the actual building held importance for me, was a bit of a disappointment, though. Besides all the museums, there we visited lots of lovely cafes in Vienna. The problem with them, though, was that they allowed smoking as if it were simply a natural part of dining out. Quite a shock to the liberal hippie kid from Marin County. How dare they smoke in here. They are polluting the atmosphere of my meal and I am trying to eat. I don’t go to a restaurant to exit coughing and stinking of cigarettes. Cough cough.

Despite the horrible hostel, I was sad to leave Vienna.

Berlin and Prague laters.

I fergot some photos: