4.05 - Munich

It's raining this morning in Munich, and I'm huddled up in my top bunk with a book, under a fluffy comforter, freshly showered and dressed in warm, clean clothes. This is the nicest room I've stayed in so far. The three travelers with whom I shared it last night have all already left. Two cute German girls, consultants from other cities in town for a meeting, appeared younger than I: jobless.

The rain turns to sleet, then snow. The view out my window - a juxtaposition of rooves, of colors and textures - gathers the sky's moisture at angles, holding it in, or letting it run. Red-brick-pink-stucco, I do not know the words for most of what I see. My imageries have been the stuff of imagination.

I'm not sure if it's taking pictures, looking them over, and trying to figure out what works. Maybe it's just traveling, not speaking the language, when the sounds of a conversation seem more noticeable than the meanings of the words. Or maybe it's all the art I've been seeing. Anyway, sensory parts of me seem to be opening up in new ways, or maybe just forgotten ones. Image - colors and shapes: how they express themselves amidst a field of differences, and similarities - its alive, or lively, or changing in me. And I don't yet speak its language.

Eating breakfast this morning at a table by myself, I slowly bit into an apple watching the ways it bore the bite marks, spaced against each other around its core. Within thin skin it grew sweet flesh around its seeds, protecting them, offering them; appealing to the appetites of distance, and difference, for propagation.

Where do we - eating, interacting - stop? When we're no longer hungry? When the fruit tastes bitter? or we reach the seeds?

4.04

The sun comes up purple on the German country-side. The steep red-roofed houses, white, spread wide or clustered around the grassed and muddied fields, wake with the almost silence of a passing train.

Hungry, tired, who are you? Lonely, worn down, at wit's end, what are you capable of?


Munich

A new city, equipped with the small compass I purchased in Brussels, open to exploration...

And what beer! The Hofbrauhaus was nice, and you can't beat a whole liter of fine German beer, but I have to agree with the guidebook, the Augustiner beer garden was nicer. The beer was smaller, but richer, and I got to have a nice conversation with a young couple from Boston, World War II buffs, not to mention a big old German pretzel.

4.03 - Brussels
In every city there's a conglomerate of closely related experiences which intersect to shape a somewhat vague, amorphous, culture; a culture which in turn shapes the range of individual experiences within it. Inside of every city, there are an infinite number of cities: accumulate experiences thrown together, by chance and determination, into lives.


Sometimes I'll go to the monuments and take pictures of the tourists taking pictures. I still like the monuments, taking pictures of them, and reading about their history. But it’s also fun to notice the intersections: where a four-hundred year old church sits beside a sexually suggestive builboard; where an old woman in a shawl asking you for change stands between them; where a younger, wealthier woman goes inside the church to hear the music, or see the history, and returns outside to jarring images of what she’s supposed to be, or look like.


I like to walk the back streets and stumble into courtyards in the poorer parts of a city, to notice the laundry drying on the lines. Today I ate chocolate and waffles until my belly hurt. Tonight I'm going to take the overnight train to Munich.

4.02 - Amsterdam

This morning I went with the Austrians and the Canadian over to the Van Gogh Museum. I never knew very much about his life, or had seen anything other than the more famous of his paintings, but I was thoroughly impressed.



Afterwards, having not yet eaten all day, I went to an empty Mexican cafe run by an Egyptian man who spoke Dutch to me. In the northwestern part of the city, in a more historically working class neighborhood away from the tourist shops and restaurants, Otis Redding was playing on the radio, and I ate a large burrito. After a while, a man from Amsterdam and his Northern Dutch wife, old friends of the owner, came in, the three of them sitting down to a friendly conversation. Slowly, we all began to sing along to the music.



They invited me to their table, and bought me a beer. In English we talked about music and politics and culture, about Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the EU, and the US. He loved the city and told me where I might be able to find a job if I wanted to stay. I could see myself staying here, but it also seems a bit intense with the red-light district and all the smokeshops. It seems a bit too touristy. I left the restaurant, went back to the hostel to gather my bag, and say goodbye to my friends, and headed for the train station, and a late night arrival in Brussels.

4.01 - Amsterdam

For most of the day I just wandered around the city. I'd finished the book I was reading (Mother Night, which I forgot to tell you that I borrowed from you Taylor) last night, so I stopped at a used book market in one of the open squares, and finally found something that looked interesting, and English, Paul Auster's Timbuktu.


At night, with low wooden tables surrounded by large seating cushions, I found myself upstairs in what seemed like an opium-den (though it was only a smoke shope). Not too confident in my joint rolling, one of the two guys from Austria - another is from Toronto - with whom I'm sharing a room at the hostel, rolled one. And then another. We invented a smaller game of snooker, flicking discs with our fingers into one of a small chess-sized board's four corners. By the end I'd gotten the hang of it and won the last two games. They went back to the hostel, as one of the Austrians quite incapacitated from his smoking too much, and I wandered off to get a slice of pizza.

I don't know the age it becomes comfortable to think of yourself as a man. I don't know when that will become comfortable.

3.31 - Amsterdam (some first observations):

Already, in descent, there's a pronounced visual difference. An order. Un-American; not in any condescending sense of patriotic one-upsmanship, like that term's now often used, but something else, something organizational that I just haven't ever seen at home, or maybe I just haven't noticed. Channels pass concentrically from the city's center to its outskirts. There are lanes and traffic signals for the bicyclists, who outnumber the drivers (and the bicycles outnumber the people!). Ducks swim in the channels, and trolleys channel down the roads.

Forget what you might have heard with puritanically-rooted American ears: not just the red light district here is orgasmic. Ohh, what public transportation! Philadelphia, America, you could be so much more with just a bit of love for your Septa, or your Amtrak, or a little bit more thoughtful, efficient, domestic planning. Perhaps a little less war.

The people in this city bustle around, looking driven. But they bike too. And they don't always seem to be driving towards anywhere in particular. Or to be too worried about getting thrown off track. The men sit with their legs crossed at uncovered cafe tables smoking cigarettes.

Places tend to have a feel, a general tone with which they approach their internal tensions, a manner in which people wear their differences: the way they sit on a train amongst dissimilar appearance, or negotiate a conversation swollen with linguistic gaps of understanding. Once you have to work just to communicate, it can change what you mean, even when you no longer have to work for it. There are so many different languages here, so many ethnicities, so many cultural histories. They've certainly had their fair share of tensions in the past, and with the EU there are bound to be so many more, but...

I dont know, maybe it's just me. I've never really traveled much before. It's funny how strong the onrushing drive to interpret can be upon arriving in such a place. You try your best to digest, I imagine, to judge it.

And hell, this is only Europe...