20070630

      My comfortable friends, I greet you today from a pizzeria in Barcelona. It has been too long since I've last written, so there are many things which I have to share. Barcelona has many things in common with the rest of Europe; they serve pizza and espressos, and play much English-language music. But, Barcelona is a city that never stops partying. During the day along La Rambla, the main street which runs down to the beach, there are human statues of all kinds, magicians, and even a 4-person circus. I can't figure out why, since this is mainly a tourist area, but there are also a many bird and rabbit sellers. I must admit, I was tempted to buy a fighting cock, but I didn't think my hotel would allow me to keep him in the tub.

      From the top of the Columbus Column, you can see much of Barcelona. I also ran into a couple girls from Hong Kong going into law school, and so made a couple friends that have been better than a pair of wheeled tripods for my photo-journaling. For example, see this documentary photo of comparative European play-equipment. Also, it's wonderful if you don't like making plans to encounter other people who do, since you can mooch off their planning skills.
      On Wednesday, we went to a hedge-maze. I didn't think it could be confusing at all, but I was pleasantly surprised. However, anyone with a stack that runs 3 elements deep can navigate the maze. Or you could just touch your right hand to the wall, close your eyes, and follow the wall for a long while.
      Here I am trapped in a glass box.
      Here I am trying to get away after escaping the glass box.
      Here I am giving up.
      After a short tram ride from the maze, we saw the Gaudi park. Gaudi exemplifies Spanish style, with his chaotic placement of tile mosaic and organic forms. Everything fits together precisely because none of the elements match. We also encountered in the Gaudi park a fantastic one-man band.
      This is the world's largest pineapple.
      Don't drink from the public fountains.
      Beware the (fe)male prostitutes. It says so in the pizzeria.
      Mullets are the latest fad in Spain.
      This is actually an ice-cream advertisement. Get your head out of the gutter.
      On Thursday, after touring the Barrio Gothico, which is a wonderful neighborhood with plenty of shopping, we went to the Dali museum. If you are ever near Spain you must visit. Noone but Dali would adorn a building with eggs and bread. Throughout the museum, there are several art pieces with coin slots. For a small fee, you can bring his kinetic sculptures to life. I didn't know what this Cadillac would do, but I had one of the Hong Kong girls take a photo with her camera inside the car while I snuck a coin into the machine. Quite to our surprise, the inside of the car started raining. Wonderful. What I realized later while walking through the museum was that the umbrella hung at the top of the sail boat 30 feet above the Cadillac had changed from closed to open. He's a tricky guy, that Dali.
      Friday brought us to the contemporary arts museum. This was very contemporary; mostly a series of video installations. So we watched some, and made hand-puppets of others. I don't recommend going to any other museums after you've been to the Dali museum; we were well adored by the security guard who followed us through our visit. Security guards just don't understand interactive art.
      Here I am with a tourist.
      Has anyone seen the gun-show?

20070626

      Good cheerful morning to you, fellow travelers. It is not impossible, and perhaps not difficult, but certainly adventurous, to arrive in a foreign land and navigate one's way to a bed of uncertain existence. So it was last night that I managed to find my way by bus to the Plaza Cataluna at 3am. When an 11:45 arrival is delayed an hour, and you add on the time it takes to carefully collect as much information at the airport as may be useful later, then throw in a long bus ride, this is about right. I landed only several blocks from a hostel which probably had open beds, but decided that the concierge giving me directions to the hostel was friendly enough that I should splurge and get a hotel for the night, and enjoy proper sleep and proper shower. This morning, I have extended my splurge for 3 more days, and I am happy to write you from my private desk, freshly shaven, and feeling quite dapper. It feels _great to have a desk!
      So it is that I am here in my hotel enjoying the first bit of privacy and relaxation I've had in ten days. I will see the outside of the hotel soon enough, but for now I am pleasantly realizing that there is a reason to pay extra for better accommodations.

20070625

      Bored fellow traveler. It is true that I have not placed any of these entries online, though I have been diligently adding to them each day. To my knowledge, Amsterdam has 5 computers at the StayOkay Hostel, and several more at an Internet cafe I discovered yesterday after its 6pm closing hour. Apart from these, I'm not sure there are any computers in the city except my cardboard-covered VAIO, and other such laptops brought into this Internet-free city.
      I dined last night in Chinatown at a fine Thai restaurant. For under EU30, I had fried prawn balls before my fried cuttlefish with peppers, and plenty of hot sake and jasmine tea. Any time I'm having hot sake with jasmine tea, the meal is guaranteed to be good. I'm not sure, though, what to make of the fat cat that cleaned himself by the table across from me. He has either no need, or no trouble catching himself enough mice to eat.
      I woke early this morning to eat my breakfast and pack my backpack, so I could return my bike and get to the central train station. After an hour's wait (I got #401 today, when they were serving #350), I found out that a train ticket would cost EU250, and last overnight. I had found a plane ticket for 9:30pm costing only EU118 last night, but thought I could save half that by taking the train. So much for thinking. So I went through 4 more lines to get a ticket to the airport. (FYI, Europe is a cash place. Any time you have less than EU25 on you, you should start looking for an ATM. If you're taking a train, you should not have less than EU100 on you in case you need to pay for a special ticket.) At the airport, it only took another several lines before I had found a pay phone which could dial the 0800 number for my air-carrier and order the ticket for only EU120! This would all have been easier today if 1) I had listened to advice of others which said that trains are always more expensive for long travel, and 2) if the lady at the Vueling ticket window busy taking a personal call had not lied that her computer was down just to get rid of the line. (Incidentally, it took her five minutes to pause the phone to tell me she could do nothing for me). So here I am enjoying the company of you and Chomsky and waiting to travel. Knowing that every time I travel consumes a full day, I think I might skip Menorca, or try to do a short day-trip and focus my time in Barcelona on enjoying the subtleties of the city. As one of my Australian friends describes it, I much prefer to be a traveler than a tourist.
      For those of you patient enough to have read my words, you'll understand why this next picture is called "Spot the Italian."

20070624

      Yesterday I finished telling you about the Van Gogh Museum and the nice cafe. Today I sit at a "Lunch & Koffie" a short ride from the Rijksmuseum. I have just finished a nice conversation with an Amsterdamian about all things worldly. As it turns out, things are not all sunshine and roses even in Europe. To this day, Switzerland's economy is bolstered by their use of strict immigration policies to prevent permanent residency of foreign workers. This allows them to hire cheap labour from abroad and keep them only for long enough to capture cheap labour from immigrants who do not have the ability to demand better pay. Oh well, it could be worse; at least it's all consensual.
      At the end of yesterday, in the cafe, I met a local man who is quite nice and a self-taught inventor. He has led an interesting life, currently consumed by his fight to keep contact with his daughter, who was kidnapped by her mother who Polish courts awarded custody to even after this. I have heard in law classes about similar Polish legal issues, and it is very educational to have this concrete example. After a long discussion with him, I went home which took me through the red light district. This is a very interesting place; sex workers have very hard jobs, even with the liberal system of regulations Amsterdam uses to make things easier for them. For anyone ready to condemn the red light district, I offer the reminder that every city has its own prostitution districts, but that in most cities it is not safe to walk through these areas, and the police offer no recourse for women against violent crimes. Here in Amsterdam, at least, things are kept civil.
      ( . . . Rain drives me away and I visit the Rijksmuseum . . .)

      After the rain drove me from my cafe, I toured the Rijksmuseum, which has a wonderfully manicured small garden in which the entrance line forms. The museum itself is a wonderful example of Dutch architecture using varicolored bricks to create ornamental patterns in the building without adding to the cost. The Rijksmuseum has a smaller collection that I had expected from the outside, but it features Rembrandt's enormous painting, Night Watch. It also has a 4 meter, 1/12th scale model warship that is over 300 years old, and numerous amazing examples of Dutch realism. Their use of light and their advances in color theory really make these masterpieces stand out. Another noteworthy piece is a doll house which cost as much as a small villa, with ornate perfect miniatures by very skilled artisans. The level of detail and quality sustained in this doll house is sufficient that I would be delighted to live in a life-size replica of it.
      After the museum, I went off for a random bike ride. I found several things you might find interesting: First, how do you get pianos into your house when the staircase is really a ladder? You construct houses with outward-slanting faces so people can attach a pulley to the top and lift without breaking windows. And what if you're just too lazy to take the stairs? Put an elevator outside!
      Can you think of a better way than this for two kids to have fun in traffic?
      Don't forget that you're never too ill to bicycle.
      This is a pigeon party.
      This is a Jon party.
      This is a high quality rental bike. It looks like crap so it won't get stolen. When the Germans lost the war, they fled Amsterdam to Germany by bicycle, which is only a 12 hour ride; but they stole all the best bikes they could find to do so. To this day, Amsterdam has had only crappy bikes because good bikes stand out from the rest and are almost certain to be stolen. To this day, Amsterdam shouts at soccer matches against Germany "Give us our grandfathers' bikes back!"
      This is VondelPark, just next to the StayOkay Hostel.
      Incidentally, all the canals around Amsterdam make it a wonderful place for night and evening photography or just walking.
      If you're a guy and you need to use the bathroom on the street, you can use one of these public urinals. It's all the fun of peeing in a dark corner of an alley but without the loneliness of peeing alone.

20070623

      This afternoon (6:15 pm, to be precise), I sit outside a cheap cafe in a neighborhood of Southern Amsterdam which I am told by the two counter-cultural looking women who just bought me an espresso is one of the more desirable neighborhoods of Amsterdam. I had the brilliance to rent a bike for EU5/day and bike in whatever directions looked pleasing until I found this place, which has given me an enormous amount of food and a soup for what will probably be less than EU10. This must be how non-tourists survive here. I am now eating one of my two pita shoarmas and it is excellent! I think it is curried french-cut lamb. Unfortunately my conversation with the women was cut short by a short rain shower, typical of Amsterdam, but I did manage to have a fragment of a conversation with them and discover that the free culture here is great for adults, but dangerous for children. Any small child with a 16 year old friend can get hold of weed, which can permanently impair their development before they have a chance to make an informed decision.

      For anyone traveling soon to Amsterdam, I recommend getting your own bicycle and heading off at random; or if you want to follow my footsteps to a local deli, go to Rooseveltllan 67 (at the intersection with Waalstraat) to Lunchroom Broodje. Order the shoarma, or 2 and a soup if you want to be stuffed for cheap. The neighborhood, however, is deceptive. The buildings are all large monoliths which could just as easily be a housing project as a desirable neighborhood. I suppose their location near Centrum makes them quite attractive.
      I should also tell you what I did earlier today: The Van Gogh Museum. It was nice. Unfortunately, you should not expect to see Starry Night; perhaps the Louvre has that one. If you are an art-buff like me, you should budget at least 30 minutes to see the whole thing. (Just kidding; I spent over 2 hours there, though you can do all the Van Gogh easily in 1:30, assuming the crowds aren't any worse for you than they were for me. Seriously, it made me a bit agorophobic, which is not normal at all for me.) In fact, I'm not supposed to say this since it sounds so remarkably uncultured, but you're probably better off looking at postcards by Van Gogh, since his style is best regarded from a distance not permitted by the hordes of spectators. The entire religious experience of art-viewing is destroyed when you must deal with people walking in and out of the art, and when you must limit yourself from soaking too long in the warmth of a piece. So, postcards and art-books it is, in the privacy of your own home, or in a local cafe with a fine cappuccino.

      But also at the Van Gogh Museum, quite fortunately, was another exhibit hidden in the half of the museum that crowds don't see. This Max Berkman (sp?) exhibit was really incredible; I wish I had some pictures for you, but they were prohibited. All decent artists are either insane, or have a focused angst rising near the level of insanity. Berkman seems to have problems with women, and later with Nazis. One piece in particular of his struck me: a simple pen-sketch of a dream, he stands on the edge of the left-half of a bridge which would cross the entire canvas except for a section in the middle of the bridge which has been removed. Standing on this dark left-half of the bridge and about to fall into the chasm below, he is trying to reach the lighter right half of the bridge. At the bottom of the chasm is a nude woman laid out below, her mons ready to catch the artist when he falls. So far as I can read into the piece, it's a compelling display of man's need for woman to complete him, and man's fear of the loss of self which necessarily accompanies this transformative experience. Best of all, it's done in simple and powerful ink. As I will say time and time again, I wish I could have a picture for you; instead I must use 1000 words.

20070622

      Today is my third day in Amsterdam, and I am loving it here. Within a minute of stepping off the plane, I knew what an orderly society this would be, since even the luggage belts at the airport are designed to cooperate with each other to keep bags properly separated by delaying the chain of predecessors whenever the successor was too immediate. (Looking closely at this picture, you can see the little laser-reflector the system uses to detect bags as they cross from one belt to the next).

      My first night in the hostel, however, did present one incident: I had fallen asleep on my bed, and woke to the realization that I had never put sheets on the bed. Not realizing that this was because the bed already had sheets, I took a folded set of new sheets from the empty bed above and started to make mine, which had no folded sheets on it. As I was doing this, a guy came in and asked me what I was doing to his bed. He had already made my bed. I explained to him that this was my assigned bed, and he argued that it was now his bed because he had made it, and placed his clothes upon it. We went back and forth for about a minute before he finally realized that I was not backing down, and that the main office would side with me, whose assigned bed this was. Looking back, I now realize that he was just angry at me because he had tried to cheat me out of my bottom bunk, having himself been assigned a top bunk which he did not want. It is now almost 6pm here, and he is still sleeping in bed. I suppose he likes bed; he took several minutes when making his bed that first night just to fluff the starch out of his fresh sheets while cursing me under his breath.
      Having told this story, I should say that hostels are usually quite a nice experience wince most people recognize the level of collegiality required to maintain workable relationships, but when the system breaks down it breaks down massively.
      Yesterday I saw the Anne Frank Museum, which is situated within the house she actually hid in. It was rather moving, entering this house and standing in the places where we know actually stood and breathed some sixty years ago. I was disappointed, however, that the museum chose to frame her experience as only a Jewish experience, and not to relate the historical Holocaust to modern day and ongoing genocides. Also, the end of the exhibit is always a temporary installation, and the current installation is an "exploration of the boundaries of fundamental rights," including such 'difficult' questions as whether free speech should be allowed even for hate speech, whether freedom of religion should include the right to wear headscarves to school, and so on. The exhibit showed videos of offensive uses of these fundamental freedoms and asked people to vote whether the fundamental freedom should be observed, or whether each particular video clip went so far from propriety as to abridge the freedom. So far as I could tell, especially by the voting habits which were predictably biased toward restrictions of freedom, the point of the exhibit was to show that these fundamental freedoms must occasionally be restricted by resort to value systems of the majority. This is a message in stark contrast to the rest of Amsterdam, which professes freedom of thought, religion, expression, etc. as fundamental bases for cooperative democracy. Nonetheless, if you want an interesting feeling, go to the Anne Frank Museum. I have a feeling I will recommend tomorrow that you see Van Gogh and others first, though, to make best use of time.

      I also went yesterday to the "Heineken Brewery Experience." It turns out that the third word in the name is the most important: Although this used to be a functioning brewery, it has been transformed into a walk-in advertisement with Disney-style effects. From start to finish, the brewery acts just as a beer commercial, indoctrinating the unsuspecting visitors who believe that their admission price has purchased them entrance to a real bit of genuine history.
      My favorite educational parts of this museum were the two rides: First, walking into a small movie theatre, you will wonder why you're given bars to stand between, but then you realize their purpose is to give you a grip while the floor shakes beneath your feet, and you watch the screen as if you are a Heineken bottle moving down the assembly line to be washed, filled, capped, boxed, shipped, and ultimately drank to the tune of "Celebration." The second ride is a horse-drawn carriage ride through the streets of Amsterdam. You sit in a hydraulic wooden carriage, watching a screen as you pass all the happy young school children waiving at the pretty Heineken kleidsdales. Funny enough, many parents apparently think it a great idea to bring their adolescents to the Heineken Brewery Experience. My next favorite part of the tour was the TV-area where you sit down almost totally reclined into a comfortable chair and look up at a TV screen in the top of the curving chair, using your paws to press either forward or back to view Heineken advertising from 1955 until present day. Naturally, there are fewer of the older than the newer advertisements, but the curious side of me wonders what gems are hiding in Heinekens past which are not publicized in this marketing show. You can see in this photo how happy is the Canadian to whom I gave my extra beer token! (Incidentally, he had already used his 3 tokens, and 2 others provided by a father whose young son wanted only a single Coke).
      Today I went on a bicycle tour of downtown, with Mike's Bikes and Rachelle. One of our leaders was a lady named "Mike" who was dressed in a white fur vest and had spiky white hair. I believe that she could probably kill me handily in a knife fight, but she professes no extraordinary skills at such. The tour was nice, though it started to rain just as we transitioned from the biking to the boat-riding part of the tour. We went all around the city on bikes, including Chinatown and the Red Light District. Our guide also explained the way that Amsterdam attempts to curb crime related to various fringe activities by drawing them away from the fringes through legitimization, which allows sex workers to pay taxes and drug users to get needles and treatment. It was a very nice tour, though I'd suggest perhaps a walking tour if you want to avoid criticisms of our President. All in all, it was a great introduction to Amsterdam, which seems to be a place highly affected by, ironically, the free trade of the 1600s laying the ground work for the free lifestyles of the 1960s.
      I have just now arrived home from the Boom Comedy Theatre with Rachelle, which was absolutely hilarious improvisational comedy. I won the first free drink of the night for "Skeletor" as the answer to "Thing." Apparently you have to be really good to perform as a main act in Amsterdam, since these guys were amazing. If you enjoy shows like "Whose Line is it Anyway," you must go see the thing live in person, because the experience is much more dynamic when you have the opportunity to interact with the performance. However, if you don't want to hear criticisms of the current president (and this will probably hold true in the future as well,) I think you might be better off avoiding Amsterdam altogether. This advice also holds if you are readily offended. The number of references to naughty bits and verbs in this act was enough to shock all but the most seasoned veterans of toilet and sexual humor.
      Speaking of the Marquis du Sade, we visited the Sex Museum before going to the Comedy Theatre. EU3 was about what this short "museum" was worth. It's a nice little walk-through in the style of sensationalism rather than history. It was, however, very worth the visit for anyone interested in opening their mind a bit further in an area so typically repressed. At occasional turns, a motion-activated mannequin will spring to life, like the flasher who pops from an alley to reveal the contents of his trench coat. Also, there is an area marked "Enter at your own risk" for those brave enough and interested in seeing more fringe behavior. Of course, this area is not for many people.

      I am now sitting at the sofas of the hostel next to the vending machine watching a guy operate the vending machine and grunt in what is either a foreign language or a mushroom trip gone wrong. I'm not sure it makes a difference whether he's speaking any language or not; he is clearer from the outside looking in than I think he is from the inside looking out. I cannot begin to fathom the difficulties he is going through trying to decide what to do.
      Incidentally, for all those of you who share my love of sundials, here is a building in the center of Amsterdam which has both a main and a backup sundial on the front! I suppose this is some form of redundancy for fault-tolerance in case one of the sundials ices over or is covered by clouds.



      If you look closely in this picture you can see the herd of men making the cattle-call toward the red light district.