On to India

First of all, most recent pictures are up here.

Yikes! Well it seems I've gotten a bit behind in my updates. I finally got around to copying my journal entries and uploading my pictures from my time in France, but I've still got Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Bergen, and the Norwegian Fjords that I haven't posted about. Maybe I will eventually, but probably not for at least a month, and probably not quite as verbosely as I have been. I think that's my downfall - I never have enough time to write it all. Maybe one day I'll learn to summarize (I must have missed that week in junior high).

But there was a little bit of a curve ball thrown into my plans - in a good way. While in Norway I got an offer to go to India with d.light design, a startup formed by some Stanford grads who are trying to create an affordable and safe lighting solution to be used in rural India. So I cut the Europe trip short, flew back to DC to see my family for a week, and I'm about to head out to New Delhi in a couple of hours. A bit crazy, but I'm super psyched. If I'm ever at a computer, I'll try to post a couple of quick updates.

What a summer.

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Munich & Weimar

Finally done with Amsterdam, I made my way to Berlin with a couple of stops en route. The first stop was Munich, capital of beer-drenched Bavaria. I felt my family had already well-explored Bavaria on our visits to Nuremberg, Regensberg, and Passau, but everyone said Munich was a must-see so I opted for a quick trip.

It was worth it for the Deutsches Museum alone. The place was like the Louvre of technology and science. It was huge (ok, not quite as huge as the Louvre) and I would have needed days to sufficiently explore it. They had exhibits on everything from ship-building to microelectronics to power machinery to tunnel construction to pharmacology to musical instruments. In each section there were examples (copies or originals) of all the innovations of note in that field, explaining the importance of each step in the technology. There were demonstrations (most ear-splittingly in the electricity lab) and interactive exhibits (most playfully in bridge-building). They even had a whole seciton on photography including eamples of every kind of camera bod and lens since the invention of film. Wow. This place would make anyone with any interest in science or technology feel like a kid in a candy shop.

After exploring the Deutsches Museum the best I could in my time constraints and without making my brain explode, I was planning on making late afternoon trip to the concentration camp at Dachau to see the darker side of German innovation. Unfortunately after my 25 minute ride on the commuter train to the suburbs, the train station attendant informed me that Dachau is closed on Mondays. Stupid guidebook, "9am-5pm daily" my rear end.

I was too tired to do anything else when I got back to the hostel, so I conked out for 5 hours before going to explore the city at night. It was much more pleasant at night, without the mobs of tourists and the sweltering heat. Despite being 11pm on a Wednesday, there were lots of people out and about, going for walks or bicycling home. Young people all gathered to drink and chat on the benches and steps of old buildings along the traffic circle of Gartnerplatz. There was also some kind of concert going on in the Schwabing, the student section of town, all making for a pleasant nighttime stroll.

The next day I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Weimar, the capital of Germany during the interwar period of the Weimar Republic in the 1920's. Despite this political importance, the place was tiny. Miniscule, even. I have no idea how it would have been the seat of a national government. I was staying in a place called Hababusch, which is an unrestored 19th century house run cooperatively by a bunch of college students who live there, manage the rooms, and (occasionally) man the reception. It felt a lot like a co-op at Stanford and having spent my senior year in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest I felt quite at home. Plus it was dirt cheap.

Having missed Dachau, I decided to go to Buchenwald, another concentration camp just outside Weimar's (diminutive) city limits. The Allies ha bombed the hell out of the place so a lot of it was just rubble, but that made it even more eery. One of the few buildings left standing was the furnace room where they burned the bodies. Buchenwald was mostly a forced labor camp, full of men and boys forced to work on revenue-producing projects for the Nazis. The SS would rent out a factory, workers included, to various companies requiring manual labor. Prisoners were sometimes even dragged into Weimar itself to work on construction projects in the city (although this was limited to prevent visibility of the conditions under which the prisoners were kept). This was also where hordes of Russion POW's were sent. Most were shot upon arrival. Another of the still-standing buildings was the "examination room" here Russian POW's were told to stand on a scale facing away from the wall, and then would be shot in the nape of the neck from a slit in the wall. They would then be piled into a wheelbarrow and carted next door to be incinerated. They were then ropped in mass graves in the woods. Now they have installed metal poles along the burial sites to commemorate the dead.

Here the Nazis also conducted medical experiments on prisoners, infecting them with various diseases to test cures or just to watch and document the person's slow progression toward death. This building was leveled, however, so only the foundations remain. There was also a museum with various displays and artefacts on the SS, the prisoners, and the setup of the place. One photo I saw was extremely haunting, of a prisoner looking into the camera immediately before he was shot. The museum also had an exhibit on photographers who chronicled what happened there, including some prisoners who somehow managed to take photos while the camp was still running (most of them were otherwise in charge of taking ID pictures of incoming inmates; that's how they had access to camera equipment). Most of the photographs on display, however, were taken by Allied war correspondents. This included Lee Miller, who I'd learned about at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

On a lighter note, one of the other things I'd come to see in Weimar was the Bauhaus Museum. The Bauhaus design school was basically the forerunner of most modern western design, so as I'd felt the need to brush up on my art history credentials by visiting museums in Paris, there was no way I could skip out on visiting the birthplace of the Bauhaus. Well it was a good thing I got a lot out of my visit to Buchenwald, because the Bauhaus Museum was a bust. There were only three small rooms open to the public with some works that were not very well-labeled or explained. What little signage they did have was entirely in German. It took me about 20 minutes to walk through the whole place, and I didn't get much out of it. Too bad, but luckily there was another Bauhaus Museum in Berlin to try.

So it was back to the co-op for a good night's sleep before finally heading to Berlin...

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Three Gay Pride Parades

I hadn't planned it this way, but Sevilla, Barcelona, and Amsterdam were all having their Pride Parades when I was in town, and I wasn't complaining. In Sevilla and Barcelona I was with the rugby team, so that made it even more fun. We didn't know that Sevilla Pride was going to be that weekend until we stumbled across the stage the night beforehand with their banners strung up and their flags flying. They were having a pre-party with some smarmy Spanish love ballads being sung by a woman and her band who seemed like a lot of rejected acts from that Adam Sandler movie The Wedding Singer. The impression was confirmed when she broke into a barely recognizable "It's Raining Men."

We spent too long at the beach the next day and missed the parade (they didn't walk very far), but we made it there for the rally and the party afterwards. it was in a big open plaza in the middle of an area with bars lining the path alongside of the road. There were stands set up seling beer for a euro (!) and people were sitting around in groups talking to friends. It wasn't a big gathering, maybe a couple hundred people tops.

From this experience we soon learned that in Spain, to indicate you're a lesbian, there is only one permissible haircut: the mullet. In clothing there are a couple of options, one being the baggy jeans dragging on the floor with a studded leather belt holding them up and a tank top (for the guns, I suppose). Option two is some sort of flowing, thin fabric, loose-fitting hippie type pants. But the mullet is really the key.

Unfortunately the music wasn't better than the previous night, mostly consisting of a whiny Indigo Girls wannabe duo sporting (you guessed it) a matching pair of rather ridiculous mullets. Therefore nobody wanted to dance and people started to leave pretty early, so it wasn't a very convivial atmosphere. We stayed for a while and had some drinks at a bar alongside before giving up and heading home to catch a couple hours of sleep before heading out on a long trip the next day.

Barcelona Pride was exponentially better. First of all, we actually got there in time for the parade this time. It wasn't a huge parade, not anywhere near San Francisco, but apparently the big one this year (actually the "official" one for all of Europe) was happening the same day in Madrid. There were all sorts of different groups and clubs marching: the standard AIDS awareness/find a cure, parents & allies, students, no to transphobia, etc. etc.). We fell in behind a group of drummers and dancers dressed all in white. Eventually they asked one of my teammates to join and she almost kept up. Later we joked that she should have danced completely off-beat to teach them a cultural lesson for picking the only black one out of the group and assuming she could dance. In the meanwhile, she was getting her picture taken left and right, so she may just end up on the cover of Out&Proud, who knows.

The parade was a lot more fun and the music was also a lot better. The mullet and studded belt + baggy jeans or hippy clothes rule was still mostly in effect, though not as completely as in Sevilla. We went to the after party that night in a big park. While there were way more people, it followed Sevilla's example by having really undance-able music. This time it was some sort of radical, experimental, electro-punk.

Now Amsterdam Pride was the real deal. I'd decided to stay in Amsterdam just to see it, and I was newly refreshed and well-nourished after my trip to Brugges. It was a huge affair, with events starting a week ahead of time and the schedule really getting packed starting three days beforehand. There were even multiple parties every night, including street parties with huge stages hosting DJ's and shows. One night I went to dance to the DJ at the Homomonument, a memorial along one of the ring canals to the gays killed in the Holocaust. A somber theme, but the corner is now also home to the Pink Point info center, which hosted parties every night of Pride. Another night I went to Rembrandtsplein and watched a huge drag show being put on there, stopping by a stage playing popular Dutch music on the way (which had about 10% of the audience that the drag show did).

The real deal, however, was on Saturday. The distinguishing factor of Amsterdam Pride is that it takes place on water. It starts at the north of the city by the train station and follows one of the ring canals all the way back around. It was supposed to start at 2pm, and by the time a got to a spot a third of the way along the route, everywhere was packed. Luckily a nice woman with her elderly mom made some room for me next to them. She said that everyone in Amsterdam comes to support the Pride Parade; "It's not just for gay people, you know." She'd come every year, and even hosted parties for it. There were whole families out and people had clearly planned their weekend around this. All along the sides of the canals were parked boats of spectators, often dressed in their own theme. This was a huge difference from the parade in Spain that people would pause for a second to look at, but wouldn't join in, and usually didn't seem to know it was happening.

The parade itself was huge, wildly varied, raunchy and political, but also with some of the more wholesome causes. But mostly it was a big camp display. It was basically the SF Pride Parade on water.

After the official parade went by, then everybody else followed along the canals in their own boats. The rest of the day consisted of techno music and people dancing all along the waterways, past sunset. There were even more street parties and stage performances. The streets around the main stages were packed with throngs of people, and litter was piled so high that you couldn't see the street anymore in those areas. I was glad I'd worn close-toed shoes. The Argentinian guy from my hostel that I was hanging out with was not so lucky. We hung out with some people we met from Rotterdam, up for the day, and had a great time despite the fact that the music on the main stage sucked (theme?). I have no idea how that happened since the music had been really great all the other nights. But they had on this band that was kind of like the MTV boy band spoof group 2gether, except they were two guys and two girls, which only made for more cheesy couple duets and choreography. But there were, thankfully, many other stages, and the night went on.

All in all, the Amsterdam Pride was really a much bigger spectacle, had way more events going on over a larger time span, and had exponentially more people participate. But I kind of liked the Barcelona parade, where we could walk with whatever group we wanted, unlike the official-ness of the Amsterdam parade with its sponsored boats and traffic routers. And Amsterdam Pride did lose some credibility with its distinct lack of mullets. How else are you going to tell people apart?

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Brugges: Chocolate, Waffles, Stew. (Real food, oh goodness yes.)

When I decided to stay for the Gay Pride Parade in Amsterdam, I also decided that I needed to get out of town for a bit before I went crazy. So I took an overnight trip to Brugges, Belgium. I picked it because 1) I hadn't been to Belgium, 2) It seemed more interesting than Brussels, and 3) It was supposed to have good food. I had a great time.

Brugges is a little touristy town in Western Belgium that is reknowned for its quaint medieval buildings. Most of them were actually destroyed and rebuilt over the past 200 years, so technically they're not really medieval but I guess it's the ambience they're going for. And since the canal silted over, they haven't been a trading center for centuries. No, with the reconstructed buildings and canals all over, they've turned their sights on tourists. They've been remarkably successful, and the place seems to be a magnet for middle-aged American and European tourists. But, for some reason, it didn't really bother me like it has some other places.

First stop, waffles. And oh, what waffles they were, with real, rich, melted chocolate and some ice cream. See, it's not hard to make me happy, really. It helped that I was in the little back courtyard of this hidden-away little restaurant, with lots of lush plants and a little fountain to keep me company.

Afterwards, I was able to see the standard sights pretty quickly: climb the church bell tower for a view, see Michaelangelo's sculpture "The Mother and Child" in another church (he worked on this as a study break while working on David), and a stroll around the Beginhof, a religious community for widows and unmarried women during the middle ages. They also had a community in Amsterdam that I'd visited. Then it was time for a little snack, so I had some French, I mean Flemish, Fries (I had to, they were invented here), with the local favorite meat sauce topping.

So, with all the things I wanted to see seen and a couple of good hours of sunlight left, I rented a bike and rode it out down a well-work path along
a canal to the little village of Damme, 6km away. There were farms and windmills (both the historic and actually functioning, electricity-producing kind), grazing cows and lush trees, and other bikers everywhere along the canal. I was having such a great time that I kept going past Damme down the path, got pleasantly lost for a while, and made my way back to Brugges. It was a beautiful day and I felt a great sense of freedom biking around for kilometers and kilometers in any direction I liked. It had also been a while since I'd done any excercise, and I had been missing it without even realizing that I did.

I arrived back to Brugges invigorated and read for a real meal, which I got at Cafe In Den Wittenkop (don't ask me what it means). It had a warm tavern-y atmosphere, playing jazz music in the background. the waiter and all the other guests were dressed sharply, but didn't make me feel bad for my baggy jeans and slightly damp t-shirt. I had a great meal of mussels and beef stew with copious amounts of free warm rolls, and I went back to my hostel, took a shower, and went to bed smiling, with a full stomach, and completely content. Like I said, I had a great time.

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Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is expensive and full of tourists. So expensive that I continued my inadvertent vegetarianism that I'd picked up in Paris, and so full of tourists that I had to change hotels three times in the week I was there because nobody had room for me for more than a couple consecutive nights.

The first hostel was called Hotel Sphinx on the southern end of town, which was inconvenient because the train station was on the north end. But it was the only place that could take me and was under 50 euro (although only just). I stayed there one night before moving to Hotel Bulldog, which was run by a chain of *ahem* coffee shops. Despite that, it actually turned out to be quite well run, and the best hostel I stayed in of the three. It was clean, quiet (perhaps partially because everyone was so zoned out), and had lots of food (which also follows...), and a couple of nice comfy couches to watch movies (ditto). It was also located right in the heart of Amsterdam's famous red-light district, so I could watch college frat boys walk out of prostitutes' rooms and pop their collars while smirking to their friends, waiting to give them high fives. OK, so that only happened once, but it made an impression. Most of the time you could walk by the prostitutes without even noticing, as they were all down small side alleys. That is, except for the ones who had their offices on the backside of the old church. But if you did go down one of those back alleys, you would be greeted by women in white bikinis with blacklit rooms striking a pose or flirting with male passers-by. Either that or a closed curtain...

Anyhoo, the third hostel I stayed in was also in the red light district, called Hotel the Globe. It had a pub downstairs that was always full of rowdy British, Irish, or Italian football (soccer) fans watching the satellite TV, drinking beer and yelling at each other. The first night in my 8-person room was me, 6 girls, and one guy. But all of the girls left and the next day a group of six rowdy Italian guys moved in and would not ever leave (except at 1am to come back at 6am) or shut up. Sigh. But I did make friends with the cleaning guy who came from Ghana and told me about all of his family that he's supporting back home (three sisters, two brothers, and his mom).

Back on the food note, Amsterdam didn't seem to have a lot of its own "signature" dishes, but they did have a lot of immigrants, and therefore a lot of foreign food (especially Indonesian, for some reason). The unfortunate thing was that this food conformed to Amsterdam prices, which were really high. If I was too cheap to eat out in Paris where there were at least some budget options, there was no way I was going to pay 20 euro for an OK meal in Amsterdam. For under 10 or 15 euro in Paris you could get decent cheap street food and healthy alternatives (fruit, nuts, yoghurt), but the only food in that range in Amsterdam was junk food. We're talking candied apples, donuts, and ice cream. There were always also the french fry stands - actually they call them Flemish Fries as they were invented in Belgium (who knew?) - but grease and mashed potatoes can only keep you going for so long. So I was pretty excited when I discovered a couple of branches of the Maoz falafel chain I had so relied on in Barcelona. It wasn't quite as good as in Barcelona (no chickpeas or cauliflower and the falafel balls were smaller), but it was a meal for 5 euro that would fill me up. And when you need three meals a day and the euro's going for $1.50, after a while I couldn't really afford more than that.

So, yeah, besides eating and sleeping, I did actually do some touristing around in Amsterdam. The main touristy features were the canals that spread in concentric horshoes around the city center and the bicycles that everyone used as a mode of transport. Everywhere you turned there were picturesque canals with dinged up little boats cruising around as locals and tourists alike zipped by on bicycles (or left them stacked artistically on the street). That accompanied by the red brick buildings with the gabled roofs did make quite a romantic little picture. Except that it would not stop f-ing raining, which kind of put a damper (no pun intended) on my desire to take a casual stroll.

And, not being 100% museum-ed out, I did manage to convince myself to go to the Anne Frank House, the Van Gogh Museum, the Photography Museum, and the Rijksmuseum (housing a bunch of Dutch masterpieces). The secret attic of the Anne Frank house was much larger than I had imagined. For some reason I imagined throughout the book that they were all ducking to walk around; I don't know where I got that idea. But if I though reading her diary was pretty personal, it was nothing compared to walking through her room and seeing the posters and magazine clippings she'd pasted on the wall - not to mention her handwriting in the original journal itself. Seeing everyone's pictures and where they slept and ate and listened to the radio made the reality of their deaths that much more horrible.

While that sobering trip was definitely the most compelling of the things I saw in Amsterdam, the others were also worth a visit. The Van Gogh Museum was my second favorite. I especially liked learning about how he started so late and never really mastered all of the technical aspects of painting (he often still used a perspective frame to help him get his sketches right), but was still able to create things that had such an impact on people. It give my artistically challenged self hope, anyway. The painters in the Rijksmuseum were the exact opposite. Apparently the Dutch masters were all about smoothness, detail, and technical precision. Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" might have been exquisitely crafted and a breakthrough in portraying active portraits, but frankly it was boring. I liked Van Gogh better.

The photography museum (FOAM) was kind of like the one in Paris in that they both didn't really seem to have a permanent collection but were just spotlighting certain artists at the moment. The mixup of artists was kind of strange but I particularly liked a retrospective on the work of Jacques Henri Lortigue, a French guy who captured everyday life throughout the 20th century through action shots. His photos were fun, and didn't have some of the over-dramatization of the other artists.

And I almost forgot, there was also the "Heineken Experience," which was a Disneyland version of a brewery tour, even including one of those movies where the floor shakes around (to make you feel like you're a bottle going through the factory). But they give you enough beer that you couldn't actually drink it all without getting completely wasted at 3pm, so that's where my money went I suppose. I went with Chrstine, a Portuguese-Canadian girl just finishing up a couple of years in Ireland organizing skateboarding competitions, who I'd met in the Bulldog hostel and hung out with for a couple of days. That made downing glass after glass of beer at the plastic-feeling bar a little less awkward than it would have been had I gone alone.

Overall, I probably would only have stayed in Amsterdam 3 or 4 days, but I found out the Pride Parade was going to be be that weekend so I decided to stay longer. It was a long time to spend in one place on this kind of trip, and I was getting a bit sick of it in the end. I saw a lot of interesting stuff and met a few cool people, but in the end I got sick of stuff like the frat boy smirking out of the prostitutes' room an people assaulting me on the street corner telling me that I don't really know how to party if I don't come on their expensive all-night bar hopping, binge drinking tour. As a tourist, the place kind of felt like a kids' playground, not to sound like too much of a prude. It was fun for a couple of days, but beyond that a bit tiring. I have no conception what it would be like to live there; I imagine those are two completely different worlds. I realize now that whether I am well-fed or not also has a great deal to do with my mood, and in Amsterdam I wasn't particularly well-fed. So that might have something to do with it...

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