New Delhi

So, I've been in Delhi for about a week. Well, actually, I've been in Noida, Uttar Pradesh (which is kind of a suburb of Delhi). There are 7 people traveling in India for d.light right now: the president and CEO are here in a ridiculous number of meetings, another MBA and friend are doing some needfinding for them, and I'm in the second needfinding group. I'm here with Erica, a Mechanical Engineer who is one of the original team members for the company, and Rohan, a Mechanical Engineer who was a classmate of Erica's and who is from India.

We're staying with Rohan's family in Noida, and that has made life approximately a billion times more convenient than if we were on our own. His family is great, they feed us really well, and they have a car and driver that takes us to all of our meetings. So we can really just concentrate on the work and not worry about the hundreds of tiny little details that can consume daily life when worrying about where you're staying, where you're eating, and how to get from point A to point B.

Rohan also got here a day later than Erica and I, so we got our sightseeing out of the way then - we went to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, and then a bit further afield to see Fatehpur Sikri. They're all monumental Mughal architecture - Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri were a fort/palace complex and a whole city/palace built by the "greatest" Mughal emperor Akbar for himself. The Taj Mahal was built by the megalomaniac Shah Jahan as a tomb for his favorite wife, supposedly (although he clearly also built it partly to show how great he was). We woke up at the crack of dawn to get to the Taj Mahal by 6:15am to miss the crowds and the heat, and it was definitely worth it. It was every bit the marvel everyone says it is, especially since they've moved all of the industry out of Agra to keep the area pollutant-free in order to preserve it.

This first week we've actually spent a lot of time in meetings and not as much time in the field. We've also gone around to different markets to check out competing products and see what replacement/component parts generally cost. We finally got a chance to go out and talk to people in some of the slums around Delhi on yesterday night, and we are going out again to some slums and a night market tonight. I'm excited!

Also, I've got a Delhi cell phone, so if anyone wants to talk to me my number is: 0091-9958117288

Up to top

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.

Up to top

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...

Up to top

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?

Up to top

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.

Up to top

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...

Up to top

Paris

After a really impressively fast TGV (Tres Gran Vitae) express train from Aix En Provence, my family and I arrived in Paris. I would be there for a week, the first half with my family and the second half on my own, once they'd all flown home. The first half we stated in a nice cozy little hotel right off the major street of St. Germain du Pres. The Hotel (Pas du Calais) had a little indoor courtyard with a skylight and a whole wall of flowers and vines supported by wooden latticework. We came down and sat there every morning for a breakfast of yoghurt, cheese, coffee, or tea, and fruit. While my family was there we also ate well the rest of the day, most notably on their last night when we ate at a restaurant called Los Boquinistas where waiters with crisply starched shirts served us a meal mostly consisting of very tender meat and deliciously seasoned bit-sized side dishes.

Once my family was gone, however, it was the beginning of my budget travel. I stayed in a 5-floor industrial-feeling youth hostel and ate food out of the grocery store or fruit stands along the street. I realized at the end of the week that I had, in effect, become a vegetarian for the rest of that week. It wasn't on purpose, I was just too cheap to buy any meat. Eventually on the last day I broke down and got a chicken dish at a little cafe, and probably looked quite strange to the people walking by as I devoured it. It didn't really help that in cafes in Paris, all the seats face out; the point is to allow for better people watching, but it doesn't work out so well if you don't also want the people walking by watching you.

So, besides sleeping and eating, what did I do in Paris? Well, for one, I saw a lot of museums. I mean, a lot. I spent two days in the Louvre alone: one for the ancient stuff (Greek, Egyptian, etc), and one for everything from the Middle Ages on. The Musee d'Orsay was a great stop, with a lot of Impressionist painters and a great exhibit of Art Noubeau furniture. The Pompideau Center was home to a huge collection of modern art, meant to contain a survey of modern art with a couple of works form almost every notable artist from the late 1800's one. Not only that, but it was modern art itself, a huge monstrousity of a building with all of the insides on the outside (pipes, beams, etc). I also snuck in visits to the Picasso Museum (I'd gone to see his earlier work in Barcelona, so I couldn't resist this one), and the photography museum. Whew. I spent a lot of time in these museums, listening to the audioguide, reading all the text, and generally slowing down my entire family. But I kind of felt like this was stuff I should already have known about, especially since Product Design is supposedly a great bit about, well, design, which supposedly has some relationship with this art thing. And to be honest, I really am woefully ignorant on the subject.

Well, anyways, besides my art history education, I also saw a great deal of monumental architecture. With my family I saw Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. With a couple of boys from DC (one of whom had my friend Krystal's mom as an elementary school teacher) who I met at a crepe stand, I went to go see Versailles. They were all sufficiently monumental, although I thought the gardens at Versailles were actually way more impressive than the super famous Hall of Mirrors.

Another thing I saw a lot of was tourists. As a tourist, I 'd say other tourists are probably the thing you see most. It doesn't help that by the end of the summer most local people are off being tourists somewhere else. But seeing so many tourists helps to reflect on what kind of tourist you might be yourself (or I might be myself, you know, however it should be phrased). There are the safari tourists, people dressed up like they are going to be in the African wilderness full with completely rainproof gear and vests with a ridiculous number of pockets. There are family tourists who are basically doing whatever they can to get their kids to shut up and not run into traffic. There are loud tourists, smelly tourists, quiet tourists, I've seen it all tourists, bored tourists, and tourists that are just trying to navigate all the other tourists to get into the Louvre.

The worst kind of tourist, though, is that kind who doesn't care about damaging the place they are going as long as they get a picture or souvenir. They're the kind of people who would pick an endangered flower in the rainforest to take home and show their friends. In their Paris incarnation, however, they take flash photos of light-sensitive centuries-old paintings. The Italian wing, where the Mona Lisa is kept, is the one hall of the Louvre where no photography at all is allowed (let alone with flash!). So of course there were so many flash bulbs going off that it was like the Mona Lisa was Britney Spears and we were all the paparazzi trying to catch her abusing her child. Plus there was such a huge, pushing crowd in front of the painting (people actually shoved an 8-year-old child out of the way) that I doubt anyone could get a good picture anyway. Just buy a postcard people.

But I'm not excluding myself form the strange behavior that categorizes tourists. I wear the same clothes several days in a row to avoid having to do laundry, and I take plenty of pictures too (although I try not to be obnoxious about it). I, too, get frustrated when I can't read directions or make myself understood, even though I know I can't expect anyone to speak English and my French is extremely minimal.

So, along with running into all the other tourists in museums and other sight-seeing musts, I also ended up meeting a lot of foreigners in bars and restaurants. While at a grungy cellar bar on his last night in town, Nathan and I met an English girl who was teaching art at an International School in Paris, along with her French boyfriend. Once everyone else had left, when I went out to a bar on my own I met an American woman who went to high school in DC a couple of blocks from me (at GDS) and is now a design agent in Paris. We met again for coffee later and she introduced me to her German art professor friend. And then there were the two DC boys I met at a crepe stand and went to see Versailles with. So I met a lot of people, it just so happens that none of them were French (except for the English girl's boyfriend, with whom Nathan had quite an animated, if slow, conversation). Maybe this was due to my complete incompetence in French, maybe to the fact that all the French people were out of town, or maybe I was just destined to hang out with Americans and Brits. Who knows. But in the end i saw lots of new things, met lost of new people, and learned a bit about art history. I'd chalk that up to a pretty successful week, I suppose.

Up to top

National Lampoon's European Vacation

You know those National Lampoon movies where Chevy Chase takes his family on some road trip and ends up taking a wrong turn, driving the wrong way down a one-way street, through a corn field, and into swamp (or something ridiculous like that)? Our experiences driving around France were kind of like that.

We rented a huge passenger van from the airport in Geneva. We should have know driving it would be trouble, as the entire right side was smashed in already and the paneling was missing. And we soon learned that the French road signs weren't going to help the experience either; within 10 minutes of leaving the parking lot, we had managed to make about as many wrong turns and my parents were having a shouting match about whose fault it was. Eventually we got on the right highway heading into Chambery, where we were going to do some touristing and get some lunch. Once off the highway, however, we immediately got lost again, and while trying to make a U-turn, found out that the van had the turning radius of a 100,000 passenger cruise ship. In attempting to make a 3-point turn, we realized that the reverse was not working (it was a 6-speed transmission and we later figured out you had to pull up on a ring to get into reverse). So, while blocking traffic in two directions, my mom puts the car in neutral and my brothers get out and push it back. We are now pointed in the right direction, 3/4 of the way in the street. Just as we are pulling back out, however, a truck driver thinks he can make it past us, so he comes barrelling down the street and crunches the whole left sid eof the car. There is a huge dent all along the left side and all of the paneling is sitting cracked in the road.

While Nathan collects the pieces of our car, Mom tries to talk to the driver, fairly unsuccessfully as he doesn't speak English and her French is rusty. He then pulls off onto a side road to get out of the way of traffic and immediately proceeds to hit a parked car. The driver of that car, who was sitting inside at the time, can thankfully speak some English, and so helps with the whole ordeal. After 45 minutes of debate and filling out the forms the police brought, we head off with the remains of the left side of our car piled in the trunk. We got lunch at a fancy hotel on the lake, looking up at the Alps. Then we headed to the chateau where we were staying, only making two or three wrong turns the whole way.

Our trip from the chateau to Aix En Provence was just as eventful (if not quite as damaging). I was the navigator this time, and we had directions printed out from the French equivalent of mapquest ("mappy" or something like that). I soon learned that most of the directions on paper did not correspond in any way to signs or roads that existed in reality.

The directions had us go through Grenoble, but there were no street signs that corresponded to the streets we were supposed to turn onto. Soon we were lost in downtown, with my mom pulling 3-point turns in our whale of a car like an expert now. I was rattling off names of streets we were supposed to be on at some point in the directions (each of which lasted for approximately 100 meters before changing names or forking, so that there were over a dozen street names on there). Finally we found one, but it abruptly ended and became something else not in our directions. Eventually we got out and asked directions, with the two bikers we stopped pointing different ways. We went the way the first one pointed and saw a highway sign! Glorious! It told us to go straight ahead for the highway, but 5om later we hit an intersection, and the road straight ahead went into a housing community. We arbitrarily chose right, then I saw something that looked like an onramp, so I made my mom turn onto it. It was actually an overpass, but at least now we knew where the highway was at any rate. We turned and followed alongside it until we finally found an entrance.

The plan for the day was to stop at a point along our way down to Aix-En-Provence where the Tour de France would cross our path, and then watch for a second day. Being a flat stage, things would go by much more quickly and be less interesting, so we decided to try and see a feed station. There the riders would get food and drink, so they'd have to slow down, and we might be able to get a team water bottle or something they'd thrown away. On falt stages the road only closes a couple of hours before the riders arrive (not a day ahead of time like in the mountains), but with our late start and many wrong turns, by the time we got near the turnoff we saw signs saying the road was already closed. My one navigational success for the day was managing to get us to a different point along the route (albeit after a few more wrong turns). We waited over an hour, and when the riders came it was two or three blurs in succession and then it was all over. The mountains really are the place to watch.

Back on the road again, our attempt to find the train station followed the precedent of the rest of the day. The directions said to exit towards places A, B, C, and D. Well places A&B went one way, and C&D went another. The directions did not illuminate which we were meant to take. Finally we just followed signs to the airport, as the train station was relatively close by, and got there via a quite triangular route. But we got there, and we dropped off the car. The said we would be hearing from them about the state of the car. I'm sure we will. But we were just glad to be rid of the damn thing.

Up to top

Le Tour

So, early in the morning after our last day in Budapest, we pulled ourselves out of bed to catch a 6am flight to Geneva on the Swiss side of the Alps. We drove over to the French side and made our way to a little village outside the city of Chambery, where we were staying in an old chateau up in the mountains. The chateau was amazing, a tall old brick building with ivy climbing up the walls and the rooms named after various French noblewomen and men. Although there were only six rooms in the place, this still proved rather frustrating in the end, as it was difficult to remember that I wanted to call my mom in the Count and Countess de la whatever room, rather than #6.

The rooms themselves were really comfortable, and the room I was sharing with Nathan had a bathroom in a loft with a vaulted timber ceiling. The heat and humidity up there when you were showering and the woody smell made it feel kind of like a sauna. There was a swimming pool out back and an orchard with all sorts of fruit trees. They had a tiny little 5-table restaurant where they served a lot of well-cooked and seasoned meat dishes. As we ate dinner, one of the chef's assistants would scuttle back and forth across the yard to the storage shed, returning to the kitchen with various ingredients (sometimes in a wheelbarrow).

But the most important aspect of the chateau was the helicopter pad, because that's how we were going to get up the mountain to see the Tour de France the next day.

The next morning we got up, and after a fresh breakfast of yoghurt, jam, rolls, sausages, and cheese, we all boarded the helicopter (after spending a few frantic minutes looking for my laggard little brother Josh). The reason we had to fly up is that the roads had all been closed the day before, so we wouldn't have been able to watch the stage in the mountains unless we drove up there and camped out for a day or two. My whole family had gone camping along the Gila River for a week once a couple of years ago in New Mexico, but I think that was enough for my parents for a while. So helicopter it was!

The pilot was also the owner of the chateau, a 50-60 something looking guy with what looked like frostbite scars on his nose, mouth, and chin. He had been flying for over 30 years, and had some ridiculously large amount of hours logged flying both helicopters and fixed-wing planes. He definitely has the life: owning a chateau in the mountains and flying around in a helicopter all day.

The flight over was exhilerating! We passed over farms and little viallages and swooped over and next to mountains. We were up for about half an hour and I was practically squealing with joy the whole time. It was OK, though, because we all had on ear protection, so nobody could hear me. It was really amazing to feel like a little bug in the sky, getting moved around by the wind currents (although the pilot really knew what he was doing so we didn't actually get jostled too much). Although some of the view was similar to what you could see taking off in an airplane, the feeling was entirely different. I was definitely aware of our size and the maneuverability of the smaller craft. It was awesome.

We landed in a little village near the base of the mountain, 12km from the summit. We started walking up, passing the RV's of the people who had come before the road closed to park and camp. Avid cyclers were pedaling up the route several hours ahead of the racers. There were all sorts of people biking up, from little kids to grandparents to slightly portly people I was impressed could haul themselves up so much better than I would be able at a fraction of their size. Who knew?

Nathan, Josh, and I went ahead of my parents and took a "short-cut" through the rocks and brush rather than taking the circuitously winding road. We found a spot 6 km up (halfway to the peak) that looked down on several curves of the road and was pretty steep, so we figured they'd be going slowly and we could get a better look. By the time my parents had made it up there and we had settled down and eaten some food (which Nathan had been forced to carry up there), we had killed most of the time before the race was supposed to arrive.

But before the race was the caravan, which basically consisted of a huge commercial display of floats of all the corporate advertisers of the event. Everyone was there, from tire companies to bottle water companies to banks to promoters for the new The Simpsons movie, and they all had freebies. They threw out hats and keychains and packets of pretzels and little bottles of lotion and whatever else they were advertising. Some floats had gigantic inflatable figurines, others had scantily clad women dancing on platforms to pumping techno music. It was an oddly surreal scene to be occurring in the middle of the Franch Alps halfway up a mountain on curvy one-lane roads.

After they'd passed, things were oddly silent as we waited for the riders. Spectators had gathered everywhere alongside the roads up the mountains and in any spot it was possible to get a view. People had been chatting and laughing and running around, but everyone got a little quieter when we thought the riders were coming soon. Full of anticipation, people strained their eyes looking to the distance. The first sign was a white news helicopter circling in the sky, and soon we saw a couple of breakaway riders in the distance ascending the same road we had walked up from the helicopter pad. It was probably 2 or 3pm by the time they'd reached us, and they'd been going since that morning. We watched the riders in the breakaway make their way along the curving road below us, and then saw a chase group behind them and then the peloton (the main group of riders).

Everything was a jumble of spectators and riders and team cars. I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't more accidents, with such narrow roads and nothing keeping spectators out of the way but their own etiquette. Accidents do happen (this year there were two crashes involving pets that ran into the road), but it still seemed a miracle to me that none happened where I was watching. As the breakaway and the chase group and then the peloton went by (followed by some stragglers, and the gruppetto - those just shooting to make time and avoid disqualification), spectators would lean into the road, cherring them on, and only jump back at the last second. One guy even came out into the street and gave a couple of riders a push.

We had picked a good spot, and the steepness and the distance the riders had already gone meant they were passing us pretty slowly and we got a pretty good look. Nathan knew a lot more of them than any of us, and he cheered on all the American riders by first name (he said he thinks a couple of them noticed, and hoped they were psyched to have a someone who knew them cheering them on all the way up there).

Once the last riders had passed, everyone swarmed down the road. We stopped at some RV's with TV's to crowd around and watch what was happening further on the course before we made it to the bottom to wait for the helicopter ride back. This time i sat in the front and didn't take any pictures, so that I could just sit there and be giddy the whole time. It was an amazing day.

Up to top

Cruising Central Europe: Hungary

Our final destination along the Danube was Budapest. We powered through a lot of land on the border between Hungary and Slovakia to get from Vienna that night to Budapest in the morning. Budapest is actually three towns divided by the river that have been merged into one. On the east side of the river is the flat and cramped Pest and on the west side is hilly Buda. On the west side is also mostly residential Obuda, which is further out and we didn't visit. Together, they make Budapest. We got a bit of a chance to see the monumental structures and figure out the lay of the land as we sailed into town at the crack of 8am.


[View of Budapest Parliament as we approach the city]

A little bit later in the morning when we disembarked, we found that the weather had finally started heating up, too much so actually: I was sweating even before I got off the ferry from our boat (docked on the Buda side) to the Pest side. In the morning we had just enough time to go and catch the central market (Nagycsarnok) in Pest before it closed for the weekend. It was really a huge market, worth going to see even though I knew I didn't want to buy anything. The whole thing was a giant metal and glass structure that looked like it used to be a train station back in the day. On the first floor were food products, mostly meat and vegetables. On the second floor was a maze of tschotske stands for tourists, with everything from stacking dolls to table runners to fur hats (which did not really seem necessary in this weather).







[Budapest Central Market]

In the afternoon we had our last big bus tour(!), and the first stop was Heroes' Square on the Pest side, built in 1896 to honor Hungary's founding Magyar fathers. Judging by the statues of them, they were all very burly. We toured around and caught some of the historic architecture that currently houses government buildings. Some of these old fancy buildings are slipping into disrepair; the guide told us that the government can't afford to keep them up, so they are planning on moving the government out and launching a scheme to get big multi-national businesses to move in. They figure the businesses can pay for the upkeep in exchange for the location. We'll see how that goes...


[Heroes' Square]

On the Buda side, we drove up to the top of Castle Hill (Varhegy) and walked along the arcade and up the towers that looked out for a great view over the river. There was also a great view in the reflection off the windows of the Hilton, which had somehow finagled building a hotel 30 yards from the Castle towers. The were not inclined, however, to let any of us in to look around. Neither was the big neo-Gothic Matthias Church across the square, which apparently was in the middle of a wedding service.


[The towers on Castle Hill]


[1 - The tower reflected in the Castle Hill Hilton, 2 - View down on Budapest]


[On Castle Hill in Budapest: 1 - Matthias Church, 2 - My mom waiting for the bus]

After our little walk around Castle Hill, we were bussed back to the boat to get dolled up for the captain's dinner. It was like most other dinners except everyone was slightly less tacky-looking and they served us a dessert called "Baked Amadaggio" that had a lot of ice cream and chocolate in it and that the crew carried around the dining room singing and waving sparklers. It was our last night on the ship, and it was also Bastille Day, so we were treated to a big fireworks display over the water as a send-off.


[1 - The city lit up at night, 2 - Bastille Day fireworks]

The next day we got all of our stuff over the bridge to the hotel we were staying in on the Pest side. There was a big pedestrian market on the bridge with crafts and books (in Hungarian), but it was really hot and I wanted to check in to the hotel and get settled. After we all got ourselves sorted, we all headed our separate ways to see what we wanted to see in our free day in Budapest. I had to run some errands: I ran out of storage space for my photos, I couldn't get them to transfer to my iPod, so I had to go buy a little mini-hard drive. I didn't learn much from my expedition to the shopping mall except that Hungary has the same shopping malls as everwhere else in the world, and also that they don't really think it's necessary to mark their subway entrances. Every so often there's just a staircase going down and you have to have some faith that it's not just leading into a basement somewhere.

Despite the oppressive heat, that afternoon I did manage to get out again to the Jewish quarter and see the Great Synagogue which we had passed the day before in our bus tour. I was glad to get back to the hotel, though, not only for the air conditioning, but also to get away from the dumpy shirtless men walking around. Two of them were in front of my a good half of my walk home, sidling along and scratching their hairy bellies. Finally they sat down on an abandoned couch under the shade of an awning to relax and smoke some cigarettes; their departure gave me a much nicer view for the rest of the walk home.



[At the Great Synagogue in Budapest]

Next, my immediate family was heading out for another week in France, while everyone else was flying home to the States. Our flight out left the next morning at some ridiculous hour that I can't even remember any more, so it was a pretty early dinner and an early night. It was a bit anti-climactic saying goodbye to everyone and then heading off so early after all the time we'd spent together over the last week and a half, but in the end it was a great trip and we all saw a bunch of new countries (except for my grandmother, who, like I said, has been pretty much everywhere).

Up to top

Cruising Central Europe: Austria

After leaving Passau, we crossed the border into Austria and had our first afternoon of great weather. It was sunny and warm enough to be out on the top deck for more than ten minutes. This stretch of the Danube was beatiful, with hills, forests, and little towns around on all sides. People biked down the path alongside the river; apparently this path goes pretty much clear across the country. My brother Nathan and my uncle Chip decided to join the newlywed couple onboard in using the ship's bikes to make the 20km trip the rest of the way to Linz, our stop for the night. I stayed on the top deck to sit and enjoy the scenery, as did most of the rest of the family.



[1,2,&3 - Cruising down the Danube in Austria. 4 - My grandmother helping Sally (my brother's girlfriend) with some knitting]

We arrived late that afternoon in Linz, and we only had the night there before we would set sail again. The bikers had beat us there and were sitting and having a beer waiting for us. We went on a quick walking tour just to get the feel of the town before dinner. With dinner being the usual two-and-a-half hour affair, things were pretty much shut down by the time it was over. Some of my cousins and I enjoyed the view of the city lights across the river, as well as of the illuminated Kunstmuseum, which we were docked alongside.


[Linz: 1 - The city at night, 2 - The Kunstmuseum]

The next day we made our way to Vienna, stopping at Melk along the way. Melk's big draw was Melk Abbey, home to a community of Benedictine monks for over 900 years (although the current building is more recent, having burned down and been rebuilt multiple times). We were led around by a very emphatic guide with a very guttural German accent. It sounded at times a bit like she was getting punched in the stomach with the beginning of each new word. The museum that they had set up in a wing of the abbey was actually pretty interesting, as they constructed each room to create a feeling in visitors for how the abbey was doing at that time. So, for example, during the Protestant Reformation when the Catholic Church wasn't doing so well, the rooms detailing this time in the Church's history were dimly lit and kind of gloomy. On the other hand, for the rooms of the Counter-Reformation when the Church got back some of its power, the rooms are bright and practically glistening. One room was dedicated to a time when the church was on a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs; in this room the floor had been slanted up and down to give you a sense of the highs and lows of the church's fate. It was actually a pretty effective way to get people to remember what they had seen, by incorporating physical atmospheric cues along with all of the display cases of historical objects and descriptive text on the walls. I was also a big fan of the library, which had books stacked to the ceilings and was very musty and old-feeling. Over the course of the trip, every one of us had a day that we got to be travelling buddies with my grandmother, and this was my day. She had seen the abbey already (she's seen pretty much everything already), so could tell me about the differences since she was here last.



[Melk Abbey: 1 - The front courtyard, 2 - A gilded statue (not entirely out of gold to save money and their conscience), 3&4 - Fancy staircases]


[Melk Abbey: 1 - The library, 2 - View of Melk from the balcony]

After our stop in Melk, we all got back onboard - well, except for three people who thought we were leaving an hour later and had to take a taxi to the next dock to catch up with us (and then wouldn't shut up about it for the rest of the trip). We got into Vienna that night, got dressed up, and bussed ourselves off to a concert in the Hofburg, the Hapbsburgs' palace in Vienna. It was all quite touristy, but still enjoyable as far as I was concerned. It showcased the music of Mozart and Strauss, two of Vienna's most famous former citizens, including several operettas with a few extremely hammy singers.


[Vienna: At the concert in the Hofburg]

The next day we had until late afternoon to explore Vienna. It was the most consecutive time we'd had anywhere since Prague, but I still thought it wasn't enough. I really liked Vienna and there were multiple sights and areas that I wanted to explore a bit more. It's definitely on my list of places to come back to. The ship was docked a bit far out from town, so I took the bus in for the morning tour, but then peeled off with my cousin Julie and my brother Josh. We wandered over to an 100-year-old coffee shop that was still decorated more or less like the 1950's and hung out there for a bit, kicking the day off with some caffeine. Then we made our way over to the Museumsquartier, a huge museum complex along the museum plaza near the Hofburg, where we had been the night before. We meandered through the touristy shopping district and stumbled upon the Hofburg gardens at the back of the palace complex on the way there.


[Food and drink in Vienna]


[A greenhouse and the park in the Hofburg Gardens in Vienna]

Once at the Museumsquartier, we first went to the Museum Moderner Kunst (called the MOMAK), which housed an impressive range of modern art. They were having an exhibit on Sigmar ole, a Polish pop artist who liked to use huge translucent synthetic canvases. The overall effect was that you can kind of make out the wooden beams that are bracing the frame, and these become a part of the overall composition of the paintings. Not bad. There was some funny stuff up on the higher levels, including a series of kind of dada-ist records that you could listen one, one being "A Lecture on Nothing" by John Cage, that goes on and on about how he's in the second part of the third chapter of the fifth section and he's still saying nothing and how it's a little bit like passing through Kansas. In the basement was a exhibition on the Vienna Actionists, who liked to do perforamcne art and weird things with human and animal bodies that I don't really want to talk about. I thought I was pretty open-minded but I guess at some point I'm still a bit prudish. It still makes me shudder a little bit to think of it (if you think you are less of a prude then me, then go to this link.)



[Elevators at the MOMAK in Vienna]

The other museum in the complex that we had time to visit was the Leopold Museum, which is famous for its collection of Egon Schiele paintings, who I'd never heard of but who turned out to be quite good. His paintings are really powerful in a twisted, painful kind of way. I thought it was pretty amazing that he is now considered such a major figure and he died before he was 30, even having spent a lot of that time in the army. And on top of that, he produced so few paintings that the largest collection of them amounted to maybe six, maybe seven tops. You can find out a little more about him here on Wikipedia.

After that museum I made a stop at the English Bookstore along the way to stock up on some reading material (as I'd discovered that travel guides don't really always make excellent leisure reading material...), and pretty soon we were all back on the boat again and on our way.

Up to top

Cruising Central Europe: Germany

So after our time in the Czech Republic, we finally made it to the Danube to start the cruise. The first stop along the way was Nuremberg. To be honest, I was still recovering from rugby tour and the early hours weren't helping, so I was a bit zombie-ish for the first couple of days once we got on the boat, and consequently took in a lot less information. That may be lucky for you (if anybody is actually reading this) in the end, because it means I have less to write about.

Nuremberg was full of all sorts of Nazi-era history. Hitler picked the place to build the Nazi party rally grounds that they began to use for propaganda and indoctrination in 1927. The guide took great pains to explain the psychological measures Hitler used for this, including speaking from way up high to appear godlike and making everyone wait for hours in line in extreme heat so that their brains were addled (and therefore more receptive) by the time they listened to him speak. She kept saying that these were not excuses for their acceptance of Hitler, but that it would help us understand how it happened. Among the many grey, dull buildings of the larger rally ground complex, Hitler also had a huge coliseum built for himself, which remains unfinished and is now being used partially as a museum.


[Nuremburg: 1 - The Nazi Party Rally Grounds, 2 - The courthouse where Nazis were tried after the war]

There was also a medieval part of the city with a modestly named "Beautiful Fountain" shaped like a big golden tower that we used as our meeting point. There was a big fruit and vegetable market in the plaza in front of the church, and the church itself housed another of those fancy clocks with mechanical figures that come out and move around on the hour. Some of my cousins and I just sat and had a beer off the plaza until our free time was up.


[My cousin Trevor spinning the ring on the Beautiful Fountain for luck]

The second stop in Germany was Regensburg, a small little town with some architectural remnants of its Roman heyday and a medieval town square, now also known for being the birthplace of the current Pope. The tour was, thankfully, short, and I wandered around a bit with my parents, looking for a jacket for me. The weather had been extremely screwed up since we got there, regularly featuring cold, rainy days where the cruise director assures there is normally only sunshine and heat this time of year. He says its probably better (for him anyway), because people tend to get cranky in the heat. But it was definitely a surprise to me that I needed to layer up with a sweater and a jacket in the middle of the summer.


[Regensberg: 1 - Artwork about the Pope, 2 - Don't trust a wolf in priest's clothing]


[Regensberg: 1 - Chocolate & teddy bears, 2 - A shop in the basement of an old Roman structure]


[Regensberg: Chapel to the Virgin Mary]

Our last stop in Germany was Passau, right on the border with Austria. I was a little more awake by this point, and it was a nice little town with pedestrian streets leading you around to sweet-smelling bakeries and other little shops. As with the other towns we'd been to in Germany, people were big on bicycling and they were parked everywhere across town. Passau is known as the town of three rivers, as the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz all meet here. Along the banks of one of these rivers, I sat and watched two women feed the ducks along the sidewalk for ten minutes or so. They smiled and said it was OK for me to take pictures. After they were done, one of them told me (in literally flawless British-accented English) that she had moved to Passau three years ago from her hometown elsewhere in Germany. Shortly afterwards, walking along the river, she had noticed a duck with a broken bill that could not pick up its food. Saddened by the thought of this duck starving to death, she has come back every day for three years and fed it hand to mouth. I was really struck by the dedication and the thoughtfulness it would take to make a commitment like that. Anyway, it gave me something to think about as we boarded the boat and headed across the border into Austria...


[Passau: 1 - Graffiti, 2 - Bicycles everywhere]


[The duck lady]

Up to top