Berlin was not all that special. Maybe my impression was colored by being woken up on the train into Deutchland by a kick to the head by a German police officer while he shined a flashlight in my eyes. He may have muttered something like “sorry” as he moved on to the next compartment. But curled up on the floor of our non-sleeper compartment with my legs alternately falling asleep and cramping, squeezed in beside three other frugal travelers, that’s not what it sounded like.

Berlin looks a lot like Boston with straighter roads. It was comfortably boring. If we didn’t look too closely we could swear we were home. I had always thought that some sections of Boston looked liked they were designed as Soviet bunkers, now it seems I was correct. The resemblance was uncanny. Berlin is undergoing massive construction. Every part of the city is being torn up and redone in steel and glass. With some decent attempts at architecture too, not just boxes.

There was a big Marathon happening the weekend we showed up, so all the hostels we tried to phone ahead for were full. So we were wandering along with our backpacks through a kind of crappy wasteland that seemed to be given over to street artists and junkies, wondering where to sleep and we looked up to see the words:

DON’T PANIC!
Heart of Gold
Spaceship Hostel

We walked in through the airlock and rented beds in a cabin on the first deck. The decks were future white and the facilities were oddly modern. All of the Heart of Gold’s laundry and lavatory facilities were designed by the Sirius Cybernetics corporation and included “Human Friendly” instructions cards on their somewhat quirky operation. For a small deposit you could borrow towels (of course) and a variety of Sens-O-Matic sunglasses. A selection of alien drinks were available at the bar.

After Paris, is was nice to see individuality in dress return. There’s this funny hair dye thing goin’ on in Europe. A small minority of ladies will dye half their head, right down the middle. Mostly its the brown/blond thing you’ve seen before, but the older generation does white/red. I saw a 16 year old girl with white/red too. It was more common in Berlin than anywhere else. Old guys are still wearing the Hitler mustache. Traditional dress was present in the big city, but pretty rare. We only spotted a couple leiderhosen and one traditional blouse. The jean jacket with blue jeans is still a hit over here. Germans like all the cheesy American music from twenty to fifty years ago. The obnoxious cars blasting music at the stoplights put out boring techno, not hip-hop. There’s not even bass to rattle the windows.

We went out to this restaurant that advertised “Tradition Deutche Kitchen”. I’ve never really liked sausage or saurkraut, but they did an amazing job on this stuff. They had a red cabbage and clove sauce that went perfectly with beets and shredded beef. We also had wonderful taut bratwurst popped open in our mouths and soft, pleasing sauerkraut. We finished with an apple strudel and grapes, kiwi and whipped cream. We payed 7 Euros a pop for entrees that just aren’t available at home. Local traditional cuisine is just so many kinds of good. I had this bizarre drink: Berliner Weisse mit Shisse und Juniper. Green juniper flavored wheat beer. Good, but strange. The regular ales and lagers cost fifty cents for a half liter. This cheapo bottled beer was rich, tasty and better than most fresh brewery beer in the States. But you can’t ship it because there’s no preservatives. We drank a lot of it.

Feeling the pinch of Western European prices and the sinking dollar we jumped on a train for Prague…

In Paris, everything is perfect. The broad avenues intersect in star plazas with huge statuary and fountains. Your walk is always close to trees and little public flower gardens. The buildings are all decorated as finely frosted cakes. Everything is just a little nicer than it needs to be, but also spookily uniform. The city is spotless. There are recycling centers and rubbish bins every fifty feet. Its all meticulously well maintained. Paris is a huge city, but its easy to get around, easy on the eyes and choc full of interesting things. We only saw a tiny tiny piece of what we’d like to have done.

We’d heard about fashion in Paris, so we were hoping to see funny clothes. We did, but not the way we expected. People in Paris dress neatly and deliberately with almost no variation. The women’s outfits come in five varieties of Power Secretary, a big scarf is mandatory. The men have two outfits: Bank Teller and Bank Manager. Its really boring, and more than that, slightly unnerving. The sk8ter kids all dress in the same conventional style as everyone else. Like the buildings, the population is in uniform. It really started getting to me by the third day.

We really started hitting the museums and monuments. Centre du Pompedu, a modern art museum, has the guts of the building built on the outside and color coded: Red for heat, green for plumbing, blue for air, yellow for electrical, black for structural. We also went to see the Catacombs underneath the city that house the bones of millions of Parisians. As you enter the kilometer long walk of bones a sign reads: “Arret! Vous entree Le Empire du Morte!”. Notre Dam was nice from the rear with its layers of buttresses and crazy gargoyles, but pretty dull inside. The Louvre really seemed to go for quantity over quality. Maybe if I knew more about art history I’d be tickled to see some milestone works, but very little in the Louvre grabbed my attention for its own sake. Notable exceptions were Da Vinci’s paintings, which were easily my favorites. He does animated and expressive like nobody’s business. The Mona Lisa, for instance, I had real doubts about, but it really works and is a pretty nifty trick. I went back to look at it twice.

Musee d’Orsay was my favorite. Great sculpture on the ground floor and impressionist masterpieces on the top. I turned a corner and saw my first real live Van Gogh. It was literally stunning. I’d always kinda liked his lines and the layout of his work, but seeing his paintings in person is just completely different. The colors he uses are incredibly bright and jump out of the painting like field lines and reverberate against your brain directly. Its transfixing. His self portrait which I’d seen a million ho-hum prints of zaps you with vibratey squiggly goodness in person. I was so shocked I just wandered dazedly through a whole room of Monets and an another of Renoir before realizing I was missing my favorite impressionists.

There’s a big line for me between what I consider “really good” painters and magicians. For instance: Renoir was a really good painter and Da Vinci’s are captivating, but I think I grok the process and the mind with which they were created. Monet and Van Gogh, however: I just cannot fathom how they were created, and how they do what they do.

Our adventures in local cuisine began in Paris. I’ve never liked French sauces, I’ve always felt they were too thick and creamy. This is because….drum roll please…they were! French sauces are delicious and very thin and delicate. All the food is delicate. But we didn’t eat out much, mostly we self catered. In Paris grocery stores are like big convenience stores. Your real staples for the day are bought at le boucher, le fromagier, le fruitier, le pannier, le perfumerie etc. which are everywhere you turn. The chains haven’t wiped out all the variety. Constantly dealing with small businesses is one of the real joys of being in Europe. Like the rest of the continent, most of the food (even in the grocery stores) carries the “BIO” label. This label probably means as little as the Organic label in The States, but if you talk to the proprietor, he can tell you who he gets his stuff from. He or she has probably visited the abattoir or the dairy or vineyard where the products come from, and can verify its not a factory farm. He doesn’t “just work there”.

I learned some of these details from this guy, Johannes, we met on the train from Paris to Berlin. I asked him how the little shops could compete when supermarkets were so much cheaper. He said:

“Yes, but they’re not as good. They’ll never be able to compete on quality. People will never give up their food.”

Our camera broke on our second night in Paris. These photos are all we were able to retrieve.

We were going to go to Munich, but Oktoberfest was on and prices were doubled. Also, party culture wears on us pretty much instantly and we’d just been to Amsterdam. So Berlin it was. I drifted off to sleep on the train and was awakened by a steel toed boot to the head…

Amsterdam is outrageously small and cute. Built around concentric canals, the houses are wedged along the water mingled in with cafes and shops. The narrow cobblestone spoke streets gradually give way to avenues outside the medieval center, but the first thing you notice is the bicycles. Everyone seems to be on one of these black utilitarian boneshakers. Hordes of them fly by at speed down the ubiquitous bike lanes. Canals or trams get the center of the street, cars are squeezed in beside them, and the bike lanes take up the road until the skinny sidewalk.

The red light district is safely contained in the center of the old city. By night its a big, cheesy, adult playground. Streetwalking is illegal, so the girls pose in windows illuminated by blacklights and red neon. It looks like suddenly the mannequins are what’s for sale. Hardcore pornography is plastered onto the walls, but by Scandinavian mores, its a pretty family friendly place. Children play in the streets by day, mobs of drunken tourists crowd it by night. You can cruise down to the Prostitution Information Center and get all kinds of info on how to start up your own cathouse and safety information for both johns and girls.

The Dutch drug laws make ridiculous amounts of sense: If it grows naturally, its legal to possess, if you have to synthesize it the gov’t can regulate it. So E, Speed, Coke and Heroin are all “controlled” substances. Mushrooms, Peyote and Cannabis are no problem: Entire populations have been ingesting them for tens of thousands of years. Many soft drugs are sold with helpful labels regarding dosage and other chemicals not to mix them with, like medication back home. Fun fact: The Dam has half the per capita junky rate of Paris and very little violent crime (Aside from the odd British football hooligan).

Amsterdam is a very fun place to be. There’s always a cafe to stop at, boats to watch and something going on in the street. We saw contact jugglers and excellent street musicians. We stopped to watch a chess match on a giant sized board where the players furiosly hauled the pieces around while yelling challenges at each other. One of the best things we bumped into was a really nice antique shop full of old devices mechanickal: Astrolabes, telescopes, coffee grinders, weird complicated gadgets we couldn’t puzzle out; all of the most meticulous craftsmanship and usually older than the United States.

Link to our photos.

Righto. More than a little dazed, we found our bearings and jumped on a train for Paris…

In late September we left Boston, flew into Keflek airport, rented a subcompact mini car and drove to Reykjavik as the sun rose. Watching long fingers of misty clouds retreat back over the mountains we realized what the big deal was about Iceland.

The vulcan rock of the island is sharp, raw and fresh. Everything is jagged and porous. The “fields” are all knee deep in glacial debris. The peaks jut up out of the landscape without foothills. The crunchy boulder strewn ground is covered in 7 inches of thick, soft, bouncy green moss. It looks like candy and just begs to be stomped around. Its like a mold experiment let loose on Mars. There are no real trees, but if you hunt you can find small copses of lonely dwarf birch and evergreen. Mostly its just small patches of moss vainly trying to crawl up the steaming, sulfurous mountains.

Reykjavik is small, like Portland Maine. The city has short buildings and cobblestone streets winding through narrow alleys. Its pretty much an overgrown fishing village. Every crosswalk is a very high speed bump. Where there are people, the cars must drive slow. The hot water from the tap smells like sulfur. We picked up some food and coffee in the city and then charged off into the country.

When you leave the city the human habitation just ends. There are a quarter million people on this island the size of Britain. More than half of those people are in Reykjavik. So really its more like a hundred thousand out here, widely scattered. There are many underground mound homes and a few shops tucked into the earth like hobbit holes. The people out here leave their villages, run off into the mountains and stick a pipe in the ground until steam shoots out of it. The horizon is dotted with little puffs of steam where someone decided to start a miniature Icelandic pony farm.

The Icelandic language is basically perfectly preserved archaic Norse, and the landscape is named after the mythology. So the road signs are all runes spelling out the names of the old gods. This, combined with the primeval landscape and lack of people and trees make Ultima a very storybookish place to tromp around.

We spent most of our time attempting to drive to Sights. Mostly we’d drive for a bit, get distracted by the amazing scenery we’d bump into along the way, pull over and run off to chase sheep and ponies up into the mountains. We’ve pictures of Geysir and Gulfloss, we also went swimming in the Blue Lagoon hot springs. There’s this silicate mud that gives the water there an eerie milky blue color. We sculpted big white horns on Mandy with it (French girl: “You are like zee bull”). Its supposed to be good for your skin, but it turned my hair in to one giant dreadlock. Nappy. It fell out in handfuls.

In Reykjavik there was an advertisement calling for hands on an organic farm. I’d love to spend a week or two messing about in the earth here. Stick my hands in it, stomp all over it. This land has great texture. Its too bad we only had a couple days here. I’d like to get to know some wooly sheeps and those tiny ponies. Every inch of this island is amazing, driving from one “attraction” to the next is just a good excuse to see all the cool stuff in between.

Here’s a small smattering of photos we took.

Then with very little sleep we flew to Amsterdam…