Days 44-46: Preikestolen, Kjeragbolten, and Bergen

Norwegians are fond of picnics and swimming. I forgot to mention that the other day. I saw a bunch of them having picnics and swimming, which constituted my first real impression of them. One of them told me when the central bus station would be, and another of them, or a group of them, decided to put a portrait of Piet Hein, a Danish philosopher, on the airplane in which I flew to Stavanger, which, to my way of thinking, shows that they are societally advanced, as only societally-advanced countries honor philosophers on their airplanes.

Comedy aside, my first day in Stavanger was quite pleasant, as I was able to find the tourist office trivially, bought groceries, and learned that breakfast was included in the cost of my hotel room. The managers of my hotel took breakfast seriously -- they served granola with all sorts of add-ons, such as nuts, raisins, and various seeds; they had three types of yogurt; they had fresh fruit, including watermelon, pineapple, and red and green grapes; they had sausage, bacon, four types of eggs, three types of herring, smoked salmon, and cured salmon; they served all sorts of bread, with various types of meat, cheese, butter, and jam; they had as many hot drinks as one could name; they had a salad bar; and they even served apple turnovers, brownies, and two types of cookies. I ate a great deal at breakfast every day, sticking almost exclusively to the healthiest dishes that I could find (one eventually grows tired of pastries, especially when the alternatives are so good), and I pitied the more finicky eaters who only took a few eggs sunny-side-up with bacon or sausage.

My hike to Preikestolen went off almost without a hitch, which leaves me little to write about. I met someone from Seattle, who agreed that Stavanger was like the Pacific Northwest, with its coastline, mountains, seagulls, and breeze, and I met a Polish couple, who offered me grapes, Polish sausage, pizza, and beer at the hike's official peak, or the large, flat rock at which most people stop. The actual peak of the hike is higher up and is only reachable if one scrambles up a short rock face and across a few rock fields. One is rewarded with panoramic views of the inlets and peaks surrounding Preikestolen, and one is alone with the wind, as very few people bother to go up there. I saw what looked like wild blueberries and cloudberries at the top of Preikestolen, and I got lost trying to take a shortcut and avoid backclimbing the rock face that I had climbed up, as a result of which I had to scramble down a bunch of scree and smaller rock faces to get back to the real trail, reaching which was a major relief.

My hike to Kjeragbolten was a little more exciting, as I met someone from Vancouver, which was like gold to me, and had excruciating muscle spasms in my upper back on the way back down. Going to bed last night was extremely painful, as I experience a stabbing pain when I lean my head back, and I woke up feeling little better, unable to move my head without serious pain in my upper back and neck. I expect that the pain will subside within a day or two, and I will massage and stretch the area as much as I can once doing so no longer makes me feel like crying.

My trip to Bergen, which involved two ferry crossings and took me past numerous inlets, was not actually that interesting, and it was a mistake to go in the first place. As it turns out, the way to hike Trolltunga, or the Troll's Tongue, is to first go from Stavanger to the village of Odda, and then to do the hike on the following day, for a two-day trip. I do not know how much accommodations cost in Odda, but one would have had to plan one's stay there months in advance in order to avoid getting fleeced; in fact, I remember wanting to stay exclusively in moderately-sized cities because of the certainty of convenient transportation into and out of them. I also wanted to take the train from Bergen to Oslo, so it is a little early to say for sure that it was a mistake to come here.

Since I am obsessed with societal progress, I have sought it wherever I have gone, and I think that one can see it if one knows where to look. Gas here does, indeed, cost between 15 and 16 kroner per liter, or roughly two Euros (if I am not mistaken), which, to my way of thinking, bespeaks of people's being able to pay that much in the first place, of high taxes possibly related to the desire to limit people's driving and save the environment, and of the type of taxation that supports all sorts of social welfare programs and other institutions, such as schools, hospitals, universities, and the like. Stavanger feels clean and safe, if that means anything; perhaps the absence of visible problems indicates the city's high level of development. Norway is known as one of the least corrupt countries in the world, which one cannot see one way or another as a tourist (not directly, at least). The buses here have seatbelts, which I had not seen in buses anywhere else. Russians do not use seatbelts even in their own cars; Norway is clearly doing something right.

I did not give the ride to Kjerabolten as much description as it deserved. It took us right along the coast past inlets with such clear, undisturbed water that I could see the sky's and mountains' reflection in them. As we ascended, we came to pass alpine valleys and, occasionally, little villages, and we were soon surrounded by mountains that rocketed out of the water. Wild sheep grazed by the side of the road or, when they were feeling adventurous, ran across it, and the bus was almost entirely silent, so that, when an especially good view encompassing forest, mountains, and an island opened up, I felt a s though I were in a church and it would be sacrilegious to photograph it. Norway is the land of four hundred thousand lakes, according to our driver, and, as we passed one of them early on the drive to Kjeragbolten, I felt that I had found Elysium.

The views from Preikestolen are, for the record, better than those from Kjeragbolten, as one sees much more water from it, but the views on the way to Kjeragbolten are better. I am going to send another email tomorrow, assuming that I have time, describing hiking in Norway specifically for people who might one day be interested in visiting it. I hope that my successes and failures on this trip can proof instructional to other people.

Views like this are standard issue in Norway.

Days 41-43 - Stockholm, Stockholm, and Stavanger

I have made it to Stavanger! My escape from Copenhagen was a real fiasco, my worst experience with trains in recent memory. My problems started as soon as I left my hostel, when the bus to the train station took thirty minutes rather than fifteen to get there. When I got to the train station, I learned that every train to Malmo that morning had been cancelled due to a "problem with the signatures"; nobody there knew when the next one would be leaving. Eventually, after switching platforms a few times, I was able to board a train to Malmo, though it was one of the passengers, not a train official, as there were none of them in sight, who told me that the train would be going in that direction. The train was not literally full, as more of us could have fit into it if we had been stacked on one another, but we were standing elbow-to-elbow, with nothing to hang on to but one another's luggage for balance, as the train finally left the platform, perhaps fifteen minutes after I had gotten onto it.

The ride in the train was not actually that bad once we started moving. I was fairly certain that I would be late for my connection from Malmo to Copenhagen and would have to negotiate another ticket, and there was nothing that I could do about it. My neighbor in the train, a double bass player with facial piercings, described the music scene in Copenhagen, Malmo, and Gothenburg, where he was from, and told me the fastest way to get to the main hall of the train station as I was leaving.

As soon as I was in Malmo -- as soon as I had left Denmark -- everything was fine. A very kind railway employee gave me a new ticket for Stockholm on account of the technical problems in Copenhagen despite the Swedes' having a different rail company from the Danes, and I was soon on my way to Stockholm.

The Swedish countryside abounded in dense woodlands, isolated farmsteads, gently-sloping hills, and, more than anything else, water; when we were not crossing a river or moving next to one, some part of the sea or a sound was often visible. We passed groves of pine, and cedar, and young birch, simple, solid houses, and stone churches. The kind old man in the seat next to me talked about his previous travels with me, making a drive through the north of Finland, Sweden, and Norway sound especially interesting, and was able to tell me about the various industries driving many of the cities that we passed.

I will, as usual, have to truncate some of my descriptions: Stockholm is the most extraordinary city that I have seen on this trip. I did not get to see much of it on the day of my arrival, as it was almost dinnertime when I arrived, but I was immediately struck by its clean streets, modernity, and drivers who followed traffic laws. The man sitting next to me in the train had told me how architecturally varied the town hall was, and he had recommended that I visit the Vasa Museum, which contains the only fully-preserved 17th-century ship in Europe. When I looked at a city map in the evening and saw that an entire island in Stockholm was a reconstructed 19th-century village, I realized that Stockholm had way more than I could see in one day, and I decided to skip Drottninghom Palace, which I had expected to be one of Stockholm's few highlights, in order to focus on its historic center and surrounding neighborhoods.

Stockholm is a city of 100 museums and at least as many churches. I started my day yesterday by visiting a church, at which I happened upon a free concert performed by the best pianist whom I had ever heard live; she played pieces by Brahms and Ravel, the best that I had heard in concert besides the Shostakovich piece that I heard in Moscow three years ago. I met the pianist's mother, a Russian emigre next to whom I had happened to sit down, and then the pianist herself; we exchanged contact information, and they told me about the two Slavonic churches in Stockholm, one of which was going to have a service that very morning. As I left the church, a local saw me looking at my map and asked if I needed help finding something, completing the city's conquering of my heart.

I spent the next few hours wandering through Stockholm's historic center. Its old town is well-preserved and chock full of museums, and the city, it turns out, is not ultra-modern entirely by choice. Numerous conflagrations from the Middle Ages onward gutted the city of most of its historic buildings, but even so it breathes its history. One of its many islands, which appeared at first to have little more than a few museums and some trees, was connected to the mainland by the city's oldest wrought iron bridge, and it had a whole collection of early 20th-century boats on display with plaques explaining their historic importance. I was already tiring as I left that island after only a few hours of walking; I was wearied by the sun; and so I only took a short walk through a museum district before heading back to my hostel, having seen only a little bit of Stockholm and very interested in coming back.

Stockholm is a city of order, sea breeze, and cultural riches. I would love to return to it with a little more time and enough money to see some of the museums, none of which I saw the other day, as I had little time and no money beyond what I would need for groceries and a ticket to the airport. Stockholm had too many cars downtown and too few pedestrian walkways between bridges; I got free bread at the church in which I heard the concert; and its youth, according to the Russian emigre with whom I spoke, fiercely resist their parents' traditions and are badly educated. I could never have guessed, based on what I read about Stockholm and the pictures of it that I saw, that the city would be so fascinating, just as I could not have guessed how much Copenhagen would suck. The level of incompetence of its rail employees, impossibility of finding any useful information in its train stations, and ineffectuality of its transport system vastly exceeded that which I had seen in any other country besides Slovenia, in which people at least knew what to do when things broke down, as they break down daily. Thankfully, I will be able to avoid Denmark entirely in the future, and I should be able to visit Stockholm again due to knowing people in and relatively near it, as well as potentially being able to spend a month working at the University of Uppsala within the next few years. This was one of those visits in which I was delighted to have had a taste of the place that I was visiting, as I tasted the food in Angers, rather than disappointed that I could not stay for longer (or, in the case of Denmark, skip the place entirely -- who knew?).

My trip to Stavanger was relatively easy, though it proved that even the Norwegians are not invincible. My flight was delayed by a few minutes, a technical problem prevented our leaving the plane for a few minutes when we arrived, and the luggage belt stopped moving for a bit when I arrived at the airport in Oslo. The Norwegians have an idiotic system of flying within the country: rather than giving one all of the boarding passes that one will need to reach one's destination and checking one's luggage in such that it will automatically reach one's final destination, they make one pick up one's luggage in the airport in which one has a layover, check back in, and pass through security again. On the plus side, they are excellently staffed, and, just like in all of our stereotypes, the vast majority of its staff members are blond.

My flight from Oslo to Stavanger was the best of my life. Much of the landscape between the two cities looked uninhabitable. Barren, rocky ridges ribbed with snow eventually gave way to barren, rocky ridges with a little tree covering, which, in turn, became plateaus speckled with little towns. The area just east of Stavanger is composed largely of small, separate islands and mountains lumbering out of the water, misty and heavy blue. By the time one reaches the Stavanger airport, one is flying over a fairly standard-looking, small city with barely even a hill in sight; the residents of western Norway built their cities, naturally, in the only places in which it was possible for them to thrive.

Stavanger itself was a pleasant town with such signs of its past as the old warehouses in which people worked when it was a major port, the building used for customs, its defensive tower, and its cathedral. People here are friendly and helpful; my hotel was easy to find; the center of the city is on a lake and rings with the cries of seagulls; and, to my horror, groceries were reasonably priced. I wanted to find something further to carp about, but I was able to find enough groceries for three or four days (in addition to the bread that I brought from Stockholm) for a little over thirty dollars. The tourist information center was easy to find, and I arranged to take the two hikes that I had planned over the next two days. The only thing that I am likely to miss on this trip is Norway's most famous crag, the Troll's Tongue, which will probably be too far form Bergen to be doable as a day-trip. I will probably do a different, more accessible day-hike from Bergen when I am there; it is not the greatest loss in the world.

Norway so far seems like an idyll to me, though it is too expensive to visit a second time (even ignoring the reasonableness, or seeming reasonableness, of grocery prices), and it would be impossible to live here if one had not grown up here, I should think. One of the most interesting things that I have seen here was a heavy metal concert taking place in the gazebo outside of the cathedral, on the edge of the lake, just after dinnertime. People played Frisbee right next to it or strolled by, while families sat on benches or on blankets on the grass listening as though it were an ordinary way to spend a Thursday evening. I have met several more very nice Australian tourists and, today, a tourist from Seattle; every reminder of home is like gold to me. The cost of transportation for the hikes that I will be taking over the next two days is not actually any more than that of taking public transport to Whistler and back and skiing for a day, to be honest, and it might be cheaper than driving, as gas here is reported to cost $10 per gallon. I saw a chapel in the Oslo airport, which had free restrooms, though the stewardesses walked down the aisle trying to sell people water on the way to Stavanger. I will not have the chance to write over the next few days, as I need to catch up on sleep and want to take advantage, to that end, of being in a very nice hotel. I may, ironically, end up with more Norwegian kroner than I will need, but only time will tell. Finally, I am running out of things to read, but I have enough to last until London, which will have overpriced bookstores coming out of its ears.

This is part of downtown Stockholm -- I cannot remember which part.

Days 39-40 - Roskilde, Helsingor, and Helsingborg

I admit that I wrote my last email a little half-heartedly, even getting the day of my travel wrong. I wrote that email mostly out of a sense of duty to do so and had to search for things to say. I hope that this one goes a little better, but I suppose that I should also be less critical of my writing in these letters.

Roskilde was too insignificant to even be considered a town of German standards. If I had known how interesting Helsingor would be, I would have skipped Roskilde entirely, spending all of Sunday in Copenhagen and saving my money to splurge on food today. Alas, I did not know, so I went there, seeing the whole town in an hour and coming right back. I had my first and only shawarma dinner yesterday; while the shawarma was more interesting than canned fish and canned vegetables, it was also so greasy as to be barely edible. I decided, yesterday, to save the money that I was going to spend on another shawarma dinner and instead spend it on more groceries and, perhaps, a little delicacy.

That delicacy turned out to be fresh fruit, which was good but overpriced. My trip to Helsingor took longer than that to Roskilde, which I liked, as I enjoy long train rides and spent most of my time in the train reading a passable translation of Natalia Ginzburg, a step up from the terrible one that I finished recently. It had rained lightly before my departure, leaving little wells of white sediment on the window, like the salt left behind by dried sweat. The landscape was densely wooded as we went north, with houses nestled between the trees and even a few of the half-timbered houses, or those with colored timber frames, of which I have grown so fond of late and which are so common in the north of Germany.

Helsingor itself was fascinating and well-deserving of Hamlet's having been set in it (It is transliterated as "Elsingore" in the play, I believe.). It was full of old houses and banners over the streets with Danish flags, and it had an excellent war memorial, town hall, and pair of churches, in one of which I listened to some organ music for awhile (I am ashamed to admit that I am coming to like it.). It also appeared to have excellent ice cream and pastries, in which I would have loved to indulge, but I had already pent 32 kroner, or five dollars and change, buying a quarter-kilogram or cherries and four plums. I had seen a fruit store with fresh-looking fruit and prices that did not see over-the-top intimidating until I had filled my two bags with more fruit than I expected; such is life.

My trip across the Oresund (with a crossed-out 'O' -- one of the busiest straits in the world, according to Wikipedia) was very, very rainy. The rain had started up perhaps fifteen minutes before I left Helsingor, and it continued for the rest of the afternoon. On the plus side, I met some Ukrainians and chatted with them all the way to Helsingborg. I have a claim to make that is meant to affront Russians: Ukrainians are friendlier than Russians. Of course, I may have merely met some kindly Ukrainians, just as one can meet kindly people in any part of the world; my sample size was small; but it still strikes me that Russians have the same mentality as American rednecks: they sit on their plots of land with shotguns figuratively in hand, looking suspiciously at anyone unfamiliar who comes anywhere near them.

Helsingborg was a pretty town, with a fantastic castle (like Helsingor itself), a beautiful town hall, and some woefully new-looking buildings, such as the theater, center for the arts, and central library. I spent an hour and a half in it, climbing the keep and then wandering through the town, then decided to curtail any further wandering, as the rain was too heavy. The views from on-board the ship would probably have been quite good; Helsingor and Helsingborg are close enough that one can easily see the one from the shore of the other.

That more or less concluded my Danish adventure. When I returned to Copenhagen, I went back to the local supermarket to see how much food I could buy for 31 kroner and discovered that I could cover my lunches and dinners in Stockholm. My impressions of Denmark have, obviously, been negative on the whole. Copenhagen is the only city in which I have so far felt any sort of danger, not for my own personal safety, but for my wallet and other belongings. This reflects not so much Denmark itself as the size of the crowds here: one is surrounded so much by other people in the center of Copenhagen on weekends in the summer that theft must be fairly trivial. On reflection, this is almost surely true of many other major tourist destinations that are also big cities; I have just happened to have the luck not to be in too many of them.

People here bike a lot, even more than in Germany, though less than in the Netherlands. I learned, upon my visit to Roskilde, that a major music festival, the Roskilde Festival, at which people camped out for a couple of days and partied all night long, had just finished, and it turns out that it is jazz week here. It is interesting to me that so many people travel specifically for the sake of visiting festivals, going to concerts, and the like, while I showed up in Gdansk during some major European soccer tournament without even knowing about it in 2012 and did not bother watching a single one of the soccer games that were broadcast all over Europe, even when I was in countries that were playing; it is interesting that people's travel interests differ so much.

I am afraid that I have to leave you with a rather watered-down image, as it is the last one in my notes and the last thing that I want to say about Denmark. I regret that I was on the very periphery of town when the 6:00 PM knell sounded on Saturday, as I expect that it was spectacular in the city center. I have heard some very nice church bells ever since I was in Hanover and am coming to appreciate them as a little more than pleasant background noise. They are solemn and can be even more majestic than the sights of churches themselves, reminding us that we are small, weak, and, if not subject to some sort of overpowering force without ourselves, at least very insignificant, individually, compared to the rest of the world, mere specks in the history of mankind. I am the millionth person to have voiced this very thought; to feel it in the knelling of the bells themselves, to stand and feel their vibrations and focus all of one's senses on them, somehow hammers this home more than merely thinking about it.

Shakespeare should have set Hamlet in a country that did not suck.
This castle is the only thing that differentiates Denmark from Slovenia.

Day 38 - Copenhagen

Denmark is a land of pale, pale water, water barely deeper in hue than the sky, that stretches on and on until it is lost from view at the horizon. Its fields appear to be uncultivated; the land is flat and wooded in patches, in one of which I saw a beautiful conifer with bluish needles.

My arrival in Copenhagen was much more interesting than my trip there. As I left the train station, I briefly feared, since I had essentially entered Scandinavia, that I would suffer the ignominy of knowing where I was going, but I quickly discovered that I was still in Europe and that none of the roads had signs above them. Luckily, the tourist information center was right outside the train station -- I am not sure why they put it in a logical place -- and I was given straightforward directions to my hostel.

Copenhagen reminds me a little of Paris in that it is an essentially unpleasant city with excellent architecture and interesting monuments. Its sidewalks are narrow, often forcing one to walk in the street, and the streets themselves are two small to handle the amount of pedestrian traffic that they face. Much of the center of town appears to be under construction, which is probably more a problem of timing than an innate shortcoming of the city, and it is composed principally of expensive shops. Copenhagen has a more relaxed, laissez-faire feel to it than any city that I have visited in Germany (like Hamburg on steroids), which I find disagreeable: the city is full of music, which is a plus, and people lie around drinking beer, which is, perhaps, a plus, and the combination of these conditions creates a bit of a festive atmosphere that does not sit well with me. Perhaps because this is a Saturday, many of the city's male citizens appear to be drunk from he afternoon onward, and they grow loud and overexcited when they are drunk.

When I checked into my hostel, I discovered that it was better than I had expected, its only real shortcoming being its lack of a fridge and kitchen for guest use. I also discovered that everything here was incredibly expensive -- garbage Thai food sells for something like fifteen dollars per reasonably-sized dish, perhaps three times what it would cost in Germany. Thankfully, one of the hostel employees told me that I could get food plenty cheap at a grocery store around the corner and that I could get shawarma here for six or seven dollars. Having worked out that I would need 310 kroner for transportation, had only 490 kroner left, and did not want to have to take more money out of the bank here, I decided to spend up to 100 kroner on groceries and save 80 or so to treat myself to a pair of donair dinners, a real luxury around here. I managed to buy more food than I could eat in three days, all non-perishable, for 77 kroner, even including a half-kilogram of grapes that I got as a treat as cheaply as I could have done back home, oddly. I am going to buy a liter of milk tomorrow evening (for 7 kroner, or just under a Euro) to make up for not having any to drink with breakfast, beyond which I will be subsisting on my traditional meals of canned vegetables, canned fish, fruit juice, and, in this case, horrible-looking, healthy, whole-grain bread, which went for two dollars per kilogram. I can make myself Turkish delight sandwiches with the bread if I grow truly sick of it, as I have a bunch of Turkish delight left over from Hamburg.

Food is not that interesting, though, except to the traveler himself. In its favor, Copenhagen is a city in which one cannot spit without hitting a church. The statuary and museums here are fantastic, and the citadel and palace gardens are very pleasant places to walk; the waters themselves look excellent for sailing. Copenhagen is the least European city that I have seen so far: while the requisite percentage of its citizenry smokes, I have seen several people exercising, and four of them have even smiled at me, as a result of which I believe that Denmark should be removed from the European Union for cultural treachery. As much as I prefer the Germans' sobriety to the Danish's joie de vivre, I have to admit that it is kind of nice to be surrounded by people who are not quite so sour as in, say, France.

My plans for tomorrow are to see Roskilde and the parts of Copenhagen that I still have not seen, while in two days I plan to see Helsingor, where Hamlet was set, and Helsingore, which is 15 kilometers away from it by boat (and is in Sweden). I think that Denmark will not be so bad now that I have enough food for the trip and know that I will not need more money to see it; while I left Germany regretting that I had left a relatively cheap country in which everything was reasonable and worked as it was supposed to, and while I felt that I had been fleeced by a German railway employee who sold me a reservation for the train that turned out to be optional, I realized that the reservation was a form of insurance to make sure that I would at least have a seat, while many people had to stand or sit in the train's aisles for roughly five hours, and I should get plenty of work done over the next few days, as the WiFi here is good. It also might not hurt to experience a different culture for several days, as too much sobriety can make people unoriginal, though the risk of its doing so is vanishingly small, to my mind.

I have to shower soon and go to bend, and I will not have time to write tomorrow; I am going to wrap this letter up soon. I forgot to mention that the Indian girl whom I met the other day, the one who was studying medicine in Essen, said that she would be happy to help me plan a trip to India in the future, that her mom's relatives are all from Amritsar, one of my eventual destinations, and that there is a saying in Punjabi that translates as, "Guests are gods." I met a young man, an engineer who had been living in Copenhagen for three years and was originally from Romania, who told me all sorts of things about Denmark, including how crazy its language was and how Roskilde was the country's former capital. In fact, "Copenhagen" translates directly as "purchase port" -- the city was merely a harbor in which people could buy things. Naturally, its prominence as a port eventually made it more important than Roskilde and led to the capital's being transferred, but it had modest beginnings.

Copenhagen sucks. These old houses, however, do not.

Days 36-37 - Schwerin and Lubeck

Schwerin was magical, much like Celle, though for slightly different reasons. There was a market right outside the train station, which, while usually a bad sign, as almost anything sold near a train station is low-quality and overpriced, was incredible. I only wish that I had had two stomachs and two wallets: while I tried a couple of pastries, a fantastic fish sandwich, and the best ice cream that I have had on this trip (all for something like six Euros), I was unable to try the bratwurst or fruit. It was a small market, a collection of little food trucks that had pulled up around the plaza, a fountain with some nearby benches, outside of the train station. I spent something like a half-hour there, enjoying the feel of small-town Germany and the unhurried pace of the city in which I found myself.

Besides that, Schwerin was a standard small German town, different from others only in that it had a castle and was located right on the water. I walked into one church that felt almost like a crypt -- it was as quiet as the dead of night, and, at first, I thought that I was the only person in the church's empty, silent vaults. I saw a couple of other tourists leaving as I entered the second set of doors, though, and a woman working there -- the only other person there -- explained a bunch of the church's history to me, of which I understood only that it had been recently restored. I understood her wishing me a good day and said, "Thank you," rather than, "I do not understand," and, later in the day, I managed to tell someone what time it was when she asked me. My Germany is getting a little better, but progress is slow.

Lubeck is Germany's crown jewel, an incredibly-beautiful city like Ghent or Rouen. I explored it with the girl whom I met in Hanover a few days ago; she explained to me its historic importance as a port with a salt mine. I would try to explain this in greater detail, but my throat is sore, as it was a very hot day and, while I drank plenty of water, I, evidently, did not drink quite enough; and I have to get up early tomorrow to go to Copenhagen. The day was immensely pleasant, and pleasant days are harder to describe than strange or unpleasant ones, as the feeling of pleasure is almost always more or less the same. It would be interesting to discuss the ways in which people try to achieve and hold on to this feeling, but I am sweaty and stinking and have to shower before I go to bed.

I am a little worried that my hostels in Copenhagen and London are going to suck, and I do not know if I will get as much work done as I would like over the next few days, but that is not so bad, as the trip is flying past, and in only a month I will be back home, where I will be able to work productively once I have made my syllabus for the class that I will be teaching in the coming semester. I have been reading a wretched translation of Natalia Ginzburg, which I have been enjoying, as Ginzburg is one of the most brilliant writers, as far as I can tell, of the twentieth century; I did not finish my book of Aeschylus and consider him more of a literary relic than a writer of contemporary importance. The birds here have been a little more interesting than those in Belgium, though they are nothing to write home about; the forests here are very dense in every direction from Hamburg, and the buskers here are fantastic. I have heard them play both American jazz and famous classical music (that I could not quite place) over the past few days.

As usual, my most interesting experiences over the past few days have been connected with people. I met an Indian girl from near New Delhi who was studying in Essen and said that one could get a higher education in Germany almost for free, and the girl whom I met in Hanover has invited me to visit her wherever she ends up in the future. Today I met a couple of girls from South Dakota, which was fascinating, and I met an Australian man who told some of the funniest stories that I have ever heard about killing snakes in the outback and racing away from the police on his motorcycle in Russia.

I am growing very interested in trying to work out conditions that lead to maximal realization of human potentialities. It seems that Germany, with its excellent education, health care, and infrastructure and its safety, honest politicians and businessmen (perhaps?), availability of jobs, and funding for advancing the sciences and arts, is as close as we have come on the planet to a utopia, though I am almost surely wrong. In Lubeck today my companion and I passed by a medieval almshouse, hospital, and library, among other buildings of interest. It seems that Lubeck developed very quickly as a successful welfare state; my companion explained to me that its having been so wealthy helped it to develop in ways that were not immediately connected with merely surviving the coming day.

One of my most interesting impressions from the past few days was of seeing a group of twenty or thirty people, perhaps seniors, standing outside of some building or other as though on a tour of it. Death is all around us from the moment of our birth, yet people everywhere strive to create life. The seemingly-meaningless tour outside of some building in the middle of nowhere was obviously important to the people who were participating in it, and nothing more than that was needed to give it significance.

While I am worried that some of my coming destinations will disappoint me, and while I wish, as one tends to do, that I were somewhere else, where everything would be perfect (in my mind), the least prepossessing of my destinations on this trip have sometimes been the most interesting, and I am sure that none of my accommodations will turn out to be truly awful. I hope to catch up on my sleep over the next few days and to get as much work done as possible, though I suppose that I will have the whole coming fall to do that.

This is the castle for which Schwerin is most famous.

Days 31-35: Hanover, Celle, Braunschweig, Hildesheim, Luneberg, Hamburg, and Bremen

Day 30 of my trip has not disappeared. Rather, I got the dates of my last post were wrong. I have since righted the ship.

I wish that I had more time for these! When I last left off, I was leaving Brussels, a regal city with a bigger collection of beggars and drunks than the whole rest of Belgium, seemingly. Some of the touts in Brussels worked as a team, moving like a swarm of midges. They approached everyone whom they saw asking if they spoke English. Those who stopped and replied affirmatively were shown a clipboard and told that the tout only needed a few more signatures for some sort of humanitarian fundraising (I know because it worked on me in Paris; I gave someone 50 cents and learned to ignore such people.). Touts here show an animal frustration when one ignores them or gives them less money than they want.

Another problem in Brussels is the number of pickpockets. In Brussels I bumped into the young Malaysian man with whom I had dinner in Ghent, and he told me that someone had tried to steal his cell phone but had not quite managed to get it out of his pocket. There is a sign outside of the main cathedral in Brussels stating that pickpockets work in and around the cathedral, and one suspects that they worked in and around the cathedral at Cologne.

My arrival in Cologne brought me, like my trip to Lyon, from a small to a big train station. Brussels has several train stations, each covering different types of routes, as a result of which its main train station has only six tracks. This makes travel through it quite pleasant, as it is not crowded, but it can also be hugely confusing: I would have missed my train from Brussels to Cologne if a woman working at the hostel at which I was staying had not told me to check my ticket, which said that I would be leaving from the South Station. That same woman sold me an umbrella for 7 Euros, which has been a fantastic investment.

My only real impressions from Cologne were of walking the fifty meters from the train station to the cathedral, listening to a drunk German man yell things at no one in particular as I ate lunch on the steps outside, and checking out the cathedral itself. Practically everyone inside the cathedral had a phone (or old-fashioned camera) out and was taking pictures. While I do not take pictures inside churches, I take them outside, and I visit churches (and cathedrals) for the same reason as everyone else. While it is enriching to visit buildings of religious significance, that they turn into a spectacle is a little unnerving. I do not know what further to make of this, but I noticed it more acutely than anywhere else at the cathedral in Cologne.

At this point, I have a mass of notes to sort out, and, since I have little time to reread them, I will attempt to reproduce the last five days according to memory and fill in the gaps later. Hanover was not that interesting a city, though it did have an interesting historical tie with Great Britain and very nice church bells. One of the most interesting things about Hanover was that I was truly forced to use German there. While using German is usually a choice made to try to immerse oneself in one's surroundings, relatively few people in Hanover spoke English. The woman working at reception in the hostel in which I was staying did not speak a word of English, nor did the woman working at the pharmacy that I had to visit in order to get eye drops, as I had lost the ones that I brought from home. Thankfully, Lonely Planet phrasebooks are comprehensive enough to include words related to health care, as a result of which I was able to get eye drops without difficulty.

My health was generally poor towards the end of my trip to Hanover. For one thing, my allergies have gotten worse since I arrived in northern Germany, and for another, I ended up getting sick in such a way that I had to urinate every 20-30 minutes. This is not the type of thing that one usually wants to read about in a blog, but it had, naturally, a substantial effect on my travels. I tried to solve my problem at first by drinking little water, and, when that did not work, I tried to rehydrate myself and assumed that the problem would solve itself. I must have eaten or drunk something that my body did not like; I have been fine since yesterday evening.

Reflections on micturition aside, my trip through northern Germany has been just as interesting as I could have wished. I cannot, unfortunately, corroborate the common perception that northern Germans are less friendly than those from the south. I have found Germans all over the country more or less equally friendly. People have offered to helped me with directions here, asked me for directions, spoken very civilly with me in train stations, smiled at me (when I initiated conversation and smiled at them), and even invited me to a feast, an event that deserves further description.

I left for Celle on a cloudy day on which I would have been happy to stay in my hostel and read a book. I was tired out, if I remember correctly, and felt a little lethargic. I saw heavy storm clouds moving in when I first got there, and I was worried that Celle would be one of these tiny towns that is disappointing in the end.

My worries immediately proved unfounded. I can only hope to communicate the feeling of walking through Celle by reference to the peculiar joy of being in Germany. The trains and train stations here work wonderfully; the cities here are clean; in small towns, one sees very few buildings besides churches that are more than two or three storeys tall; often, these cities are built on rivers or at least have canals running through them; they are quiet, modest, and calm. Celle was chock full of the half-timbered houses with which I have fallen so much in love on this trip; it is one of the few historic cities in the north of Germany that was not leveled during World War II. Everything in the city is smaller-scale than in more modern cities, as though one were walking through Legoland; much of the city center was pedestrian-only, and its other sections had so few cars that one barely even noticed them. Celle was like a stripped-down version of a modern city, free of all of the clutter of recent development (I am speaking strictly of the old town.) that obscures one's view of what life used to be like in it. It was easy to find the city's churches, historically-important houses and buildings, schools and administrative buildings, and castle. Finally, my arrival in Celle was opportune: I had come on a Sunday specifically because I thought that there might be a market, and it turned out that I was present for a festival that happens only once per year.

The festival that I attended in Celle was, for lack of other terms, a breakfast festival. Simply put, masses of people convene in the city's central square to have breakfast together. Local singers and musicians perform, tables are laid out, and dozens of families cover them in traditional German spreads. I did not stick around to see it at the beginning of my visit, as I was afraid that it would start raining, but, when I had seen the whole of the old town, I figured that I may as well see if it was still going on. I saw a table of people that seemed especially lively, asked if an empty space next to someone was free, and was invited to join them. I got out a dessert that I had bought at a bakery that morning in hopes of making at least a small contribution to the table's food supply.

As it turned out, no contribution was needed, as everyone at the table had already eaten, and they were only too happy to have another mouth to feed. In a combination of German and English, we introduced ourselves and fell into conversation. I had happened to sit down at the table occupied by members of Celle's German-Polish Culture Club, and, as such, was both treated to a combination of German and Polish food and lucky enough to be able to talk to other people interested in travel. Several of them had been to Canada, and one of the couples there even owned a cottage in Nova Scotia. We chatted for about two hours, at which point most other tables had emptied and the weather was starting to look iffier again. My prandial companions sent me home with more food than I could eat (I finished it on the morning of my departure form Hanover.) and invited me to join them at the same place and same time, the last Sunday of June, in two years' time.

I wish that I could ascribe the extraordinary goodwill of the people of Celle to some sort of exclusive German trait, but there are, in fact, a great many well-meaning people in the world, and I would not be surprised if this same type of thing -- as much as I would like to aver the contrary -- could theoretically have happened in Slovakia or Poland, as people there seemed exceptionally friendly, and Eastern Europeans in general are known for their hospitality. A German whom I met in Hanover, and whom I might see in Lubeck on Friday, suggested that northern Germans were perceived as cold because they did not like to travel to the south, and another German, whom I met here, in Hamburg, corroborated her. The climate here is hideous; it is possible that northern Germans are considered unfriendly simply because people have negative associations with the north as a whole; but the people themselves are very nice.

Braunschweig and Hildesheim were both historically-fascinating cities that I do not have time to adequately discuss. I got look at a picture-perfect church, which is, I believe, on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and listen to a little organ music (I am warming up to it.) in Hildesheim; I do not have too many other outstanding memories of either city except for getting lost multiple times in Braunschweig, finding it a city of enormous cultural wealth, and finding yet another Asian food market there. There seem to be many more such markets in Germany (in any part of Germany) than in France and Belgium combined; Germany is definitely much more to my liking. (The number of Russians here is also vastly greater; I have enjoyed listening to their speech in trains and, occasionally, on the street.)

I am tearing through this lack of notes! Luneburg was a very pretty medieval town, complete with, if I am not mistaken, the cit's first hospital (I am probably mixing it up with somewhere else.) and a thirteenth-century mill. I forgot to mention Bruges' having a bunch of religious cloisters in a previous post, as I did having not found time to see Mechelen except through the train window. I skipped Gottingen and Goslar on this trip, just as I have missed out on other potentially-interesting cities in past trips. I am getting increasingly more comfortable with the impossibility of seeing everything and am very much enjoying the glimpses of other countries that I am getting in the cities that I have time to see.

I do not know where to start with Hamburg except to say that many people, those who prefer large, living cities, would call Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich the only livable cities in Germany. I saw relatively little of Hamburg the other day, as I was tired out and needed to get groceries, but my short walk took me to the docks, with their view of the port's endless cranes and derricks, and, unbeknownst to me at first, through Hamburg's red light district, which was horrifying. The red light district was a strip of sex shops, strip clubs, casinos, corner stores selling only cigarettes and liquor, and moneylenders stretching for block after block, the sidewalks littered with broken glass and homeless alcoholics. I did not feel unsafe at any time during my walk, but I was also depressed by the turpitude that imbued the whole area like a poison gas. Toothless, tattooed women rattled by with shopping carts, and many of the bums were passed out or too tired even to beg.

Bremen was a little bit underwhelming, especially given its relative size; while it had some interesting buildings in its historic center, and it was full of plaques relating the history of many of those buildings, it had very little to see, overall. As I was wandering through its cathedral, it struck me that people interested in the history of painting would probably have a ball visiting cathedrals in a place like France or Germany, as they could trace the gradual development of style and conceptions of beauty and worthiness reflected in paintings from different areas. The adornments inside churches seem to be broken down into straight displays of wealth (gold ornaments, &c.), architectural filigrees meant strictly to be visually pleasing (fancy staircases), representations of saints (often, framed by marble columns), scripts detailing important events in the church's or town's history, representations of Christ, stained glass, organs, and tributes to former priests, sometimes including their gravestones. The cathedral in Bremen had a whole wall covered in such tributes, each one with its own crest. It also had excellent stained glass representations of Christ getting his ass kicked shortly before his crucifixion and of his shaking an admonishing finger at some of his disciplines for either their sins or their ignorance. I guess that my inability to take this stuff seriously is obvious at this point; I wish that churches had historically been meeting grounds for discussion of important civic issues, natural philosophy, and the like, but such ideals usually have consequences that one could not have foreseen, and that was not how things happened in reality anyway, so who cares.

I got back to Hamburg at 4:20, as there Bremen did not take long to see and there are frequent trains between the two cities. I had a great time walking through it -- Hamburg is an excellent city for walking -- and, instead of trying to see every important historical monument in the city, I made a small list of monuments that I wanted to see (almost all churches -- Hamburg has tons of them) and decided to focus more on the feeling of walking through the city than of documenting its cultural riches. I discovered, on this walk, that Hamburg had a significant Iranian population, that there is a smaller red light district near the main train station, and that the vast majority of its cheap fruit and vegetable markets are Turkish; the east Asian population here seems low. Hamburg is full of youth and development; it appears to be the greenest city in all of Europe, based on my experiences; and it is clearly a city of great financial turnover, though it is full of mendicants. The most impressive monument that I have seen here is a church that was bombed out during World War II and subsequently turned into a museum about Nazi atrocities during the war. While I did not see the inside of the museum, as I got there too late in the day, I looked at the statues and plaques there. As in every large German city, people here are committed to remembering their past.

Some scattered notes: I got to listen to a free choir concert at one of the churches here this evening; Bremen's plaques have no direct mention of the war, only mentioning renovations following it; Hildesheim has the best memorial to the persecution of the Jews that I have ever seen, a statue on the top of which is a miniature representation of the synagogue that formerly stood there; much of Belgium smells of ordure; and, as a Russian sitting near me on the train from Brussels to Cologne said, everything is "swimming in verdure." Northern Germany's hideous weather is excellent for plant growth, and it even has a strange pleasantness of its own. While I miss, to some extent, the heat of which I complained so much, I kind of like feeling the cold on the edges of my nostrils (how is that for poetry...). Both the Brussels and Cologne train stations have recycling bins for glass, paper, and plastic in addition to garbage bins everywhere, and the train station in Brussels even has an escalator that detects movement near it and stops moving when no one is on or near it. Many people here drive smart cars, and a great many of them bike, as I have probably already mentioned.

Some of my most enjoyable experiences over the past little while have involved meeting people in the hostels in which I have stayed. The German whom I met a few days ago explained the tension between Germans and Turks here; a Frenchman at the same hostel told me that extreme right political groups were gaining traction in France due to the country's weak and unstable economy; a German whom I met today told me that Braunschweig suffered so much damage in the war not because of strategic importance, but as it was one of Hitler's favorite cities; I have met Canadians who have talked about other parts of Canada with me; I have heard young English women misuse the word "literally" in every other sentence; I met a young English man here who seems quite pleasant; and I have liked literally, in the literal sense, every Australian whom I have met on this trip.

I am almost through my notes! (I have also surely left a great deal out, but such is life.) I saw haircuts in Bremen advertised for up to 73 Euros and cuts of halal meat in a Turkish grocery store for up to 18.49 Euros per kilogram. I am getting wiser with age, having discovered that, as Zev likes to say, money can be exchanged for goods and services. Specifically, while I used to be willing to walk miles in any weather in order to save a few dollars, I am now content to pay for a subway ticket in order to avoid being wet, tired, and miserable. Finally, even going to an ATM here can be interesting. Not only do ATMs dispense money in 50-, 20-, and 10-Euro notes, they also contain slogans in English (when one chooses that language for the display), such as, "With over 100 offices in Germany, there will be one near you," that show the difficulty of translating tone as well as content into another language.

While northern Germany has been just as historically interesting as I would have liked, it has failed to capture my imagination as Lake Kostanz has done. While Lake Constanz is seemingly so insignificant, there is something about it that makes it incredibly pleasant to be there. I am going to visit Schwerin tomorrow and Lubeck the day after tomorrow, and I expect to continue enjoying myself, as I will not be buying any haircuts or halal meat. I have not, in fact, bought any baked goods here since I was in Celle, as I have enough groceries to last me until Saturday evening. I have made loving eyes at every bakery that I have passed here, and I have looked at what was inside them, but, alas, I will not have occasion to buy anything from them, it seems. Perhaps that will change on Friday, as Lubeck is, apparently, known for its marzipan.

Also, this is an interesting time to be in Europe, as people go nuts after their soccer teams win. It is almost midnight, and I have exhausted both my notes and my patience for writing at the moment. I will hold off on writing tomorrow in order to get some work done and will write a letter in two days about both Schwerin and Lubeck.

For once, my camera took a photo right-side-up,

Days 28-30 - Bruges, Leuven, Antwerp, and Brussels

I have to keep this brief, as usual, as I do not have much time to write. I had to change my accommodation in Hamburg and figure out how I would get to Copenhagen from there. I also have to figure out how to get from Stavanger to Bergen, after which I should, hopefully, have finished planning the rest of my trip (although things often change).

I am a little apprehensive about visiting northern Germany, as I am not sure if it has the same cultural riches as much of the south and west. The pictures that looked so interesting to me several months ago no longer do so, and I do not know if I will get the full value out of my rail pass. Nonetheless, it should be an interesting leg of my journey, as all of these turn out to be; some of the cities or areas that sound least interesting turn out to be enthralling.

My first note is that one does not get free water in Belgium, unlike in France. In fact, waiters here are demonstratively rude when one declines to order a drink; as it turns out, they are paid well and do not expect tips, as a result of which they do not work for them (I did not know this, as a result of which I overtipped a waitress, which initially made me quite angry but will not make a difference in the cosmic scale of things.). The food here is quite good and is heavier than that of France; the man with whom I had dinner the other night posited that it was a sort of fusion between French and Dutch food, which sounded plausible to me.

I have noted that the tiny towns that one passes on the train here appear to be in fine condition, unlike in, say, Hungary, where it is clear that people in small towns (and even small cities -- in fact, even in Budapest) are incredibly poor. The landscapes here are boring: besides cows, trees, and the occasional canal, there is nothing to look at. I have not seen any interesting birds lately besides magpies, though I heard a little nice birdsong in Antwerp today. Finally, Belgium seems a little more humane than France, as some of its railway stations (the smaller ones) have free restrooms.

I woke up with the sun in my face on Tuesday and Wednesday, when I was staying in Ghent. I had slept well and quite enjoyed being right on a canal, above a bunch of bars and restaurants, as people's conversations and laughter ebbed and fell in a very pleasant background noise. The blinds, however, could not keep out the sun in the mornings; one awoke early so automatically that it felt like camping (I am relatively far north at this point; the sun sets later and rises earlier here than in the south of France.). I took a tram on Wednesday morning that moved slightly faster than walking and won a young woman's approval by demonstrating a desire to see much more of Belgium than just Brussels, in which many tourists, apparently, start and end their trips here. I spent another fairy tale day in Bruges, which was much like Ghent, only with a more extensive, less concentrated old town (it was not as pretty as Ghent).

I did not give John and Louise nearly enough time in my last email. They were very interesting interlocutors and very nice people; they gave me keychain with a furry animal on it as a souvenir, and Louise gave me a piece of famous Ghent candy when she bought a bag of it to share. The two of them had heard the so-called "last call" in Ypres, which was, apparently, incredible; their daughter was playing in a marching band that was touring Europe in remembrance of the 100-year anniversary of the start of World War I and the 70-year anniversary of the beginning of the Germans' defeat in World War II (if I have my history straight), and the two of them were following her itinerary. There were, it turns out, people from all of the Commonwealth nations, including Australians, Indians, and Brits, in attendance at Ypres, and the last call is, apparently, quite affective. Finally, John said that the French were quite at peace with absurdity (e.g., sitting motionless in their cars for several minutes because a postal truck has parked in the middle of the street, which is only wide enough for one car, and not getting the slightest bit frustrated, as they accept that as a part of life), which assured me that I was not the only person who had come to think that after visiting the country.

Train schedules and tickets are much better here than in France, as one's tickets are not tied to any particular time, and trains between cities run more frequently (they are covering much smaller distances). They are also much worse, and cheaper, than in the Netherlands, where every stop is not only announced but also displayed in every carriage on a screen that changes in real-time. In Belgium, stops on regional trains are not announced at all, and railway officials do not tell one when one's train is expected to arrive at one's destination; one has to keep track of every stop oneself in order not to miss it.

Ghent is the only place where I have seen someone smoking inside a train station, though I did see someone smoking in a subway station in Toulouse; people here do not smoke that much less than in France. I have, to my horror, seen some people exercising; I think that people's exercising here makes them anti-European.

I had the pleasure of travelling from Ghent to Brussels (actually, to Leuven, in my case -- in the same direction) in the same carriage as three Russian women; on the way, I got to listen to the mellifluous sounds of their quarreling. I found a Russian store in Antwerp today, though I did not buy anything, and I found a Chinese market in Brussels yesterday, the first one that I have found on this trip. I have spent more money on food than I intended to in Belgium: the restaurant where I ate in Ghent was overpriced, and I have been buying lots of fresh fruit now that I finally have the option to do so. While I have avoided eating much ice cream on this trip, I have fallen prey to a great many bakeries, and in the Chinese market, I went nuts. (If it is not one thing, it is another.) I bought dumplings for the evening, having already consumed ten boiled dumplings filled with black sesame paste (called "tong yuan" -- I brought them back from Leuven, where I also found a Chinese store that I had forgotten to mention); I forgot that the hostel had no freezer and ended up having to eat the dumplings that night. I also bought a box of mochi balls, a package of pineapple cake, and even one of those bizarre Asian drinks, this one flavored with mangosteen. Brussels has proven the most multiethnic city that I have visited of late, the only one, as far as I can tell, that has had any sort of Chinatown (though I did not seek one out in Paris), but I am now digressing, and I still have much to tell.

The kitchen in this hostel is a war zone that would deserve a whole post of its own, and I have met some pretty interesting people here, including some girls from Winnipeg who said that I was not missing much by not having been there (they seemed much more friendly than Vancouverites). I started my day out today by exploring Brussels, which was incredibly rich in culture. One of the hostel workers in Ghent told me that I should consider skipping Mechelen if I only had two days for Leuven, Brussels, and Antwerp, and, while I was ready to ignore his advice, as I had ignored all of the advice ever given to me (unfortunately), it was spot-on. Brussels was full of churches, museums, palaces, and interesting statuary, and it was much more of a city than either Ghent or Bruges, as its historic sites were interspersed throughout normal commercial zones.

I did not leave Brussels until 1:30, having slept in, and arrived in Antwerp at 2:30. It seemed a little less Belgian to me than any of the other cities that I had so far visited, perhaps because it has fewer of the old houses that populate most of Belgium's tourist centers, and the clouds that had started rolling in broke at around 4:15 or 4:30. My eyes started burning forthwith, as sun screen was running to them, suggesting that I probably should have invested in an umbrella for this trip. I nonetheless enjoyed the religious architecture of Antwerp and think that I have seen the finest stained glass of my life here.

For some reason, I keep comparing Worms and Speyer with the cities that I have seen of late, perhaps because I have visited so many cathedrals. While I have tended to feel that neither German city has anything on the aforementioned Dutch cities, perhaps because Worms' city gate, while enormous, is not that much better than those that I have seen here. It occurs to me now that there is no need to compare different cities so much. I have seen some interesting ones here, and I was enraptured in Baden-Wurttenburg (sp?). I have probably left out a lot of observations from the past few days due to time constraints and a dearth of notes. Rather, I have a few more notes. While the French are generally incompetent, their police force responds very quickly when bums wander through train stations or into trains, and they appear well-trained. Also, from my reading of Aeschylus, I have gathered that the Greeks were in constant fear of an attack by outsiders and have surmised, based on their having, apparently, wanted power over weaker people, reverence from the weak, control over their subjects, &c., that the cultural riches that we ascribe to them were the direct product of their having been more organized than almost any society that preceded them: while those in power suffered from the same follies as those in power today, and, probably, for all of history, they had a large task force at their command due to efficient governance. That is my conjecture, at least, and a reasonable one on which to end this email.

Belgians like fancy libraries, like this one in Leuven.

Day 27 - Ghent

For the first time on this trip, I got somewhere by car yesterday. I met an Australian couple yesterday morning, started chatting with them, and was offered a ride to the city center of Ghent when we discovered that we were going to the same place. I did not see as much of the Belgian countryside yesterday morning, but I have grown more interested in visiting Australia and saved a few Euros. I also enjoyed walking around the center of Ghent with John and Louise, my new companions, until we reached the tourist office and parted ways so that I could leave my luggage at my hostel.

Rouen can take a seat: Ghent is the most beautiful city that I have ever seen. Its city center appears to be composed almost exclusively of the type of brick homes that I saw in Ypres yesterday: they have triangular roofs, multicolored facades, and little attics with windows sticking out of their roofs, and they all look older than the Stone Age. Walking through Ghent is a little like being in a fairy tale: it is so beautiful that it does not seem real. Fewer people smoke here than in France, there are far few cars, and there is less of the "rah-rah, we are great" architecture and atmosphere here than in France. Perhaps that is because Belgium has historically been too small a nation for a warlike or colonizing culture to develop here; perhaps it feels less self-aggrandizing than France perforce.

The churches here bespeak of extraordinary wealth. I know that Belgium has historically been a trade center and that it used to make a lot of cloth, as evidenced by the cloth hall in Ypres; whatever the case, it grew filthy rich in the Middle Ages. Its cathedrals are full of marble, statues, paintings, ornamental staircases leading nowhere, and all sorts of little architectural details -- representations of people, bits of statuary sticking out of supporting columns, tiny, sideways spires -- that solve no purpose beyond ornamentation. One comes to feel, in one of these cathedrals, that they are partly a celebration of beauty; while every painting that I have ever seen in a church has been derivative in style, church interiors here are designed in such a way as to be very aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps the most available outlet for the energies of artistically-inclined people in the Middle Ages was to try to make religious buildings as beautiful as possible.

The stained glass here is the best that I have ever seen. While the depictions of most stained glass are hard to make out, these are as clear as day, showing scenes of human interaction that are as beautiful as good paintings. I have discovered both that stained glass windows can be opened, which seems like cheating to me (to air out churches on hot days), and that the parts of stained glass that depict human scenes and the parts of them that merely provide color are clearly demarcated on one and the same window in Belgium, which I had not seen before.

Stop me if I have mentioned this before, but men and women have very clear, distinct roles in classical statuary: men are statesmen, warriors, or thinkers, while women are nymphs or bearers of children. I forgot to mention that the cathedral in Ypres had extensive representations of the 1383 siege by the English, during which the city's citizens prayed to some saint or other to protect them. The Belgians' (former?) piety reminds me of that portrayed by Aeschylus; it seems that the ancient Greeks and medieval Belgians alike attributed most of their triumphs and defeats to gods rather than ascribing them to human agency.

The Belgians know their food. At a fruit and vegetable market the other day, I bought almost two pounds of very fresh fruit (cherries and grapes -- the raspberries were too expensive, and the strawberries looked so-so) for four Euros, which, while not a great price, is much better than what I would have paid in France (for worse fruit). I also bought more food at a bakery (most of it savory) for five Euros, meaning that I paid nine Euros for two lunches here. I got dinner at a nearby restaurant for something like 11.50 Euros -- but I am now speaking only of prices and forgetting to tell you what it was. My dinner was a phenomenal meatloaf dish that came with mashed potatoes and steamed green beans -- the Belgians are not prejudiced against vegetables! I do not know if meatloaf is very high-quality meat, but it was incredibly tender, marinated as it was in a gravy that tasted heavily of black pepper. I plan to return to the same restaurant tonight to try the dish that my companion for the evening had, a veal stew, as I am not going to eat out at all in Brussels, where I have decided that I would do better to make my own dinners.

The last note, the one about my companion, is a little vexatious. I met someone in my hostel who asked if he could join me for dinner, and I did not have it in me to refuse. The fellow was a Malaysian computer scientist returning home after three years in Sheffield, and, while he was plenty interesting to talk to and I would have liked him in pretty much any other setting, I would rather have had dinner on my own than with him. Again, I discovered that I took in less of my surroundings and felt less immersed in the surrounding culture when I was with another person. I brushed off his invitation to join him on his trip to Bruges today, as I had to write this email, which I might have been able to write yesterday if I had been able to eat more quickly, and do not know if I will see him for dinner tonight. Perhaps such interactions are a workplace hazard of staying in hostels and are not so bad after all, as we would wither if we did not interact at all.

Oops! I forgot to describe the belfry that I climbed (for more money than I would have liked -- I am not going to climb any more cathedrals or towers in Belgium except, perhaps, in Antwerp). It had a long and interesting history dating from the fourteenth-century; people had lived there at one point, and its passages were so narrow that a stouter man than I would not have been able to fit through them at all. The belfry offered a 360-degree view of Ghent somewhat near its top, and it even had a passage leading higher up, but a schoolmaster told me that tourists were not allowed up there when I tried to follow his students up. The city of Ghent is unwittingly awaiting my lawsuits on the grounds of ageism, sexual discrimination, and unfair treatment of people from another country.

This was the view from the window of my room.

Day 26 - Lille, Ypres, and Kortrijk

Lille is penitently quiet on Monday mornings, almost as though it were begging forgiveness for the excesses of the weekend. A few trucks still drive through pedestrian zones, but the streets are otherwise almost deserted. Shattered glass litters the sidewalks, and street cleaners -- that is my name for those machines that people drive to clean the streets -- crawl through the streets. The few people who are out of doors appear to be getting breakfast from coffee shops and bakeries.

I saw relatively little of Lille today, as I was in a rush to leave and the city's citadel, as it turned out, was closed. I was impressed, though, by the city's greenness; Lille appeared to have the most trees per hectare of any city that I visited in France. It has a small, free zoo, a massive park full of attractions for children, and a canal surrounding the park, which makes it feel like its own island. Lillians, or residents of Lille, take their citadel seriously: while it was built in the seventeenth century, it is now a military base! I am not sure whom Lille is fighting at present, but I did see one military man leaving the base on his bicycle with an expression of equanimity on his face at roughly 10:30 AM, perhaps a decoy meant to give the base an appearance of calm.

As I went from Lille to Kortrijk, I both started reading Aeschylus, who seems like a more serious writer than Hesse, and considered that one's journeys on trips abroad were more important, and more memorable, than the destinations themselves. I will spare you most of my thoughts concerning the matter, as I am exhausted; in short, this idea partly arose when I realized that Chartres itself was essentially just another cathedral, the appearance of which I would forget. I would not forget the conversation that I had on the way there, though, or the feeling of the train ride back, &c.

The first announcement that I heard on the train from Lille to Kortrijk let me know that I was leaving France, as the person making it sounded like he was speaking in tongues. To give you an idea of what Dutch looks and, by extension, sounds like, take the word "guesthouse," which is written on the slip of paper that has this guesthouse's WiFi code: "gastenverblijk." This probably looks like some kind of cruel joke, the scribbling of dyslexic six-year-old (not to make fun of dyslexic people), but it is not. Now consider that every word in the language is written like that, and you will have an idea of how hard it is to speak and understand.

I spoke my first words in Dutch today, saying "I would like a yogurt and a strawberry tart, please," and "I from Canada," which started a brief discussion with the bakery employee about Canada (in English), as she had been to Toronto. People here speak excellent English, though I have been trying to use Dutch whenever possible, such as when I asked, "Here is Kortrijk?" as my train arrived there. The trains in Belgium are cheaper and worse than those in France: they do not have any announcements of stops, and train tickets do not include one's arrival time. Controllers check one's tickets here much more frequently than in France, and people have more of a hale-fellow-well-met disposition than in France. When I asked one of the controllers today if I could get from Kortrijk to Ypres and back in one day, and then asked him if he could give me a return ticket (a two-way ticket) when he told me that he could print one off for me, he cried out, "I have everything!" in English.

On the whole, everything seems quieter, smaller, and slower in Belgium than in France (perhaps because I have only seen small cities). I have not yet seen a high-rise here that I can remember, and the drivers here are not only sane but even yield to pedestrians! I noticed one thing, before I forget, that surprised me: when Belgians want to signal that something is disallowed, such as walking on a certain path or parking somewhere, they circle the disallowed symbol in red, almost as we do (in North America) when something is allowed. It took me awhile today to figure out what these circles meant. Belgian architecture so far seems defined by brick buildings with particolored facades, triangular roofs, and the same little attics as in many French buildings. The town hall of Kortrijk, if my memory holds, looked like it had devils' horns as a results of its having two triangular rooftop adornments.

My trip to Ypres was a huge success. While I was tired on the way there and did not want to get off the train, I was intrigued by it as soon as I stepped onto the gravel path that was one of its railway platforms: I was in the sticks again, as I had been in Arles. Ypres is full of very pretty, old buildings, including its world-famous former cloth hall and its cathedral, and it has several museums and war memorials. It is a bit of a pity, in fact, that the war hangs so heavily over the city, as though it were the city's only defining feature, which must rankle some local residents. Ypres has been the site of many battles historically, though, as one is reminded by reading the plaques on the sides of some buildings. Its cathedral had the most impressive display that I have seen so far on this trip: it included a wheelbarrow with a massive China vase in place of its usual metal holder, a sculpture of roses, some sort of non-stone representation of dead soldiers, a bunch of spray-painted rocks, some old furniture, a manuscript related to the city's original cathedral, and so on. I could not figure out the exact point of some of these objects, as the descriptions of them were mostly just in Dutch, but one got the idea that they related to the city's history.

I enjoyed Kortrijk's historic center, as well, although it was less impressive, but I have no time to describe that, as I need to get to bed (and should have done so an hour ago). I am going to have some time to rest up over the next few days before plunging myself more seriously into my travels for a few days. One plus to rushing so much, perhaps the only plus, is that it costs relatively less than taking one's time would (one presumes, assuming that one would attempt to see roughly the same amount of cities); while the guesthouse in which I am staying is terrific, staying for a few days would rack up a handy bill.

Some final thoughts include that Belgium seems -- again, perhaps because of my not yet having seen a big city here -- to have more cyclists and narrower streets than any of France. It is much better at not sucking than France -- I do not know why, but I get that overall impression. I saw someone texting and biking today, which was cool, but I also saw someone texting and driving. I met a stereotypical Chinese salesman the other day, whom I would like to describe, but everyone knows the stereotype anyway, and some people find stereotypes offensive if they are treated with undue insensitivity. I skipped a free concert in Lille the other night, as I had no time to see it, though I got to hear plenty of street music regardless (on National Music Day). Finally, a note on English: when I took the bus here today, the bus driver said that he would "drop me" at the stop nearest to my hotel. Verbal phrases must be terribly hard for foreigners to learn -- it must take a real leap of faith to say, for example, "drop you off" instead of "drop you." I am off to bed. I have to get up at 9:00 AM for breakfast tomorrow!

This war memorial honors soldiers from the entire Commonwealth.