I left Maastricht lost in thought. The woman whom I had asked for a train ticket to Aachen had told me that taking the bus was faster and cheaper than going by train, and a man outside told me which bus station to go to. Before that, I had had breakfast at a nearby café and seen a bunch of interesting things. Firstly, it turned out to be a Sunday, and Aastricht's entire main square was empty. A man was driving a machine the size of a bulldozer across the square, sweeping up garbage from it, and I even saw what looked like joggers. At first, I thought that they were actors paid to dress up in jogging clothes before running around the corner to smoke a cigarette, but I later saw enough of them to shatter another one of my preconceptions about Holland: not everybody there smokes.
I had seen other interesting things, as well. I quickly learned that it is easy to eat reasonable food in Europe without shelling out tons of money as long as one knows what kind of place to look for. The prevalence of the café culture in Europe is predicated mostly on one thing: people like going out to cafes. Locals, as well as tourists, like eating out, and they often like places with cheap, authentically-local food (though not always). A good rule of thumb for finding decent cafes is to never eat within three blocks of a train station or major tourist attraction. If you see a café or restaurant with twelve or more tables lined up outside of it, gaudy awnings, and similar cafes to the left and right of it, avoid it; if you see a café with five or fewer tables that could suit at most twenty people indoors, you might be on the right track. Low-key or youthful music is often a good sign, as is the prevalence of alcoholic drinks, unlike in Vancouver: many beerhouses here serve very good food for good prices, as they are not aimed at the upper class. Shopping at supermarkets and bakeries is also a god way to get bang for one's buck, but the former are much harder to find than they were in Warsaw, for example, and bakeries are only really good for breadstuffs and dairy (they carry milk in most of Europe).
[Editor's note: I forgot to say in my first post that the café culture in Holland (and Europe as a whole) seems to reflect a whole different cultural climate from that of Vancouver. Residents of Vancouver lead very private lives and are generally unfriendly: while Vancouverites run away from each other and spend time alone in their apartments once they have finished work, Europeans (again, generalizing from the Dutch and from previous trips) congregate in central areas and - shockingly! - interact with one another. Older people especially seem to like meeting up in cafes for a glass of beer once work is over, and the Dutch as a whole - again, unlike Vancouverites - are entirely willing to engage strangers in conversation. It seems that, as soon as one leaves Vancouver, people immediately become friendly and remind one that human beings are generally interested in one another.]
I have digressed, though, from the heart of this post! As the bus carried me through suburbs similar to those that I had seen on the way to Maastricht, full of houses with gabled roofs, gardens, and an awesome amount of greenery, I regretted having to leave Holland. It struck me as a country in which people believed in the government and treated one another with dignity. Holland has not participated in any wars over the past few hundred years that I know of; the intimate integration of farming into daily lives, the signs of which are plainly evident when one is driving through the suburbs and passes field after field of grazing cattle, bespeaks of production on a low scale that fosters self-sufficiency and does not overtax the land or encourage overconsumption; and the people struck me as content and selfless. When I sat down for breakfast by the deserted square on Sunday morning (breaking my own rule of not eating near cultural monuments, and again being served a ham sandwich with slices of boiled egg (and slivers of carrot) on it), the man serving me (who, like all Dutchmen, spoke fluent English), explained that storeowners were only allowed to keep their stores open a certain number of hours per week, as a result of which they often stayed open late on Thursdays (for people who could not visit them early in the evening) and opened late on Monday; even that seemed reasonable! I was taken by the man's friendliness and by the apparent disinterest in ripping off tourists: Holland strikes me as an eminently-successful country, in that the quality of life of people living there must be very high. I would be interested to learn more about the problems besetting the country, as those must exist beyond the veneer of what I saw, but I am, alas, woefully unfamiliar with Dutch history and literature, so I cannot enlarge on them.
And so it was that I left Holland with a heavy heart, arriving in Germany more quickly than I would have liked, as, once I am settled in a bus or car, I wish for the drive to last forever. Aachen was so pleasant that it led me to write down, in my notes, that, if I could be reborn in any other country, it would be Germany. I do not quite know how to communicate the charm of a small German city. The streets are narrow and winding, the cars few. Stores and houses sit, respectively, shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, each of their facades a different color from that of its neighbor, and almost all of them have overhanging eaves and little embellishments around their windows. The streets are lined with trees and often end unexpectedly in churches or museums. There are ample pedestrian-only walkways in the center of town, which is peppered with fountains and states of divers form, which give the streets a gay and colorful atmosphere; it is as though the designers of such cities believe that life can be beautiful and that testaments to our creative expressiveness better our moods. The historic center of Aachen was very nicely preserved, and the ice cream tasted like ice cream.
I wish that I could say what happened once I got to Cologne. All that I remember is that I checked in to my hostel just fine - rather, I remember everything. I decided, being the type of tourist who tries to drink in as much culture as possible rather than strictly have fun, to see as much of Cologne as I could. I toured the entire historic center, extending all of the way to the remnants of the town's former walls and to its synagogue, and exhausted myself in the process. Cologne had far fewer street signs than Aachen and was the first city that I had visited in Germany that was hostile towards tourists: a giant proportion of its roads were blocked off, there was construction everywhere, the train ran right through a busy part of the city, and many of its sidewalks led nowhere, cutting off halfway between city blocks. I discovered on the following day that it had the worst train station that I had ever visited, but I hope to remember to talk about that in my next post. It was more or less a city full of churches that had more of a contemporary cultural life than Aachen: one saw posters here, there, and elsewhere for concerts and other events that would appeal to young people.
Sticking to my guns, I went to a nearby beer hall for dinner rather than eating at one of the numerous nearby Turkish take-out places; I am set on eating real German food rather than fast food that I could get anywhere. I managed to ask if the dish of the day contained meat, discovered that it was gulash, and ordered a fairly decent schnitzel (which is Austrian, not German, food). While trying to pay the bill, I took out my German phrasebook (I am terrible with numbers; I cannot count above three.) and said "I have this" in Russian, only to discover that the waitress was from Latvia! (She spoke Russian with a very weird accent.) I have found my knowledge of Russian useful in every city that I have visited and have heard people speaking Russian everywhere. In Amsterdam, I asked someone, in Russian, how to find the right platform for my train, and in Aachen, a woman even directed me to a church in Russian! When I asked her, in German, if we were on such-and-such a street, she replied affirmatively but then asked if I was looking for anything in particular. I had not been prepared for such a complex question; I answered, after searching my memory and realizing that I did not yet know the word for "church," "a church" in Russian. "That's Russian," I added after a pause, and she said, in Russian, "I know"! Germans are capable of anything! The young woman directed me, in a mixture of German and broken Russian, to the church that I was looking for, and that was in a city thousands of miles (or something) from Russia.
In Cologne, to jump ahead a little, I asked a man (whom I had heard speaking Russian) why the bathroom door would not open, and in Trier I happened upon a couple speaking Russian and asked them how to find a local church. In the hostel in which I stayed in Cologne, I even managed to speak at length with a retired soldier from Saint Petersburg. He greeted me with a bunch of words in German and, "Get the hell out of here" in Russian when he found me sitting at a table that he wanted for himself. He claimed to have made it clear that it was his by putting a cup and plate there that anyone could have put there - they looked abandoned. When I answered that I was moving as fast as I could, he grew even more annoyed, querying how a Russian - or at least a Russian speaker - could possibly take a fellow Russian's space at a table. We started arguing about whose space it was, and, before long, we started talking about our travels in a conversation that drew out for several hours and could have gone on endlessly. The man (who never formally introduced himself) thereafter greeted me with a hearty handshake when he saw me in the hall and even briefly introduced me to his wife.
Since I have finished saying things about the second day of my trip, I may as well pass on to offhand notes so as to make my next few posts easier to write. All German men under the age of thirty years have facial piercings. I like to sit next to young women, people with children, older people, and young couples in trains, but I avoid young men like the plague, as I am afraid of them (especially when they are in groups - it is funny how are fears work) and see the all as potential hooligans. "Maas" is the name of the river on which Maastricht is located. One of the most ubiquitous banks in Holland (based on what I saw of it) is called "Rabobank," which literally means "slave bank" in Russian, and I saw a restaurant in Cologne called "Extrablatt," which more or less means "more Mafioso." I liked the fact that the waitress at the restaurant where I first ate in Cologne (and to which I returned the next night) was an average-looking woman in her late-40s; the waiters and waitresses at many German beerhouses are ordinary men and women. Finally, when I accidentally overpaid by 20 Euros for the computer that I bought (for 400 Euros, including various accoutrements - a great price, in my opinion), the woman working the cash register returned the overpaid amount to me; and both Holland and Germany (the parts that I have seen) have an excellent infrastructure for the blind. I will return to more standard narration (perhaps) in my next post.
I had seen other interesting things, as well. I quickly learned that it is easy to eat reasonable food in Europe without shelling out tons of money as long as one knows what kind of place to look for. The prevalence of the café culture in Europe is predicated mostly on one thing: people like going out to cafes. Locals, as well as tourists, like eating out, and they often like places with cheap, authentically-local food (though not always). A good rule of thumb for finding decent cafes is to never eat within three blocks of a train station or major tourist attraction. If you see a café or restaurant with twelve or more tables lined up outside of it, gaudy awnings, and similar cafes to the left and right of it, avoid it; if you see a café with five or fewer tables that could suit at most twenty people indoors, you might be on the right track. Low-key or youthful music is often a good sign, as is the prevalence of alcoholic drinks, unlike in Vancouver: many beerhouses here serve very good food for good prices, as they are not aimed at the upper class. Shopping at supermarkets and bakeries is also a god way to get bang for one's buck, but the former are much harder to find than they were in Warsaw, for example, and bakeries are only really good for breadstuffs and dairy (they carry milk in most of Europe).
[Editor's note: I forgot to say in my first post that the café culture in Holland (and Europe as a whole) seems to reflect a whole different cultural climate from that of Vancouver. Residents of Vancouver lead very private lives and are generally unfriendly: while Vancouverites run away from each other and spend time alone in their apartments once they have finished work, Europeans (again, generalizing from the Dutch and from previous trips) congregate in central areas and - shockingly! - interact with one another. Older people especially seem to like meeting up in cafes for a glass of beer once work is over, and the Dutch as a whole - again, unlike Vancouverites - are entirely willing to engage strangers in conversation. It seems that, as soon as one leaves Vancouver, people immediately become friendly and remind one that human beings are generally interested in one another.]
I have digressed, though, from the heart of this post! As the bus carried me through suburbs similar to those that I had seen on the way to Maastricht, full of houses with gabled roofs, gardens, and an awesome amount of greenery, I regretted having to leave Holland. It struck me as a country in which people believed in the government and treated one another with dignity. Holland has not participated in any wars over the past few hundred years that I know of; the intimate integration of farming into daily lives, the signs of which are plainly evident when one is driving through the suburbs and passes field after field of grazing cattle, bespeaks of production on a low scale that fosters self-sufficiency and does not overtax the land or encourage overconsumption; and the people struck me as content and selfless. When I sat down for breakfast by the deserted square on Sunday morning (breaking my own rule of not eating near cultural monuments, and again being served a ham sandwich with slices of boiled egg (and slivers of carrot) on it), the man serving me (who, like all Dutchmen, spoke fluent English), explained that storeowners were only allowed to keep their stores open a certain number of hours per week, as a result of which they often stayed open late on Thursdays (for people who could not visit them early in the evening) and opened late on Monday; even that seemed reasonable! I was taken by the man's friendliness and by the apparent disinterest in ripping off tourists: Holland strikes me as an eminently-successful country, in that the quality of life of people living there must be very high. I would be interested to learn more about the problems besetting the country, as those must exist beyond the veneer of what I saw, but I am, alas, woefully unfamiliar with Dutch history and literature, so I cannot enlarge on them.
And so it was that I left Holland with a heavy heart, arriving in Germany more quickly than I would have liked, as, once I am settled in a bus or car, I wish for the drive to last forever. Aachen was so pleasant that it led me to write down, in my notes, that, if I could be reborn in any other country, it would be Germany. I do not quite know how to communicate the charm of a small German city. The streets are narrow and winding, the cars few. Stores and houses sit, respectively, shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, each of their facades a different color from that of its neighbor, and almost all of them have overhanging eaves and little embellishments around their windows. The streets are lined with trees and often end unexpectedly in churches or museums. There are ample pedestrian-only walkways in the center of town, which is peppered with fountains and states of divers form, which give the streets a gay and colorful atmosphere; it is as though the designers of such cities believe that life can be beautiful and that testaments to our creative expressiveness better our moods. The historic center of Aachen was very nicely preserved, and the ice cream tasted like ice cream.
I wish that I could say what happened once I got to Cologne. All that I remember is that I checked in to my hostel just fine - rather, I remember everything. I decided, being the type of tourist who tries to drink in as much culture as possible rather than strictly have fun, to see as much of Cologne as I could. I toured the entire historic center, extending all of the way to the remnants of the town's former walls and to its synagogue, and exhausted myself in the process. Cologne had far fewer street signs than Aachen and was the first city that I had visited in Germany that was hostile towards tourists: a giant proportion of its roads were blocked off, there was construction everywhere, the train ran right through a busy part of the city, and many of its sidewalks led nowhere, cutting off halfway between city blocks. I discovered on the following day that it had the worst train station that I had ever visited, but I hope to remember to talk about that in my next post. It was more or less a city full of churches that had more of a contemporary cultural life than Aachen: one saw posters here, there, and elsewhere for concerts and other events that would appeal to young people.
Sticking to my guns, I went to a nearby beer hall for dinner rather than eating at one of the numerous nearby Turkish take-out places; I am set on eating real German food rather than fast food that I could get anywhere. I managed to ask if the dish of the day contained meat, discovered that it was gulash, and ordered a fairly decent schnitzel (which is Austrian, not German, food). While trying to pay the bill, I took out my German phrasebook (I am terrible with numbers; I cannot count above three.) and said "I have this" in Russian, only to discover that the waitress was from Latvia! (She spoke Russian with a very weird accent.) I have found my knowledge of Russian useful in every city that I have visited and have heard people speaking Russian everywhere. In Amsterdam, I asked someone, in Russian, how to find the right platform for my train, and in Aachen, a woman even directed me to a church in Russian! When I asked her, in German, if we were on such-and-such a street, she replied affirmatively but then asked if I was looking for anything in particular. I had not been prepared for such a complex question; I answered, after searching my memory and realizing that I did not yet know the word for "church," "a church" in Russian. "That's Russian," I added after a pause, and she said, in Russian, "I know"! Germans are capable of anything! The young woman directed me, in a mixture of German and broken Russian, to the church that I was looking for, and that was in a city thousands of miles (or something) from Russia.
In Cologne, to jump ahead a little, I asked a man (whom I had heard speaking Russian) why the bathroom door would not open, and in Trier I happened upon a couple speaking Russian and asked them how to find a local church. In the hostel in which I stayed in Cologne, I even managed to speak at length with a retired soldier from Saint Petersburg. He greeted me with a bunch of words in German and, "Get the hell out of here" in Russian when he found me sitting at a table that he wanted for himself. He claimed to have made it clear that it was his by putting a cup and plate there that anyone could have put there - they looked abandoned. When I answered that I was moving as fast as I could, he grew even more annoyed, querying how a Russian - or at least a Russian speaker - could possibly take a fellow Russian's space at a table. We started arguing about whose space it was, and, before long, we started talking about our travels in a conversation that drew out for several hours and could have gone on endlessly. The man (who never formally introduced himself) thereafter greeted me with a hearty handshake when he saw me in the hall and even briefly introduced me to his wife.
Since I have finished saying things about the second day of my trip, I may as well pass on to offhand notes so as to make my next few posts easier to write. All German men under the age of thirty years have facial piercings. I like to sit next to young women, people with children, older people, and young couples in trains, but I avoid young men like the plague, as I am afraid of them (especially when they are in groups - it is funny how are fears work) and see the all as potential hooligans. "Maas" is the name of the river on which Maastricht is located. One of the most ubiquitous banks in Holland (based on what I saw of it) is called "Rabobank," which literally means "slave bank" in Russian, and I saw a restaurant in Cologne called "Extrablatt," which more or less means "more Mafioso." I liked the fact that the waitress at the restaurant where I first ate in Cologne (and to which I returned the next night) was an average-looking woman in her late-40s; the waiters and waitresses at many German beerhouses are ordinary men and women. Finally, when I accidentally overpaid by 20 Euros for the computer that I bought (for 400 Euros, including various accoutrements - a great price, in my opinion), the woman working the cash register returned the overpaid amount to me; and both Holland and Germany (the parts that I have seen) have an excellent infrastructure for the blind. I will return to more standard narration (perhaps) in my next post.
This appears to be Aachen's cathedral.
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