Amsterdam

The first discouraging sign was the weather. It had been beautiful from Istanbul to Budapest, fickle in Germany, and when I got off the train in Amsterdam it was pouring rain. I never knew the extent to which climate determines the personality of a people - and where there's not much sun, they don't smile. It rains a lot in Holland and the Dutch are reserved almost to the point of dourness. When I got to my hostel - really a budget hotel - I found at reception a tired-looking monotone youth who acted much put out that I'd interrupted his computer time. He took from me the exorbitant cost of my stay, gave me my keys and the house rules and returned to his techno.

A little later on I was sitting in the joyless lounge of the hotel fucking around on my ipad when a group of people came in. One of them was a friendly young guy from the Pacific Northwest named Andrew. We started chatting about the usual shit - where ya from, where ya been - when the man behind the reception desk came out and started shutting down the room. At 11 pm. That's it, I thought. I'm changing hostels.

We were remarking on how lame this closing of the room was when Andrew said they were going to a bar anyway. With them was a Ukrainian girl who lived in Amsterdam and was showing them around. "Would you like to go to a bar?" he asked me. I said I would. I went upstairs to change and would meet them in the lobby.

We were outside the front door about to leave when he addressed me.

"By the way, we're all rolling."
I looked at him quizzically. "What?"
"Or at least we will be soon. She hooked up some MDMA. Just wanted you to know what was going on in case we started acting weird. We put it in the water."
He was holding a half-full plastic water bottle.
"Oh," I said. A moment passed.
"Unless...you'd like to join us?"
I looked at the bottle. Another moment. Then I took the bottle unscrewed the cap and drank two huge gulps of the chemical-flavored liquid.
"That'll be enough," said the girl.
"Good. Let's roll."

It was a strange and motley patronage assembled at the club we entered. A group of ten or so Asians, some dancing awkwardly while the others sat at a table behind a velvet rope. I took them with no further basis to be nouveau riche Chinese. A Dutchman overdressed in a poorly matched coat and tie talking to two women. Tourists like ourselves. And standing in front of me at the bar were the strangest customers of all.

The first was a woman wearing a kind of corset made of what looked like black rubber. It covered her chest but left her back and shoulders bare and these were covered in strange tattoos. Hieroglyphs and arabesques and foreign words. All black ink on that pale skin. She was talking to a tanned woman with long hair and tight jeans each the same color of deepest black. This one wore a hot pink tanktop and was so, so thin that as I watched her sway rhythmically to the music she was like a snake charmed to dance entirely upright.

The Ukrainian girl seated next to me gestured at them. "Prostitutes", she said.

To top off this bizarre milieu the bartender was a dead ringer for Lindsay Lohan only she had a wax face. I was in a delirious state of heightened observation. I found myself rubbing my arms and chest just for the sensation of it. I redoubled my attention on the surreal scene before me, all of it scored and striped by the red lasers of the clublights and dreamily obscured by smoke from a machine.

Along with the two whores already described two more were congregated at the bar around a man who was obviously their pimp. He had olive skin and oiled hair and I placed him in his early twenties. He was well-dressed. He wore a Burberry sweater. The pimp would in turn hold the girls to his side and whisper coyly in their ears and then he would shove them away. There was one whore who was the least attractive of the bunch, tall and fat and ugly, who stood apart from the rest of the girls doting on the pimp. Pensive. Like an outcast. Watching this group interact I reflected that when you see a pimp in his element you're looking at a low form of life indeed.

Soon more whores had seeped into the club and they'd taken to dancing on the bar and tabletops with their perfect bodies, their distorted faces. At this point I wondered aloud whether we were in an outright brothel but the local girl assured me we were not. She said she didn't like it either but that it was a Monday night and everywhere else was closed.

We drank and danced for a while and then moved to another club for one more beer before calling it a night. I got into bed and passed out.

I awoke the next morning with a pretty good hangover. I ran into the people I'd gone out with the previous night. They were going to a coffeeshop around the corner from the hotel. I said I'd meet them there.

In Amsterdam a coffeeshop is a place where marijuana can be legally bought and smoked. What we call a coffee shop they just call a cafe. To someone used to the caution and secrecy with which the drug is treated by users in the US the novelty of being able to walk off the street, sit down and smoke it, of smelling it everywhere, is strange to the point of comedy. I found my friends and walked up to the bar to make a purchase. A cigarette of pure marijuana cost eight euro. I ordered one of these and coffee and received my item in a yellow plastic vial.

I sat down at the table and lit up and we sat smoking and drinking coffee in our shared hungover daze. There were plans to do a canal boat tour and I asked if I could tag along. Andrew looked at me with a look that admonished me for even thinking I had to ask. "Please dude," he said. "We've been waiting for you."

Being pretty hungover already I decided to just keep going and stay in that night. Andrew and I bought two beers apiece for the ride and I ended up drinking one of his. When we got off the boat I was drunk. As planned we were now close to our next sightseeing destination: the Red Light district.

Amsterdam, with its picturesque canals lined with tall and narrow homes and its ubiquitous cyclists rolling over the bridges and along the banks would be a place well worth visiting on the aesthetic merits alone. But this placid, quintessentially European setting combined with the tolerance for vice makes the city a truly unique place in the world. The Red Light district has a sketchy feeling to it even during the day. Here all pretense is dropped. Prostitutes dressed in but lingerie sit on faux-ornate chairs in booths covered floor to ceiling in red velvet that you step into directly from the street. When a man enters a curtain is drawn and the business conducted right there. Most of the women are old and fat and ugly and they bang on the glass doors of their booths and holler at you in Dutch to come to them. Some though are young and attractive and they do not call but only stare at you boldly and bid you come with their eyes alone. While we were walking around in our fucked-up state the bells of a nearby church began tolling loudly and I asked an Australian girl in our group what she thought and she said she felt like she was dreaming. A dream or a nightmare, I wondered.

After walking around some more I went back to the hotel to crash and recover from the night and day's debauch.

For the first four nights of my stay I was alone in my six-bed dorm with the weirdest girl ever. She was a Swiss national but she was not of European descent. She was tall and had hair of thin braids dyed blonde that went all the way down her back. Several times early in my stay I would glance over to find her staring at me and I actually had to tell her to stop doing this, which she obliged. She was harmless, just weird.

When she found out I was American she perked up and said she was moving to LA. "You wanna be an actress?" I said. She said no, a singer. I thought there was sufficient sarcasm in my voice to deter further conversation but apparently not. She said that night she happened to be singing at a local jazz club. She asked me to come watch her. Sometimes when you're traveling you just have to go with things despite having some reservations. I said sure thing.

I found out on the way to the bar that she didn't have an appointment to sing and there wasn't even an open mic, she was just going to try and cajole her way onstage. This only added to my initial skepticism and I was starting to regret coming. But the errand was partially redeemed when I heard the band play - they were incredible, each man an absolute virtuoso. The downside was that I figured no way musicians of this caliber were going to let some weirdo girl they'd never seen before just stand up and sing with them. What if she sucked? But she asked and must have said the right things because they agreed. And she wasn't half bad.

Her going to LA will be a complete disaster. But that wasn't the point. It had been a fun night and something different. And relatively wholesome.

The rest of my stay finished up quietly. The weather cleared up the day before I was to leave and at last this beautiful city was pleasant also. I was the only witness to a marriage proposal on the Canal Amstel and I gave the couple a thumbs up which they returned. I met a local seacaptain who kept gazing at me with a strange twinkle in his eye and later while taking me to a bar had us stop by his place where I thought I might get trafficked but nothing happened.

I walked around, talked to locals in cafes, read and wrote and drank.

Amsterdam was a highlight. Now I was leaving the Continent. On to London.

Germany - Town & Country

Three straight weeks of partying finally caught up with me in Berlin and I got sick. Sucks not being able to drink in one of the nightlife capitals of Europe but when you're on the road six months the priority is to just get better. My first night I unwisely attempted to go out and had to turn back at the door of a bar I'd traveled a half-hour to get to.

I forced myself outside the next day. The first thing I noticed was the architecture. Unusual for Europe Berlin has few old buildings. It looks like a place devoid of history (when of course it is the opposite), fashioned out of nothing by the city's brilliant unapprenticed youth. That's the second thing I noticed. The young have made it their own. They swarm the streets in their strange dark clothing, tattoo the buildings with wondrous designs, smash the half-liter beer bottles they all carry around at night onto the sidewalks (in Friedrichshain, a popular hood for this crowd, they're covered in broken glass.) Young people are everywhere, and when you see an old person they're like an uncommon oddity you had almost forgotten about.

Berlin is seldom traditional-Europe beautiful. Sure there are more civilized districts than Friedrichshain, and the parks, monuments and institutional castles proceeding west from the Brandenberg Gate are reliably lovely. But the soul of Berlin is alternative, and poor. For street art it's without rival in Europe, and a young German native of Berlin harangued me about the moral imperative to reclaim public space from advertisers. Across the facade of one Soviet-era tenement was hung a huge sign reading "Fuck Media", part of a grassroots campaign against a planned corporate development of land along the river. But there are cracks in the proletarian armor. Below this impressive, wall-sized relief I recognized the "Go Forth" slogan of Levi's current ad campaign:




I was informed it had been done by a respected Portuguese street artist. So at least one guy's "sold out." Call them cooptions or collaborations, they're inevitable - and not all bad. I think the Levi's campaign is beautifully done and this artwork a cool and inspired extension of it. It's only when money becomes too interested in a place that it loses its authenticity and so too its appeal.

On top of being sick I only had two nights in Berlin which is really a crime. I was traveling too fast - for a major city you need at least four nights. I was looking forward to London and Spain where I'd be able to slow down. But I couldn't slow down yet. I had a rendezvous.

The seed of this whole voyage was a ten day trip I took to Spain last year with two of my closest friends. I had the time of my life and saw what I'd been missing not having traveled before. On that trip in the city of Valencia I met two German girls, Mariam and Lena. Over the next year they would badger me on facebook about when I was coming to visit them and I would say 'the next time I'm in Germany.' But I doubted I'd see them again. Then this trip took shape, and so did plans to come. I would meet Mariam at the train station in Hannover and we'd catch another train to Oldenberg, where the girls grew up and Lena still lives.

I knew nothing of our plans - where I would sleep that night, what we'd do, if this was going to be worth it. Turned out we were going to Mariam's family home. It was midafternoon when we arrived at the house she grew up in outside Oldenberg. Her family were all seated at a picnic table in the back yard. They had just finished lunch and were drinking little glasses of beer or wine or juice and talking. I was given a beer and we sat down with them. They were kind enough to speak English as I don't know a word of German.

Mariam's brother and his girlfriend live nearby in a farmhouse with horses and it was decided that a jaunt was in order. We took beers and attached one of the horses to a four-person coach and then we were off with the horse's hooves clopping over the German country backroads and Lena's dog loping alongside the coach and beaming. Here's me at the reins:



I stayed there one night and was shown every courtesy. I ate a delicious meal for free at a Turkish restaurant Mariam's father has owned for thirty years. When I asked if I could do my laundry the old lady who lived with them and who seemed to occupy the dual-role of grandmother and maid simply said "give it to me" and that night I found my clothes neatly folded in a basket in my room. When I came downstairs in the morning there was a full breakfast on the table and I was sent off a little while later with an embarrassment of goods, sandwiches and fruit and candy and a glass jar of strawberry jam made from the mother's garden that I said I loved.

Mariam and her brother drove me to the train and we stopped so I could buy a bottle of California wine for their parents.

If following up a recuperative stay in a family home with a blow-out debauch had become a strategy I was sticking to it. I hugged Mariam goodbye on the station platform and thanked her once more for everything and boarded a train bound for Amsterdam.

Incredible Budapest

I disembarked at the Keleti Railway Station in central Budapest at nine o'clock in the evening. Already I saw it was dirtier than Vienna, more weathered. The streets had a layer of grime on them. Litter on the sidewalks. The equally glorious buildings weren't kept up to the same standard; they needed to be restored, repainted. In Budapest I sensed decay. I sensed a place that - unlike some Western European capitals I'd visited - could no longer afford to maintain the splendor reared up in its golden age. But Budapest isn't the worse for it: the way its modern inhabitants embrace and interpret the decaying past is what gives the city its signature ambience of gothic cool.

Let me say it succinctly: Budapest is incredible. Beautiful during the day, a hell of a lot of fun at night, with a deluge of art and culture everywhere you turn. I saw in a decrepit, long-abandoned synagogue huge modern paintings suspended from a fifty-foot domed ceiling and not a trace of an exhibition space besides. The paintings hanging ghostly and unexplained as if left by squatting artists as payment in kind. I drank at some of the coolest bars I've ever been in my life, "ruin pubs" where locals gather in crumbling mansions turned with found decor to hip, stylish haunts. Where once lived prosperous merchant families, landed gentry, servants of the empire.

It would prove a hard place to leave, and not just because of what I'd see. I had a great time, with some wonderful people. Here's what happened to me.

From the train station I made my way to Carpe Noctem hostel. (That's "Seize the Night" in Latin. Sorry had to, Classics major.) I hove up around nine o'clock and found the place nearly empty. The staff member on duty informed me that most of the guests had already taken off for that night's drinking event, a karaoke bar called Morrison's. I got directions and headed over.

Carpe Noctem is affiliated with several other Party Hostels (they call themselves that explicitly), so each night you go out with them you get a good-sized crowd of young tourists looking to have fun. After about an hour in this bar it seemed like everyone was making out. I'll admit I hadn't had much luck with the ladies so far on this trip and I was starting to feel a little lonely. Then I saw a girl eyeing me from the bar.

She was American from Seattle and was a studying archaeology. She was really into it and we talked for a while about Egypt and ancient Greece and Rome. Finally a girl I liked and who seemed to like me. We went to the dancefloor and made out a little and when she went to the bathroom I told her I'd meet her at the bar and she smiled and nodded yes.

I never saw her again. I walked up and down that bar ten minutes and at six foot five I'm hard to miss. I don't know if she got sick or too drunk or if she just changed her mind. Anyway I was bummed out and not really knowing anyone I walked out of the bar and started home.

I'd gone perhaps a hundred feet when I heard good music and voices coming from a lit doorway down a set of steps from the street. The steps were behind a locked gate. The gate was ten or twelve feet high so there'd be no climbing this obstacle. But the gate didn't go all the way to the ground. It stopped maybe a foot and a half short. I bent over to gauge the space. Then I laid down flat on my stomach and slithered through the gap.

I walked down the steps into a room in which seven people were hanging out. Five guys and two girls, all Hungarian, one of the guys manning a small bar. The music didn't screech to a stop when I entered but it might as well have. They all looked at me.

"Hello," I said.
"Hello," one of the guys responded.
"What is this place?"
"It's a private party. How did you get in here?"
"I walked in off the street, the gate was unlocked."
He looked me up and down, at my jeans and t-shirt covered in yellow dust.
"No you didn't."
"I crawled under the gate."
"I know you did. Where you from?"
"Chicago."
"Chicago," he said. Then he put his fists to his temples and stuck out an index finger from each hand to make little horns.
"Derrick Rose," he said.
I smiled at him and he put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the bar.
"What you drinking?"

It went from there. I bought the room a shot of the cheap local liquor and drank with them the rest of the night.

My second day I went to the public baths located in the city's main park that looked like the baths in ancient Rome must have. Three pools each a different temperature ringed by a baroque palace which was in turn crowned by a white colonnade. Water spewed into the pools from the mouths of goddesses carved in stone and from green bronze spigots affixed to the center of giant urns filled with flowers. I tried all the pools and levitated on the jets in the floors of the pools and let the sculpted fountains that feed the pools pour onto me.

When I got home to the hostel I ducked through the low door. Not low enough - I banged my head on the lintel. There to laugh good-naturedly at my misfortune were two girls, one a staff member from Australia and the other a girl from New York City who had just checked in. I didn't say much to her that day but she ended up with the bunk next to mine, we both had a top bunk. The following morning she woke up to find me reading my book. I don't remember if she asked me about it or if I volunteered the literature euphoria I was experiencing from reading it but soon we'd talked about books for a good half-hour and it was on. We had lunch at a cafe on a tree-lined boulevard where we were the only customers and the waitress brought us apertifs on the house. One was clear anise and the other looked like red wine and had the aroma of a sweet I could not place and an aftertaste of marzipan. When we'd finished eating we went to the park and laid down in a shady spot and I kissed her. We stayed in that place the whole afternoon and worked on a crossword puzzle and talked and kissed and slept.

There were other highlights. An elegant dinner of local fare taken with my roommate from that Istanbul hostel who was my first friend of this voyage and who I know will be my friend for a long time. A debauched evening cruise on the Danube where I nearly suffered blindness by champagne cork. An intrusion while consummating affection in a hostel that was an embarrassment to all involved.

I could have stayed another week in Budapest, but I was leaving without regret. I'd partied hard, met a great girl, and most importantly I felt I'd given the city a good look. The great haste of Europe continued next with Germany. Some photos of Budapest below.

A Personal Detour - Venice

Venice was to be the briefest of stopovers - I hadn't planned on going to Italy at all. When questioned pointedly on this omission by the many Italy-loving travelers I met along the way I responded that I wanted to do Italy with a girl, and even the most strident admitted it is a very romantic place. I was going to Italy for a specific reason - to see someone. Someone I've kept alluding to in this blog as an old friend. The real story is she's an old friend of my parents.

Years ago my father worked with a man who had an Italian wife. His name was Jim and hers was Eolina. My parents became friends with them, and after Jim stopped working with my dad and moved away our families still saw each other periodically. One of my earliest memories is driving to their house in Maryland in the Fall of some year to visit them. When we got there my dad and I went down with Jim and his son to a lake they lived by to skip stones. The leaves were in full change and I remember how all the yellows reds and oranges reflected off the black glass of the water. I remember my dad teaching me how to throw the stones to get them to skip because I'd never done it before.

Jim and Eolina moved to Italy in the early nineties and the last person to see them was me, when I went to Europe on a school trip in seventh grade. Then our families lost touch completely. My dad heard somewhere that Eolina had died. Knowing I'd be in the neighborhood for this trip I searched for their now-adult children on the internet and found the son, Terence. I wrote him and he responded saying his parents had split up, that his father had wound up in Cali Colombia after leaving Italy but that Eolina was still in Venice. I got in touch with her, made plans, and now I was on my way.

I took a bus from Ljubljana to a suburb of Venice called Mestre, then a train to Venice proper, and then finally a canal ferry to Lido, an island adjacent to Venice where Eolina lives. She met me at a cafe and bought me a gelato and we stood outside the open window of the cafe catching up. I told her about my mother's death. I realize now that the urge to convey this news was perhaps the single greatest motive driving me to this place, this reunion. I believe she was the last person on earth who knew my mom well and still hadn't heard the news (well, besides her now ex-husband). Telling her wasn't fun. "For he that increases knowledge increases sorrow." But I felt I had moved toward completing something, some vague morbid duty.

In her home she treated me as her own son. As soon as we got to her apartment she sent me off with a beer to her balcony where I read and watched the boats on the sea glide past. She cooked a dinner of old family recipes with fruits and vegetables and herbs from her own garden. Later I was offered clothes, a bathrobe, slippers. For someone used to hostels you can imagine the kind of respite this hospitality provided.

Nobody likes losing touch. I'm sorry to say it's already happened to me with some of my friends from high school and college who've moved away. But because our families were close and because of what happened to my mom I felt a responsibility to reconnect. Venice was out of my way, and I'd sacrificed a magical destination - Prague - to go there. But it was one of the best things I'd done on my trip so far, and I was so glad I went.

From Venice I flew to Vienna Austria for another brief stay of just two nights. It was beautiful but sleepy - I arrived on a Sunday night before midnight and wanted to get a beer and bite to eat at a bar. I couldn't even manage that - everything was closed and I ended up eating McDonald's. The main reason I'd gone to Vienna was to see some paintings by Gustav Klimt, and I got this done at the magnificent Belvedere museum.

In three days I'd experienced the tranquility of a family home in Venice and the beauty and culture of Vienna. Now I was ready to get into some trouble. I was headed to the right place. My next stop was Budapest Hungary.

Location:A Personal Detour - Venice