World Journeys

As Jill stated in the last post, the trip has ended and we are back in our respective communities (some more modern and northern than others). A week and some odd days have passed, and life has settled around me like the sludgy dregs of that Turkish coffee I hated then came to love. It’s always like this - life on the road becomes a predictable onslaught of new experiences, new places, consistent amazing food and unforgettable people. The constant adrenaline rush of forging new paths across foreign countries, booking plane tickets a day or two before the flight and wondering if the two hours allotted before the train leaves will really be enough time are replacements for the stresses and stimulants of life back home- forging through mid-day Rt 250 traffic, struggling to get to work on time, making doctors appointments without really consulting your schedule.

I must say, it’s nice to be back to a form of stability. My bank account sure is happy I’m home, and I have to say it’s almost a luxury to have a consistent bed to fall into at night, my loved ones surrounding me, and easy access to internet, a washing machine, more than four days worth of clothing and ample room in which to spread my crap and not have to worry about it being stolen.

The first few days back home are always the most surreal. The days in which driving my car feels foreign and exciting, my music collection blares at top volume constantly and I find that I actually have a cellphone and a social life; these are the days in which I hang my hammock, revel in the stillness of my backyard at dusk, and make plans for gardens and dinners and domestic activities.

But then the shift arrives, when suddenly my most recent activity wasn’t a fretful hour on the London Tube, counting and re-counting the stops between our hostel and the airport, trying to distract myself by reading the free London Metro I’d found on the seat next to me. Now my most recent activities include commuting to Westlake, attending Farmer’s Markets, or going to downtown Sandusky. I have re-entered normalcy, or at least my former normalcy. Accents still surround me, but they’re the ones I grew up with. Foreign languages float around, but now it’s because I have a new job in which I have to speak Spanish. I find myself still counting my expenditures, but it’s not as crucial because I have an income and, this time, a dollar actually equals a dollar.

One of the hardest parts about coming home from a trip is explaining what I did “over there”. Jill and I spent every second literally ensconced in foreignness. We lived up each other’s butts, as I like to say. We took our family, friends, Ohio and Sandusky (and, I guess, a little bit of WV) with us everywhere we went. We attempted new languages, we explored cities on our own terms. We saw sights, we wrote, we drew, we made jewelry, we ate (I could repeat this one a few times), we learned the complex art of city planning and transportation systems. But what really stands out to me, above all the “stuff” we did over there, is the people. We met so many fascinating, incredible, amazing, beautiful, sometimes strange, sometimes annoying, sometimes just plan freaky, people. It sounds ridiculous, but we found humans everywhere we went. Of all the revelations we made, of all the different cultures we tasted and participated in and witnessed, the biggest most important thing I (re)learned was that everyone, everywhere, is pretty much just the same.

Couchsurfing played a huge role in the incredible, life-transforming nature of this voyage. I never expected to meet so many generous people. I never expected to meet so many people who “got” me and Jill. I can’t even begin to describe or explain the experiences we shared with the people we met on the road, including the friends we met up with again along the way. Couchsurfing re-inspired my faith in humanity.

I really like the Shannon that blooms when I am on the road, and it’s this Shannon that I strive to retain when I am back in the lovely yet sometimes mundane home life. The lessons I’ve learned from traveling, from meeting people, from absorbing quiet nights at a plaza in Madrid or wandering cemeteries in Copenhagen, are ones that I try to keep at the forefront of my daily life back home.

Getting this new job of mine was a bit crushing to the wanderer within- I need an income like nobody’s biz, but in a way it felt like I was ending the trip too soon. Even though I’m back home, the traveling still lives on inside, and having a full-time job makes it hard to ignore the fact that the journey is really over.

I’ll get off my soapbox now, but I do want to add a few bold-faced memories to the list Jill began below.

The uncaptured magic. There were a few times that I either didn’t have my camera or the batteries were exhausted, and of course those moments were, perhaps thankfully, the most magical. I have a (perhaps irrational) fear of forgetting my life (but really, almost anyone will attest to my early stage Alzheimers), so it’s crucial for me to take photos and otherwise document my life so that someday I can remember what I’ve done. The one memory that really sticks out in my mind is our first night in Prague. The night was really too beautiful to describe, an eerie combination of murder mystery air and gothic glory. The moon hung swollen and mysterious in the air, and frequently peeked out from behind the spires of gothic creations bathed in shadows. It was hard for us to walk anywhere without becoming breathless and bothered by the how utterly haunting and gorgeous it all was.

Gleeful, crisp bike rides through Copenhagen. I’ve never really biked through a city before, much less lived in a bike-friendly city, so these few magical days in Copenhagen feel now, looking back on them, like I was in a perpetual commercial for a Gilette Razor or something. Just picture the gleeful girl riding her bike through a city, squinting up to the sunny sky with a content smile on her face, inhaling the fresh air of a clear blue day while celebrating her closely-shaven legs (which, come to think of it, mine were not). The clouds looked hand-picked for some sort of catalogue where maybe Climates are on offer, and a customer can browse through the pages and point excitedly at the cumulonimbus perfection and choose #45D for their customized planet.

Ending up in the Red Light District. We wanted to find a cup of coffee. We found the cup of coffee, but we also found the first street of the Red Light District. I won’t say more.

Every single transportation recording ever. One of our ideas along the way was to create a CD of pre-recorded transportation announcements we’ve experienced throughout the world. Countless rides on trams, metros, buses and trains have burnt these foreign-language announcements into the flesh of my brain. These things run the gamut of human emotion too, from blatantly disinterested Greek to unflinchingly happy German. My favorite: Czech, where the lady was a delicate mixture of Robot and nasal. Also, Philip, his brothers and Jill and I sang the song that thundered through the halls of every single train station in France the entire time we were visiting him in Valence.

Jill’s pact with the devil. One night, it become common law that whenever I uttered a certain phrase (”I want a boy”), it was her sacred duty to respond with a prepared monologue under the guise of a retired British colonel. I provoked this reaction from her in every country, without fail. I even made her do it in the UK, where it become even weirder to use our obviously-not-British British accents.

Finding Jill everywhere. Maybe I get off in harassing my friends or we just don’t let jokes die (after all, we have been saying ‘Eight Days ‘Til Wang’ since 2002), but at least three times a week I would “run into” Jill (I tried to do it everyday). As in, I would pass her in the hallway, or bump into her at a train station, or sit next to her on the plane and we would act as though we were old high school friends who hadn’t seen each other in years who were unexpectedly realizing that they had been to all the same places and had the same exact plans. What a miracle! I can’t begin to imagine how strange this must have sounded to the people overhearing us.

There may be more to come, folks, and I do plan on uploading the last of the pictures. The processing period is not over, as I’m not sure it’s so easy to process what is happening on the road while actually on the road. The decompression period is needed, for the brain to sort through the events, to discard the clutter, to latch on ferociously to the good memories. Right now, nothing would betray that I’ve spent the last three months traveling, except the fact that my capacity for walking far exceeds that of my friends, my pastry gut is noticeable, I have bits of train ticket stubs littering the house, and a mysterious red-and-white checked scarf is draped across my bedpost when previously there was none…

As I sit on the free standing covered porch of my plantation home in West Virginia, watching the Sweet William bloom and the deer bound and sipping sweet tea, I find myself reflecting on these past three months and wondering, “Was it all a dream?”

I suppose the answer is no, since there are pictures of me in a Red Light District window dressed in a nurse’s uniform, and a notice from the Danish Police just fell out of my purse when I reached in to find my compact mirror (as I do believe I have grits stuck in my teeth from breakfast).

And yet…the sweet song of the birds and the hum of the cotton gin beg me to stay in the present. Not to be lulled back into the strange and sordid memories of a time when I left this great land and crossed the wide sea and, once on foreign soil, did things no lady of breeding such as myself would do.

No…no, Bustah, my sweet dog, the bihds ahh tellin’ lies. You and Ah know the truth. Ah did go away, Ah went fah away, and Ah lived many wonduhful adventyuhs. They wuh as real as the magnolia blossoms that scent the ayuh, as real as the peach cobbluh in mah oven and the pork rihhnds on the stove…as the flag of the confeduhacy that waves ovuh mah free-standin’ porch…

Yes, the trip was real, but there are definitely moments from it that I still can’t quite believe actually happened. Here are a few choicies:

I am paralyzed by Sudafed. There’s no other way to describe what happened on the flight from London to Amman back in March. I took some Sudafed PM for my flu symptoms and was rendered unconscious for the duration of the flight. I opened my eyes once to find a dinner tray in front of me, but I couldn’t move any part of my body, and in another second I was gone again. Later still I surfaced and was able to move my hand just enough to touch the bun, before falling back into a dreamless, motionless, and drooly sleep.

The first person we meet in Jordan has been to Sandusky, Ohio. And not even to go to Cedar Point–to fish. You don’t need to fish in Sandusky–all the fish are already dead, their rotting corpses strewn upon the beach. Also, dude, you live in Jordan. Isn’t there some water kinda close by? Or were you getting tired of blue marlin and couldn’t resist the lure of the noble walleye? Small world.

Shannon and I, through a series of wacky occurences, end up locked in our private bathroom together in our hostel in Luxor while housekeeping cleans our room. Finally we decide to suck it up and exit, one at a time. I’ll never forget the look on the housekeeper’s face as I emerged a moment after Shannon–bewildered, slightly amused, the vague reproach in her eyes redeemed by the forced politeness of her smile.

I give the women’s restroom in the Egyptian Museum a good hosing down with my bidet. I thought it was the flusher. Is it my fault that it was actually the bidet control and that the bidet had a particularly powerful stream and that there’s quite a bit of space beneath the door of the stall?

We are not allowed to wear fake mustaches into the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Considering all the things we were allowed to do in Amsterdam, I’m a little surprised they had such a problem with the mustaches.

We find the Nazi Gold. Just kidding, that didn’t happen.

Our train tickets from Valence to Paris cost $100. That did happen.

The graveyard in Edinburgh invites us in at the witching hour. We came across the graveyard (one of the famous ones–St. John’s maybe?) on our first day, when we noted as a possible place to sleep (no room at the inn because of a rugby match). The sign said the gates closed at 5pm. A couple nights later we were walking by it a little after midnight and the gate was open. Bewitched, we walked in and wandered among the graves. We were the only living souls there. When we told somebody about it at our hostel the next morning, they said the gate is always closed at 5pm, just like the sign says.

The world-famous pizzeria in Brixton, England runs out of dough a half hour before we arrive. What??? I’m sorry, you ran out of what???

That girl in our hostel in London. She was looking for advil, but what she needed was a personality transplant. She had achieved a level of whininess known only to the spoiled rich kids in young adult novels who inevitably become the school hallway nemeses of humble but true-hearted protagonists.

There are many more, but at the moment I see the sun begin to set behind blue mountains, and I know it’s time for me to put my evening dress on and get ready to entertain society’s finest. I must make sure the cobbler hasn’t burnt, and that Bustah hasn’t eaten all the pork rinds. These pesky memories just won’t leave me alone. I’m back where I was born to be, and yet part of my heart lingers many miles away, across the same blue ocean that consumed an AirFrance flight the same morning we hopped on our United carrier. As Journey says: Some will win, some will lose. And some are born to sing the blues.

God Bless America and Save the Queen.

It’s been quite a party.

Jill

It is May 31st. Jill and I are in London. We leave on a big plane for D.C. tomorrow, and somewhere along the line I blinked and it went from March to May.

I have begun to add some of the seriously backlogged photos that I have accumulated. Pop in, even after the trip is over, to see more. I promise it will be worth it.

As for the last leg of our trip…it’s been a serious bout of laziness combined with a serious bout of awesomeness. If that makes any sense. Our last host for the trip, Lee in London, wrapped up our couchsurfing adventures in a way neither of us dreamt possible. He, his sister Laura, Laura’s boyfriend Paul and the two of us spent many a night over wine, making noises, having impossibly witty banter and eating freakishly delicious food (Lee is a chef of sorts). We also managed to see some sights in London, surprisingly. The visit to London has been an eerie echo of the beginning of our trip, what with being surrounded by Muslims and Arabic (once again giggling into our shoulders at the insane vowels of Arabic). Although there’s no Mount Sinai nearby.

Also, in the interim between London and whatever my last post was about, we went to Scotland. In Edinburgh, we had some trouble booking a hostel for the 23rd in advance. When we got to Edinburgh from Glasgow, we realized that a Rugby Cup of sorts was being hosted in the city, and as a result, sports-crazy Brits had swarmed the city and sucked up every last available bed or sleeping nook. With no accommodation available for miles, we visited churches and refuge centers to find a place to sleep. The Salvation Army said it could take us in and would even give us a little soup, but the doorman openly warned us of the crazies within. We opted to wander the streets, mingling with the joyous and not-so-joyous drunkards, taking in the haunting spectacle of a moonlit, festive night in Edinburgh with the castle constantly looming in the upper horizon. Hostels wouldn’t let us sit in their lobbies, even though we were quite vocal about our alternative (the street). Finally, a nice hostel employee said we could “sit” in their lounge area. We spent the wee hours of the morning draped across a couch in the SmartCity Hostel in Edinburgh (it deserves a shout-out) and then conversing with a delightful lad named Lee who was returning late from a stag party.

Computer time is running out and I need to go enjoy my last breaths of London.

More to come, mates.

Okay, so maybe we joined the forces of the Red Light District lady workers…but it was only for a little bit…we promise.

Weeks ago, we booked a flight from Brussels to Scotland because it was cheap. We didn’t originally plan on going to Brussels, but we figure it’s a nice unexpected day trip. We find a train from Amsterdam to Brussels and things undergo the same amorphous shift that occurs between all European countries - Dutch is replaced with French, abandoned reading material no longer features “ijks” and “varks”, the overhead train steward is way too enthusiastic and friendly.

We arrive in Brussels with no knowledge about what might be interesting to do. We wander through a metro system that looks like it came out of the 80’s - the early 80’s. Fires burn in trashcans, corners smell a bit too much like urine, multiple metro lines run on the same track. Escalators and entire underground tunnels are closed off due to construction. I decide Brussels got the raw end of the European City deal. We buy a Belgian waffle within three minutes of stepping off the train.

Our hostel is divided up between two different parts of the street, and Van Gogh once resided in the area above the reception area. We find a city guide that informs young tourists with a self-deprecating twist. We learn that the city is ugly, and that eurocrats live there. Americans in our dorm room are planning on going to Amsterdam the next day, and we advise them to plan a few extra days there.

I meet Germans on the patio that night and we talk until midnight. One asks me in choppy English about the education system, and we discuss some of the pros and cons of free market schooling. He poses the question to me about why young Americans can drive cars and fight in wars while still unable to legally consume alcohol. One of them tries to eat my journal. 

The next day, Jill and I pack our bags, check out of the hostel and explore Brussels. We find out the city map is deceivingly compact and we accidentally discover the entire center without actually trying. Extreme victory. We ransack a tourist information center, the same one that published the map that informed us of eurocrats and ugliness, and drink free coffee and eat free chocolate and use free internet. Later, we take our photo in a photobooth with our headscarves on. 

We decide to spend that night in the remote Brussels airport to save money, and to not miss our flight to Scotland. Before we leave, we go back to the hostel and make loads of pasta. We order a glass of wine and a beer to kill time, then go to the train station to find a train to Charleroi.

Charleroi is not Brussels, but RyanAir pretends it is so unassuming travelers will fly there. We stagger through the Brussels train station looking for the shuttle bus to the airport and cannot find it. The bags are heavy and bladders are aching, so we spend another 20 minutes looking for the bathroom. It is conveniently located in the opposite end of the station. We are sweating in the multiple layers of clothing that a RyanAir flight necessitates. I overhear a thinly veiled domestic dispute between a man and woman as the woman nurses their baby. We miss the shuttle bus, but find a train to the airport. 

Charleroi Airport is tiny and serves only discount airlines. There are rows of uncomfortable seats divided by armrests, but the bathroom features the cutting edge of hand drying technology - the AirBlade. We amuse ourselves by drying our hands frequently.

We find a fitful four hours of sleep resting on backpacks with legs draped over armrests, asses numb, and headscarves over our eyes. Around 4:30AM, passengers begin arriving for a flight to Spain. We wake up for the day. 

We kill time with books, sudoku, luggage rearranging and delirious banter. The flight leaves at 11, but we think we might be able to go through security around 8:30AM. When Glasgow finally appears on the overhead check-in screen, we eat tomato sandwiches made the night before. I rummage through the food bag and a bottle of Japanese soy sauce slips through a hole in the bottom and gleefully cracks against the tile floor. Soy sauce is everywhere. Neither of us react. I ask a security man if he could call back the woman who had just passed through to mop the floor. It smells like a sushi bar. 

My bag is checked without question at 2.1 kilos over the weight limit. I have to remind the RyanAir agent to take off my previous airline baggage tag. When I ask him about the Visa stamp we need to get before boarding, he looks confused. I decide I love RyanAir again and we go through security. Jill’s bag is searched. All of her toiletries are put in ziplock bags, her shampoo is confiscated and her dread comb is scrutinized. Outside the airline gate, we giggle about the English and Scottish accents around us.

On the plane, we sit in separate rows so that we can secretively work on the anthologies we’re compiling for one another. A French couple sits next to me and I am weirded out by the guys crazy left eye. They spend 18 euro on alcohol and perfectly shaped sandwiches. 

We disembarcate in Scotland, still sleep-deprived but eager for accents. We make a plan to ask every person we see for directions or information just so we can hear the Scottish vowels. After the first person we try this on, we abandon the plan because we understood nothing they said. 

Luckily, signs are in English. The air is intoxicatingly fresh. Green hills sprawl around us. Cars drive on the wrong side of the road. In the airport, we pass a store selling kilts. 

It’s Scotland, mates.

We spent about 6 days in the Netherlands, in lovely Amsterdam. So while we were there, we

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What a time we had in Amsterdam.

Love, Shannon and Jill

Readers may recall that a few entries ago Shannon made reference to a ninja market in Prague where the savvy tourist can purchase throwing stars, knives, brass knuckles, police truncheons, nunchuks, and any number of weapons that might be frowned upon at other open-air markets. Well, we found that market while we were in the Czech capital, and Shannon bought a ninja star, and I bought a set of brass knuckles shaped like a dragon with spikes on them.

We were very proud of our souvenirs. We showed them off all throughout Germany. I used my brass knuckles to make guacamole in Gera when we had nothing else with which to mash the out-of-season avocados. Then I put them in my backpack and forgot about them for the duration of Denmark.

Then I tried to get on a Norwegian Air flight to Amsterdam.

Something you should know: Brass knuckles are illegal in Denmark. As the police officer who later took my statement informed me, you can be jailed or at the very least fined heavily for possessing them. You know what’s even worse? When you try to take them on an international flight.

Okay, so, we arrived at the airport a little later than we’d planned. It took us a few minutes to find the check-in desk. Shannon checked her backpack and I stood at an angle so that they wouldn’t notice that mine is blatantly too large to be a carry-on. Shannon went to the bathroom. I unlaced my boots to expedite things in case I had to take them off when I went through security (I would regret this later when I had to run through the airport, crossing three people-movers and mowing down at least two duty-free shoppers). All told, we had about forty minutes before our flight departed when we finally arrived at security. I was a little nervous because I had a bottle of shampoo in my carry-on that was more than three ounces. But I figured if worst came to worst I’d buy a new bottle in Amsterdam. First they pulled Shannon’s bag off the line and searched it. They rummaged and rummaged, but didn’t find what they were looking for. Finally they tilted the X-ray screen toward us. “We’re looking for this one,” they said, and pointed. I glanced at the screen and saw four familiar spikes attached to four steel rings, mounted on the gleaming, curving body of a dragon.

“Oh, that’s not in her bag,” I said helpfully. “That’s in mine.”

“It’s not in this bag?”

“No,” I pointed to my backpack. “That one.”

The lady dragged my backpack over. “Which compartment?”

“The front one.” I thought that maybe if I cooperated there was a chance we could all laugh this off as the simple misunderstanding it was. The woman opened the front compartment of my backpack and pulled out my dragon brass knuckles, spikes glittering in the fluorescent glare of Terminal 2.

“I bought them as a souvenir for my brother,” I explained sheepishly. (It’s true K-Dawg. I was going to give them to you, to repay you for that knife you won me at the State Fair of West Virginia two years ago).

The viking lady made a noncommittal noise and said, “I just have to call the police, because you see, this is illegal.” That worried me, because it sounded like maybe she meant not just illegal to take on a plane, but illegal to, you know, have.

“Um, our flight leaves really soon–” Shannon started politely.

The woman shrugged. “We’ll see what the police say.”

We were sent over to the Bad People’s corner to await our fate.

A few minutes later a police officer showed up. He was young, blond, very attractive; in another time and place maybe he and I could have grabbed a danish and some rødgrød med fløde. But here and now he was probably going to arrest me. He walked over to the counter where the woman had my brass. He grinned when he saw the brass knuckles, and looked up when the lady pointed me out. Shannon and I grinned back. Then his expression became very serious, and we immediately stopped grinning. Because having an illegal weapon at an airport is not funny. Even if the weapon is shaped like a dragon and was purchased at a ninja mart. Then he actually tried on the brass knuckles. They do make you feel very powerful. Finally he came over to me.

“These are yours?”

“Yeah. I bought them in the Czech Republic, as a souvenir for my brother.”

“You bought these?”

“Yeah, in Prague. They have these ninja markets-”

He held up his hand. “Yes, I know.”

“And I forgot I had them in my bag. But you can have them,” I said generously.

“Oh, we’ll definitely be keeping them,” he said.

“Yeah, no problem,” I assured him.

“How old is your brother?”

“Twenty-one.”

“And he likes stuff like this?”

“No. That’s why it’s funny.”

That’s when he told me about how it’s illegal to have things like this in Denmark, and the jail term and the fines. He also seemed surprised that I’d managed to get them for only 7 USD. All I could really say to that was, “Oh.”

“Now you know,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

Then he leaned against the counter next to me while we waited for the Nordic Nancy to finish scanning my passport, my drivers license, and my boarding pass, so that I could be registered in the Danish Terrorist Database. “This your first time in Denmark?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You look like a normal person who wouldn’t do anything crazy, but…”

“I understand, you have to take this seriously.”

“You really can’t take these on a plane.”

“Yeah, I forgot they were in my bag, otherwise believe me, I would not have brought them to an airport in a carry-on.”

We shared a chuckle. I still wasn’t sure whether or not he was going to arrest me.

“I used them to make guacamole,” I told him. “That’s the worst thing I’ve done with them.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So you have used them?”

“Just on avocados.”

“You didn’t have anything else to cut the avocados with?”

“They were really hard,” said Shannon.

“Out of season,” I added.

“So you were going to give your brother a used gift?”

There was no way to win with this guy. “It was an emergency,” I explained. “We needed to make guacamole. You can’t even tell!”

He studied the brass knuckles. “They do look very clean.”

“I washed them afterward.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

Then the woman called the officer over to check her report. He came back and handed me my IDs, and a copy of a form saying that I had had materials confiscated by the Danish police. I signed it. Then the lady took my bag and ran it through the X-ray again. she frowned. She ran it through again. She opened it and began to search. She didn’t find what she was looking for. She ran it through again. she called another security worker over to look at the X-ray. The officer and I watched all this. He turned to me. “You have anything else in there?”

“God I hope not.” I thought about confessing to the shampoo, but I decided that if I could make it through this with my Head & Shoulders Classic Clean, I would consider this a victory.

“Scissors, a knife–anything?”

“No, I think it was just–” I indicated my brass knuckles, which were still in his hand. I realized this might be the last time I would see them. “that.”

Meanwhile the Ostrogoths were still searching my bag, scrutinizing the x-ray screen. At this point, our gate was closed and our flight was about ten minutes from taking off. Shannon asked the officer if he could call our gate and let them know we were coming. At long last, the security woman opened the front of my back pack and pulled out my comb. She held it up for her coworker to inspect. She turned it over a couple of times. Then she put it back in my backpack, and handed the backpack to me. “Okay, you can go,” she said.

“Thank you,” we replied.

She looked me in the eye. “But don’t ever buy those for your brother again,” she said sternly.

“I won’t,” I promised.

“Have a good flight,” said the officer. He added, “You’d better run.”

We bolted. We could hear our names being called over the loudspeaker. My boots were flopping and I had my enormous backpack on, divested of illegal weapons but still laden with questionable combs and six ounces of shampoo. We arrived at the gate just as they were about to remove Shannon’s bag from the plane. The lady who scanned our boarding passes was kind enough to tell us that, “Next time you should check in at least thirty-minutes before departure.”

“Yeah,” said Shannon. “We did.”

We were escorted onto the plane. I smelled like a track team and my bag (of course) wouldn’t fit under the seat, but a nice lady beside me helped me punch it partway under. So we were able to fly to Amsterdam, and I wasn’t arrested for bringing illegal spiked dragon brass knuckles into an airport. But I have lost my favorite–and only–souvenir from this trip.

You know that cop kept them, too. He’s probably in front of a mirror right now with the dragon brass on, flexing his biceps and saying “Finish him!” in the Mortal Combat voice.

I know. They used to be mine.

Jill

P.S. Barbora, are you happy? Your country - you know, the little one shaped like a piece of friend chicken with a penchant for throwing people out windows? - almost got me put in Danish jail.

Check out our youtube page for some lovely new moving pictures.

Some highlights:

The “german experts” in the video are Mari (the vociferous one holding the strange portrait) our host, and her two friends. Filmed in Dresden.

And then, of course, a snippet of the space toilet experience in Paris:

Ive been looking forward to Germany. When I was 13 I memorized Rammstein lyrics in an effort to pretend I could speak German even though I couldnt understand the basic grammatical rules, and almost my entire life Ive known that a significant portion of my heritage is comprised of German ancestors (after the Brits and Transylvanians, that is). In addition to this, its one of those countries that I know a bit more about, at least in terms of recent history, so I really felt like I was finally visiting a long-lost friend as Jill and I entered Germany on May 1st.

I had a pretty lengthy to-do list. The first thing was: Conquer the Language. That didnt work out so well, mostly because of the complexity, but also because it made us giggle more times than I care to mention. But I can schpreken a mean deutsch, when someone is slowly articulating the phrase and I am free to add as much gutteral embellishment as I choose. I also learned how to politely announce that I need to “piddle in my pantaloons”. This is a Shanism, yes, and my friends tried hard to translate it precisely, so here we have…ich mach mir ins hempt. Or something.

Next, I wanted to Analyze the Countryside. You know, get a real feel for leiderhosen wearing, beer drinking, rolling yellow fields of village life in Germany. I wanted to do this by visiting the origin of my mothers side of the family, a village so small that apparently nobody in Germany knows about it except the people that live there. Not only could I not pronounce the name itself, even native Berliners and Dresdeners could hardly pronounce it. Nobody had ever heard of it. And then I found one lady in Berlin who had a vague idea of where it was (Bavaria region) and went on to describe a complex system of regional village rules that dictate how the villages are named and what that means about their location, which meant she said lots of complex German words that i forgot before she was even done saying them, so basically I learned nothing and was more confused at the end. I didnt make it to the birthplace of my maternal forefathers, but I did go to another small village called Toutenheim or something like that, a little village near Gera, and we spent about 15 minutes walking around and were actually able to see everything. But no leiderhosen. And nobody was slapping their knees and stomping the ground like I had been hoping. But there were barren biergartens and meticulous house-care procedures happening (a woman was scrubbing the bricks of her house…talk about German cleanliness, I guess), and we visited a cemetary where I instantly saw a Keller tombstone, which further cemented my Germanic heritage.

Something i had been looking forward to for years, but had sort of forgotten about, was the German Autobahn. Everything is a bahn of some sort (U-bahn, S-bahn, hauptbahnhof, omnibusbahnhof, etc), but the Autobahn is the only one that Ive known about since my childhood. Legends of the autobahn circulated in the air of my formative years like an exotic mist…kids would crowd around and say in hushed, excited voices, I hear you can drive as fast as you want on the Autobahn…can you believe it?? And, as the daughter of a Nascar fan and former race car driver, I have a tendency to, well, prefer speed. So in a sense, I came to Germany to experience the Autobahn. I was not able to get behind the wheel and drive recklessly fast myself, but twice we were in cars that used the autobahn, going speeds that were definitely not legal in any state in the US. The cars dont have both Km/per hour and Miles/per hour on the readout, so Im not exactly sure how fast we were going. But 200 kph isnt anything to sneeze at, I know that much.¨

Ever since the 10th grade unit on the Holocaust in highschool, I have been both fascinated and horrified by this aspect of German history. It has been a distant dream of mine to visit a former concentration camp, and over the past ten days I managed to visit two. We went to both Sachenhausen and Buchenwald, the former being more of a “model” concentration camp, the latter being a death camp. Both were horrifying and chilling and haunting and touching and moving and all the other sorts of things that outrageous, tragic human history and tales of genocide inspire within the heart and mind.

Sachenhausen was located literally in a residential neighborhood- a significant portion of the videos and information there were dedicated to this aspect, something I think may be unique in the history of concentration camps, being that so many average citizens were interacting with SS guards in everyday life, totally unaware of the extent of what was happening only meters from their front doors. A former Oranienberg resident told a story of how her mother was known throughout town for taking care of pesky rodent and rabbit problems, namely by slaughtering them. One of the most violent and feared SS guards came to her mother to ask her to slaughter a rabbit for him because he just couldnt do it, while behind the walls of Sachenhausen he was slaughtering thousands of people per year.

The Buchenwald visit was a shorter trip yet equally as gripping, and some of the things I learned about methods of torture and murder were gruesome. The SS had a lot of different ways of killing people, and this was a camp where we were able to walk into the crematorium and see the row of ovens used exclusively for burning corpses. Something like hundreds of people were taken there daily. And of course, Jill and I talk about it all. We talk about the other genocides that go unmentioned or unnoticed, the ones of the past and the ones happening right now, we talk about what we would have done, what we would have liked to do. We talk about how history is an endless cycle, how these things happen over and over again with different names, different victims and different quests. Its fascinating, sad, terrifying, horrible, and inevitable.

The history lessons didnt end at the former concentration camps. One of my other goals for Germany was to get a taste of that counter-culture, politically-actiive, punkish arty scene, which to me is as much a part of my image of Germany as tiny villages and hoppy beer. Berlin was the perfect place for this. The history of the city itself is still alive, the Berlin wall still stands in pieces, graffiti and street art testifies to this. East Berlin crosswalk lights are diffferent than West Berlin crosswalk lights. People talk of the differences in attitudes between East Berliners and West Berliners, the differences in accents, the murmurings of socialistic tendencies, the tensions that are still palpable. It is such a freaking cool place - to me, it felt like art was the lifeblood of the city, and that the recent history of Berlin was a fearsome, fierce undercurrent that has propelled an extraordinary amount of avant-garde, freeform, unhindered, totally politicized artistic expressions that decorate the city in all possible ways. Tachales was a good example of this, an old bombed out department store covered entirely in graffiti, with posters and murals that implore people to “Keep doing shit” and essentially never give up their freedoms to create and speak out. Berlin is spine tinglingly aware of the cost of such freedoms.

One of my favorite parts of Berlin was the DDR Museum, an interactive museum that prided itself immensely on the interactivity of it all. It was a shrine to the former GDR which featured all the elements of everday lives under Soviet rule. Jill and I hung out in the recreated GDR living room and kitchen, I watched a 1975 socialist propoganda film, and then I fondled spoons used in the former GDR. This is how I like to learn about history. I want to see the mundane, everyday shit that was used. I wanna look at the spoons that people used to use, the toilet paper brands, I want to be able to feel the fabric of their Young Pioneer school uniforms. Now if we could get some of these interactive museums for eras such as, oh, I dont know, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Nabateans, perhaps Atlantis, Id be very pleased.

One of the last of my German tasks was to, of course, visit old friends. I managed to meet both old and new friends: some of my pals from the internship in Guatemala last summer and I met up in Gera. Annie, her friend Marcus, Jill and I stayed in the bottom floor of an enormous old German cottage house nestled in the countryside of Gera, and we spent long evenings over dinner near the woodfired oven catching up and entertaining each other. We also found new friends such as our two excellent hosts in Germany, Mari in Dresden and Michou in Berlin. Couchsurfing is one of the best things that has happened in the world, I am convinced. Our experiences only continue to improve, which is hard to do, because each experience has been stellar.

I had a great time in Germany. Its been one of my favorite stops so far. I really felt like I was going home in some ways, maybe because of the intense ancestral connection, maybe because of the way German people always seem to populate my life and travels through Latin America, maybe because it just sort of is structured the same way as home. But I often found myself feeling more familiarized, in a sense, with the faces of those around me. They were like kin. They reminded me of aunts and uncles and distant relatives. I saw the jawlines of my family members in the jawlines of the Germans.

One last thing: I found out those breathtaking fields of rolling yellow grasses are, in fact, used for biofuel. Ah, the lovely rolling biofuel fields of Germany….

Berlin is a city that I kind of know something about. By “know something about” I mean that I can name the four powers that owned a hunk of it during the Wall Days, I know what year the Wall fell, I’ve heard of Checkpoint Charlie, and I can make profound statements showcasing my knowledge like, “sometimes people got shot trying to get to the other side.”

But seriously, Berlin is a city that I find very fascinating, and I was excited to start exploring it today. First we went to the DDR museum, where we were encouraged to touch the exhibits (finally. I’ll bet they would have let us eat Nutella there, too), and to watch film clips of nudists doing various nudist activities, mostly running through meadows, jumping in water, and playing volleyball. What does this have to do with the DDR, you ask? I don’t remember. I was too busy watching the way things flopped.

Next we went to the Parisir Platz, which Shannon read me lots of information about, but I was busy taking care of a hangnail and looking at a cloud shaped like a heart, so I kind of didn’t hear her and then asked her what Parisir Platz was immediately after she’d finished. In fact, as I write this entry, I find myself asking Shannon what that one place is that starts with a P that we visited today, because I still can’t remember. But yes, it’s Parisir Platz and it was completed in 1814 and it has some arches and something about Prussia. And the Kennedeys.

Anyway, onto the Reichstag. I know that it burned in 1933. But it’s looking pretty good now. So thumbs up to whoever rebuilt that. And thumbs down to whoever decided not to let unauthorized visitors in. I can’t even light the gas burner on our host’s stove. You don’t have to be afraid of me.

Next we debated going to Checkpoint Charlie. There’s a museum there with lots of cool info and artifacts from Wall-traversing attempts. But…it kind of costs money to go. And even though it would be really cool to see that museum, you know what else is really cool in Berlin? The Fassbender and Rausch Chocolate Shop. They feature replicas of major landmarks made out of chocolate, such as the Titanic and the Reichstag (I would gladly have volunteered to do some historical reenacting–perhaps biting an iceberg-sized hole in the Titanic and then melting the Reichstag into a delicious fondue.) Upstairs is a cafe with an infinite menu of chocolate treats. So, the thing was, we figured we could use the money we saved by not going to Checkpoint Charlie to buy chocolate. I ask any of you what you would have done, faced with an orange chocolate torte or a hazelnut almond heap or whatever Shannon had that was so delicious that I became temporary property of the angels when I sampled it. Well? That’s what I thought.

What I’m saying is, don’t judge us. We love Berlin and its rich, tragic history, and the inspiring self-makover that let it become the beautiful, shining beacon of life, art, and culture that it is today.

Just not as much as we love its chocolate.

Jill