Star Trek Into Darkness review

Spock and Captain Kirk interrogate Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness

Almost fifty years after Gene Roddenberry conceived the original television series, the American institution of Star Trek thrives. Paramount Pictures pumped an astronomical $190 million into the newest film, Star Trek Into Darkness. In an era when dull action movies dominate the box office, it’s nice to see a studio take care of a franchise that celebrates science, exploration and the unity of humankind.

Unfortunately, those values must have gotten lost somewhere in the giant bales of money. Into Darkness is so crowded with laser fights and space crashes that there’s little room for the things that make Star Trek worth preserving. The director, J.J. Abrams, has turned a franchise about ideas into one about glossy special effects and explosive action scenes.

The plot is hardly worth explaining, serving only as an empty bookshelf to stack special effects sequences on. A villain from the old series, the genetically enhanced Khan, is terrorizing Starfleet in an effort to free his fellow supermen, who have been cryogenically frozen for centuries. After he escapes to enemy territory, the crew of the Enterprise sets out to capture him, tiptoeing to avoid starting a war with the bellicose Klingons.

Into Darkness is, at least, a well-made action film. The space chases and fistfights are riveting, seamed together with a witty script, flawless special effects and Abrams’ good sense of pacing. The cast is successful at channeling the personalities of Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban) and Scotty (Simon Pegg). Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan as an icy villain, with an arrogant stare and a disturbingly precise British accent — much different from the hotheaded performance by Ricardo Montalban in the original series.

Abrams succeeded in making a funny, exciting action flick, but he ignored the opportunities available in the rich Star Trek universe. Many scenes are set in 23^rd-century London and San Francisco, a bonanza for Trek fans who hunger for depictions of post-warp drive human society. Yet all Abrams offers are the typical backgrounds of glass and steel scrapers seen in dozens of movies about the future. He could have delved farther into the relationships between the humans and the Klingons, but all that’s exchanged between them are laser beams. Instead of exploring the friendships among the Enterprise crew, he only tosses in a few token catch phrases.

The worst crime occurs near the end, when Abrams plagiarizes a touching scene from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan almost in its entirety. Was this supposed to be a remake? There are enough differences for it to avoid that epithet, but it has hardly more originality than if it were one.

Spring Break in The Big Easy

Oversize beads hanging from a tree in a sculpture garden in New Orleans.

On a windy Monday afternoon, my friends and I slipped into the Spotted Cat bar on Frenchman Street in New Orleans. We ordered a round of Abita beers and listened to Sarah McCoy’s Oopsie Daisies, a 1940s-style blues lounge band. Sitting on stools in the middle of the bar, we shared a cigar while watching the lead singer in a red dress croon love ballads.

Only in New Orleans could you stumble on such a great band on a Monday afternoon. The town is saturated with great musicians. With the older ones, you get the sense they’ve been playing in New Orleans for decades and long ago passed the line of virtuoso into whatever comes after. You feel that the young ones came because they love music and know there’s no city where they’ll be more appreciated.

Sarah Mccoy’s Oopsie Daisies perform in the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street.

You don’t have to worry about whether they’re good or not. New Orleans doesn’t tolerate bad musicians. Even the street musicians are high caliber and play with passion. We saw great jazz bands, blues bands, funk bands, rock banks, and the wonderful Treme brass band, which pulled my friend Liz on stage during their last number after she distinguished herself in the crowd with her dancing.

The Treme band.

I’ve heard New Orleans called the most unique city in America. Although I’ve been taught to be skeptical of the word “unique,” I think the title is deserved. The city’s past as part of the French and Spanish empires has left it with a perceptibly non-American cultural strain. In most of the United States, houses are decorated modestly, but not there. They paint their houses as if they’re competing to have the most colorful one on the block. They put rococo frills wherever they can, especially on their metal balconies. Even weeks after Mardis Gras, it’s not uncommon to see a tree whose branches are so dense with hanging beads that it looks like it came from the candy paradise scene in Willy Wonka.

New Orleans also stands out among American cities by allowing open containers of alcohol on the streets at any time of the day, which people take great advantage of in certain quarters.

That’s not to say the city isn’t American. The most prominent culture in the city, probably, is African-American. There’s been controversy over the city’s shift toward a whiter population since Hurricane Katrina led to the evacuation of black neighborhoods, but it’s still 60 percent black. The black community has established the blues and jazz core of the local music and seem to make up most of the musicians.

The iconic New Orleans sandwich, the po’ boy, also originated with the community. I wouldn’t recommend eating a po’ boy every day if you plan to live past 40, but they’re delicious in a greasy way, and they do a great job of preparing your stomach for a night of beers.

New Orleans also has a distinctively southern character. While eating New York-style sandwiches in Stein’s Deli, a place we became addicted to during our stay, we started talking to a pair of older ladies who seemed to come from the southern gentry. The more talkative of them proudly told us that the other lived in the house Jefferson Davis died in (her friend nodded proudly). We confirmed this afterward.

The talkative southern lady insisted on giving each of us hugs after our conversation, even though the four members of our group ran the spectrum from loving hugs to reserving them for weddings, graduations and funerals. This was one of countless examples of extraordinary friendliness we encountered in New Orleans. The night we arrived, a group of twenty-somethings devoted nearly a half hour of their night to giving us advice on where to go. It’s not uncommon while walking down the street for passersby to give you an earnest “good times!”

The supreme act of friendliness was our encounter with Wendell Pierce, the New Orleans native who played Bunk on The Wire and Antoine Batiste on Treme. We read in the Times-Picayune that he would be opening a grocery store on the outskirts of the city in an effort to eliminate a food desert, so we stopped by on our way to see the beautiful marshland at the Jean Lafitte National Park.

The alligator-infested marshland in Jean Lafitte National Park.

We were bashful about approaching Pierce, who was busy talking to neighborhood folks in the crowded supermarket. We almost left, but then we saw Pierce suddenly standing alone. He shook all our hands (we agreed that his handshake was really soft, but not in a bad way), and asked where we were from. He was happy to hear we were from Mizzou, and asked some sports-related questions I didn’t understand.

Later, we worried that he thought we were in town as part of a charity effort instead of being on vacation. Still, I’ll always remember his generosity in opening the grocery store and taking the time to ask questions of four strangers on that busy day.

I only spent a week in New Orleans, but I think I’ll carry a little bit of it with me for a while. It makes you want to be more passionate about music and to take more out of life, in a friendly way.

Review: Lincoln

Lincoln and his cabinet.

In a scene in the middle of Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican congressman, chides Abraham Lincoln for waiting so long to make an attempt to end slavery.

Lincoln responds that if he had tried to end slavery after the war began in 1861, the border states would have joined the Confederacy, leading to the Union’s defeat and making the chances of emancipation even more remote. Stevens sits there with a defensive expression on his face, unable to offer a rebuttal.

Abraham Lincoln’s character – his blend of compassion and pragmatism – is the focus of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, as its title makes clear. Most Civil War epics focus on the great battles between the Union and Confederate armies, but Lincoln concentrates on the role the 16th president played in the great legislative battle over the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery.

Those who pay $9 to see artillery fire and bayonet charges will be disappointed by the film. The few battle scenes are short and brutal, serving only to remind viewers of one of the many pressures weighing on Lincoln’s mind as he decided the best way to end the war.

The ongoing carnage has led the Democrats and the conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives to oppose passage of the 13th amendment out of the fear it will ruin peace negotiations. They pester Lincoln for even bringing up emancipation, while the Radical Republicans pester him for not pressing emancipation hard enough.

In his portrayal of Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man aware that his role in history is to herd his hard-headed colleagues toward emancipation and peace. He does this mostly through slippery legislative techniques we would associate more with LBJ: patronage, cajoling, and even a little bit of dishonesty. Moralizing is used only as a last resort.

Two of Lincoln’s great speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, make it into the film, but they seem only rhetorical flourishes for Lincoln’s legislative masterwork. Unseemly political tactics are an essential part of Republican government, in any year; during the Civil War our country was lucky to have a brilliant president who used them to achieve great things.

I could think of no historical character more deserving of a portrayal by Daniel Day-Lewis, with his well-known thoroughness, than the complicated, monumental Lincoln. Ironically, the British actor brings America’s most revered historical figure to life. Instead of the booming voice most Lincoln impersonators use, he employs a more realistic reedy twang. He demonstrates Lincoln’s penchant for funny anecdotes well enough to get my theater laughing a couple times. With saggy eyelids, a slight hunch and a sad smile, he communicates the weariness and the spiritual burdens Lincoln acquired after four years of a wartime presidency.

He also gives him flaws. In scenes of discord with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field), and his son, Robert Lincoln (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), he shows Lincoln as a man prone to indecision and anger, like the rest of us. Underneath it all, though, is the wisdom and strength of character that made Lincoln such an icon.

A great cast joins Day-Lewis in creating real people out of the historical figures known only through stodgy old photographs and dry academic writing. Sally Field plays Mary Lincoln as a woman so anxious, in large part due to the death of her son Tad shortly before the beginning of the film, that I both felt sorry for her and wanted to avoid her. Gordon-Levitt’s Robert Lincoln is a frustrated young man imprisoned at Harvard by his mother’s worries while he would rather be proving himself on the battlefield.

Thanks to the full-fledged performances and the attention to detail in the sets, costumes, accents and 19th-century lingo, the movie creates such a convincing image of 1865 that it felt like a precious window into the past. The United States of 1865 is a character itself, tired of war and uncomfortable with the great changes it is undergoing. The new capitol building is so blindingly white that it seems both inspiring and awkward amongst the dingy buildings and muddy streets of Washington, D.C. The telegraphs that bring news of the results of battles and their casualties seem to strike the characters as exciting and frightening, and the same could be said of the freed blacks who have just begun serving in the army.

At the end of the movie, when I stepped out of the theater into the parking lot, I felt like I had returned from a trip to the past. I was conscious of the fact that I and my surroundings were products of the historical currents portrayed in the movie. Some characters in the movie, including Lincoln, ask what America should be like after the war ends, how it can heal the scars of slavery. Stepping back into modern-day America, I had an opportunity to examine the way the United States chose to proceed from their eyes.

Review: Flight

Denzel Washington in Flight.

Most of Flight is slow-paced character development, but it contains a few scenes that make your heart thump. In one of them, Denzel Washington’s character, Captain Whip Whitaker, tries to pull his passenger jet out of a nosedive while the passengers scream in terror. In another, the same character, an alcoholic, discovers a mini-fridge full of liquor bottles in a hotel room and struggles with the temptation to break the week of sobriety he has achieved so painstakingly.

Both scenes made me lean forward in my seat, but I found the second more agonizing than the first. Although more than a hundred lives would have been lost if the plane had crashed, Whitaker’s soul was at stake while he stared at the glowing liquor bottles, and I felt invested in the condition of his soul.

It’s a credit to the talents of Washington and the director, Robert Zemeckis, that I cared so much about what choice the character would make. The movie they made together is rare in Hollywood these days – an intimate, realistic examination of a life.

Whitaker lands the malfunctioning plane with minimal loss of life by employing strange maneuvers that make his co-pilot scream in confusion, as well as terror. The scenes that precede and follow the flight explain how he could think clearly while the plane plummeted so fast that the altimeter was a blur. Before the flight, he snorts lines of coke, takes a puff of a joint and empties a few beers in his hotel room before strutting down the tarmac in his snazzy uniform. While addressing the passengers, he mixes a few mini-bottles of vodka with orange juice out of their view. It’s not that being drunk or high helped him control the plane. He’s just used to staying calm in the midst of horrible turbulence, thanks to his drug addictions. It’s a thrill for him.

After waking up in the hospital with a mild concussion, Whitaker decides to become clean. His drug dealer, played by John Goodman with his characteristic obscene energy, offers him various substances from his woven handbag, but he turns them down. He holes up at his family farm, where he collects liquor bottles from his hiding places and empties them down the sink. While he does this, we see clues that he comes from a proud line of pilots and that his addictions have shoved his wife and teenage son out of his life.

At first, Whitaker is a hero, but before long word gets out that blood tests taken at the hospital showed he was drunk and high, meaning he could be charged with manslaughter and spend the rest of his life in prison. Ironically, this revelation sends him back to the bottle.

Meanwhile, his union representative and a lawyer from the airline (Don Cheadle) ask him to play along in their strategy to obliterate the toxicology report and blame the empty mini-bottles found on the plane on a flight attendant who died in the crash. Whitaker has to make a decision: will he stop lying to himself and others about his alcoholism, or will he tell the truth and face the consequences?

Apart from the crash scene, most of the movie takes place in mundane settings such as a hospital, Whitaker’s ancestral farm and corporate meeting rooms, but Washington’s performance takes the movie to the extreme lows and highs of human experience – especially the lows. The movie is so devoted to the character of Whitaker that it wouldn’t work if the Washington didn’t manage to make him so realistic and nuanced, as well as hinting at an underlying decency that makes us root for him.

The ancestral farm that Whitaker exiles himself onto may be mundane, but Washington’s performance makes it powerful through the contrast of its pride and simplicity – the rotary phone, the black and white family photos on the walls, the old Cessna plane in the garage – with his decadent behavior.

Zemeckis also deserves credit for the quality of the movie. This is the first live action film he’s made since Cast Away, which was similar in the way it focused on one character developing in response to trial and isolation. Most of his direction is straightforward and concise, like a well-written novel that lets its fascinating characters keep the pages turning. A few times, though, he uses flourishes that become even more powerful in contrast to the conservative shots around them, such as a zoom and shake of the camera when Whitaker snorts a line of coke before the flight, or a long close-up of a mini-bottle of liquor that Whitaker might or might not take. The emphases these shots place show what Zemeckis thinks is important in the film: the moral choices Whitaker makes.

Flight‘s budget of $31 million was anemic by Hollywood standards. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Zemeckis and Washington took large pay cuts in order to make the film. They must have really believed in the project to make that sacrifice. Judging by what ended up on the screen, they were wise to have faith in the material, but their devotion itself is what pushed the film into the upper stratosphere of quality.

Review: Cloud Atlas

The enslaved fast-food worker Son-Mi struggles for freedom in 22nd-century Korea.

I would be hard pressed to think of a book more difficult to turn into a movie than David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Mitchell’s book follows six plots from six eras of history. The stories are about, in chronological order, a man working on a slaveboat in the 19th century who has a crisis of conscience, an aspiring composer from the 1930s who must hide his homosexuality, a reporter in 1970s California who uncovers a deadly plot involving a nuclear power plant, an English man from the present day kept prisoner in a nursing home, a cloned fast-food slave from 22nd-century Korea who attempts an escape, and a man in post-apocalyptic Hawaii trying to protect his village from a predatory tribe. The plots are loosely connected by hints that some characters are reincarnations of the same soul.

As if turning that into a film weren’t hard enough, the book has a pita-sandwich structure, with the earliest story beginning and ending the book, the second coming second and second-to-last, etc. Only the chronologically-last story is unbroken in the middle, with the others cutting off abruptly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.

When I saw the film version of Cloud Atlas over the weekend, I was amazed that the Wachowskis managed to turn the book not only into a coherent film, but an entertaining, thoughtful one. This took some serious story-telling skills and imagination (they are, after all, the directors of The Matrix), but also a talented cast and great stories to work from.

The movie abandons the pita-sandwich structure of the book. I imagine this was a difficult decision for the filmmakers, but the right one. They would be asking a lot of the audience to wait three hours (the movie clocks in at 2 hours and 50 minutes) to see the conclusion of the story that began the film. Instead, the directors and editors spliced together the six stories in parallel, matching their expositions, climaxes and denouements. In a feat that surely drew a lot of sweat from the screenwriters, editors and directors, they made this work. Although the pacing lags a bit near the end, they put the stories together in a way that makes their common themes clear and keeps the viewer hooked.

As in the case of all their work, the Wachowskis use their imaginative prowess to take the film to a higher level than the average Hollywood thriller, especially in their depiction of the 22nd-century Korea in which a “corpocratic” government rules over a mass of depraved consumers. A clone named Sonmi who is enslaved in a McDonald’s-style restaurant goes on the lam after glimpsing an inspiring movie clip on a customer’s phone. While reading the book, I savored every detail of this fascinating dystopia, and I felt the same way during the movie. The Wachowskis use special effects to create a brilliant vision of a brutal future that made me wish I could pause the movie to get a better look at Neo Seoul. The setting rivaled the Los Angeles of Blade Runner and the vast human-farms of the original Matrix in its horrible wonder.

Another ingredient of the glue that holds these plotlines together is the cast. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Susan Sarandon play different characters in each of the stories, helping the viewer understand their cosmic connections. I especially enjoyed watching Tom Hanks show a versatility I didn’t know he had. I’ve always thought he had a knack at giving movies a moral center with down-to-earth roles, but here he pulls off a wild range of personalities – an evil doctor on a slave boat, a slimy hotel clerk, a conscientious nuclear scientist, a cockney tough-guy, and a schizophrenic tribal leader who speaks a pidgin future American English.

The Wachowskis were also successful in translating the themes of the book to the screen, if in a more digestible form. Each of the six stories follows characters who make the difficult choice to go against the grain of their historical setting to do what’s right. Obviously, the goodwill of the characters doesn’t keep society from going bonkers – that’s evident even from the trailer or the description on the back of the book. The message of the movie and the book is that even futile acts of charity are worthwhile because they elevate the human soul to an ether above worldly matters. Watching these stories, I felt the same revolutionary thrill as when Neo kills the agents at the end of The Matrix.

I was motivated to write this review by the lukewarm reception the movie has received elsewhere. I was bewildered by this, because Cloud Atlas got an emphatic check mark next to every entry on my list of what a movie should be. It was fun, it featured interesting characters, it transported me to different worlds, and it gave me something to think about after I left the theater.

David Brooks, “The Real Romney”

David Brooks is the only New York Times columnist I always make a point of reading, even though his politics don’t accord with mine. I like his insight and the way he strives for moderation. I like how he seeks out unusual topics for his columns when every other columnist lazily picks partisan themes.

Last week, he wrote a column in which he declared his support for Romney/Ryan because he thinks they will do something to halt the growth of Medicare. Yet, in the same column, he criticizes them for being unwilling to raise taxes. In his next column, he criticized Ryan for not voting for the Simpson/Bowles deficit-reduction plan. This sort of independent-mindedness and appreciation for nuance is the most important quality of a columnist.

Brooks doesn’t usually tickle my funny bone – the tone of his columns is usually as serious as he looks in his picture – but he did with today’s column, which made me laugh out loud more than once. It is top-notch political satire worthy of The Onion or MAD Magazine in its prime, poking fun at the way both parties distort a candidate’s history to inflame their bases.

Brooks has changed his tone radically for this column. Instead of reasoning about politics, he’s lampooning it. But he’s kept his independent perspective.

Hangin’ in the Treme

Albert "Big Chief" Lambreaux in Treme

When I was sick with a cold last week, I spent almost three entire days watching seasons 3 and 4 of The Wire, one episode after another. It was so enjoyable that I almost regretted getting better. I’m not sure which I would prefer: to have a stuffy nose and a scratchy throat while observing McNulty, Freamon and Daniels struggling against a miasma of crime and byzantine government institutions, or to be well and step out into the dull real world.

After my personal Wire marathon, I realized that I had seen every season of the show, some of them twice. Yet, I was addicted to the writers’ point of view of America. The solution was for me to give Treme a shot, since it was created by David Simon, the creator of The Wire, and shares much of The Wire‘s writers and cast.

I’d been reluctant to check out Treme because it has a reputation for being boring. When HBO approved a second season for the show, I remember seeing comments on the internet to the effect of, “maybe something will happen this season.”

I suspect that the people who claim that nothing happens in Treme only liked The Wire for its gunfight scenes. There isn’t much of that in Treme (only one scene that I can remember featured gunshots), but the same elements that made The Wire a brilliant show are there: compelling characters and a realistic, informative portrayal of American life.

One of the many themes Treme shares with The Wire is the inefficacy of America’s government. Both shows believe that America’s true character is in its people, not in the actions of its government, which is depicted as a distant, blunt force controlled clumsily by selfish hands. See, for example, the plotline in season 3 of The Wire in which Major Colvin establishes a drug-tolerance-zone (“Hamsterdam”) that works wonders for the community but that the police commissioners shut down because it makes them look bad.

Treme concentrates on the way the federal government bungled its response to Katrina. One of the show’s main characters, Albert “Big Chief” Labreaux (played by Clarke Peters, Lester Freamon in The Wire), occupies a housing project that was shut down despite the fact that it wasn’t damaged much in the storm. It’s implied that the “fucking fucks” in the federal and local government (as they are called by John Goodman’s character, a Tulane professor), aren’t eager to see New Orleans’ poor, black population return.

Another character, LaDonna Batiste-Williams, spends most of the season trying to figure out what happened to her brother, who was mistakenly jailed hours before the storm and was then lost in the system. With the help of an attorney working pro bono, she circumvents the defense mechanisms of the local government to discover that her brother died from head wounds that he supposedly got from a fall from a bunkbed. She finds his corpse stored in the back of a refrigerated semi-truck, next to dozens of other unidentified bodies.

One of the shows most powerful subplots, I thought, involved LaDonna’s ex-husband Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk in The Wire), a trombonist who’s always desperate for a gig. After Antoine accidentally bumps his trombone into the side of a police car, the police arrest him. His instrument and his livelihood disappear. He is rescued by a Japanese man who loves New Orleans’ music so much that he flew in after the storm to help struggling musicians. When the man buys him a shiny new trombone, Antoine looks sort of sad and confused, and that’s the way I felt too. Why must a foreigner step in to protect New Orleans’ culture from the local government?

The characters in Treme come from different ethnic and class backgrounds, but they have one thing in common: a passion for New Orleans’ culture. In the first scene of the first episode, John Goodman’s character, Creighton Bernette, throws a British journalist’s microphone into the Gulf after the journalist suggests that New Orleans isn’t worth saving because its music and cuisine are over the hill. In addition to occupying the housing projects, “Big Chief” Lambreaux does all he can to bring his Indian tribe back to New Orleans to perform their traditional dances in feathery costumes.

At first I didn’t like Steve Zahn’s character, Davis McAlary, a goatee’d, overenthusiastic white guy who has disavowed his old-money family in order to embrace New Orleans’ traditional music and squalor. By the end of the season, however, I felt the same way about him that many of the other characters seem to: his passion made him worth having around. In the last episode, he tries to persuade his friend not to flee to New York by spending a day showing her the cream of New Orleans’ culture. His friend, a creole chef, is forced to move after her business fails due to damages done to her restaurant by Katrina.

Treme’s big message is that New Orleans is worth saving, and that it would save itself even without the support of its country. It seems ridiculous that a show would need to argue for saving a city with hundreds of years of history and culture behind it, not to mention millions of inhabitants, but the belief that New Orleans should be abandoned because of its unfortunate geographic position is disturbingly common. I’ve heard it not only from the media but from people I’ve met in real life. The fact that the wealthiest nation in the world has to even consider whether it wants to spend the money to save one of its oldest cities shows a big flaw in America’s culture.

Eurotrip 2011: Krakow

Krakow's market square.

Although I was exhausted after spending the night sitting in a train seat, stuck in that area between consciousness and sleep that makes you wonder afterwards whether you were actually sleeping or not, after arriving in Krakow I set off to see the former factory of Oskar Schindler. Schindler’s List was filmed at the factory, so I recognized many rooms from the movie.

The factory was recently converted into a museum about the Nazi occupation of Poland. The museum didn’t dwell much on the story of Schindler saving his Jewish workers, unfortunately, but it did a wonderful job showing what conditions were like under the General Government. In nearly every room there were computer consoles with a selection of video interviews of Poles telling stories about their experiences of that era. I love it when museums include personal stories like that.

Schindler's factory.

My main impression from the museum was how appalling the actions of the Nazis were – not exactly a novel insight. Nazi Germany did everything it could to make Poland into a colony where the Poles served Germans as slaves. They attempted to wipe out Poland’s intelligentsia and keep children from learning to read or to count above 500.

My hostel, the Goodbye Lenin hostel, was only a few blocks from Schindler’s factory. I had a wonderful time staying there and would rank it among my top five favorite hostels. It had a beautiful garden area with plenty of picnic benches, free computers (although slow ones), a good kitchen, and an extraordinarily generous free breakfast that included cereal, orange juice, coffee, tea, jelly, butter, chocolate spread, honey, cookies, and an assortment of meats and cheeses. I found that if I ate a really large breakfast right before it ended at 11, it sufficed as lunch.

The hostel also provided lots of activities that made it easy to meet people. One night an employee started a game of Kings (they call it Circle of Death or Circle of Fire in Europe), providing free shots of vodka and orange juice.

On my second day in Krakow I took a bus to Auschwitz-Birkenau. My experience at Auschwitz was like my experience at Sachsenhausen in Berlin – I had trouble comprehending the extent of the horror that occurred there. I tried to keep in mind the fact that 1.5 million people were murdered on the ground I was walking on, to imagine what it must have been like for both the prisoners and the guards, but I couldn’t understand it. I know what literally happened there, I know the chain of events that led to Auschwitz, but I don’t know how it happened on a personal level for the people involved. How could millions of Germans, real thinking people, have collaborated to make what was basically a factory for killing people? How did the people who were imprisoned and killed there endure what was happening to them?

Birkenau.

Some bunks at Birkenau.

A gas chamber the Germans attempted to destroy before the war's end.

There were lots of pictures on display of Jews arriving at the camp, being split into two groups: those fit to work and those to be gassed to death. It’s interesting to look at the expressions on their faces. They usually look unhappy, but not utterly miserable or terrified – they have the same hard expressions you would see on the faces of people waiting in a really long line. Maybe they had been suffering for so long that they resigned themselves to it. Some of them probably coped by staying hopeful. Many did not know that they were about to be killed, because the Germans hid it from them. Either way, it’s heartbreaking to look at those photographs, which always include mothers holding their babies and children holding hands.

The Birkenau part of the camp, where people were gassed, is so spread out that it makes you feel lonely and bleak. The day I went happened to be really hot and humid. The Germans tried to destroy the gas chambers in the last days of the war, so all the remains are some collapsed roofs.

Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz part (a short, free bus ride away), consists of rows of brick houses that don’t look like they were used for sinister purposes. They look like they could be part of a nice college campus. In these houses lived those who were lucky enough to be chosen as workers. The buildings have been turned into museums about daily life in the ghetto, the Polish resistance, the Nazis’ confiscation of property, etc.

Suitcases taken from those imprisoned at Auschwitz.

Inside, there were displays of suitcases, glasses, and children’s toys taken from the Jews by the Nazis. The most horrifying was a display of hair cut off the heads of murdered women, for sale to the German textile industry. Again, I can’t understand how so many Germans could have worked together to find a way to use the hair of murdered women in clothing, apparently thinking it was an okay thing to do. It is unbelievable, something that belongs in a ridiculous Hollywood screenplay, not in real life. Maybe extreme circumstances such as those occurring in Nazi Germany bring out a side of human nature that we don’t see in our relatively comfortable lives.

I was fortunate to have a pretty, pleasant city to return to after leaving Auschwitz. Krakow is small, feeling more like a town than a city. Pretty much everything is within walking distance. The market square has a beautiful brick cathedral and Gothic market, and on the edge of the old city there is a castle on a grassy hill. My favorite thing about Krakow, physically, is the park that surrounds the old city in a giant ring.

Krakow's castle.

The tower in Krakow's market square.

Yesterday, I got lost on my way to the airport, arriving minutes after the gate closed but before the plane took off, so that I could see the plane I was supposed to be on outside the window. I had to pay a fee to change for a flight the next day, but I was surprisingly okay with it. After traveling so long, I’ve learned to accept my own mistakes and bad fortune. I decided to walk back to Krakow from the airport using country roads. It was a lot of fun until near the end when I got really exhausted.

Maybe I didn’t care much about missing my flight because it meant I got another day in Krakow. I had been feeling guilty about only booking three nights there. I was happy to spend one more night drinking cheap beers with my new friends from Georgia (the country), the Netherlands, England, and Scotland.

Eurotrip 2011: Prague

Eurotrip 2011: Budapest

Eurotrip 2011: Vienna

Eurotrip 2011: Hamburg and Munich

Eurotrip 2011: Berlin

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Prague

A view of Prague.

It was raining for most of the six days I was in Prague, and I was really absorbed in the book I was reading (Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, which I’d been meaning to read for a long time), so I spent most of the first half of my stay lounging around my hostel. I was lucky that it was one of those hostels that puts a reading light on the wall by every bed. I was so into the book that I hardly even spoke to anyone.

It didn’t help that the hostel, Sir Toby’s Hostel, was in sort of a dull neighborhood far from the city center. I usually prefer walking to public transportation, and the walk from the hostel to old Prague took at least half an hour and required crossing many busy, pedestrian-unfriendly streets.

Apart from the location, Sir Toby’s was an A+ hostel, with a friendly staff, free computers, a well-stocked kitchen, and several balconies and a garden area to hang out in. There was even a free barbeque on Canada Day – the first time a hostel has offered me free non-breakfast food. Strangely, there was no barbeque for the 4th of July, which I celebrated by buying a Zlatopramen beer – I wanted to buy an American beer, but I couldn’t find any.

After it stopped raining, I spent a lot of time simply wandering around Prague, admiring its beauty. As I mentioned in my entry about Vienna, Amadeus was filmed in Prague due to its abundance of 18th-century architecture. Most of the buildings in the old city are the kind you would see in the background of that movie.

Prague is also a great city for Gothic architecture. Scattered here and there are big, black, menacing tower-gates. In the center of the city is the Old Town Square, constantly jammed with tourists, with a Gothic cathedral and a clock tower from which a man blows a trumpet to mark every hour. There are numerous alleys branching off the square, and I had a lot of fun turning into one of them at random and seeing where it led me.

The clock tower in the Old Market Square.

One of Prague's gothic towers.

Prague’s most famous landmark is probably the Charles Bridge, a Gothic bridge with one of those scary black towers at the end. Unfortunately, it is always crowded with tourists and people making money off them – much of the bridge is occupied by caricaturists. Across the bridge, on the same side of the river as my hostel, is the Prague Castle, which contains within its walls the Saint Vitus cathedral, one of the most impressive cathedrals I’ve seen in Europe. It was so big I couldn’t fit it all in one picture.

The Charles Bridge.

The difficult-to-photograph Saint Vitus cathedral.

The only museum I went to in Prague was the Communist Museum, which told the story of the Czech Republic’s communist era and the 1968 Prague Spring revolt which was brutally suppressed by the Soviet Union. I enjoyed the Communist Museum, but it was one of those museums that doesn’t have many real artifacts, only paragraphs on placards on the wall, so going to the museum is sort of like paying to read a Wikipedia entry. They did have some communist propaganda posters, however, which I always find fascinating and actually sort of inspiring in their earnestness. They obviously tried to make the posters as striking as possible in an effort to inculcate the masses with communist values.

The text says, "We are building communism, we unmask the saboteurs and enemies of the republic, we are strengthening the front of peace!"

Like with Budapest, communism didn’t seem to leave much of a mark on Prague, architecturally. There is one leftover of communism in Prague, though – its affordability. You can get a half-liter beer in a bar for the equivalent of just over a euro, and in a convenience store for about 50 euro cents. My hostel cost only 15 euros a night, a really good deal for a top-quality hostel in July.

On July 6th, I left Prague on an overnight train to Krakow – hopefully, the last overnight train I will have to take on my trip.

Eurotrip 2011: Budapest

Eurotrip 2011: Vienna

Eurotrip 2011: Hamburg and Munich

Eurotrip 2011: Berlin

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Budapest

A view from the Buda side of Budapest.

My Eurail pass expired while I was in Vienna, so I took a Eurolines bus from there to Budapest for 19 Euros. In addition to being cheap, the Eurolines buses are surprisingly comfortable. All three of the buses I’ve taken so far have been less than half full, giving me more personal space than I had on the trains. The interiors of the buses are so clean they seem new. It’s also nice that there are electrical outlets in every other row. The main downside is that the bus stations tend to be in out-of-the-way places, not in the center of the city like the train stations.

My hostel in Budapest, the Mandarin Hostel, was also on the outskirts of the city, only one metro stop from the bus station. The Mandarin Hostel was wonderful, despite being a 30-minute walk from the city center. I can usually tell by the time I reach the reception desk whether I’ll like a hostel or not. In the case of the Mandarin Hostel, I saw the tall ceilings, the old, elegant marble staircase, the courtyard with broken-in lawn furniture and grill, and the absence of dozens of people milling around the reception desk, and I knew I would like it. It also helped that the employee at the front desk (and owner, I believe), named Zoltan, was friendly and knowledgeable about the city, and reminded me of Bob Newhart, except he had a really deep voice.

Mandarin hostel also had a great kitchen with many cooking tools I had never even seen before, in addition to the crucial can-opener.

I became friends with some guys in my room – an English fellow, an Irish guy, and two friends from Singapore. One night we went to a few pubs with a Romanian girl and a Finnish girl also staying at the hostel. Before we even left, the Irish lad had enough beers and liquor to put me in the hospital, without even seeming buzzed.

The gang at the hookah bar.

We went to two excellent bars where I had a couple half-liter Arany Aszok beers. It was a Sunday night, and both bars had a nice amount of people – not crowded, but not empty. We didn’t even have to wait for the foosball table at the first bar, where we played a few games. Both also played great music. The first one had a jazz band performing, and the second was playing obscure tunes by Grace Jones and Kraftwerk. At the second bar, we ordered a hookah and smoked strawberry-flavored tobacco, which reinvigorated some of us somewhat, it being past three in the morning.

The Finnish girl and the Singaporean guys went home after the second bar, while I opted, against my usual habits, to continue the night with the others. We got another round of beers at another bar while it grew light outside, then we walked through the empty streets to a Turkish-style bathhouse, a leftover from Turkey’s occupation of Hungary, arriving just as it opened at 6 A.M.

The baths.

We were the youngest people in the baths by about 30 years, and we got unpleasant looks from the other patrons, as if they intuited that we had been out all night drinking. The baths complex was what I imagine the ancient Roman baths to be have been like: pools of varying temperatures surrounded by ornate columns, arches and statues. We started in a warm outdoor pool that had a whirlpool in the center. Then, we took a short but painful dip into a cold indoor pool that immediately chilled the bones in my toes. We proceeded to an even hotter indoor pool, then we returned outside.

The baths' interior.

The others remained out there (some of them managed to catch a few winks in the pool), while I went back inside to try the thermal baths. They had already been to the baths a few days before and weren’t eager to come home smelling like sulfur again. The thermal bath gave me a pleasant tingling sensation all over my body, and I felt very tender and relaxed afterwards, although I did end up with a rotten-egg smell that remained even after another dip in the normal pool. After more than an hour at the baths, we took the metro back to the hostel and crashed.

A cathedral in Budapest.

A beautiful but neglected building.

The ornate surroundings at the baths were not unusual – Budapest has a lot of beautiful architecture in unexpected places. A stroll through the city will take you by many unique buildings showing a mixture of Western and Eastern influences. Unfortunately, many of the buildings are falling apart, probably due to neglect during the communist era and damage caused by the rebellion of 1956. Hungary’s current economic situation has also probably played a role. It is clearly less wealthy than European countries to the west, with levels of homelessness I haven’t seen since I left the U.S. Budapest also reminded me of American cities in that its metro trains seem to be many decades old.

Budapest's riverfront.

Budapest’s riverfront rivals Porto’s in its beauty. The Buda side (Budapest is actually two cities, Buda and Pest, joined together) is hilly, heavily wooded, and relatively empty, with a medieval palace atop one of its hills. The Pest side is dense with gothic churches and government buildings. Despite being under communist rule for decades, there are very few ugly concrete-and-glass buildings in Budapest.

One day I took a long bus ride to Memento Park, where the propagandistic statues of the old communist regime have been deposited. Some of the statues were actually really powerful. One that struck me was of a worker striding forward with his arms raised in triumph and a determined look on his face, presumably meant to represent the impetus of the communist revolution. Looking at the statue, I felt like the man had enough forward momentum to break free from the platform and walk out the park.

A Red Army soldier.

A statue of Lenin.

The rebellious worker.

Budapest was another place where a great hostel plus a great city equalled a great time for me. I’m glad that I’d decided to book a generous five nights there.

Eurotrip 2011: Vienna

Eurotrip 2011: Hamburg and Munich

Eurotrip 2011: Berlin

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Vienna

A public square in Vienna.

I only booked three nights in Vienna because someone told me it was ugly. I don’t remember who told me that, but the idea took root in my head. I imagined a bombed-out city of wide streets, awkward green spaces and glass office buildings, like the worst parts of Berlin and Hamburg.

Actually, Vienna was an exceptionally beautiful city, and I regretted not spending more time there. Maybe the person who misled me about Vienna held a personal grudge against the city because he was mugged there. Maybe he was thinking of another city that was ugly. Or, maybe I was mistaken and it was another city he said was ugly.

A surprisingly high percentage of Vienna’s center consists of beautiful baroque buildings, giving it an architectural uniformity almost equal to that of Paris. While walking through the crooked streets downtown, I often had a flashback to the scene in Amadeus in which Mozart drinks a bottle of wine while walking to his apartment past horse-drawn carriages and street-performers. The architecture in Vienna was so similar to that of the movie that I assumed it was filmed there – especially since it takes place in Vienna – but a look at the IMdB page shows that it was filmed in Prague, where I will be soon.

A typical beautiful building in Vienna.

The Stephansdom cathedral.

The Votivkirche, blocked by an unfortunate advertisement.

There are also a few magnificent Gothic buildings scattered about, including two cathedrals and a Rathaus. Unfortunately, all three of these wonderful buildings were undergoing renovations during my visit, and one of the cathedrals had an advertisement hanging rudely from it. I also stopped by the Secession center, an Art Nouveau building used as a meeting place by artists like Gustav Klimt who rebelled against the conservative establishment in Vienna’s art scene in the late 19th century.

The Secession building.

One of my favorite buildings in Vienna was Karlskirche, a baroque church framed by two triumphal columns inspired by Trajan’s column in Rome. According to Wikipedia, the columns illustrate scenes from the life of St. Charles. I think it’s very interesting, although probably not totally appropriate, that an architectural form originally used to trumpet the military exploits of an emperor is used to tell the story of a Christian saint.

Karlskirche.

My hostel – the Hostel Ruthensteiner – was wonderful, with a great kitchen and a beautiful courtyard with plenty of comfortable chairs. However, it became so crowded during breakfast and dinner-time that it was difficult to cook or meet people, simply because of a lack of space. Luckily, I already had a friend in the city. Dhika, the Indonesian student I met in Florence, is completing her Masters in Vienna, so she showed me around.

The day I arrived Dhika took me to the Schonbrunn palace, once the summer getaway for the Holy Roman Emperors, now surrounded by urban sprawl. It reminded me a lot of Versailles. We strolled through the gardens to the top of a hill with a great view of Vienna.

Schonbrunn

The last day of my stay was the first day of Donauinselfest, an annual rock concert held on an island in the Danube river. That night, Dhika and I took a train there to watch a German rap-rock group perform. They weren’t playing my kind of music, but they weren’t bad. I had a good time despite cutting my hand while attempting to open a bottle of beer with a key.

Donauinselfest

Later that night, back at the hostel, I was awoken by someone who seemed to have had too good of a time at the festival – one of my roommates was puking onto the floor by the window. Everyone in the 10-bed room seemed to wake up, but no one said anything as he heaved a few times and walked casually to his bed. I simply returned to sleep so that I would be well-rested for my bus ride to Budapest the next morning.

Eurotrip 2011: Hamburg and Munich

Eurotrip 2011: Berlin

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Hamburg and Munich

Munich, from the spire of the Frauenkirche cathedral.

I’ve come up with a rule for hostels: if the hostel serves beer in the lobby, I probably won’t like it. Unfortunately, the hostels I stayed at in Hamburg and Munich – the Meininger Hamburg City Center and the Easy Palace City Hostel, respectively – both served beer right at the check-in desk. Overpriced 3-Euro beers.

I don’t have anything against beer, but I’ve found that the hostels that serve it (the ones that can afford the liquor license, probably) tend to be large, corporate-style hostels. They tend to be the type of hostel that charges 2.50 Euros an hour to use the internet, that has an understaffed reception desk, that doesn’t give out free maps, that doesn’t offer free breakfast. They are full of large groups of American college students and French and Italian high-schoolers, making it difficult for individual backpackers to meet each other.

A lot of my food was stolen at my hostel in Hamburg. The thief even opened a fresh can of pasta sauce and used three quarters of it, which particularly incensed me. There’s always a risk that someone will steal your food, but when you’re staying at large hostel, the risk that some jerk will pass through the kitchen and filch your food is, obviously, larger.

What angered me most about my hostel in Munich was the poor quality of the kitchen. There were only two plates and no bowls, forcing me to eat my cornflakes out of a pot. There was no table, so you had to carry your food two stories down to the bar to eat it. This made it especially hard to meet fellow lone backpackers, who can often be found eating their meals in the kitchen. I was also annoyed by the lack of a can-opener, which I needed to make my usual lunch of a tuna-salad sandwich. The first and second day, I walked to the Italian restaurant next door and asked an employee to open it for me. The first day, he did so cheerfully, but the second day he angrily asked if I would be doing this every day, so from then on I opened the cans with a knife.

Unbelievably, this hostel which had no can-opener, no table, no bowls and almost no plates in the kitchen, had a posh bar area in the lobby with rainbow disco lights running all day.

I managed to meet people at both hostels despite their anti-social ambiences. On my first night in Hamburg, I went to a bar on the Reeperbahn in the red-light district with a guy from Toronto, a girl from Montreal, and a girl from Brazil. Hamburg’s red-light district isn’t nearly as seedy as Amsterdam’s; there aren’t prostitutes tapping on windows everywhere you walk. It was in this area that the Beatles started their career playing at grungy clubs, and there’s a small monument to them on the sidewalk.

Hamburg's Rathaus.

The next day I walked around the city with the Brazilian girl, Natalya. We saw Hamburg’s beautiful Rathaus (a.k.a. courthouse), and the St. Nikolai church, which was almost destroyed in World War II and has been left in its ruined state as a memorial against war. We strolled through Hamburg’s high-end shopping district, where we stopped at the Lego store and marvelled at how expensive and cross-marketed (with Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc.) Lego has become. Still, there were some sets in there I would have loved to have as a kid. On our way back to the hostel we walked by Hamburg’s magnificent port, a beautiful, colorful industrial vista.

The ruins of the St. Nikolai church.

Hamburg's port.

On my last day in Hamburg I took a day-trip to Lübeck, a small medieval town that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Some of the buildings were beautiful, such as the entrance gate and the cathedral (which, unlike St. Nicolai, was repaired after World War II), but I didn’t like Lübeck much. There was too much construction, too many tourists and too much traffic. It wasn’t the quiet town I was expecting.

Lübeck.

The next day I took a five-hour train to Munich. Munich seems to have suffered less damage in the war than Berlin and Hamburg, leaving more interesting architecture around. I spent a lot of my time walking around and taking pictures of the buildings I liked.

A church in Munich.

I also spent a lot of time in Munich’s beer gardens. On my second day in the city, I walked through the rain to the Hirschgarten park, where I ordered a large Augustiner beer. It was much bigger than I expected – I put the salt and pepper shakers next to the mug when I took a picture to give a sense of its size. I ordered some meatballs and potato salad to soak up some of the beer.

The Augustiner beer at Hirschgarten.

On the next day, a Sunday, there was a big Bavarian festival next to the Rathaus in the city center. I never found out for sure, but I think the festival is held every Sunday. When I first arrived there was a band playing traditional Bavarian music, with couples dancing in front of the stage in traditional Bavarian garb. Later, a younger band played music that seemed to be a Bavarian-rock hybrid. I ordered a Hofbrau beer and some sort of wurst in a bun. For desert, I bought a fist-sized wad of marshmallow and bread covered with chocolate.

The festival in front of Munich's Rathaus.

I spent my last day in Germany at the Neuschwanstein castle in Füssen. The castle was built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the late 19th century as a fantastical version of a medieval castle. Later, it served as the inspiration for the castle at Disneyland. It is, predictably, a very popular place for tourists, many of whom were having a lot of trouble hiking up to it.

Neuschwanstein.

Although Neuschwanstein was magnificent, I enjoyed my trip to Füssen more because it gave me one last day in the Alps. As soon as the train entered the mountains, I remembered why I loved the Alps so much when I was in Switzerland. The air smelled fresh and woodsy, and the sky and water were special shades of blue. After experiencing the castle, I hiked to the nearby Alpsee lake and spent some time sitting on a bench, enjoying the view, before I returned to the train station to go back to Munich.

A view from Neuschwanstein.

Alpsee.

I woke up at 5 AM the next morning to get on a bus to Vienna, wondering groggily whether I booked the early ride out of necessity or because I wasn’t thinking. I spent more than two weeks in Germany, but there were so many cities I didn’t get a chance to see – Dresden, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, etc. Hopefully, I will get a chance to return someday.

Eurotrip 2011: Berlin

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Berlin

A remnant of the Berlin Wall.

Berlin isn’t a very pretty city. Most of its buildings are of the glass-and-metal post-war style, put up quickly to replace ones that were destroyed in the war. Its center consists mostly of big, charmless monuments, museums, and government and office buildings. But it makes up for its lack of beauty with an abundance of history, resulting from its status as the capital of the Third Reich and as a red-hot collision point between the two sides of the Cold War.

On the first of my six full days in Berlin, I visited the Holocaust Memorial, an acre or so of cement blocks, some towering over your head, some no higher than your knee. It reminded me of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., in that it seemed to express something about the event in an impressionistic way. Underneath, there’s a free museum telling the story of a half-dozen people who perished in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Memorial.

I hate to say it, but a large chunk, maybe most, of my sightseeing in Berlin was Holocaust-related. It’s simply the most fascinating thing about Germany’s history for me. It’s good that Germany has taken responsibility for the atrocities it committed against the Jewish people and supports tourists’ curiosity about it. In addition to the Holocaust Memorial, they’ve built a large, modern Jewish Museum, which tells the history of the Jewish people in Germany going all the way back to the diaspora. Parts of the museum are impressionistic in the same way the Holocaust Memorial is. One room has thousands of anguished-looking metal faces on the floor which make jarring sounds when you walk over them, representing victims of violence around the world.

The metal faces.

The main impression I got from the museum is how sad it is that the relationship between the Germans and the German-Jews, which showed hope of improving in the 19th and early 20th centuries, came to such a horrible end, and nothing can be done to fix it because the German-Jews don’t really exist anymore.

Later in the week I took a train to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the suburbs. Really in the suburbs – the camp borders the backyards of suburban houses. Whether the houses were there during the time of Nazi rule, I don’t know. Like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sachsenhausen seems to be heavily subsidized by the German government, making admission free.

Part of the wall at Sachsenhausen.

Sachsenhausen.

Bunks.

Sachsenhausen was one of the first concentration camps, built in 1936. It originally housed political prisoners, but in the last years of the war it mostly held Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. It’s hard to describe the feeling you get from being inside a place designed to destroy the human spirit. Even while there, it’s hard to conceive that 30,000 people were murdered at the site, and many more lives were ruined.

A Jewish man staying at my hostel in Athens believed that Germans are sneaky, malicious people by nature, but the ones I’ve spent time with have been nice. It’s hard to believe that what is today a benevolent, reasonable society could have committed such acts within the lifetimes of people still living. I’ve tried to get inside the minds of the perpetrators of the crimes and justify the way they acted by their age (the average age of guards at Sachsenhausen was 20), by their getting brainwashed by propaganda and fear, but I can’t do it. They must have been really messed up people. I suppose that the majority of Germans living under the Nazis, even the majority of Nazi soldiers, knew that horrible things were being done to the Jews, and wouldn’t have done those things themselves, but didn’t protest out of fear of what would happen to them or their family. The people who committed the crimes were sociopaths, who exist in every society, but usually don’t reach positions of power.

Berlin suffered for its crimes by being split in two soon after the war. Berliners are still sensitive about this; I was reprimanded by the owner of my hostel for saying that something was in East Berlin. You can tell when you cross into former East Berlin because the post-war buildings look even shabbier.

Checkpoint Charlie today.

I went to two excellent museums that covered the Cold War era in Germany – the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, and the DDR Museum. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum tells the story of the construction of the Berlin Wall (or the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, as the East German government called it), and the thousands of attempts by East Germans to cross it before it was torn down in 1989. Some of the attempts were wonderfully successful, using air balloons and clever hiding places in cars and suitcases, etc. Some were not, such as in the case of 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who was shot in his attempt to cross and took fifty minutes to bleed to death while East German and West German guards, police officers, and American soldiers refused to step into the no-man’s-land to help him.

The DDR Museum offers insight into the daily life of citizens of the German Democratic Republic, which you don’t hear much about when you learn about the Cold War in high school. There were displays covering clothing styles (surpringly similar to those of the capitalist world at the same time, although using cheaper fabrics), vacations (nude beaches were popular), and music (radio stations were required to play mostly music from Communist countries, but Western rock was still supreme). The museum displayed a Trabant, East Germany’s poorly running response to the Volkswagen Beetle.

The Trabant.

I also visited Berlin’s famous Pergamon Museum, home of the Ishtar Gate, the Miletus Market Gate, and the wonderful Pergamon Altar, with a wrap-around sculpture depicting a battle between the Greek Gods and giants. When the museum was built in the 1910s-20s, these ancient monuments were reconstructed on site from shattered ruins and some fabricated parts – something no museum would do today. However harmful the reconstructions were to the purity of the ruins, they let you see how magnificent the buildings originally were.

The Pergamon Altar.

The Babylonian Ishtar Gate.

I had a great experience at my hostel, John’s Cozy Little Backpacker Hostel. The hostel was like its name: a little weird and cluttered, but intimate and with a lot of character. It was on the outskirts of Berlin in a Turkish immigrant neighborhood, which meant there were lots of internet cafes and doner kebap restaurants around. The bathroom was dirty, and I could hear more of what was happening in there from my bed than I would have liked, but it had a great kitchen, which trumps all other considerations. It was also cheap, costing only eleven euros a night. Berlin is strangely cheap; I assumed Germany would be one of the most expensive countries in Europe, since it’s one of the most developed.

Berlin’s signature dish, Currywurst, costs less than two euros. It’s a sliced bratwurst covered in a spicy sauce that may or may not be related to curry, usually served with fries on top.

Currywurst.

I formed a good group of friends with the other people in my room: a German couple, a Spanish teenager, an English guy from Manchester, and a Malaysian guy who just graduated from a college in Florida. About halfway through the week, we started going to breakfast together every day. One night we went to a club, but, as usual, the time spent getting there (two train transfers) and the price (five euros just to get in) wasn’t worth it for me.

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Copenhagen

The Distortion music festival.

When I checked into my hostel in Copenhagen, the receptionist asked if I came for the music festival.

“What music festival?” I asked him.

He explained that Copenhagen was halfway through the 5-day Distortion electronic music festival. He marked down on my map where the festival would be taking place that night. It sounded interesting, so I bought a few beers (very expensive, like everything else in Copenhagen) and headed over.

I immediately liked the festival. There were numerous dance parties around different DJs scattered around the neighborhood. They were playing songs I liked (such as “Windowlicker” by Aphex Twin), and, despite the energetic dancing and club-style music, there was a friendly atmosphere. I saw a guy wearing an Ohio t-shirt, so I went up to him and asked if he was from Ohio. He was just a local wearing an Ohio shirt, for some reason, but he shook my hand and yelled “go Buckeye State!”

I was standing in the crowd, enjoying the music, when a young guy asked me something in Danish (the Northern Europe segment of my trip is also the segment in which I’m often mistaken for a local). When he learned that I was a foreigner at the festival by myself, he invited me to hang out with him and his brother. So, I spent the rest of the night with Michael and Martin and their friends. We ended up at a bar where they bought me a rum and coke and some tequila shots. Everyone in their group of friends was very friendly – the Danish like to speak English, sometimes even slipping in phrases in their conversations with each other. They speak English better than in any other country I’ve visited on my trip. Martin explained it to me like this: people in small countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have to learn English, because no one else in the world speaks their language.

After sleeping off my hangover the next day, I checked facebook to see that I had received a message from Michael inviting me to join him and his friends at the last night of the festival. I met him at the Islands Brygge neighborhood of Copenhagen, a former industrial district that has recently been gentrified. Michael pointed out some modern apartment buildings that were made out of cement silos.

People hanging out by the canal in Islands Brygge before the festival.

A former industrial buildings converted into apartments.

After drinking some beers by the canal, we walked to the festival. The last night of the festival was in Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, which is in the middle of a conversion into a neighborhood of dance clubs. The final party was supposed to cost something like 40 euros, but we snuck in over a roof.

The party was even crazier and more crowded on the last night. Part of the party was in a pool. I jumped into the water in my boxers, and regretted it later.

The pool party.

I traveled with Michael and his friends from one dance floor of the party to another, drinking many beers and Jagermeister shots, until I finally walked back to my hostel at 2:30 AM. Imagine my surprise when it started getting light outside on my walk back, and the birds started chirping.

Michael invited me to a barbeque at his family’s house in the suburbs the next day, so I took a train out there. Michael, Martin, and their mother treated me to a delicious meal of salad, potatoes and grilled chicken in their backyard. They claimed that their neighborhood was really crummy, but it seemed nice to me – maybe Americans have different standards for crummy neighborhoods than Europeans.

I was inexpressibly thankful to Michael and his family for giving me a nice meal at their home – the first home-cooked meal I’ve had in months. I think they enjoyed using their impeccable English with an American, and I think they also wanted to give me a good memory of Copenhagen. They certainly succeeded at that. Thanks in large part to their friendliness, I would rank Copenhagen among my favorite cities in Europe.

I especially appreciated their friendliness because my hostel, Hotel Jorgenson, was sort of a dud. Although the staff were friendly, the breakfast was excellent (plenty of cereal, meat, bread, and chocolate), and everything was clean, there wasn’t much of a social atmosphere. If I hadn’t met Michael and Martin at Distortion, it probably would’ve been a lonely four days for me.

Apart from going to Distortion and sleeping off the resultant hangovers, I ventured into Christiania, a neighborhood of Copenhagen that considers itself independent of Copenhagen, and Denmark, and even the European Union. At the neighborhood’s exit there’s a sign that says, “You are now entering the E.U.” The neighborhood was founded in 1971 by hippies who occupied former army barracks. Today, it still has a hippie atmosphere, with artful graffiti covering every surface.

The sign at the exit of Christiania.

There was a lot of great architecture in Copenhagen, including many interesting spires. I also spent time in a beautiful park near my hostel. Copenhagen was experiencing perfect weather while I was there (which is unusual, according to the people I met), so the park was always crowded.

A canal in Copenhagen.

On Monday I took a train to Berlin, carrying lots of great memories of Copenhagen and its locals with me. Thanks to facebook, I’ll be able to keep in touch with Michael and Martin. I deactivated my facebook account when I left for this trip, thinking that it would be good for me to get some time away from it, but I quickly reactivated it because it’s a good way to keep in touch with people you meet while traveling.

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul

Eurotrip 2011: Bruges and Amsterdam

My voyage from Porto to Bruges on the 28th was a big turning point in my trip: I was leaving Latin Europe for Germanic Europe. For the first time, I would be outside the borders of the former Roman empire.

I experienced some culture shock after arriving in Bruges – surprising, considering that I didn’t experience any when I arrived in Istanbul from the U.S.A. The chilly, windy, cloudy weather made me homesick for the Mediterranean clime. The people seemed more reserved. The prices were higher. I understood less of the language (my Latin and tiny bit of Italian help me with the Romance languages). However, I quickly acclimated myself, thanks in large part to the coziness that even the buildings in Bruges seem to radiate.

In Bruges, in case you haven’t seen it, is a movie about two hit men hired to kill someone in Bruges, who develop spiritual qualms when they see what a nice city Bruges is. I think that the director got his idea for the movie from walking around the city and taking in the atmosphere. It’s a pretty, peaceful, unpretentious town unsuited for murdering.

I was only in Bruges for two nights, and I spent much of my time planning the rest of my trip, so I didn’t have as much time for sightseeing as I’d have liked. I took a walk recommended by an employee at my hostel, which took me past some beautiful canals, windmills and Flemish architecture into a part of town that was empty due to lack of tourists. According to a brochure I read while in Bruges, the city has more tourists than local residents in the summer.

My hostel, the Snuffel Backpacker Hostel, had a bar for a common area – a quality I usually hate in a hostel. But, they served a great local beer called Brugse Zot.

On my last night in Bruges I spent 7 euros to see Tree of Life at a local theater. They showed it in English with Flemish subtitles. I thought it was great, but many of the other people in the theater didn’t have much patience for its slow pacing and lack of dialogue. They cheered when the movie ended, not in a complimentary way.

The next day I took a train to Amsterdam. Frankly, I didn’t like Amsterdam much. My hostel was in the middle of the red light district, somewhere you don’t want to take a walk through at night. Just down the block from my hostel, there were prostitutes behind glass doors with red lights on top.

The city is rather pretty outside the red light district, however. It reminded me of a blown-up Bruges, with wider canals and bigger buildings.

On my first afternoon in Amsterdam I went to the Van Gogh Museum. I was expecting a mixed experience after Roland told me that he was kicked out for making a sketch there. An art museum that doesn’t allow artists to make sketches doesn’t have its priorities straight. Yet, I enjoyed my time there, thanks to the large variety of Van Gogh’s work.

The next morning I went to the Anne Frank house. It was fascinating to see the small, winding rooms I remember imagining when I read Anne Frank’s diary in 8th grade English class. I can’t imagine living in such close quarters with so many other people. I suppose that being in such a tense setting provided the creative fuel for Frank’s diary, which is so insightful for a 13-year-old.

Amsterdam has more cyclists than any other city I’ve been to. There are extra lanes for bikes between the roads and the sidewalks that you quickly learn not to walk across carelessly. Sometimes the cyclists make it hard to navigate the streets as a pedestrian, but thanks to them there are very few cars on the road.

I spent four and a half days in Amsterdam – three nights, plus a fourth day before boarding an overnight train to Copenhagen. I later wished I could have added one of the days to Bruges or Copenhagen. I spent most of my time in Amsterdam wandering around the canals or chilling out at my hostel.

Eurotrip 2011: Lisbon and Porto

Eurotrip 2011: Madrid

Eurotrip 2011: Barcelona

Eurotrip 2011: Rouen, Le Havre and Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Paris

Eurotrip 2011: Nice and Marseille

Eurotrip 2011: Venice and Milan

Eurotrip 2011: Interlaken

Eurotrip 2011: Florence and Pisa

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 2

Eurotrip 2011: Rome pt. 1

Eurotrip 2011: Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: The Journey To Palermo

Eurotrip 2011: Santorini and Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Athens

Eurotrip 2011: Istanbul