Three Weeks in a Backpack

This is my attempt to summarize the three weeks of my spring break, a time period that I am currently entitling “Euro-Hedonism”, during which I explored five countries and eight cities. Hedonism is clearly a strong word, as I lived (mostly) within my means and did not fly off the handle, but I really can’t think of a better way to describe a time spent with so few responsibilities or demands on my time. With the exception of my time spent on a study tour with my study abroad program, I very rarely had anything to do that wasn’t shaped or decided by the will of myself or one of my travel partners. I think that’s a pretty incredible phenomenon, and I think I’m very lucky to have had it. If hedonism can be defined as a life lived according to want and curiosity, then I think it very accurately describes my time.

I think the part of my overall experience of which I am the proudest is that I very rarely put any restraint on my curiosity. If I was walking around and something interesting caught my eye, I looked into it. If there was a building and I could not immediately identify what it was there for, I went over to it. And thankfully, I was traveling with wonderful people who encouraged and enabled this kind of curiosity–we basically didn’t say no to any path that popped up, and it usually led us to good places. As my friend Ben so eloquently put it while we were in Aarhus (the second largest city in Denmark), every road was worthwhile, and every road took I wanted to be. And that’s a pretty awesome thing. Sure, there were setbacks, like longer walks back to hostels or trains taken in the wrong direction or tourist traps sprung (goddamn 50 Czech crowns for a BOWL OF POTATO CHIPS), but nothing ever overshadowed the enjoyment of each day.

So first, a break down of my trip:

March 20th-March 27th: Prague and Český Krumlov with the DIS program.

March 28th-March 30th: Prague with Luci, Henry, Peter, Marissa, Charly, Lisa, Sarah.

April 1st-April 3rd: Berlin with Sarah.

April 3rd-April 5th: Paris with Sarah.

April 5th-April 7th: Cannes with Sarah.

April 7th-April 9th: Amsterdam with Alanna.

April 10th-April 12th: Aarhus with Alanna, Ben, Peter, and Sarah N.

April 12th-13th: Copenhagen with Alanna.

And now, for the curious and meticulous (like me!), a list of all the museums and monuments I visited, by city:

Prague: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Tower Praha, Mucha Museum, Franz Kakfa Museum, Prague Castle, St. Vitus’ Cathedral, The Meet Factory, The Old Jewish Cemetary, The Spanish Synagogue, The Maisel Synagogue.

Český Krumlov: The Schiele Museum, The castle in Český Krumlov, the Chram Cathedral and Ossuary (a bone church), both of which are technically in Kutna Hora.

Berlin: Berliner Dom, Unter Den Linden, Marx-Engles Park, East Side Gallery, Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburg Tor, Holocaust Memorial, Reichstag, Berlin TV Tower, Hamburger Bahnhof.

Paris: The Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Monmartre, The Sacre Coure, Centre Pompidou, a walk along the Seine River, the Conchorde, Champs d’Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs de Mars, Ecole Militaire, Notre Dame.

Amsterdam: The Jewish Historical Museum, The Van Gogh Museum, The New Church, The Amsterdam Historical Museum, The Anne Frank House.

Aarhus: Aros Kunstmuseum, De Gammel By (The Old Town), aaaand a beach that we reached by walking along an industrial parkway. It was sketchy, but kind of par for the course, considering we asked the gentleman at the hostel desk how to get to the beach and he said “go outside, take a right, go that way.” The previous day when we asked the same man if there were any grocery stores in Aarhus, he responded with a “yes” and said nothing more until we goaded him with the question “Well, how do we get there?”

But to get to the heart of the matter, I’m going to offer a series of anecdotes and observations from my travels. I dearly wish I could do a step-by-step retelling of my three weeks, but I simply don’t have the energy to communicate it all (nor, do I think, do my readers have the patience to hear about five-hour train rides, no matter how much charming European countryside I saw). So instead, a glimpse into these three weeks will have to do, until I sit my readers down  for a few hours and a few cups of tea for a more complete description. Maybe saying that means I just lost a bunch of my readers. Oh well.

Prague: Prague is a complicated city, I think. And I think my perspective on the city has a lot to do with the fact that maybe I overstayed my welcome. When I talk to those who were in Prague for a few days, they said that they thought it was beautiful and fun and a great place to explore. And it certainly is all those things–I can very easily say that every street in Prague contained something pretty awesome, especially in the realm of architecture or food. Walking down any given street would very likely take you past a beautiful old house or cathedral or past some restaurant or cafe offering something very tantalizing, and the temptation of the food/drink was awfully hard to resist because GOOD GOD was Prague CHEAP! You hear this from everyone but please, dear reader, think of how it felt for a person from Copenhagen to go from a world where a good deal on coffee means paying $2 for a cup of black coffee to a world where you pay about $2.75 for a good-sized cup of hot chocolate so thick that it flowed like honey when you drank it. Magnificent. But despite the exceptional beauty of Prague’s architecture and the distance my money carried me, I really didn’t jive with Prague, for the irony that it was too touristy (I know, and there I was making it all the worse). I couldn’t turn in a full circle without seeing at least three tourist shops selling really kitschy souvenirs, like a t-shirt featuring the flag of the Czech Republic with the words “PRAGUE DRINKING TEAM” below it. Classy. And despite the plethora of tourists, Prague never really seemed to welcome the tourists. Prague was the only place I encountered that actively used “tourist traps” on the public, like posting a menu outside of a restaurant with prices half as much as what you pay when you actually go inside and sit down. Yeesh. Whenever I broke free of the tourists, I enjoyed myself immensely. Like the long hike up a hill that my friend Luci and I took to visit the Petrin Tower, Prague’s version of the Eiffel Tower (Prague has a love affair with Paris, it’s really quite amusing to see how the relationship expresses itself). Or when I met up with Sarah, Marissa, Charly, and Lisa and basically got to relive some of the good times we have in Boston when I go up to visit–it was really awesome to have a group of friends reunite like that, and it’s pretty remarkable to think about when you realize that we were all coming in from different parts of Europe. Prague also contained a really fantastic shop that was a bookstore/cafe/restaurant/bar/accoustic music venue. That’s about 70% of what I imagine heaven looks like (the other 30% heavily features kittens).

An especially big thank-you to Luci for being a wonderful travel partner in a city as unfamiliar as Prague (the Czech language has no English cognates that I can recognize. You get up shit creek pretty quickly that way), and another great big thank-you to Marissa for welcoming me Sarah Charly and Lisa to the city and making me appreciate Prague again when I had grown tired of it.

Cesky Krumlov: Cesky Krumlov is a small town out of a fairytale, only more like Alice in Wonderland than Sleeping Beauty. While it does have a really awesome castle (built into the rock cliff on which it stands…so damn cool), it’s a strangely labyrinthine town, wherein walking down one street suddenly places you on a riverbank, looking 30 feet up to the bridge you crossed over to get onto that street, only you can’t remember going down so far. It’s quite curious, but the town just feels so old-time charming that you can only smile at it. The Alice-in-Wonderland-ness of the place also comes out in the castle’s moat. Now, it’s not uncommon for a castle to have a moat, but this wasn’t a moat with water. It was a dry-land moat filled with BEARS. FRIGGIN’ HUGE BEARS. It felt like something out of a fantasy novel, where the wizard doesn’t just have a moat, he has a moat with bears in it. That’s REALLY getting screwed during an invasion of the castle. Oh, and by the way, when thirty Americans are standing around and shouting the word “Bear!” over and over again and your name sounds a lot like the word “Bear”, such that you explain to people that you pronounce your name “like the past tense of ‘bear’”, it gets REALLY irritating to try to figure out what’s going on. Cesky Krumlov keeps the castle element alive in all things, including a bar that looks like a dungeon, decorated in stone and iron and full of candelabras. And it is there, in that dungeon-esque bar that my friend Ben described as a place where vampires might gather, that my friends and I had a great night of stereotypical American stupidness. On the night we were there, the only people in the bar were the ten or so of us and the bartender. So we asked the bartender to play some Queen for us. He put on Queen’s best hits and then followed it with something that was CLEARLY a mix CD for Americans to dance to foolishly–it had Green Day, ABBA, a bunch of 80’s metal, Avril Lavigne…all it needed was Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”.  So dance we did, singing along loud and proud. It was a magnficient night, and I am wholly unashamed of being “that group of Americans”. At least no one really noticed us.

Berlin: Berlin was a very welcome change from Prague. Where Prague had been too touristy, Berlin felt almost devoid of any sort of tourist “culture” as it were. There were many monuments that clearly draw lots of tourists, and I did see tourist shops where one could buy postcards that contain tiny little pieces of the Berlin Wall, but it seemed to me like the city was too focused on moving forward and developing itself. There was lots of construction going on, and much of the architecture felt very modern and devoted to housing or commerce rather than looking old and pretty. People have pointed out to me that that’s what a city does after it has been bombed to the ground, so perhaps Berlin is progressive more by necessity (gotta do something after the walls have been reduced to rubble, I guess) than by choice. But either way, I really loved the balance struck between an actual livable city and the REALLY AWESOME monuments that Sarah and I checked out. We spent the better part of our time in Berlin walking around the neighborhoods, and as a result reached a lot of the biggest sites (see the aforementioned list). But the key to our time in Berlin was our wonderful hosts in the Wombat Hostel we stayed in. Sarah and I didn’t really have a sense of where to eat, so we asked the deskworkers for advice on just about every meal we had. And EVERY PLACE THEY RECOMMENDED WAS AWESOME. Sarah and I ate at a brewery with the warmest, most charming atmosphere I’ve experienced here in Europe (and I was under the impression that Copenhagen had a monopoly on that sort of thing), after a really fantastic lunch at a sidewalk cafe. And the people at the desk also sent us up towards the White Trash Fast Food bar, which was very eccentrically decorated, from the large styrofoam airplane that hung from the ceiling to the menu, which described the fish & chips as “so fresh it was mouthing off to us as we stuck it in the fryer”. By sending us in that direction, we also discovered the Volksbar, which, when we went into it, was nearly empty. But it looked like a pretty chill place to hang out before you ended your night, so I’m sure it was an even better time later in the evening (but Sarah and I were there around 11). The Volksbar also made me the greatest White Russian I have EVER had (except for the ones made by Tom and Roxy in Brighton, but that’s because they’re made with love and cats are usually a part of the experience too). And Berlin’s goodness seemed to rub off on others, because Sarah and I had three roommates (well technically four, but we never heard a word out of the fourth one), two from Canada and one from Germany (who was on his way to Copenhagen, woo!), and they were all really good people.

Paris: Paris is everything you’ve seen in the movies and in books and magazines and all that jazz, and it is beautiful for it and worth the hype, in my opinion. I have to thank Sarah for being such a wonderful and ambitious tour guide. Having been to Paris, she had a very detailed list of what we were going to see, so in the roughly 40 hours we were there we got to see many of the major sites, and it was incredible.You can see all those pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Notre Dame and scenes from the Siene and think that you know what to expect, but, really, the sight is so impressive that it flies in your face and calls for your full attention, and even then you’re awed by it. Sarah described the Notre Dame to me as a spiritual experience, and I really have to agree. The grandiosity of the architecture of these places goes beyond simple asthetics and reaches you on an emotional level. Yet somehow France manages to bring in the modern as well and keep it all in balance. Sarah and I spent a good amount of time in the Centre Pompidou, a modern art museum that was probably the best museum I’ve been to in all of Europe. It had both modern and contemporary art, and the modern art exhibits were incredible. One of the things that particularly impressed me (and really challenged my perception of France as Anglo-phobic) was that many of the pieces had a sign next to them that would not only describe the art, but critique and analyze it as well. And I was REALLY impressed by the thoughtfulness of the critiques that were written in English (I’m sure the ones in French were even better, but, well, I can’t read French). They were very thought-provoking and REALLY brought you into the artwork, which was already astounding in and of itself. I discovered the artist Simon Hantaï there, and was very much drawn to him. His technique of folding the paint into the canvas and letting sheer chance form the final painting really moved me.

And I have to say, I had heard so much about Paris being an unpleasant experience because of the tourists and the Parisians, and I’m really pleased to say that I didn’t really experience any of that. The tourists, while there were many, simply came with the territory of places like the Sacre Coure and the Eiffel Tower. (Oh, and I did get my obligatory photo in front of the Eiffel Tower that every foreigner must get in Paris. Otherwise it doesn’t count) But it felt pretty easy to get away from them, simply by turning down a side street. Cafes got very quiet very quickly, so that when Sarah took me to a really excellent restaurant called Le Comptoir des Saints-Peres, it felt like we were the only Americans in the restaurant. And thanks to the crash course in French given to me by Sarah in the Berlin airport, I was able to speak the minimum level of French that they tell you to speak in France so as to be appreciated by the locals. I feel badly, though, because Sarah, having been in France for the past three months, is really adept at French, and would often converse with our waiters in the native tongue. But because I was silent (or mumbling the few words I know), I think they would catch on that we were Americans, and so often speak in English. But I LOVE to hear the French language spoken, and I hate to think that I missed out on that opportunity. If not for the fact that I wanted to talk to Sarah during our meals, I would have just faked being deaf and dumb and let Sarah and our waiters converse with no translations for the more-visibly out-of-towner. But I did manage to have an entire interaction with the waiter in French at our last meal in Paris, so that should count for something. Here again, HUGE thanks to Sarah. I would have been so horribly lost without her guidance. But let’s touch back on that meal, because I could not mention Paris and not mention the food. Paris was where we were most hedonistic, but good God was it worth it. The food was astounding. Deciding to splurge on our last night in Paris, Sarah and I had a foray through French cuisine that was frankly a work of art. Good red wine, escargot, macaroni a la Provencal and fondont au chocolate for Sarah, roast duck and mashed potatoes with arugula salad and a trio of mini creme brulees for myself… France deserves all the praise it receives.

Cannes: For those of you who read Sarah’s blog, you’ve already heard a great deal about Cannes. And while Sarah can do it much better justice than I, I want to try to sum up how beautiful Cannes is. But first, consider this. You’ve been in Copenhagen for about two and a half months, going through the city’s winter. You have about seven or eight hours of sunshine, and it’s often very cold and windy. And while it gets nicer as you go through central and western Europe, you suddenly find yourself in a place that has a beach, with people out sunbathing on it. Can you picture my love for this place now? It was the greatest welcome to a city a person could dream of. I wrote earlier about how my boots are some of my closest friends, having been with me for so long and on so much, but I RELISHED the opportunity to place my boots aside and bury my feet in the sand. While Sarah was in class, I took some time to simply sit down on a bench facing the beach and lift my face to the sun, listening to the sounds of the surf. That alone would give me reason to stay in Cannes for a very long time. But it gets even better! Cannes is such a charming city, especially the old town. The streets of the old town get so narrow and winding that the awnings of restaurants on opposite sides of the street touch when they’re extended, so the entire street becomes covered, like some sort of circus tent. I love it. I also had my opportunity to sit outside of a French cafe, eating croissants and drinking cappucino. I was very self-aware of the moment, but I don’t care. I loved it. Since Cannes came at the end of about two weeks of travel for both Sarah and I, we spent a lot of time relaxing. But I think this has as much to do with Cannes as much as our travel fatigue–Cannes just invites you to let things go and close your eyes. Sarah and I welcomed the opportunity for as long as we had it.

And then I parted ways with Sarah for Amsterdam. And I really must thank Sarah for being such a wonderful travel partner through four cities and three countries. All the challenges of travel and the frightening size of the world really didn’t seem so bad when we were tackling them side by side, and the enjoyments of all these sights were multiplied when they were shared.

Amsterdam: First and foremost, I must thank Alanna for being such a wonderful host to me. She met me at the train station, presented me with maps, took me to her dorm, offered me her floor and the contents of her cabinets and refrigerator shelf, showed me the city and showed me the Dutch wonder that is the stroopwaffle: two thin waffles pressed together and held together with sweet syrup. Heavenly.

I really liked Amsterdam–it was extremely charming and picturesque, even in the infamous Red Light District, where the sex shops and coffeeshops (those are the ones that sell marijuana. Cafes sell coffee, as I learned) are criss-crossed by really lovely canals. But more than that, it felt comfortably familiar while still offering me new sights and experiences. Amsterdam and Copenhagen have many similarities in terms of their organization, and, as conversations with Alanna revealed, the two nations that house the cities have their similarities as well. Both are old, small nations, known for trying to get along with others and having generous if eccentric welfare states (they pay for you to go to college in Denmark and the state health insurance in Holland includes a methodone program for heroin addicts. Isn’t welfare fascinating?). They both possess funny languages spoken almost exclusively by their respective citizens, they both are seeing a growing right-wing political movement against immigrants, their people love food and comfort (the Danish concept of hygge, which I touched on earlier in my post about warm places to go in Copenhagen, is actually mirrored by the Dutch concept of gzelig, which I KNOW I didn’t spell correctly). I think the only thing that makes Amsterdam more well known than Copenhagen is the legal weed and hookers. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Interestingly, in the Amsterdam Historical Museum, three fellow tourists mistook me for a model. Not a fashion model (devilishly handsome though I may be), but a model on display, i.e. an exhibit. I was standing in a room about 14th century Amsterdam when one of them approached me. Before the tourist reached me, however, I shifted position, causing her to jump. She then explained to me that she thought I was a model and that she was going to have her picture taken with me. I have no idea what would make her think I was a model. I was standing still, yes, but I was wearing modern clothes while standing in a room with no other models in a room about THIRTEENTH CENTURY DUTCH HISTORY. Maybe the museum wanted a display of people in awesome sweaters? I don’t know. But I wish I had stayed still–I really wonder how I would have reacted to being photographed with two smiling tourists when I was just trying to read about Dutch trading vessels.

Aarhus: Although I like to describe my time on Spring Break as hedonistic, there was a certain “poor-college-kid” mentality adopted by me and my friends in Aarhus that I really enjoyed. Not only did I enjoy it because I AM getting to the end of my money, but it also made for some really good adventures that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. For example, we decided to buy most of our meals in grocery stores while in Aarhus. Now the funny thing is, when you buy in a grocery store, you kind of buy in bulk–you’re almost always getting more than one meal’s worth of food. This makes sense when you’re in a given place for a long period of time. But my friends and I were only in Aarhus for two days. Therefore when each of us bought a 1-kg carton of yogurt (you can drink the yogurt in Denmark, it’s like a smoothie and it’s really good),  we felt it necessary to drink the entire carton in one sitting. That’s 2.2 POUNDS of yogurt. Likewise, when we decided to cook dinner for ourselves, we completely overestimated how much pasta we would need, and so we ended up buying two huge packages of spaghetti, which makes about 7 or 8 pounds of spaghetti. FOR FIVE PEOPLE. Eating that much spaghetti, even spread over two meals (a dinner and a lunch) wasn’t so much an act of eating as much an act of ENDURANCE. It was like climbing a mountain–each of us kept encouraging the others to keep eating so that it wouldn’t go to waste, but it was more like a “C’mon, we’re almost there! Keep going! I can see the bottom of the pot!” mentality. We also understimated the amount of sauce needed for the aforementioned 8 pounds of pasta, so it was a real culinary experience. Good God.

But now, let’s talk about the good parts of Aarhus. I mentioned the hostel ealier, and it really merits further mention. Every part of the hostel was REALLY nice–the kitchen, the lounge, this really great outdoor area, etc.–with the exception of our actual rooms. There, the mattresses were stained, the lockers were broken, chunks of paint were missing from the walls…it was a hell of a place to stay. But we made the best of our living situation, most importantly with ghost fights. When you, the hostel visitors, are in charge of putting the comforters in the duvet covers, it can get pretty frustrating. The best way to express your frustration is to drape the duvet cover over your head, which creates the effect of looking like a ghost. And when two people look like ghosts in a fairly small space, they’re going to collide with each other. This will inevitably start a fight. Ghost fights! They’re the greatest. The best of these came when we were actually taking the sheets off the beds at the end of our stay and Ben quietly says “So, I hear this place is haunted…” Confused, we turn to look at him, only to see him toss the duvet cover over his head and charge at Peter. I laughed so hard that I actually pulled a muscle. It was so worth it though. And the rest of Aarhus that takes place outside of our hostel deserves some mention, because it is a really beautiful town. Alanna Ben and I went wandering one night in Aarhus and kept discovering really cool place after really cool place, marking them down as places to return to in the morning/in the distant future when we come back to Aarhus. The streets were surprisingly alive for a small city, but it was nice to have the company while we went wandering. We also went to the Aros museum, which had a lot of contemporary art that, strangely, didn’t piss me off. A lot of it had to do with art, technology, and the Internet. One exhibit in particular simply took words and phrases being said on the Internet at that very moment and arranged them into different groups on this HUGE wall made up of small television screens. It was completely hypnotic.

A thanks to Ben, Sarah N, Peter, and Alanna for the great times in Aarhus. All these absurd times just wouldn’t have happened without all of us together, and I would have had a tiny fraction of the good time I had without that absurdity.

So, that closes three weeks of my life. It was unlike anything else I’ll probably experience again, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try it again. I loved my time every where I went. I want to go back.

So let’s start planning.