Paris: Le Battement de Cœur et Les Rêves - Part 2

Antoine's flat was in a neighborhood known as Oberkampf in the 11th arrondissement.  Most travel guidebooks this year will tell you that Oberkampf is an up-and-coming neighborhood near Place de la République that features good restaurants and bars that have a slightly grungy, contra-tourist, "authentic Parisienne" atmosphere.  

My personal first impression of the neighborhood differed significantly and was dominated by a string of video game themed stores, one after another.  This block in Oberkampf will forever be remembered by me as the Paris Video Game District.  The directions Antoine gave us to find his apartment said to turn at the big, yellow "games" sign.  The Games District block was dominated by big, yellow "games" signs which rendered these instructions much less useful than we'd originally assumed.  After a few missed turns that led us deep into Video Game Land, I was more or less unsurprised when I saw that the view from the front door of Antoine's building was a life-size image of Link from the Legend of Zelda wielding a sword.  The block would have been heaven for a twelve year old boy.

When we arrived at chez Antoine, we were given keys from a girl named Julie who was dutifully waiting on the stoop.  Julie didn't say much to us besides a polite "Bonsoir!"  We never actually met Antoine and we never saw Julie again.

We decided to stay in a flat in Paris because we were going to be there an entire week and it turned out to not be much more expensive than a hostel.  It certainly felt far more glamorous to have our own private residence.  The flat itself was a cozy, top floor studio with a back room that someone (who I would venture is Antoine's main squeeze) was using as a small workroom for fashion design projects. It was filled with scraps of materials, old portfolios and box of g-strings.  

The kitchen was small and cluttered; its wooden floor sloping severely.  The angle of the floor was so pronounced that the doors of the banquet hung wide open, causing night time bathroom runs to be alarmingly hazardous to our travel-weary knees.  I tried to keep them closed with rubber bands, but when the rubber bands both snapped I grudgingly accepted that the doors were simply happier swinging freely.  (Liberté.)  For a French kitchen it was shockingly under-supplied.  It seemed to be more or less unused except for the preparation of a number of fancy-smelling herbal teas which were clustered by the sink and microwave.  The kitchen was stocked with a box of potatoes and onions, but I suspected that they had been largely forgotten about; the potatoes had sprouted a labyrinth of offshoots before reaching a nearly liquified state of decomposition by the time I found them.  

The main room served as both a common room and a bedroom; neither area was separated from the other by anything but logical space.  There was an old leather chair in a state of such disrepair that we were sure the bottom would drop out of it at any moment.  It was alarmingly comfortable.  The bed was a full size mattress laying on the floor in the far corner of the room.  There were two windows, both of which opened widely to the chilly September air of Paris.  On the wall was taped a set of Polaroid photographs of other photographs of models posing in that avant-garde, high-fashion sort of way.  I amused myself by taking photos of the photos of photos while marveling at the meta levels of recreation like staring into a mirror with another mirror at your back, trying your damnedest to see what infinity looks like.

Paris: Le Battement de Cœur et Les Rêves - Part 1

It's only fair to begin writing about Paris with a confession.  I loved this city before I ever arrived and all my thoughts about it now are the hopelessly skewed thoughts of a young lover still too infatuated with a distant, lovely mistress (which he has had scant few real conversations with) to really consider any of the realistic downfalls she almost certainly has.

It's not even just Paris.  It's France.  It's the French language.  I am enamored by it all.  The mere sound of French flowing into my ears is enough to make my heart start throbbing; make my lungs feel strained from the breaths I'm holding back.

I suspect this all started really, really early in my life.  When I was a kid, we didn't have television at home.  Or, more accurately, we did have it, but not in the way that most people had it.  The technology that was used to bring the television signals into our home was a large, white satellite dish that stood prominently in our yard.  In order to set this satellite dish you had to physically go out and crank the thing up and down, degree by degree.  Our version of "channels" mostly consisted of a set of lines hand cut into the crank shaft to mark specific orientations that we had empirically shown to receive viewable signals.  The only real way to find those orientations was to go outside, crank the dish up one or two turns, walk back inside, check all the knobs on the television set (which predated remote controls) and if you found anything at all, mark the shaft.  It took hundreds and hundreds of cranks to span the entire range the satellite could cover.

The difficulties did not end there.  Once the satellite was cranked to a position where it was actually receiving some sort of signal there was still a question of whether or not you could actually view it.  Often the signals were encrypted or "scrambled," a phenomenon known to anyone who's tried in vain to catch a nipple slip through the static of a hotel television screen when you haven't paid for the adult channels.  You could buy a dubiously legal box called a "de-scrambler" that could turn those channels into real television.  We did not have a de-scrambler. 

Finally, if you were able to find a channel that appeared clear and un-scrambled, there was the problem of scheduling.  The satellite we had was generally picking up the broadcasts from a parent station to local affiliates.  As a normal television consumer you may not realize how this whole process works.  What typically happens (or at least, how it happened when I was a kid) is that the parent station, Fox, for example, broadcasts a whole week's (or month's or whatever) lineup of a particular show or particular time slot to their local affiliates (like Fox 5 DC or KPTM Fox 45: Omaha) who record the shows and replay them later according to their own programming schedule.  (I'm sure this happens digitally now, but I assume the process is comparable.)  What that really meant to us is that if we were going to watch a show, we typically were presented with five or ten episodes of that show at a time.  When episodes of a show weren't being broadcast, all that you saw were those rainbow colored bars on the screen accompanied by a very steady, persistent and annoyingly loud ring tone.  This "no signal" screen was not entertaining for very long.  Our solution to the scheduling problem was to act like our own local affiliate station, figure out when the broadcasts would happen by trial and error, record all the shows onto a VHS cassette when we got it right and watch the episodes later at our leisure.  For all the difficulty involved, we really could fast forward through all the commercials even in the 1980's, so I guess our unconventional system wasn't entirely without merits.  The original Tivo, I suppose.

Because of all the difficulties and complexities involved, usually our television could only show one channel at a time, and it would show that channel for months or years until we lost the signal.  Luckily, when I was very small, the one channel we got played age-appropriate shows for me like Sesame Street.  The problem was that the broadcaster was CBC, i.e. the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The feed we were receiving was aimed at affiliates in Québec, which leads me to the moral of this whole discussion about my television.  I watched Sesame Street like any other American kid, but when I watched it, it was bi-lingual, half in French, half in English.  I could count to ten in French before Kindergarten.  "Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, seis, sept, huit, neuf, dix."

When I hear French now, on some level it feels comfortable, safe, nostalgic.  It was integrated into my childhood mind irreversibly.  Lost, waiting to be awakened.

Amsterdam: The Unrequested Baptism in Highly Undervalued Shoes

Is today the day?  Yes, today should be the day, it feels right, it's noon and I'm not sick.  But it's cloudy.  It's been raining again and the park will be muddy and wet.  It's probably going to rain more.  But where else should we go?  There's no place better.

It's better with chocolate, but save some for later.  You never know when your life might demand more chocolate.

I can't believe the trees have golden leaves that are falling on the ground.  It's my favorite time of the year but it's too soon, it doesn't make sense that it's happening already.  But I like my sweater, covered in little golden leaves.

The dogs in this park are the muddiest, happiest dogs in the entire world.  They run up and down the paths by the old Dutch ladies on the park benches chasing tennis balls with their muddy paws and muddy bellies.  A man hits his tennis balls with a racket, far out into the marsh.  His muddy dog loyally jumps into the water.

This park bench is a good place to call our home, beneath a tree with little golden leaves on a path with little muddy dogs and in front of the plaza with the red flowers and the hedges shaped like a page from a Geometry textbook.  My best math subject in high school.

The Turk tells us that he is a famous salesman who could make the rain stop.  I watch the wave of rain come across the water behind him as he boasts.  I'm sorry, I don't really want your Heineken today.  The Turk is sad that he isn't making money today because of the rain.  No one wants to drink Heineken in the rain, apparently.  He has a cigarette (on us) as consolation, sits for a minute quietly and disappears.

A little muddy dog runs past.

The sun finds it's way around the clouds which roll past pulsing and throbbing through little golden leaves.  The cloud separates and spirals around itself like a page from a Geometry textbook.  I can't look at the tree, only its happy little golden leaves that frame the symphony clouds.

In that one brain of mine is all the memories I have ever created.

My parents are discussing whether or not I am ready to go to school at four years old.  I'm technically ready but they're not sure if I'm social enough.  I am coloring at the foot of their bed.  No, he'll be fine.  I'm scared to go.

I have this computer game.  You conquer the world in it.  You should come over to my place and we'll stay up all night until we beat it.  We'll buy the soda with the extra caffeine to make sure we don't sleep.

I am in my apartment that I pay for with my own money wishing that I could sleep.

I talk all night on the phone during the summer to the guys from school.  Then we talk on the phone all night to our girlfriends.  Then I fall asleep on the phone with my girlfriend.  Then I whisper to my girlfriend on the phone I fall asleep with and learn why she breathes so heavily on the receiver at night.  Then I fall asleep after phone sex with my girlfriend.  Then I fall asleep after real sex with my girlfriend.  Then there are other girlfriends.  Now there are none.  Now there is a park bench and little golden leaves.

Do you know how to tell if berries are poisonous?  First you take one berry and squeeze the juice out on the back of your hand.  Then you wait an hour.  If your hand hasn't broken out in hives by then, then your throat probably won't either.  Then you take one berry and squeeze just a little of its juice onto your tooth.  Slide your tongue over your ambiguously poisoned tooth and wait an hour.  If you aren't sick after an hour you can continue.  Take one berry and eat it.  Wait an hour.  If you're still alive you can try to eat five berries.  Wait an hour.  Et cetera.  It's a lot of work for berries that probably aren't even very good berries, but it could make the difference between being alive and being dead.

When I met Brandy with a "Y" I knew who she was but had never spoken to her.  I had never intentionally been in the same room with her.  "I'm sorry, do you mind if we stop here first, it's our friend Brandy (with a 'Y') her father passed away."  When I met Brandy with a "Y" she was standing in a parking lot crying.  Her father had slid his tongue around the barrel of a rifle like a poison berry he hadn't sampled first.  Brandy with a "Y" hugged me.  "It means so much to me that you came."

Brandy with a "Y" surely doesn't think about me now.  I met her on an unplanned side trip, founded on a friend's apology on the way to somewhere like a church meeting for a God I'd already started making mocking jokes about.  I flip through the Bible looking for pages on sex and slavery and bears that eat children.

I think about Brandy with a "Y" all the time.  But not her, really.  I don't know her.  I know that parking lot.  I know feeling ashamed that her father's shortened life didn't impact me at all, that I didn't know her before that moment.  That I was really there just for me (and barely even for me) and I'd never considered her emotional state for even a second before that parking lot.  I know hugging back and meaning it and kissing her soft blonde hair and saying that everything was going to be okay and wanting to be the one who loved her instead of the abusive boyfriend who didn't even show up that night.

The first time Brandi with an "I" fell asleep on me it was on a bus.  She listened to my "Guster" album.  She smelled like "Ralph" by Ralph Lauren, which I was later informed was a perfume for sluts by girls who said "sluts" extra scornfully.  Slutty girls that fall asleep on buses with boys who pet their hair and still never really kiss them except maybe once in the back room for a second that honestly doesn't even count.

Now, I prefer a much more refined Chanel.  But sometimes Ralph makes me smile.  I can smell it from across the room, inhaling deeply.

There are only maybe five spots on the "cool" bus for freshmen, we have to make sure we get on that bus.  We got on that bus.  I had my first kiss.  I wonder if anyone ever tried to get on my bus to have their first kiss or if there even was a cool bus after the cool bus crowd graduated high school and went away.

The deep deep heavy breathing on the other end of the phone line.  The extra long phone line I bought so that I could lay in bed while I listened to raspy breaths.  The extra long phone line that was too long really, coiled copper intercepting the phone calls of strangers and we played the game where we were very very very quiet, trying to listen to whatever they may be saying to each other and wondering if they could hear our raspy breaths and orgasms.

The odd, odd feeling of having grown up with so many people that are so far away that I feel like I grew right past them.  And they stayed where they were, staring at me like some curious anomaly.  "New York?  Isn't that place really fast?"

Catherine, saying to me in a non-ironic fashion:  We are the fucking elite.  There are rules for other people that don't know how to get around them.  That doesn't apply to us.  We are above it.

The sun is out as the clouds dance in their kaleidoscope geometry book page behind the little golden leaves.

We are above it.  I empathized far too much with Raskolnikov when I first read those pages.  I was him.  I can get away with it, I am that strong and you can't stop me.  I can do whatever I want and I will.

The clouds are suddenly darker and rushing and squeezing and swirling and the birds are audibly upset.  There are no muddy dogs with muddy dog bellies.

And I stare into the eyes of whatever God is. If he has eyes I don't know but I stared past little golden leaves into them and said I can do whatever I want to do and I spit into his eyes whether they existed or not.  I spit and I laughed and I cried and I spit and I laughed.

And the rain came down.  It didn't hesitate, the Sky opened up and It is coming and it came and it will come and it fell on us like the hand of a God with spit in his eye that doesn't exist.  My jeans are soaked and my sweater (that I like) is soaked and my socks have become a hilarious parody of what socks should be and I could step straight in to the canals of this city and be drier than I am right now as God himself humbles us on our park bench that we call home.  The two spoiled children who are (kind of) right when they say such bastardly, over-confident things but they can't stop the rain any better than a sad Turk Heineken salesman can and the lightning flashes above us as we get up to leave.

Where can we go?  Nowhere.  We don't actually know where we are.  There is no shelter here, but the joggers are still jogging in circles so we will just drippedly walk through the rain.

Over there is a covered stage with a man with a beard that says to me that we probably don't have the same religious background and he says something incomprehensible to me in Dutch.  I say, "I think it may rain."  And he throws his head and his beard back and laughs and shakes his head.

A man in a tiny car opens his door beside the dry stage and plays strange music.  American top 40's with the same cheesy station identifiers that we know back home, wherever the fuck that is.  I don't know the address but I know the sound of the station identifiers.

There is a girl with a bike with a plastic bag on her dry seat and an umbrella and she is the most Dutch thing I've seen all day.  But her smile is French and it radiates the kind of cuteness and shy passion that makes me say that your face is the only thing I can see when I close my eyes at night and ma cherie ma cherie your name is all I hear when people are speaking and the gods themselves lament for ever having made eyes as perfect as yours because there will never be a pair of eyes again that can compare and I will buy you pearls and watch you put on your make-up and kiss your neck in the mirror and fill your womb with our children that we will love wholly, even if imperfectly as our skin withers but our hands with our withering fingers can still never be happy unless they are intertwined like our legs were after our first night of passion together, ma cherie, ma cherie.

We eat chocolate.

The rain slows down and the man with the tiny car drives away and the man with the beard says that we have no more music.  I say, "No.  Music is kaput."  The man with the beard throws his head and his beard back and laughs and shakes his head.

The lights in the park blink on in a wave and it's time to go, sloshing in my sad wet cold shoes.

I bought the shoes three days before I left the country.  They weren't the color that I wanted (and I care about color.)  They were a half size too small, which was noticeable.  They told me that they could order me the shoes I wanted and they'd be ready in two weeks.  I don't have two weeks.  I bought the shoes in the O.K. color that were a little too small.  I paid forty dollars and change.

And, I suppose to prove a point my second choice shoes said to me that they'd samba my feet that can't samba in rhythm with the steps of a Brasilian and that they would carry me to the top of a mountain that is higher than the clouds are and throw me right off the face of it and that they would carry me across beaches and up stairs and stairs to monasteries and up towers painted with demons who eat sinners like me for breakfast.

I took off my clothes and stared into a mirror and realized that I'd lost some of the baby fat that I could never lose before.  My skin is red and rashed from too much walking.  I turned on the shower and the water was warm.  So much water falling from the sky today, but this was not water of wrath, this was like my mother soothing my wounds.

In Denmark they have a word, "hygge," that roughly translates to a sort of familiar coziness - the kind of coziness that brings joy to winter days that spend eighteen hours each in the dark.  I want to fall into the arms of a beautiful woman who isn't a stranger right now.  I want for just one second her to tell me that everything is going to be O.K. in a parking lot maybe and maybe also wake up beside her while she's still sleeping and make french toast - because I can do it quite well with brioche and Grand Marnier - and because she'd love it and I love giving her the things that she loves and then I could go back to being the pillar, the stone that I am - that I can be, the infuriating stone, unfinished Michelangelo marble with unpolished hammerstrokes emerging from my sleeves like trophies or scars, the stone that spits at God's eyes that don't exist until the sky opens up and erodes it into dust.

I want to know what people will think when I say that this girl is the most Dutch thing I've seen all day.  Or how it rains and I say, oh this is just Holland.  That street has the good croissants.  As if I should know where the good croissants are in Amsterdam.  I know a great place to have your hair cut the next time you're in Stockholm and there's this little tent in Switzerland that is the only place with affordable beer in town, they'll even play your own music if you make a playlist on your iPod.  Really just having to have olives with my beer and saying things like how French that is while I shrug or that babies at home aren't as cute as babies in Scandanavia.  Scoffing at dried pasta.  The path through this alley that is a street but doesn't even look like a street is the shortcut home.  Whatever home is now.

Argentina has beaten defending world champions Spain 4 - 1.

I apologize to my shoes.

I close my eyes and listen to heavy breaths and the distant conversations of strangers and static.

København

My nostrils were filled with the sweetly burning aroma of whiskey as the man with long, blonde hair fell into me next to the jukebox.  He was Danish and he was happily singing along with a bar full of his countrymen to "Sweet Home Alabama."  I caught him and stood him back up.  His friends told me that they had been to a whiskey festival earlier in the day and that he had drank far too much.  It was apparent as he dropped three cigarettes on the floor, one after another, trying his best to light them.  His friends went on to tell me that he doesn't normally get this drunk, that he used to be an officer in the army and that now his job was to walk the streets trying to save the world.  They told me that because of what he does for the country if he wants to spend a night completely pissed then they'd be here to take care of him and make sure he gets home in one piece.  He interupted the conversation and tried to convince everyone to migrate to a bar where we could order "One very well served beer."  I would later find out that this somehow involved an aging stripper and her aging vagina and a fairly steep price for a single beer, if you ask me.  Three other Danish men independently tried to get me to go to the same place before the night was over.

As the evening wore on, the blonde haired hero sobered up just enough to tell me more about what he did for a living.  His job was to walk the streets of Copenhagen looking for homeless people; anyone on the streets.  He would go to them and talk to them to make sure that they were ok and that they knew that the Danish government would happily step in and take care of them, give them a home, healthcare.  That no one in this city had to sleep on the streets."But some of them, they just want to sit on the streets anyway.  You know?  They've chosen it, to be anarchists or whatever.  Just remember, when you see them, they're choosing to be there.  Don't feel sorry for them.  Don't give them any money."

"So, what do you do when you talk to them about their options and they don't want to accept any help?"

"Nothing.  You can't help anyone that doesn't want help.  I just let them sit there."

Nicholas was staying in my hostel.  He was German but he had been living in Australia for over a year.  He spoke German with a strange Aussie accent.  It was impossible to tell where he was actually from when he spoke.  He told us heaps of stories about his wild adventures in Australia.  If even half of what he told us was true, then Nicholas is easily one of the craziest people I've ever met.

"I mean, I never thought it would work but my friend just kept telling me to do it, 'They'll never know, man!  They won't know anything about Belgium, just go for it."

Nicholas had been pretending to be the Prince of Belgium.  He was cocky enough that people actually believed him, or, believed him enough to get him in heaps of trouble.

"I have been seeing this girl, and you know, I am thinking she is the one for me.  We will probably get married.  But, she is, you know, she is not here now, right?  So I am going to go talk to that girl that's dancing over there."

I was horrified and thoroughly amused.

Standing outside the bar an ex-employee of IBM was groaning over the homeless man across the street.

"It makes me so angry to see that.  I really want to apologize for it.  I don't want you to get the wrong impression of our city.  There are no homeless people in Copenhagen. These people just choose to live this way."

I walked along rivers and canals and glossy sex toy boutiques in the main shopping district and an amusement park called Tivoli with rides that induce as much g-force as a space shuttle launch and a small community that had declared its independence from the rest of the world decades ago.  Aging hippies still live there selling pot on the streets.  It's called Fristaden Christiania and it's apparently easier to just let it exist than to try and clean it up.  There seems to be an understanding with the residents of the area and the police that as long as the hard drugs stay off the street, they can do what they like.  The neighborhood self regulates the drug trade as a survival mechanism.  Photography here was strictly discouraged.

Copenhagen reminded me immensely of Brooklyn.  I could see myself living here in the endless sun of summer and the endless nights of winter.  Maybe.  Probably.  I don't know.  It is a wonderful place; a dirty city full of beautiful people.  Sharp, jagged edges wrapped with foam and silk sheets.

Stockholm: A Frigid New Beginning

Our comfortless Ryan Air flight landed in a muddy field which we mistook from the air as a lumber yard or a saw mill or something else necessitating cutting down trees for industry.  We arrived in an absolutely silent, minuscule warehouse that someone had named "a terminal" as a backwoods, Scandinavian inside joke.  If you told me right now that someone had to be ceremoniously woken up and called in to turn on the lights in that building before we got off of our plane, I would believe every word.

There was a sign that said in very apologetic Swedish that due to some remodeling of the terminal there would be modest (read: significant) delays in the arrival of our checked luggage via the adorably small carousel conveyor belt.  Blonde, tall people sat patiently.  Tan Italians scoffed.

I sat and waited while D paced the floor impatiently, counting the seconds until his next cigarette.  An alarm on a door sounded for five minutes.  I sat with the blondes and D paced.  We heard the grinding and vrooming of machinery as one carousel began to turn.  Ten bags arrived.  They weren't ours.  I moved in order to sit on the other side of the room; D paced.  Waiting.  We waited a long time.

The transition from Rome to Stockholm was severe.  Stockholm was cold.  Rainy.  Our hilariously naïve, short sleeved assumptions made while packing our virgin backpacks were immediately apparent.  Still, despite being the only two people in the discernible country of Sweden walking the streets in t-shirts, no one stared at us.  But, we knew - as anyone would have to know - that the locals saw us and were perplexed and concerned and at least slightly bemused at our obvious lack of preparation.  Stockholm was cold and we were so underdressed that we might as well have been skipping between the damp island bridges fully nude.  My nose sniffled in disapproval.

Stockholm served as an effective halfway point of our trip.  Temporally, it was a little bit late, but the shocking change of scenery from Southern Europe to Scandinavia was intentionally instituted by us (in one of our rare moments of actual planning) as a way to articulate and punctuate the median of our travels.  It worked, as far as I was concerned.

Walking through Stockholm I couldn't help but look like an advertisement for H&M.  It was the cheapest place to buy warm clothes.  It was a local establishment there.  It made us fit in warmly without destroying our finances.  What I mean to say is that H&M saved our very frigid asses, more or less.  I wrapped myself in a black hooded sweatshirt, a white jumper with horizontal blue pinstripes and a black and blue scarf tied firmly around my goose bumped neck.

Like we discovered when we arrived in Switzerland, the jump from Southern European hedonism to Northern European efficiency took hold of our decision making almost immediately.  Upon arrival we realized that two things were absolutely necessary:

First, if we waited any longer to do laundry our socks were going to become self-aware, sentient beings and possibly stage a coup d'état one night while we slept.

Second, if we waited any longer to get haircuts then we'd be waking up every morning in a room full of strangers with the same sort of maniacal hair one may expect to see on the floor of a psychiatric ward or on the head of a deranged serial killer - either image being resoundingly negative for the perception of said strangers we were waking beside.  I could imagine their horrified faces.

Actually, if I am going to be honest, we'd already manifested the reality of the second scenario.  Even I was frightened by the visage of myself in the morning mirror.

Luckily, as far as I could tell, every third establishment in the city of Stockholm was required to be occupied by a hair stylist.  We chose one at random.  The man who cut my hair was Lebanese and was infinitely curious to hear an American's opinion on all things political.

"How is Barack Obama doing?" he'd ask.  

Everyone in Europe seems to ask us this.

"He has a tough job.  We think he's doing alright, considering.  Other people think not so much."

This is the message we have delivered to Europe for over a month now.  Noncommittal semi-optimism.

The hair stylist told us that we should go to Lebanon.  We would find great wives right away, no problem, he said as he clapped his hands.

He told us that he thought Swedish girls were boring.  He had dated a Latina for years.

The haircut was good.  I had a white outline of my previous hair length from the dark olive tan the Italian skin had tattooed my head with.

And it kept on raining in Sweden.

Sidetrack:
Somewhere, I can't remember where, we were told that we would not have any good food in Scandinavia.  This was not our experience.

Our good food started when we found a restaurant that specialized in game which had existed since the 1700's.  We ate reindeer and game meatballs with a side of linden berries.  The food was incredible.  The main problem was that there were two more items on the menu that we felt that we just needed to have:  bacon-wrapped pheasant and a filet of wild boar.  We came back the next night and ate the remainder of the menu.  This was the first restaurant on the entire trip we actually came back to for seconds.  I think that says something.  (And that something may be that Santa Claus had better be careful the next time he lands on my roof.)  Reindeer is amazing.

Where was I?

The first night in Stockholm we went to an Irish pub to have a few beers and a snack.  There were two Swedish girls playing blues songs on guitar, souls bared powerfully.  They played many classic American songs and eventually told the crowd that they were going to get even more American and play some country music.  They requested yells of "Yee Haws" to the delight of the Swedish crowd.  They started playing Johnny Cash.

Someone in the crowd begged them to play "Ring of Fire."  The Swedish girls laughed and dug around in a bag until they produced a kazoo.  It took them about five minutes to start the song after attempting to play the trumpet part on the kazoo for the first time.  The "trumpet player" was laughing buzzed little laughs through the kazoo until she nearly cried; until we all nearly cried.

They moved into an Irish folk song:

I am going, I am going
To wherever the wind is blowing
I am going, I am going
To where the whiskey is flowing

My life resonated in perfect thirds with the chorus.

D had been given a list of places we must see in Stockholm from a Swedish bartender he met in London.  So, the next morning we set off to find a cafe she had recommended to us where we absolutely had to have coffee.  She asked us to tell the owner "Hi!" for her.  As we walked to the cafe, we realized that it was very far from the center of the city.  The sky darkened as we walked and we were not surprised at all when the rain started falling on our uncovered heads.  When we finally reached the cafe they laughed at us for being so wet and made us both double espressos which were indeed quite fantastic.  The owner was serving us so we asked him if he knew the bartender who had sent us there.  There was some deliberation between him and his colleagues in Swedish before they realized who we were referring to.  "OH.  THAT girl.  She is crazy."  There was more gossipy sounding Swedish thrown about the room.  "No one really knew where she was.  She just picked up and left one day."  The looks on their faces said that now they understood how two Americans had found this tiny cafe on the outskirts of Stockholm.  They were done conversing with us.

But, the important thing to note here is that if you were to meet the bartender in question, you'd probably think she had both her feet on the ground.  And, she does, more or less.  But in Sweden - she was crazy.  And, she was, more or less.  When your whole society has done as much as it can to create a societal utopia, it does seem crazy to the locals when people leave it.

That night we decided to visit some bars in the city and try to meet some Swedes.  It wasn't going very well because - although they almost all speak perfect English - the Swedes are very shy and it's difficult to really break into their social circles (or at least that's how it seemed to us.)  However, just as we were about to give up on the night, two Swedish girls approached us and beckoned us over to their table.  Now, if you judge me as shallow or superficial for the upcoming description, then so be it.  I am just describing what I saw.  These two girls were not attractive.  There was a blonde and a brunette and both were clinically overweight and done up in exaggerated makeup as if they were tarting up for a state fair pageant.  They wore expressions of general unhappiness as they tried to mention casually that they both had boyfriends.  D and I stared at each other perplexedly.  However, despite the highly unappealing nature of our new company, we surmised that it was possible that making ANY Swedish friends could be the key to unlocking the previously closed Swedish social circles.  So, with this hypothesis we shared drinks, clinking our glasses to a chorus of "Skál" and eventually moved on with them to another bar.  These girls were the first Swedes we found that didn't speak very good English.  Still, they spoke enough, so D and I conversed with each other in Spanish to make sure that we were both on the same page and O.K. with the whole situation, inching away as the girls tried to get friendlier, despite the earlier boyfriend conversations.

Swedish rules:  There are a lot of rules to be followed in Sweden.  Blonde, big girl was about to show us the first one.  Rule #1 is that a bar may carelessly turn you away if you are even a little bit drunk upon arrival.

Blonde, big girl (BBG), stumbled into the bar's doorway, looks the bouncer in the eye and, in English, says, "Hi, Honey-Bunny."

The bouncer replied, also in English, "Somebody's drunk."  Then they bickered a bit in Swedish.  After a few moments of this he tells her that she has to go and the conversation returns to English.

BBG:  "You're an asshole."

And the bouncer, sitting as cooly as possible, didn't flinch, didn't move a muscle that wasn't involved in the pleasant smile that he formed as he said, "Yeah, what do I care?  You are just a dumb, fat, blonde bitch."

D and I looked at each other stunned as the girls were jettisoned unceremoniously from the bar.  Stunned at the audacity of this guy to say what everyone else was already kind of thinking and to say it so casually.  Stunned at how nonchalant the whole exchange was.

We left the girls and decided to start heading back towards our hostel.  But, we'd only had about three drinks at this point and when we saw another bar on the walk home, we figured we might as well have one more to cap off the night.  Unfortunately, as we walked up to the door, we also learned BBG's lesson.  I am not sure what we did to draw attention to ourselves, but as we showed our ID's the bouncer immediately says to us, "Have you been drinking?"  We were asked kindly to leave despite being seriously, pretty sober.  D was suddenly extremely angry; he did not like being told that couldn't do something under those circumstances.  That it felt like injustice somehow.  I said, "Whatever." and we went to bed.

On our last day we went on a very long walk through a park that was large enough that it might as well have just been called a forest.  It was nice to be back in nature for a little while; as much as I love them, cities can be so draining when they aren't supplemented with something natural.  However, our exploration of this park was cut short when, deep down a wooded path, we heard horns and sirens coming from the waterfront that sounded an awful lot like a storm warning.  At the same time, there were rolling black clouds overhead that seemed to provide correlating evidence to support that theory.  I felt a raindrop and we started walking briskly, trying to find a good way out of the forest-park.

We emerged from the trees as the rain actually began to stop.  The storm had largely blown overhead without much ado.  We found ourselves walking through a street fair designed for rich yacht owners.  We ooed and ahhed as we realized that we could actually buy saunas to sit on our docks or on the decks of our (non-existent) boats.  There were vendors hawking compasses, water proof coats and telescopes.

At the end of this fair there was a museum that we entered.  The museum was built around a ship that had sunk in the Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage.  Its construction had been hurried due to pressure from the king and its dimensions were poorly designed.  The ship was built too top heavy and there was not enough ballast to hold it upright.  When the first gust of wind caught the sails, it capsized, killing many onboard.  The ship was recovered hundreds of years later and now sits in a museum, slowly decomposing as the visitors snap photos.  Ironically, the ship was only really preserved because the Stockholm harbor had been so polluted that there was almost no oxygen in the water and therefore very few bacteria to digest the ill-fated vessel.  It's rescue will eventually be its ultimate and final demise.

For our last night we had one final recommendation from the crazy Swedish bartender that had sent us out for coffee.  Again, the walk to this place was extremely long.  No tourist would have ever found this place on their own.  It was deep in the city, onto the campus of a university and tucked away behind a nondescript fence and under a bridge.  It was a club, sheltered by the bridge overhead, but otherwise outdoors, equipped with enough couches to make full living room sets and peppered with the occasional ping-pong table.  There was a girl on the turntables that was extremely terrible at fading albums in and out of each other.  Otherwise, the club was more or less empty, despite it being a Friday night.

The bartender lamented this fact with us, blaming it on cold weather and a very big Sweden football game that night.  She said some other things as well, but I was largely distracted by how cute she was (in the pinch her cheeks kind of way); standing there with a stuffed hammerhead shark emerging from her coat.  A few more people showed up later on, but it was a very quiet night.  We got a free round of drinks that I am pretty sure was intended to be a sort of apology.

Back in the hostel I re-packed my bags and got ready for Copenhagen.

Rome: The Gilded

In Rome we stayed a few blocks away from Vatican City. Despite not having a single Catholic bone or tissue or neural path in my entire body, it still only made sense to make a pilgrimage to St. Peter's as soon as we arrived. Its size and grandeur are such that other cathedrals around the world must all be forced to have an unshakable inferiority complex. It bears the kind of earth shattering significance that makes a city like Geneva create the most conspicuous phallic symbol the Swiss could ever imagine. And yet, in spite of a church whose mere facade made me say, "Holy shit," the first thing I saw were two beautiful and hopelessly, inextricably bored girls sitting by the gift shop door completely immersed in their phones, texting. In my mind, they were probably messaging each other: "Church iz so lame. Wut R U doin 2nite?"

To each their own.

As we walked back to our hostel we passed a cafe by the river that we would continue to pass each night on our way back home. Every night there was a new musical act that one might describe as the worst musical act they'd ever heard in their entire life. D described it as his own personal hell, a life aboard a cruise ship that is supposed to be fun but actually just sucks out your soul into overpriced and over-watered drinks; sharing the company of overweight souls who have given up just a little on life's possibilities and are ready to settle for calling the worst musical act of all time a really nice evening on their only vacation this decade.

Sundays have traditionally (We've been traveling long enough to have traditions) been our lazy days. We woke up this Sunday intending to continue that trend. D had said the night before that we should really drag ourselves out of bed and go see the Sunday mass at St. Peter's, but, as if I was back in my adolescence in the States, I slept straight through the church services. Luckily, as I mentioned, I am not Catholic, so I didn't feel guilty about it at all. Sometimes it's incredibly relieving to not need to be forgiven.

We decided through our afternoon yawns that a nice, relaxing Sunday activity would be to take a bike ride on the Appian Way - the old, old, very old road that used to be the main way in and out of Rome.

Unfortunately, we grossly underestimated the length of the walk to actually reach said road. And, yes, we could have taken public transportation there, but we have generally avoided it as much as possible - not because it is too complicated or logistically worthless, rather that we see so much more of a city if we make ourselves walk everywhere. Subway stations all basically look the same, after all.

It took us well over an hour to reach the mouth of the Appian Way. By the time we arrived we'd already drank both of our bottles of water and I was legitimately concerned about heat exhaustion. My dark gray shirt was sweat soaked and stained with white streaks from all the salt pouring out of my body. I'm surprised it didn't crystalize.

We hired our bikes with only an hour and forty-five minutes before the bike shop closed. They told us that we'd have to hurry if we were going to see all the sights along the way. I forced my rapidly liquifying legs to pedal hard up the first hill.

The landscape was dusty and barren, the sun was exceptionally bright and it washed out any colors that hadn't already been masked by the layers of summer dust. The road was paved with ancient stones that our bikes struggled to climb over and weave around. At some points the terrain was so severe that we had to get off the road and ride through the dusty ditches along the side. (You should make note of how many times I had to use the word "dusty" in that paragraph. There's no better word to describe it.)

The Appian Way is lined with ruins, monolithic piles of stones that no longer even resemble whatever they once were. There are catacombs and ancient bath houses - where only they mosaic floors and the outlines of walls remain.

Pushing ourselves and our bikes, gear boxes grinding, we made our way far enough to see planes landing at the airport outside of Rome. Later, after returning our bikes, we checked a map and realized we'd biked all the way past the last of the tourist destinations along the road and still made it back with time to spare before our bikes were due. Apparently we are pretty swift bikers and now I honestly wouldn't mind owning a bike again when I finally get home. I haven't had one since I was a kid.

On the return trip, beside one of the crumbling monoliths was a pair of lipstick red stiletto heels casually discarded beside the road. There was no one in sight, but the shoes were not there when we'd passed by fifteen minutes earlier and they had yet to be covered by the dust that blew relentlessly in the wind. Someone had kicked them off minutes earlier and scampered away, barefoot.

My Sunday was amazing, but whoever owned those shoes, I think, was having an even better one. Rome pulsed with passion, a thumping heart after a hard run or a first dance or a first kiss.

We found a neighborhood that night that we immediately recognized as the place where we would live if we ever actually moved our lives to Rome. It's called Trastevere and it is edgy and hip and full of plazas where young twenty-somethings seek out the kind of passion that leaves stilettos beside dusty ruins. We found a bar at one of these plazas that served shockingly good (and strong) micro-brew beers for a very reasonable price. We came here almost every night after we discovered it. One night we sat and watched a fire dancer in the square, swirling her burning ropes around that plaza as if to say that not even the night in Rome could stop the burning heat. She writhed on the ground as the fire spun in tight circles over her head.

This entry would be worthless if I didn't take a minute to talk about some of the food we had in Rome. The real highlight for me came from a place called Restaurante il Boom, which we chose because any place that names themselves "The Boom" is just kind of cool and because they had photos of 1950's pin up girls on their doorway. We were told by the owner that it's a rather new place, open only a few months, which I suppose makes us Roman trendsetters. They brought us free champagne and bruschetta and I swear they didn't pay us anything at all to rave about their food online. We had a plate of pasta carbonara that brought creamy, eggy little tears to my eyes and veal with a paste of rosemary and panchetta that was to die for. But, the highlight - and I don't say this lightly, because, honestly, I'm not a big fan of dessert at all - was their tiramisu. It was like being hit in your taste buds with the H-Bomb of tiramisu. It redefined for me what tiramisu should actually be. The shape, the presentation, the texture, the sweetness, the richness. It was flawless and inspired. D and I almost always share plates of food when we eat out (so as to maximize how much food we get to experience) but after this meal, we began to refer to having "a tiramisu moment," which is to imply a sudden feeling of ownership and entitlement that leads one to no longer want to share.

The pizza we had in Rome was also divinely inspired. In fact, it was some of the best pizza of my life, if not the best. But, what really struck me (while our mouths were in the middle of pizza induced orgasms) was the couple beside us. They were married. The husband had long, dark, flowing Italianesque hair and a face of casual stubble. The wife had brilliant green eyes and a figure that was an elegant balance between slim and womanly, garbed in a shirt that read "I left my heart in Chicago." They jokingly harassed the man trying to sell roses to the patrons, they were good friends with the servers at this incredibly hip restaurant and they never stopped staring at each other like they were freshly in love; making each other laugh all night. It made me feel very warm and optimistic to bask in the glow of their obvious love. At home, with a few exceptions, I feel like all I ever hear is, "Well, life is over now that I'm getting married," or, "Oh, I'm headed back to the old ball and chain." But, no. That's ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that way at all. It shouldn't. The "Good Life" doesn't have to end; with the right person it only grows and when two people like that make it grow it's so powerful that it even knocks over the travelers sitting at the table beside them who can't understand a word of their passing conversation.

When the scalding sun came up again we went to the Vatican museum. Their collection of timeless masterpieces is seemingly infinite (although often still radiating the faint glow of being stolen or corrupted.) The museum itself is a timeless masterpiece, every inch of wall is a work of art. There were rooms covered in frescoes by Raphael and an endless hallway of painted maps of the Roman empire at different times in history (something I assume served as the original Google Maps.) There were mummies and crowns and treasures piled on top of other treasures. I saw the corner of a door so ornately carved that it had been roped off from tourists so they couldn't pet the sculpted cherubs on their way past. There was even a contemporary art section with unseen works by Van Gogh (amongst others) that the tour groups just stomped casually past. I overhead an English girl passing by a towering abstract expressionist canvas painted bright red say, "I hate art like this." A statement from a person so selfishly involved in their own limited perception of the world that they couldn't even take the time to think that there might actually be some deep value in the piece that was chosen amongst thousands of others to be presented in the Vatican (which only houses treasures in the first place) as the last work of art you see before you step foot into the Sistine Chapel itself. "I hate art like this."

Oh, and by the way, I am not even going to try and write about the Sistine Chapel. I can't do it justice and the photos I took that I was technically forbidden to take can't do it justice either so I'm just going to not say anything about it except go there. See it before you die. This belongs on your bucket list. You have no idea.

Also, if you look very carefully near one of the upper corners in the Sistine Chapel you can vaguely see the outline of a secret Pope escape passage. And, my opinion is that anything that involves such important secret passageways is intrinsically worth your time, masterpiece or not.

Sistine Chapel, holy fuck. I am glad we didn't see these things before we saw the other churches in the other cities. They would have just seemed silly.

We walked to the Trivi Fountain and I watched tourists tossing in coins over their shoulders, hoping for the luck they'd need to return to Rome one day. We climbed a hill to a park that reminded me so much of Barcelona's Park Guell, except that this park didn't seem to be melting around us. Although, I must mention that much of the architecture that we saw in Rome was so old that the surviving stones actually resembled Gaudi's work that we'd seen in Spain. It was endlessly interesting to see the things that he probably saw at some point that inspired his designs and his dreams. The park atop the hill in Rome was filled with couples intensely making out, leaving their stilettos beside dusty ruins, I assume.

We went to the ruins of the Roman forum and wandered around them lost and confused. The forum ruins are interesting because no particular fallen column or broken wall seems all that interesting. But, when you find yourself able to step back and take in the entire, massive site it is imposing and tremendous and still filled with the echoes of the academics and scholars and philosophers and senators that once paced those dusty, broken floors.

We walked through the Colosseum in much the same fashion, our perception undulating like a sine wave between a feeling that this stadium is pretty much just like any stadium you've ever seen today (minus the flat screens) and a knowledge that the stone you just ran your hand across has been covered with layers and layers and layers of blood from warriors and criminals and the innocent and wild animals and that it was filled with the whole city of Rome and its emperors that once stared down on those bloody stones with cheers bellowing from their throats.

I loved Rome. Deeply. The heat, the passion, the love, the exhaustion, the hypocrisy, the lines of souvenir shops that seem to ruin the monuments that were technically already ruined, the dust and the sun and fallen columns and a shirt that read, "I left my heart in Chicago."

But this was the end of Southern Europe for us. We worked our way to the airport, where you could just make out the winding curves of the Appian Way we had biked a few days earlier and checked our bags into the comfortless belly of a Ryan Air jet and headed for Stockholm.