Travel diary: a trip around Europe
October 26th 2006 16:08
England
-- If you visit the Queen, be sure to make a toilet trip to earn your “I took a bog at Buckingham Palace” t-shirt.
-- The National Gallery: One thing you don't get from reproductions of Van Gogh is texture -- the way the sunflowers literally stand out from the canvas.
-- The parliament of Westminster: So large, authoritative, imperial…
-- The British Museum: Just goes to show to what extent England raped the world to bring back treasures to its fake Greco-Roman temple.
-- Stonehenge is more explicable if you realize it took over a thousand years to build. Imagine the patience…
-- Green flat tamed parcelled out land; instead of concreting a place over, you gardenize it.
-- Drinking lead-infused sulphuric water from the "curative" hot-springs of Bath? That's a well-good idea, that.
-- The Tower: At graduation ceremonies, does anyone else find the academic procession amusing? -- a long line of people in funny hats, and coming up behind them a guy with a fucking huge mace, larger than he is. What do you plan on doing with that thing, mate?
-- Said the Yeoman Warder, every year, on Anne Boleyn's birthday, flowers arrive from an unknown source, and this has occurred without fail for the past two hundred years.
-- Londoners are a friendly lot, and a lot more polite, and a lot chattier, than Sydneysiders.
-- It's strange to talk to an English lady in a burqa -- her appearance a barrier, alien, depersonalizing, off-putting, but her voice perhaps broad and cockney, suddenly yielding character and connection. You can communicate after all, understand each other, speak the same nouns, reference the same experiences.
French countryside
-- Isolated farms… Okay, they probably have wireless internet inside, but still it's rather frightening to think how easily the mind may slip into parochialism, how one's world narrows, how you can be trapped inside your community or your head. You can't choose your parents or upbringing, but people should make an active choice of the new parents and upbringing that is their country and their city.
Belgium
-- Ridiculous amounts of chocolate (not all Belgian-made) -- in supermarket aisles, in shops on shops.
-- We have most of it here.
-- Sexual openness, in shops and on TV.
Luxembourg
-- First taste of having to pay to pee -- generally 50 Euro cents. This is the norm in Europe, though apparently the French system, at least for public toilets without a "Madame Piss" watching over you, is to have doors that automatically spring open after a certain period.
-- One reason queues form is that everyone's too cheap-ass to pay: they just wait around, and they stick a foot in the door when someone else emerges.
Switzerland
-- Buildings with mediaeval-type paintings on them, ancient cobbled streets with modern shops (each tiny but expensive, with elegant window displays). Cuckoo clocks and army knives. Yodelling and fondue. Precision and impatient rudeness.
-- Five thousand feet above Lucerne, so high that you quickly run out of breath: at the time, I thought that this was the closest to experiencing "kami" that I'd come, looking over mountains, or actually inside the blueish ice of the glacier.
-- Asked a Japanese girl if she felt it, and she didn’t know what I was talking about -- "kirei", "pretty", was all she had.
-- Thought I felt "kami" again when looking over the green of the Tyrolian Alps -- ridiculously lush countryside -- houses like islands amid seas of vineyards, castles perched on cliff edges. But I suppose most countryside disappears from the memory; it's just filler, just in between; it really is the destinations, the main tourist locations, that stick.
Liechtenstein
-- It may be small, but it has its own domain address -- ".li".
-- Oddly cartoonish, tribal statues outside the church.
Innsbruck
-- A roof made of gold. Must have been impressive once.
Venice
-- Masks, glass, and lace.
-- Pigeonshit, flooded, sinking city inhabited by tourists and pickpockets, a shrine to Casanova, where every shop sells exactly the same items. What would St Mark have thought?
-- Lions all over the roofs and monuments.
-- Good city planners (in London, in Venice) are careful to let their columns be framed by sky.
-- Pigeons carpeting the square. You can buy packs of birdseed for one euro, and before you've distributed the contents, they're all over you, perching on your shoulders, crapping on your arms. Said someone or other, "In Venice, pigeons walk and lions fly."
-- Love the way gondoliers shout before they go round corners, and the way they kick off the sides of buildings as they row.
-- So much gelato and pizza.
Assisi
-- Surrounding countryside: castles and houses blended with, grown into, the Godather-II landscape.
-- So many religious artefact shops.
-- A basilica like the sideshow tattooed man, covered by murals.
-- Strange sensation, on looking at St Francis' rough rock tomb, with the sound of the air conditioner humming.
Rome
-- Shocking hugeness of the Renaissance statues -- I just wasn't prepared for their size and number -- casually littered around the city.
-- Everywhere you dig, you will uncover ruins.
-- Huge, impressive architecture; one begins to appreciate the extent of what was lost as Rome declined.
-- For the record, Chinese food is not necessarily better in China -- London might have the best Chinese and Indian -- but perhaps Italian food is nowhere better than in Italy.
-- Italians always sound like they're arguing.
-- Learnt from a Roman: If drunk girls on a tour bus are blowing kisses to you, you should coolly examine the available candidates, and the appropriate response is then to point to your breast -- maybe one of the girls will oblige.
-- Stores without price tags, which raise their asking prices immediately when a group turns up, or they hear a tour guide recommending a book.
-- Following your tour guide’s flag like a legion behind a Roman standard…
-- I think people will soon be unastonished by the length of European history. Give it a couple thousand years. From a sufficient distance differences collapse.
-- Ridiculous repetition of allegedly popular songs… Arrivederci Roma, Godfather theme…
Vatican
-- Michelangelo is more understandable when you see his contemporaries -- there was a culture of high standards, and there was a gradual accumulation of sculpture knowledge.
-- After a point, very quickly reached, another palatial room is another palatial room, another mosaiced ceiling is just another mosaiced ceiling, more marble and more gold is more marble and gold, another masterpiece is another masterpiece, etc. It all looks the same, and none of it leaves an impression on you.
-- At the end of the toilet queue you find two urinals. Dunno how many litres of piss go down them every day. One could calculate, assuming that people feel the urge to pee at 250mL, and assuming a 10,000-visitor average.
-- Camera flashes, despite all the "no flash" signs, despite the guards constantly warning you. Camera flashes in the Sistine chapel itself. They should just ban photography.
-- No one's dared censor the Sistine ceiling. So in the heart of Christendom, past galleries of fig-leafed and castrated statues, there are sexual, fleshy, nude women.
-- All guarded by pantalooned clowns, striped court jesters, with submachine guns (do I detect a theme here?).
-- When Jesus kicked the moneylenders out of the temple, they set up the gift shop outside.
Roman hills
-- In Frascati, the young people gather in the square, just to hang out.
-- Small statues of women with three breasts: two for milk, and one for Frascati wine.
-- In Europe in general, chairs and tables are set up pointing away from the shops, so that customers can sit and people-watch.
-- There's often three different prices: one for takeaway, one for standing, one for sitting.
Florence
-- A church, Santa Croce, with a chapel in which the Medici went to pray, with effigies to great Florentines (though with few of their corpses) -- Machiavelli, Dante, Galileo…
-- Some churches are a lot more impressive outside than in, and the Duomo is one of these.
-- The baptistery next door to the Duomo has a series of false peaks: just when you think you've reached the top, you haven't. You laugh at people on your way down when you see them making the same mistake.
-- If the Vatican didn't desensitize you, in Florence you'll certainly find Michelangelo’s David unimpressive -- the head and hands ridiculously oversized, even if intentionally so -- set in a square full of statues, each sculptor with the skills to make stone flow like flesh. I don't understand the David's renown.
-- The Vatican, Assisi, the Duomo -- monuments to the tragic grandeur of men’s folly -- 27 years on this single bronze door -- how much human effort went into the smallest details, and how many the details; how much care, attention, labour, love, how much taxing of the poor, how much conquest, spilt blood, went into this opulence. But this level of grandeur, this concentration of energy, is only possible through folly. You need canals to force waters of dedication. The history of achievement could be mapped through the glorious succession of idols.
-- Face it: if you go to Florence, you’re going to be pickpocketed.
Pisa
-- White marble square surrounded by African markets. The tour guide tells us to leave everything on the bus, especially our passports.
-- Everywhere we go in Italy, we are mobbed by Africans (and only seldom by gypsies). And they carry the same blue garbage bags: they set up shop when tourists arrive, and they vanish at the sign of police.
-- It's illegal to buy from them.
Italian and French Riviera
-- How long can you stare at a breathtaking landscape, or how many times can you stare at breathtaking landscapes, before you start breathing again?
-- More thoughts on "kami"… I woke up S and I pointed. I pointed out the window, but I wasn’t really pointing at anything in particular. There was a focus -- the mouth of the river opening to the sea -- but in a sense I meant everything, not just the rivermouth, and not just its setting. And I wasn’t saying “Look” but “Feel” -- feel what it’s like to be here, feel awed, remember this.
-- And in feeling awed, does one feel connected, does one feel oneself in the picture, do you have both landscape and your response to landscape?
-- How many times, on this trip, do you simply say "Sublime", "Beautiful", "So scenic", "How gorgeous", "How breathtaking" -- at a loss to say anything more particular. Perhaps these are nearest English equivalents to the Japanese.
-- I'm finding this difficult to describe, but my tour highlight was, near Monte Carlo, the impossible way the sea blurred into the sky so that you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Misty, luminous blues, both sparkling and tranquil, with gradual gradations of shade, and in their centre a band of white almost blinding to look at. A sensation of immensity and infinity and possibility. What I can't express is the unnatural naturalness, and the precise combination and purity of colour; and I doubt this could be caught on film.
Nice
-- All the rooftops of the buildings are colour-coordinated.
-- I can't believe my high school French actually works, and people really do speak exactly like that.
Monte Carlo
-- The town has a Disneylike feel -- fairytale and crass buildings, with a strange combination of different styles.
-- In the famous casino, luxurious rather than glitzy, you find snooty girls behind the ticket counter, pointedly brusque, asking for your passport for entry, and giving you a personalised ticket. You find toilet seats that self-disinfected when you flush, old male dealers at the tables, and cordons to separate the players from the watchers.
-- In general, there are many types of toilet in Europe -- with bidets and without, usually with wimpy flushing, often low, sometimes water-filled, often automatic.
Lyon
-- Dark-skinned prostitutes dressed in a sort of Lyonnese prostitute uniform standing around outside white vans (don't come a knocking if the van's a rocking).
Beaune
-- A hospital-museum, with torture instruments displayed in clinical glass cases.
Paris
-- Traffic jams. Large sex district. High crime rate. Beautiful square where the most important of the 40,000 beheadings took place.
-- Hemingway couldn't stand the Eiffel Tower -- crass metal pile -- and therefore ate nightly at its restaurant. "It's the only place in Paris from which I can't see it."
-- Dog shit picked up in the streets and trampled all over the Louvre, dog shit covered by perfume.
-- Obligatory Dan Brown references and refutations. Another enormous and therefore forgettable collection.
-- Tour guide doesn't see what's so special about Mona Lisa either.
-- Startling sculpture of the winged victory of Samothrace. Surprising that someone in ancient Greece could carve stone into fabric that flaps against the wind.
-- Venus de Milo is moved from her normal position. "But, darling, if you feel like stripping off and striking up a pose here, go ahead."
-- About 500 euros a month to rent a 15 metres square apartment in the Latin Quarter.
-- Casual nudity of the cabaret dancers. Deliberately see-through clothing, or openly bouncing breasts. Girls who can kick behind their heads.
-- In Versailles, the gardens are endless and immaculate, the king had red velvet covering his walls in summer, exchanged for green velvet in winter, and royalty were without privacy: the queen gave birth for a crowd of spectators.
-- If you stand outside Sacre Coeur in Montmarte, you can see all of Paris, and there isn't much green (whereas London has been careful to preserve or create green patches).
-- Fine painters at Montmarte, sitting in the square, painting on request.
-- After you’ve been to St Paul's, Assisi, to St Mark’s, the Duomo in Florence, the Vatican, Pisa, Notre Dame, you can’t look at most churches the same way -- you can’t help but look down at them…
-- The rose window in Notre Dame: another time-still moment…
-- Outside Notre Dame is point zero, the place from which distance to the city is measured. Said the tour guide: if you stand here, so the story goes, you will return to Paris.
Money and fat
-- You save for half a year to go, you spend half a year paying off your credit card afterwards, and hundreds of hours working off the fat. For one month of pleasure.
-- If you go to Europe, you will get fat. If you do not get fat, then you'll have missed out, if you haven't travelled Europe with your stomach.
-- Tour guides getting cuts out of us as they drag us from one set of inflated prices to another.
-- Tourists are cynical. But their cynicism doesn't help them. Yes, everyone is out to milk you of every cent you've got, but, no, there's nothing you can do about it. Europe is one massive thief, and it's had centuries of practice.
-- Going on tour -- if you realized how much things really cost (the meals you buy, the entry to museums), you’d be shocked by how much extra you’re paying. But if you don’t buy the optional tours, then you won’t get through the queues.
And afterwards
-- Goodbye European virginity. I’ll never again feel what it’s like to pull into Calais for the first time, to see the grey cliffs of Dover for the first time, never come to those iconic places without expectations and wondering what I’ll get and doubtful I’ll be affected and surprised when I am. I'll never look on all these places as alien, and with the eyes of an alien.
-- When you travel, you do not relax into your head so much. You're more awake to your environment. And on your return, you do notice new things. Because you're more awake. Or because you've forgotten (or haven't yet slipped into) your old manner of seeing things according to particular aspects and in particular ways. Or because you simply have new eyes, just as students trained in botany have new eyes for flowers -- experience might genuinely have changed you.
-- It's funny that one difference ever-present on return is the sizes of things -- of spaces from this to that, amount of space in the shower, size of each stair on the staircase, sizes of handles, beds. Then there's little readjustments: you have to push this hard to open this door, to turn this tap. And barrenness is surprising -- white wall, for instance -- because in your memory, there are no blanks.
-- I suppose the looks of things surprise, the colours, the symbolism of the way they jut out at you or retreat, the symbolism of crowdedness or openness, the buttons they push in your head; and you simultaneously come to them as a lover and as though to another hotel room, which you must learn to operate and interact with; how unfamiliar and strangely familiar is the familiar, and how unreal; it's true that you don't look at things in the same ways, see the same aspects…
-- One goes through a ritual on one's return, where you wash Europe from your skin, shampoo it from your hair, brush it from your teeth, cough it up, spit it out, blow it out, piss and shit it out. But perhaps Europe is a virus that never leaves you, that's already assimilated.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles Vincent van Gogh, British Museum, Tower of London, Luxembourg, Lucerne, Alphorn, Mount Titlis, South Tyrol, Liechtenstein, Goldenes Dachl, Venice, St Mark's Square, Basilica of San Francesco, Trevi Fountain, Baths of Caracalla, Arch of Titus, Sistine Chapel, Swiss Guards, Vatican Museum, Florence, Duomo, Pisa, Monte Carlo, Nice, Beaune, Palace of Versailles, Notre Dame de Paris, Winged Victory of Samothrace.
-- If you visit the Queen, be sure to make a toilet trip to earn your “I took a bog at Buckingham Palace” t-shirt.
Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers
-- The parliament of Westminster: So large, authoritative, imperial…
-- The British Museum: Just goes to show to what extent England raped the world to bring back treasures to its fake Greco-Roman temple.
-- Stonehenge is more explicable if you realize it took over a thousand years to build. Imagine the patience…
-- Green flat tamed parcelled out land; instead of concreting a place over, you gardenize it.
British Museum
-- The Tower: At graduation ceremonies, does anyone else find the academic procession amusing? -- a long line of people in funny hats, and coming up behind them a guy with a fucking huge mace, larger than he is. What do you plan on doing with that thing, mate?
Tower of London
-- Londoners are a friendly lot, and a lot more polite, and a lot chattier, than Sydneysiders.
-- It's strange to talk to an English lady in a burqa -- her appearance a barrier, alien, depersonalizing, off-putting, but her voice perhaps broad and cockney, suddenly yielding character and connection. You can communicate after all, understand each other, speak the same nouns, reference the same experiences.
French countryside
-- Isolated farms… Okay, they probably have wireless internet inside, but still it's rather frightening to think how easily the mind may slip into parochialism, how one's world narrows, how you can be trapped inside your community or your head. You can't choose your parents or upbringing, but people should make an active choice of the new parents and upbringing that is their country and their city.
Belgium
-- Ridiculous amounts of chocolate (not all Belgian-made) -- in supermarket aisles, in shops on shops.
-- We have most of it here.
-- Sexual openness, in shops and on TV.
Luxembourg City
-- First taste of having to pay to pee -- generally 50 Euro cents. This is the norm in Europe, though apparently the French system, at least for public toilets without a "Madame Piss" watching over you, is to have doors that automatically spring open after a certain period.
-- One reason queues form is that everyone's too cheap-ass to pay: they just wait around, and they stick a foot in the door when someone else emerges.
Switzerland
-- Buildings with mediaeval-type paintings on them, ancient cobbled streets with modern shops (each tiny but expensive, with elegant window displays). Cuckoo clocks and army knives. Yodelling and fondue. Precision and impatient rudeness.
Mount Titlis -- but the image in no way does the real thing justice
-- Asked a Japanese girl if she felt it, and she didn’t know what I was talking about -- "kirei", "pretty", was all she had.
South Tyrol
Liechtenstein
-- It may be small, but it has its own domain address -- ".li".
-- Oddly cartoonish, tribal statues outside the church.
Castle above Vaduz in Liechtenstein
Innsbruck
-- A roof made of gold. Must have been impressive once.
The Goldenes Dachl at Innsbruck
Venice
Piazza San Marco
-- Pigeonshit, flooded, sinking city inhabited by tourists and pickpockets, a shrine to Casanova, where every shop sells exactly the same items. What would St Mark have thought?
-- Lions all over the roofs and monuments.
-- Good city planners (in London, in Venice) are careful to let their columns be framed by sky.
A Venetian canal
-- Love the way gondoliers shout before they go round corners, and the way they kick off the sides of buildings as they row.
-- So much gelato and pizza.
Assisi
Basilica of St Francis at Assisi
-- So many religious artefact shops.
-- A basilica like the sideshow tattooed man, covered by murals.
-- Strange sensation, on looking at St Francis' rough rock tomb, with the sound of the air conditioner humming.
Rome
-- Shocking hugeness of the Renaissance statues -- I just wasn't prepared for their size and number -- casually littered around the city.
Baths of Caracalla
-- Huge, impressive architecture; one begins to appreciate the extent of what was lost as Rome declined.
-- For the record, Chinese food is not necessarily better in China -- London might have the best Chinese and Indian -- but perhaps Italian food is nowhere better than in Italy.
-- Italians always sound like they're arguing.
-- Learnt from a Roman: If drunk girls on a tour bus are blowing kisses to you, you should coolly examine the available candidates, and the appropriate response is then to point to your breast -- maybe one of the girls will oblige.
Trevi Fountain
-- Following your tour guide’s flag like a legion behind a Roman standard…
-- I think people will soon be unastonished by the length of European history. Give it a couple thousand years. From a sufficient distance differences collapse.
-- Ridiculous repetition of allegedly popular songs… Arrivederci Roma, Godfather theme…
Vatican
-- Michelangelo is more understandable when you see his contemporaries -- there was a culture of high standards, and there was a gradual accumulation of sculpture knowledge.
The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museum
-- At the end of the toilet queue you find two urinals. Dunno how many litres of piss go down them every day. One could calculate, assuming that people feel the urge to pee at 250mL, and assuming a 10,000-visitor average.
Sistine Chapel
-- No one's dared censor the Sistine ceiling. So in the heart of Christendom, past galleries of fig-leafed and castrated statues, there are sexual, fleshy, nude women.
-- All guarded by pantalooned clowns, striped court jesters, with submachine guns (do I detect a theme here?).
-- When Jesus kicked the moneylenders out of the temple, they set up the gift shop outside.
Swiss Guards
Roman hills
-- In Frascati, the young people gather in the square, just to hang out.
-- Small statues of women with three breasts: two for milk, and one for Frascati wine.
-- In Europe in general, chairs and tables are set up pointing away from the shops, so that customers can sit and people-watch.
-- There's often three different prices: one for takeaway, one for standing, one for sitting.
Florence
-- A church, Santa Croce, with a chapel in which the Medici went to pray, with effigies to great Florentines (though with few of their corpses) -- Machiavelli, Dante, Galileo…
-- Some churches are a lot more impressive outside than in, and the Duomo is one of these.
The Duomo in Florence
-- If the Vatican didn't desensitize you, in Florence you'll certainly find Michelangelo’s David unimpressive -- the head and hands ridiculously oversized, even if intentionally so -- set in a square full of statues, each sculptor with the skills to make stone flow like flesh. I don't understand the David's renown.
-- The Vatican, Assisi, the Duomo -- monuments to the tragic grandeur of men’s folly -- 27 years on this single bronze door -- how much human effort went into the smallest details, and how many the details; how much care, attention, labour, love, how much taxing of the poor, how much conquest, spilt blood, went into this opulence. But this level of grandeur, this concentration of energy, is only possible through folly. You need canals to force waters of dedication. The history of achievement could be mapped through the glorious succession of idols.
-- Face it: if you go to Florence, you’re going to be pickpocketed.
Pisa
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
-- Everywhere we go in Italy, we are mobbed by Africans (and only seldom by gypsies). And they carry the same blue garbage bags: they set up shop when tourists arrive, and they vanish at the sign of police.
-- It's illegal to buy from them.
Italian and French Riviera
-- How long can you stare at a breathtaking landscape, or how many times can you stare at breathtaking landscapes, before you start breathing again?
-- More thoughts on "kami"… I woke up S and I pointed. I pointed out the window, but I wasn’t really pointing at anything in particular. There was a focus -- the mouth of the river opening to the sea -- but in a sense I meant everything, not just the rivermouth, and not just its setting. And I wasn’t saying “Look” but “Feel” -- feel what it’s like to be here, feel awed, remember this.
-- And in feeling awed, does one feel connected, does one feel oneself in the picture, do you have both landscape and your response to landscape?
-- How many times, on this trip, do you simply say "Sublime", "Beautiful", "So scenic", "How gorgeous", "How breathtaking" -- at a loss to say anything more particular. Perhaps these are nearest English equivalents to the Japanese.
-- I'm finding this difficult to describe, but my tour highlight was, near Monte Carlo, the impossible way the sea blurred into the sky so that you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Misty, luminous blues, both sparkling and tranquil, with gradual gradations of shade, and in their centre a band of white almost blinding to look at. A sensation of immensity and infinity and possibility. What I can't express is the unnatural naturalness, and the precise combination and purity of colour; and I doubt this could be caught on film.
Gives you some sense of the blue of the sea at Nice
Nice
-- All the rooftops of the buildings are colour-coordinated.
-- I can't believe my high school French actually works, and people really do speak exactly like that.
Monte Carlo
-- The town has a Disneylike feel -- fairytale and crass buildings, with a strange combination of different styles.
The casino of Monte Carlo
-- In general, there are many types of toilet in Europe -- with bidets and without, usually with wimpy flushing, often low, sometimes water-filled, often automatic.
Lyon
-- Dark-skinned prostitutes dressed in a sort of Lyonnese prostitute uniform standing around outside white vans (don't come a knocking if the van's a rocking).
Roofs of the Hotel-Dieu
-- A hospital-museum, with torture instruments displayed in clinical glass cases.
Paris
-- Traffic jams. Large sex district. High crime rate. Beautiful square where the most important of the 40,000 beheadings took place.
-- Hemingway couldn't stand the Eiffel Tower -- crass metal pile -- and therefore ate nightly at its restaurant. "It's the only place in Paris from which I can't see it."
-- Dog shit picked up in the streets and trampled all over the Louvre, dog shit covered by perfume.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace -- but the image doesn't give you the hugeness of the statue
-- Tour guide doesn't see what's so special about Mona Lisa either.
-- Startling sculpture of the winged victory of Samothrace. Surprising that someone in ancient Greece could carve stone into fabric that flaps against the wind.
-- Venus de Milo is moved from her normal position. "But, darling, if you feel like stripping off and striking up a pose here, go ahead."
-- About 500 euros a month to rent a 15 metres square apartment in the Latin Quarter.
-- Casual nudity of the cabaret dancers. Deliberately see-through clothing, or openly bouncing breasts. Girls who can kick behind their heads.
-- In Versailles, the gardens are endless and immaculate, the king had red velvet covering his walls in summer, exchanged for green velvet in winter, and royalty were without privacy: the queen gave birth for a crowd of spectators.
The gardens of Versailles
-- If you stand outside Sacre Coeur in Montmarte, you can see all of Paris, and there isn't much green (whereas London has been careful to preserve or create green patches).
-- Fine painters at Montmarte, sitting in the square, painting on request.
-- After you’ve been to St Paul's, Assisi, to St Mark’s, the Duomo in Florence, the Vatican, Pisa, Notre Dame, you can’t look at most churches the same way -- you can’t help but look down at them…
-- The rose window in Notre Dame: another time-still moment…
-- Outside Notre Dame is point zero, the place from which distance to the city is measured. Said the tour guide: if you stand here, so the story goes, you will return to Paris.
The North Rose Window of Notre Dame
Money and fat
-- You save for half a year to go, you spend half a year paying off your credit card afterwards, and hundreds of hours working off the fat. For one month of pleasure.
-- If you go to Europe, you will get fat. If you do not get fat, then you'll have missed out, if you haven't travelled Europe with your stomach.
-- Tour guides getting cuts out of us as they drag us from one set of inflated prices to another.
-- Tourists are cynical. But their cynicism doesn't help them. Yes, everyone is out to milk you of every cent you've got, but, no, there's nothing you can do about it. Europe is one massive thief, and it's had centuries of practice.
-- Going on tour -- if you realized how much things really cost (the meals you buy, the entry to museums), you’d be shocked by how much extra you’re paying. But if you don’t buy the optional tours, then you won’t get through the queues.
And afterwards
-- Goodbye European virginity. I’ll never again feel what it’s like to pull into Calais for the first time, to see the grey cliffs of Dover for the first time, never come to those iconic places without expectations and wondering what I’ll get and doubtful I’ll be affected and surprised when I am. I'll never look on all these places as alien, and with the eyes of an alien.
-- When you travel, you do not relax into your head so much. You're more awake to your environment. And on your return, you do notice new things. Because you're more awake. Or because you've forgotten (or haven't yet slipped into) your old manner of seeing things according to particular aspects and in particular ways. Or because you simply have new eyes, just as students trained in botany have new eyes for flowers -- experience might genuinely have changed you.
-- It's funny that one difference ever-present on return is the sizes of things -- of spaces from this to that, amount of space in the shower, size of each stair on the staircase, sizes of handles, beds. Then there's little readjustments: you have to push this hard to open this door, to turn this tap. And barrenness is surprising -- white wall, for instance -- because in your memory, there are no blanks.
-- I suppose the looks of things surprise, the colours, the symbolism of the way they jut out at you or retreat, the symbolism of crowdedness or openness, the buttons they push in your head; and you simultaneously come to them as a lover and as though to another hotel room, which you must learn to operate and interact with; how unfamiliar and strangely familiar is the familiar, and how unreal; it's true that you don't look at things in the same ways, see the same aspects…
-- One goes through a ritual on one's return, where you wash Europe from your skin, shampoo it from your hair, brush it from your teeth, cough it up, spit it out, blow it out, piss and shit it out. But perhaps Europe is a virus that never leaves you, that's already assimilated.
***
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles Vincent van Gogh, British Museum, Tower of London, Luxembourg, Lucerne, Alphorn, Mount Titlis, South Tyrol, Liechtenstein, Goldenes Dachl, Venice, St Mark's Square, Basilica of San Francesco, Trevi Fountain, Baths of Caracalla, Arch of Titus, Sistine Chapel, Swiss Guards, Vatican Museum, Florence, Duomo, Pisa, Monte Carlo, Nice, Beaune, Palace of Versailles, Notre Dame de Paris, Winged Victory of Samothrace.
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When I finally get my butt over there I hope to keep a travel diary too. I think it's a great thing to do and it sounds like you had an awesome time!
Comment by Damo
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Comment by Adrian
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Dear Sisi, it was the first time I was ever in Europe, so it was a bit of an eye-opener. I don't know if I mentioned, but I liked it enough to want to move to London in a couple of years.
I saw a couple of people on the bus with black hardcover notepads labelled "Travel diary". I don't know if many of them got written in.
Me, I brought a travel computer.
There's a sort of futility to it, though... I didn't take many pictures, because I knew that I'd never go back to look at the album. And I don't know if I'll ever come back to read this diary...
Dear Damo, most of that actually came from memory. The travel logs tended to be more moment-by-moment reports of consciousness, along the lines of, "I really need to pee right now. Oh God do I need to pee."
More the sort of the thing in the previous travel entries, I guess.
Dear Cibby, I was in Europe this morning. I'm in a strip club right now.
Comment by Carnie
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog