The long lost last city!

Sorry this has taken so long to write- I’ve been drowning in final papers and tests!

City 4- Lucerne (or Luzern, c’est comme vous voulez, and it’s in Switzerland for all those who were wondering)

Let me just preface this by saying that none of the people I went to Switzerland with were truly excited about going. They were just humoring me.

The train ride from Rome to Lucerne was the longest train ride that one could possibly take in daylight, and the morale in the group was considerably low; until we got into Switzerland…

The scenery immediately changed from cute Italian towns and vast vineyards to the most magnificent mountain range ever imaginable. Boring scenery shots? I’ve got plenty. How could I not try to capture the Swiss Alps in a pocket-sized camera for me to take out and look at whenever I wanted? Sorry mom, I know you like “people shots”, but the Swiss Alps count as people.

Our train pulled into the Lucerne station in the evening. We followed the crowd of people to the front of the station and headed out into the crisp Swiss air. It was breathtaking. The town overlooks a beautiful lake that reflects the snow-capped Alps at all times of the day. We looked at our map and traversed the darling bridge rolling out from the front of the train station to the center of town. It ended up being a pretty tiny town, so it wasn’t hard to find our hotel.

When we walked into our hotel (note how I say hotel and NOT hostel for the first time), we were met by two smiling women in black lady-suits behind a sleek black desk with free gummy-treats on the counter. The floor was dark-stained wood. There was an oil-rubbed bronze spiral staircase to our right, and a comfy looking sitting area to our left. The smell of really expensive but delicious Japanese cuisine was wafting in from the restaurant connected to the hotel. Sarah immediately said, “Are you serious? Is this for real?” Yes, it was for real, it wasn’t a dream. Your welcome, travel buddies.


Our room was on the second floor. We went over to the elevator expecting it to be a normal doll-sized European elevator, but we were greeted by a giant/unnecessarily-large American style lift. We got to our floor and found our room at the end of the hallway. Eagerly opening the door, we found a very large room with king-sized bunk beds. You could fully stand under the top bunk. It was unreal. There were down comforters and pillows. I almost started to tear up.

We got ourselves situated and headed out for some dinner. Regardless of the fact that Switzerland has its own form of currency that is currently weaker than the US dollar, everything was ridiculously expensive. We walked around looking at menus outside of cute restaurants and decided we didn’t want to spend $20 on dinner the first night. We ended up a McDonald’s. I’m not proud of that, but I’m a college student, I just can’t deny it sometimes.

The next day we walked around the town, got some wonderful pastries for breakers, and just sat with our feet dangling over the lake for hours. Really, that’s all we did for the day we were there, we sat and stared at the beauty around us. It was the best way to wind down the backpacking trip across four countries.


We packed our bags and headed back to Paris the next morning with Swiss goodies in hand for the long train ride home. Even though it was a marvelous town with a magnificent view (and all other superlatives that one can think of), we were pretty glad to be going back to Paris and its pollution. We didn’t realize it until then, but Paris has really become a place we call home, way more than I personally thought it would.

Bella Roma!

City 3 : Rome




In one of my classes here in Paris we take our magnifying glasses to the timeline of the city to see how it has changed as a result of historical events and advancements in literature and the visual arts. We look at poems and extracts of books written about the city by people in the city, by people looking at the city, or by people looking at people who are looking at the city. We look at pictures and maps to see how people viewed it historically and how they artistically interpreted it, and how the city itself has changed the way people looked at things. We look at architectural projects and monuments that have changed the city as well, both geographically, historically, and theoretically. I couldn’t help but look at Rome in this critical way when we first got there. One thing in particular is present due to the way that Americans and other tourists look at it: pizza stands are EVERYWHERE.

This is my historical estimation; it seemes like cartoons, postcards, word-of-mouth, and whatever other type of publicity available were spread around by tourists, claiming that Italians are pizza-eaters. Then when other tourists went to Rome, they said to the nice Italians “hey, I heard you guys eat pizza, pasta, and gelato. Where can I get some of this delicious pizza, pasta, and gelato?” Rome responded to the high demand of pizza-craving tourists by setting up a pizza/pasta/gelato restaurant in every other storefront. Now they supply lots of pizza and pasta for this demanding crowd, but the quality has suffered. To attract more business, since their products weren’t doing the trick anymore, they decided to stick creepy men outside the entrances of their restaurants, to hail down anyone wearing sneakers and a Bears hat, for an “authentic Italian meal”. When these tourists kindly say ‘no’ to the solicitors since they’re on their way to the countless amounts of ruins, churches, obelisks, and brightly lit government buildings that Rome has to offer, the friendly men at the restaurant doors suddenly turn into real-life gargoyles/sexual predators, spitting vulgar phrases in thick accents at the suddenly scared and speedy tourists.

A man was handing out flyers for his restaurant when I walked past and I smiled, waved my hand, and said, “no, grazie”. He proceeded to call me a “sexy lesbian” until I was out of earshot.

I was walking with my three friends past a bunch of restaurants with a bunch of those men when one guy spotted me, pointed, and said really loud, “I WANT THE RED ONE!” We walked faster. I also wore my hat for the next two days.


Other than those strange and offensive encounters, Rome was beautiful. The Spanish Steps were gorgeous, the Vatican was breathtaking, and the random ruins at night looked amazing with lights shining on them. We got really lucky, it was Rome’s birthday the week we went, so all the museums were free and there were free music events all over the city at random platforms in different piazzas. Ben Harper was playing for free on one of the nights we were there, but we chose to do karaoke instead… we all decided that we were better singers than him, and would rather listen to ourselves in some obscure Irish bar with tons of other American tourists singing along to “Sweet Caroline” instead. I will never forget that song, never, but I want to. Oh, how I want to.










There was also an insane amount of PDA (public displays of affection). I was lucky enough to catch two couples making out at the same time!

Mostly Mozart, and that's it in Vienna.

City 2: Vienna.

Hostel Huttledorf was our destination. Sarah had the metro directions, so from our night train from Berlin towards the Harry Potter Hostel we went.

It took forever to get to the metro stop. Hostel Huttledorf was way outside the center of the city, and much to our dismay, on top of a giant hill. The metro station was at the bottom, of course.

We huffed and puffed our way up a very scenic road lined with old Vienna apartments decorated in pastels to our new home for the next 3 nights. It was a cute looking building with lots of younger kids running around it. Someone was sweeping the tiny rocks off the cobblestone driveway area. He gave up after a while, realizing it made absolutely no difference.

We got to our room, and found it to be homey enough. The beds were pretty much foam sheets on top of wood, and I think they forgot to give us pillows with the pillow cases, or maybe they thought that the pillow cases were in fact pillows, but we couldn't complain seeing as it was seriously cheap. We dropped our things off and headed out to hear the singing hills of Austria.

There's got to be something really cool in Vienna, people go there all the time and say they love it; we just couldn't find it.

We spent lots of money going in and out of lots of museums (which was very educational and interesting now that I look back on it), but we didn't find free entertainment en route like Berlin. We couldn't find a 4 hour tour to take, we couldn't find open air markets, the bottom floors of buildings weren't open with stores, bars, or cafés, and people that were dressed up as Mozart kept trying to get us to go to costly concerts every night. Even if we wanted to go to the concerts, they would have been impossible to find in the expansive labyrinth that is Vienna.

We did however have a picnic. We did visit pretty cool art museums. We did walk around the old Hapsburg residence and saunter through their much cropped gardens.





We did wander into a crafts expo - there was lots of lederhosen, lots of wood cutting, and lots of bratwurst.



We accidentally hiked up a mountain that took us outside of Vienna to have cheesecake, apple strudel, and traditional Viennese coffee called the "mélange", which had THE BEST foam on top of it I've ever ingested.










One of Vienna's biggest marathons was going on while we were staying there. They set up stations with big-screens and PA systems with techno music blaring from the speakers at different points in the city, so we stopped and watched the spectacle for a while. Most of the runners were over 40, so we figured Vienna was kind of boring due to the population being primarily older. I’m not sure if that’s true, so if you’re from Vienna and you’re reading this please don’t be offended, it just seemed like the population is older from what we saw…





We also ate the famous "Vienna tort", which wasn't as great as it looked. A little dry, I'd give it an 8 on a 1-10 scale, and I would definitely not pay the same price for the same slice again.



When our little group of American students first came to France, we were forced to sit through a bunch of orientation meetings. For one of these delightful meetings, our school brought in a psychiatrist to talk about the different stages of culture shock, and the possible hurdles of situating one's self into a new country over a long period of time. She talked about cats, used profane words, and scared the shit out of us, to be perfectly frank. She shattered all dreams of becoming fluent in French over the 4 ½ months we were going to be in Paris, and she even drew out a diagram that mapped our projected levels of depression over the course of our stay. The diagram starts out as a straight line, then rapidly slopes to a low point on the page, and stays there for a while. Most of us laughed uncomfortably, telling each other that this lady was absolutely insane and had been an ex-pat for way too long, but I think she kind of set all of us all up for a giant fall when some of us didn’t have a breakdown in our future to begin with. I think some of us have willingly jumped from our straight line of emotional stability – and I think Sarah and I were two of those people who held our noses and leaped in Vienna.

It may have been the fact that I locked my keys in my locker with all my stuff in it and had to cut it off with a lock-cutter personally, it may have been that we spent most of our time wandering around Vienna in frustration, surrounded by too many people who wore too much perfume and cologne (one of the top stand-out traits of Vienna), or it may have been that we couldn’t find any wiener-schnitzel in the land of wiener-schnitzel, but Vienna most definitely marks the bout of complete discontent in our international adventures. We simply could not wait for Rome.

Currywurst and Berlin

Dear everyone-

I am very sorry for not updating this sooner, I went on one of those stereotypical college backpacking trips around Europe. I’m just now recovering from it. I will go through each city I visited one by one over the next few days so that you don’t have too much to read all at once, and so that I can ease myself into writing again…

City 1: Berlin.

I had an oversized bag on my bag with my backpack hooked on the front of me like a pouch on the way to the train station in Paris. I was meeting Sarah to catch our over-night train to Berlin. The metro on the way was more packed than I’ve seen it, which made it hot and sticky, and really uncomfortable. Of course, I found myself standing next to the only twit on the train who didn’t stand up from his fold-out chair amidst the insane amounts of passengers packed in the train-car. This inconvenience of a person forced me to have to stand leaning over him with my arms against the wall behind him, surrounding him in a little Tricia-made hut. I’ll draw a diagram to clarify, because my ergonomically awkward position is not properly portrayed by this description:



The guy next to me started having to lean over the kid too, so he yelled at him to stand up. The kid acted as if he was punched in the face. I wondered what he would have looked like if I really had punched him in the face.

I got to the train station finally, met Sarah, and we got on our train to Berlin. There were people waving out the windows just like in the movies, I couldn’t believe it. I almost started waving just for the sake of it, but there were too many smelly people by the windows, so I just sat down on my little bed thing.



When we got to Berlin, we hopped on the metro to our hostel and watched Berlin roll over us for the first time. The weather was wonderful, and the city was absolutely beautiful looking, even with its visible scars from the war. I couldn’t wait to get my bags off my body and start exploring.




Our Hostel, The Generator Hostel, was a huge building visible from the metro stop. It was gigantic looking from the outside, and looked like something meant to be from the future on the inside. The color scheme was blue and neon green, with rivets, visible metal piping, and air ducts all over, making it seem very industrial and futuristic all at the same time. When we got into our room, it had nice maple wooden floors with steel bunk beds and lockers for everyone to store their things in. One of the walls was completely open with windows overlooking Berlin. I was pleased, it looked clean, and I even got to sleep on a top bunk! I’m terrified of bottom bunks for all those who don’t know; when I was nine or ten a top bunk fell on top of me. I caught it with my cat-like reflexes so I wasn’t physically hurt or anything, but the psychological impacts from that event still haunt me to this day, like when I am assigned bottom bunks at hostels. Thank God for the English girl who got to the room first and took my bottom bunk without saying anything. I liked the hostel already. There was even mood music in the hallway at all times, which usually consisted of top 40 songs from 2 years ago in America, and all things done by Cher with techno backing.

We dropped our stuff off and spent our days in Berlin looking at all the great monuments (we went on a 4 hour tour one day and got the history behind most of old East Berlin). I got freckly, Sarah got a little tan, and we enjoyed every second of that city. There were little markets all over, gardens and parks which softened the city-feel, and everyone we interacted with was incredibly nice and helpful. I never realized how new of a city Berlin was, but 90% of it was destroyed during WWII, and most of it (the East side from what I learned, I'm not sure about the West side) was really built up after the reunification of the country when the Berlin Wall came down. Buildings that looked as if they were hundreds of years old were actually not, they were just made to look old.



The support of the DIY scene in Berlin was also intriguing. There was graffiti everywhere, and I mean everywhere, but it seemed as if it was looked at as more of an art-form integrated into the city as opposed to unruly teen-angst and violence. Sarah and I were wandering down a random road when we peeked into a very graffitied doorway and saw a bunch of sand on the ground. Intrigued, we walked through the door to check it out. It ended up being a bar/art gallery of garbage art made from scrap metal and other strange industrial ingredients. The ground was covered with sand. The building that the art gallery occupied looked abandoned, most of the windows were barred and smashed, garbage was collected at the bottom of the stairwell, and graffiti covered every inch of every wall on the inside. There was a constant smell of urine too, which added to the whole ambiance. I don’t remember how many floors there were in the building, maybe 5 or 6, but every floor had a few studios that were occupied by artists at work, willing to chat and sell their stuff right then and there. There were postcards for sale in some of the studios, so it was definitely a known and accepted building of commerce, but it completely contrasted with any idea I had before of a place where art, commerce, and tourism flourished. This wasn’t the only building like this either. Amidst the abandoned buildings next to haut-couture boutiques and nice restaurants were other graffiti havens with artists and bar tenders at work.



Berlin; city of many layers, city of much history, pretty city of art and new architecture, contender for no. 1 city I’ve visited.

vacation

For the past week my host mom has been on vacation. Her son has been staying here “watching” the dog, and it’s been a little strange. I apologize in advance for any offense that is taken on the following profile of this young man (looks to be in his early thirties), but I call it as I see it, and this is what I see:

He doesn’t change the toilet paper. I can’t reach it or else I would do it, but it’s on the top of a cabinet in the WC. There must be a fold-up ladder in the wall or a button that shoots the toilet up high enough for Renée to get at it, because she’s shorter than I am, and there is no way she can reach up there if I cant.

He doesn’t take out the garbage. It’s been overflowing for the past week, so I finally stalked the hallway through the peephole in our front door until I saw a neighbor walk out with a garbage bag. I lowered the sunglasses and followed them to the big garbage bins.

He doesn’t do his dishes. I figured machinery like dishwashers would be relatively universal in how they function, but not the French ones. There are ten different settings for hot water, ten different settings for cold water, ten different settings for warm water, a few for hot then cold or the reverse, a few for pots and pans or just dishes, one for utensils, combinations of all of them, a setting for cooking fish, one for baking a cake, one for flying to the moon, and one for forcing unruly sons to learn how to use the dishwasher. I couldn’t get that one to work.

He doesn’t have a job. This, I can’t really knock as I look across the Atlantic to America… or can I? I am in France after all, a fact I seem to forget way too often.

He doesn’t take the dog out. The only reason he’s here is to walk the dog and feed it. No, I’m not that naïve, I know he’s here to make sure I don’t throw giant parties like I normally do and end up burning the apartment complex down too. I leave for classes from anywhere between 9 and 11 in the morning. I wake up somewhere in between 7 and 8 AM, and usually Renée has already left for work, which means she’s already taken the dog out. Mr Slick on the other hand doesn’t wake up until after I’m gone for the most part. I can’t imagine the confusion in that poor pup’s head and bladder. Wait, I can, because I’ve cleaned up his confusion a few times this week.

He parties hardy. I woke up this past Wednesday morning to a gurgling, heaving sound. He was barfing up the 3 bottles of wine he had consumed the night before. It was obviously wine; I won’t even get into how I know. The night before, he had taken the dog with him to wherever he went, because he didn’t want to come home to take it out. That was a great idea, it got him out of a world of difficulties.

Please don’t think I abhor this character though; he’s very nice, which is the problem. People like him park a truck in the path of my behavioral logic thought process. I can’t hate him, but I want to, and I can’t like him, because I’m trying to hate him. He’s not much of a conversationalist but he’s inclusive; if he goes to the store he asks if I need anything, he asks how my day was when I get home, and he helped me tweak the grammar in a paper I wrote for a class. So I’m left dumbfounded, thanking him with my grammatically correct paper in hand, and cursing him a little later while wiping up runny dog crap from the living room floor with toilet paper I had to climb up a wall for, as a dish falls over the sink and shatters on the floor.

Renée is coming back this evening, but I'm leaving for my vacation in an hour. I won't be able to tell her how much fun we all had together until after I've gotten over it; but upon my return, it may still be fresh enough in my mind for me to ask her who has babysitting who exactly, because the dog and I were really confused.

a singing silhouette

A French funk band was playing when I walked in. The room was packed from the back wall to the door on the left side of the stage I walked in through. It was hot and sticky – the humidity hit me like a bucket of hot water propped on top of the door, soaking me as I entered. I spotted my friends at the front of the mass, right at the foot of the stage, but there was no way I was pushing through to get to them, so I waited and watched the fog play with the lighting around the band. The band wasn’t bad actually, the drummer was particularly solid.

The band finished and the crowd dispersed to the corners of the bar to rehydrate with over-priced watered-down beer. Some went outside for a cigarette break, and some just left. The group of friends I was meeting diminished considerably. It was a Tuesday night, and we had classes the next morning, so most went home. They came to the show to see Ben Lee anyways, a singer/songwriter from the States who played earlier that evening. I didn’t really know why I came when the show was half over…
We stood in the middle of the bar waiting for the next band to start. A strange looking couple took advantage of the open space and started dancing. We had to dodge their feet a few times; they got pretty into their own moves, flinging themselves in the most awkward manners from one side of the room to the other. The girl lost her balance once and flew into Sarah, almost table-topping her. They looked like they were really good imitators of people who actually knew how to dance, but they just weren’t at that level themselves. If the next band wasn’t good, this dance show redeemed the 5 Euros I paid to get into the bar at least.

Just when the tiny dancers had enough, the curtains opened. The lights turned off and a lone figure stood in the center of the stage, one light from behind showed only a silhouette. A loop of voices started playing, harmonizing with each other – I thought it was Bjork secretly touring on her acapella album Medulla for a second and got really excited. Then I realized whoever this was with this amazing voice had an afro and leather pants, so it couldn’t have been Bjork. Lights came on from the sides of the stage and a voice belted out words onto the crowd like I’ve never heard before. Three or four people with intense cameras jumped to the front of the stage and started shooting while everyone else in the bar dropped their jaws and did a half-smile-type movement with their mouths. It wasn’t Bjork, but she got the same reaction Bjork does for the most part.

Three songs in and the entire crowd was still a mass of statues, our eyes unable to move from her energy above us. She sang in French and English, but words didn’t matter much with the quality of sound she was producing. Such soul! Such energy! Such passion! Such ingenuity! She had no instrument but her voice for us at first, her Boss RC-50 loop pedal let her toy with self-created beats and harmonies right in front of us. Halfway through her set she was joined by the drummer of the funk band that played earlier, a bassist, and a keyboardist. They all harmonized with her, accentuating her melodies and complementing her better than TV does to Sunday afternoons.

The closing of the metro pulled us out of the venue unwillingly – we had to leave before the end of her set. Walking to the underground tunnels, all we talked about was how ridiculous her voice was, and how soulful she sang.

A few days later, putting together notes to write this little blog entry, I realized I needed one bit of information that I didn’t catch while I was at the concert. I went on the venue’s website to search for it, but it was already gone. No one in the group I was with caught the singing silhouette’s name.

I'm off the malaria pills, what's with the weird dreams?

I had a dream about Golden-Grahams cereal last night. I don't even eat those in the States, and I haven't seen anything like them in France yet. Just thought that was notable.