And rightfully so. The Euro vs America debate is often ridiculously over-simplified, although this excellent NY Times article is anecdotal and informative, a rare combination. I will simply say this: during my time in the Netherlands, I was struck, repeatedly, by how two societies that claim to love freedom and liberty can have such different ways of ordering the world.

Famke, my couchsurfing host, had put me up in an empty room in a student housing block in her university. Every day she would take me out to ride bicycles around her small hometown of Wageningen, a name that I cannot pronounce to this day. And every day I would marvel at how much power the Dutch cyclist possesses in comparison to their American counterparts. Bike paths run parallel to almost every main road, and bicyclists have uncontested right of way when ranked against cars  (which is of course the case in America, but i’d argue more so on paper than reality).

Of course, there are about 16 million people in the Netherlands, and 12 million bikes, so it makes sense cyclists act with such impunity. The Dutch passion for bicycling is long and storied. The bike was introduced to Dutch society in the late 19th-century and has been ubiquitous on Dutch roads since roughly the early 20th century. The Dutch Army once fielded a unit of machine-gun mounted bicycles. The country is flat and temperate, practically engineered for bicycling. Even the street signs seem to swear (in English) at car drivers to ‘Move on the effing shoulders’ when confronted by cyclists.

See? 'Move on the effing shoulders.'

Famke and I rode our bicycles past canals where the sound of croaking frogs and newts chirruped against a bright blue sky.

“You hear those?” my host asked. “Those amphibians were once threatened here, but we convinced local farmers to stop using toxic pesticides. Now we don’t have such bad run-off, and the returning animal population help keeps the water from going stagnant with insects.”

Further on, we passed several large fields overgrowing with fresh produce. Famke stopped her bike, walked over to one particular plot of land, and plucked some greens.

“This is a cooperatively owned field. Those of us that kick in money on the field on an annual basis are allowed to pick some of its fruits and vegetables. We also try to maintain the land as much as possible.”

We rode on, past pretty little cottages and horse pastures, although I will admit there were no windmills tilting lazily in the middle distance. After about 20 minutes, we pulled into the parking lot of another farming cooperative. Famke bought several bunches of boerenkool (kale), which the Dutch mix with mashed potatoes and serve with smoked sausage in a dish called stamppot. Stamppot is good stuff – hearty, filling fare of the Northern European kind – tastier than the average home-cooked Dutch cuisine. There’s a good, if perhaps overly enthusiastic guide to its preparation, here.

The author and a bicycle loaded with boerenkool.

I digress. As Famke loaded the boerenkool onto bike, I noticed several laughing mentally retarded men carrying stacks of produce and playing with chickens. Famke smiled at them.

“We try to employ the mentally disabled in manual labor positions like that. It helps them feel useful, it keeps us from exploiting illegal immigrant labor, and they really enjoy it, especially the parts where they get to play with animals.”

I think, at this point, I lost it. “Enough!” I yelled. “Enough of you people and your legal hash and sensible healthcare and winsome prostitutes and organic co-op fields and bike paths and gay marriage and happy Downs Syndrome cases! You’re making me feel bad!”

The really funny thing? Famke stopped. I don’t think she had any idea that the things she was saying were, to my American ears, out of place, imminently sensible, and therefore ignored at home.

The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country that built itself on foreign trade and commerce. Flooding has been an ever-present danger. Land had to be shared if folks were to survive. The frontier sense of individuality that is at the core of the American identity was never really the Dutch thing. There is a sense here that society does not exist to hold you back – the idea that drives so much of American adulation of the Rebel Without a Cause – but rather is crucial to individual growth. In the USA – excuse the generalization – we generally have a negative conception of liberty. Freedom is lack of external interference. In the Netherlands, and much of Europe, liberty is a positive function – the ability to fulfill one’s potential.

Because they do care about the rights of the individual here, although the right to bear arms is not a privilege the Dutch trust their civilians with (I admittedly take issues with the Netherlands in this regard). But to make a long story short – its not just welfare collectivism versus free market individuality when we compare the Netherlands and the USA. Because in the former, we also have a recognition that the well-being of the society is based, partly, on the happiness and self-actualization of the individual.

Of course, sometimes individuals take advantage of their societies. Famke took me to a ‘Dead Celebrity’ themed-party. There were a lot of Michael Jacksons about, a few Elvises, and one guy dressed normally with a sign hung around his neck: “The Eternal Student.” He was bemoaning the recent loss of a protected status of student in the Netherlands, the sort of kid who mooches off government-provided tuition for decades, a folk hero amongst the university crowd.

I was only able to reflect on this at the time for a few minutes, because a DJ started playing that particularly noxious form of Dutch popular music known as ‘Happy Hardcore. ‘I would define the genre thusly: people on helium raving to the sound of kittens being tortured at high speed. The Dutch, I thought, may have an interesting take on the divisions of the public-private sphere compared to Americans. But when it came to music, we were still, firmly, kicking their asses.

The post Cycling through the Dutch Psyche appeared first on The Faster Times.

Which was cool, because naughty as it was, I occasionally got to sneak a peek at the letters. Especially the barrage of cover letters accompanying internship applications. Most of this were standard, “I would be so excited to be a part of your organization” type stuff, with subsequent content that ranged from pandering to professional to occasionally inspiring. But I remember one that dripped with condescension; in the second graf, it read, “Unlike my fellow students, who spent their summers backpacking in Europe, I was putting in my hours at the Podunk Weekly Shitrag investigating important blah blah blah…”

I resolved, after reading that, to go and backpack through Europe, which I did in the spring of my 21st year. It was a good time. I saw plenty of the continent, always following one important rule: avoid Amsterdam.

The Dutch capital seemed to magnetize the worst douchebags in every hostel across France, Germany and Ireland. It was always the same types; either frat boys bellowing about how high they were gonna get, or sleazy eels who were practically rubbing their palms in excitement over the prospect of prostitutes. Neither of these demographics were the types I particularly like to hang out with.

In the years since, I’ve come to regret my decision. Amsterdam, I’ve heard from anyone who’s been there, is beautiful, cosmopolitan, clean and cultured. So on my couchsurfing expedition, I decided to give it a whirl.

When I stepped out of Amsterdam’s central train station, I had the immediate, very edifying sense of lightness that accompanies arrival to a place I know I am going to like from the get go. In front of me was a flat plain rung round with gorgeous old fairy tale buildings. At ground level, the Old World gave way to modern: a flashy tram system ran tourists to various destinations. Water felt integrated into the fabric of the urban experience. Canals formed a skein of transport paths and natural barriers, flowing seamlessly into the movement, commerce and general daily life of the Amsterdamer.

Bikes and canals in Amsterdam

My host would be Famke, a student finishing her Master’s degree in environmental science in a small town two hours south of, as she called it, ‘the Dam.’ She had told me to meet her in Dam Square, a 10 minute walk from the station. It was raining and cold and generally miserable, so I ducked my head against the elements and pressed down into the city.

The way to Dam Square was not particularly inspiring. Betting booths, banks, fast food chains and the usual luxury-goods skin of H&M-Armani-Zara stores lined an obvious tourist trap corridor. But all of the above were housed in gorgeous old buildings that suggested a unique sense of place, and character, was close by, waiting behind the next small canal.

It didn’t take long to arrive in Dam Square, a handsome, immense plaza that would have been far more enjoyable in fair weather. As it was, the day was rainy, cold and vicious; I ducked out of the elements under the National Monument, a medium-sized memorial dedicated to the Dutch victims of World War 2.

Like many things Dutch, the National Monument is understated yet effective. It doesn’t pierce the sky nor absorb the entirety of focus on Dam Square. It is, rather, a quiet commemoration by a largely quiet people – assuming they’ve been keeping off the Heineken – done tastefully and well.

Famke near the Van Gogh museum.

Famke arrived not long after I did. We hugged and she promised to show me at least one museum before night hit, which would be soon in the northern European winter. The fairly obvious choice was the Van Gogh museum. I don’t want to wax rhapsodic about seeing all of the originals of the man’s famous work; needless to say, the stuff is impressive. But I was more taken with the collection of pencil sketches and notes that were the kickstart to Van Gogh’s creative process, each rough draft and commentary taking up a small display case next to some of his more famous paintings.

We left as evening began to set it. Famke suggested wandering aimlessly, which struck me as perfect. Because Amsterdam is a) supremely handsome and b) laid out in an irregular pattern thanks to its many canals, it’s a great town for sauntering, in the original, French sense of the word – sans terre, without Earth, without any real destination. Every turn netted us a glimpse of some quaint, heart-achingly lovely vista of canal-front townhouses or houseboats, although Famke assured me the price for this antique quaintness was well into the millions of Euros.

We avoided the freezing rain with a few of the bracing dark beers made for those times when you need to avoid freezing rain, and then, slightly drunk, stopped off for what Famke called Dutch fast food. In this case, a frikandel, a grayish, soggy-looking, very processed sausage that, like all foods made for post-alcohol consumption, was delicious when deep-fried, topped with chopped onions and accompanied by a greasy box of French Fries mit mayo.

Dutch fast 'food.'

“You know,” I said, mouth full of French Fries, “we seem to be doing this backward.”

“How do you mean?” asked Famke.

“Well, I thought, when in Amsterdam, we were supposed to do…er…other stuff that gets us hungry first, and then eat.”

She caught my meaning and laughed. We left the North African frites shop owner obsessing over an Egypt-Algeria soccer game and headed into a coffee shop. Both of us actually ordered coffee – no, seriously; Famke, like most Dutch, only smokes in moderation and I was happy with post-food coffee – and spent a pleasant evening watching tourists get stoned out of their gourds. As one joker stumbled past, Famke reached into her bag and produced a large hunk of good Dutch cheese.

“For you,” she said, smiling.

There are many ways to my heart, and good cheese is often at the forefront of all of those means. I smiled, in the warmth and comfort of that coffee shop, a friend and hunk of cheese by my side, and reflected on the Dutch concept of ‘gezellig.’ Roughly translated, the word means ‘cozy,’ but it can also suggest nostalgia, the warmth you get when you walk in from the cold, and the comfort of old jeans versus new shoes. Famke’s little gift of cheese imparted all of the above feelings, and I thou-

Crashgigglehahaha.

-I don’t remember what I thought, because the next minute, a stoned Albanian fell out of his chair. I smiled at him, sort of smiled at the world, as happy as a stoner if not, in fact, stoned, and started shaving off hunks of cheese in the heart of Amsterdam.

The post In the Stadt Amsterdam appeared first on The Faster Times.

I think so. Belgium, where almost everything is defined by the linguistic split between French and Flemish, is my evidence. The stereotype of the more sensitive, artistic French-speaking Walloon contrasted with the earthy, industrious Flemish (Dutch)-speaking Flanders resident is easiest understood in the ways those nationalities use words to describe the world they interact with.

Like the world of sex toys.

There was a small kiosk selling a veritable Lucky Charms-grade assortment of pleasure tools in the Brussels train station. White vibrators! Black dildos! Pink cock rings! Their descriptors in respective Belgian tongues (as it were) seemed to flesh out (as it were) the Walloon/Flemish approach to sexual satisfaction. One electric blue double-barreled plastic variant of the shocker was labeled, in French, something like ‘Cœur de la passion’; its Flemish variant was along the lines of ‘Vagenschtuffer.’

Sensual, slow butterfly kisses versus the admirable efficiency of a one word love device. What hath Europe wrought? I thought. Was this strange little mish-mash of culture clash scrawled on the side of a twin-attack dildo in the EU capital an allegory for the difficulties of trying to create one society out of many languages, which is the grand variable in the EU equation? Was the identity of the New Europe contained within this lovestick masquerading as peace sign?

Probably not.

On another note: Bank of America customers, beware in Benelux. I had supreme difficulty getting money out of Belgian and Netherlands ATMs. The difference between these nations? The niceness the Belgians express when you come to them with said issues. I never could figure out why my debit card was denied at every cash point in both countries, but where the Dutch would frown and tap their feet impatiently as I struggled with the vagaries of the world financial system, the Belgians were always lovely and understanding. If they and their bank employees could offer no helpful advice, they always had a smile ready for me.

Occasional inefficiency counteracted by acts of warm welcome were the gist of my Belgian experience. When I boarded what I thought was an Amsterdam-bound train in Brussels, I felt sure I had been directed to the correct platform by the friendly man in the ticket counter. And as a matter of fact, I had been at the right platform. But I had boarded the wrong train, a fact I realized as I stared at the pretty town of Waterloo – the same Waterloo, I realized with a start, which gave the name to the battle that ended Napoleon’s imperial ambitions.

Isn’t that awesome, by the way? If you’re a history nerd like me, there’s nothing quite like reading a name, assigning an importance to it, visualizing it and imagining it and then, whilst staring out a train window at a crosshatch of green fields and brick townhouses with mansard roofs, realizing the name assigned to the loci within the geographic space of the universe you are inhabiting right now is the same one to which you have assigned so much of your mind’s creative faculty constructing in the past.

This moment of supreme travel romance is always a bit blunted when a stout, improbably female Gimli-esque train conductor frowns at your ticket and does not speak English.

Through a combination of pidgin French and sorrowful looks, I was told the train I boarded was in fact the previous train on the timetable, which had arrived late at the same time, on the same platform, as my train to Amsterdam. I began to freak, imagining myself being hauled off the train bodily by the powerful figure of squat rail authority in front of me. But she smiled. Her appearance shifted from angry hausfrau to concerned-if-Butch auntie. She printed out a slip of paper from her little ticker machine that gave me permission to return to Brussels (now about 30 minutes away) and board the next Amsterdam-bound train at no additional cost.

Bless you, Belgium. John F. Kennedy once called Washington DC as a city of ‘Southern efficiency and Northern charm’; that clever little descriptor could be applied to Belgium and Brussels; just replace ‘Southern’ with French and ‘Northern’ with Dutch. Although it’s not entirely fair, either. I’ve often found American Southerners possessed of the best work ethic in the country, while Northerners can project a fierce, protective friendship that’s highly endearing.

If little things in Belgium – stubborn ATMs, late trains, ambiguously described sex toys – seemed cocked up (as it were – last time I use that!), these little stumbles were offset by patient folks in a bank line, kind train conductors and the fascinating linguistic possibilities of sex toy verbiage. I eventually did board the right train to Amsterdam and chugged off on the next train, an express train as it happily turned out, that pushed hard into the wetlands of the Low Countries.

I lied. As it were.

The post On Sex Toys and Linguistics in Belgium appeared first on The Faster Times.

My fondest memory of Sev was going to a bar to watch Greece take on Portugal in the Euro Cup final. I could give a thimbleful of olive oil for both soccer and the Greek national team, but at Sev’s request, I had donned Hellenic blue and white.

We arrived at a sports bar stuffed with some 50 angry male Portuguese expats and tourists. Most were grumbling about the Greek style of play up to that point — the Greeks were playing total defense ball, rarely giving up a goal. To say the Portuguese considered this a cheap tactic would be a vast understatement.  Their disapproval was broadcast loudly and clearly thoughout the bar, wherein sat two lonely islands of blue and white: Crazy Sev and her increasingly nervous American friend.

Greece did not dissapoint. They scored early in the final and kept the score 1-0 till the end of the match, beating 150-1 odds and the host nation to win the UEFA 2004 Euro Cup. Sev’s reaction was to laugh, scream and curse a bar full of now drunk Portuguese who had murder in their eyes. Mine was to cower in abject fear, an unwitting and unwilling pawn of European aggression.

Now Sev works as a — the EU version of bureaucrats — Brussels. When she was finished lavishing hugs and rage on me, she insisted we get some frites.

“You are in Belgium. This is what Belgians do. They eat frites. You’ll love them. What the hell are you waiting for?”

This was all said in the span of crossing a block at a breakneck passionate Greek clip. I tried to take in the buildings around me.

“This city is boring. In many ways I cannot stand it. My God it is beautiful though. These balconies.  That architecture. Are you paying attention? Makous, Malaka! (‘listen, bitch!)”

We had covered two more blocks. The stone balconies and handsome townhouses and elegant curves of Brussels passed quickly, in a blur of Sev-fueled speed. I was panting by the time we stopped at a streetside shack. As Sev regaled me with stories about boyfriends and jobs and school, we scarfed frites and mayo and béarnaise sauce (it works. Really), some grilled brochette (meat on a stick) on the side. You learn a nation by many ways: its language, its history, its art. In this case, I was learning Belgium by its beer-soaking drunk food. And I wasn’t even drunk. Although I wasn’t complaining.

Sev’s apartment was in a lovely old building that reminded me of the European sets where Israeli assassins took out various Black September members in Munich.  Her place was a studio, but a surpassingly large and spacious one, despite her assurances she lived in a hovel. I was shown to my cot on the floor. Through the thin walls, techno music beats were thumping, raising small clouds of dust from the bookshelves in Sev’s room.

“My neighbor. He’s from here. A Brussels native. Let’s meet him.”

She knocked on the door and we were greeted by a thin Belgian who was so stereotypically Eurotrash he was almost a caricature, a mix of the Sprockets guys from SNL and Pepe Le Pew. He was nerdily handsome — curly blonde hair, thick black glasses, a dark blue turtleneck, ripped jeans and flip flops. A joint smoldered in an ash tray in front of a wall papered in vintage music posters, just next to, of course, a set of turntables.

“Wassup?” he said.

“Wadup?” I answered. He gave me a blank stare. I realized I shouldn’t have assumed a mastery of American slang based off his greeting. “Wassup” may sound familiar to a Walloon raised on American pop culture, but its more subtle, rarefied versions — yes, this is complete sarcasm — such as “Wadup” have yet to be translated across the pond.

Sev shot me a dirty look, then began talking with her neighbor in French. From what I could gather, she was getting ready to hit the town with me by her side — so much for much-needed rest — and the neighbor was invited. Neighbor looked at us, his turntables, then us again, considered the possibilities, shrugged, finished his joint and put on some shoes.

I can’t remember what part of Brussels we hit that night, although I do remember we could better communicate with the North African cab driver in pidgin Arabic then French. He gave us a friendly ‘Massalamah’ (goodbye) as we departed his car in what was, apparently, the northernmost suburb of Kinshasa.

I’m only half kidding. The Congo was once a Belgian colony, and thousands of Congolese now call Belgium home. Lingala music was pumping out of bars. There were many African men about, and hardly any women, and the men were loud and laughing and yelling, drinking with a huddled, almost boiling intensity. The walls were plastered with posters of African politicians and musicians. It all felt very vintage, as if we had been caught in the tide of some ’70s immediate post-colonial backwash.

As we got out of the car, a few big guys took a long, lingering look at us. I felt Sev’s stoned neighbor freeze up a little besides me  My own hand went to my pocket, although for what, I have no idea; perhaps then to just ball my hand into a fist. Sev herself was blithely oblivious, which could be a good thing — bless her optimisim — or a terrible one.

In this case think the resolution was widespread confusion. Sev steamed through the crowd of hard-looking Congolese, who seemed so shocked she would simply walk through their posse that they sort of crumbled into wide eyed wonder, giving me and Neighbor a minute to sneak by.

In the bar we eventually settled in, I drank many good Belgian beers with many Eurocrats. Brussels, I concluded, was a weird spot. Its population reminded me of my hometown of Washington DC. Almost everyone seemed from somewhere else, ready to contribute to the EU dream, talking about their jobs primarily and slowly building a community that grounded their professional transience. I chatted with another Greek who wore 600-Euro shoes and worked for a Socialist MP and seemed to see no contradiction to this lifestyle choice, and a German who looked like Grizzly Adams who managed international aide programs who on a date with a lovely young Italian painter. The only native Belgian was Neighbor, who, due to a combination of beer and pot, was soon passing out at the bar.

Sev and I packed him into a cab, but the driver’s French was lacking. Another newcomer to Brussels. Sev looked the cabbie up and down, then said something guttural. The driver nodded, and drove off. Sev looked at me, smiling, and said “Turkish. Don’t think just because I’m Greek I won’t speak Turkish…” and I could feel her anger boiling. I shook my head, quickly.

“Good,” she grinned. “I like to defy stereotypes.”

The post Couch Surfing in Brussels With a Passionate Greek appeared first on The Faster Times.

I’ve never seen Salt Lake City, supposedly one of the most pleasant cities in the country, but for its Greyhound station. If I gotta judge from that experience, the seat of the Mormon faith and host of the 2002 Olympics is a cigarette-burned bathroom covered in graffit of the  “Hector gonna kill a mofo named Ronnie if he don’t stop runnin’ wit Maria” school of thought.

The bus rolled north, through soggy green fields, all a-drenched in gray French winter. I’m not sure when we passed into Belgium. There was no black, gold and red welcoming banner, no sudden presentation of lambic beer and chocolate. As billboards go, the landscape was consistent; you pass from France into Wallonia, the French-speaking portion of Belgium, so there’s no language shift.

Eventually fields gave way to highway interchanges, which gave way to roundabouts, which gave way to handsome old buildings. A woman flapped laundry out of a window set in the sort of old apartment block that screams, Dude, you’re in Europe.

Hanging out clothes somewhere in Belgium.

It was a handsome building, ledges and edges set off by fine stonework, a structure built for beauty and durability, unlike the brutal concrete tower blocks that dot the outskirts of so many European towns. My Euro friends always give me shit for the often rotted out state of American city centers. But they never realize that those centers are offset by rings of generally attractive suburbia. In Europe, the center is often preserved and inhabited by the middle class, and good for them: these may be the roots of increased pedestrianism and reliance on public transport. All good things. But the poverty and immigrants are still there – they’re just shunted to the Towers of Terror in the hinterland.

Although in Brussels at least, the new arrivals are living in the city center, or at least by Brussels North station. I got on the metro after departing the bus and noticed almost the entire car was brown, black or brown-black skinned; a mix of Middle Eastern, African and occasionally, Asians. There were maybe two or three white passengers at each stop. Everyone else was an ethnically ambiguous sea of caramel.

Being mixed-race, I fit right in; an old woman said something to me in Turkish and I nodded and smiled at her and moved out of her way (which seems to always do the trick when you’re in a close quarters I-don’t-understand situation).

I’m sorry: did I say I got on at Brussels North one paragraph up? I meant Bruxelles-Nord/Brussel-Noord. In bilingual Belgium, I feel the need to translate everything twice. The linguistic split is both the heart of and major trauma of Belgian identity.

In short: Wallonia takes up about 55 percent of Belgium’s space and Walloons about 33 percent of its population. Most of the rest are from Flanders and speak Flemish, a dialect of Dutch ( a small 0.7 percent of the population tucked into the Eastern cantons speak German). All this in a country roughly the size of Maryland.

This division of tongues impacts everything in Belgium. In London, a friend who has been working with Belgian tourism promotions threw up his hands while describing being shunted around between two different tourism boards – one Walloon, one Flemish – that never communicated with each other. In 2007, the election of a Miss Belgium who didn’t speak Flemish re-sparked serious discussion, which continues today, of secession between Wallonia and Flanders.

Funnily enough, all those afore-mentioned African and Asian immigrants are more removed from the Belgian linguistic split than Walloons and Flemish are removed from each other. The Belgian immigrants I encountered had little regard for debates over French/Flemish language and identity. That wasn’t their fight.

I got into a conversation with a young Arab-descended Belgian about the French/Flemish thing, and he dismissed it – “I speak both, and English, and can cross half of Europe speaking Arabic anyways.” What he did care about was European perception of Muslims like himself.

He rattled off an odd mix of revolutionary rhetoric, mild homophobia and anti-feminism that occasionally crossed the line into misogyny. The gist: Muslims were always treated like criminals, these people got no values, man, lookit them let the gays out, their women are so immodest and of course the society is messed up but its not us, man, its them, lookit what they let their kids get up to.

I nodded and grunted throughout in that sort of daze I enter whenever I get ranted at, and wondered what happens when a liberal, relativist society clashes up with an orthodox, black-and-white morality. Because the latter was the Islam this guy was preaching, and it made the Christian Coalition sound like Unitarians. At the same time his message carried more weight because he also spoke of some real concerns. However tolerant Europe likes to consider itself, it can still be a pretty prejudiced place against different-skinned foreigners.

Such are the real issues and often idiotic posturing of identity politics. Divorced from Europe’s traditional communal tensions, immigrants ignore them, and get by without getting involved in the fights of Old Europe. But some of the same immigrants bring their own cultural baggage and end up picking the fights that define the New Europe. Sometimes the fault is that of the host society, sometimes it’s the fault of some immigrants, and sometimes everyone’s to blame.

Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles, Brussels

Take the issue of the hijab (headscarf), which was banned last year in Flanders. Some Muslims argue they are not allowed to express their religion publicly; schools argue all students must be dressed equally to be treated equally; some Muslims claim the hijab is crucial to their identity, some say they’re glad to be rid of it and some say the whole thing is blown out of proportion to feed the anger and vitriol of the other sides’ extremists, who are the only ones who really benefit from communal tensions.

I think the last opinion is right. Crazy white Europeans and crazy Muslim Europeans feed off each other and secure power within their communities by pointing out the faults and oppressive practices, perceived and otherwise, of their counterparts. Just look at the comment thread on this article.

That’s not to say Muslims don’t deal with issues of real prejudice in Europe, or that white Europeans don’t have the right to question how their country’s character will change with immigration, or that the Flemish weren’t historically screwed by the Walloons, or the Walloons aren’t currently economically lagging behind the Flemish. But often, these issues become excuses for a lame sort of jingoism.

Isn’t this supposed to be what the European Union, seated in Brussels, is against? Isn’t the EU supposed to facilitate trade and travel, and create a Europe where folks don’t hold their language or culture over someone else’s? I had a feeling this wouldn’t be the first refutation of the New Europe I was to encounter on this trip. But it was odd to experience it so quickly, in the capital of that experiment.

The post Making Sense of Prejudice in the New Europe appeared first on The Faster Times.

It’s never a good sign when, by 8:15am, it’s already been a long morning. But it had been a long morning, as I finally bade farewell to London and left for mainland Europe – the continent, as folks call it in Britain.

The author and friend demonstrate what not to do the night before a long bus trip.

Adam’s first rule of travel: always leave a country hungover. Leavings must be lived passionately, with both celebration and mourning. The party before I leave a place is the fête of my going; the wretched headache the next day is the sadness of departure. Although admittedly, I hadn’t planned on being this hungover.

The night before an Irish friend had rung me and asked me out for a drink. Just a drink. Or two. Or ten. He lost his bag, and later, his mind; we had a gloriously Irish evening of sustained drink that included a fight, tears, laughter, and as per normal, me on a night bus. I think I got back to my appointed couch at five in the morning. I had to wake up for my bus at seven.

At 7:45am my hosts roused me out of a liquor-induced coma. My head felt stabbed by a thousand iron knives; my mouth was an ashtray dribbling a little rivulet of brown drool. I had not packed, and my laptop was on; Pleaseplease I thought let me not have sent anyone a drunk email. On my camera was a picture of myself, soused, obviously taken while stumbling home.

My hosts grinned, were good-natured about my state, and even lent me some money for a cab (‘You’ll never make it on the tube”). But there were no cabs to be found in their quiet residential neighborhood, and so I found myself on first a bus, and then in Brixton, where they play classical music in the train station to keep teenage loiterers away.

I love the classical music in London tube stations, but on this morning, even Vivaldi had the power to unsettle my stomach. When ‘Spring‘ can induce cookie-tossing, things are not well. I jumped on a train headed to Victoria coach station. The London Underground, bless her, made excellent time.

I did not. If you ever need to catch a bus from Victoria station, note, dear traveler, that the bus station is a good fifteen minute walk from the tube turnstiles. I ran with my pack bouncing on my back and my stomach bouncing into my eyes. Every few steps, I made a small retch in my mouth. It seemed inevitable that I would be sick somewhere on the station floor.

Somehow, I wasn’t. Yet somehow, each bus station kiosk I stopped at was not the Eurolines coach to Brussels. So I would run a few more feet, and then try not to projectile on the wall, and be told to move on to station 18, ‘Just around that way mate,’ and on and on. Part of me wanted a cigarette, because sometimes, when you feel so bad, you just might as well make it worse.

When I made it to the ticket stand I was directed with frowning eyes onto the bus, whose engine was already idling. In my mind: success! In my stomach: lurch. I spent the next few hours with my eyes closed, willing the world and my gastrointestinal system to go away.

When I woke up I felt marginally better inside. Outside, the world was aglow: fresh morning light poured over green hills and sheep paddocks. To my left, the chipped teeth of an island: the White Cliffs of Dover, chalky and fronting a bright blue ocean. My stomach moved again, but this time, with the excitement of anticipation.

There are times and places when you know you are moving. The act of crossing a body of water is particularly significant. Water is the most natural and primal of boundaries. The Xhosa in South Africa have a saying, Ndiwelimilambo enamagama – ‘I Have Crossed Famous Rivers.’ It doesn’t just signify physical movement, but mental growth. But the above proverb also signifies how a river by nature delineates the border between two very different states of being, and those states can be literal, external as well as internal. In this vein, the English Channel is a Very Famous River, the boundary between England and the Continent.

It’s funny how that designator (‘Continent’) so easily suggests distance, physical, cultural and linguistic, when Europe is in fact only separated from England by a body of water not 150 miles long at its widest. That’s about the distance between Washington DC and Philadelphia. At its closest, the channel is only 21 miles long. That’s a ten minute drive for some groceries.

But narrow as the Channel may be, there are few bodies of water that so clearly separate two different cultural worlds. I’m not just talking the United Kingdom and France; I’m specifically referring to England and Europe. Even Ireland and Scotland, by dint of Gaelic resentment of English hegemony, have stronger ties to the European continent than England itself, which is more proximate.

While I’d be remiss to umbrella all of ‘Europe’ as one cultural entity, there are European traits that seem shared when placed in contrast to the United Kingdom. From philosophy – (British Empiricism vs Continental Existentialists) to economics (free market England and the European welfare state) to gastronomy to the obvious linguistic gulf. In Belgium, I couldn’t escape posters advertising cheap flights to London; the picture always showed a cartoon-ish alien around some recognizably English institution (a red telephone box; a cup of tea) with the slogan, in French or Flemish: ‘London: It’s Another World.’

The European continent was a big goal of my couchsurfing odyssey. I often feel as if I know England, and not just because I lived there. Only about 23 percent of Americans are of English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh decent, but Anglo-Saxon culture is the substrate soil the American experience grows from.

An Italian-American friend of mine is guido enough to feasibly audition for Jersey Shore, but despite his occasionally big hair, Italian flag bedsheet and general ‘fungoo‘ attitude, his general take on life – center right, free market orthodox, vaguely socially conservative but pretty libertarian at the end of the day – is essentially English. As, of course, is his mother tongue.

Europe then is both familiar and entirely not. The trickles of European influence are absorbed into America, flattened out and smoothed into the cultural sea we US citizens swim in. I wanted to follow these streams to their source, see what of the stereotypes held true and which ones were so much merde.

The bus stopped in a line for the Chunnel next to a small service station. We were given a break for smokes and food. I had both: a Camel Light and a bacon and egg sandwich. Because I’m healthy like that. After 15 minutes the driver called on us back on board. I sat down, my body a little more settled and my general disposition – bursting to be in Europe – much less so.

The post The Hangover: English Channel Edition appeared first on The Faster Times.

Step three: Using dead animals as flotation devices

The island of Lewis is connected by a small spit to the island of Harris. Harris is currently famous for Harris Tweed and should be famous for having some of the most stunning landscapes this side of a fantasy novel.

Me and my traveling companion had, at this stage, couchsurfed, used dormitories, and slept in the spare rooms of kindly pensioners. We had woken up next to Portuguese fishermen and mad Scottish retirees and unsmiling Germans. We were in need of isolation and cold, windswept beauty, the original grail of our Scotland quest.

On Harris, there were treks into the mountains that were waymarked by crofter huts, the old, low-slung stone cottages that housed Mel Gibson in Braveheart (when he wasn’t spending those portions of the movie screaming like a Detroit Lions fan with a Bob Marley haircut). Balancing out the traditional huts were bothys, small wayhouses that can keep you  watertight and windtight and nothing more. It’s simple but generous hospitality, the sort of kindness to trekking strangers that is sadly rare among American landowners, but pretty par for the course in Europe. The code of the bothy is simple: bring your own bedding, your own firewood, and when you make No. 2, bury the shit outside.

Call it ‘crofter-surfing.’ Well, call it back country trekking, since that’s what it potentially was. David and I spent one more night in a boarder house in Stornoway, on the Island of Lewis, then set off by car the next morning for Harris and her hills.

There is an almost immediate shift in landscape as you cross the isthmus that separates the low gorse and blowsy grasslands – the machair – of Lewis from Harris. Both islands are cold and gale-stripped of vegetation, but where Lewis is flat, soft and rounded, Harris is knobbly, jagged and rocky. Harris bristles with mountains. It is harsh, and very beautiful in her harshness.

We rounded curves and bends in the road, our jaws in a permanent state of drop. On one bend, a steel-gray ocean was edging towards mountains whose peaks formed a bay, like Pacman taking a jagged chomp out of the sea. To the west, a plain rolled away into a foggy valley. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life. I said, “David,” but he was already pulling the car to the shoulder. That valley demanded a hike.

There was a curve of green short grass rounding like the bottom of a ‘J’, with the top of the letter the western peak that overlooked the entrance to the valley. The bottom arc extended into the plain and looked smooth and easy enough to walk up, a grassy spine to a great view. David set off at point; I followed behind a few paces.

All the way up flat slabs of rock jutted out like the pffting tongues of some race of rude giants. Purple heather and sharp shrubs clung to the cliffs, an alpine stubble for the rockface. We occasionally gripped the hard, sharp plants for footing, to keep from falling into larger and deeper chasms that striped the approaches to the mouth of the valley.

David reached the peak that lipped over the landscape before I did. It took me almost 20 minutes more to join him, and when I did we were both silent. Somewhere in my attic I still possess a photo of what we saw, and I can and will describe it here, but it was too beautiful, and came after too much searching – of feeling adrift in Europe and searching for a place to be alone, of long hours on British buses, of nights in train stations and bus depots, of rain and wind and more rain, of sleeping on strangers’ beds and sofas, of the long walk here from a car just glimpsed below by the white tideteeth of the northern seas – for me to truly describe the feeling that view gave us. It was as simultaneously sad and happy as I’ve ever been in my life.

We saw: A trickle of snow rush river. Wet, black clumps of boulders flanking a soft depression in the landscape, overlain with dark green grass. In topographic counterpoint, mountains made for dragons shredded a fog which poured over everything like sour milk.

David and I stared for awhile. One of us said, ‘Damn.’ We stared awhile more and then David started making his way back to the car, picking his way down the same slope we had trundled up.

“Wait,” I said.

“Wassup.”

“I’m gonna walk back through the valley.”

He stared at the bottomlands for a bit and nodded.

It took me almost half an hour of careful stepping amongst the rocks and the gorse, using Silverweed and Milk Wort as handholds that scratched my palms, to make the bottom of the valley. When I reached that lowland I realized my error in judgment.

This was not a valley but a bog inlet. There was no ground. It was, essentially, an extension of the bay we had spotted earlier. Grass mixed in with ocean; an estuary masquerading as land. I grew up in a similar wetscape amidst the marshes of Southern Maryland. I love that land, but I respect it, too, for its deceptive beauty. There’s a lot of dangers in the mucky teeth of a swamp.

Here and there marsh orchids and marigold and clumps of heather and red lichen formed little islands, but the rest was reed grass underlined with a thin gruel of mud and cold water. As I stepped in, I slipped, till the wet was up to my ankles, my knees, my waist, and finally, my chest. I imagined being dug up centuries later, preserved in peat, my jacket intact and leaving me identifiable to future archaeologists as Helly Hansen Man.

The situation turned worse when a thick Scottish mist curtained over everything, until I literally could not see five feet in front of me and the world was reduced to a milk cloud, plus the small lap laps of cold water pushing against my chest. My feet were suctioned into something warm and yielding. My arms treaded, because even with mountains just meters away, I was sinking into this hybrid land/water/fog world. If you have ever seen The Hedgehog in the Fog, that excellent Russian short animation film, this was where I was: in the fog, unable to escape, blind and led by whatever small sensory incidents were around me.

Ahead of me, I spotted something black. It stood out against the white mist like a beacon. I mucked my way towards it and the ground began to firm, until I pulled higher, dryer, and my feet were on solid something. The black, a small, dark blot, was still ahead of me. I backed up two steps, all I could without feeling the seep of water begin to squish into my toes, and then stepped forward and jumped.

Splash. Water rushed up, and now it was at my neck and my chin, but the indistinct form had taken on proportion, texture, definition: it was a drowned ram. Its coat was stringy and waving tendrils of wool in the rush water, blending into the encompassing fog. The head was black, a dead face, no longer bloated but stripped and leatherized by whatever bacteria preserves things in peat.

The water pumped in and out of the eyes and nostrils and between brown, rotting teeth and under the fur so the ram looked as if it were breathing in marsh time, like the marsh had given it life after robbing it of such. A few bones floated to the surface, displaced by the weight of my body.

I clung to the corpse like it was some ungulate life preserver and looked into the empty eye sockets, pulsing with the bog tide. The horns of the ram licked the surface of the water, and unaccountably, I wanted those horns, wanted to bend forward and hold them.

Instead I looked up onto a new world of sensory mileposts: flashes of color and marsh flora. I turned away from the horns and plucked a small sprig of purple heather, pocketing it. Then I placed my hands on the sides of the dead ram and pushed up and my feet were free and now my chest, and I pushed off and kicked out and was on ground once more. There was color ahead. I jumped again.

My feet skimmed the water and I swear in that moment something like hands pushed out of the sog. I felt, in a space between breath, the ghost of something around my ankles, yet nothing pulled me down but gravity and I landed with a whump in a clump of blood lichen and knife-y reeds. The plants grew on solid soil and I passed my hands through it, breathing that reassuring dank. The world was musty in my nostrils, and then cold, fresh, mountain air gusted through, and the fog started to lift.

Ahead of me, more marsh islands crept out of the cloak of the dissipating mist. I judged my distances, hopped them, one after the other, till the marsh islands became rock islands and the rock islands became turf. On one stretch carpeted in Sea Campion a herd of curious sheep waddled towards, than away from me. I wondered if they could smell their dead brother.

From there I stumbled, leg sore and gasping, back to the car. I saw myself reflected in the shotgun mirror: wet, and almost black up to my face with the trace of whatever I had just flirted with. I opened the car door and sat down.

David snored awake from a nap and gave me a once over. “What the hell happened to you?”

I sighed and lit a cigarette to stave off a wet cold already gripping at my bones, and exhaled. “Just drive, man.”

The post Bogsurfing, or How to Not Drown in Peat appeared first on The Faster Times.

Step 2: Find Megalithic Site. Make high school yearbook analogies

In the summer of 2002 I was unofficially couchsurfing my way across the Scottish Highlands. By couchsurfing, I mean I was crashing with whoever would host me at the time. Unfortunately, the reason I had opted to visit Scotland was the reason accommodation was difficult to find: I wanted to find a cold, lonely corner of Europe to lose myself in. I had found a kindred traveling spirit in another American named David, and together, we were discovering one of Europe’s last, great wildernesses – but unfortunately, not a lot of lodging options.

Things got worse (lodging wise) and better (scenery speaking) when we left the Scottish mainland for the Outer Hebrides, which by name alone were exactly what David and I were searching for. The word “Hebrides” may come from Greek or Gaelic or Norse or Gaelicized Norse and means, among the definitions I’ve found, ‘The Outer Islands,” “Islands at the Edge of the Ocean,” “Islands at the End of the Earth” and “The Islands of the Non-Gaels,” referring to the traditionally Norse population of this windswept archipelago.

Any way you cut it, “Hebrides” and its etymology essentially means distant, foreign, far away and other. The chain is the deep dark woods of the Scottish geographic unconscious, where generic Robert MacScotsman’s Wild Things Are. If winter is the season of being alone, it is always, as the Frenchman said, winter here.

We took a ferry from Ullapool to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, the Long Island. The Hebrides are small, fiercely Presbyterian and all alone; this is one of the last places in Scotland where Scottish Gaelic is both first language and spoken in everyday speech. Signs are bilingual here, and David and I had fun mispronouncing them – or at least the ones we could vaguely sound out. Gaelic’s dipthongs make no sense to anyone who hasn’t grown up with them, and those liquid vowel combinations, while attractive on the page, defy the native English speaker’s clumsy tongue in practice.

Letters are literally inserted for cosmetics, because they fit some arcane transliteration formula. As a result, “Gaelic,” written in its own alphabet, is “G

The post Seals and Standing Stones in Scotland’s Outer Islands appeared first on The Faster Times.

Earlier in the night, somewhere between fight and I-love-you-sho-mush-man, I commented to Paddy, “The English are good to drink with, but you people take it to another level. Every Irish night out seems to go batshit.”

He snorted. “That’s because they’re fucking English. We’re human beings. We’re Celts.” Then he took another shot.

I nodded. There is something about the Celts that has always appealed to me, and I hasten to add I don’t have a drop of Irish, Scottish, Manx or Welsh blood, so please don’t think of me as the sort of American with a great-aunt’s roommate named Conroy who feels the need to go to Muckanaghederdauhaulia and bleat about my ‘heritage’ to anyone who’ll listen in County Galway.

But that mix of melodramatic fatalism, passion, dry humor and sustained substance abuse does hold a place in my heart. It has ever since my first trip into the Celt-o-sphere, undertaken seven years ago as a college student on summer break. It’s a story worth a couchsurfing post, although the terminology may be more accurately expressed as ‘bogsurfing.’

Here’s what happened.

Step 1: “I love zee North”

I met David in Ullapool after taking an 18-hour bus from London to Aberdeen to Middle-earth. No, not really, but…well, really. Have you ever been to the Northwest highlands of Scotland? Ullapool is a lonely point of reference stabbed into a coastline shredded by a sea monster.

You are not in Norway, but these, friends, are fjords: great, brown and gray valleys carpeted in soft moss and fairy groves of damp red lichen, buttered at sunset – and night comes slow this far north – by clots of dark, purple heather. There are sunny days, but I never experienced them. I was here in deep summer, but the sky was steel gray and the ocean was steel gray and all the light and color had been leached from the land. Hobbits trek this  way on the road to Mt Doom.

David was another American student. He had been studying in Edinburgh; I had finished a semester in Prague. School was out and, in the American tradition, we were backpacking across Europe.

At home, my friends were entering journalism internships, complaining about being paid $600 a week in those heady days of non-newspaper collapse. I was broke, living off of a budgeted thirteen British pounds a day, which was to include lodging, which was usually the chairs of train stations. Food was a bottle of water, peanut butter, a Snickers if I could afford it. The rest went to lodging. If that element of financial management went out the window, I could double my caloric intake.

This was 2002, before the days of official Couchsurfing, although I couchsurfed in spirit, and sometimes, reality. If no one was offering a couch or room and there weren’t public transportation terminals to doss in, I’d snatch naps on park benches. Or else I’d sneak into the dormitories of youth hostels, paying for one night and shifting my stuff around in the mornings. It was distasteful and dishonest; I hope being 21 was something of an excuse.

I got my comeuppance every now and then. Never caught, but sometimes my dorm mates were weirder than the beer-breaths at the bus stop. One morning I woke up, or more accurately, was woken up, in northern Scotland at 5am by the sort of hardcore trekkers Scotland attracts. They were, of course, Germanic – from Deutschland proper and neighboring Austria, rustling plastic bags about, spreading nutella on toast, gobbling on like farm animals in Bavarian German.

One of them must have noticed the stink eye I was directing towards them.

“Must be up early. Vee need to make zee summit by noon, ja?”

I grunted ‘ja,’ then went back to bed, comforting myself with D-Day fantasies.

David was also a trekker, but he was cool: a  pony-tailed Coloradan, the sort of laidback granola eating, gaiter-wearing hippie who I imagine will be  reunited with some distant day in Telluride. We were both seeking the same thing: distance from the hot, bustling summer swelter of urban Europe in July in favor of windswept isolation and a palpable sense of loneliness.

One day we managed to convince a lovely, elderly Scottish woman to rent us two spare cots in her boarding house. It was inhabited by a rogues’ gallery: a Scottish pensioner with a Sean Connery brogue and Hemingway beard named Jim, who was exploring his homeland in his retirement; a crew of gentleman-ly fishermen, mostly swarthy, quiet Portuguese with small dark eyes and navy beanies who dragged on cigarettes that smelled like rotten sweat and ate frittatas and cod in the communal kitchen.

A member of their crew wasn’t Portuguese, though, didn’t speak in that odd muddle of Iberian lisp and chewy, Slavonic-sounding accents. He was French; chestnut skin, thinning silver hair, pale blue eyes as wild as a seagull. He wasn’t a permanent member of the crew, and only fished when he wanted to.

I walked in on David speaking to him one evening.

“Je vis à Bayonne, mais je viens ici chaque année.”

“He says he comes here every year,” David said, noting the question on my face.

“Why?”

He turned, staring at the empty docks outside, and blew his cigarette  out the window. “I love zee North. I love zee winters. Ze emptiness. It’s always winter here, non?”

(Next time: getting lost on the Islands at the End of the Earth)

The post Couchsurfing Scotland, or How to Drown in a Bog appeared first on The Faster Times.

In my last months as a student I lived in the East End, near Bethnal Green, down a road that eventually evolved into the Third World bazaar I spent so much of the next two years wandering through as a Lonely Planet author. Pakistanis, Bengalis, Nigerians, Egyptians; I have this constant attraction to Asia and Africa, so why not just live here, where Asia and Africa and their assorted chaos are on the doorstep? Cheap watches thrust in the face; flea market off brand clothes, belts and purses; ripped off DVDs and music videos and porn and Korans just a few fold out tables apart.

Maybe it is too chaotic, and maybe this is why I never was able to live in Asia and Africa; I missed those things that I find distinctly Western. The new and hip, music and museums and art galleries that, while present in Jakarta and Nairobi and other sweaty capitals, feels too hidden or reserved for expats and an aristocratic class I’ve always felt a little awkward around.

So then the East End steps up again, this time with the impossibly cool artists, musicians, DJs and designers who wander along Brick Lane, itself the Bengali version of Miami’s Calle Ocho, the public persona of an immigrant community that has actually integrated into its parent society to the point that said community can afford to be ironically self-referential.

One road: curry stalls and stands (including an Asian fusion place named, oddly, for Rosa Parks; just a little off-putting). Other direction: markets selling pop art, t-shirts fashioned by young, hungry designers from around the world, demo tapes by Jamaicans looking to break big.

By nighttime the brick walls by Brick Lane are the rusty brown of dried blood under the street lights. The rains have passed; it is cold and dry, and that raspy air gusts through the narrow passages, mixing with the hot salty sweat breath of thousands of milling folks.

Now everything is too new, too hip and contemporary and cutting edge. I no longer feel creative in this atmosphere, but behind the times. The pressure to be newer and more shocking than the folks around me is intense; all around is the sense these artists and artisans are more interested in making the New over the Beautiful, which has always been my beef with modern art.

At the same time, I must acknowledge my own insecurities in this environment. When it comes to stereotypically cutting edge arts scenes, maybe I am just too conservative. So I retreat a bit back into the spice and warmth of Bethnal Green and Mile End’s immigrant enclaves. I’ll probably be able to stay within these circles for a few days, until the incomprehension of all those multiple, muddy languages pushes me back into the well-heeled hipness of Hoxton, Angel and Shoreditch, seeking assurance amidst the crowds of the young and brand name booted and smart-dressed.

In short, this is all too much. The things that I love not just about London, but about the City, if we consider the City as its own universal entity, a word for any place where humans congregate, hell, humanity in general – our diversity and creativity and energy – are all cranked to 11 in the East End to such a point that I need to turn down the volume and the brightness after a few hours.

It is at these points I retreat back to Clapham Common, in South London. Clapham is busy and bustling, but she is, essentially, warm and safe, the originator of the term, ‘Man on the Clapham Omnibus,’ a description of the everyman cited in so much English civil jurisprudence. Warmth and safety are what I associate with one of the most hallowed of British institutions: the pub, that home away from home, fireplace-kitted out sanctuary where a man can down a pint and feel the worries of the day and shit English weather vanish into buzzing conviviality (or admittedly, hangdog alcoholism; while finishing my Master’s degree I worked in a London pub and dealt with plenty of walking psoriasis and clinical depression cases).

My London pub is called the Bread and Roses. The name, in and of itself, it lovely; it’s an old labor slogan demanding both food and dignity, sustenance and beauty. And the pub provides both; it is hip but not pretentiously so, and cozy without being hokey.

A mate from grad school joins me here, a young, half Welsh, half Lebanese politician who I reckon is being groomed for office within his own beloved Labour party. It’s appropriate I’m meeting my buddy, the multiracial face of New Labour, at the Bread and Roses, an establishment named for an old working class slogan that has transformed into a new pub for the new London worker. We chat with a London cop; he doesn’t have a bobby cap or baton, but tracks down pedophiles via internet policing. The B&R serves warm, bitter ale that CAMRA would approve of, but they do a mean mojito too.

Somehow, we learn they serve jaeger bombs as well, and the night takes that turn for the raucous that only – I am a little embarrassed to write – six jaeger bombs, plus several pints of beer and far too many whiskeys can engender. My mate ends up couch surfing with me, as we finish the night far too drunk to get him to his place. Since he is getting my ‘couch’ (the air mattress) I end up floor surfing, but not before we have to re-inflate the mattress.

We sneak into the aparTment with the sort of exaggerated lets-be-quiet drunk ninja gesturing that is the exact opposite of being quiet. Whisper whisper, crash-dammit-man-I-told-you-to-watch-out-for-the-lamp. Okok nowshhhhh be quiet while I hook the air tube to the mattress. Just gotta flick the switch here…

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

I forgot the air mattress pump makes a noise somewhere between an outboard motor and a charging elephant. We both collapse on each other laughing, until the mattress pumps up. I curl up on a solitary sheet on the floor and drift off, fitfully dreaming of training in the Spartan army and wake up feeling, to put it lightly, like shit. Our hosts are not awake yet, thank God, so we go for a coffee, emerging, blearily, into the light. A jogger huffs by, and my friend pauses.

“Christ, mate, that was Polly Toynbee,” he says, naming one of the most prominent left wing newspaper columnists in Britain. I nod, impressed, but he is more star struck, the young Labour politician come (briefly) face to jogger butt with a journalistic idol.

“That may be a bloody sign,” he says.

I nod, thinking of how I am about to leave the United Kingdom for the European continent, thinking of how every random moment on the road so far has felt like a sign pointing me to some serendipitous next exit on life’s highway, thinking, basically, much the same way.

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