These Last Six Weeks

I realized last night (while making my slow, tortuous way back to Berlin, through various train mess-ups and delays) that I've traveled about four weeks out of the last six. More specifically, I guess it was 32 days out of 45 - which makes a bit more than 2/3. It's been crazy and great.

I was also working this last week, while I was visiting friends and then in Belgium - it actually worked out well, to travel and translate at the same time.

I just did the calculations, and I actually even managed to earn more money this week than I spent - not a huge amount more, and it's not taking into account the fact that while I travel, I'm also still paying for my apartment and other running costs back in Berlin - but considering that travel is usually 100% spending and no earning, it doesn't seem too bad.

Maybe there's a future for me as a roving freelancer?

Where I Was: Belgium

Obsessed with My Maps much? Yes, I am.


View Belgium Dec. 2010 in a larger map

In Antwerp

BELGIANS: So friendly and helpful! I'd forgotten! (Flashback to Rebecca and me, on our cycle tour, hauling our bikes up to the platform of a train that was already pulling out of the station, and the train STOPPED FOR US and the nice conductor helped us load our bikes on. This would never, ever, ever, ever, ever happen in Germany.)

ANTWERP: So full of ultra-Orthodox Jews! In their hats and long black coats! Riding bicycles! I'm not sure I'd ever seen an Orthodox Jew ride a bicycle - but since this is Flemish-speaking Belgium and thus a lot like the Netherlands in many respects (but shh, please don't tell them I said that) of course they do here.

THE FLEMISH LANGUAGE: Not just a dialect of Dutch, but in fact many, many different dialects of Dutch. I had the good fortune to fall into conversation with a middle-aged local guy who was an expert on the Bruges dialect, at the bar of the hostel where I was staying. He and the woman at the reception told me about regional differences in how they pronounce things from how the Dutch pronounce things, and that you can tell which town in Belgium someone is from by hearing their dialect. "Even the next town over," the man said. "Oh, yeah, definitely," the woman said.

In Dutch, I Mean Flemish, I Mean Belgian, Oh, Whatever

I'm also so happy to be back in one of the homelands of one of my all-time favorite languages: Dutch!

Memorably described by my friend Rebecca as "German written by a clown," Dutch is approximately 45% English and 45% German with 10% alien-language thrown in. So if you speak the first two of those, you can usually sort out what Dutch is trying to say, at least when it's written. When spoken, unfortunately, the alien-language percentage jumps to about 50% (chhh sounds, etc.) so that's a little more difficult to penetrate. But still awesome.

In Bruges

This town seems to be spelled with a different number and combination of g's and umlauts in every known language, and I can't seem to get it straight. My dad wrote me back with this helpful comment: "In English we spell it Bruges, and pronounce it with a 'zh' sound, as in 'leisure'. Mostly, we just don't say it."

Indeed.


Celebrated arrival in Belgium last night by eating an enormous portion (it was the "small") of fries drenched in mayonnaise. Afterward, felt slight ill and figured I'd fulfilled my quota of deep fried things for the foreseeable future.


Bruges is known around Europe for being so ridiculously picturesque it borders on disneyworldesque, and in this, Bruges does not disappoint. Last night I wandered down the street from my hostel to the medieval town gate next to a row of old-fashioned windmills, then watched a drawbridge rise so a modern barge could squeeze through the narrow moat that surrounds the old town. Seriously, Bruges? You still have a moat?

Nighttime at the main square:

Also, all over the place are tours and things relating to the city's one big recent claim to fame: the 2008 movie "In Bruges," which apparently (I just finally looked it up) concerns two hitmen stuck, purgatory-like, in Bruges.

The weird thing is that this turns out to be the very same movie as the German title "Brügge sehen...und sterben?" (See Bruges...and die?) I feel like I've been hearing that title forever, so I assumed it had to be a different movie from this "In Bruges" thing I'm seeing advertised everywhere. But apparently, in this case, "forever" means "two years."

On the Train Again

The absolute best thing out of many bests over Christmas at my friend Lisa's family: Lisa's three-year-old nephew Julian and Lisa's mom Ulrike playing together with Julian's puppets. Julian was completely worked up and overtired, but categorically refusing to even think about bed; Ulrike was voicing the witch puppet in a straight-talking Rhineland dialect, telling Julian's frog puppet, "Go tell that boy Julian, he should go to bed!" Julian turned around and in all earnestness informed himself, via the frog, "You should go to bed."


Now I'm on a train out of Germany. (This new USB stick thing that gives me internet access anywhere there's a cell phone network, by the way, is quite possibly my new favorite item EVER.)

I've got some work to do this coming week, but no appointments specifically tying me to Berlin, and at some point I noticed an almost desperate desire to use that flexibility. Because, well, why stay at home if I don't have to?

I think this is what they call being bitten by the travel bug.

So the next couple days I'll be in Bruges, Belgium, and then briefly in Antwerp, before heading home in time for New Year's in Berlin. I noticed already on the train platform, when Lisa and her dad saw me off, that I was almost bouncing with excitement to be headed off for points new and unknown, instead of just the boring old west-east corridor back to Berlin I've done so many times before.


Also, can I just mention that Belgium has possibly the world's cutest trains? Rebecca and I noticed this on our Belgian/Dutch bike tour three and a half(!) years ago - we felt like we were in the prefects' carriage of the Hogwarts Express.

The Year's Midnight, and the Day's

Happy solstice! From here on out, the days can only get longer - isn't that a lovely thought?

Today is both the winter solstice and the full moon - a total lunar eclipse, no less. (In my time zone, the eclipse happened after sunrise and moonset, so I didn't see it, but I'm still enjoying the idea.) Winter solstice and a lunar eclipse haven't coincided in 372 years, apparently, and though there's no particular astrological significance to these two things happening on the same day, there's somehow something resonant about it from the human side of things.

Winter solstice. The shortest day, the longest night, all in the depths of snowy winter. No surprise here that so many cultures have holidays around this time that involve candles and bonfires, celebrating light at the darkest time of the year.

Here's my favorite solstice poem, John Donne's "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day." St. Lucy's Day is actually December 13 - you might know it as the Swedish Santa Lucia - but Donne is writing about the longest night in the darkest winter, when the world seems dead - the solstice. I wouldn't worry about understanding everything he's saying... I love to read this poem aloud and just let it wash over me.


'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

Christmas in Berlin

Germans have really small Christmas trees...or maybe Americans just have really large ones?

In any case, the Christmas trees now popping up on makeshift tree lots all over Berlin are darling little things, often not even as tall as a person. And since the branches are usually wrapped up tightly in netting like this for ease of transportation, when you see them on the streets being carried home, they look even smaller. (This may vary a bit regionally, since I think part of the point here is that Berlin is a city, and in a city people live in small apartments, rather than big houses.)

The other day I even saw a couple pushing a Christmas tree in their baby carriage...they had one of those double ones meant for twins, and there was a baby in one side and a Christmas tree in the other.

Where I Was

Hey, I finally figured out how to use "My Maps" on Google! So here's a map of where I was in South India. Not expertly executed or anything, but it gives you an idea.


View South India in a larger map

Pictures from Kochi and Kodai

The backwaters, a network of lakes and canals, in Kerala (southwest India).

Kathakali dance demonstration - a type of story-play in dance form.

In a mountain river near Kodaikanal.

Ben, Maike and the wild bison.

Vivek and Farouk in Farouk's souvenir shop, laughing over a phone call with (I think) Farouk's young daughter.