When we visited Kolin, a small town near Prague, we noticed some darker skinned people who didn't look like most of the other people we saw in that town or in Prague. We saw a couple of families of these darker skinned people on a visibly poorer street in the town and some "mixed race" couples as well in other parts of the town.
Being blond-haired, blue-eyed, and having fair skin, German people began speaking to me in German on more than one occasion. My wife was born and raised in the Philippines and is noticeably darker than Germans. As we traveled together throughout Germany, we noticed that people stared both at Karen and at the two of us together as if they had never seen a couple like us before in their lives. They weren't embarassed in the slightest when we caught them staring. They would just keep on staring until we stared back. It was only then that they realized how uncomfortable a stare could be and they would stop. We were never looked at the same way in any other country we traveled to.
Nature happened to call Karen when we were near the zoo in Berlin. As she entered the public bathroom, she saw a grungy women looking for something on the floor. Karen walked past her and entered a stall. The toilet bowl, seat and floor all had fresh blood on them so she moved to another stall. As she did so, she noticed the grungy woman was on her hands and knees continuing her search with a stick that she was dragging along the floor under each stall door, one after the other. Then Karen noticed a syringe on the floor at the side of her stall, and realized she couldn't get out of there soon enough.
The "zoo" is also how Berliners refer to the large subway station that is located near the Berlin Zoo, but it is an ironic appellation for an area that resembles a zoo of sorts. No where else in Berlin or even Europe (not even Amsterdam) did we see more people that looked like drug abusers than near the "zoo" subway station.
Strasbourg is a small, pretty city that has been a historical pawn fought over numerous times by the Germans and French. The Alsatians and neighboring Lorrainers have a culture distinct from either super power, but one that blends elements of them both. Strasbourg is seen by many as the de facto capital of Alsace-Lorraine.
Our most memorable experience in Strasbourg, which was unfortunately dwarfed by the larger cities we stayed at (and spent more time exploring) involved a drunk couple in the middle of the day. I saw an inebriated woman crouched over in between two cars as her drunk companion waited for her on a sidewalk bench. Curious, I kept looking at her until I realized what she was doing. She had her pants around her ankles and was urinating. She got up just as I was walking by and didn't seem in any hurry to cover up were paunchy stomach or the thick bush of black hair between her legs. It wasn't an attractive or pleasant sight and I looked away immediately. Karen, who was walking slightly behind me, saw her just as she had covered up her pubic hair. The woman shouted something to her in French and from what Karen could make out, it sounded like she was asking for toilet paper!
We traveled to Berlin during the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and there were a couple of exhibits dealing with Nazi Germany that we were able to attend. While in a town in Baden Württemberg, we had the chance to speak with some German people that could speak English about this period in German history and a couple of other issues.
We learned about a man who was stationed in Southern Italy during the war and what became of his family during this time period. His parents had petitioned that he not be sent to the Eastern Front (Russia) because they already had three sons who had been sent there. One of his brothers died in Stalingrad and the other two brothers died less than a half dozen years after the war while prisoners in Russian camps. The relatives hadn't even heard from the brothers in Russia following the war, but finally got in contact with them through a pastor somehow.
I once saw a movie, Nasty Girl, that dealt with a young woman's interest in finding out the townspeople's roles in the war. The daughter of this one soldier in the family to have survived told us that the townspeople never spoke about their roles in the war when she was growing up much the same as life was depicted in the movie. She added that those who were financially well-off had a least colluded with the Nazis during the war because they would never have been able to hold onto their wealth otherwise.
Several years ago, I had read in newspaper articles that the Turkish immigrants in Germany were resented even though they held menial jobs that most Germans had no desire in taking. I had the opportunity to ask a young woman about the German attitude towards immigrants from her perspective. She said the only complaint she had with the Turkish immigrants was their unwillingness to assimilate. She was more upset with the other non-Germans who have taken advantage of Germany's previously open borders to exploit Germany's social system without contributing their own fair share.
First in Austria, and later in Germany, Karen had noticed that the tires on cars all looked brand new. We also noticed that, like in Tokyo, people didn't drive cars on the road that were banged up or had any noticeable problems. We asked a woman about this and she said that German cars, at least, undergo an inspection to assure such a thing. She added that there is tremendous community pressure on individuals in Germany to maintain things such as their cars and homes.
The Metro, one of the best subway systems in the world, makes Paris one of the easiest cities to discover. Paris is the city of Napoleon. The place where his tomb rests at Invalides, where his achievements are honored at the Arc de Triomphe, and Vendome, and his presence can even be felt at nearby Versailles. It is the place of the most famous museum in the world, where the Mona Lisa (or a copy) hangs behind a piece of glass as tourists take flash photographs to take home as a souvenir of the most famous painting in the world. They have no concern for the fact that the painting may not survive for the next generation. It's the site of the most amazing exhibit of Impressionist art in the world at the D'Orsay. Surprisingly enough, Paris is not the home of the rudest people in the world as many a tourist will tell you (this award goes to the Italians, tourist and local residents, in Florence). Paris is the picture of a man or a woman walking down the street with nothing but a two foot long baguette in his or her hand. It's a place where both the most beautiful and delicious deserts can be seen on nearly every block. Paris is a chocoholics dream!
The bullfight is Spain, and Madrid is the capital of both. There is an intricate culture built into bullfighting. Whistling is a vehicle for showing displeasure, and clapping to show approval. In the six-fight event we attended, everyone pulled out sandwiches and drinks after the third as if on queu though the time separating every fight was approximately equal. Finally, everyone stands after the bull is killed even if just to stretch his or her legs.
In a typical bullfight, the bull is led out and taunted by the matador's assistants; a man on an armored horse thrusts a spear into the back of the bull to weaken it (two out of four times it was weakened severely: one time blood poured out when the bull stood still and the other time the bull kept slipping forward both during and after charges and the audience took pleasure in this); next, three assistants in succession charge the bull head-on and thrust a couple of short spears (banderillas) in the hump of the bull (this appears to be as dangerous as what the matador does especially given the fact that the bull is weaker by then); finally, the matador challenges the bull with his cape - the most daring way is to hold his feet in place as the bull charges by, the closer the bull gets to the matador as it charges by the greater the applause from the crowd; at the end, the matador thrusts a sword into the bull, head-on and then the bull is dragged out of the arena by a team of horses.
Bullfighting is very dangerous, but deceptively so because the bull is so weakened by the time the matador kills him that it doesn't seem to be much of a fight at all most of the time. We saw one assistant loose his cape to a bull, and another was chased to the wall where he was almost gored before climbing to safety. I left the bullfighting wondering why the Spanish don't adopt more modern methods of killing bulls and just shoot them in the head. Then I recalled how the Spaniards in California used to place a bull and a grizzly in a corral for sport. The grizzly was sure to win on the open range, but within the confines of a pen he was often the looser. Some sport!
Some of the women of Madrid are as beautiful and unique as any women anywhere else in the world. It doesn't hurt that many of them flaunt their breasts in a way that is remarkably sensual. Madrid is not as wealthy as the countries of Northern Europe, but it is a beautiful city with delicious food and its special drink, sangria, oh sangria! Madrid is much more than bullfights, good food, sangria, and beautiful Spanish women, but not much else seems to matter.
Amsterdam is an incredibly picturesque city with more bicyclists than car drivers (this was not the case in cities we visited, like Munich and Vienna, where bicyclists had their own intricate network of paths and the right-of-way with pedestrians). The canals were made more picturesque by the small bridges built over them. The beautiful old, narrow, buildings usually were equipped with hooks near the roofs so that heavy boxes and furniture could be roped up to the higher floors since the stairways are too narrow for historical reasons. The city can be smelly by the canals because they have partially enclosed steel toilets for men to urinate in. They have no running water in these toilets, just a small hole in the ground.
As uniquely beautiful as it is, Amsterdam stands out from other European cities because of its two sins: prostitution and dope, but it seemed that its reputation for the latter at least attracted throngs of young adults in search of naughty freedom. The prostitution was restricted to a specific area, and was as much a tourist attraction - just for gawking - as anything. Prostitution occurs everywhere, what made it different in Amsterdam was that women, often Turkish or Asian though not Dutch, sat in windows dressed in lingerie displaying their wares for passersby. It looked safer than prostitution on the streets of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. There was an occasional sign on the streets advertising call-girls, but these advertisements are seen throughout the U.S. as well in lightly veiled ads for "escorts".
Although we saw child pornography displayed even in subway stations in Berlin, we have never seen bestiality magazines until we arrived in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, near the redlight district there are several porno-shops and a couple of them had bestiality magazines prominently displayed in their windows.
We walked into the Bulldog Cafe and it seemed like any pickup bar, but it was recommended by a local publication as one of the nicest places to purchase and smoke marijuana and hashish. We couldn't figure out where you were suppose to purchase the dope because nothing was on the menu though we had read that such places have a menu for purchases. I walked up to the bartender and asked where I could buy something to smoke. He told me "downstairs". So I went there only to find the W.C. The bathroom attendant told me to go upstairs and out the front door before going downstairs into the "coffeehouse". Before leaving, I also asked her where it was permitted to smoke dope. She looked at me surprised and said, "anywhere," adding that I could smoke in the ground level bar if I chose to. The small, dark Bulldog Cafe "coffeehouse" had two rooms, one just longer than the length of the bar it housed and barely wider, and a second room running parallel to the first with stools and a bar type table running the length of the wall. It also had small glass encased "greenhouse" with a few three-foot high marijuana plants growing in it. I approached the bartender and asked him where I could buy something to smoke and he told me with an accompanying nod of his head to go back to the entrance, where in a corner was a woman talking with a man. She pointed to a menu taped to the short bar in front of her. The menu had a list of some fifteen to twenty different varieties of marijuana and hashish. I purchased the cheapest two grams for FL25 (probably the most common price-per-weight on the list).
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
