As we were walking home one night in Rome, three tall ladies in short black skirts caught my eye. I told Karen I thought they were out for a night of entertainment. She didn't think they were seeking entertainment, but rather were offering it for a living. As our path took us closer to them we heard voices that were unmistakably those of the sex with the higher levels of testosterone and we realized that had it been brighter out, we would have more easily noticed protruding Adam's apples and perhaps razor stubble peaking through their makeup.
As we walked a block further, we saw a woman bending over calling her dog down a cul de sac while the dog walked relaxed as could be behind her sniffing this and that.
Karen noticed that many of the older women in Prague had elephantitis or severely swollen ankles and lower legs probably from gout. I also noticed that the Czech people's teeth were somewhere near the condition of people I've seen in the undeveloped Philippines though the hygiene of the people in the latter was surprisingly better than most people in Europe.
Spaniards have predominately brown eyes and dark brown hair. They have slightly fairer skin than Italians. The women look distinct from northern Europeans and often wear tight shirts accentuating their breasts. Being in Spain, it became readily apparent that their genetic impact on the races of Latin America and the Philippines is rather limited.
I think we saw more ethnic Asians in Amsterdam than any other place in Europe, and they looked like residents not tourists. There were also lots of hippy-dippy types as well as gay people (both men and women) there apparently attracted by the liberal attitudes of the town.
The Carabinieri policemen in Italy reminded me of pictures of the German Gestapo: their uniforms, their hats, and their expression of contempt. I felt very uncomfortable everytime I walked past a machine-gun wielding Carabinieri. When we were in Berlin, we saw policemen with muzzled attack dogs (the muzzles could be taken off with a flick of the wrist) in subway stations and at a historical site. A handful of these policemen with two Rotweiler dogs were demonstrating to each other the vicious appearance of their dogs by encouraging them to growl and bark at each other. I videotaped this and one of the policemen with a dog walked in my direction without saying anything, but it was obvious from the expression on his face that he was trying to intimidate me. When we were in Paris, I noticed a couple of policemen in a subway there, one of them with an attack dog as well. I began to videotape them also and they signaled for me to stop. They had been on the opposite side of the train tracks, but walked over to my side and said not to videotape them. When I asked, "why?", one of the men told me they were "top secret" and that it was against the law. When I looked at him incredulously, he adopted a new tactic and stated that the subway was a private - not public place. Later we saw a woman approach a police officer with her elderly mother. She appeared to be asking him if she could take a picture of her mother with him. He quickly waved her away. The police in Ireland were the least threatening police I have ever seen in my life. They didn't wear guns and their uniform was simple: uniform pants, button-up shirt, and tie. They didn't even appear to have a weapon, all that hung from their belts were walkie-talkies. The police in England didn't carry guns either, but they had batons. The English police had the handsome hats on that they're famous for, but the button-up shirts that they wore did not flatter the guts that the majority of them seemed to carry as well. The police in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had green uniforms that were only mildly more threatening looking that their counterparts in the South or across the Irish Sea, but they had listening devices of some sort apparent in their ear with a cord that trailed down into their shirts, they carried guns, and the shear number of them reflected the tension of a Northern Ireland even after eleven months of peace.
On Good Friday in Athens, we saw many people drop off at churches merely to light a candle and kiss a crucifix or icon before leaving. Others went to attend a portion of the services which seemed to be held day long without any particular starting or finishing point.
Italy is the land of the Madonna. On numerous corner buildings there could be seen a relief of the Madonna in some form. There was a strong contrast, however, between how the two most obviously Catholic places in the world, the Philippines and Italy, deal with pornography. In the Philippines, there is no such thing as a pornographic magazine. I couldn't even find an issue of Playboy or Penthouse, which are the most common magazines of any variety throughout the world. Pornography in the Philippines is limited to half-naked "girlie" poster ads which are common. In Italy, by contrast, pornographic magazines are peddled from every newsstand.
People at a papal audience (non-Italians among them) were rudely standing up on their chairs all the while complaining of others who were doing the same with no concern for those behind them. Just when I lapsed into this cynical criticism about humanity at its worst when you expect its best, these same rude people would give up their chairs to others to see the great Papa.
While in Rome, we visited a cemetery in a church unlike any cemetery we had ever seen. In Europe, it is not uncommon for people to be buried in churches and chapels but this particular church had, with the bones of 4,000 deceased clerics, created fanciful designs on the walls and ceilings of a few chambers in the church building. Added to this gruesome oddity, that Karen admired in as much as human bones were being used for something other than to study in school, was the inscription: "What we once were, you are now. What we are now, you will be." Somehow, thought, the shiver sent up my spine after reading this wore thin like that provoked by a horror movie when I reflected that this inscription, like the designs of the bones themselves, was after all conceived by the living before he succumbed to be what we all fear.
We went to the Jewish synagogue in Florence which we were told serves 1000 members of the Jewish community residing in the area. There were police vans in the front and rear of the synagogue representing a twenty-four hour guard of the grounds. A young woman attendant at the synagogue explained that the police had guarded the synagogue on special occasions for some time, but since an attack on a synagogue in Rome several years earlier, the protection was expanded to twenty-four hours, every day of the week.
This was merely a continuation of the plight Jews have suffered in Italy as throughout all of Europe. A small museum within the synagogue building showed that Jews had been ghettoized in Florence until the Napoleonic period beginning in 1798 and were re-ghettoized with his defeat in 1815. Jews were finally given full rights with the proclamation of the Republic in the mid-nineteenth century, but during World War II most of the Jewish population of Florence was exiled or killed. Numerous names of those killed during World War II were listed on tablets outside the synagogue in a garden within the compound.
In the southern German countryside there are farm fields where a crucifix will be flanked by a couple of trees. Apparently these are sites for farmers to gather and pray during the day. We also saw May-poles in Austria and in Germany. Some of these poles were stripped of branches and bark except where some bark was left remaining at the top, or in other placed to form a design; they often have a ring or two of pine; and small flags or symbols hanging from smaller cross poles hung even distances from each other. May-poles and the town church steeples dominated most of the village skylines in Southern Germany.
We noticed chalk on several door frames of both homes and businesses. We learned that the children come around and sing a religious song during Lenten season and then write the verse on the door frame in chalk.
Public European telephones often operated with multiple use telephone cards which are sold at tobacco and/or magazine stands. Even after several attempts, we couldn't get the coin operated machines to work at a subway station in Prague. The phone cards seemed only to fit phones in the country where you purchased them, but certainly reflected the high use of public telephones in every country we visited. The pictures on the cards ranged from the bland with a simple number of phone units on them to pictures of cars or naked women with almost everything in between. These latter phone cards were sold at an inflated price to collectors.
Bicycles are a popular form of transportation in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. In these countries bicycle lanes are common as are traffic lights specifically made for bicyclists. Bicyclists in Amsterdam often carry passengers on their back-racks.
The mass transit systems in nearly every country we visited was far better than any we have ever seen in the U.S. We road extensive, and efficient subways in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Munich, Strasbourg, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, and London that were far superior to anything found in San Francisco, New York City, or Chicago. Even in the worst system found in these cities, London's, where the sometimes dilapidated trains were often overcrowded and would sometimes stop in between stations apparently to wait for a train going in the opposite direction to go by, the system was far superior to any found in the U.S. The train systems linking the cities of Europe, both big and small, was also extremely good. The ICE (Intercity Express) and TGV trains in Germany and France respectively were the most luxurious trains we rode on, the Eurostar strains which go through the Chunnel reached comparable speeds with these trains (the ICE train traveled at 250kph or 95mph) but the interior of this train was in no way comparable to the TGV or the ICE. The ICE train was the most luxurious train we road on (in 1st class) being slightly better in comfort and ascetics than a 1st class airplane seat, but without the amenities of food and drink. The only conclusion I could reach comparing these systems with their counterparts in the United States was that Americans have chosen to expend their resources on freeways rather than intra-city and inter-city rail lines.
In Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Amsterdam you don't have to purchase a ticket to get onto a bus or subway train though you are suppose to, and the penalty for being caught is less extreme in some places relative to others. For instance, in Austria you will be fined 500OS (about $50), the fine in Prague is only 500Koruna (about $20), and in Munich it is 174DM (about $41 at the time). We were never asked for our ticket and did ride free once or twice in a couple of countries. We saw a couple of kids on rollerblades skate pass the subway agent booths in Prague and duck beneath the window, but I couldn't understand why they needed to be so secretive about evading the fare. It was difficult to find out what the subway agents did at the windows next to the subway entrances in Prague. They didn't sell tickets and people often walked right in front of them without punching in their tickets into the machines which were right before them as they were suppose to. We were so confused about how to clock our strippenkart ticket in at Amsterdam, and we later realized we were unwittingly cheating the system by not punching the ticket in enough times when we road the lightrail there. You were suppose to use up two spaces on a multiple use ticket every time you took the lightrail, but we didn't realize this until just before we left Amsterdam.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
