What the Guidebooks Forgot to Mention or We Ignored

[June, 1995] Traveling in a foreign country is not like going to an amusement park where all the sites, food, and facilities are laid out for your convenience. The traveling, especially the walking, from site to site can be difficult even grueling. You always need a detailed map and should learn how to use the local public transportation system though these are said to be the favorite haunts of pickpockets (we've been lucky to avoid pickpockets perhaps with an ounce of caution). Ordering food is one of the most difficult aspects of traveling since everything is often in a foreign language and usually the familiar foods don't tast anything like the "foreign" food back home. Always be suspicious of specific places to eat and shop listed in guidebooks, you can usually do better with chance. The most basic advice a traveler should abide by is don't take too many clothes and luggage; and watch what others do when in doubt about what to do. You get the best rate of exchange if you purchase food and souveniers with credit cards (the cash advance machines in Amsterdam don't take Visa-1995). Always search around for the best exchange rates and lowest commissions when exchanging money, often times large banks will give the best exchange rate. Buy inexpensive provisions at a deli-type store or a grocery store before taking several-hour-long train trips, the food will be less expensive, you'll have a larger variety of choices, and it will probably taste better than that food on the train. Purchase train tickets and get reservations (usually a supplement to Eurail passes) a day in advance, two days if you plan to get a couchette (a sleeper on a train; always a steep supplement to Eurail passes but worth it for overnight travel-trust me we've tried it both ways). Carry small change with you whenever sightseeing because you invariably have to pay the W.C. attendants if you need to use the toilets nearby. Even when I used a W.C. in the basement of a cafe, I was charged for it. Carry toilet paper with you in Southern Europe because many public restrooms won't be equipped with it. Get rid of small change before leaving a country since you'll be stuck with it if you don't. When backpacking, purchase small padlocks to lock your zippers together, tourists are obvious targets for thieves. And finally, using the trains and public transportation is highly recommended for city traveling, but cars are an unfortunate necessity if you want to see the countryside (an option is to take bicycles together with trains). Driving in Europe can be incredibly stressful even if you don't drive in Ireland and England where they drive on the left-hand side of the road because every country has its own unique way of giving directions and getting lost is something that is too easy to do.

Throughout Europe, we usually called for a room from our guidebook a day in advance. The rooms and amenities such as a toilet and shower varied from city to city, and we usually had to share these amenities which were located outside our room with others though we had a sink in our room. This is what made our accomodations vastly cheaper than in hotel rooms with shower-bathrooms included. We had paid nearly $150 for a regular hotel room that had a slightly better view than a "Bed and Breakfast" we stayed at later in the same city but latter cost us a mere $50-a-night. These accommodations were always clean. Look for places run by couples and with as few rooms as possible, they are invariably the most comfortable places to stay. Once in Germany and for our stay in Prague, we used information at the train stations to find a place to stay. In Germany and Ireland we stayed at B&B houses that we saw as we drove by. Theye were not always clearly marked in Germany as in Ireland where the places we chose usually had a clover displayed on a sign designating them as a tourist board approved B&B. The one place we chose without this approval in Ireland turned out to be dirty and smelly as well! The breakfast served at B&Bs in continental Europe usually consisted of breads, cheeses, and jams with tea or coffee and sometimes juice and a boiled egg. The English breakfast we had consisted of a fried egg, beans, toast, tea, bacon (similar, but inferior to the bacon in Ireland), and a tomato. The Irish breakfast was the heartiest we've ever eaten in our life consisting of a fried egg, toast (though not the variety of bread found on the continent), two different varieties of sausage (four pieces), bacon (a couple of pieces which were actually a strip of bacon and ham in once piece), cereal and milk, a small glass of juice, and tea. Since these breakfasts were usually included in the B&B price they were a life saver in Europe where a meal may cost at least twice as much as a comparable meal in the U.S.

This page has been indefinitely removed from the main Cultural Bridge website. The author suggests that readers read the linked preface before going forward.

"Impressions"

It is natural to be suspicious of your own initial impressions of a place especially if your visit is brief and you don't speak the language. This doesn't invalidate your impressions, afterall first impressions are often very profound, but it does beg that these impressions be viewed within the context that they were formed.

Brindisi

On a warm late April day, I walked through the streets of Brindisi, a port town on the eastern coast of Italy, where the streets were lined with two-story-high buildings which had picturesque wooden window shutters facing the street. Men in their 50's and 60's gathered in small groups to talk on the sidewalk as a pair of policemen monitored traffic here and there where the Fiat was obviously king.

The men's W.C. at the train station in Brindisi had seven stalls, all except one of which had a paper sign announcing "guato". I tried the handle on the door without the sign and it was locked so I tried a couple of doors with the sign as well. A man doing his business at a urinal looked up at me and yelled, "guato" as if he was trying to educate me. After I kept returning to the bathroom several times to see if the stall without the sign had been vacated rather than just "guato" like all the rest, a female janitor looked in the men's W.C. as if to see if anything was wrong before she went back to her little office closet. Apparently "guato was out of her jurisdiction.

Italians are the most aggressive pedestrians and drivers I have seen. It's as if going from place to place is a devious game to see how many people you can intimidate in your path. More people bumped into us in Italy, I believe, than in any other combination of countries combined for any like period of time. Fortunately when they drive it is more a game of bluff. Italians in their cars never seem willing to stop at intersections for pedestrians, but always give the right-of-way to a pedestrian at the last possible moment without a word of complaint.

There were only two times that we took a train while traveling through Europe were it could be said the number of passengers was oppressive. The first trip was the route from Rome to Florence, and there appeared to be more people in the aisles than the seats. It was unclear if the conductors merely could not handle the crowd or if Italians knew that this was an inexpensive trip because our tickets were never checked on this trip as on the other, slightly less crowded train trip we took later through Italy.

S.P.Q.R. SENATUS POPULUS QUE ROMANUS

Senate and the People of Rome

Rome is the Western World's second home of antiquity, sacked by the barbarians after sewing the seeds of Western culture that live on to this day. It's the city of Madonna and a city within a city where the Catholic Pope John Paul resides. It's a city were the most beautiful water fountains in the world are a reminder of the achievements of the forefathers, who in antiquity furnished Western Europe with aqueducts that exist to this day.

Wien

Vienna is a memorial to the Hapsburg dynasty and the empire of Austria-Hungary where the people don't walk too much. Central Vienna is rather small, but Wienners seem to prefer public transportation: busses, trams, and the U-bahn, and many people ride their bikes or drive cars as well.

Praha

The Fiat is king in Italy, and the Skoda is king in the Czech Republic. I was surprised to find that the subway system in Prague was better than any subway system I've seen in America (that includes NYC, San Francisco, and Chicago) even though it is a legacy of the USSR-the station near Hradcany Castle still has designs from the days of the CSSR and the trains have Russian Cryllic writing on them suggesting they were made in the USSR.

I had read a little bit about Prague before arriving there and expected to see an unusual amount of American entrepreneurs exploiting a country struggling to deal with capitalism after five decades of communism. I also expected to see something of a lawless society as the Czech Republic struggled to deal with an entirely different economic system which required freedoms previously unheard of and allowed abuses that time had not been adequate enough to deal with. Aside from an American laundromat owner who seemed to be fairly successful, I didn't see the foreign, exploitative entrepreneurs I had expected during my brief visit. There were three experiences that we had though that were unique in some respect to Prague. We saw two women leave a man outside a jewelry store on Wenceslas Square, the principal tourist street in Prague, just as the women were about to enter the store. The man was dressed up, but in a cheap looking sort of way. The women were dressed up to flatter their bodies. I only saw the face of one of the women and she looked too extravagant by herself. More importantly, the demeanor of the women was clearly more of those prepared to offer a service to someone rather than entering an establishment where your carriage would usually suggest a desire to be treated as potentially important customers.

The subway trains in Prague were often colorfully painted with advertisements and I saw stickers representing a local radio station above the door of several trains as if the public subway was supporting the radio station. The lack of graffiti on the trains and the uniformity of the way these stickers had been applied on different trains suggested that they were not applied by kids or representatives of the radio station themselves.

Just when we were leaving Prague we had to walk by a large puddle of what looked unmistakably like blood. Within this puddle was what appeared to be chunks of some internal organs. Of course we could only speculate, just as a couple of Czech men walking behind us did and we didn't know - if it was what we thought - if it was from a human or some other animal.

Kolin

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.

An Aryan and His Wife in Deutschland

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.

Berlin

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

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!

Baden Württemberg

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.

Paris

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!

Madrid, España

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

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).

Eire

Dublin looked less like a capital city than any other capital city we encountered in Europe, even when compared to a city of similar relative economic standing, Athens. Whereas most cities take pride in their history, Dublin's affection for its history seemed dubious. The greatest architecture sights in Dublin are the Georgian buildings , the lesser ones of which have been allowed to go into a state of disrepair. The monument lined O'Connell Street has statues that honor Irish nationalists, but are the same that stood on the street before independence was gained. There is no statue to de Valera, P.H. Pearse, or Michael Collins, but a statue honoring the British naval genius of Admiral Nelson was blown to pieces in the 1960's.

Vestiges of English control over Ireland can still be seen even in the language of the money. The most common Irish unit of money is still the pound, though now it is the Irish pound rather than the English pound. Maybe its the radical nationalists who have unsuccessfully pushed for the use of the word "punt", but the mainstream public is conservatively behind tradition. In fact Irish coins in general show a lack of nationalist resolve. In the days under the Dominion, Irish coins had a harp with a crown on top. Several decades after regaining independence, Ireland has yet to put a nationalist hero even on her coins (only animals appear on Irish coins) and the harp remains only without the English crown. Alas, I was even given English coins mixed in with my change in Ireland.

The British, for their part, seem to do what they can to perpetuate the tie with Ireland and I'm not just referring to the situation in Northern Ireland. When we were at Gatwick Airport near London, I walked toward an entry way that was labeled "International" when the guard asked me where I was going I told him "Ireland." He told me to go down the hall where I found out that Ireland was lumped together with Northern Ireland, and (if my memory serves me correctly) "other Great Britain destinations."

The police in Ireland seem less threatening than police I have ever seen. I've seen security guards on mopeds that look more threatening. I wonder if there is a reason that Dublin is the first place I have ever seen two policewomen patrolling together.

While in Dublin, a nuance of the Irish character that I picked up on was an embarrassingly strong sense of guilt (Catholic!?). "I'm sorry" is used by young and old alike as "excuse me" or "pardon me" is used in America, or the equivalent used in France, Italy, or Spain. The usage of "I'm sorry" to get past someone was quite perplexing to me given the fact that the Dubliners don't walk uniformly on one side of a path and often walk into you rather than avoid you. I hypothesized that the usage of "I'm sorry" might reflect a sense of provincialism until I saw a French expression on a sign in a northern Dublin neighborhood that warned of a "cul de sac." If it was a disliking for Romance languages, Dubliners would likely have used "please" such as the German "bitte". Afterall, the English spoken by Dubliners is a Germanic language. Perhaps it is because "I'm sorry" is more akin to the Catholic influenced Gaelic that it is used instead of the French and Spanish or German expressions. Maybe it's even more obfuscated than that, the French, Spanish and Germans were all ineffectual aids to Irish attempts at resting themselves from the yoke of Britannic imperialism.

Doire & Northern Ireland

Prince Charles had visited Dublin a week or two before we arrived and some demonstrators had thrown eggs at him, but missed. One of the several bills we saw up around Dublin said "CHARLES is NOT welcome. Colonel-in-Chief of the Paras represents 826 years of invasion, famine and death." So I asked our cab driver if he knew anything about the egg-throwing incident. He said it was "only a small minority" who caused the problems and added that it was bad for Ireland that such a thing should have happened. He said most people just ignored the visit which was for a good cause. Then I asked him about Northern Ireland and the pending peace talks. I asked him if he thought the North might be joined with the Republic. He confidently said "the people up there don't want it, and there's no money." He also said that the social welfare system is totally different "there and here," and concluded with "it will never happen."

The woman who ran the B&B we stayed at in Dublin told us that what our map book showed as Londonderry was called Derry by "everyone here," even though the name was changed by the English several hundred years ago. The destination signboard at the train station and all the direction signs on the road north also said "Derry"("Doire" in Gaelic). It wasn't until we passed an unmanned zigzagged, steel fortification (presumably unmanned since peace had broken out) which made it clear to us that we were in Northern Ireland, that the spelling changed. A sign on the road just before the checkpoint warned "PHOTOGRAPHY FORBIDDEN". Derry became Londonderry and the Gaelic language was dropped from road signs. Some in Derry seemed to have struck a compromise (or were protesting?) over the name issue. I saw a public bus and advertising on vehicles where the town name was spelled L'DERRY.

I asked an agent at a car rental agency about a walled, turreted, and barbed wired facility that a passerby had explained was a police station and barracks. She told me that there was a second one on the opposite side of the lot from where we had come. Before peace broke out nearly a year previously, Strand Street (where the first barracks were located) was blocked off to traffic, and everyday going into work all vehicles were subject to search on the opposite side of a river that was just outside of town. She explained that she grew up with the heavy security, but now that she has lived without it she doesn't know how people could go back to the way things were.

We spoke with an Irish gentleman over breakfast near Burnfoot, County Donegal a few miles from Derry. He had grown up in the area and was returning (presumably to retire). He had worked for Bank of America first in Dublin and then in London. We talked for a bit about the troubles in Ulster and Derry specifically. He explained that the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary; the police in Ireland prior to gaining independence were called the RIC or Royal Irish Constabulary) was principally made up of Protestants. Referring to the years before IRA activities resume in the 1960's, he said that life was difficult if you belonged to the wrong religion (Catholic) even though the city and county of Derry, according to him, were predominantly Catholic. He illustrated this with three brief stories: (1) Sometime in the 1940's he had gone to a store to pickup some things. As he left the store and walked towards his car, he noticed there were several RUC surrounding his vehicle. Realizing that they couldn't have any interest in his car being anything especially nice, he asked them "Can I help you with anything?" One of the RUC men walked up to him and asked him if he knew he was parked in a restricted area. Slightly perturbed, he responded "No. If I had known this was a restricted space I wouldn't have parked here. I was just inside the store for a minute to get these things." The RUC then said, "Okay. We'll just excuse this to your Southern Irish [Irish Catholic] ignorance." (2) His cousin, who was attending Queens University (Belfast), was one of the few Catholic members of the RUC (apparently this had something to do with his enrollment at Queens University). There was a luncheon of some kind for the RUC and all the Catholics were made to strip naked and march around outside in the bitter cold. (3) Then there was a St. Patrick's Day parade on Shipquay Street, the main street in Derry, which has a steep incline. The RUC commandeered a couple of the horse drawn floats near the top of the hill, and unhitched the floats from the horses effectively ruining the parade as the floats rolled down the hill.

He explained that these events had been indicative of life for the Catholic in Northern Ireland, and that now the Protestants have called for peace because they are scared (his father was an IRA man-"the old IRA"). He felt sympathy for the British soldiers who he saw as "young boys of seventeen and eighteen who knew nothing about religion or the traditions of Ulster."

We drove past Letterkenny in Donegal and saw a double-sided billboard that said "Free all political prisoners" in English, German, and French on one side, and "Peace through British withdrawal" on the other.

We spoke to a man from Strabane in Ulster while we were in County Mayo (he had noticed that our rental car was from Northern Ireland). He described himself as a Nationalist and agreed with what the woman we had met at the car rental agency had said about peace having broken out and how it would be difficult to go back to the friction that existed before. He said that more people from the North are coming down South now that peace has broke out. Over the last twenty-five years Catholics were not allowed into some stores by the security forces because there was a threat they might have explosives. I asked him how, other than in a small community where everyone knows each other, people knew who was Catholic and who was Protestant. "It is obvious by the way you talk," he said. As an example he gave the name of the town of Derry. Catholics stopped on the roadside and asked about Londonderry would only respond with "this is Derry". He said that Protestants always referred to the city as Londonderry.

I asked him if children were educated about the Northern Ireland conflict in school or at home. "Those who had an IRA member in their families in the past would be taught hate for the Protestants." He said that it was more than a religious issue and implicitly referred to the plantations of the Scotch and English in the seventeenth century. He felt the most immediate threat to the peace process was the issue of one group marching in the area of another group. Catholics had been allowed to march in a Protestant area "and the tricolors were taken and burned by the Protestants during the procession." He said that the Protestants then wanted to have a peace march in a Catholic area and the security forces said, "No. Each group is to stay in their own area for now on."

Meanwhile, there was talk in the press about the English demanding the IRA to give up their arms before talks continue. Several decades earlier when the original IRA (which avoided killing innocent civilians unlike its contemporary namesake who seems to target the innocent as a means of inciting "terror") was fighting for Irish Independence the same demand was put on the table, but was a huge failure.

Ireland is the land of blue eyes, milky-white skin with rosy-red cheeks, a smattering of freckles, and not a little bit of orange hair. It's the land of breakfast: a fried egg, sausages of two kinds, bacon and ham in one strip, toast, orange juice, tea or coffee, and cold cereal. It's the land of the pub and grub with names like The One Foot Inn and The Just Inn. It's the home of a dark pint of Guinness with a head of tan cream on top. It's the land where boundaries are often marked with knee-high gray stones of irregular shape, sheep, cows, and soil rich enough for growing every shade of green imaginable yet too poor to grow much else. It's the land of those Irish Catholic stone crosses with a circle and Gaelic carvings. Probably the only place in the world where death notices are broadcast on the radio prior to funerals. It's the land of the ancestral names to millions of Americans and Australians. It's the land where Gaelic was kept alive and the 26 counties gained their freedom after as long as 700 years under Britannic Imperialism.

Being of Irish descent and having arrived in London after going to Ireland first and learning a little bit about the legacy of English dominance in my ancestor's home and the centuries long fight for freedom, I was naturally prejudiced against the capital of Great Britain and what I have to say about it should be read in this light. To me, London looks as if it is a decaying society, from the over sensationalized headlines of the papers to tourist postcards revealing dirty fingernails and the Underground subway system.

London

I first noticed this after getting off the Eurostar Chunnel train and entering the Underground at Victoria Station in route to a place to stay the night before continuing on to Ireland. My first impression was that the city looked old. Not like the patina of age of other European cities, but new old indicative of decay. As I looked out the window of an upper level of Victoria Station I saw old looking English taxi cabs. Several men in poorly cut pinstriped suits that had gone out of style in the U.S. a decade or two ago shared the subway car on the Underground we were in. I saw a well dressed business woman on another train who looked like a construction worker in disguise after I noticed her hand gripping a pole. The fingernails of this well dressed and made up woman were dirty and unkept. The subway system itself, which seemed to run efficiently enough on first look, looked far more decrepit than the subway in Prague. The too confined feeling of the subway trains, the dangling-penis handles for standing passengers (right out of a Buck Rogers episode), and the mechanical voice that repeats the warning "mind the gap" several times as the train slows to a stop at a station really reminded me of reading George Orwell's 1984, and I began to wonder if the Underground might have been an inspiration for him.

As we were leaving London, I saw a businessman on the Underground, dressed in a pinstriped suit no less, with nose hairs descending straight down from the opening of his nostrils while others grew as if trees bending towards the sun that lay a foot or so in front of his feet. These nose hairs might have been concealed by a man's mustache, but it looked as he wasn't capable of growing a mustache despite the fact that his hair was graying. The hair on his face was sparse like that of a pubescent boy eagerly awaiting the day when the few hairs on his face would multiply and merit his first shave.

Karen and I agreed that the worse dressed people we had ever seen were those in London. We can't exactly pin-point why we believe so other than to say that the common Londoner appeared to make a concerted effort not to look ascetically pleasing. It's as if you've all but run out of clean clothes and not only have to wear your least favorite clothes, but have to wear clothes that don't compliment each other either. If you can imagine, this would extend to hair styles too. Of course the guards at Buckingham Palace and even the mounted police officers (men and women) who were there for crowd control were the exception to the rule.

London was the first place I had been to other than Tokyo where cards were plastered around the phone of a public telephone booth soliciting sex. There were a couple of differences in the London version though that extended beyond the fact that the English advertisements were a little cheaper than those found in Tokyo. The London advertisements were up every day of the week, while the Tokyo advertisements were only thick on Fridays and Saturdays. I couldn't read the Tokyo ads (though I had them translated later-see Japan section), but even the drawings of the cards in London had a peculiar bent to them. The photos of women in Tokyo ads were more simple, but captions were possibly milder than the ones in London which had phrases like "YOUR PLACE IS AT MY FEET! RUBBER LEATHER DOMINATION," "Your Pleasure...My Pain...When You Give Me The Cane...," and "SCHOOLGIRL FANTASIES TOTALLY SUBMISSIVE 18 YRS OLD."

After seeing the royal guards in Greece, the Queen's Life Guards were a disappointment. The guards in London lacked the discipline and precision of their counterparts in Athens. We even noticed that a guard who was on foot was wearing stained pants.

My impressions of London were not all negative though, far from it. The theater district of London reminded me of Broadway and the smaller version in San Francisco, though it was more beautiful from the outside than either of these two American locations. The memorials throughout the city to the Imperial Age of Britannia impressed upon me the vigor of an age passed that has few comparisons. Westminster Abbey, with its numerous statues, crypts and monuments, is the most spectacular monument to the political and cultural achievements of a country that I have seen throughout Europe. The view of the parliamentary buildings and the Clock Tower, which houses Big Ben, from across the Thames rivals any of the major sites in Europe. The Imperial War Museum dealt with the World Wars in both an interesting and educational way that I have yet to see anywhere else. The British Museum with its Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and display of Egyptian mummies has reserved a place for its own in the museums of the world (having said this I must add that the impact of the Elgin Marbles is severely diminished out of their context of the Parthenon, and should be returned to their rightful place at the Acropolis complex in Athens).

The Tower of London is impressive to some because it houses the crown jewels, to me because so much history has occurred within its walls. It was a prison, a home for royalty at the same time, and housed both England's mint and an unmarked graveyard for some 1500 people. Where else can you see graffiti carved into walls dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The original Tower of London is the innermost structure known as the White Tower which was started by the Norman invader, William I, in 1078 (twelve years after the Battle of Hastings). Henry VIII had some of his wives beheaded there, Elizabeth I was jailed there, and so was Thomas Moore. Sometime in the intervening centuries, royalty has moved out to Buckingham Palace, coins are no longer minted there, and prisoners now have more comfortable homes, but it still houses the crown jewels and the illustrious Beefeater guards, all retired British military officers with at least twenty-two years of service.

Architecture

You will learn that the architectural ingenuity applied by Jefferson in designing his Monticello in Virginia is much overrated after seeing the Pantheon in Rome. Monticello is merely an adaptation of the former on a unique scale for a not overly grandiose home. The most important feature of the Pantheon is its dome. This feature is lost at Monticello, all that is left is the symmetry and structural facade of antiquity. Jefferson has achieved something of note, but it is less remarkable than many would have you believe. I don't know which is more important, to criticize dome architects or praise the architect of Aggripa's dome (the Pantheon) which is beyond compare despite the distance of time that has elapsed since its design and construction.

Art, Museums, & Exhibits

We discovered a conspiracy of Renaissance artists on the walls of the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi, the Kunsthistorisches, the Alta Pinakothek collections, the Louvre, the Prado and a few lesser museums. It seemed that the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian was being promoted as a subject of the world famous painters whose art hung on these walls comparable with only one pair of subjects, that of Jesus and the Madonna.

Città Del Vaticano

Some museums restrict photography and even videotaping of their possessions not out of respect for the artwork--banning flash of a camera or harsh lights of a video recorder would be sufficient for this purpose--or to make the viewing experience more enjoyable for the audience, but merely to keep their sales of postcards and books of these artworks artificially high despite the cost of admission. This was the case in a couple of museums we visited in Asia, a church-cemetery mentioned later on, the Prado, Westminster Abbey, and in the Sistine Chapel. This was particularly annoying at the Sistine Chapel because it is the highlight of the Vatican Museums and the signs throughout the museums directing you to the chapel (albeit in a circuitous route) make it clear that this is the most valued of their holdings. The admission fee was also one of the highest in Europe and there was no forewarning that we would not be allowed to videotape or take non-flash photographs of the ceilings in the chapel. So we skirted the rules. Okay, we ignored the rules, but tried to be discrete less the book-pushing guards notice. One particular portly patron, after nearly sitting on Karen's lap, reminded her "no fotografia" and she responded with a "yes, I know." Then she continued to videotape much to the amusement of a couple of teenage girls on her other side.

Waiting in Line at the Ufizzi and the Subsequent Disappointment

In front of us was an Italian family of 3: a man and woman in their mid- to late-40's, and their maybe 13-year old son. They also brought their two small dogs to accompany them in line. The mother would alternate between playfully slapping her boy, who was playing a hand-held video game; kissing him on the cheek and lips; and kissing and hugging to her face the smaller of the two dogs who when not in her arms was pivoting in circles around the ground apparently scratching its butt. Behind us was a young French couple, who despite the crowd, were kissing and rubbing their faces and other parts of their heads together during the entire wait to gain entrance into the museum.

We waited over two hours to get into the Ufizzi. Once inside, we found that many of the artworks were enclosed in glass, and the lighting was so atrocious that glare obscured a portion of these glass enclosed paintings from any vantage point in the room, excpet for a range of about two inches in front of the work itself. We have never had the criticism of glare before either at the Prado, the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or any other, lesser, museum we've visited. After we left the museum we realized that the doors were locked for sixteen of what our guide showed as forty-five total rooms.

It becomes quite humbling, after seeing the remains of antiquity in Athens and Rome, to think of the artistic achievements of man since. Electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, the jet plane, the telephone, and the microchip are certainly innovations that have manifestly changed what humanity can do, but I believe the achievements of antiquity in sculpture and, to a large extent, in architecture (okay the I-beam changed things a bit too!) have yet to be surpassed.

Michelangelo's "David" is the first achievement I have seen that not only compares with the art of antiquity, but quite possibly surpasses it. It is a surprising contrast to much of Western art because it celebrates the male form rather than the female form. Partially because of this, I would like to add a caveat to my praise of Michelangelo though. I first realized it when I noticed a painting of his near "David". His depiction of women's breasts seems to reveal either a stylistic flaw or a unique dislike for them. The woman's breast in the lower left of his work, "The Flood," at the Sistine Chapel, the "Tomb of Giuliano de' Medici," and the "Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici" are all good examples of this deficiency or manifest dislike.

Madrid, España

The Prado Museum in Spain had some beautiful works of art, especially their collections of works by Goya, Rubens, and Velázquez. The Prado had an unusual collection of works (though not displayed as a unit) which depicted milk coming from a woman's breast (usually the Madonna): a seventeenth century work by B. Esteban Murillo entitled "Aparicion de la Virgen a San Bernardo" shows Mary standing on clouds while holding a baby Jesus and squeezing her breast while a faint stream of milk flows in the direction of San Bernardo's partially open mouth; Alonso Cano's seventeenth century work, "San Bernardo y La Virgen", depicts the same subject, but this time the Madonna's breast is revealed through a triangular slit in her dress and the stream is flowing into the open mouth of a kneeling San Bernardo; and a 1668 work by Peter Paul Rubens, "La Via Lactea", shows a woman, presumably the Madonna, squeezing her breast as milk sprays at a child in three streams.

Amsterdam

The house where Ann Frank together with her family and another family hid from the Nazis during World War II is now home to an excellent exhibit. The exhibit began with a statement that it was designed to give a human face to the victims of the Holocaust which it did and more. There was an outline of Hitler's rise to power. Nazi anti-Semitism was examined from Hitler's philosophy in Mein Kampf, to Kristallnacht, and the decimation of the Jewish population in Europe by the Nazis. Also displayed was a letter from a U.S. immigration official to a European Jew of the period explaining in typical bureaucratic language, the complexity of immigrating in this person's particular case. There was a list of Jews accepted by different countries during the period and the U.S. did accept the largest number of any country, but this letter showed in vivid terms, that it was not a simple or definitive issue of immigrating to any country. The exhibit ended in a way that I found gratifyingly unusual for any exhibit connected with the Jewish plight, there were comments on prejudice and hate crimes as they affected different peoples throughout the world today.

Beggars and Thieves

I noticed that people invariably gave female beggars outside the small churches in Athens money. The beggars were dressed all in black. It was Good Friday, and I suspect that people's generosity was affected by this.

Italia

We saw three gypsy children preying on tourists near the Roman Forum. There were two girls, one with a piece of cardboard, and a boy who limped as he walked probably from an injury he suffered during their enterprise. The cardboard wielding girl approached a middle-aged man holding her cardboard at about his chest to obscure his view of what could be done below it and then, after a few words, the boy tugged on the man's outstretched hand. The man reacted quickly by freeing his arm and stepping back, at which point the dirty rag-a-muffins let him be to search out more docile prey.

Habits

In Greece, it is common to see men repeatedly flicking a small strand of beads, sometimes just their keys, in a short flip with their hand at their side. This site became so common to us, that we realized it was a national obsession of sorts just as many businessmen in America can be seen and heard playing with their spare change in their pockets. After arriving in Italy, we noticed an American traveller who had taken the same ferry had adopted the annoying habit of flipping the Greek strand of beads and wondered how long his traveling companions would remain friends with him.

Language

Italian words usually end in a long "o", "a", "e", or soft "a". A note displayed for customers by the management at a laundromat in Florence consisted of sixteen words of which thirteen ended in "i", "e", or "o". Frenchies like to end their words with vowel sounds, but do so in such a way as to often make it sound as if they have clogged sinuses. I haven't figured out Spain yet. Germans are too efficient to resort to such "Romanticisms" though they are guilty of their "sht" rule for "st"-words and the thing they do with their "e"'s at the end of words. Americans are so individualistic that they let just about anyone add a new word to the dictionary with each passing moment.

Athens

At a restaurant in Athens, Karen asked for a glass of water, and the waiter replied, "yes please." After our meal, we asked a different waiter for our bill, and he also replied with the "yes please." Could it be that they attended the same English school or were they giving us a Greek linguistics lesson?

Italia

The first time we asked for a bottle of acqua, the vendor asked us, "with or without gas?" I thought it was some sort of joke so I laughingly said, "without gas." The second time we were posed the question, we realized that they were referring to the carbonation.

I was surprised to learn that Italians in Rome do not pronounce the word "ciao" like "chow". After several years of business dealings in San Francisco with a person who used the word to end every conversation I was sure it was pronounced so. After carefully attuning my ear, I became convinced that it was pronounced more like "shiao" (in Rome at least).

While in Italy we also learned that Joe DiMaggio's name may mean "Joe of May". I think many baseball fans would add a few other months, but wouldn't have much problem agreeing.

Italians have an affinity for ending business name with "eria" so I developed a short list as proof based on names I saw: anacelleria, birreria, carrozeria, cartoleria, latteria, lavanderia, mestcheria, oreficeria, orologioielleria, pasticceria, polloeria, and profumeria.

Madrid, España

Spain posed a formidable challenge to Italy's "eria"s. Within the space of one bloc, I found the following shops: cerveceria, ferreteria, pescaderia, perfumeria, drogueria, cafeteria, peluqueria; and later that day I also saw panaderia, lavanderia, sastreria, zapateria, relojeria, bisuteria, pizzeria, loteria, papeleria, pasteleria, croissanteria, joyeria (we should have spent some time here), corseteria, and lenceria.

Osterreich...und Deutschland

It is not uncommon to turn on a radio in a foreign country and hear American music; or see on the streets baseball caps and t-shirts with various American sport team labels on them. American mass culture can be experienced to some degree in most countries of the world. Despite having experienced this many times in many countries it was somewhat of an amusing shock to turn on a television in Austria and hear American cowboys and Indians speaking in German.

I guess if you travel in foreign countries where you can't understand the language and your ability to learn the language is severely limited by the temporal necessity, it may not be so peculiar to develop a fetish for foreign word lists like I have.

It was first in Austria that we noticed a peculiar affinity for German words with the word "fart" in them (of course in German it is written as "fahrt"): abfahrt, alpenfahrt, ausfahrt, einfahrt, hinfahrt, pässenfahrt, rückfahrt, sonderfahrt, stadtrndfahrt, vertärkungsfahrt, vorfahrt, weiterfahrt, zonenfahrt, and zufahrt.

London, England

There seems to be some question over which English is the proper English. The British would have you base the resolution of this matter on historical precedence, but this is folly. In comparison to American English and the ingenuous Australian English, the Queen's is corrupted so there shouldn't be any real doubt. How offensive it is to the ear to hear the world "schedule" pronounced "schedule" as if the English had no idea that it should really be pronounced "skedule" as we do in the Colonies. I'm no linguist, but as we walked through the streets of London and ate at her restaurants, we heard the speech of the commoner, and it became clear that the (French) Norman invasion of Britain has left a legacy on the Queen's language. Why else would they corrupt the language with that annoying habit of dropping off consonants from the beginning and end of words (apparently they do the same with consonants in the middle of the words as in Leicester and Gloucester)? Perhaps the final resolution of this debate should rest in the hands of the world's citizens who clearly favor American English which dominates music, television, and even the internet.

Markets

In the capital cities of three of the poorest members of the European Union you see similar scenes. In Madrid cigarettes are sold by individuals in the subway stations, and lottery tickets are sold by older women and blind people throughout the city. In Dublin, three women and a man at a street corner yell out "tobacco!" and "cigarettes!" In Athens, lottery vendors walk through the streets or stand next to collapsible stands of tickets calling out that they have lottery tickets for sale.

Athens

We walked through a meat market one day in Athens and saw numerous flayed, whole sheep hanging from their hind legs. There were also buckets of grayish-white intestines hanging out over the edges of large buckets as if to entice customers.

Karen looked out of her window as we were traveling through Greece on Easter Sunday, and realized that lamb was the Greek equivalent to American turkey. She saw the same scene over and over again: a family gathered in a backyard while a lamb was being roasted.

Roma

It rained sporadically while we were in Rome, and we noticed that whenever the rain started up Indian men could be seen selling umbrellas everywhere. Only two minutes before we hadn't noticed a one!

Firenze

It was common to see North African street merchants with their goods folded up and under their arms or besides their legs as they looked anxiously down the street from a corner where they could easily conceal themselves. Karen had seen several of them folding up their tables and stands when they saw the police walking in their direction. We wondered if these merchants were discriminated against because there were numerous other street merchants, all apparently Italians, who seemed to have no worry of the police or Carabinieri. The only difference that we could discern was the obvious physical difference and the type of merchandise being sold. The anxious merchants sold such things as sunglasses, "cheap" posters, leather bags, and small handicrafts that didn't appear to be made locally. The Italian street merchants sold cheap watercolor pictures, postcards, and caricatures of tourists on demand. There were also news and magazine stalls or stands that sold guidebooks, pornographic magazines, and postcards. Unless is was merely a question of not having the proper visa, it appeared that the North Africans were being unfairly discriminated against.

Food

Roma

The food in Europe was invariably much more expensive than America. The price of drinks at restaurants of any size was always much, much more than at grocery type stores where you could often find bottled drinks for a comparable price with that in the U.S. In Italy, we ate at trattorias and ristorantes when we were real hungry and didn't care how much we spent for a meal. We ate our cheapest large meals, as much as 50% less than at a sit-down restaurant, when we purchased food at deli type stores where we could usually find prepared food such as pollo arrosto (roasted chicken) cooked with a delicious blend of spices, riso (rice) salad, formaggi, even an inexpensive bottle of Chianti, and fresh pannini (bread). We'd have an impromtu picnic somewhere, though we were usually not willing to walk too far and often ate these meals on the first bench we could find. When we weren't so hungry, we would go to snack bars for a cappucino, pastries, and dry sandwiches which didn't consist of much more than a slice or two of meat in between two pieces of bread without any spread or other "fattening extras" like that found in America (which is one reason why you'll notice that Europeans are much thinner as a whole than Americans). We also ate at the pizzerias where pizzas come by the slice and are folded over to make a sandwich. The pizza we ate in Rome was far superior to that in Florence.

Napkins in Rome are more suited for absorbing the ink of a pen than they are for absorbing the oil from Italian food, and this in not a comment on Italian food.

Wien

We couldn't find non-carbonated bottled water in Vienna, but who cares? Edelweiss Beer is the best - sehr gut!

When in Wien (Vienna) we felt obliged to have a "wienner". I never actually saw anything called a "wienner", but this must be the origin of the hot-dog just as Italy is the origin of the pizza. Besides, hot-dogs and sausages sold from booths in Austria is the closest thing you can get to inexpensive food. Here is the art of making a hot-dog in Austria: first, the top of a baguette is lopped off, but this top is saved; then they push the baguette over a skewer with the cut piece down first; mustard and/or catsup is squirted into the hole that was just created; then the hot-dog or sausage is inserted with wooden tongs and it is handed to you after more mustard and/or catsup is added to the cutoff portion which forms a hat for your meal. Of course they taste infinitely better accompanied mit bier!

Praha

A few restaurants we ate at in Prague and the nearby city of Kolin had weights listed next to the main course items. The weights were usually within the 100-200 grams range. I couldn't help but wonder if this had something to do with the way life was under the CSSR (Czechoslovakian Soviet Socialist Republic).

We ate one of our favorite meals in Prague, a bowl of goulash at a corner bar we only chose because there weren't many restaurants open at the time. We had goulash in Vienna and Berlin too, but none were to compare with this.

Osterreich...und Deutschland

Both in Vienna and throughout Germany, one of the more popular hot-dog/sausage stand items is currywurst. Its uniqueness is in the condiment not the bread or meat. What makes the currywurst is the curry powder mixed with catsup to heighten the flavor of the sandwich.

Madrid, España

Having grown up in Southern California, I naively expected Spain to reflect much of what I had been exposed to of Hispanic culture but this was not to be the case. Some simplistic examples are found in the food. A tortilla in Spain is not the same tortilla found in the Americas. It is simply an omelet. The only time I saw refried beans was when we went to a Mexican restaurant. Rice is the principal ingredient of paella, and a similar flavored rice is also common in Mexican dishes though, but rice found in the Hispanicized Philippines and other places of East Asia is invariably steamed without additional flavors added.

The People

Traveling through Europe, it became easy to make some over-generalizations about people. North Africans could often be seen selling useless tourist items at tourist sites and tourist oriented cities like Rome and Paris. Chinese, the quintessential restauranteurs of the world, have restaurants in every nook-and-cranny. We even saw a Chinese restaurant in a tiny town in Ireland. Filipinos may possibly be the world's foremost domestic helpers. Indian and Arabic men are the world's foremost vendors.

Athens

My initial impression of Greek people, particularly women, was that they were not the most beautiful people in the world. Upon reflection I realized that I may be mistaking poverty for nature. In my final analysis I've concluded that a Greek nose is unique and that the women of Greece have, on average, the largest breasts I've seen which certainly adds to the latter's beauty despite other deficits.

Italia

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.

Praha

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.

Madrid, España

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.

Amsterdam

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.

Police

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.

Religion

Athens

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.

Italia

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.

Deutschland

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.

Telephones

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.

Transportation

Bicycles

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.

Mass Transportation

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.

The Metro

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.