Category: Travel for Fun

For the record

Raw-milk cheese has been cleared of all charges. The bug in my system is just some mild-mannered streptococcus viridans. Please, do not harm any sheep or goats in my name.

Anyway, I’m home from the hospital. By the end, it felt like Peter and I were doing a prison break. I feel really bad for anyone who’s in the hospital and doesn’t have information, connections, or other resources. It’s really scary how beaten down and freaked out you can get in just a few days. (But maybe I’m just more sensitive because I really, really enjoy eating and sleeping?) I wouldn’t last a second under real interrogation conditions. In fact, I had a story about my involvement in a sleeper cell to trot out in case anyone from the NSA or FBI woke me up in the middle of the night to ask me some questions.

So I’m home and doing a lot of deep breathing. I have an appointment with a less terrorizing doctor on Monday. Thanks again to everyone who called and emailed and sent flowers and other goodies! It helped immensely, and made me popular with the nurses when I shared my cookies.

Not Livin’ the Life

I’ve been so sunk in despair, I couldn’t bring myself to type the terrible words: Tamara and I are not going to be the next Chivas Life Editors.

What essential social role might this be? Well, we’d have been the paired equivalent of this guy. Most important, we would’ve been paid $100K to travel the world and report back on the fabulous, glamorous, tasteful, exhilirating Chivas-y adventures we had. We had visions of partying in Senegal or Ghana, partying in Belgrade, partying in Lviv, and saunaing in Finland. Well, it was a little more refined than that, but that’s all I can remember now.

Frankly, I can’t imagine why we weren’t picked. I don’t know anyone more qualified than us. But I suppose that’s the same flawed logic behind not understanding how Bush got elected. It’s a big country. And, now that it’s all over, I can safely admit I still get Chivas Regal and Crown Royal confused.

Living My Myth

The Greek Tourism Board’s new slogan is hopelessly cheesy: “Live Your Myth in Greece”. I’ve been thinking of other slogans, at least for Athens:

Athens: Like Cairo, but With Breathing Room.

Athens: Not so third-world anymore.

I don’t remember much from my trip here ten years ago–lots of to-and-fro on buses, and lots of sitting in a dim salon staring into space while my then-boyfriend shouted in Greek at his deaf grandmother. I do remember the meat sauce on her spaghetti, however, and the fact that I didn’t take seconds has haunted me ever since. And it was very cold, and Albania seemed like an exotic destination then (we never made it because there was a terrible snowstorm just around the time we got near the border, and we’d been warned about bandits armed with sharpened spoons. Honestly.)

This time around, Athens is sporting stylish new modes of transport (more subways, sexy trams taking dangerous curves on their way to the clubs at the beach) as well as stylish parts of town. I feel like I should be writing about it for some magazine, but it’s nice just to be on vacation.

I did meet a very sharp woman today who runs bike tours of Greece, which sound awesome. I’m mentioning it here in hopes that bike and travel freaks will be intrigued and pursue the matter, but that’s as far as working goes for today.

Soon Peter and I are off to Mytilini, where we may or may not be married officially in the Greek church. It first seemed that my heathen upbringing (i.e., no baptism) would be the impediment, but now it appears that Peter’s churchgoing cannot be properly documented either (i.e., the payoff to a priest in Albuquerque got a sealed letter, but the Denver diocese was quick to spot the fraud). So, while I was not too perturbed to interrupt my suntanning and ouzo-drinking schedule for an hour or so of bible-kissing and frankincense-smelling, it looks like I might not have to.

Don’t expect too much more posting for the next month…

Fab!ulicious

Just to give you a sense of context, that’s the current motto of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Yes, Fab!ulicious, with the exclamation point. When has an airport ever been so cool?

And when has a city ever been so cool as on April 30, Queen’s Day? According to the Metro paper (Amsterdam is so cool, it got this fluffy daily commuter tabloid years ago, well before NYC did), more than 400,000 people came out on the streets in Amsterdam on Saturday to celebrate the queen’s birthday, the Netherlands’ biggest national holiday. That’s more than half the city’s population. Some 160,000 people came in from elsewhere on the train.

Total number of arrests that day: 60.

I don’t see something like this happening in the States, ever–and not just because we don’t have a queen. (The name of the one here is Beatrix, by the way–Trixie, for short.) But in Amsterdam, it’s totally normal for everyone from 3-year-old kids to twinkly eyed grannies to push out into the streets and canals in their best House of Orange gear and party like rock stars. I even saw a Sikh wearing a bright orange turban. (And the Dutch complain immigrants don’t assimilate enough!)

As a bonus–that is, alongside all the public beer vendors, blaring techno and disco anthems, boats full of aging rock stars playing live sets, people wearing orange feather boas and so on–Queen’s Day produces what’s probably the world’s largest yard sale. Something about vendor’s licenses (and a lack of yards) prohibits people from selling their junk on the street the rest of the year, but on this one day, it’s a flea free-for-all. Days before, people start marking out their patches of sidewalk with tape and chalk; you can practically hear people sorting out all their useless crap behind their doors.

I didn’t wake up early enough to see the good stuff, I admit (the night before is Queen’s Night, when everyone goes out to clubs)–but there was something so bizarrely heartwarming about all this optimistic commerce, even at 3pm, when the only stuff anyone had left was totally useless. And in between people selling puffy-shoulder leather jackets and decks of 49 cards and raspberry tarts rendered in ceramic were other entrepreneurs: an 8-year-old girl busking with her accordion, for instance, and a booth selling Polaroid photo ops of you sticking your head out from between Princess Maxima’s legs (Will you be the next royal child?”).

With everyone high on something, or just plain drunk or giddy, all the bizarre street action and the steady roaming around through crowds, it felt a lot like Burning Man. But, and here’s the heresy, it was better, and precisely because money was changing hands. I didn’t think I was much of a capitalist, but commerce honestly did improve the experience, and not just because there was someone prepared to sell me a super-dense and delicious orange-frosted donut or a pancake cut into the shape of a crown and covered in orange sprinkles. (Also, by the way, there was a lot of pumpkin soup and fresh orange juice being sold–because they’re, duh, orange.) Because I could choose who to give my money to, I didn’t have to accept pointless kitschy trinkets with a smile as part of a “gift economy”, as I do at Burning Man. Instead, I could laugh my ass off at some enthusiastic Dutch guy doing his best third-world salesman impression (“You buy! My friend! Special price!”) after we picked over his 1970s Dutch cookbooks and vinyl suitcases and said no thanks. We could give a euro to the accordion girl, and maybe she’d do better in the future. We could stop every two blocks and buy another beer, rather than having to schlep them on our backs all around the desert, or risk dying of thirst. We could nod sagely at the dangers of accumulating too much stuff as a woman ankle-deep in golf balls, hair straighteners, egg cups and other flotsam, wailed, “I can’t give this stuff away!” (And I could buy a perfectly decent pair of sandals from her for one euro.)

I guess it makes me a grumpy, art-hating anti-idealist, but even though I’m fond of the temporary dreamland of Black Rock City, I do like cities the way they function now–especially Amsterdam, which is almost ridiculously too functional. And even when it’s not Queen’s Day, there are enough kooks in the streets and enough do-what-you-want attitude that it’s kind of like BRC year-round. I’ve been going to Amsterdam since 1994, and envying so many things about the place all along (No working poor! Bikes everywhere! Topless women on billboards!), but I do appreciate it more after having been to Burning Man, because it’s comforting to know that this ideal place that 30,000 people strive for every September is at least partially existent over here in Europe all the time. I’m perfectly willing to carry my wallet around for that.