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----
-title: >-
-    Mr. Worldwide, Pt. 1: Europe
-description: >-
-    Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love tomatoes.
----
-
-## TODO
-
-## Outline
-
-- The Second Leg
-    - Munich
-        - No more pictures, no more tourism
-        - Diet
-    - Belgium
-        - Brussels
-            - Communism and french fries
-            - Comic book museum
-            - Drawing
-        - Bruges
-            - Beer
-            - A fucking expensive fairytale
-            - So cold, so scarfed
-            - Camina Del Santiago
-    - UK
-        - London
-            - Cost of museums, theft of culture
-        - Dublin
-            - Housing problems
-            - Glendalough
-        - Edinburgh
-            - Reading/Writing
-            - Harry Fucking Potter
-    - Amsterdam
-        - Pub crawl (partying vs ...)
-        - Van Gogh
-        - Weed
-        - Sex (museum)
-    - Copenhagen
-        - Freedom (Christiania)
-        - So many chairs
-    - Stockholm
-        - Tradition
-    - Berlin
-        - History
-        - Movie
-    - Prague
-        - Wandering
-        - Planning
-- The Third Leg
-    - Munich
-        - Alps, Olympics
-        - Passport
-    - Venice
-        - Beauty in spite of tourism
-    - Rijeka
-        - Hitchikers
-        - A strange beauty
-    - Vienna
-        - Riches and empire
-        - A day at the palace
-        - The Couchsurfing Cult
-    - Athens
-        - Culture
-        - History
-
-## Munich, Germany
-
-On Febrary 14th I returned to Munich. Having been on the road for a little over
-3 weeks, I was utterly exhausted, and neglected to take any pictures at all. In
-fact, I hardly remember _what_ I did there, except go to the library a lot.
-Munich has a fantastic public library, which I spent a considerable amount of
-time at every time I was in town. I'd create my rough plans of where to go next
-there, as well as do miscellaneous coding and writing. I was through being a
-tourist.
-
-After Rome I had begun really putting my strategy of "wander around and see what
-calls out to me" to the test. By the time I was in Munich it had really sunk in,
-and the only thing which really called to me in Munich was the peace and quiet
-of the library during the day, and hanging out with Caitlin and her friends at
-night. For the rest of the trip I wouldn't take so many pictures as I had been
-doing, and wouldn't go way out of my way to see something which didn't truly
-interest me.
-
-After I left Italy I had begun eating differently too. Italy is, obviously,
-known for two foods: pasta and pizza, and I had a lot of those while I was
-there. At one point I had the awkward experience of an Italian guy asking me if
-Italy had better pizza than the U.S., and me having to try and find a way to
-both be honest and not seem like too much of a dick when I told him: "no". It
-would be fair to say that, in Italy, your money goes a lot farther in terms of
-quality than in the U.S.; or, in other words, their average quality is higher.
-But it's not like Italians know some secret the rest of the world doesn't, and
-you can easily find a good, crispy, thin crust, wood fired pizza anywhere, if
-you look for it.
-
-That was the real lesson for me: it's not that Europe has _better_ food across
-the board than the U.S., it's that even their cheapest restaurants will be
-pretty high quality, whereas finding good but cheap food in the U.S. can often
-be quite difficult. So someone like me, who's on a spend-as-little-as-possible
-budget, can still enjoy pretty good food anywhere.
-
-All the same, I would largely stop going out to eat at all from this point in
-the trip onward, and instead I began visiting grocery stores frequently. During
-the day I'd always have in my bag: a bottle of water, a loaf of bread, a block
-of cheese (usually gouda), almonds, and dates or dried figs. These I would munch
-on throughout the day, and for dinner I'd make something simple like pasta or
-rice with veggies and tofu. Having a kitchen would become a requirement for me
-to stay at a hostel, and many hostels have a "free stuff" section filled with
-food items people had left behind, like garlic or salt or whatever, so I often
-didn't need to go shopping at all.
-
-Of course, I didn't abstain from eating out _completely_. Every country has some
-claim-to-fame food item, which I'd try once or twice while there, if it didn't
-mean going way out of my way. But food wasn't a primary concern of my trip, and
-so I tried my best to spend as little as possible on it.
-
-Having spent a few days in Munich, recuperating and figuring out my next steps,
-I continued on... to Brussels!
-
-## Brussels, Belgium
-
-The bus arrived in Brussels super late at night, and I woke up to the voice of
-the bus driver over the intercom: "Welcome to Brussels! Donald Trump says it is
-the shithole of Europe, and he has it right!" So it was a warm welcome. I only
-stayed in Brussels for two nights; it was more of a pit-stop on the way to
-Bruges than anything. My hostel was, apparently, on the site of one of Van
-Gogh's old studios, but that fact was played up in favor of actually making the
-hostel any good. But the city was nice enough, and despite the bitter cold I
-enjoyed myself.
-
-{% include image.html
-    dir="mr-worldwide" file="brussels-2018.jpg" width=556
-    descr="Comic murals like this can be find all over the city. Brussels, 2018"
-    float="right"
-    %}
-
-Besides being the capital of the E.U., Brussels is also famous for its history
-of comics. Not just superhero comics, but also political, children's, humor, and
-historical comics too. While wandering around I visited a number of comic stores
-with huge selections, almost entirely in not-English (Belgium has three
-official languages), and there were huge comic murals all over the city.
-Brussels' comic history would also provide me with my favorite museum experience
-of the entire trip.
-
-The majority of museums I went to in Europe were only loosely ordered. Large
-collection museums would organize be era, and maybe by year within the era, or
-perhaps by artist. Those museums are fine for wandering around, but the really
-good museums are those that tell a story. The Escher exhibit in Lisbon, the
-Picasso exhibit I went to in Barcelona, and the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam
-tell the story of a single person's life, and by having that focus can be really
-compelling for the visitor. Those with a more broad focus have more difficulty
-being as compelling, but the Belgian Comic Strip Center nailed it.
-
-The museum started with a walkthrough of how comics are actually made, from
-initial blocking, to pencil sketches, to coloring, and finally inking. It
-covered materials used in past and present, and how digital tools like
-Photoshop and 3D modeling, which allow the entire process to be done digitally
-and quickly, have changed the landscape.
-
-From there the museum opened up into different sections, some focusing on
-specific countries, others on a particular artist, others on a theme. Each had
-a series of wall texts guiding you through the section, not just by giving
-information on a specific piece, but giving overall information on context.
-There were sections on specific Belgian artists, famous comic characters, a
-whole section on comics in propaganda, chinese and japanese comics (_not_
-manga), and much more. There were sections on the different mediums that comics
-appeared, e.g. newspapers, comic books, and posters, and even a whole section on
-the Smurfs. Overall it was one of the most thought out, well designed museums
-I've ever been to, and it made the trip to Brussels worth it on its own.
-
-After the Comic Center I didn't have much else I wanted to do. I wandered
-through the tourist-y area, saw the statue of the peeing kid that's apparently
-famous, and ended up walking a long while to visit what is, according to _the
-internet_, the best belgian fries joint in the city. It was pretty good (though
-the best belgian fries I'd have would turn out to be in Amsterdam), and I sat
-down in a little plaza to eat them. While there I caught the eye, for better or
-worse, of a guy coming out of a bar, and he immediately bee-lined for me. His
-English was not solid, but that didn't slow him down in the least.
-
-He opened by telling me he was waiting for his taxi, and then immediately
-launched into a tirade against capitalism, in favor of communism. I told him I'm
-from the U.S. and we (mostly he) talked about consumer culture, the plight of
-the working man, and the like. After a few minutes his taxi showed up, he wished
-me a good trip, and we said goodbye. It was a fun but extremely odd interaction.
-"Are all Belgians so eager to espouse communism to random passerby?", I'd wonder
-to myself.
-
-After wandering a while longer I decided to just catch a bus back to my hostel.
-A woman walked by with her two kids while I was waiting at the stop, and turned
-back to tell me something, though she didn't have hardly any English to work
-with. After some struggle we managed to land on "no bus". Damn. So I walked down
-to the metro station to take the train instead. While waiting for the train I
-overheard on the intercom: "Train delay due to worker strike". Which explained
-everything instantly. The Brussels public transit workers were on strike, so
-there was no bus, and no train, and a man (I'm betting one of the workers) was
-drinking in the middle of the day, waiting for a taxi, and super primed to talk
-about worker's rights.
-
-While it was a funny situation, in a way, it did make my life quite a bit
-harder. Once I finally got back to the hostel I stayed in for the night, and the
-next day headed on to Bruges.
-
-## Bruges, Belgium
-
-I'll be honest and say that 90% of the reason I wanted to go to Bruges was
-because of the movie, _In Bruges_, which is one of my all time favorites. The
-movie was shot almost completely in the city, and makes a lot of fun out of
-tourists coming to see it. "It's a fucking fairytale" is a common refrain in it.
-Bruges always had a pretty solid tourist game, but after the movie it really
-took off, so that most of the other people in my hostel said they had only
-really heard of the city from the movie too.
-
-{% include image.html
-    dir="mr-worldwide" file="bruges-pano-2018.jpg" width=1492
-    descr="View from atop the the Belfry of Bruges, 2018"
-    %}
-
-The city itself is actually beautiful. Once out of the busy tourist area,
-centered around the Belfry, the streets and canals wind around through quiet
-neighborhoods and small parks. Bruges is sometimes called the Venice of the
-North (though Amsterdam also calls itself this), due to its history as an
-important historical commercial port built on top of a maze of canals. There are
-many canal boat tours available, but I was too ~~cheap~~ poor to spring for one,
-so I took a free walking tour instead.
-
-"Free" walking tours are a fairly common business in European cities. The tour
-guides collect people from various hostels they have arrangements with, and walk
-them around the city, talking about whatever is worth talking about. Most that I
-took were quite good, weaving together the history of a place, its culture both
-then and now, and current events, all while giving you a good lay-of-the-land
-and two-ish hours of being out-and-about. At the end of the tour the guides ask
-for tips/donations, and most people give between $5-20.
-
-On the tour of Bruges our guide had pointed out a sea shell cemented into the
-pavement. This was part, he said, of the Camino De Santiago. In the middle ages
-the Catholic Church considered pilgrimage to be a suitable form of atonement for
-sins/crimes, and so many people throughout Europe were sent away from their
-towns to travel by land to the Santiago de Compestela Cathedral in northern
-Spain. Over time the various routes materialized into a network, denoted by sea
-shells or sea shell symbols, which stretches throughout Europe and which people
-continue to use today.
-
-Even as the guide was telling us about it I knew I wanted to do. As the trip
-wore on I talked to a few people who had done the pilgrimage, and for every one
-I became more and more convinced that I must do it.
-
-{% include image.html
-    dir="mr-worldwide" file="bruges-canal-2018.jpg" width=1920
-    descr="Canals of Bruges, 2018"
-    %}
-
-I made a few friends in my hostel, our friendship having been forged in the
-struggle of trying to find an affordable meal in Bruges. Every restaurant in
-Bruges, it seemed, did "full" meals, where you pay a fixed amount and get two,
-three, or four courses. But the fixed amount was never lower than €45, and so we
-spent a lot of time searching for alternatives. After a lot of searching we
-found a couple places which were reasonably priced for the couple nights we were
-all there, and one of the group knew of a hard-to-find pub which made and sold
-13% alcohol beer for a few euro. After all that Bruges wasn't as unaffordable
-as it first seemed, and was a lot of fun, but it took a bit of work to make it
-so.
-
-After Bruges I took a bus back to Brussels, where I hung out for a while waiting
-for my next bus which would take me across the pond.
-
-## London, England
-
-Getting to London was honestly one of the most exciting parts of that trip. The
-Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel", runs from France, underneath the English Channel,
-and pops back up in England. In the tunnel is a giant train which ferries cars
-and buses through the tunnel. Taking the Chunnel was as easy as buying a bus
-ticket from Brussels to London, and passing through three passport checks along
-the way (the UK check being the most intense passport check of my entire
-journey, for whatever reason).
-
-While the London Underground (The Tube, as the British call it, in their very
-endearing habit of giving everything an endearing nickname) was easy enough to
-use, though _very_ expensive, so I spent a lot of time walking in the bitter
-cold. London is a _huge_ metropolitan city, filled to the brim with shops and
-restaurants and plenty of other attractions to grab tourists. But despite their
-best efforts, none were more grabbing to me than the museums.
-
-{% include image.html
-    dir="mr-worldwide" file="london-steg-2018.jpg" width=1920
-    descr="Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum. London, 2018"
-    %}
-
-All the major museums in London are free to enter. This includes the National
-Gallery, exhibiting paintings and art from the world over, the Natural History
-Museum (my favorite), with its seemingly infinite halls of fossils and stones
-and pre-historic artifacts, and the British Museum, which exhibits many of the
-archeological treasures the British have stolen from other cultures throughout
-history.
-
-There's a significant amount of controversy surrounding the British Museum, and
-whether or not it's right for it to keep artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, and
-sculptures from the Parthenon of Athens. The argument is that the British were
-not really _given_ these artifacts by the peoples/cultures which originated
-them, and so the museum is effectively parading stolen property.
-
-The British Museum argues that, in fact, it's encouraging the spread of culture
-and understanding by collecting these artifacts from around the world and
-displaying them in context to each other, and that its mission is charitable to
-the cultures from which the artifacts are taken. And additionally that: "[the]
-restitutionist premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an
-original geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other
-great museums of the world".
-
-The argument that they're actually spreading culture is pretty patronizing, as
-if the people they've stolen from don't know how to do this best for themselves,
-and as if they should obviously _want_ this to be done for them. As for the
-argument that restitutionism would empty the museum, I can only imagine a
-restitutionist responding: "Yes, that's the point". It's one thing for a museum
-to be given or loaned an item for display by another people, but quite another
-to assume the right to take an item regardless of its peoples' wishes.
-
-Besides some very good fish and chips, London didn't have all that much else for
-me. The museums were insanely crowded, with everyone pushing over themselves to
-fill out their selfie-with-famous-objects-bingo-cards; my hostel was weird (all
-of my hostels in the UK were weird, in fact; more on that in Ireland); and
-everything was quite expensive. I wasn't too sad to leave.
-
-## Dublin, Ireland
-
-My bus dropped me off at a small ferry terminal in Holyhead, a town in Wales.
-From there I took the couple-hour ferry ride to Dublin.
-
-I spent only a couple of days in Dublin, but one of those days I struggled to be
-a living human while fighting off the flu. I still managed to walk down to
-Trinity College to see The Book of Kells and the college library's Long Room,
-but the memory of it is fuzzy. I'm sure I looked as dead as the people who wrote
-those books.
-
-That day I mostly hung out at the hostel. Hostels in the UK have a very
-different atmosphere than everywhere else; there's a fairly bad housing crisis
-occurring in most major cities (like the three I went to), and often it's
-cheaper to live in a hostel than to rent an apartment. So the hostels I stayed
-in were filled with people who'd been there for months, some of them working,
-others trying to find work, others just lounging. But the dichotomy between
-people who were just passing through and people who were there long term made it
-a less than stellar experience. The long-term residents all knew each other and
-formed cliques, and generally took up the common spaces, so if you weren't
-already traveling with others (like me) it was pretty easy to feel excluded.
-
-On the second day I decided to go on a day trip out of Dublin. The city was
-neat, but I wasn't finding all that much I wanted to do inside of it. I found a
-bus company which did day trips to Glendalough, a valley which holds
-the ruins of a 6th century monastary, a beautiful lake, many hiking trails, and
-some sheep. I spent the day hiking, wandering around the ruins, and escaping an
-incoming snow storm. By the end of it all my sickness from the previous day was
-completely gone, and I slept the whole bus ride back.
-
-## Edinburgh, Scotland
-
-I left Dublin just as the Beast from the East made landfall. A giant cold wave
-brought in tons of snow and unseasonably low temperatures, stretching all across
-Europe. My plane must have been one of the last ones to land in Edinburgh,
-because for the next 2 days the entire city was completely snowed in, and most
-stores and attractions were closed.
-
-The tourist industry heavily plays up that Edinburgh is the city where JK
-Rowling wrote most of the _Harry Potter_ books, and you can see its influence
-clearly. The towering gothic cathedrals, castles on cliffs, old graveyards,
-dense cobblestone streets and dark alleys all feel like something right out of
-the books (though really it's the other way around). There was a cafe only a few
-blocks away from my hostel where JK Rowling apparently first started writing the
-books, a piece of trivia which the cafe has not failed to cash in on.
-
-The city was quite peaceful, probably because everything was closed from the
-storm, but it felt like it might always be like that even in good weather. Most
-days I'd find a spot to hunker down and draw for a while, then in the afternoon
-go explore some sight or another; the castle, the royal mile, Calton Hill... Or
-I'd go in search of decent groceries, which were strangely difficult to find.
-The city is (said to be) built on seven hills, like Rome, and between the many
-steep stairways and narrow alleys navigating them, and packed snow and ice, it
-was quite difficult to explore too far.
-
-While I spent five whole days in Edinburgh, I don't have much to talk about for
-it. It's probably one of the most unique cities I visited, with a lot of beauty
-and history and things to see, and I absolutely would love to go back. But
-despite all that, there was definitely a feeling a depression while I was there,
-like I was totally alone. When I got onto a plane and took off, I was more
-relieved than anything else.
-
-## Amsterdam, The Netherlands
-
-One of the first things I noticed when I landed in The Netherlands (which is
-such a strange name for a country, now that I'm typing it out) is that they have
-a sun. It's a stereotype that the UK doesn't get much sun, but it was absolutely
-a true one while I was there. There was literally cloud cover the whole time.
-That probably had to do with why my mood was down the whole time, unbenownst to
-me.
-
-With my extremely pale ginger self back under the sun, it felt like I'd been
-holding my breath for weeks and I was now finally able to breathe again.
-
-Amsterdam is sometimes called the Venice of the North. Like Bruges. Unlike
-Bruges, Amsterdam is gritty and in some places delapidated. The buildings are
-sinking into the soft, slightly-under-sea-level Holland soil, and so lean
-precariously over the streets. House boats line nearly all canals, many
-appearing abandoned. Most canals have a layer of debris and trash floating on
-them.
-
-Some parts of the city are littered with bars and clubs and "coffee shops",
-giving them a grunge feel. And others had wildly colored houses and quiet
-corners on the canal. And then the museum district, with the amazing Van Gogh
-Musuem and the laborynthian Rijksmuseum (those were the two I went in, there's
-like five in that little square). And still there's the red light district, with
-sex shops and cheesy tourist shit and live shows and, obviously, prostitutes.
-They each have a little window where they try to grab your attention from. It's
-kinda weird.
-
-Despite that, Amsterdam was probably my second favorite place I visted on the
-whole trip. Like Lisbon, the city feels real. The grunge lets you know people
-actually live there. The hostel I stayed in was really cool, and I made a bunch
-of friends. One of the nights there I confirmed a long-held suspicion: that I
-would hate bar crawls. Now I know for sure. On a different night me and friends
-went out, visited a "coffee shop", and hit up the Sex Museum. This turned out to
-be a great idea; it wasn't even that raunchy, just kind of mind-boggling.
-
-Amsterdam also turned out to have the best Belgian fries I've ever had, for
-whatever reason, and they ended up being my lunch almost every day. I'd grab my
-fry-cone and wander the canals, finding small corners and tucked away cafes to
-sit and read at. I wouldn't have thought that a city known for nightlife could
-also be home to so many serene little spots; nevertheless, the city is full of
-them.
-
-My bus out of Amsterdam was an 8 hour overnight journey which deposited me in
-Copenhagen. Before getting on the bus I killed the last of my "coffee" that was
-in my pocket, contorted myself into a ball fitting into the two seats of space I
-grabbed, and got the best sleep I've ever gotton on a bus.