If It’s Tuesday It Must Be…
...well, not Belgium, but any other country in Western Europe will do…
Our continental whirlwind tour began with a Eurail pass and two overnight ferry crossings, from Crete to Athens and from Patras, Greece to Bari, Italy. We shared the first experience with a Greek grandmother in the cafe section who stared at us all night long (no one stares like the Ancient Greeks), and a high school group that reminded me of long nights as a dorm supervisor. This led to the extravagant purchase of a sea-view cabin with in-room shower for the second night, the first of many concessions to the European financial market. We crossed the Adriatic in style, after a brief delay in the port town of Patras. We missed out on the opportunity to buy a European guidebook in the only English-language bookstore because shops close on Wednesdays at noon. (Obviously!) Once we arrived in Italy, we embarked on a series of small pilgrimages to sample the musical, artistic, architectural, gastronomical, political, and ethical challenges and rewards of several millennia of European civilizations. We listened to Respighi’s Pines of Rome in the shade of a pine of Rome in the Villa Borghese, and joined thousands of other tourists as we tossed coins over our shoulders into the Trevi Fountain. We pushed past people and their audio guides to see Monet blur the boundaries between light and paint. We ran through the Pompidou to find Kandinsky’s “Yellow-Red-Blue”, and spent as much time in front of that one painting as we did in the entire Louvre. We revisited childhood fairytale dreams and solid metaphors for liquid in the nooks and crannies of Gaudí’s magnum opus, the Casa Batlló in Barcelona. We walked through cast iron labyrinths inside the Bilbao Guggenheim and subterranean labyrinths of redundant subway tunnels. We gazed up at the Florence Duomo and felt like dolls in a dollhouse of epic detail, and sent postcards from the cupola at the top of the Vatican. We compared the stained glass windows in 34 cathedrals across the continent. We learned that an Italian breakfast is really just a cappuccino and a pastry, no matter how exuberantly the hotel manager presents it in his sales pitch, and that you have to stand up and eat it at the bar or pay triple the price. We enjoyed chocolate Mozart balls in Salzburg, honey wafers in Germany, and pretzel bread in Switzerland, but struggled to find an acceptable interpretation of chicken breast among the ubiquitous displays of pig flesh in every Spanish storefront. (The most notable example of this was a boar head with sunglasses and a cigarette, appealing to a variety of Spanish tendencies.) We found that pastries are an excellent substitute for lunch and dinner when the shifting dining hours eluded us at the start of each new country. We rejoiced upon discovering a renegade can of tuna in one of our backpacks after yet another grocery store turned out to be closed on Sunday. We navigated language shifts with a few good hybrids (“Ich möchte ein...pizza...por favor?”), and at times didn’t even notice when the web page we were reading was in Norwegian. We missed the memo about carrying our own wireless device, and smiled graciously as we were asked over and over again, “Why didn’t you book online?” In an attempt to satisfy my eclectic US-American palette, we ate Turkish food in Granada, Chinese in Bilbao, Mexican in Amsterdam, Greek in Salzburg, Thai in Innsbruck, Vietnamese in Berlin, Indian in Copenhagen, and in Paris...McDonalds. We stood with one foot on each side of the Berlin Wall and got lost in the cement maze of the Holocaust memorial. We marveled at the architectural remains of centuries of religious conflict, with cherubs carved into the columns of the Córdoba mosque and plaques commemorating Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquest at the top of the Alhambra. We sat up straight all night on a Cold War-era overnight train from Amsterdam to Copenhagen in a compartment that we shared with enormous German men with legs that went on for miles. We slept in the light of the midnight sun above the Arctic Circle in Norway, and got Icelandic volcano ash caked into our shoes and geysir spray in our hair. We said “More Cowbell!” to the cows in the Swiss mountains. We drove round and round the English roundabouts, trying to find the right way out. And in honor of the Italian preoccupation with shoes, I made my La Scala pilgrimage in heels. Little strappy black ones that I carried all over the world for a one-time use at Das Rheingold. Opera takes commitment.
