Barcelona, Berlin, and Bugs, Oh My! [Belgium #3]

Hi all--
it's been a while since I last wrote, since I've been really busy. Perhaps I can remember everything that's happened in the last week and a half.

Wednesday before last, Erik, my host, had his public PhD defense. It went fine, of course, and afterwards he and Jessica had a big party at their house. Since he is Dutch, and works part-time at the university in Delft, and she is Flemish, all the people at the party were Dutch speakers, so I had quite a good time practicing my Dutch with them. The whole thing felt quite convivial and nice, and it really made me feel at home there.

With that feeling of home, I then set out the next day for Barcelona. The party consisted of me, Brandon, Carmen and Jim. Brandon is a business major (and a Republican) from Texas who, despite these apparently obvious marks against him, is actually quite an interesting and thoughtful guy. Carmen goes to Mt. Holyoke and is majoring in Critical Social Thought. In other words, she's a swattie from another institution. The three of us got along very well, and we also got along well with Jim, the guy who was leading us around.

Jim is sixty-one and has more stories to tell than most people. He was apparently in the Navy in the late 1960s, where he declined an assignment as a pilot in favor of the least combat-likely job he could find: working on an oil tanker in the Mediterranean. Then, as the conflict in Vietnam heated up, he realised that he was a conscientious objector. The Navy took some issue with this and declined to release him, whereupon he sued the Secretary of Defense. After some wrangling, he lost the case but won in the sense that he got a letter from the Navy telling him that within 48 hours, he was to be honorably discharged the service and that special commendation by the President was "NOT AUTHORISED".

He's slept, or so it seems, with women in more countries than I was aware of the existance of; he's Irish-American and likes to refer to Northern Ireland as "Occupied Ireland" and in general, he's extraordinarily smart and well-read about everything.

Anyhow, Barcelona is a fantastic city. The whole place feels very alive: full of culture and life and beauty. And above all, the weather is fantastic, even at the beginning of February. The only complaint I have is that there's an omnipresent haze over the city, which makes it hard to see very far from the tops of hills, which is too bad.

The first day we were there, we went around and saw a number of Gaudi buildings: the Casa Batllo, which looks like it could play host to an enormous and fantastic Jules Verne-themed party, and La Pedrera, an apartment building, which feels rather more like a place in which one could comfortably live.

The next morning, we went up to the Montjuïc, which is the biggest of the hills around Barcelona, situated right onthe coast. There's a big fort there. On one side, you can look out at the port and the Mediterranean sea, and then on the other side, you can look out over all of Barcelona. It's quite a view, despite the smog. Then we went to the Miro museum. I like Miro a lot: he's playful in a way that a lot of modern art isn't. Instead of trying to shock you with the weirdness of what he's doing (Mr. Dali, I'm talking about you!) he's just messing around and having fun.

That afternoon, I went to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). This is really out of character for me, I suppose, to go of my own volition to a contemporary art museum. There, they had an exhibit of a series of installations by two Canadian artists, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. If you ever get a chance to see any of their stuff, do. It's fantastic. What they did was create installations that used sound to make a sort of sculpture all around you and pull you in. My favorite was on called "Opera for a Small Room." They had built a small room that you could look into, full of LP records, turntables, shelves, speakers, and in the middle, a chair. The exhibit, which ran for about 15 minutes, involved the lights changing so that it seemed like a man was sitting in the chair, and then the man told a sort of long, rambling story while playing records. There was sound going on all around, and lights, and the whole thing was just exhilarating!

Then on Sunday, we went up to Figueres, where was saw Salvador Dali's museum. I don't like Dali. He's just gratuitously weird. I feel like I'm peering into a very diseased mind, and I just want it to go away. After leaving Dali, we went to a town with the excavated ruins of an old Greek and Roman village. At this point, the weather had gotten a little crummy, so it was less enthralling, but we did discover a marvelously cute little hotel right on the beach that I'd love to come back to before I leave Europe.

So that was Barcelona: a really wonderful weekend trip, with some fascinating people. The rest of last week wasn't very exciting, since what I was really looking forward to was going to Berlin. And that turns out to be a story full of ups and downs.

I'd like to start out by saying that if you or anyone you know is planning to take the Nachtzug from Paris/Brussels to Berlin, I would encourage you in the strongest possible terms to spring the extra ten euros for the bed, rather than the seat. The reasons for this will become abundantly clear. In any event, I did not have a bed on the way there. I was in a cabin with three seats facing three other seats. The three seats opposite me were occupied by one man, asleep, and one of the seats on my side was occupied by another sleeping man. This left me little room for sleeping myself. After much gyration and contortion, I finally decided that the best way to sleep would be for me to lie down on the floor, head underneath one set of seats and feet underneath the other. This way, I actually did get about four or five hours of sleep. However, later events would reveal this to have been an unwise course of action. Stay tuned.

So I arrivedin Berlin at 8 am, rendezvoused with Bryce and dropped my stuff off at his place. Fortifying ourselves with breakfast, we set off on the Berlin Wall segment of our exploration. First stop was the East Side Gallery, a 1.2km-long section of the wall that has been preserved along the Spree River. It differs markedly from the original wall in that it has graffiti not only on the western side, which is to be expected, but also on the eastern side, which was done in 1990 by a group of celebrated graffiti artists. Berlin has celebrated graffiti artists. Actually, Berlin has about ten million graffiti artists, at least, that's what it seems. There is not a flat vertical surface in the city that isn't covered in marker, spray paint or pen.

Walking along the East Side Gallery, my first thought was that the wall is very, deeply strange. But I still didn't really have a sense of it's emotional impact until we went to the Dokumentationszentrum, where a piece of the wall is preserved along with the no-man's land and the other associated fencing. This was what did it for me. Because here's the thing about the Wall. It's not that thick, really. It's not even *that* tall. It would have been practically the easiest thing for someone to go up to it from the West and blow a great big hole in it with some dynamite. But it wasn't about the actual Wall. The Wall was just a symbol for the whole thing, the great tearing emotional gash that the Soviets ripped through Europe. And while I was staring out across the death strip into what used to be occupied East Berlin, I realised that it's not right for me to gawk at the spectacle of the wall and think, "Woah, gee, that's intense, man!" It's not a spectacle. It's not stupid dorm room posters in American colleges of "SIE VERLASSEN DEN AMERIKANISCHEN SEKTOR" and silly men in Red Army uniforms posing for tourists by the Brandenburg Gate and stamping pretend visas. It wasn't our wall.

That wall, that gash across Europe, was a heart-wrenching emotional wound for millions of people. Real Berliners walked by the wall every day, knowing that half of their world was on the other side and that for all they knew, they were never going to see it again. I sat in the museum watching videos of people escaping across in the days right after the wall went up. The people in those videos escaping through the fences, that was life or death business for them. They left everything behind and bolted for the one chance they had, and thanked God that they had made it and not gotten snagged in the barbed wire or shot to death and left to die and as I watched them, I cheered for them as they made it across. I'm never going to have to do anything like that, and I don't know if they'd be happy or upset that people are gawking at the Wall like it's a spectacle, but I'm not going to anymore.

The next day, we met up with Bryce's aunt and uncle, who live in Potsdam, and his uncle showed us around a little. If one had been smart, and somewhat brave, about eight or ten years ago, one would have bought property in Potsdam when everything was still varying shades of Soviet Brown and Soviet Gray, because it's becoming quite a nice place. It's full of parks, some quite genuinely nice buildings, and it's cleaning up nicely. It might not have been a great investment in the short- or even medium-term, since there's a great deal of expense involved in restoring any of these historic Potsdamian buildings, but the end result would be very nice.

That evening, Bryce and I decided to try and see one of the films playing in the Berlinale film festival. Figuring that it was a film festival, so how could we possibly go wrong, we bought the two spare tickets that some woman was selling off while we were waiting in line. The film turned out to be the world premiere of a Bosnian (or perhaps it was Croatian) film called Armin, which purported to be about a boy and his father who travel from their Bosnian village to Zagreb so that the boy can audition for a movie. This synopsis is, in fact, basically all that happens. I read on Wikipedia that among other things, Armin is the name of "a fast-acting anesthetic similar to sodium pentothal." Let me tell you, there was no fast actiing in this movie whatsoever. There was hardly any acting at all. There was no need, since nothing happened for eighty-five minutes, and then the movie was over. Appparently the boy had some kind of ailment, which was alluded to but never discussed, since that would have brought a plot into the movie, and that would never do. In conclusion: world premier + film festival does not always equal good.

However, what I may or may not have thought about the movie was not on my mind for very long, because the delayed aftereffects of having slept on the floor of the train began to come into play. You see, around nine PM, as we headed home, I began to feel a little unwell. And then in the next couple of hours, my digestive system decided to empty itself out as swiftly and violently as possible. Finally, I woke Bryce up in the middle of the night and told him that I had to go to the hospital, since I felt very dehydrated and feverish.

The upshot was that I spent several hours getting IV fluids pumped into me, and then I went home and slept for the next eighteen hours. I missed my Sunday night train and ended up taking on Monday night instead. Since I got back, I've basically been resting, although I'm going to have to get up tomorrow to go to Chemistry class in the morning, and we'll see if I stay and go to class in the afternoon or not. Basically, I'm just feeling really, really tired now, and I want to feel better. I hate being sick and I hate not having any energy. It's gray and rainy out and I'm basically just feeling out of sorts, so if anyone wanted to send me a note with something cheery, it would be magnificent.

Sorry to end on such a down note, but I'm sure I'll feel better soon. The weather is supposed to get sunny and quite warm this weekend, so maybe I'll go down to the big park south of the city and walk around. Anyhow, until next time,

--Nathan