Living off Christmas markets

Christmas in Berlin has come and gone, which means I can finally stop talking about the endless holiday. Well, I’ll give it one more paragraph. Nigel Slater at the Guardian writes about Christmas in Vienna, which sounds not too different from Berlin:

I have long been embarrassed by our own big cities’ tackiness when it comes to Christmas festivities. While our town centres are decorated with a sort of flashing Las Vegas-style ugliness, Vienna manages to retain the feel of an advent calendar, complete with a dusting of glitter. The Christmas markets, of which half a dozen are dotted around the city, are heavy with the fragrance of freshly cut pine trees and freshly baked ginger biscuits. Sure, they have more than their fair share of dodgy craftwork for sale, but it is a small price to pay for the lingering scent of cloves and hot apple cider that hangs in the air like an edible cloud.

There’s definitely something to be said for spending Christmas Eve outside in the bitter cold with hundreds of other cityfolk, surrounded by steaming mugs of mulled wine while stuffing yourself with waffles, bratwurst, and crepes.

My last few weeks can be characterized by just that — Christmas markets on a rotating landscape of city squares and changing languagse. French and Dutch in Brussels, French and German in Luxembourg, back to Dutch in Amsterdam, more German in Berlin — but always universal availability of the familiar markets, and therefore sugar, carved wooden toys, and glühwein.  It’s all been a happy blur.

The long year past

Around this time of year, people usually begin to lament how fast the year went by (it seems to go by faster and faster each year, like a global calendar conspiracy). But time doesn’t really fly by the way we think it does. We just forget everything we did and everyone we met.

Take Carla, for example. I met up with my native Berliner friend today and between walking through shopping streets and squatter apartments, eating falafel and drinking German beer, we reminisced about how we met: earlier this very year while backpacking in Seoul. She was on her way home after six months of farm and surf in New Zealand, and I was enjoying a week away from Taiwan during Chinese New Year. That was in February, but it felt like it could have been last year or the year before.

Since then Carla has started university — she might be the youngest friend I have these days — and I have left Taiwan, returned home to L.A., and embarked on my Eurotrip.

I’ve seen so many things and been so many places since February, I can hardly comprehend the idea that I was in Seoul just earlier this very year. Carla felt the same way. And yet, the calendar doesn’t lie. Time doesn’t fly if you give what you’ve done its proper due.

Yes, it has been quite a long, fruitful, eventful, good year.

Revenge of the $15 hamburger

Speaking of money, the New York Times has a story that I know well, after almost three months paying for things in pounds and euros. The nosediving dollar is killing Americans here in Europe:

Erica Nevins’s faith in the dollar was shaken the moment she pressed a crumpled $1 bill into the hand of a little girl begging for money on the streets of Marrakesh, Morocco.

“I don’t want this. This is nothing,” Ms. Nevins recalled the scornful reaction of the child, who demanded more.

‘We don’t accept Monopoly money’

Dec. 4: Eurostar from London St. Pancras to Paris Nord 

It’s hard to tell between which two countries there’s more mutual antipathy: France and the U.K. or France and the U.S. I think most people would automatically choose the latter, but think how much longer France and its neighbor across the channel have had to dislike each other.

When I was last in France (only two months ago), I watched two portly men blow up at a waiter in a brasserie. One stood up and gestured, red in the face, yelling about a bowl for his moules frites. All signs pointed to American, but the two men were, in fact, British.

From what I can gather, when push comes to shove, the British and the Americans are essentially cut from the same cloth for the French — and indeed they’re right, aren’t they? If complaining exclusively about Americans doesn’t suffice in any given argument, all they need do is swap out “the Americans” for “the Anglo-Saxons.”

The Eurostar should theoretically be the bridge over (under, really) these troubled waters, but I think all it’s done is increase the opportunities for misunderstanding and the upturning of noses.

(Last month a Eurostar campaign to draw more tourists to the U.K. ruffled some feathers with its caricatures of British culture. Among the ads: an image of an English skinhead urinating into a teacup.)

The U.K.’s Euroskepticism doesn’t help matters either. While most European countries, including France and anglophone Ireland,  have long switched to the euro, the British still insist on using the pound sterling.

On the train back to Paris, I tried to pay in pounds for my lunch in the bar.

“We prefer euros,” the man said. I only have pounds, I answered, and passed him a £20 note — from Scotland.

(Scottish notes are legal tender, but do look different from the run-of-the-mill U.K. notes. Each Scottish bank actually seems to issue their own design. I was warned I would get funny looks if I tried to use them down in England, but I had by the end of my Scotland trip acquired a sort of transient Scottish nationalism that would defy anyone not to take my Scottish money. I was also, at that very moment, wearing a pair of boxers that had the Scottish national flag on them.)

If trying to use Scottish money in England was supposedly troublesome, trying to use Scottish money with French people on a Paris-bound train was something else entirely.

On time and travel

Last year, in Taiwan, I met a couple people in the Chinese program who were a good deal older than me … 30, 40-ish. One in particular had had a successful career, but decided in the end his heart wasn’t in it, and quit. He decided instead to study Chinese, although to what end it didn’t seem particularly clear. I think it was mainly to get away.

Reading my first Haruki Murakami book — the author had been highly recommended by my good friend Leslie for some time now — I was struck by something the protagonist Toru Okada says. Okada has quit his job recently, and finds himself with a lot of time on his hands, and with that, a lot of new thoughts:

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to know another person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

I started thinking seriously about such things a week after I quit my job at the law firm. Never until then — never in the whole course of my life — had I grappled with questions like this. And why not? Probably because my hands had been full just living. I had simply been too busy to think about myself.

Okada’s question about understanding another human being isn’t really my question, but his point stands the same. I’ve taken a break from being too busy to think about myself. And aside from taking pictures of cool and funny things and having loads of fun, and aside from occasionally feeling homesick, I’m glad I’m out here zigzagging off the straight line. It gives me time to think — time for clarity, which sometimes seems like a rare commodity among 25-year-olds, not to mention 40-somethings.

Luxembourg for a half-day

I took a silly route to Luxembourg. I’d explain the details, but they’re pretty boring. Suffice it to say I backtracked a good number of kilometers, and will do so again when I go to Amsterdam tomorrow. The great thing about my unlimited rail pass, though, is I can knock around Europe on all the ill-planned, circuitous routes I want.

It’s now maybe the lowest of the low season. Last night in Bruges, I slept alone in a 12-bed room. Based on that experience, I winged it (Wang it?) today to Luxembourg — I didn’t reserve a hostel, in a city with only one. (I’ve been hesitant to wing anything ever since I almost missed my flight out of Poland and ended up on a terrible night bus journey from Krakow to Warsaw, topped off by a wild goose chase for apartment keys that involved my being called Bobby Lee.)

But apart from a lot of uphill climbing, it went smoothly this time. Luxembourg is all hills and valleys — well, given the city’s size, I should say all hill and valley. And winding streets. Which all makes for an incredibly charming place. My hostel is nestled at the edge of one of the valleys, and looking up out the window you can see double-decker trains passing by on the bridge.

The main city square, Place d’Armes, has been turned into a Christmas market, just like the many squares of places I’ve seen recently: Bruges, Brussels, Edinburgh. Maybe it was the saxophone players; this one was particularly lovely. Matched with the warm lighting and Santa hats, I felt for a moment like it was all very cleverly orchestrated to part people from their money.

But it’s hard to stay cynical in a place like that. It’s free music — sax filling the air — in a public square, not fake snow in an outdoor mall. The local winter liquor, glühwein,  was hot, sweet, and delicious, and the gromperenkichelchen, potato cakes topped with apple sauce, made for one of the happiest, if not healthiest, meals I’ve had in a while.