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Across Northern Europe with Brook Silva-Braga

Across Northern Europe: A Coda to Travel Love in Amsterdam

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 23, 2007

Sometimes I walk to the southeastern corner of Central Park and watch the tour buses respire tourists. I walk by slowly and try to pick up an accent or language. For a while I thought of stopping and offering to show them the city, to take them for a drink or walk through the park. But I never did.

One nice thing about New York is that there are always plenty of travelers to watch and I like watching them more than I like looking through my own photographs because they are living something current and exciting and photos only remind me I was doing that at some other time but not now.

If there is one honest to goodness reason not to go on a long trip it is because coming home is so impossible. A married friend of mine e-mailed me while I was away saying how much he still misses that time in his life – now fifteen years in the past – when he went traveling in Asia. At film festivals, after the Q&A, someone always comes up to tell me about the trip they took two years or two decades ago and still think about always.

I’ve sometimes compared travel to a dangerous drug, which makes you feel high in a new and fabulous way and then becomes necessary just to feel normal. And I think that’s true.

But just now I’m thinking that high is more like a first love.

First, with love, you find yourself with a certain kind of new-found freedom. In high school or maybe university you start to become your own person and its flush with possibility and uncertainty and innocence. And then you meet someone who makes you feel high in a new and fabulous way.

When it ends, if you’re lucky, you’ve learned something about finding the right person but certainly you’ve lost the innocence of caring so much so quickly so blindly.

Isn’t that how it felt on your first week out alone? Wasn’t it like a new kind of freedom? And wasn’t it filled in by making connections to people that were much stronger and faster than they had any right to be?

If you are unlucky, when the newness has warn off, you’re left looking at pictures. You are too jaded or scared or cynical or bored to make new pictures that mean anything.

“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the suffering of being unable to love.”

I have no idea where I’m going with this.

But its worth reminding myself that I’m in the apartment of the girl who filled up my innocence when I left home more than two years ago. The thing about love when you’re traveling is that you can always blame the road for the split. You don’t have to learn what’s wrong with being together, because itineraries split you up before you find out. So its like the magic of that first love in high school, but without the kick-in-the-gut first break-up. What a dangerous little thing.

“It’s really good to see you,” I said when we touched glasses tonight, my last in Amsterdam.

“Is it different seeing me in my real life instead of the other times when I was traveling?” she asked.

“It’s very much the same but its very different too.”

“I think its very different,” she said.

“Yes, but you are the same person.” And that hung in the air.

What I meant is that in the bar in Amsterdam with the warm red light and the white, leather benches I saw the same face I met at the World Bar in Sydney 31 months ago. I heard the same voice inflecting the same way.

At most museums and some monuments they have benches in just the perfect place. You have a very good view and can rest your legs. You don’t wait in line to sit on them, of course. You maybe mill around hoping someone will get up. Or you stand there looking at the paintings while someone else sits. And when someone gets up the bench is immediately filled.

There are certain people like this too, who when they become available will always be made unavailable by the next passerby. The passerby might truly love the view or only know that it is a good seat and they should take it. But if you ever fall in love with such a bench and then leave it to go to Asia and Europe and South America you can be certain if you drop in for a few days it will not be empty. And if you’re very unlucky that won’t even hurt because all those places will have made you almost unable to love seeing new things or unable to do other things. You’ll only be reminded that something current and exiting is in a 31-month-old picture.

That’s not hell, it’s Amsterdam.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.

Across Northern Europe: Two to a bed in Bruges

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 21, 2007

There are many ways to end up sleeping with someone in a hostel bed but this was a new one for me.

Bruges, Belgium is a little city of 117,000 with about five million tourists on every cobblestone street so I was happy to find shelter at a hostel in the north part of town. My friend and I claimed beds in dorm room 10 and headed out for a long day of beer reconnaissance. Our exploration was as thorough as 8% alcohol levels will reasonably allow. It had been a good nine hours of diligent effort when we made it back to room 10.

Room 10 was darkened and filled with sleeping bodies, including one in my bed. My guidebook — which had been on top of my bed to hold the place — was now on top of my bag which had also been moved to the door. Naturally, reception was closed.

But the hostel bar was open and I staggered over there and asked the bartender what to do. He walked with me back to room 10 and observed that there was in fact someone else in my bed.

We went back to the bar and squinted at a computer spreadsheet. A group of nine had been split between rooms 10 and 11 and it appeared one of the fellas from room 11 had gone into room 10 instead. Sure enough there was an empty bed in room 11 and the barman gave me a key to the room and went back to pouring bier.

It was a comfy bed on the bottom of the bunk with a blanket of ideal weight. I was asleep for five minutes or an hour or a year when Stacey came into the room. I have no idea if her name was Stacey but we need a name for her.

“You’re in my bed,” Stacey observed in close proximity to my slumbering head. “You’re in my bed!”

“Shut up!” a guy in an adjacent bunk offered.

“I need to sleep and he’s in my bed,” Stacey clarified with a distinct Queensland, Australia accent.

I explained what had happened to Stacey and suggested she talk to the bartender. The bar was closed, she noted calmly and not at all drunkenly or annoyedly. It had reached the hour where even annoyedly was a word.

“I’m sorry, but this is the bed they gave me and it’s the only place I have to sleep and I’m not getting up,” I said.

Stacey curled up on the floor and proceeded the squirm audibly. “If you want to share you can,” I offered chivalrously. “That’s the best I can offer.”

And with that Stacey climbed into bed with her back to my back and her feet to my face. Sleeping with someone in a dorm-size bed is an act of skill, sleeping with someone in a dorm-size bed without touching them is an act of will.

I don’t often remember my dreams but I remember one from this night which I feel compelled to share. In it, I was sitting up in the bed while Stacey slept and since I didn’t know who she was I looked her up on Facebook and read through her profile. It seemed an odd way of learning about someone you were sharing a bed with. I don’t recall if her name on Facebook was Stacey but there is no accounting for the subconscious.

In the morning, Stacey and I were in much better spirits – though no thanks to each other, if you know what I mean – and both agreed that it had been no ones fault and we both behaved admirably. At breakfast she gave me a knowing smile and though she wasn’t as cute as her Facebook picture had made her seem, I hoped she’d share an undercooked egg with me and tell me her name and a few personal details I could put in this section of the story.

But instead she sat next to an American girl who had just been to Amsterdam. Reception was open now and they gave back my 17 euros. The hostel’s slogan is “party hard, sleep easy” but in Bruges the partying was the easy part.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Across Northern Europe: Authentic Belgian Beer

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 20, 2007

Belgium is home to the EU, many very fine restaurants, important art and beautiful architecture. But it is also a tiny country with a giant selection of excellent beer and if you like beer and live in New York (where Belgian beers are fairly scarce and cost close to $10 with tip) you can easily justify a trip to Belgium simply to drink beer.

If I’m being honest I’ll admit to having done that. If I’m being really honest, I’ll admit to having done it twice.

I don’t like to drink alone so I met a friend this weekend for a survey of lambics and trappists. I arrived in Brussels a day before him and decided to sample some tourist attractions. Having already visited the beer museum (and the EU headquarters, thank-you-very-much) I scampered to the Cantillon brewery. The guidebook gave the address of a street just off the map and when I arrived the sign was so small (and so not in English) that I nearly turned around.

When Paul Cantillon started making beer in Anderlecht more than a century ago there were heaps of traditional breweries in Brussels but today there is just the one. Cantillon is fighting the good fight in part by giving tours of its 19th century production behind the subtly marked door at Rue Gheude 56.

I graduated university and have been to several breweries and have a pamphlet here on the process but making beer is still quite a mystery to me. But what became clear on my Cantillon tour is that the beer makers of the world have sold out to new techniques and changing public desires, leaving Cantillon nearly alone in defending the ancient traditions. They do so with the stubbornness of someone selling a product they know almost no one wants but insist they should.

“A true lambic is never sweet,” the guide/brewer told us. “But the masses want sweet. And since there is no protection in Belgium for the traditional methods, you cannot tell by the label if you are drinking a true lambic or they simply call it a lambic because people know the name.”

One principle difference – I’m cheating from the pamphlet here – is the type of fermentation. Cantillon uses “spontaneous fermentation” meaning they simply pour the wort (the base liquid of mashed up grains) into a big, flat pan and it let it cool overnight. Instead of inoculating it with yeast cultures they let the special Belgian air do it naturally. This is apparently how all beer was made until Pasteur got creative in the 1860’s.

It’s at this point – if I’m being honest again – that my thoughts generally turn to the beer tasting and I fail to learn how to make beer. So soon after they poured small glasses of the Gueuze and Rose de Gambrinus. Gueuze is a mix of one, two and three year old lambic; Rose de Gambrinus is a fruit beer with fresh raspberries (not fake syrup!) in two year old lambic.

The Cantillon, as promised, is not a sweet beer. It’s a bit like eating Wheaties when you’ve grown up on Frosted Flakes. But the taste is complex and different and worth a try. I bought two bottles and had them ready when my friend arrived that night.

I explained to him the different types of fermentation and the use of the traditional methods. I told him how all the Chimay and Leffe and Kwak and La Couffe and Rochefford and Palm and Duvel we were about to drink wasn’t how the monks made it 500 years ago. This seemed to weigh much more heavily on me than him.

“I don’t know, I like the Belgian beers,” he said. “However they’re making it seems good to me.”

And with that we went out into Brussels and bought pitas for dinner and drank a giant Chimay Grand Reserve on the church steps of the Grand Place. The bottle was $4.50 at the grocery store outside town instead of $18 at the bar in New York.

I’m in Amsterdam now with another friend and the two bottles of authentic Cantillon beer are chilling in her refrigerator. I can report that they are heavy bottles which I’ve carried diligently through three cities and two countries in hopes of finding someone appreciative of their authenticity. My friend is German and favors Becks Green Lemon beer when Smirnoff Ice isn’t readily available. Wednesday I’m going to Denmark, and I’m afraid the Gueuze and Rose de Gambrinus will be joining me.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Across Northern Europe: Terror in Berlin

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 17, 2007

I’m in Belgium now but I have a word more about Germany because simply being a tourist in Berlin will get you thinking. I’d love to take a history class on the last century in Berlin: WWI leads to Hitler leads to WWII leads to the DDR leads to the fall of the Berlin wall. How’s that for a syllabus?

A couple days ago I was at the Topography of Terror, an outdoor museum that lost funding before it was completed. The exhibit stands where the Gestapo and SS once set up shop and is complete enough in it’s telling of terrible things.

“World history sometimes seems unjust, but in the end it reveals a superior justice.” That quote was translated into English on one of the displays from the WWII period and it reminded me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopeful formulation that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

But in 1944 it wasn’t that kind of movie and the quote is from Joseph Goebbels the Nazi propaganda minister. He was right, I suppose, but I’m not sure he knew it.

I spent a fair bit of my time in Berlin wishing I was traveling with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president has famously denied the Holocaust and when Mike Wallace interviewed him on “60 Minutes” some months ago, Ahmadinejad basically asked, “If it happened, where is the evidence?”

Berlin, indeed much of Germany, is an answer to that question. Perhaps most stirring at the Topography of Terror are the audio recordings which play with the push of a button at several of the displays. One live radio report describes the hysterical crowd on the night Hitler was named Chancellor.

But the button I wished Ahmadinejad would push was from October 4, 1943. It was Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander speaking at a Nazi party meeting. “I want to talk to you quite openly here about a very difficult topic,” he said. “The extinction of the Jews.”

Germany is peppered with such horrible things. But tonight I’m in Belgium where the museums and monuments don’t make you think so much. That might not be fair though, since it was only a few decades before Hitler that Belgium’s King Leopold II’s pursuit of rubber led to the death of 5 to 22 million people in the Congo.

Back home in the United States of America our wealth was derived with the help of an unspeakable forced migration. Slaves worked land that was free because it’s native inhabitants had been exterminated or relocated.

I thought of that sometimes as I walked through Berlin; how Germans face their grandparent’s misdeeds much more than the rest of us.

“This was the worst event in the history of the world,” a thirty-something German told me. “And it’s important that we remember it, so that it never happens again. But sometimes it’s too much.”

I thought he was right and I thought if there were fewer people like the president of Iran, it wouldn’t be so necessary.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Across Northern Europe: The Elusive Dutch Drivers License

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 17, 2007

I met Ella, Hilde and Amber in a Stockholm hostel two years ago this summer just after they went to the Roskilde music festival. They were roadtripping from their home in Rotterdam, Holland and we got along famously. So famously, in fact, they invited me to drive south to Denmark with them in Hilde’s sister’s tiny car. It was an act of generosity, yes, but also one of convenience: I could drive.

Though all three were well into their 20’s, only Hilde had her license. Driving in Holland just isn’t so simple.

To be fair, Ella knew her way around a steering wheel, having taken several dozen lessons as part of Holland’s rigorous, expensive divers-license gauntlet.

“I was taking lessons two to four hours a week,” Ella said today, license now in hand after completing an eight-month process that took her sister three years.

But back in 2005 in a Swedish parking lot, a perfect metaphor played out for the difference between American and Dutch driver certification: It was the Dutch learner teaching the American licensee how to drive.

Though I’d been driving for nearly a decade my mastery of the stick shift was non existent and since that July afternoon I’ve often credited Ella with giving me the direction my various amateur instructors hadn’t: basically encouraging me to ride the clutch as I started in first gear. She had plenty of chances to offer advice as I stalled and sputtered and the giggling Dutch girls asked if I was sure I had my license.

Amber would like to drive too but she’s held back by a common complaint: It’s just too expensive. Before you can spend several hundred euros taking the theoretical and in-car exams you need the green light from your instructor. Typically that comes after 40 or so lessons (though Hilde’s mom had more than 60 when she finally attempted to get her license in middle age). Each lesson is roughly 30 euros, bringing the total cost over $2000.

The various hurdles are paired with a general sense that driving just isn’t necessary. Holland is biker-friendly and covered with train tracks. But still, today, it was nice to have the driving option as they headed to another music festival, Holland’s own Lowlands festival.

“When you have your license you get the feeling that you need it,” Ella said. “But really there’s very good transportation without it.”

An old van pulled up to Ella’s apartment and the Dutch girls piled in with some other friends. Though two-thirds of the trio are now street legal, they were still bumming a ride.

“Even when you have your license,” Hilde pointed out. “You still need a car.”

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Previously on Across Northern Europe: