Amsterdam (October 22-24)

On my first day in Amsterdam I took my last free walking tour. It was good, but, understandable given that this is my seventh or eighth one of these things, all the "this king did that" and "some people did this" kinda just washed over my head a little bit. After, I met up with a friend (one of the girls I went to Versailles with, who happened to be here the same days as me) and we wandered all around the city, through some markets, and ended up at the giant Amsterdam letters, which were full of children.

This is a mall. Though possibly a king did something there once.

Even though it looks like I'm posing with them, I promise I do not actually know these children.

I didn't really partake in much of the (infamous?) Amsterdam nightlife while I was there, because my lingering illness from Rome took a turn for the worse after leaving Belgium (funny how that always seems to happen after you stay out till 3 am in clubs with strangers...) so a) I was already coughing like twelve times a minute, and b) I get really grouchy and kind of hate all humans when I'm sick, so socializing wasn't really my top priority.

But I did take a night tour of the Red Light District. And it was awesome. My tour guide was brilliant and knowledgeable and understanding, which I think makes all the difference, and I had a really great time. I like the Red Light District. I like how open everybody is about sex, that there's so much less taboo than most other places. I like how the legalization (tolerance) of prostitution really does make it safer for the ladies (at least, that seems to be the case here), and I like that the girls behind the doors are there because they want to be (or at least I hope they are, though I'm not so naive as to think that everything is totally perfect), that they make their own rules and choose who they'll let in and don't do anything they don't want to do. Feminism at work! 

This is what it looks like: a condom store.

 The next day, I got up early and went to the Anne Frank House. I got there about twenty minutes before it opened and was maybe the thirtieth person in line, and I"m glad I went then. It was literally around the block when I left not even two hours later. 

 It really is an amazing experience, and you should definitely, definitely go if you're ever in Amsterdam. It's always a powerful experience to think about standing in a place where other (important) people have been, and this was no exception. The first thing I was struck by was how small the Secret Annex really is. Like, seriously small, those little rooms all squished together. There were always people behind me, so I didn't have as much time to linger and let things sink as I would have liked, and they don't let you up into the attic.

But yeah, it's sad, and heavy, this stuff, this past, these lives. I definitely sniffle-cried a couple times near the end, especially at the point where there's a video of an interview with Hanneli Goslar, because, you know, I've read her book too. And, you know, I read these people's words, and I feel like I know what they went through, feel like I know them, but of course I don't. There's no way I could understand, not really. Parents don't know really their children, and I don't know Anne Frank. The whole thing left me sort of searching for the right words. I"m not sure I have them.

In the afternoon, I went to the Van Gogh Museum. It was nice, but ever so full of humans, and I was definitely in grumpy sick-person mode. But I like Van Gogh. I like his sad life story and I like the way things in his paintings seem like they want to slide away from you and toward you at the same time, like maybe there are holes in things. (This sentence brought to you by the Foundation to Remind You That I Don't Know How to Talk about Art.) But yeah, nice.

I had to go back to my hostel after that to check in for my flight and pack and be really sad about leaving Europe, but later I wandered around the city some more and had a celebratory/farewell drink (I'll miss you raspberry beer), just me, and reflected that this really has been such an amazing trip. 

 

Belgium (October 18-21)

If I have one piece of traveling advice, it's this: Make sure when you travel that your family is currently hosting a Belgian exchange student, so that her parents will offer to let you stay with them in Brussels, at their giant house at the top of a hill in the suburbs, with a cute dog and a charming little sister, where they will feed you beer and wine and toasted cheese, and eggs from the chicken they keep in the backyard, and take you out to restaurants that tourists don't go to and insist that you order three courses and two drinks. They'll take you around the city to chocolate museums and then to dinner at their best friends' house, who will feed you the best lasagna you've ever had and talk to you about modern art and cure your cold with magical cognac-laced drinks. 

This is cherry beer, not a cognac-laced drink, to be clear.

(Probably not enchanted) chocolate pots

Yeah, Belgium was a lot about eating for me, but I think that Belgians are very much about eating and drinking (at least, the ones I met), so maybe that's appropriate. All the inhabitants of Brussels I met liked their before-dinner drinks and their after-dinner drinks and lingering long at the table just talking. They were also very giving and very affectionate. They do the kiss-on-the-cheek greeting thing (but just one kiss, not two), which at first startled me and which I never quite got the hang of; I always just ended up kind of pressing my cheek against the other person's face, which I'm sure was a really nice experience for everyone. But I like it. I feel like so often I'm afraid to reach out and touch people, that lots of people are, afraid our intentions will be misconstrued or we'll be turned away from, but I like this easy exchange of care (I might even say intimacy of some sort) even between strangers. I think it's pretty great. 

Here's that peeing baby everybody thinks is so great.

Anyway, I did more than just eat in Brussels. I went on a walking tour and got shown some other sights by a friend a met in Prague, who goes to school here. He took me to the Palace of Justice and up to the top of a parking garage with amazing views. And I also went to the Atomion, to an underground medieval street buried beneath the royal palace, and to Mini-Europe, which was neat but which I couldn't help feeling would be even cooler if it were mini-golf Europe.

After Brussels, I went to Bruges for a day, but I don't really have too much to say about it. It's very small, and often beautiful, and I had a super-awesome roomful of people at my hostel that I ended up spending all my time with, wandering around and drinking (12%!) beer and eating waffles, and it was just really nice. Definitely a recommended way to see a city.

Paris (October 14-17)

I arrived in Paris in the afternoon (of the day after I left Rome--long tiny-Italian-train-station kind of night) and went on a night tour of the Montmartre district, which was really good and involved a lot of scandalous stories about the Moulin Rouge and about various artists you may have heard of, which are my favorite kinds of stories. 

The literal heart of Jesus (Sacre Coeur)

The next morning, I went to the catacombs, which is this gigantic collection of bones from several cemeteries in Paris, reinterred in some old mining tunnels a couple hundred years ago. For some reason, I wasn't expecting this to be that popular a tourist destination (compared to everything else there is to do in Paris, not to say that I don't think huge collections of bones are cool; obviously I do), but I arrived about an hour after it opened and found a line around the block. It took me almost two hours to get in, easily the longest line I've stood in on this trip, but at least I had a book to read (thanks, Kindle app!). And at least the catacombs were really neat.

Turns out the reason the line was so long is that they're only allowed to let a certain number of people inside at a time, and people get pretty spread out, so sometimes I was in these long stretches of tunnel with no one to be seen anywhere, like I was the only one in (under) the world. And, yeah, they've installed lights, but other than that, there aren't many amenities down there--just low ceilings, rough stone walls, gravel underfoot, and rows of skulls and stacked bones from floor to ceiling. Every once in a while water drips down, you can hear it splashing off to the side, and the crunch of gravel starts to feel like you're walking on the bones themselves. And let's not even discuss the gaps at the top of the bone stacks where something could totally hide. Definitely a creepy place. But I don't mean to be needlessly macabre or disrespect the thousands of dead that thousands of people walk past every day. If you really start thinking about it, it's overwhelming--and maybe scary in a different way--to find yourself surrounded by that. 

After the catacombs, I did my customary wandering, and was pleased with my map skills again. Paris is the only place of all the places I've been/am going that I've been to before, four years ago during my study abroad, but I wanted to come back because I felt like there were still so many things I wanted to do. And there is a lot to do. But I was pretty tired, so post-wander (which included an excellent used bookstore, always a plus), I headed back, ate a kebab, and went to sleep.

The next day I got up early and went to Versailles, one of the places I didn't have time to go before, with two girls from my hostel I'd discovered the night before had identical going-to-Versailles plans. Here, I was worried about long lines, but there weren't really any at all, though it was crowded inside the palace. Also unbelievably beautiful. Just ... the detail, the opulence, the brocade, the gold. It's so pretty. I got perhaps more excited than I care to admit looking at the royal bedchambers and the Hall of Mirrors, and I read enough novelizations of the life of Marie Antoinette in my youth that it was easy to imagine this place in another time, with the people I'd read about in it. 

After the palace itself, we ventured outside to the gardens, which of course is when it started raining. It got freezing and miserable pretty quick, but we pressed on through the topiary and reached Marie Antoinette's hamlet, which is so cute and maybe my favorite part of the whole thing. 

That and the crazy gold doors. 

Back in Paris, I went with one of my traveling companions to Notre Dame. I've been in Notre Dame before, and I've certainly been in plenty of churches/cathedrals on this trip--and sometimes I am distinctly unmoved by them, but walking into Notre Dame you can't help but feel something. There's a weight to this place, and something beautiful, and the arches and the spires and ... yeah. That. 

Here are some gargoyles!

Then I took myself out for a proper French dinner (onion soup, cordon bleu, and chocolate mousse), and it should have been another early night for me, but then I accidentally went clubbing with a mixed group of Brazilians, Australians, and Irishwomen, because, you know, as discussed previously, priorities. 

It was tough getting up the next morning, but I wanted to see the Louvre (another thing I missed last time, though not for lack of trying--museum workers were on strike last time I was in Paris) before catching the afternoon train to Belgium. Again I was surprised by the total lack of line (though I did get there only a few minutes after it opened). It only took me about twenty minutes to get from outside to a hall of sculptures, and half of that was me wandering around like a lost lamb looking for the Mona Lisa and then going the complete opposite direction anyway). And--maybe because the Louvre is so massive--it didn't actually seem incredibly crowded, except of course when I actually did make it to the Mona Lisa, which was, you know, nice, and now I guess I can say I've actually seen it, but I feel like I've seen so many recreations of it that it didn't feel all that special

Heyyyy, Mona Lisa.

My favorite things in the museum were the Dutch masters, as per usue, and all the Egyptian stuff that Napoleon looted, of which there was a lot. I also kind of appreciate that only a few signs/placards have English translations and most are just in French. Sometimes in museums I get so obsessive about reading about the art that I forget to actually look at it (and the not-catering-to-tourists pleases me as well), though I'm sure that this led to me missing at least one important work because I wasn't paying attention to its title/artist. 

When I was too tired to appreciate the art anymore, I headed out and got a crepe, then settled down by the fountain in the Tuileries to eat it, and I had this moment--one of several I've had on this trip--where I thought, Here I am, eating a crepe in the Tuileries, and it's beautiful out, and I'm in Paris, and isnt' life awesome? Yeah it is. 

Rome (October 12-13)

Rome was probably my least favorite place, but that wasn't really Rome's fault. I woke up on my first morning there feeling achy and with a terrible sore throat, but I hauled myself out of bed and went to the Sistine Chapel anyway. On the advice of someone working at my hostel, I hadn't bothered to get skip-the-line tickets, and as I watched people who had stream past me, I thought I would soon come to regret this, but it only took me about forty minutes to get inside the Vatican, and another twenty to get inside the Chapel itself. For some reason, I'd expected it to be bigger, but it was very beautiful. I mean, we've all seen pictures (or Arrested Development reenactments) of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, but I was impressed by how lifelike they seemed in person, how incredibly 3-D. They don't let you take pictures inside, but here are a couple shots of the ceiling of the hallway leading to the Chapel.

After about half an hour of staring up, I went out and wandered through the rest of the Vatican Museums (I like the ancient statues and all the stuff found at archaeological sites), and then somehow found myself back in the crush of people headed for the Sistine Chapel, and I didn't know how to escape. IT was about ten times more crowded than it had been an hour and a half ago, and so hot, and that's when I started to really feel sick. I finally made it out of the Vatican Museum, but I took a wrong turn and ended up back out on the street instead of still inside the Vatican. So I decided to do the thing where you walk all the way around it to say that you've walked around an entire country, you know. I made it around to St. Peter's Basilica, which was unfortunately closed for some reason, and then I got a little lost, because, you know, that's what I do, and also the handy wall to my left, which is what I'd been following) disappeared and I found myself in a hospital backlot. Still, I made it back to the Vatican Museum eventually, so I'm gonna count it on the circumnavigating-a-country front. After that, I went back to my hostel, did some much-needed laundry, found out I had a temperature over a hundred, and had an early night.

After being woken at six am by two boys in my room going to Mass (grumble grumble), I dragged myself out of bed to do a free walking tour, but I was a couple minutes late to the meeting place and couldn't find it, so I just did it by myself, more or less, and saw the Trevi Fountain (which is not the fountain from When in Rome, apparently), the Spanish Steps (they're just steps with one million tourists sitting on them), and the Pantheon (okay, pretty impressive, I'll give you this one, Rome). I had planned to go inside the Colosseum, but once I got there I decided that it wasn't worth it to stand in line and pay money for something I wasn't going to enjoy, since the only thing I would have enjoyed right then was a nap. So I took one on the grass in front of the Colosseum, then headed back to the Pantheon for the best pasta I had in Italy, bought a couple souvenirs and my last gelato, and rushed off to catch a train to Paris.