Middle Europe

admin — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 03:29:29 +0000

Its all relative to the last place, Hungary felt like one of the friendliest places I've been, only a few days, a drunken night, met my sister Bree and her friends, told her house mate he was a dick head and had no respect, I kicked into Budapest like a Tartar. They have an interesting history, the language is not Indo-European, they arrived from somewhere east of the Urals in Russia over a thousand years ago, on the way they split, one half went and settled Finland and Estonia, the other to Hungary. They are surrounded by Slavs, I was not surrounded by a sea of Lars', although there is something distinct about the Hungarian look. I have been trying to get people to guess my descent, I have had Russian, German and English, in a few select cases I think you can guess a persons nationality, most Europeans say that you can't pick a person's nationality by look, only dress or speech. Budapest is a beautiful city, full of old four or five story buildings, on our last day covered in snow, leafless trees glistening white, a quaint underground with a two carriage train. A very international feel, walking along the streets a host of different languages yet everything shuts on Sunday. A night out, the place is full of unpretentious bars, cheap beer and some truly beautiful women. Into Slovakia and possibly the most brutal weather I've experienced, below minus ten, snow flying horizontal and an economic step down. Streets of ice with little grip, the snow is much better than the rain, still below minus five hurts a little, the air bites the nostrils. We stomped through snow a foot deep for an hour to get to a castle that was closed, the largest in Slovakia, Roma, gypsies kids begging for money, they look and act like poor South Asians. Bree and I found the Slovaks to be pretty friendly people, one guy walked with us for half an hour to find our hostel in what I considered to be a blizzard. I have lost my incredulity that humans live at this latitude, its all about the clothes, dead animals the key, the Russians have no excuse for depression, its not a Slavic thing, the latitude or the cold, the Slovaks and the Poles smile. This is the country of the .sk domains who have given us the legendary www.astlavista.box.sk, a long lived and much used source of serial numbers and cracks. My platitudes to the Slovaks were delivered to faces of incomprehension. Bree and I decided to test our ability to survive in the cold and headed to Krakow in Poland and a very beautiful city, in a museum I saw original parchments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a memory resurfaced, I meant to read this eight years ago. We stayed in a hostel with no logic, a curfew at midnight, the drinks machines turned off, undrinkable tap water, dorms of eight beds with two keys, doors with no handles, only a lock to close them, every entrance requiring a knock, someone inside must wake up and open the door, no staff between 10am and 6pm, for a country of mathematicians its odd. In Poland I can see the guys from high school whose surnames ended in ski or sky, their mannerisms and looks, except here the people are smaller. This is the land of the reigning Pope, he may not remember it, the Poles certainly haven't, a photo of a lead statue of him adorns the room we are staying in. Krakow is a beautiful city, again snow covered, old city wall, inner old city, footpaths cordoned off for falling slabs of snow from the rooftop. We went to Auschwitz, at first just a collection of buildings, barbed wire, a guide who was slightly worked up, then we went a building, a room full of human hair, piles of shoes, glasses, cooking pots, then the reality hit, they were a machine, using the Jews like raw material, not only labor but the extraction of material from their bodies, dissected and experimented on, truly brutal. In 1942 the allies knew of this carnage, its easy to say with hindsight, they should have taken a utilitarian approach and bombed this place to reduce the death toll. She said the Slav's were second rate Aryan's, to be sterilized but not murdered on mass. Onto Prague and the most beautiful city I have ever seen, not the power of St. Petersburg, no grid, winding streets, old restored buildings, not a Czech in site, the English have invaded, this is tourist town. Old Gothic cathedral's with dragons, half monkey-men and all manner of medieval imagination in stone statues hanging from the edges warding off the unvanquished pagan Gods. We met some Argentinians who grew up on rice and butter for lunch, a Mexican who wouldn't stop complaining, Chileans traveling on mass and some Irish who didn't know the about the Nazi's or that Germany had been divided who were training to become teachers. Continuing my lightening tour I was off to Germany and a truly organized country, I found the hostel without needing to ask a person. The guy who runs it was born in New York to an American mother and an Italian born father, at ten they moved to Germany, at 16 they wanted to return he refused and stayed with his girlfriend, he speaks English with a German accent, has married a Pole, considers himself Italian and travels on an Italian passport. A free tour of Berlin with an over expressive guide, they've built a gay sauna on top of the bunker where Hitler shot himself and a car park over his grave. The collapse of the Berlin wall was a mistake, the spokesman for East German politburo slipped at the press conference saying all travel restrictions would be lifted immediately in response to daily mass demonstrations, 500,000 Berliners descended on the wall, the guards were paralyzed, to avoid a stampede and getting crushed they opened the gates. The city is awash with construction, the new is not so ugly, there is little that survived the war, buildings with bullet holes, some remnants of the wall covered in graffiti. There is a superb monument to the Jews constructed in part by the company that produced the gas used in the gas chambers, a double profit. Plus the best museum I have ever seen, I saw the Ishtar gate of Babylon, the ancients of Assyria, the Pergamon of Greece, giant stone statues to the pre-Judaic Gods of Mesopotamia and statues of the freed slaves of Rome. A Slovak lawyer and discussions of civil vs. common law, I am writing a little treatise on this, in a sentence, common law seems less democratic, not in the spirit of the separation of powers, a form of legislative power in the hands of an unelected judiciary, like philosopher kings, ancients keeping all in check. This EU seems like a scam, directives passed down from unelected commissioners. Border crossings with little control, the EU must be a smugglers paradise, Slovakia stamped us in but not out, we passed through Austria without acknowledgment, Poland found out we arrived, Germany knows I entered but never left and the Dutch don't know I've arrived. I haven't smoked in over a month, I'm having dreams where I slingshot through space, using an elastic lasso to hook onto planets, moon and stars to catapult myself around, picking up pace as I use planetary gravity like the photo taking unmanned probe playing a slate of wax with all the worlds hello's that has just left the solar system.

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Middle Europe