freedom

Arbeit nicht macht frei.
Never, ever forget the
Lessons of this place.

While all of you at home were celebrating freedom with fireworks and beer, I had the opportunity to (read: couldn't help but) think about what freedom really means. I hope that everyone who reads this takes time in his or her life to visit the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Oświęcim, Polska. It's hard to think about the fact that I walked through rooms where hundreds of thousands of people died. I'm not a child of the war by any means; I was born more than 40 years after it ended, and as far as I know no one in my family was directly affected by it. I grew up in the US, I'm not Jewish... but that was probably the most terrifying place I've ever been to in my entire life. I don't really feel I can say anything else except, "go."

...Other than that, Kraków was pretty neat. There's a church there that has a tall tower with a clock (surprise, I know), but on every hour for 600 years there's been a bugler at the top who plays a tune. Kinda weird. There's also a huge mall, including a movie theatre currently playing Transformers (in Polish) and a McDonalds.

Poland is really cheap. They use a currency called the zloty, and they're about 4:1 on the euro and 3:1 on the US dollar. Alex and I went out for a nice dinner in the Jewish quarter of the city, and it cost about 100 PLN (that's the abbreviation for zloty) for the two of us. The train trip to Oświęcim from Kraków was 16 PLN roundtrip... though I would've been pissed if it had been more, mainly because the trains in Poland are ridiculously slow. I took a video, which I'll put up later today (theoretically) of just how absurd it was. Oświęcim is about 50 km from Kraków, and the ride was roughly 2 hours. On the express train.

That was okay, though, because we got a chance to meet some kids from Croatia. They were nice, and I actually don't think I'd met anyone from there before. One of them told a pretty excellent story about how he'd gone out and gotten trashed then woken up with a Swedish girl's business card in his pocket. We also got to admire several random Polish people alongside the train tracks who were notably underclad and gathered around bonfires. Oh, random.

The hostel that we stayed in was, you know, pretty nice, but the stay there was totally rockin', mainly because of the people. There was a man who we decided was probably God in disguise who took it as his onus to ensure everyone got where he needed to be. The morning we were leaving, there was a cadre of rather hungover boys in the same dorm room as we three (me, Alex, and God), and he basically threw them out of bed and told them to "get their shit together." He informed me that I was manic, and Alex that he was in the army. He gave us advice on every aspect of life, and he seemed to have been everywhere and to know everything. It was sort of ridiculous.

Total cost for the weekend? Under 50 euro, including hostel. Awesome.

I really want to go back to Poland someday, I think. We didn't get a chance to see the famed salt mines; time was too tight on Sunday morning when we had to go catch our flights. It won't be for a while, though. I need a bit more time to recover.

on rails

Shined by the weight of
Endless hurries and dreams, reach
For infinity.

I never realized how terribly poetic train tracks are. On the train ride to Wien, I paused for some time at sunset, distracted by the view out the back window. As we raced away from Nowhere, heading for the next bend in the tracks, the rails stretched out, rust worn away by the friction of endless passings by endless passengers: the English teacher going to visit his school friends for the weekend, the old woman on her way to see her even older mother in the hospital, the businessman rushing to finish a presntation before he arrives, the university students en route to whatever it is that awaits them nowhere in particular.

It's easier to appreciate a trip when there aren't responsibilities. Straight through from Frankfurt to Wien on a EuroNight train, no changes to worry about, no highways, insurance or directions, nothing to do but appreciate scenery and conversation, and, once the world inside and outside goes to sleep, to appreciate sparser and sparser dots of light on dark hills and the peaceful silence of one's own thoughts.

Learning to travel is a process that forks and forks, but I don't think that it ever terminates. It runs in the background on every trip, taking input from any experience that arises. It is certainly recognizable, though, as it chugs along: I can see the fresh look on Teetee's face when Mathieu and I speculate on whether our not our hostel will have bedsheets. "I am never telling my mother this," she affirms.

As I packed my bread into my backpack this afternoon, I wondered where I could have been today. But I realized that it doesn't matter. I found CS and am cultivating an admittedly still-nascent sense of adventure. I'm helping wear the rust off the tracks.

berlin on a whim

Open your mind, relax,
Jump in! Flight by the seat of
One's pants can work out.

Sometime on Thursday, I was at TUD, checking email while I was waiting for a presentation. Mathieu appeared on chat, and I mentioned I had nothing to do this weekend. He was like, "Come to Berlin! It will be fun! Oops, gotta go." I got a message from him later that he still wanted me to come, but because of his class he wouldn't be able to make it to the train station until after 15:30.

Okay, so this is enough to go on, right? I looked at trips from Darmstadt to Berlin, and I found a suitable one that arrived there at 17:30. I sent him an email asking would he be able to meet me there? ...No response. Friday morning there was nothing, either, so I sent another message that I was wearing a bright pink dress and rainbow socks and to please meet me at 17:30. I figured that, even if I couldn't find him, Berlin's a big city, and it wouldn't be hard to find a hostel and figure out a plan on my own.

The train ride was everything that I would expect from a train ride through Europe. There were rolling green hills with white goats throwing speckles across them. The towns were clustered in valleys, and each one had a token cathedral in the centre. A bit closer to Berlin, there were windfarms on some of the hills. I think Germany is #1 in wind power? Maybe it was solar power; I'm not sure.

So I arrived at the train station in Berlin, even more nervous because my train was running 5 minutes late. I looked around the platform, then headed down the escalator. "Valkyrie!" a voice called down to me, "It's Mathieu! I guess I'll meet you at the bottom." So it was a success. :D

He'd also brought friends; one of whom may start writing on this blog at some point. They were Alex and Nadège (I think that's the spelling...), and he'd met them during his language course in Berlin. Alex is doing geology in Bavaria for the summer, and Nadège is doing biology stuff in Hamburg, I think.

So our first adventure was to cross past the EU building, the Reichstag, and the thousands of people in the train station to get on a double-decker bus that took us past a lot of interesting sights. We stopped by Mathieu's apartment to try to figure out where to go, but we couldn't get his internet to work, so we just went.

Eventually, we found ourselves at a pub in Alextanderplatz, where we enjoyed some delicious schwartzbeer. The place offered beer in interesting formats: for instance, you could buy a metre of beer. It was also sold by the 3 or 5 litres, which was served in a tower. Hum.

We wanted to find a club, so we asked a local guy who happened to speak some English ("happened" isn't really the right word... almost everyone here who's less than 30 speaks pretty good English) where to find one, and he pointed us at... well, a local club. We couldn't get in because we couldn't speak German.

There were some French people hanging out outside, and we started talking to them. Mathieu and Nadège are from Quebec, so they speak French, too. Alex and I stood by as they sorted out that we were going to go to a club called "Tresor," which, incidentally, is one of the 3 most famous clubs in Berlin. The other two were the one we'd just been turned away from and a gay club. They got us in with their Frenchery, and it was good.

That club was ridiculous, may I mention that? The music was industrial like I've never heard before, and it was kickin' all night. We danced and danced, then walked outside to be greeted by sunlight. Yup, it was 7am. What next?

Well, we had to meet someone else at the train station. So we wandered on over. We had some time to kill, so we had pizza and chilled out. A guy, probably 40, walked up to us and started talking to me and Alex about how he wants to go to Canada or the US to study forestry. Then he switched topics and started talking about a protest that he was going to be in that day. It's a group, I never caught the name, that wants toilets to be free and people to have more say in what goes on in their governments. Germany's sales tax is 19% for chrissakes. Then he left us, we found the person we were to meet, and we walked right through the protest he was talking about.

A walk past the Reichstag again showed us another protest, this one filled with people who wanted fair treatment for milk cows. They had banners with "faire Milch" printed on them, which I initially interpreted as "milk fair"... it was sadly not so. :)

Then what... oh, everything else. We saw the Brandenburg Tor, the civilisation museum (one of the exhibitions for now is the GATES TO ENTER FECKING BABLYLON), a few random sculptures on the streets, some craft fair things that seemed to be happening, and the zoo. The only zoo in Europe with a panda!

After that, the wall was a necessary thing to see, but we stopped back by Alex's for a moment to grab something we needed. The subway to get to his house was closed, though not by protesters. We did see a shitton of Berlin football fans, though, just out of a game. It was sweet.

I actually wrote my name on the wall. Maybe if you go someday, you'll get to see it. ;) It was covered in graffiti, some of which had been commissioned AFAIK, and it was really interesting. It's hard for someone from the US to believe that something like that could have existed, or needed to exist. I think I will learn a lot on this trip.

A beergarden provided dinner and some entertainment for the evening. We also made a stop at the Radisson, which sounds weird, but it's home to the tallest cylindrical aquarium in the world. Pretty sweet.

The night wrapped up with a long sit and talk, which actually stretched into morning and dawn. I managed to drag my sorry, tired ass to the train station to catch an earlier train than I'd expected to take, which was a good thing. Apparently, protesters (again!) had started rioting at the main train station in Frankfurt, so it was closed by the Police. I needed to make a train change there, which became impossible. So much luck there, though: there was a woman sitting next to me on the train who a) spoke English and b) needed to go to the same place that I did. So we navigated the alternate transportation routes and managed to get back to Darmstadt about 2.5 hours after we had expected to. Thanks to miracles, I had exactly enough money (I found a .05 piece on the floor of the train, actually, that got me up to the exact amount) to get home, and I caught the last bus to my house. Amazing.

What a weekend. I hope I see those guys again soon.