Sunny May Sundays in Ghent are for markets -- food, books, antiques -- and for public performances, not just by buskers, but by dancers with fans, dancers with batons, and an orchestra on a platform that's crashing through an arrangement of 'Delilah' when I pass. Strange to think that someone took the trouble to think of something for oboists to do during 'Delilah'. In a church off a square, a sale of junktiques where I find an old French edition of a Baedeker travel guide to London. I put my elbow through my Kindle's screen a couple of weeks ago, and I read French incredibly badly, so it might be fun to get a confused idea of what people were being advised to see in London in the 1890s. But when I go back, minutes later, it's gone. Or I just can't find it again and give up too easily, which is actually more likely.
There's a castle in the middle of Ghent, a nicely-restored medieval one (the Gravensteen). It's full of exhibits of weapons and torture devices, even though the tourists are plainly clamouring for more about the castle's administrative functions. "If only there were more on the tax structure", they murmur as they crowd around the rack and shackles. The walk through it goes up long spiral staircases and along narrow walls, and features lots of waiting behind easily-fascinated children, people with severe limps, and a man in an Exodus World Tour t-shirt who's the kind of painstaking photographer who's prepared to wait for the light to change. Behind the castle, there are shady benches where a teenager plays Eminem on his phone and raps along in Flemish; though I don't know whether he's always there or is just set out on days of special celebration.
Lille
From Ghent, I went to spend a night in Lille, the beautiful city the Eurostar to London leaves from. I looked forwards to Lille because it was my only chance on this trip to use my horrible French. Generally, when I speak French, people give a tiny shudder and reply in English, so I only do it when I want revenge on the world for something. But I didn't go through years of the world's least-effective language training -- the halfhearted effort to teach French to English Canadian children -- for nothing.
Morning in Lille. The anniversary of V-E Day is a holiday, and the intention seems to be to treat it pretty seriously: everything is closed. Outside the train station, which has an M&S, troubled-looking people are gathering to yell at themselves. The square by the Vieille Bourse is empty except for a pony-tailed man in sunglasses and baggy shorts who hovers protectively over a tripod as I come close. On the corner, one man smacks another on the head, possibly angry that he's not only drunk, but is still carrying a half-full bottle around. This isn't an uncommon condition in the neighbourhood. A group of men wanders up, stops in confusion, and turns back. One of them starts to sing softly and the others join in: a quiet lilting song of getting lost in Lille.
Lille has the usual charming old streets and ornate buildings, and also a Carrefour hypermarket in a huge white shopping mall. The hypermarché is a French Wal-Mart. I wanted to be able to say there are interesting cultural differences, and maybe that it's like an elegant Wal-Mart with stylish shoppers, but it's actually like a Wal-Mart in every way I can think of, except for its useless pharmacy section. Most European pharmacies (the Dutch ones are an exception) sell nothing directly but makeup and vitamins. If you want an aspirin, you must discuss it with a pharmacist. If you have a cold or a headache in Europe, the easiest way to treat it is with cigarettes, which can be had anywhere.
After the hypermarché, the Citadelle. This is a work of Vauban, Louis XIV's master of fortifications and sieges; a celebrity architect of slaughter, like a 17th century Temple Grandin. It took me a while just to find a bridge over to it ("damn, that Vauban guy was good") and then to cross a hot gravel parking lot (everyone else had avoided it by using the right bridge). Beyond that, Vauban placed an amusement park and a zoo, but caused them to be closed, to undermine enemy morale. There are benches here where you can rest and watch disappointed children pad up and read about how the zoo is fermé; and a man in a tricorner hat and a two-day beard eating a sandwich and offering to make balloon animals. The final disappointment for an invading army would be the sign on the door of the citadel itself, which explains that you need to visit a tourist office to arrange entry. There is still the strange and lovely walk around the star-points, along a broad ditch of cloudy gray water, past a thousand picnicking couples.
London
And then London, two nights in a dowdy little hotel on an endless row of dowdy little hotels near Paddington Station. Ancient, screaming subway trains, the tea-coloured Thames, puzzling private parks with spear-tipped fences, hurrying people. Everyone in London is in a terrible hurry all the time. People in suits race about gabbling into phones about financing possibilities. Middle-aged men on folding bikes attempt track stands at busy intersections. Couples stroll briskly along the river, frowning slightly as they mentally try to maximize functions relating time, romance, and opportunity cost, in terms of foregone financing discussions.
The tiny sand beach at Gabriel's Wharf, where two sandcastle men are preparing the ground with shovels and a strange girl is grimacing out at the water like someone trying to telepathically summon a kraken. There are under-bridge accordionists, one with a little dog, one with a gigantic St. Bernard with eyes like black marbles in saucers of blood. Not an "I'm here to rescue you, please have some brandy" sort of St. Bernard, but a "hi, I'm here to take your soul to hell" kind of dog. Also, a pair of poets for hire, sitting behind a typewriter in fedoras and "is this going to work?" expressions. They work on a pay-what-you-want basis. I might have considered it if there'd been a menu. How much for a skaldic attack on my enemies?
I've been to London many times, and have already seen most of the obvious things that aren't impossibly silly and expensive (like Madame Tussaud's). I did go to the hard-to-find but descriptively-named Old Operating Theatre Museum, which is in the attic of a church. Tinted bottles of poison, animal parts, interesting remedies (chocolate "worm cakes" for de-worming children; a big ol' bottle of heroin), surgical tools. The scariest tools are the most innocuous; a saw is just a saw, but a 19th century cervical dilator is a thing you expect to see again and again in your nightmares. The operating theatre itself is a semicircle of creaking benches in rising tiers. Someone is giving a talk. She's induced a tourist to lie on the operating table and is telling stories about Horatio Nelson with a scalpel in her hand while a dangling skeleton grins in from the corridor.
I can't seem to open the door to Samuel Johnson's house. Get in eventually, and apologize to the crowd of uniformed schoolgirls I'd been bashing with it. Luckily, they're just leaving, and there's no one else about, so I can poke around Johnson's study and flip through his dictionary in the plain garret where he (and a bunch of underlings) produced it. In the courtyard outside, a quiet illusion of 18th century London, and then round a corner people are boiling out of office buildings and yelling into phones about servers.
Also, a quick visit to the British Museum. Having been to the Acropolis, wanted to look in on the rest of the Parthenon.
I fly home from here and am partway through the last-day ritual of going through junk: using things up, wondering why I'm carrying things, throwing things away. The Dutch-only phone app for train tickets I fought with in Arnhem. The tin of hake I seem to have been carrying since Split. The rest of the 'Protection Solar Balm' bought in Sarajevo after a long search (too big to fly with). The unused text that didn't meet this blog's extremely modest standards for quality or having-a-pointness, like the thing about pharmacies. The bag of mixed coins, and the mysterious bills I'm always worried I'll try to use in the wrong country. Tanzanian dinars? That's not even a real currency. Wait, did I draw these? The packaged waffle I bought on a train platform in Antwerp -- it was from a dusty vending machine in a quiet corner, so I checked the expiry date, and was relieved and then disconcerted to find it was a month away. A month seems like an unnatural lifespan for a waffle; I've been keeping it under observation.
Outside my window, a rollerblading parade of about a hundred people goes by with a lot of cheering and bad music, like they knew exactly the kind of elegiac note I wanted to wrap this up with. That's it, then: from Europe, whose ancient stones breathe centuries of history, back to Toronto, which often smells like fried chicken.
There's a castle in the middle of Ghent, a nicely-restored medieval one (the Gravensteen). It's full of exhibits of weapons and torture devices, even though the tourists are plainly clamouring for more about the castle's administrative functions. "If only there were more on the tax structure", they murmur as they crowd around the rack and shackles. The walk through it goes up long spiral staircases and along narrow walls, and features lots of waiting behind easily-fascinated children, people with severe limps, and a man in an Exodus World Tour t-shirt who's the kind of painstaking photographer who's prepared to wait for the light to change. Behind the castle, there are shady benches where a teenager plays Eminem on his phone and raps along in Flemish; though I don't know whether he's always there or is just set out on days of special celebration.
Lille
From Ghent, I went to spend a night in Lille, the beautiful city the Eurostar to London leaves from. I looked forwards to Lille because it was my only chance on this trip to use my horrible French. Generally, when I speak French, people give a tiny shudder and reply in English, so I only do it when I want revenge on the world for something. But I didn't go through years of the world's least-effective language training -- the halfhearted effort to teach French to English Canadian children -- for nothing.
Morning in Lille. The anniversary of V-E Day is a holiday, and the intention seems to be to treat it pretty seriously: everything is closed. Outside the train station, which has an M&S, troubled-looking people are gathering to yell at themselves. The square by the Vieille Bourse is empty except for a pony-tailed man in sunglasses and baggy shorts who hovers protectively over a tripod as I come close. On the corner, one man smacks another on the head, possibly angry that he's not only drunk, but is still carrying a half-full bottle around. This isn't an uncommon condition in the neighbourhood. A group of men wanders up, stops in confusion, and turns back. One of them starts to sing softly and the others join in: a quiet lilting song of getting lost in Lille.
Lille has the usual charming old streets and ornate buildings, and also a Carrefour hypermarket in a huge white shopping mall. The hypermarché is a French Wal-Mart. I wanted to be able to say there are interesting cultural differences, and maybe that it's like an elegant Wal-Mart with stylish shoppers, but it's actually like a Wal-Mart in every way I can think of, except for its useless pharmacy section. Most European pharmacies (the Dutch ones are an exception) sell nothing directly but makeup and vitamins. If you want an aspirin, you must discuss it with a pharmacist. If you have a cold or a headache in Europe, the easiest way to treat it is with cigarettes, which can be had anywhere.
After the hypermarché, the Citadelle. This is a work of Vauban, Louis XIV's master of fortifications and sieges; a celebrity architect of slaughter, like a 17th century Temple Grandin. It took me a while just to find a bridge over to it ("damn, that Vauban guy was good") and then to cross a hot gravel parking lot (everyone else had avoided it by using the right bridge). Beyond that, Vauban placed an amusement park and a zoo, but caused them to be closed, to undermine enemy morale. There are benches here where you can rest and watch disappointed children pad up and read about how the zoo is fermé; and a man in a tricorner hat and a two-day beard eating a sandwich and offering to make balloon animals. The final disappointment for an invading army would be the sign on the door of the citadel itself, which explains that you need to visit a tourist office to arrange entry. There is still the strange and lovely walk around the star-points, along a broad ditch of cloudy gray water, past a thousand picnicking couples.
London
And then London, two nights in a dowdy little hotel on an endless row of dowdy little hotels near Paddington Station. Ancient, screaming subway trains, the tea-coloured Thames, puzzling private parks with spear-tipped fences, hurrying people. Everyone in London is in a terrible hurry all the time. People in suits race about gabbling into phones about financing possibilities. Middle-aged men on folding bikes attempt track stands at busy intersections. Couples stroll briskly along the river, frowning slightly as they mentally try to maximize functions relating time, romance, and opportunity cost, in terms of foregone financing discussions.
The tiny sand beach at Gabriel's Wharf, where two sandcastle men are preparing the ground with shovels and a strange girl is grimacing out at the water like someone trying to telepathically summon a kraken. There are under-bridge accordionists, one with a little dog, one with a gigantic St. Bernard with eyes like black marbles in saucers of blood. Not an "I'm here to rescue you, please have some brandy" sort of St. Bernard, but a "hi, I'm here to take your soul to hell" kind of dog. Also, a pair of poets for hire, sitting behind a typewriter in fedoras and "is this going to work?" expressions. They work on a pay-what-you-want basis. I might have considered it if there'd been a menu. How much for a skaldic attack on my enemies?
I've been to London many times, and have already seen most of the obvious things that aren't impossibly silly and expensive (like Madame Tussaud's). I did go to the hard-to-find but descriptively-named Old Operating Theatre Museum, which is in the attic of a church. Tinted bottles of poison, animal parts, interesting remedies (chocolate "worm cakes" for de-worming children; a big ol' bottle of heroin), surgical tools. The scariest tools are the most innocuous; a saw is just a saw, but a 19th century cervical dilator is a thing you expect to see again and again in your nightmares. The operating theatre itself is a semicircle of creaking benches in rising tiers. Someone is giving a talk. She's induced a tourist to lie on the operating table and is telling stories about Horatio Nelson with a scalpel in her hand while a dangling skeleton grins in from the corridor.
I can't seem to open the door to Samuel Johnson's house. Get in eventually, and apologize to the crowd of uniformed schoolgirls I'd been bashing with it. Luckily, they're just leaving, and there's no one else about, so I can poke around Johnson's study and flip through his dictionary in the plain garret where he (and a bunch of underlings) produced it. In the courtyard outside, a quiet illusion of 18th century London, and then round a corner people are boiling out of office buildings and yelling into phones about servers.
Also, a quick visit to the British Museum. Having been to the Acropolis, wanted to look in on the rest of the Parthenon.
I fly home from here and am partway through the last-day ritual of going through junk: using things up, wondering why I'm carrying things, throwing things away. The Dutch-only phone app for train tickets I fought with in Arnhem. The tin of hake I seem to have been carrying since Split. The rest of the 'Protection Solar Balm' bought in Sarajevo after a long search (too big to fly with). The unused text that didn't meet this blog's extremely modest standards for quality or having-a-pointness, like the thing about pharmacies. The bag of mixed coins, and the mysterious bills I'm always worried I'll try to use in the wrong country. Tanzanian dinars? That's not even a real currency. Wait, did I draw these? The packaged waffle I bought on a train platform in Antwerp -- it was from a dusty vending machine in a quiet corner, so I checked the expiry date, and was relieved and then disconcerted to find it was a month away. A month seems like an unnatural lifespan for a waffle; I've been keeping it under observation.
Outside my window, a rollerblading parade of about a hundred people goes by with a lot of cheering and bad music, like they knew exactly the kind of elegiac note I wanted to wrap this up with. That's it, then: from Europe, whose ancient stones breathe centuries of history, back to Toronto, which often smells like fried chicken.
