In which Andy just sums it up and gets it over with (part 1)

Sitting in a square in the Albacine neighborhood,
with the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevadas in the background

Well, it seems we've come to an impasse as it were. There's a lot happening nowadays that I can't get write about in the blog until I finish up the backlog of stuff I have to write about, and I can't catch up on what I still need to finish! So, inspired by a recent post by a fellow Fulbrighter in Bavaria, I figured I'd just get it over with. It seems a little ridiculous to write about March halfway through May anyway. As a substitute for words I'll put up a bunch of photos (they tell the story quicker and better than I can at any rate).

A view of the Sierra Nevadas.

1) Spain. Granada was the next stop after Brussels, which is on the Southern coast of Spain (close to Malaga if you can find that on a map). One of my fellow Voicestreamers, Shannon (who is actually the soloist in this post, was studying abroad there for the semester, and I figured--since I had the time and inclination--that I'd head down there and visit! In short, Spain absolutely blew me away. Granada is right in the middle of the beautiful Sierra Nevadas, and the city itself is amazing. Plus it was really great seeing an old friend again! Some items on our itinerary: standard sightseeing around the city, tapas, a hike around the nature area near the Alhambra castle, a trip to nearby Nerja to lay out on the beach, among other things. I had an awesome time, and really want to see more of the country after having gotten this introductory glimpse into it.

The beach at Nerja.

2) The Fulbright Conference. At the end of my travels was the week-long Fulbright Conference in Berlin. Each year the Fulbright Commission hosts a conference for all the grantees in Germany, as well as all of the grantees in European countries. That is to say--four days of dinners, panels, concerts, and networking with some ridiculously smart people. It was a great opportunity to see everyone that I had met at orientation again and compare notes on how our experiences had gone. Activities included: some absolutely phenomenal dinners and breakfasts totally gratis (drinks included!), panel discussions with various figures in the Transatlantic political scene, a Q&A with the mayor of Berlin (especially cool to see), the opportunity to meet and chat with the German grantees going to America next year, and a concert featuring Fulbright grantees and alumni.

Street art in Granada.
The city is particularly famous for it.

A small town on the side of the road
between Granada and Nerja

The Park Inn Hotel in Berlin, where the
conference was held.

Me with Kiersten and Karl, fellow Fulbrighters.

Enjoying some street beers on the edge of the fountain in
Alexanderplatz, close to the hotel.

A shot of Albacine neighborhood.

Outdoor spice market!

3) Voicestream comes to visit! After all that running around I had about a week and a half to rest and recuperate, and then some current Voicestreamers all came to visit me in Hamburg! Willie and Casey (who were studying in London) and Shannon all came up for the weekend, stayed at my place, and we all got to reunite and do a little sight seeing! I had joked around with them back in Ithaca about doing a reunion trip like that, and it was so cool that we put a weekend together and actually did it! They hadn't seen each other since the previous semester either, so it was a great opportunity for us all to get back together and catch up. I took them to my school to introduce them to some classes, did my classic, well rehearsed Hamburg city tour with them, blew their minds with Currywurst and other German delicacies, and generally just had an awesome time and rehashed many tried and true ICVS stories and inside jokes.

Willie taking a picture in the park.

All of us in the observation deck of St. Michel.

The Death of Osama Bin Laden: A Perspective from Germany

It was a pretty normal Monday morning in Germany. May second, the first Monday back from the Easter holidays. I had just had a really pleasant week of relaxing in Hamburg--sun, 70 degrees, friends, books, barbeques, a quick trip out to Friesland to see a fellow Fulbrighter--and was getting ready to get back into the swing of things at school. Like every 20-something with a laptop, I jumped on Facebook to check up on things quickly before leaving the house, and this is the first thing I saw:


It's quite a comment on our world today that this is how a major, MAJOR piece of world news got broken to me. I remember the chaos on the radio when I woke up on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. How none of the commentators on X96 or NPR had any idea what was going on that early in the day, only a couple hours after the first plane hit. How everyone in Frau Kerr's 8'th grade German class were staring at the TV in the corner watching the second tower collapse. Little details stick out in particular: the confused, frightened expression I saw on Frau Kerr's face when I walked into the classroom; the bewildered way we all walked around the school, trying to comprehend an event with implications that totally surpassed the understanding of a bunch of suburban junior high school students; Jenny Moody crying in the hallway.

Almost ten years later some lolcat-inspired photo of Obama in sunglasses and a handful of status updates brought that chapter in American history to a close for me. The world is a strange place.

It's stranger still thinking and looking at how this event is happening in the US. On Monday I went to school, taught some kids, went to a cafe and wrote some emails, finished the day with our weekly game night at Down Under on Grindelallee, and went to bed. I didn't even talk about Bin Laden's death to anyone until I met up with a few other Americans in the city later that night.

I did a lot of thinking about the whole thing, but that was basically it for me.

The atmosphere on the other side of the Atlantic, as I understand it, was electric. There were spontaneous rallies in the street all over the USA on Monday. Firefighters and policemen parading around Ground Zero with thousands of New Yorkers cheering them on. People dancing and singing on the National Mall and in front of the White House. American news websites were overflowing with reports about Bin Laden's death, and I imagine the big cable news networks were abuzz the whole day with coverage. There was a fierce division among my friends about everything. Some praised the actions of our military, jubilant that the face of terrorism for the past ten years has finally been brought to justice, God-Blessing America up and down. Others were torn about the event, or even critical of it, commenting on the irony of the celebration of death--even the death of the most famous mass murderer in the world.

I don't even know what to think really. Looking at America nowadays is like looking at a foreign country. If you put me on a plane and sent me back tonight I would be totally overwhelmed by the response. While the comparative silence of the Germans around me is weird enough (I'm still an American, after all), the videos and news reports and blogs I see and read are strange as well. The death of Osama Bin Laden has so many implications for so many different parts of the world that it's hard to form a single opinion about it.

I wouldn't say that the Germans around me have been ambivalent about the event, but their silence is strange. I haven't even talked to any of my teachers about it, which goes to show how the topic is being treated over here. Interesting how something as major as the death of the mastermind behind 9/11 is hardly something worth talking about over here, and I don't think I'm tainting that judgment with my own cultural background--the event had deep and long lasting implications all over the world. Granted, it's more relevant in America and the Middle East than in other parts of the world, but somehow...I would expect something else I guess. A different response. Europe as a whole has been very opposed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since the beginning. One of my friends who went on a trip to France close to the beginning of the Iraq war said that some people on the street would spit at him for the sheer virtue of his nationality. This could be the beginning of the end for those conflicts, and yet this past Monday was just like any other day since I've been here.

And my own opinion on the matter? I can barely put it into words. Am I ultimately glad that there's one less evil person in the world? Yes. Am I going to sing and dance in the streets about it? No. I think the world needs to move on from this period in our collective history. This one man wrought so much evil and put so many terrible events into motion, and even his name and the ideas and ideologies he stood far have been misused and twisted and manipulated to justify even more acts of violence and death. It would be an absolute shame to let his influence outlive him. "We got him," as our President puts it, and I really, really hope that this marks a turning point for America and the rest of the world. After ten years we finally got him, and we need to put what he did to rest.

Part Three: Brussels

The last part of our tour was Brussels, which we were only visiting for a day and a half. No big problem for me, since I’d already been there before as well, and it was great to visit it again. Brussels had been the last stop on my backpacking tour, and I really liked the city. It’s a strange mix of urban nastiness and old European beauty. The city on a whole is just gorgeous, but when you’re walking through it the atmosphere is so urban and chaotic. There are police sirens everywhere, homeless people all over the sidewalk, trash and dirt and graffiti—a city of contrasts, if you will. Even though it’s kinda small, it’s nevertheless a really interesting place, and I was excited to see it a second time and compare experiences. Plus I got to act as a secondary tour guide: a supplement to Mr. Steves. The whole time I kept on going, “Woah! I’ve totally been here!” and, “Guys, this place is just around the corner, trust me.” Brendan and Karl called it “The Andy Fry Nostalgia Tour of Brussels.”

This was also the first and only place on the tour that we scored a Couchsurfing host (for those unfamiliar with the website, you can find some info on it here). Since there are so many tourists in Europe it’s kinda hard to find a host, but after a protracted search we finally found one in Brussels. And I have to say, our host was probably one of the most…unique and interesting people I’ve ever met. Her name was Suki Jenkins, pronounced “Sooki” (no, I’m not lying, that’s actually her name). She was an American, born in Seattle, and had been living in Brussels for the past fifteen years. When we got to her place we started chatting and getting into her life story, and the thing just got better and better as we went along.

As I said, she was born and raised in Seattle, and spent the first part of her life living and working there right in the middle of the grunge scene in the 90’s. She’s spent her whole life working in the music industry, and got her start at Subpop Records. The first act she ever signed with her label? Nirvana. The second act? Sound Garden. AKA this lady is famous. We were floored. I spent a pretty large portion of my formative years listening to Nevermind on repeat in my CD player, and to be with someone who had, you know, given Nirvana their start was just insane. Something I wasn’t expecting out of this particular CS experience at all, which is half of the attraction of the thing. She also said she worked for a time at the Cowboy Café, which was one of the big bars in the Seattle grunge scene. She said she’d always serve Kurt Cobain free beers since he was broke all the time.

Her life story gets stranger after that. She said that higher up in the music industry things get really nasty and heartless—the upper echelons of the big labels are full of people in suits who are just in it for the money and don’t care about the music. So she decided to turn expat, and came out to Europe. I can’t remember exactly, but she’d spent time in Belgium, Germany and France working in varying capacities in different music scenes, finally settling in Brussels and starting her own music co-op: Music Brussels. She spoke four languages—English, German, French, and Dutch, and supposedly held something like four or five university degrees, although I’m not sure how much I believe that. At either rate, we had some very interesting conversation for those first few hours in her living room. You could tell the lady had partied pretty hard throughout all of that history too—she was only in her late 30’s/early 40’s, but her face told a different story.

Anyway, she had some business to take care of, so we excused ourselves for the afternoon. She invited us out to a concert her co-op was throwing later that night, so we wandered around the city for a while and met up with her later. Of course, this was no normal music venue. Apparently in the 20’s “tent shows” were all the rage. They were essentially touring music venues—the thing looked like an enormous circus tent, dark red and faded yellow, and the inside was all decked out with hardwood floors, tables, booths, a stage and a bar. I think this particular tent had started in Berlin at some point in its early history, and had been on the move ever since. Somehow Suki had managed to get in contact with a group that still maintains and uses one of these tents, and they set up camp in the square behind one of the big churches in Brussels.

The show was kinda small—a three-piece Belgian act was playing, and the audience was basically Suki’s friends and some other randoms. Suki’s posse was, of course, a bit eccentric—definitely a group of fringe characters hailing from all over Europe—but they were all friendly and really inviting, and showed us a great time. After the concert we went on a tour of all the smaller local bars in the city, and generally just had a great time.

The next day was the official end of our trip. We hadn’t been in Brussels long, but the week was up, and we all had different plans at the end of the week and different places we had to be, so we couldn’t stay in the city much longer than we did. We got up at a leisurely hour and hung around for a bit, said goodbye to Suki, hit the few remaining sights we hadn’t seen the day before, and headed off to the airport to fly back to Berlin. It marked the midway point of my own journey, and once we got to Berlin we said goodbye to Brendan, and I hung out with Karl and his girlfriend Kiersten at Kiersten’s place in Berlin, giving myself a bit of a layover before heading to my next destination.

All in all it was an incredible trip. I got to see some new places, revisit old ones and get a new perspective on them, and spend a lot of time with Karl and Brendan. The Wanderlust strikes me from time to time, especially after summer 2009. It comes in waves, harder at some times, lighter at others, and this was the first time since then that I’ve been able to travel for a long(ish) period of time on this continent since then. I spent my few days in Berlin just relishing in it, remembering back, finishing journal entries on the whole thing and just taking it easy after being on the move for a week straight. And I wasn’t even finished! I had Granada right around the corner, and the Fulbright conference after that.

Stay tuned for part four: Granada.

Part Two: Brugge

After a few days in Amsterdam, doing a couple day trips to nearby Den Haag and Haarlem, we made our way south by bus to Brugge. If you recognize the name from somewhere, it’s probably because you’ve heard of or seen the movie In Brugge with Colin Farrell (which is actually pretty good, I highly recommend it). At first I was really, really unenthusiastic about going to Brugge. I’d already been there once before in summer 2009, but that wasn’t the issue. All I remembered about Brugge is that it was absolutely mobbed with people (I went in the middle of August, right during the peak of the tourist season). I saw and heard zero Flemish in the stores or on the street, and there was absolutely nothing going on in town.

The place felt basically dead, like some other boring, old town that would be totally without merit were it not for all of the other tourists visiting. The huge, major event going on when I visited was a horse and buggy show running through the town square. One of my few distinct memories about the city is that there were so many fat, sweating, fedora-wearing middle aged tourists taking shitty, boring photos with point and shoot cameras that I could barely navigate my way through. I protested a little bit, but Karl and Brendan were set on going, so I went along anyway, leaving my opinion open for change and hoping it would.

And it did. In a big way. Just around the time we got there the weather was getting to be really nice, and when we checked into the hostel we barely even needed sweaters. Brugge in August was hell, but it was absolutely delightful in March. There was actually room to breath on the winding, cobble-stoned streets, and I saw the most incredible, ornate, ancient buildings; buildings that I don’t even remember seeing since I was so busy with searching for a path through the crush of humanity around me, lamenting a day poorly spent on my trip. Brugge is one of the best-preserved Medieval towns in all of Europe, and the personality and beauty of the place is overwhelming. It’s one of those cities where you walk around unsure of what you should even be taking pictures of since it’s all so wonderful. I could try to explain the place away in writing, but I’ll let a few photos do the talking for me.

The central square in town.

The buildings on the left in the previous photo, with the statue in the middle of the square.

A canal towards the south of the city, with a view of the backside of the cathedral tower in picture one.

The hostel we stayed at in Amsterdam was a little questionable and very expensive (I blew about 2/3’s of my travel budget there alone), but we ended up scoring a really nice, reputable, clean place in Brugge with a great atmosphere and really friendly staff.

Since we got in a little late the previous evening, we spent most of the next day touring around on rented bikes through the city, ticking off the sights and taking some photos. One of the great things about Europe is that the whole place is really bike friendly. Even I get annoyed with bicyclers in the USA, but around here people have a lot more patience for bikes—they’re a much more integrated part of the traffic around here, which means that it’s a great way to get around. All of the cobblestones on the street made for a sore butt by the end of the day, but that didn’t detract from the experience at all. It was pretty magical (for lack of a better term) to bike around the city, dashing through little side-alleyways, heading up and over bridges over canals, breathing in the chill air and taking in the sights.

Karl (left) and Brendan (right)

Minor bike disaster on the way out to Damme, fixed in about a half hour with a borrowed screw driver from a fishing shop down the street.

Around 1:00 or so on day two we took a tour of the Halve Maan (half moon) Brewery one of the oldest in Brugge. The tour wasn’t actually very good unfortunately, but at the end we did get a free token for one of the brewery’s beers, which I used on a Brugse Zot. Belgium is famous for its beer (the country puts Germany absolutely to shame), and drinking a beer fresh out of the tap in the very brewery in which it was made was just incredible. That will probably be the best beer that I will ever drink. I tried the same beer later that night from a bottle, and even though it had been brewed and bottled and sold all in the same city, there was already an amazing difference in taste.

It was also in Brugge that I had “The Sublime Moment” of the trip, as I took to calling it. That one little part of the whole experience that sums it up in one beautiful, half-surreal, peaceful moment. At the end of the day we biked out to the nearby town of Damme, about 5 kilometers outside of Brugge. The weather was just a little cloudy and cold, the bike path smooth and straight, running right along a canal that led into Brugge from a nearby river. Damme, although not well known, was almost better that Brugge itself. The town had a nice little center to it, and was pretty quiet and quaint, but the main attraction was the enormous, monolithic 13’th century church lying just outside of the main part of town. Yes, 13’th century, as in the 1200’s. I was floored. With the exception of the Coliseum in Rome, I had never seen an older building. And it was huge—towering way above our heads like some sort of ancient, ruined relic from a long forgotten, vanished civilization. The sort of stuff that Tolkien is made out of. Being three males who grew up in the middle of the videogame era, we of course joked that it looked like something out of Zelda, but we were all taken with it.

At the base of the church on my bike.

A view from the bottom.

It put me in a contemplative, grateful mood, and as we were heading back to Brugge the clouds opened up in the west and we were greeted by a beautiful orange and yellow sunset. Hamburg is cloudy and gray pretty much all the time, and it had been a few months since I’d seen a really good sunset, and it blew me away. I was speaking with Karl later around the end of the trip, and he commented that we had just lived a lot of people’s dreams. Thousands of people will buy the Rick Steves’ Guide to The Netherlands and Belgium, read it cover to cover, fantasize endlessly about making the very same journey that we had just completed, and never do it. We were pretty damn lucky to have the means and the time to go out and do this ourselves, and that good fortune culminated for me with the bike ride back into town. All three of us were spread out along the path, I was in the front, with a rare bit of time to myself to pedal and think, breath and contemplate. Riding through all of those fields, past run down, decaying farm sheds which were probably older than the United States itself, past windmills and villages and with a arrow-straight view into Brugge and this amazing sunset right behind the city, it was nothing less than sublime.

Part One: Amsterdam

Starting on March 3’rd Hamburg had the start of it’s Frühjarsferien (essentially spring break). Back in January me, Karl, and Brendan (two of the other Fulbrighters in Hamburg) put together a trip for the first week of break: Amsterdam for four days, Brugge (in Belgium) for two days, and Brussels for one day. We spent a long time working out logistics and schedules, putting the trip together, planning, etc., and ended up with what looked like a really great trip. When the time finally came we spent the night in Berlin (since our flight took off early in the morning from there), and woke up super early to get to the airport by six.

Intrepid travelers at 5:00 on the subway platform.

The majority of the time when I’m traveling (road trips, backpacking, etc.) I’m usually on my own, which sounds a little lonely, but when you get down to it, it’s actually really nice. I’ve traveled in groups before too, and while I won’t say that it’s ever been a bad experience (we always have fun, and it’s really great to share the experience with others) there’s just a whole different feel when you’re among a few other people. There’s less time to take it easy and really inhale, lift your eyes up from the sidewalk and appreciate what you’re seeing. Wanna sit down on that bench and contemplate the Alps in Innsbruck? Fine. Ride a bike around the Alster in Hamburg in August and find a nice spot on the grass to watch the sailboats? Sure. In a group you always have to come to a consensus, always have to make sure everyone else in the group is ok with what you’re seeing and where you’re going, which makes things a little hasty sometimes, and adds an extra layer of complexity to the whole thing.

Traveling with Karl and Brendan, though, was a serious pleasure. We’d all traveled in Europe before, and had a really good understanding of the do’s and don’ts with this sort of thing—a sense of how to get around and navigate the whole process—which made things so nice.

I never quite know what to expect out of any given city when I visit, but Amsterdam took me completely by surprise. One of the problems with a lot of German cities is that they got bombed totally to the ground in WWII (really apparent in a place like Berlin), but Amsterdam, in spite of the German occupation, seemed all but untouched. Every other building it seemed was about 100+ years older than the United States itself.





Anyway, we got there at the ripe and early hour of 9:00 AM and busted out our patron saint for the trip, Mr. Rick Steves, to do a walking tour of the city. I’d never really used a guidebook in earnest before, but the walking tours we went on in Amsterdam, Brugge and Brussels were all really fantastic. One of the most interesting things we saw in Amsterdam (which we also saw in Brugge) was a Beguinehof (Beguine courtyard). I had no prior knowledge of what the Beguines were, but apparently they were a nun-like group—a very faithful and religious sect of female worshipers who weren’t associated with nunneries or anything. They build Beguinehofs in a lot of cities in Amsterdam and Belgium as refuges from the hustle of city life: places where they could live and pray in peace.

The Beguinehof in Amsterdam was right off of one of the main drags, down this really non-descript, tiny alleyway. Walking in was really breathtaking, it was like someone muted the entire world after walking through the archway to the courtyard. Inside was a wide, open lawn crisscrossed by sidewalks, and around the lawn were the Beguine’s houses, small, white two storey houses with little fenced-off gardens out front. At the center of the lawn was a small red brick church with a bell tower and the classic big wooden gate. The last Beguine died in the 1960’s I believe, so now the houses are used as public and student housing. There was a sign out front requesting that you not take photos to preserve the peace of the place, so unfortunately I can’t share any of my own photos with you.

Another highlight of the Amsterdam trip was the Anne Frank House. On the second or third evening we signed up for a walk-through of the house, and it was really amazing to actually be there and see it first hand. I remember reading that book in the seventh grade and having only a hazy idea of the context the book was happening in, or even the very house in which they hid from the Nazis. And all of a sudden I was WALKING through the secret bookshelf entrance to the hidden annex, climbing the stairs into the upstairs rooms and seeing where the family lived, the pictures and magazine cutouts that Anne decorated her room with, the black curtains over the windows. What really blew me away was seeing the tick marks on the kitchen wall which marked off Anne and her sister’s height as they were growing, Anne was maybe four or five inches shorter than me by the last marking.

Over a canal in the Jordaan neighborhood.

Whoops.

.....and then visitors happened! I got all in the mood to start writing again, and then this past week I had a whole blitz of visitors who I had to entertain and show around town (two weekends ago my friends Willie, Shannon and Casey, last week my Dad and Stepmom). Well, I shouldn't say "had to," I really enjoyed it. But, of course, sightseeing and catching up leaves little time for writing.

But I am firmly dedicated to a crazy writing blitz these next couple days, in which I hope to get through spring break and the past couple weeks. So here we go.

Prelude: March 2011

Well beloved readers, it seems we’ve fallen into the cycle of blog writing I seem to get into again and again: write, stop, feel guilty about stopping and start up again. During the holidays of course I didn’t want to spend my time pounding out entries on some hostel computer when I could be exploring cities, but now that I’m back in Hamburg I can sit down and tell you all about what I did during the break! Three weeks worth of stories and pictures, it may be a bit of a challenge (big writing projects like this make me a little apprehensive), but we’ll give it a shot.

Anyway, as I said, I got back into Hamburg about two weeks ago. In total I was on the road for twenty-one days, which translates into four countries and eight cities. I rode bikes through medieval cobblestone streets in Brugge, sat on the edge of canals and ate sandwiches in Amsterdam, hiked in the Sierra Nevadas in Granada, laid on the beach in Nerja, and had the honor and privilege of attending the annual Fulbright Conference in Berlin. Even though it was only three weeks and not a whole month of traveling, the trip was just a fantastic time. Three weeks takes a toll on your body and wallet though—even now I still get random pains in my knees and feet walking around the city, and I was living out of my change dish for the last week and a half of March. I had a tremendous amount of fun, however, and got to meet, visit, and travel with a huge variety of great people.

Anyway, let’s start from the start, shall we? Part one on the way.