Keats, St. Pete's

Reading over the texts I send while visiting the rooms where John Keats spent his last days, I can't commiserate with Higgins when he laments conversations with women. "You want to talk of Keats or Milton," he whines to the Colonel, "she only wants to talk of love."

Keats was buried on my bday.

More happy love! more happy happy love! 4ever warm and still 2 b enjoyed, 4ever panting, and 4ever young.

I'm alone, but sharing via the miracle of SMS. The above is Keats, by the way, and sent from a man to a woman. Why can't a woman be more like a man?

The rooms, literally on the Spanish steps (first building on the right as you're looking up the steps), now house a research library about Keats, Shelley (both PB and Mary), Byron, and some contemporaries. Lists of British and American expats living in Rome at the time line the stairs as you enter, the host is a frazzled middle-aged British lady unsure how best to manage her two grad school interns, the entrance fee is small, as is Keats' room. The view is worth bragging about.

I picture myself teaching Keats someday, a classroom full of lazy, hungover college kids in pajamas. "Search for the moments," I tell them, "the Im watching night fall over the Spanish steps from keats writing desk moments, reading Ode to a Nightingale to the song of tittering mulititudes of travelling teenagers, amorous lovers locked in a precarious embrace." They yawn and eye each other up, more anxious to be the lovers than the lone reader; when can I awake so I may seek another drink?

U and I have already outlived this guy. I'll drink to that.

St. Peter's Basilica

The crèche outside is huge, lit up in many colors. The manger changes every year, apparently. Half the set was designed and sculpted by a Filipino artist to show the universality of the Church. The crèche inside is smaller, more colorful, and designed in Oberammergau.

Of course it's huge-the whole place is. Standing among the gigantic pillars, the cupola so dizzyingly high, the long arms stretching powerfully on either side, I almost laugh aloud as a song enters my head: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

Do I want to ask the question of whether it was worth it to cheat from so many millions of sinners indulgences to build this Duomo? Was the arrogant threat of damnation upon the collective souls of bankrupt kingdoms worth the stadium-sized cathedral, so enormous the intricate artwork from floor to ceiling blurs before my eyes?

Or do I wander on, content in the assertion of the Grecian Urn, that truth is beauty and beauty truth, and allow the age-old art to breathe its own life into me?

But truth be told, I think little about the poor medieval illiterates so abused. And the beauty does speak to me, but the closed prayer room calls more loudly, and I assure the guard I came to St. Peter's to kneel.

The ancient words so lately learned whisper from my lips. From my corner I see I padre with Nicaraguan features. I see a nun, and then another one.

"Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy."

I tiptoe out, leaving truer pilgrims to longer prayers. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spritus Sancti. Amen.

Entrance to the Church, by the way, on like 7 billion levels, is free.

America, the blog

America is HUGE. The streets are so wide it’s like there are whole streets on either side of the street, and the cars are like ten feet tall. When I go into a Sam’s Club, looking to the far wall makes me feel like those submarine guys (and now girls) who can’t focus on anything more than 100 feet away after being underwater for all those weeks. There’s so much unused space—empty freeway turnarounds, wide medians and ditches along the freeways, parking lots stretching for miles.

My first visit back to the US since moving to Italy was Christmas day. It snowed, and took a long time to get to Julie’s parents’ home. I ate Mexican food, BBQ, played in an indoor water park, and spent time with our families. It was a good, if short, trip.

The biggest thing I notice, besides the size of everything, is this ridiculous sense of superiority that kept splashing over me like a wave of muddy water from the gutter. These people in Perkins have never been without this Perkins, and have never seen the inside of Da Michele’s, the voice in my head sneered. These people in Target don’t know what they have. These people at Pizza Hut… please.

Following a friend through an intersection as the light turned yellow, an imagined conversation appears in my head.

“Hey sorry about going through that yellow light,” I imagine him saying. “I hope you were able to follow me alright.”

“Please,” I answer with a sniff, “I’ve been driving in Naples.”

Now I don’t actually think any of these things, and I know how like an ass I sound admitting it. I don’t feel superior to those people in farm garb in the Perkins because, for one, I have no idea whether they’ve lived only here all their life or not, and more importantly, two, it doesn’t give me any edge over them in any forum anywhere no matter what we’ve done with our respective lives. I don’t think I’m superior to them any more than I feel afraid of a black guy on the street, or want to have sex with a random pretty girl I notice, or want to act on any of the violent, suicidal, or destructive thoughts that invade my mind every minute of every day. I am amazed, however, by the frequency of these thoughts and their varied manifestations throughout the entire time I am in the States.

So, family (who are the only ones reading this, I assume), there's my confession and please don't take it the wrong way. I can't wait to hang out again. Also, tickets are bought and hotels booked for Ireland in Feb. and I'll have some thoughts up on Rome from last week's trip in a few days. Sorry for how long it's been but, hey, I've been busy feeling too good to write. Maybe one day I'll write something good.

Denmark

The story begins the same to each new Dane we meet.

"Yeah, my parents were born here Well, near here, in Bjedstrup, near Skanderborg. My dad came over in '27, and my mother left Denmark in '39, just a few months before the Germans invaded."

The Americans in front of us on the plane overhear, and nod. It's a very American tale.

"My mother and father actually met on the boat coming back to Denmark. She was coming home from a visit to her mother, and he was going back to find himself a wife."

The hotel receptionist in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, looks up and smiles. She knows that Danish girls are the best for marrying.

"Well my father had sort of settled in a place that actually looks very similar to Denmark--namely, Racine, Wisconsin." He chuckles, "the fields, the farmland, even the trees look so much like Wisconsin. It looks just like Wisconsin!"

"Around the corner is the entrance to your room," the receptionist says. "This key gets you in the door, this one for your room."

Both the hotel receptionist and the waiter at the cafe (clearly a local college hangout) seem confused that a man named Eric Pedersen, who looks 100% Danish, doesn't speak the language.

"My dad would've been happy to teach my sister and I to speak it," Eric explains, "But my mother wouldn't let him. 'You're in America,' she'd say, 'speak English!'"

I have the most European driving experience, but taking the wheel of our rental in Denmark, where rules are followed (even, it seems, not so much out of fear but out of some, rather foreign, sense of communal goodwill, completely absent in Italy), I am nervous I'll break six inviolable laws before breakfast. We're meeting Lennart Frederiksen, a curator at a local museum and researcher of local Danish genealogies (check his website at http://www.fredenslyst.dk). Lennart lives in Skanderborg, where Eric's mother was born, and we meet at the local McDonald's to follow him the last few miles in our pilgrimage to the home of Eric's ancestors.

"This place DOES look a lot like Wisconsin," we say as we follow Lennart and Eric, who has chosen to ride with the one so connected to his past.

First stop is Dover Kirke, the church where Eric's father was baptized. It sits in the middle of three fields, its cemetery full of gravestones with "Pedersen" on them. "I don't know if any of these are my relatives," Eric says with some sadness. "It's such a common name, and I've lost contact with any living relatives."

He perks up in the inside of the church. "A spitting image of the one I went to as a kid," he smiles, walking up the pews to the altar. We pretend to baptize Aryn and take some pictures. Aryn picks up a Danish hymnal and proceeds to belt out two full verses of Amazing Grace. This small church, somewhat unremarkable in appearance (much like the Old North church in Boston, really), feels like it's built on sacred ground. Two if by sea, without whom Eric, Julie, and now Aryn would not exist.

The house where Eric's father was born is about fifty meters inside the town limits of Bjedstrup. No one in Aarhus had heard of this town, and that may be because on the map there aren't even any intersections to speak of, let alone a posted population.

"The house used to have an attached barn," Eric explains to Lennart, pointing to where now an in-ground pool sits, covered. "Those trees weren't there when my grandfather lived here, either.
He made a path up to the top of that hill, where he had a table and chairs." The owner isn't at home, but we gather from the signs outside and the laborer's truck that pulls up as we're leaving that she owns a pool installation company.

The school is about 200 meters away, but has expanded quite a bit in the past 100 years. Lennart points out the building that would have been the one-room schoolhouse a century ago, then invites us to his house for Aebelskiver (a kind of Danish pancake about the size and shape of a golf ball).

"Normally we only have these at Christmas," he explains, "but we'll have some today."

"Sue makes those," brags Eric. "Of course, we have them all the time, for any big family
gathering. She also makes frickadilla, kleiner…" he goes on, listing the Danish culinary delights of Racine. Lennart seems to recognize few of the foods, but we do find many later in the supermarket. "By the way," Eric asks, "do you have kringle here?"

Lennart looks confused.

"It's a pastry we have in Racine," Eric explains, "thin, with a filling, shaped like a racetrack."
Lennart thinks for a moment and shakes his head. He's never heard of it. Many of the Danes we encounter seem slightly bewildered at, if not to say uninterested in, those portions of century-old Danish culture their far-flung forefathers decided to preserve in the New World.

We take one turn after the school, leave the town a moment later, and at no time does it look like we are anywhere but a tiny cluster of houses amid farmland.

"Wow, look at that horse farm," we exclaim, coming over a hill. It's so pastoral, such a postcard Danish farm. Lennart turns in the driveway, and Aryn waves to the horses as we follow. His wife and daughter greet us at the door, exclaim over Aryn's appearance (for once, not for its uniqueness but for its similarity to their own families). They show us the pictures of children who could all be related to Julie's family.

"For this whole time I've felt almost like I was among family," Eric tells them, which certainly explains his abnormally loquacious mood these past 24 hours. "It's like Racine used to be, with such a concentrated Danish population."

Two enormous but shy dogs eye us suspiciously as we sit down to coffee, cinnamon roles, aebelskiver, and long talk.

"There are so many Danes in Racine that the queen herself came once," Eric says. "Marguerite came to Racine!"

I'm privately reminded of the comical Lake Wobegon anecdote about the King and Queen of Norway, who do a whirlwind tour of the Norwegian enclaves of Minnesota and Wisconsin singing songs their parents had never even heard of, eating terrible food in VFW after VFW and looking at endless black and white photographs of dead ancestors from the Old Country, and when they return from this grueling trip they look at each other and say, "now who were those people?" I smile from the humor, not the condescension.

The Frederiksens are impressed by Eric is saying, but, like everyone else, confused that with such a strong heritage he doesn't speak the language.

"I studied some of the Rosetta Stone," Eric admits, "but what understanding I do have comes from when I was young. My aunt [he says a word that sounds like festerolavia, which doesn't jive with my translator] came to visit when I was young, and she didn't speak any English and expected us all to understand her. If I didn't understand what she asked, she just said it again, louder! She wanted her sugar cubed and her tea leaves loose. She stayed for a year and a half."

The story continues on the train to Copenhagen, through that great city (if you want to see Amsterdam but are indifferent to pot, go to Copenhagen instead), and in the airport. Every Dane is family, though we met none related by blood.

"All the family I knew in Denmark has died," Eric tells the souvenir shop lady, who is actually from Australia but moved to Denmark for her husband. "My father was 48 when I was born, and he was about the youngest in the family so all my aunts and uncles had grandkids my age. I've lost contact with all of them." Sue buys souvenirs for everyone at home, many of whom may never come over here.

Will we return together, a new contact with a living relative made and strengthened? Will we walk the streets of Copenhagen in the balmy summer, not the wintry November winds? Will the Little Mermaid be there when we come back, instead of on loan in the Far East?

Garrison Keillor would be proud of this visit, but so would T.S. Eliot. Old men ought to be explorers, the poet said. And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. Eric, an indifferent traveler at best, may not agree with the former sentiment, but we have now lived the latter.

As the plane first touches down in Copenhagen, I see Eric's face as he peers out the window and murmurs "Never thought I'd make it here. I never thought I'd make it to Denmark."
"And here you are," say the Americans in front of us on the plane with a smile.

Passionsspiele 2010

"I think I only have two things on my bucket list," says my mom as we drive north. "Other people may have more, but for me, I just have two. And we're going to do one of them right now!"

My mom isn't the kind of person who disguises her enthusiasm for something, and there's an atmosphere of excitement in the car as we cross the Po and start to spy the foothills of the Alps. Since I was a child I'd heard about a village in Bavaria that put on a play only every ten years, and while these ever-growing mountains may have posed quite a challenge to the likes of Hannibal, we'll cross them in just a few short hours.

The town of Oberammergau, population 5,204, is home to some fantastic artisanal wood carvings, a NATO school, breathtaking flower gardens that hang from typical dark wood Bavarian facades and, every decade, swarms of ancient tourists creaking off tour buses, finally checking the Passionsspiele off their bucket list.

In 1634 the town of Oberammergau was plagued with, well, the plague. The townspeople came together and put on a play about Jesus' death and resurrection, in a desperate attempt to show their devotion to a God who, they thought, had forsaken them. It must have worked, because from the time of that play, no one in Oberammergau has died of plague. They now put the play on every ten years to keep the memory alive and, perhaps, to keep the protection from the plague alive too.

We worry about how they'll change the story, or what they'll do to Christ's divinity. Germany (and indeed, most of Western Europe) is famously skeptical, with abysmal church attendance and a strong influence not only of modern progressive humanism but westernized incarnations of Buddhism or spirituality in the most nebulous, uninvasive forms. It's really only the Catholic PIIGS countries that have any measurable church attendance or active religiosity anymore (ideas, after all, have consequences). Can an ancient story of an outdated religion survive in such a climate?

We sip our radlers--a mix of Sprite and beer that, we hope, will allow us to savor the tastes of Oktoberfest while not knocking us catatonic during the first three hours of the six-hour play--and discuss our concerns. We hope these people can get it at least mostly Right. Sip.

We are about to find out just how preposterously small our minds really are.

"Jesus, the Jew, sought to renew the religion of the fathers, a religion built on the foundation of the law and the prophets, by showing that the personal relationship to the Eternal Father-God represents the core of all religious activity," my Passionsspiele 2010 textbook reads. "Religion is meant not only to give order to human life but a lasting inner connection with the realm of the divine."

They've given us textbooks in English to follow along, because the play is, naturally, in German. Julie and I share a booklet, even though they gave us two, because while it may be a bit inconvenient to have to accommodate another person's reading speed or desires, sharing a booklet allows us to share the experience, to read along together.

But how can I tear my eyes away from the stage? A crowd, all in blue, more people than I've seen attending most other plays, swarms the stage. Sheep, donkey, goats, horses, camels, all leaving their mark behind to be cleaned up during intermission, are led or ridden by actors from age one to ninety. When the crowd roars, my heart stops with the sound. I've seen fewer people on the field for a Super Bowl halftime show than the multitude to whom Jesus preaches. He turns over their money changing tables, their oil jars. He smashes a cage with doves, and they fly out into the open sky to make a home in the Bavarian Alps.

Recent iterations of the play have incorporated more and more of the Jewish traditions from the period, and the fabulous costumes worn by the priests and teachers of the law, the Last Supper based more on an actual Passover meal and less on Da Vinci's fresco, and the constant acknowledgement of a simmering tension between a people both socially and politically oppressed and their Roman occupiers shows the depth of thought the committee put into the show. The miracle unfolds itself on stage as additions to the sparse gospels play out flawlessly and seamlessly. Jesus' words repeated by Nicodemus as he quarrels with his colleagues in the synagogue. The pomposity of those Jesus called "whitewashed tombs," and their elevated intellectual dialogue. Third-Reich Pilate, a no-nonsense military man in complete command of his post, but who also asks, jarringly, "What is truth?"

My favorite is the living images, the live stills of Old Testament episodes that introduce each scene and ground the story in its ancient past. And how apt (and sometimes obscure) the references: the anguish of Cain before the anguish of Judas, the mocking of Job before Jesus' trial in front of the high priest, Joab's betrayal at the rock of Gibeon before Judas' kiss in Gethsemane. The sacrifice of Isaac and the raising of the bronze serpent before the way of the cross and crucifixion.


(from the trial of Jesus before the high priest):

3rd witness: He said: I am going to tear down the temple built by humans and replace it in three days with another that was not built by human hands.
Ezechial: What an impudent boast! It took 46 years to build this temple, and he wants to rebuild it in three days?
Nathaniel: What do you have to say to object to this testimony? Can't you think of a response? Contradict, if you can!
Annas: He neither speaks nor gestures. The defiance he has shown against me has not yet left him.
Nathaniel: I see: you think you can save yourself if you keep silent. He doesn't dare confess in front of the fathers of the people, in front of the judges, what he has boasted before the common people.
Caiaphas: Jesus of Nazareth! Impatiently I have waited for this moment. Whence do you assert this claim? Who has appointed you leader of Israel and judge over us? Speak!
Jesus: (is silent).
Annas: Should reverence not protect us foam being made an object of his derision?
Nicodemus [to Annas, Nathaniel, Caiaphas]: He is a living reproach to your basic convictions.


The scene continues and Jesus does claim to be the Son of God. He does physically rise from the dead. He does preach the Beatitudes (though he might have said "Blessed are the poor" vs. the “poor in spirit”), He is wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The feared theological "flaws," such as they are, mostly aren't. Jesus has blonde hair, and Judas looks much more Jewish than any of the other disciples. For all the strides forward in German-Jew relations these past six decades, you'd think someone might have noticed. The former charge, about poor vs. poor in spirit, may be the insidious influx of progressive socialist theory into the text, or just a translation slip-up, or whatever. Certainly heaven and the Christian life are dependent on subjecting one's individual will to the Divine Will ("In his will is our peace," as Piccarda Donati says), whereas one's relative economic class may have far less influence on actual salvation, but as the choir sings Hallelujah and the crowd envelops the risen Christ and we weep in the cold night air, not much matters but Christ and Him crucified.

Haarlem

It costs about half as much to stay in Haarlem as to stay in Amsterdam, which is why we spend our two nights in Holland there. That, and the great sage Rick Steves says that if you have two days to spend in Amsterdam, spend one in the city and one in Haarlem. I know, enough with the Rick Steves already, but I wish I paid even more attention, because he gives the hotel we booked indifferent reviews. There isn’t much wrong with it, except that it’s a bit remote from the train station and breakfast isn’t included, so our 20 minute train ride to Amsterdam Centraal takes longer and cost twice as much because of cab fare and our stay costs more than advertised because of the costly—albeit delicious—morning buffet. That 20 minute commute from Haarlem to Amsterdam would make an excellent bike ride, though, through the beautiful Dutch countryside.

The town of Haarlem, home of Corrie Ten Boom, is like a Dutch Bruges with fewer tourists. After getting past the obvious comparisons with the Harlem of New (Amsterdam) York, the town offers serene walks along the canals, winsome shopkeepers and museum guides, plenty of pedestrian-only areas, and (sniff sniff) a few of the other delights this country is famous for.

The Corrie Ten Boom house, we find by accident, is just off the Grote Market square. A pilgrimage for many, including the Van Dykes, of Boston, who make up the other half of our tour group, the house is restored to look like it may have in those horrible days when she had to hide Jews in a false wall (aka “the hiding place”). Pictures of family and friends line the walls and the piano is in good repair (the Ten Boom family and guests kept busy by singing and staging plays during blackout hours). The refugees in her house certainly led a better life than Anne Frank’s family, 20 minutes away by train. Fun at night and sun during the day (an enclosed area on the roof allowed them to sit outside unobserved from the street below—or the Gestapo headquarters 200 meters down the road), they were the ones taking heroin from clean needles. Corrie Ten Boom’s story during the war is compelling, and her thirty years of charity work and evangelism after speak to the passion alive inside her. She died on her birthday, as did so many other saints.

Also highly recommended is the Adriaan Molle (or, you know, the big windmill). It’s reconstructed in the old style, with wooden pegs keeping the all-wood gears, pulleys, shafts, and brakes together. We learn how the position of the sails sent messages across the town and how they can turn the turret to face directly into the wind, and enjoy the warmth of all-wood construction after spending so many months living in marble. We also have a wonderful view of the town and the yachts sailing up and down the main canal.

Within sight of the windmill is a playground on the banks of the canal. For a sitting fee of fifty cents, we eat our packed picnic of cheese and fresh bread, tomatoes and olives and an inexpensive merlot. Aryn plays and plays as the sun trickles through the boughs of a great willow tree.

As the sun sets, Aryn settles into bed and Julie rests her legs in the bath with her book. Jake and I have a drink and discuss the incredibly long twilight this far north. The conversation turns, as it does when someone like me talks with someone like Jake, to politics, poverty, development, literature, economics, God, and Garrison Keillor. Someone once told me that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. I took issue with it then, and I still do. Not because ideas aren’t discussed by great minds, but because it implies that an amiable and edifying conversation among friends about this person’s pregnancy or that person’s recent trip to Barcelona is somehow inferior to an angry and divisive dispute about integrating Muslim immigrants into European society or whether six-day Creationism is the only possible interpretation of Genesis. Here’s an idea: edifying conversation among lifelong friends strengthens the most important thing in heaven or on earth—our relationships. Discuss.

So thanks, @Jacob Steele, for the conversation and the memories. May we meet again soon in another corner of this wide world.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam has an interesting personality. The pot and sex tourism color the whole of the city center.

“Why do they have to play it up so much?” asks Jake, my friend from school who is interning with an NGO in Brussels and also the impetus for our trip to Benelux. “Why can’t it just be like, ‘pot and prostitution are legal here,’ and that’s it?”

Money, I imagine, if the swarms of hairy hippies humping their backpacks off the train with a wild excitement in their soon-to-be-glazed eyes are any indication of the scale of its share of this city’s tourism.

“I just think they’re selling themselves short,” Jake concludes.

“Not entirely my favorite city,” Julie agrees, as we dodge every conceivable form of transportation: bus, tram, taxi, construction truck, bike, bike with huge box on the front like a wheelbarrow with pedals, and bike rickshaw.

Our concierge in the hotel in Haarlem agrees. “You were in Amsterdam?” he asks us as we check out. When we nod, he snorts, “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

We visit the NEMO science museum (which looks like the prow of a huge ship sunk in the canal), hoping for an awesome toddler-geared exhibit. We are disappointed—first by the amount of kids there, then by the target age of about 8+. Aryn lacks the patience required by the exhibits, and we don’t linger. The VOC Amsterdam, an old Dutch East India ship collocated with the NEMO, is more exciting. Aryn, aka “captain Jessie,” a riff on her current adopted character from Toy Story, learns to fire a cannon, steer the ship, and cook and eat the hardtack and gruel enjoyed by the ship’s crew. The captain’s mess has roasted chickens and wine in bottles shaped to be very bottom-heavy. She loves it and doesn’t want to leave.

We walk. She falls asleep.

It turns out to take less time to walk back to the Centraal station from the NEMO than it did to ride the bus. Most of the city center is like that. Better, even, to take a bike, which we do later.

But Julie yet again proves her skill at locating the best café. Note: in Amsterdam, “Coffee shops” sell pot, and cafes are cafes. We sit amidst a record market and watch old metalheads browse the vinyl discs for buried treasure. The sun, surprisingly blazing, kisses their grateful northern European skin. We came north to flee you, sun, but the breeze is cool and the Amstel cold and much is right in the world.

Our walk, unexpectedly, takes us through that staple Amsterdam walking experience: the Red Light District. Shine on, sun.

Julie gasps, “There’s a naked woman in that window!”

I smile. I’m happy she gets to see this, and I say “I’m happy.”

“You’re happy about this?” she asks, with her uncanny ability to cut through equivocation. “You think these girls are willing?”

Well some are, of course, but I remember that it was on a previous trip to Amsterdam that I was first awakened to the world of human trafficking.

“It’s got to be better here,” Jake offers, “with regulation, enforced condom use, access to healthcare…”

“Like using heroin from a clean needle, you mean?”

“No, I mean the regulation should keep the trafficking and exploitation side down.”

But when I stayed with the YWAM guys in the “Jesus loves you” building overlooking Centraal station and we discussed their ministry, they told me, “If a prostitute ever accepts Jesus, we have to get her out of town immediately, or she’ll be killed.”

And, in fact, Amsterdam is one of the top destination cities in the world for human trafficking. While it is difficult to know which women initially chose to work in the sex industry, seventy-five percent of the prostitutes are foreign (most from countries identified as “source countries” in Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia). Routine medical checkups are not required. The U.S. Department of State confirms 909 trafficking victims in 2009 (that’s one for every 18,091 people in the country, as compared to 1 per 182,343 in the U.S. and 1 per 118,221 in Thailand), and in 2007 and 2008 the government prosecuted and convicted 152 traffickers with an average sentence of 15 years.

When a Christian organization called Scharlaken Koord (in English, the Scarlet Cord) surveyed 439 prostitutes they had contact with, 380 had been introduced into the business by a supposed “lover” or boyfriend. That sounds a great deal like the classic tale of a trafficking victim: an offer to a desperate citizen in a poor land that sounds too good to be true, and it is. Upon arrival in their promised land, they are informed of the massive debt they now owe (transportation and visa costs, etc.), and they must work off their debt however their captor demands. Usually this debt comes with crushing interest, making it impossible for the victim to ever pay down the debt at all, and they die in captivity. The two competing gangs of pimps in Amsterdam are known for seducing new talent into the profession, so one can conclude that the majority of the prostitutes here are, in fact, slaves. Roxanne, you DO have to sell your body to the night.

We walk.

The mood passes. We ride our bikes out of the Amsterdam of snickering pothead fantasies. We cross canal after canal, the houseboats quietly moored to city streets. Every street has a red bike lane, and we stay safely in our lane and accelerate. I hear Aryn over the wind and the traffic, “Be careful daddy! Mas dispacio.” We discover the magic of the Museumplein, a giant square surrounded by the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum with huge “I amsterdam” letters we could climb on and a playground—plenty of people but plenty of space. We ride from there to the Vondelpark. A park within a great city is one of life’s finest things. The feeling not quite of herbs and stewed rabbit, but rather of calm amidst a lively chaos, of plunging beneath the surface in a waterpark, refreshes like an acre in the country never does (or, one wonders, never has to??).

Dinner under the NYSE and other financial buildings a few blocks from Centraal station is an urban dream. Initially unsure about the food, thinking a place with such incredible outdoor ambiance couldn’t excel also in the kitchen, we are surprised by an outstanding dinner of couscous salad, tomato and red pepper soup and a cheese plate with that rich, northern European bread. Also beer, and another order or two of fries (how many is that today?). Aryn chases the pigeons as we pass the plates around, savoring a fine meal in the mild evening air. Big banks, drugs, human trafficking, heaps of dreadlocked Rastas on the Haj, and I’m still in love with edgy Amsterdam.

Brugge

We had to buy our tickets last minute, but thankfully flying to Brussels from Rome was the cheapest flight I could buy for those dates. So we land in Brussels after an easy drive up to Rome Ciampino, where the parking lot is closer to the gate than the check-in counter is at FCO. Also the airport code is CIA, and the first syllable sounds like “champ,” and I think that’s awesome.

Sitting on the train from Brussels to Bruges, we both comment how similar the countryside is to Wisconsin. The buildings, of course, retain that European flavor—that distinct foreignness to remind us again that (pinch) we’re in Europe, in Belgium. Deciduous trees growing in thick, rich soil brings a feeling of home while the thin, watery sunlight is a welcome relief from a Mediterranean August.

The Flanders hotel, in Brugge, is the best hotel we’ve stayed in yet. The beds are soft, the breakfast enormous, the pool sufficient for a windmill-weary three-year-old who left her house at 8 and took a series of cars, airplanes, buses, trains and taxis before sitting in a stroller for a while.

Our sunset windmill walk calms Julie’s and my frenetic pulse. Julie falls in love immediately. Old historic Bruges has a trail along the surrounding canal, and on the north eastern path you find four giant windmills all in a row. A lawn stretches between them, inviting picnics, Frisbee or, today, a group of dog lovers exercising their pets.

How much is our impression of a place colored by the weather? London, in the sunlight, like when we visited, is unspeakably amazing. Pisa, in the rain, was worth a few pictures and a swift exeunt stage left. Brugge, with her cool summer showers, horse-drawn carriage rides past “God haus”-es where medieval nobility provided free lodging to peasants willing to pray them into heaven, sunny boat rides beneath the bridge leading to the swan-filled convent Julie will join if I break our agreement and die first, and her winding streets filled to overflowing with chocolate, waffles, beer, French fries, and chocolate, ranks easily among our new favorite places on earth. We are definitely in the right place at the right time.

Rick Steves told me that Bruges is a touristy place where you don’t mind rubbing elbows with a bunch of other tourists. If I do nothing more with this blog than to validate the recommendations of this incomparable traveler, from where I sit that would be okay. For you, dear reader, if that happens, just go watch his PBS shows.

About half the streets are bumpy stroller rides. The convent I mentioned earlier is open to visitors, but Aryn is sleeping and the cobblestones are too uneven to stroll through. So if I die and Aryn is grown, you can go visit Julie there and see for yourself. You may not recognize her, because she’ll have gained about 200 lbs by the time you catch up with her, and she’ll probably have finished the whole chocolate statue of Barack Obama.

Our dinner, at an Irish pub staffed by real Irishmen, is fantastic. They serve us delicious food with salad such as we haven’t had in quite some time. My Leffe beer has a pleasant aftertaste, the fries (a food invented in Belguim, which is why we call them French fries) are divine, and the whole culinary experience is totally lost on Aryn. But she manages to eat enough to “earn” dessert (parents, don’t judge me), and wouldn’t you believe it, the chocolate mousse steals the whole show. We have to physically restrain our child so she doesn’t inhale it so fast she chokes, and I have to strain myself to remember much else about that dinner, so consumed is my mind with swimming in that heavenly confection.