I’m in Brussels, Belgium now! We rode the TGV here first class, since the train company had some deals. It was actually cheaper for first class than second class. And it was such an awesome ride! The seats were wider. And we were served drinks and snacks, complimentary. I had a couple of Belgian beers on the short ride from Paris to Brussels.

Upon arrival, we found our hotel. The sign was right next to a really ratty decrepit building, and we were so afraid that it was our hotel. Then, slightly recessed into the wall, was a clean and modern looking building next to the ratty one, which luckily turned out to be our place.

Brussels has a much more modern feel than Paris. It’s quieter here. I haven’t tried the waffles yet, but the beer is great. A few blocks away from our hotel is a semi red-light district, and hookers were standing on the street. It was surreal seeing that only a few minutes away from our modern city block.

Random moment: I love French mustard, by the way. I am taking a big bottle of it home to the US. Also, I am planning on learning to drive stick shift this summer when I get back. And I really want to get a motorcycle instead of a car…

In France, I have:

Peed in the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, in a train station (not in a bathroom), and at Versailles.
I’ve spat from the Eiffel Tower, into the Seine river, and in the chateau gardens at Versailles.
I’ve napped in the Louvre.
I have watched the sun set from the Eiffel Tower.
And I’ve seen the July 14th amazing fireworks show.

I also lost the Game in Geneva, Paris, and Versailles.

Everywhere I go, the city of Paris is rooted in the Catholic religion. Its fascinating to go to the huge cathedrals and see all the art, work, and design put in for one man and his legend. It’s awesome in its power, and scary at the same time.

Out of Paris for a day, we went to Versailles for our last full day in France. It is really nice being out of the busy and loud tourist city.

The serenity of Versailles and the chateau (the former home of King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette) make it a seemingly ill-fitting place for the creation of the infamous Treaty that Versailles is now so well-known for.

Versailles is so different. Quiet, calm, but history, the chateau that sits next to the city is amazing. And so are the surrounding gardens. We had very French picnic lunch in the gardens, including bread, cheese, and meat. The only thing missing was wine.

Nearly as big as the town iteslf, King Louis XVI’s palace and his wife’s gardens sit on the edge, and are now public grounds for tourists and French alike. We rented bikes and rode around the lake-like canal in the center of the garden, under perfect rows of trees lining the gravel paths. It was not hard to imagine French aristocrats walking those very same paths 300 years ago.

In one center of the expansive gardens was a beautiful wheat field. The amber waves of grain were a surreal sight right out of America, the Beautiful or Gladiator, or 300.

Versailles is even more beautiful than Paris. I could easily see myself living here and going to King Louis’ gardens to get lost in a forested corner to read a book or just be by myself.

My feet are exhausted from walking the Louvre and Invalides museums. What an experience it was, though! The Louvre isn’t famous without reason. Attracting what seems like hundreds of thousands of people a day, it features 35,000 art peices and historical objects. The museum itself is a piece of history, as artists of the old world used to visit and do their work on the building. The vast rooms of the museum were adorned with beautiful paintings, engraving, and decorations.

Being a person uninterested in paintings, the Louvre still proved to be a fascinating place for me. The Greco-Roman busts and statues were amazing. The Napoleonic rooms were mind-blowing. The grandiosity of the living quarters of the French royals back then!

For me, the most amazing thing was to imagine all those works being created by people centuries and millenia ago. And the museum was such a vortex, sucking me in. I was so enthralled that I easily spent four hours wandering the halls. At one point, I was so sleepy that I took a nap in a room of ancient Roman antiques.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think that Louvre would be better served as a paintball arena or that the Mona Lisa was a copy. Or that the statues were alive and had to hold their poses all day, and would complain at night to one another about us tourists. I even envisioned a Family Guy tangent featuring the Mona Lisa.

After the Louvre, I walked to the Invalides military museum. It features artillery from the early modern era to WWII, small firearms, uniforms, propaganda pieces, pictures, and other military devices of the modern warfare era. Seeing military uniforms with medals and ribbons on them made me both sad and proud. I realized that I am joining a tradiion of humankind that has transcended thousands of years: warfare. And I am just another pawn (or maybe rook) that will come after literally billions of warriors long past.

Invalides also housed WWI and WWII small arms, like MP40s and 19th century French rifles. And asection of the museum was dedicated to Napoleon’s tomb. Grandious in life, Napoleon maintains an aura of command in his huge tomb under a golden dome. It was a fitting place of burial for one of the greatest makers of war in all of modern warfare.

I find it difficult to ingest the history rooted in this city and country.

Today is day one in Paris. I rode the TGV (ultrafast train) to Paris from Geneva with Monica. On board the busy train, we met a nice French guy named Thiboult on his was to get his visa to the US to study in Kentucky for college. We chatted him up about France and America. He told us that today, July 14th, is a French national holiday. What luck? Turns out that this day marks the starting of the French Revolution in 1789. A riotous crowd broke into the Invalides house (a military building), stole over 20,000 rifles, and then proceeded to tear down the infamous Bastille prison.

Marking this occasion, Paris has a military parade every year, and we also heard rumors of a firework show near the Eiffel Tower. So once we got into town, we quickly checked into the hostel. My first encounter with a Parisian involved him flipping me off. We found out hostel with the help of Thiboult, and explored the area before stolling down the Seine river that cuts Paris in half. Nearby our hostel were: two porn shops, more hotels, an internet cafe, and a delicious smelling kebab shop.

The walk down the Seine was scenic. The river was cluttered with tourist boats. A couple of friendly French guys yelled, “Jackie Chan, Jackie Chan!” at me and I obliged them with a kung-fu stance. The shore was full of Parisians and tourists alike, enjoying wine, bread, and music. I bought a sandwich with chicken and toomatoes in a baguette.

We passed Notre Dame, the Louvre, and Invalides, and marveled at the immensity and amazing design of the famous buildings. As we neared teh Eiffel, more and more overpriced food and ice cream shopes attracted the stomachs and wallets of tourists. The streets were becoming more and more clogged with foot traffic, and people were camped out on bridges. Little did we know that today was a very special day for the French.

We inched closer to the Eiffel, passing a police checkpoint and more food stands. Slowly, the crowd became a hot, sticky mass of people that was almost at a standstill. The Eiffel was literally 200 ft away at this point. WE say on the ground, marveling at the ‘metal asparagus’ and waited for the night to fall.

We weren’t sure when the fireworks were going to start, but the 100,000s of people were a sign of something big. After waiting for almost two hours, we just about gave up and were about to go home. We were pushing back through the throng of people away from the Eiffel Tower, when suddenly, across the Seine, a light and music show started. The Eiffel Tower, normally illuminated, went dark. And the most amazing fireworks show I have ever seen started.

It put our 4th of July celebrations to utter shame. The sheer size and coordination of the show was beyond awe. A live orchestra and opera singers performed famous classical pieces of music, and fireworks exploded in synchronized beat. And just as we thought the show was over, the fireworks and music would start again, doing more complicated coordination than before. The complexity and precision of the fireworks were spectacular.

The show went for about 25 minutes, and then the band played Nessun Dorma. The power of the music and combined fireworks brought tears to my eyes.

I’m zipping through the German countryside on an InterCityExpress train to Mannheim, where I will transfer to go to Geneva. I’m marvelling at how lucky I am. I could be sleeping in a terminal in Spain, or worse, stuck in Rota indefinitely. An Air Force colonel, who happens to be a commander of a Air Mobility Command wing (the section that makes Space-A flights possible), was generous enough to lend seats on his personal aircraft for passengers going to Ramstein. And the flight was quite the experience, it was like riding a VIP plane! More than anything, watching the pilots work their controls as they flew was fascinating.

Once in Germany, Sandy (a fellow traveler trying to get to Turkey) and I took a shuttle to Frankfurt Airport where we parted ways. She taught me a few German phrases and we had great discussions about economics and law. I went to the train station where I ordered a beer and bratwurst, and boarded the ICE train to Mannheim. Later, I got another beer and sausages with potatoes. All with no strings attached. It was relieving to not be carded for anything!

I am going to miss the freedom of drinking whenever I want to.

I placed my first order of food in Spain! I got chicken fillets with a glass of wine. And I did it in the broken Spanish that I had pieced together in a couple of hours.

The nice old man, Jesus, at the hostel I was staying at helped me. He was really good at English, and told me some key phrases. Monica helped me, too, and using both of their lessons, I was able to order a glass of white wine without getting a whole bottle.

The dish I ordered was a chicken fillet in a creamy yellow sauce, and I had it with bread. The meal was very satisfying. After that, I tried a local burger joint. The fast food restaurant was where I failed, though. I could order something, but couldn’t understand anything the guy was asking. At least I was able to say sorry for not understanding. After that, it remained to be seen whether I would get the food at all!

And as I sat at the table, writing this in my journal pad, I figured out through observation that I needed to pay with my receipt after ordering before I would get my food. Man, people must have though I was stupid just sitting there for almost 10 minutes, waiting for nothing.

When I actually took my receipt up and paid, I got the food immediately. And the burgers here are delicious. They taste freshly made!

Travel update: I have just been manifested on a flight to Ramstein, Germany. I think I was more anxious about this one than at Dover!

After dragging my suitcase around the base and town, waiting for the base hotel to free up, I gave up and checked in a relatively cheap hostel downtown. I was finally free for the day to check out the town, instead of lugging around the 50 pound suitcase that had accompanied me halfway across the world. A nice lady was manning the desk at the hostel, and spoke a little English. She taught me a few Spanish phrases, and assured me that the guy who manned the hostel at night spoke far better English.

I dropped my luggage in my tiny hostel room, and went out to check out the town. Five minutes later, I found myself at the beach, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean. The town was truely small, and right on the ocean!

The realization that I was in a different countr really came when I bit into my first Spanish vanilla ice cream cone. It tastes different somehow. The ice cream was definitely vanilla flavored, but it seemed to have a hint of cinnamon…or something. Funny, I thought to myself, as scooters buzzed by on the narrow streets by the dozens. Cars weaved in and out of the streets, expertly dodging the scooters, busses, and pedestrians.

No, this definitely was not Eugene. People stopped willing on the street to chat with each other, as if time was as abundant as the Spanish sunshine. Down at the beach, an old man wandered to the end of a jetty, where a younger man and his son were fishing with 20-foot long fishing poles. They, too, were having a conversation. Further down the beach, an older woman lay topless in the sun.

And on top of all the different culture, there is always the language barrier.

But having just about everything lost in translation is a rare and valuable experience. And there are other signs that this charming little town is not so alien. As the cars zipped by, every once in a while, I would hear a few notes of American music.

Kids still called their mothers ‘mama’ and a smile was always given or returns. And I started to wonder whether the taste of Spanish vanilla was the real taste of vanilla.

I just got into Rota, Spain. It’s a little town attached to a lightly populated but major Navy base at the tip of Spain. If Spain has a pinky toe, Rota would be it.

Back in Dover, I got chewed out for taking pictures of the flight line. I couldn’t help it, I hadn’t seen a C-5 before! It was my fault, though, I was being kind of thick about security measures and whatnot. I was pissed at the Petty Officer who yelled at me for most of the flight, and then he suddenly gave me a bunch of helpful tips about Rota and handed me a Robert Ludlum novel that he had finished. Somehow, I expected that to happen. Military types…they chew you out and then help you out.

There’s a flight out to Ramstein tomorrow, which I’ll try to catch. Otherwise, it’s going to have to be a commercial flight to Frankfurt, because time’s running out. It’s taken me almost a week to get here! And I’m still over a thousand miles away from my destination. The price isn’t what I thought it would be. I’ve spent over $400 on travel expenses alone. A little bit more, and I might as well have flown a commercial flight straight to Geneva. But to be honest, I don’t think I would have had as much fun if I had done that.

I tried to rent a car earlier in town, but I don’t know how to drive stick. I fantasized about cruising down the coastline of Spain, but I don’t think that is to be, unless I learn to shift and clutch quickly.

Speaking of which, I had my first lost in translation encounter in town today. I was waiting for a rental car shop to open, and an old lady walked up to me and tried to tell me in Spanish that the shop wasn’t opening for a while. I had no clue what she was saying as she pointed in random directions and gestured confusingly to me. She even asked a passerby if she spoke English to try to help me out. Finally, I figured out that they were telling me to go to another rental place, and I walked off with my heavy suitcase in tow. I chuckled to myself in amusement at my first encounter with a Spanish person.

I have been manifested for a flight to Rota Naval Air Station via a C-5 Galaxy, the biggest plane in the Air Force’s inventory. The flight is about 6 hours, so it’ll be around midnight when I get there. From there, I’m hoping to hop to Ramstein and get to Geneva!

Excited is an understatement.

My next post, if possible, will be from Europe.