Paris: Good For Brian/Bad For Brian

Last weekend I was in Paris with Steve (my biggest little brother) and his traveling band of misfits. Paris is a big, complicated city, so I'm going to classify our experiences there as either Good For Brian or Bad For Brian. This is the metric that I'm sure concerns all of us most.

Stone Carvings on Notre Dame: Good For Brian!

Mischievous devils might be Bad for Brian overall, but those rascals make for some nifty carvings.

It's a lobstah!

Vaults in Notre Dame: Good For Brian!

Because they both hold the roof up and look nice.

Rain: Bad for Brian.

Good for ennui, though.

Sleeping on a really thin mattress on the floor of Steven's friends rented apartment [not pictured]: Bad for Brian (and his back).

Free place to stay [not pictured]: Good for Brian!

Giant iron sewer cleaning balls: Good for Brian!

Bad for Steven, though. And for Dr. Jones.

€1 Espresso [not pictured]: Short term: Good for Brian! Long term: Probably bad for Brian, good for his chemical dependency.

Rodin Museum: Good for Brian!

Special thanks to Steve for putting up with me looking at five different versions of the same three statues.

Gorgeous early morning photos of the Seine: Good for Brian!

And good for his blog!

Eating a whole sausage over three meals [not pictured]: Bad for Brian.

People tubes: Good for Brian, probably bad for humanity overall.

Treating people like Pringles is a step backwards for society.

Bums that spit at you without provocation [not pictured]: Bad for Brian.

Not understanding lens distortion: Bad for Brian.

Wandering around until you run into something interesting: Good for Brian!

Happy Army Birthday!

Happy Army Birthday! Today is the US Army's 237th birthday, and the entire base is celebrating, with songs about cassons, a four day weekend for everyone in uniform (not me), and some surprisingly good steaks and shrimp for lunch. Also, the cafeteria took down it's nutrition facts signs, freeing us for one day from the prison of knowing how much sodium is in the tortilla soup. So far, the Public Health command is averaging about two barbecues, long potluck lunches, or outdoor safety fairs per week. I like it here.

Last weekend I went to Saarbruken with my Peruvian amigo Fritz and his German lady friend. Even though I was a third wheel, we still rented bikes (and not tricycles) and cruised along the river.

 

It's the Euro cup right now, so everyone gets all excited whenever Germany plays. I haven't managed to keep track of the schedule very well, but every so often I'm surprised by a party happening downstairs.

The Euro Cup logo is cute...almost as cute as this.

This weekend I'm headed to Paris to hang out with my ninja Steven, with whom I will go gorillas. In case you are curious, I would be Kanye because I am more likely to wear pretentious sunglasses and be mean to Taylor Swift. Steve is Jay Z because he's scarier and has more street cred from that one time in Trujillo. Also, LeBron would probably like him more, just because Steve gets along with everybody.

What's Luxembourg Like?

Last weekend five of us drove to Luxembourg for a night and a day. Luxembourg is the tiny little country between France, Belgium, and Germany that's basically just one city.

Luxembourg is kind of a hybrid of French and German cultures, but it's a nice little place. It's kind of a city-state, which I appreciate. The old part of the town is in a valley along a river, and the newer stuff is on the higher land surrounding. It makes for a nice, walkable area that's hard to get lost in.

Generally, the Luxembourgers were friendly and good-looking, and enjoyed bad American pop. Also, they really seem to like Coronas (the Mexican beer), a preference that will forever remain mysterious to me.

I didn't take any pictures in Luxembourg, so here's one from the archive of me endangering a cute Peruvian child:

Beyond that, I'm adjusting to military life pretty well. I'm keeping a decently scruffy beard so that no one confuses me for a service member, and I'm getting used to filling out redundant forms. Yesterday I set off the alarm in the gym by scanning my ID card. The computer yelled out, "Intruder Alert", which seemed a bit harsh. The girl behind the desk explained to me that it would take a few weeks for my access privileges to propagate through the system and that I shouldn't take it too personally.

Berlin

After some equivocating, I ended up heading to Berlin for Memorial Day Weekend. I caught a ride there from Kaiserslautern on Saturday morning and arrived at my hostel around 5 PM. I hadn't realized it, but at some point I became much older than the majority of the Western European hostel set. If I had to guess, I'd say the median age was around 19 or 20. It wasn't like this in Eastern Europe, but I suppose that's because no one goes to Bulgaria for an epic post-high-school drinking trip (although they should, because the beaches are really nice and everything is super cheap.)

A museum that we siesta-ed in front of.

Berlin is a very cool city, though. It has a lot of the same appeal as New York, except that it's easier to get around, things are cheaper, and everyone speaks German. But, you know basically the same. There's a good culture scene, both highfalutin and underground, lots of concerts, cool monuments, walkable areas, a big central park, stores full of things I can't afford, warehouses that people have turned into lofts (with mixed results), interesting and varied nightlife, lots of international people, good food, and a lot of different neighborhoods whose names you can toss around to sound like a local.

A much-diminished Berlin Wall

On Sunday I rented bikes (only 10€!) with two new hostel friends and we spent the day cruising around to museums, seeing the city, and laying around in parks and along the river. Since one of them was Argentinian, we spent most of the time speaking Spanish. I'm awarding myself Bilingual Points for making a friend in a foreign country who I spoke to in a foreign language.

We saw the old Bauhaus workshop (the third one) and the Pergamon museum,

I was so, so excited to see this.

This is where IKEA furniture comes from.

On Friday we sort of gradually worked our way across town towards my train station. There were a bunch of really shiny buildings and a Turkish street fair. 

Turkish festival

Reflective buildings

Someone in Germany has a sense of humor! We've proved it!

Working

I've started working at the Army Public Health Corps in Landstuhl. I've spent the last three days negotiating my way through security. Things are going swimmingly.

I have yet to create any real plans for the long weekend, but I'm going to try to get to Berlin. I will keep you posted about how it goes.

A bunch of us went out for Mexican food last night. I had some tamales that were not-terrible. It was a nice surprise.

Not Dead!

I made it to Landstuhl and found my hotel! There were a lot of places I could have been derailed; my flight from LaGuardia to Philadelphia was delayed and I almost missed my connection, I realized as I was going through customs I had no idea what I should state as the purpose of my visit (I went with "civilian working on a project on a US Military base", and apparently that corresponded to one of the guard's check boxes), and I really only had a vague idea where my lodgings were. But all that worked out fine.

New York was fun; I got to go to Brooklyn twice, and went to Manhattan 0 times, mostly because of concerns about traffic. I feel like Brooklynites will look back on this trip as the moment when their borough really turned the corner and became a world-class neighborhood. The precipitating factors were probably their acquisition of my cousin Ian and a very nice art museum.

After arriving from California, I was unable to go to sleep until around 12 or 1 each morning. I can at this time confirm that, during the week, parts of New York State do indeed sleep, and in fact get up very early for school. Whether or not this sleeping pattern is reflected in the city remains to be seen. I suspect that they sleep in shifts to give the illusion of constant wakefulness.

My New York-dwelling family members are all doing pretty well. The younger ones continue to grow and mature, while the older ones have not aged a day. There are also more dogs than I remembered, but who knows whether this is just a trick of memory or there are actually three where there once were two.

The Last Trip To LA (for a while)

One of the unhappy things about leaving Arizona for school is that every time I do something, it's the Last Time (for a while). Before I left Tucson, I had a lot of The Last Time I'll See This Person (for a while), ate the Last Nico's Burrito (for a while), and took a Last Swim at the Rec (for a while, but very possibly ever). I know I could do these things in July, but I know that I'll end up deciding to do other things instead. I once tried to convince Andy that the idea that in choosing to do one thing we are un-choosing all of the other possibilities held the key to some profound insight into the nature of choice. Then he pointed out to me that there wouldn't be any need for choices if you could do everything you wanted all the time, and then I felt bad about myself and my meagre philosophical abilities. Anyway, this was the Last Trip to LA (for a while), and it was a good one.

For the most part, you can't drink on the beaches in California—unless you have the foresight to buy a 20 oz bottle of coke, drink a little of it, then pour some rum on top of it, although by the time you're old enough to buy your own rum you're probably too old to be sneaking alcohol in a soda bottle—but there's a beach in Malibu called Paradise Cove that will let you bring some drinks in. Which was good, because it was too cloudy and cold to be at the beach otherwise.

I also went to the Getty Villa, which is my new favorite place in the Universe. It's a reconstruction of a Roman villa from Herculanum (which is like Pompeii with less press) and a museum of Greek and Roman art. I know more about Greek religion than I do about almost any modern religion outside of Catholicism, and I could probably name more Roman emperors than current US Congressmen (congresspersons? persons who are in congress?) or international heads of state, so the Villa was right in my dorky, esoteric wheelhouse. 

I also ate the best vegan grilled cheese I've ever had (31st among all grilled cheeses), missed a lot of exits while driving, and hung out at a bike repair shop in Long Beach. Long Beach is like Santa Monica if they traded in all their boutique clothing stores for adequate parking and street cred. I also took the LA metro to LAX, making me one of the first people to ever use Los Angeles' light rail system. You might remember the Metro from the movie Collateral, the 2004 film where Tom Cruise plays someone his own age.