Tag: Europe

Schengen -or- Finnish Grammar for Dummies, and by That, I Mean Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment


Sometimes life tells you where you want to go, but not before you can silence yourself enough to hear the answers.

The Schengen Area has become my next goal in terms of a passport. I have redirected in terms of options, not final decisions. I have until the end of November to make a final decision, and I have many before me. The Netherlands has a refugee program for trans people, and it is cheap to start a business. Finland is the cheapest option in terms of going to culinary school for free. I believe that Schengen will be more useful later in life if the British apologize.

I am not stuck on any one thing. I am trying to map everything out. I work backwards. The goal is a Finnish passport because it’s so much like Oregon. Any job becomes available to me once I speak Finnish fluently, and I’m on my way for it being day 23. I am finally understanding how verbs work and a few of the ways singular becomes plural. Finnish is so difficult that it takes up my entire brain, and that’s what I like about it. I cannot function on the constant barrage with what’s going on in my country. Laws are changing too fast and if I leave the country, I may not be able to get back in. Trans people are being harassed at the airport and their passports taken. At that point, I shut down:

  • a dog is a koira, dogs are koirat. Form follows function. A cat is a kissa, cats are kissat.
  • Romance language grammar sometimes applies. Minä olet is “I am.” Sinä olet is “you are.” Me olemme is “we are.” Ne ovat is “they are.” You can leave out the pronoun if it’s conjugated in the verb.
  • There is no pronoun…. and I’m crying when I say this…. to indicate the gender of the person speaking.

Hän on is both “he and she is.” The Finnish language is nonbinary.

You cannot legislate hearts and minds on trans issues, so there’s discrimination everywhere. But what Finns will die to protect is human rights. Having a Schengen visa opens me up to being able to live more places, essentially being able to live in Finland whether I have actual Finnish citizenship or not. I do not hate America for what it has done. I am a political science student. I will never not be a political science student interested in both State and CIA, because they do the same job. One is just public, one is just private. I am not as interested in DIA and the military, but not because I don’t like them. I just prefer information to violence because that’s where I’m the most capable.

One of the things that I talked to with Bryn was being secure that I was not offering to be approachable to foreign intelligence agencies because I have any information they’d like to have, unless what kind of cookies my boyfriend used to eat at meetings is burning inside them. He shared nothing, and we’re not together anymore (sadly- we just weren’t going in the right direction together- no harm, no foul).

I said I was approachable on both web sites as a message in a bottle to intelligence agencies that need me because they’re dying to recruit people and trans talent isn’t needed here.

Fuck you, Mr. President.

I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and more of a woman than you’ll ever get. Choke on it, motherfucker.

But I’m not bitter.

If you’re wondering why I’d curse out the president, it’s because he said he’d grab me by the pussy on a hot mic that was intentional. It wasn’t even locker room talk…. not that it’s excusable. It’s just comprehendable. None of this makes any sense and I am struggling to understand why I should go on in this country. I do not mean in terms of struggling with suicidal ideation. I mean begging for a way out.

Applying to countries that have jobs in the Schengen region is my first choice. Somewhere like Starbucks would have no problem training me in the US and possibly paying for my flight to work in The Netherlands or wherever they operate in the region where the store works in English.

A restaurant would be better in Finland because it’s an easier transition. Terms are all in French. I could work in Viet Nam, I could work in Afghanistan, I could work in Tanzania, I could work in The Phillipines. Doesn’t matter. Cooking is French. Escoffier brought it to Europe and the rest of the West, Ho Chi Minh brought it to Asia and the East.

The problem is that I am really not capable of working in a restaurant, but the lighter load of culinary school fits. It’s an easy A compared to Finnish uni. I’m interested in getting my sword, but uni is cheap and I need a way to work through it. Culinary school is free and I might not. It depends on what happens between now and the end of my lease. I can’t default on it because even though it wouldn’t follow me, it would follow my dad. That’s what happens when you have money and not income.

My mother died. I have some time to rebuild now. I’m using it. I’m being up front because people ask me all the time how I’m living. I have to live rough so my expenses are covered for a number of years, but I’m okay.

I have a possibility of collaborating with others, and we’ll discuss that if and when it happens. Just know that I’m riding the Rainbow Railroad for all it’s worth because trans talent and money is not needed here.

There is a great big correlation between leaving the country and leaving the church. The United Methodists told me for years I was a sinner while taking my money and I didn’t have a choice.

Instead of staying and participating in a system that I have to fight against until I’m black and blue, I want to use it to move into a different system where there is no homelessness and consistent medical care. Prevention is worth an ounce of cure. If you can go to the doctor every time you sneeze wrong, there probably won’t be million dollar surgeries in your future. But you can’t do that in some states when you’re poor. Luckily, mine is not one of them. But my home state is, so that’s not an option unless I just think, “I’ve lost my fucking mind, why not lose it completely?”

As I was telling Phillipa, one of my new writers, “I could buy a house in NE Texas and settle down permanently, but then I’d have to live there.” Of course there would be perks, like immediate access to my family. However, I would lose everything in terms of the social network. The Deep South is not my place anymore, as if it ever was. Maryland’s politics are more in line with Albany than Richmond. Virginia continues to struggle deeply with St. Bob- what a Northern Virginian told me a Southern Virginian calls Robert E. Lee, thus the disconnect in Virginia culture. Maryland is objectively safer for minorities, and home of the greatest intelligence officer who ever lived.

I am not being specific here, because Harriet Tubman, Jonna and Tony Mendez all lived here. Jonna lives in Virginia now, where she’s on the board at the Spy Musem. I’ve met her several times and she’s delightful. We’re not close, but I admire her greatly.

“In True Face” is essential reading if you want to know what happened to Tony after “Argo,” and “The Moscow Rules” is the last book they wrote together. The reason I pick “In True Face” and “Argo” as your introduction to real life intelligence is that you have to be able to pick out Jonna and Tony’s voices separately and you cannot honestly do that until after Tony dies in Jonna’s timeline. I told her that.

Congratulations on owning yourself.

Her lip trembled because she knew what I meant. It was the second time I’d made her cry, and I’ve written about the first time so much that I don’t need to tell it again. I have felt those emotions and they don’t dissipate with each writing. It’s an experience I’ll remember forever because it changed the direction in which I wanted to go.

Jonna decided to go to a wedding in Europe, and that was all it took. She was a citizen of the world who had the fortunate and unfortunate experience of loving two intelligence officers. The only reason I say it is unfortunate is that she had to learn how to hang quickly, and as you read it’s a different kind of love. It’s harder to watch someone else going through a thing than it is to go through a thing. It’s easier when you’re both going through a thing at once.

It’s not a trope that spies date each other. It’s reality because they never leave the office because they can’t.

They’re as trapped as line cooks during a shift, and the reality is that cooks are often messengers for intelligence and waitresses are the silent witnesses that listen to everything. No one cares if a female waitress is listening, so waitresses are often spies in a uniform and people don’t notice.

Social masking is everything. Intelligence is nothing more than a small stage, which you will learn by rote as I did if you get into the rabbit hole of Jonna and Tony’s voices. I don’t enjoy the idea of doing these things. I enjoy the idea of hearing these things. All I do is talk to people on the Internet. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. If they’re not extremists with an agenda, I’m all in.

I just realized that I should rephrase in terms of being willing to work for allies. Fuck Mossad and IDF. They’re more powerful than Palestine and have held it over their heads. Palestine gets the jump on them one time and it’s excuse for resettlement and make no mistake it could turn into genocide quickly if Netanyahu all of the sudden decides he wants their resettlement land, too. There’s no guarantee the Americans would not support him in this now.

American Jews and Evangelicals are responsible for a lot of this and I am not being antisemitic. I am being political. The Christians and the Jews have decided that the Muslims don’t have a book that’s valid, only they do. Therefore, money is being piped into Israel at a rate that is unsustainable to ever make, much less keep, Palestine sovereign.

But Mormonism and Scientology check out? Please.

The reason Americans are so racist is that you don’t hear about modern Muslims in the news. You hear about terrorists. My answer is a big fat “I Will Walk With You,” the Twitter campaign that took off and made me proud to be an ally…. and “Muslims Report Stuff” completes me.

But the thing is, I’ve been ecumenical since I was born, hungry for information about all religions and not just mine. I have even watched documentaries on Mormonism and not just from escapees. I wanted to understand doctrine because if you’re going to ridicule something, you have to know it cold. I would believe that the Mormon episode of South Park took an enormous amount of research or an all call to the jack Mormons everyone knew in the writer’s room.

I do not ridicule religions that make you better. I ridicule cults because they do not focus on self improvement. They focus on glorification. Religion is not responsible nor helpful unless it begins from the perspective of “every problem begins with me.” I have no qualms about accepting the consequences of my actions as long as I’m allowed to have them. I do not want to be forced into reading minds again, because that is the essence of learning to manage high functioning autism. It is balancing the expectations in other people’s minds versus a very real dysfunction in managing energy.

It is never “dumber” vs. “smarter” with high functioning autism. It is how well you can fit into society. It is how well you can manage your own energy in the face of needing and wanting more space. When Aaron and I move in together, I want a house with a lot of space that neither one of us have to manage. It is not bougie, it is reality. We need help and hiring it out is the one problem that money solves with autism.

In other countries, this neurological difference is recognized (even here, in some states) and you have a social worker to manage these things for you- like a nurse to administer medication and home help.

I’m not old. I’m 47.

This doesn’t make autism less difficult, and I need people to recognize that I am not bitching about problems, but working on solutions. I am tired of having to fight for things like:

  • a service dog to counterbalance my weight
  • an assistant or social worker to manage my bills and house
  • the right people to live with me and help take care of me as I take care of them.

I am tired of fighting for a life of interdependence when Europeans already do things that way. In Finland, you have no choice. In that climate, you bond through those hard activities. You help your neighbor first, because Finns have to recognize that you’re willing to put in the work to maintain a friendship before they give it. That doesn’t mean buying them a present. That means getting in the snow and helping them dig. Philippa, Aaron, Bryn, and I are all interested in spending time there, as is my friend Aaron B. As in, Bryn and AB might not want to move, but they’re not frightened by snow and would love a Finnish vacation once in a while.

I told everyone in my Finnish discussion group (we’re all learners, so it’s mostly English… I am not this advanced) that I was learning Finnish because of the culture surrounding language, not because I cannot get by in English just fine. I’m also a writer, so understanding the rules of grammar is essential. One day I’d like to be able to publish in that language, and I’m on a bit of a deadline.

I’m not going to make it, and that’s okay.

My route to the YKI is long and winding, but it’s definitely what gets me up in the morning. I have a ton of Finnish friends, but none of them have anything to do with this.

It’s that over time, I realized that living in Skyrim was indeed possible.

Suomessa siitä on helppo päästää irti, koska se on jo jäätynyt

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What were your parents doing at your age?
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I have monetized WordPress for all my writers, and we’re discussing how to profit-share. My two ideas are to pay out their money as it comes in, or if they’ll let me have their money while we’re still making pennies, then I will pay them in technology. A lot of my writers are as poor as me, so Aaron, Bryn, and I all need Macs. I now worship at the church of Steve for two reasons:

  • I speak Finnish now. Finnish is cool.
    • I’m on about Day 22, and I have busted my ass to the tune of being at the top of the sapphire league and the February challenge is already done. I am also not ready to live out my life in the United States at this point and deserve a Finnish passport. I came out as nonbinary and then found out it falls under the trans umbrella. I cannot change my gender on my passport from F to X and that is not acceptable to me. I am freaking out with PTSD because of it, thus learning the hardest language in the world. Macs are the only desktops that have long press on keys so that tama becomes tuo. It’s not this, it’s that. “This” is tamä, “that” is tuo. The title is “Letting Go in Finland is Easy, Because It’s Already Frozen.” I used Google translate because I don’t want to have to type all those special characters and it’s day 22.
  • Helvetica

Here’s the FAQ:

How are you going to deal with all that snow and ice?

Like everyone else. You plan. I have synthetic Reebok long johns and UltraTech from Uniqlo as well. If I need it, I will upgrade to Merino wool. I just want to get to Finland first before I bite the bullet. Clothes for that climate aren’t cheap, and you pay it. If necessary, I will get animal furs for my shell, but I have a great midweight from Uniqlo as well. My shell depends on how cold it is. In Finland, I might be able to find a good synthetic, but if not, I have no qualms about buying animal skins for that climate. There’s a time and place for it. I don’t take any crap. I am doing synthetics first, therefore I am giving my best effort to be kind to animals. Please do not think I am cruel to animals when it is 30 below.

I am sure that Aleksi, Dave, Cat, Carola, Phillipa, and Cyril will have lots of tips. I just bought a subscription to Aleksi because if you pay money you can talk to him. I want to do the same for Dave, because I don’t think Cyril has enough fans yet to be monetized. He deserves it, though. That’s because his videos are sometimes informational about Vami (it’s a vocational school, which is where I’m interested in hotel and restaurant management. It’s in Vaasa, which is why I’m also on day one of Swedish. I haven’t stuck with it as of yet, because when you choose a language, you stick with it. If I had started Swedish first, I would have stuck with it because the language support is better on Duolingo (it has an AI that can judge your pronunciation. Finnish don’t.). That being said, Swedish is useless for anything but the YKI-testi. Something like 93% speak Finnish, and Swedish being an official language is a throwback because Finland used to belong to the Kingdom of Sweden. Also, it’s cold. But I work on the Internet. Realistically, how much time am I going to spend in the snow vs. watching it?

How are you going to deal with the dark?

I don’t know, but Portland prepared me pretty well. The climate is not all that different from Portland in terms of the sky. It’s dark in the middle of the day in Portland, too. Rain, etc. Katya (my closest Finnish friend) says that I will not understand how dramatically dark it gets until I get there. I’m planning a trip soon to scout out schools in Tampere, Helsinki, and Vaasa. Since culinary school will be a lot of walking, again, I don’t care. You are fabulously warm when you create the proper microclimate, and when it gets REALLY cold, they have the same American hand warmers that we do. I put one in my jacket pocket to absorb into my coat, and I’d be fine in very cold weather. The Finns don’t have to teach you how to get used to the cold. They have to teach you how to layer so that inside your clothes, it’s in the 70s.

They can make you warm enough to faint, as I often do if I’m wearing my winter gear inside.

Why do you want to move across the world? Why Finland and not Mexico since you already speak a little Spanish and it’s a romance language, which is like a hundred times easier?

You have to learn Finnish in a lake so no one can see you cry. I stole that line, but I feel attacked. Yet there is something about Finland that drives me crazy, and that’s the wanderlust to be outside in the summer again without having to revisit the trauma of Portland. I also don’t like it when it’s 110 degrees in the summer. The thing I liked about Portland was that it was tolerable inside the house most days. In Portland, only new construction has air conditioning and you live in one room in the summer- because generally you can only afford one window box if you insist on being a cook. You don’t become a cook if you can do anything else. The neurotypical workflow of an office drives me batshit insane, so I want to learn Finnish cuisine as I’m building LMG. Hopefully, by the time I graduate I’ll be able to support myself on American money…. which I need a lot of in order to qualify for a visa.

Paolo the Accountant says I don’t have enough money to go to Europe and even that doesn’t daunt me. This is because America never gave me a choice. I am begging for money from the whole world and it makes me ashamed because I hate asking for help when it’s a gift I cannot possibly pay back.

But what I need you to know is that I’m The Doctor, and I’m at my last regeneration. I need you to let me have them infinitely.

What were my parents doing at my age?

Living the American dream that I’ll never have due to the United States’ dedication to the idea that I’m not a person. I’m even approachable by foreign intelligence agencies because even though I’ve dated an American intelligence officer, I don’t know anything. I just mean that it would be fun to work for the Finns in intelligence, like a translator or in the mailroom. Being fluent in Finnish doesn’t come all at once, but I’m working as hard as I can. It will take about four years to be fluent, and all of my Facebook groups in Finland will back me up on that. One of the huge problems with Finnish is that I cannot really practice until I get there. The way people speak Finnish and the way they write it is often very different.

I said “kippis” to Katya one day, meaning “have a good day, cheers.” She said that’s for shots. Of course it is.

Katya reached out to me a propos of nothing. My love of Finland is encapsulated in her because we are not romantic partners. She’s kind of my grandma, kind of my mom, kind of Supergrover, kind of Bryn. It would make me happy for us to be neighbors, because older people are lonely…. in Baltimore and in Finland.

I actually am involved with someone casually, but we are planning a future together. He is not opposed to living anywhere in Finland because he’s in Minneapolis currently. We need a vacation in Helsinki for him to warm up this time of year…. He’s also given me fantastic advice on caring for my outer shell (wool sweater and waterproof pants). That the fibers in wool can be tightened and softened with… wait for it… hair conditioner. Of course it can. It’s always something simple and hair tracks.

Aaron is quite a bit younger than me, but it’s not a case of that kind of attraction. He’s adorable, but that’s not what drew me to him. He’s a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) preacher’s kid and an atheist who believes in the same kind of social justice that I do. I’m the Rowan Williams to his Christopher Hitchens. I know Hitch is dead, but Aaron’s smarter. He doesn’t have to work very hard to impress me. He’s been to seminary (didn’t graduate) and I haven’t. Therefore, he was able to tell me what books to read to learn about Jesus, because he was indeed a real person.

At that point, if the virgin birth and the resurrection never happened, does that negate what he taught?

It does to Evangelicals, because they don’t study what he taught, anyway.

Luckily, my dad is not one of them, but at my age he transitioned from being a United Methodist minister to a medical assistant to my stepmother; so did I, in a sense. I am ordained now in the Church of the Latter Day Dude. I was just the go-to for everything as a kid, my dad’s Girl Friday.

As his American dream came together, mine fell apart. I folded at Matthew Shepard’s death, September 11th, January 6th, and now we’ve been taken over by a South African dictator.

If you’re not on board by now….

Bye Felicia.

Bye.

There and Back Again, Day Two: Bingenheimer Ried / Alkmaar

~ Carlos/Giancarla Ross ~ Leave a comment

(September 12, 2023: Echzell, Hesse, Germany to Alkmaar, Noord-Holland, Netherlands)

I packed up my things long before dawn. By four-thirty, I was on the S-Bahn into Frankfurt, and by six, I was on a different S-Bahn train headed north into the Hessian countryside. Dawn began to break as I waited for yet another transfer at Friedberg, with enough time to grab a quick breakfast at the station Bäckerei. By seven-thirty, I’d made my destination, a single platform station in butt-ass-nowhere, called Reichelsheim (Wetterau), a tidy collection of brick houses, and a few slightly newer modern-ish box homes clustered around a REWE supermarket, a smaller Netto Marken-Discount, and damn near nothing else.

It’s the kind of place that would have a Chicken Express, an A&W/Dairy Queen, and fifteen churches if it were in Texas, but this definitely wasn’t Texas. No live oaks whatsoever, instead, the forested Taunus Mountains remained visible on the far side of Friedberg well to the west, and the landscape immediately leaving town opens up into green, gently rolling farmland.

A footpath northeastbound follows the S-Bahn track toward a depression in the north, a wetland complex called Bingenheimer Ried. Before even leaving town, Graylag Geese (Graugans), svelte and free-flying unlike the tubby domestic monstrosities we see in America, honked overhead, joined by other waterfowl – including, to my amusement, introduced Canada Geese (Kanadagans) and Egyptian Geese (Nilgans) which are familiar from my travels in America.

A low, artificial rise adjacent to a tool shed gave me my first good look over the wetlands, and also revealed a decent-sized observation tower to the north. While Enkheimer Ried had been nice and productive, there was no birding-specific infrastructure there, whereas there were clearly purpose-built observation decks at Bingenheimer Ried. Maybe if I was lucky, there’d be other birders present, hopefully not too many, though.

Rare birds can draw in surprising crowds: in America, the first chaseable Spotted Rail drew in dozens, if not hundreds of birders to Choke Canyon Park, tucked away in the whole-lotta-nothing between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. A whole peninsula lined with telescopes and long-lens cameras, all looking for one ungainly, if striking waterbird that had strayed there from Central America. In Britain and Japan, I’ve seen social media photos with huge groups all straining to photograph a single stray from America.

Here, there was a continuing record of a shorebird that would have made more sense to see along the Caspian Sea than a Hessian wetland: a Black-winged Pratincole, with a real doozy of a name in German: Schwarzflügelbrachschwalbe … YIKES! Pratincoles are much less well known than sandpipers or plovers since they don’t range in America at all, but they’re streamlined open-country birds (“shorebirds” being a generalized term referring to a group of related birds rather than an absolute label of behavior or habitat) which feed aerially on insects.

Given that my itinerary wasn’t intended to take me remotely close to the Caspian, I had to give this one a try.

I stroll over to the wooden observation tower, and there are a few people already there but it’s not crowded at all. The telescopes are out, which is good because the main wetland is a good hundred yards out.

Even with eight-power binoculars, it’s easy to see why this place is a birder’s dream. White Stork (helpfully, Weißstorch) forage in the shallows. Wheeling flocks of black-and-white Northern Lapwings (Kiebitz) distract us from time to time with their chatter (ah, yes, kibitzing). Any number of marsh birds and songbirds and crows and the occasional raptor. Still, not yet The Bird.

At some point, they asked where I parked my car. “Oh, I took the train from Frankfurt.” It takes about an hour before they are like, oh, you’re not an immigrant living in Frankfurt who’s so acclimated you’re a birder. I switch to English. “Nope, just landed here from Texas yesterday.” I switched briefly to my first ex-family’s Wichita Falls drawl for comedic effect, and, well, I’m Filipino, so hearing the Hank Hill Voice coming out of my mouth is nearly as much vocal dissonance as, well, me speaking German. Mirthful laughter and I’m a stranger no more.

Turns out at least one of them had been to Texas to see Whooping Cranes, as I have in years past! Birders will be birders: we are a tribe that transcends national origin and common language, and we chase the same legends and listen to the same grapevine. I’d gotten my info from a German living in Belgium before double-checking on eBird. (Note: we’ll get to Dirk in a couple days. He’s awesome.)

Fifty-odd species later (and I’d like to note that this would be a really great list for a single location in Texas, which is right there with California in “you are a spoiled dadgum birder” terms), and we’re still scanning, and it’s getting close to nine and I really need to start considering heading back to the train, rarity or not, if I’m going to make it to my next hostel by nightfall.

Cause this is a side trip, folks. This wasn’t even part of The Itinerary, this was a target of opportunity. And right about when I thought my window was closing, There It Was.

Black wings. Forked tail. Black necklace. Too streamlined for a plover, too chunky to be a tern, sitting pretty on a sandbar. The Schwarzflügelbrachschwalbe (and, nobody was yelling this word like the KRANKENWAGEN meme because not even the Germans were going to consider that) was ours, with high-fives and smiles all around. No, I would not have to save this bird for some far-future pie-in-the-sky trip along the Silk Road. Mind you, I do want to visit the Silk Road, but that’s realistically not happening on a social services coordinator budget.

Well, not like this was realistic on non-profit salary either, and yet here I was, in the middle of a bunch of German birders, celebrating a life bird that makes literally zero sense for an Austinite to expect before retirement age.

Too soon, I had to take my leave, because I had a full birding day booked for the very next day … nearly three hundred miles northwest. And I wasn’t flying.

You see, today wasn’t originally intended to be a birding day, this was a transit day and I’d added two more steps to my whirlwind.

From Reichenheim (Wetterau), S-Bahn local train to Friedberg. Switch onto the S-Bahn back to Frankfurt (Main) central station. And then it would be time to switch to a train towards Düsseldorf, but for a transfer coming in Cologne (Köln).

The original plan had been to take slower trains along the Rhine Valley and check out the Lorelei, that fabled hill upon the Rhine below which the mermaids would lure travelers to some romantically dreadful fate, but there was absolutely no time for that now that I’d burned that on getting a much larger net haul of bird species off the beaten path. Nope, it was time to switch to an ICE train …

And by eleven, that very ICE train was now on the tracks between the Frankfurt main station and airport stops, doing absolutely nothing for half an hour. Finally, an appropriately snarky voice came over the PA, first in German, then in English, both with the same tired, passive-aggressive vocal affect. The other passengers started chuckling.

“Welcome to the ICE train to Düsseldorf. We will be forty-five minutes late to Köln, and we will not be stopping in Düsseldorf. Thank you for riding Deutsche Bahn.”

German. Efficiency. The conductor’s irritation was palpable. Evidently, my rides on the local S-Bahn trains, five in a row all on time without incident, were an utter anomaly, and this was closer to the expectation. No matter, because it makes little sense to worry about what is out of my control, and when in doubt, you pivot!

It wasn’t long before we got rolling, and not much longer beyond that we were screaming through the foothills of the Taunus at 150mph. Now we’re cooking. Forests and farms and the occasional town out the windows, my lifer Red Kite (Rotmilan) seen soaring high overhead (birding from high-speed trains being a skill I learned was indeed feasible on multiple trips along the even faster Tokaido and San’yo Shinkansen lines).

Before too long, the train slowed and farmland gave way to urbanity again, and the spire of Cologne Cathedral loomed across the river. There was my transfer, half an hour before my next ICE train, enough time to check out the cathedral and grab a currywurst,

Just then, a pretty young lady started speaking to me in English. I was caught off guard, so I instinctively replied in English – and immediately realized my mistake. She started in on her sob story about how she was from Afghanistan and needed money and I immediately just walked off because I needed a restroom, I needed some currywurst, and I absolutely did not have time for panhandlers and pickpockets and hell no, not gonna be a mark today.

This may sound callous, but let’s be real: solo travelers abroad are targets, especially Americans, because, whether or not you think you have money (and by American standards, I don’t), you still look like you have money. Even being a paycheck-to-paycheck American means you are a one-percenter by most standards.

Fortunately, I know exactly where to go. Polizei. Duh.

I wasn’t going to trouble myself by turning her in, obviously, because, for all I knew, she was really in need, but she wasn’t going to press the matter in front of the cops, and if she had any accomplices, they would be wise to disappear right the hell then.

More to the point, I didn’t have the damn time, because my bladder was going to bust. Nice coincidence, there’s the bathroom, right next to the Polizei, time to get a euro coin (blargh), and oh hey, currywurst at Le Crobag, let’s effing go.

I was so hypervigilant getting to that Amsterdam ICE train that I failed to get decent shots of the cathedral and I didn’t even remember to tuck into my currywurst until my train was nearly halfway to the Dutch border, sailing through Monchengladbach. The sandwich was still pristine. European breads are wizardry.

The countryside gets progressively flatter as you transition from Germany to the Netherlands, hammering home why people call Benelux “the Low Countries”. It can’t be overstated: the flatness of the Netherlands makes Texas look positively Himalayan. What the Netherlands lacks in topography, though, it more than makes up for in both rural charisma and, weirdly enough, urban squalor.

The ICE train announcement as you reach Utrecht is particularly dire. “Please be aware of pickpockets at all times, there is high pickpocket activity in Utrecht and Amsterdam.” Really, that would have been friendly to mention before, I dunno, COLOGNE? Eindhoven seemed clean and modern enough, but Amsterdam-Zentraal, our next transfer, was …

… yeah, we weren’t going to actually be staying in Amsterdam on this trip, because we still had more train travel to go.

Fortunately for my purposes, the warm cloudy day had become a blustery, rainy afternoon, and the transfer to the local Dutch train was rather uneventful except that I had managed to catch the commuter train with all the students on board going home for the evening.

Now. I can get by in German, and I’m a native speaker of American English. Logically, the Netherlands being geographically and linguistically between these two countries, I should be fine with Dutch, right And you would be absolutely wrong because Dutch is as incomprehensible to me as Quenya or Simlish. You’d conversely maybe think I’d find it awkward and strange, but actually, no, Dutch is a complete and utter delight to listen to.

If there was one word to describe it?

Lekker. The Dutch language is totally lekker.

I’m not being sarcastic: this was literally the word I heard the most on that train ride toward Den Helder.

Also: these folks hold on to their terminal Rs like they’re life preservers in the North Sea, for some reason the Amsterdam dialect sounds almost exactly like a Texas drawl, and I’ll be damned if “valley girl affect” isn’t the goddamn same in Dutch as it is in English.

(In completely unrelated news, if any of you knows or is a polyamorous Dutch girl and happens to be even remotely interested in dating a slightly over-the-hill but adventurous and affectionate non-binary Filipino-American …)

It was stormy by the time I got to Alkmaar, but still early enough (mid-afternoon) that I had time to explore a bit after checking into the hostel.

Alkmaar is sort of a mini-Amsterdam, a canal city with houseboats, but without the urban blight and overcrowding. Instead: a quaint square with the largest cheese market in all of the Netherlands. It looks like a church spire, but I promise you, that is a shrine to cheese. This should be terrifying to me, since I’m lactose intolerant, except that not once in Europe was this ever a problem. A mystery for the ages. (And thankfully not a reenacted movie scene across the table from Kevin Kline!) Across the canal, there was a friendly dude hawking stoofvlees, an irresistible (and actually Flemish) concoction of rich beef stew over fried potatoes, something like an Old World cousin of poutine.

(I still have dreams about all this food a year later.)

The storms had receded into herringbone clouds, and the sun peeked through again as I enjoyed dinner in Alkmaar. Black-headed Gulls (kokmeeuw) wheeled overhead waiting for pedestrians to drop tasty morsels; a wild-coiffured Great Crested Grebe (grote kuiffuut) bobbed in the water looking like the bird equivalent of a System of a Down roadie.

Tomorrow would be a whole day of birding, and all I had to do was check in …

And I returned to the hostel to find a rather snotty young Australian woman in yoga pants at the desk screaming. Evidently she’d self-extended her stay without telling anyone and so my stuff was now strewn outside the room, and her stuff was all over the fucking place and she had evidently thrown a completely shitfit which the flustered hostel manager was trying desperately to manage. After she calmed down, presumably unwadded her pantaloons, and vacated, the manager got me my own room for being so polite and patient and for helping him calm down. (I’m ex-Disney. I know this shit happens, and I know how hard it is to stay professional when it does.)

And look, people have bad days, even when they’re supposed to be having the time of their lives. It’s not a national thing, a cultural thing, or a gendered thing. I’ve had remarkably bad days, in public, during travel, with others around to hold the receipts. So, I’m not going to blame her either. I hope her yoga got her to a better headspace that day.

As for the receptionist, I noticed he was also serving as a barista. A real Dutch coffee, please. (Every country does better coffee than America, I swear.) Over that much-better-coffee-than-Starbucks, I take the opportunity to ask the receptionist-slash-barista what his real opinions about Americans are, and he levels with me that, nowadays, the “ugly Americans” don’t leave their country, and it’s actually the Aussies and Kiwis out of the English-speakers who cause trouble (this earned an eyebrow, but I was frankly thinking this was recency bias), but not even a fraction of the trouble of Mainlander Chinese who don’t queue up, never learn local languages, leave trash everywhere …

Y’all, I’m fully a quarter Fujianese by DNA — that fraction of my ancestors lived in the kind of circular fortress-towns you’d half-expect to see in a wuxia film or a Mulan remake.

But also, from Kyoto to San Antonio, I can kinda personally vouch, because the Venn diagram of “coming from a culture that considers itself the center of the world” plus “nouveau riche with no fucking manners” is going to suck no matter what ethnicity or nationality that Venn diagram comes from, and Mainland China is precisely where that junction of recently prosperous, deeply self-centered people with no common sense is on the ascendant right now.

Dude was also keenly observant on the other point: the stereotypical Ugly Americans would never leave their homes nowadays because they’re too busy believing what they’re told, that everywhere else is a shithole. Or, in the words of a particularly toxic influence long since yeeted from my life: “Why would you ever leave America when everything you could ever want is already here?” (Yeah, double middle-fingers to that person. Not one bit sorry.)

More world for me to enjoy, anyhow.

I gave myself time afterward to really enjoy a quiet evening in Alkmaar, because tomorrow would be a very busy, all-day birding trip to the North Sea island of Texel, and this was perfect — I certainly didn’t feel overwhelmed like I would have in Amsterdam. I walked past a Hawaii Restaurant whose menu was zero percent Hawaii, but those burgers would’ve been great if I wasn’t literally from where burgers are like The Most Basic Restaurant Food. So I ended up with spareribs (helpfully labeled “spareribs“, with a choice of “traditioneel” or “spicy“) at a place called De Waag (because it’s the Netherlands and their double vowels deserve at least half a dozen appearances in this blog entry), and then got myself a pretty good night’s sleep in anticipation of another early morning.

All in all, a very unexpected and high-productive side-trip, a damn-near u-turn, and my second new country in as many days. Right on.

There and Back Again, Day Zero: Gateway Gardens

~ Carlos/Giancarla Ross ~ Leave a comment

(September 11, 2023: Frankfurt am Main)

For years we talked about going to Europe together, but life always got in the way. We would talk about places we would visit, the friends we’d drop in to say hi to, the food we would try — but nothing would ever come to fruition. At least we had two trips to Japan together — where I realize in retrospect we weren’t good travel partners because I was too pushy and overeager, and she wanted very regimented and curated experiences., and even in our travels we found ourselves wandering apart more than we would be together. But for Europe? We didn’t have the money, and then when we didn’t have the time, and then eventually, we no longer had each other.

I was going to do this for myself, then. Why not? This was going to be my way to prove to myself I could move on, I could get by, I could be a stranger in a strange land and find myself on the other side of the planet in some weird quixotic ideal of reverse-colonialist fervor, a random Filipino-American bouncing across the European countryside, chasing rare bird alerts, hopping couches and stopping at hostels, taking my forty-four-year-old recently divorced ass across the continent in search of Dulcinea, and maybe a windmill or two to tilt.

But of course, I had to get there in the first place. See that date up there?

Yeah, folks, we’d all, of course, been holding off on everything for two long years thanks to COVID, and that meant I’d scraped up a nest egg of savings and PTO days from my social services work by assiduously masking, not spending my stray funds on avocado toast and Twitch streams or my Steam deck or whatever the hell the media tells us “elder millennials” are supposedly spending money on, and I was still completely in the weeds and trapped in Austin. Not everyone who lives in Austin realizes you can get to Europe nonstop using one of three airlines (four back in 2023), with three destinations available: Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt. I knew I wanted the continent. I wanted quick access to the European rail network, and I also wanted to be dumped in a country where my default languages (English, Spanish, and Japanese) weren’t going to be the default.

And then a dear old friend got wind of my plans and said he had miles to burn and he would be happy to spend those miles on me.

The very first lesson of this trip, which must be addressed and acknowledged before I even set foot out the door to take the first step to Europe is that at no point in time did I do this “on my own“. Without the coworkers at my nonprofit who covered for me while I was out for three weeks, the housemates who gave me a place to stay without paying exorbitant market rent, and then many, many friends and family who encouraged me to go and do this at all and gave me so much of the time, space, and resources with which to do it — without all of them, none of this happens.

And then it’s just hurdle after hurdle and even with the ticket in hand and my rail pass booked, it still looked like this trip was doomed. My passport had expired, so I apply months out. I get my passport, but it’s a close call, just two or three weeks before the flight date. The Friday before I leave, I manage to not only get myself rear-ended on my rental e-bike (barely avoiding injury), but I lose my wallet along Town Lake on a different rental e-bike that afternoon. Somehow, Austin PD manages to contact me and I’m able to get my wallet back on Saturday, though not until most of my cards had already been cancelled. So I would have to do this trip with cash on hand and continuously shift money from my main bank account to my backup (which I had been using for DoorDash) to make anything work. Friends offer to float me small loans to get out there.

I get out to the airport. I have my backpack full of clothes and medications and travel toiletries and my BIPAP bag. I’ve got an eSim card set up. This is happening. By chance, there is a small unit temporarily based out of Austin that morning visiting from Saguenay, Quebec — a couple of sleek jets scream into the foggy Texas sky to go mock-dogfight with our air force trainees. They’re AlphaJets — a French / German collaboration.

I close my eyes, and I’m on a Lufthansa 787-9, cruising across the Atlantic. I can’t plug in my BIPAP, so I watch movies and TV shows as you do when the in-flight wifi peters out as it inevitably seems to do if you’re in economy.

I close my eyes again. We land. There are … air stairs. And a bus? What the…

Frankfurt Airport is, charitably speaking, not what I would consider an ideal welcome to Europe. Rather, it is the nightmarish chaos of lines seemingly in triplicate, full of passengers from all over the world who are panicked because half of them have to catch a flight in another terminal, at least a few of them are extra nervous because every other damn American still grouses when they have to travel on The Anniversary of That Day, and none of this is helpful when you are confronted with a byzantine array of corridors, many of which somehow manage to still not be marked in English.

Throw everything you’ve been told about “German efficiency” out the window, ’cause this ain’t any of it. I manage to find my way to the right line and get my passport stamped and also manage to get my eSim card working. At last. I can access my Eurail Pass and get out of transit hell, and after I drop off my backpack and most of my gear, it’s still mid-afternoon and I am next to delirious from sleep deprivation and jet lag, and badly in need of my daily meditation and centering.

I walk out the door of my hostel, and down a concrete path to see a small, manicured park. Gateway Gardens. Chattering away in a massive oak tree, are tiny songbirds. Eurasian Blue Tits. Great Tits. A Short-toed Tree-Creeper.

All right. There we freaking go.

Look, I am gregarious and I can talk your head off about damn near anything, but please do not mistake this for being extraverted. I love talking to individuals, but people, especially in herds, exhaust me.

No. I recharge with birds. I’m part of that tribe.

If figure, all right, let’s keep going. I have my wallet, I have my camera and binoculars, might as well jaunt over to the best game in town.

Just like that, all the fog of chaos parts, and I have my path laid out before me like a beacon.

I was going to be fine. I was there. I had, for now, traded H-E-B and Randall’s for REWE and LIDL, taquerias for donerias, kolaches for the treats at the Bäckerei.

The day had just begun, and I was as refreshed as if I’d had a full night’s rest. It was time to explore.

So Much Trying

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s already 30 December at 1045, and I have so much to do before I leave for Paris on 3 January. I think the first step is finding clothes that I would never wear so that I can wash all the ones I would. It’s a bigger deal than it seems with so many housemates. I can’t just get everything together and put it in the wash. I have to find a slot. Surely there’s at least one between now and then. The trouble is that I doubt I can fit all my clothes into one cycle. I would rather drop my shirts at the dry cleaner, but with the holidays, I can’t be sure they would actually get done in time. So, the obvious answer is ironing with heavy starch and hoping that my suitcase doesn’t ruin the effect. Most American hotels have irons in the room. Not sure about Europe. Here’s hoping.

With the infinite care the baggage handlers take with our suitcases (insert eyeroll here- I have worked at PDX), I believe I will just take a couple of outfits in one carry-on. The rest of my laundry can go in my closet, provided I can reach it.

The problem with my stunning combination of mental health issues leads me to two conclusions. The first is that my severely less than neurotypical brain gets bursts of brilliance but does not handle the mundane or the minutiae very well. The second is that ADHD people work in piles (I am not hyperactive, but the DSM does not differentiate anymore). I can find anything within a few minutes, but no one else can… unless I put down my wallet, glasses, or phone. I think it is the difference between short-term memory and long. I can find things a lot easier that have been there for a month rather than a few seconds, made horribly worse by monocular vision. If you are not familiar, monocular vision means that my eyes don’t track together, so I have two distinct fields of vision. I can put something down on my dresser or desk, and if my field of vision changes, what I just put down disappears. I have literally lost my glasses when they were right in front of me. However, I have never lost my phone while I was using it…. so I got that goin’ for me.

Because of this, I put my passport with all my other important papers, and have not moved it since. I know for sure that if I did, I would be racing around on the morning of the 3rd, panicked to the point of tears and snot rolling down my face. I have at least learned that much, which is kind of a big deal.

What is also a big deal is knowing that I have readers in France, and though I will not meet them, I will see one of the places from which they read. My stats don’t get as granular as city, but I have had hits from almost every country in the world. I think there are 208, and I have stats from 205.

Once, and only once, my friends said “prove it.”

I got out my phone, opened the WordPress app, and they started quizzing me:

“Micronesia.”
“Check.”
“Lichtenstein.”
“Check.”
“UAE.”
“Check.”
“Nepal.”
“Check.”
“Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia.”
“Check, check, check, and check.”

Then they got bored.

Checkmate.

The majority of my readers are in the United States, but I tend to use as much international English as I can, because the next two countries catching up are the UK and Australia. I spell like an American, but tend to use international time and date formats.

I try not to think about spam bots, because certainly there are some from Russia and China. But I have too many hits from those countries by now to think that all of them are. In fact, some of those international hits may come from friends who don’t use a VPN. I have one, but the only thing I would use it for in France is Netflix. You can only stream in the country with your credit card.

This is relatively new. I used to VPN into the UK and Australian versions of Netflix until they caught up with the game. This is because different TV shows and movies are licensed in different areas of the world.

What has changed is that Netflix has realized how much Americans enjoy UK and Australian television, and a lot more shows are available in the United States than were previously. For those not in the know, Doctor Who has moved to Amazon Prime.

Speaking of Amazon Prime, I just got a watch that syncs with my Android phone for $20.00 (it will also connect to an iPhone, but not all the features work). I also had some AMZ credit that brought the price down a little. It has slots for both a micro SD card and a SIM, which means that I can store music and photos, as well as make calls without attaching it to my phone via Bluetooth. I find that bit unnecessary, though, because my phone will stream media through Bluetooth as well. I just need to get some Bluetooth headphones, because otherwise, the media and calls play through a tiny little speaker on my wrist, which is fine when I’m sitting in my bedroom. Not so great when I’m on the go.

I do want a micro SD card, though, because the tiny little camera makes me feel like a spy… and I promise, that is the closest to espionage I will ever get. It’s not like I’m going to run across foreign state secrets, but at least I look the part.

Speaking of which, a few years ago my dad and I went to see Jason Bourne, and a day later we were in a tourist trap gift shop near the White House. I found the coolest CIA baseball cap that has the big logo on the front and the tiny symbol on the back, which means it looks awesome no matter which way I wear it.

I have nearly fallen on the floor laughing several times when people look at me wide-eyed and ask if I work there. I always say that if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be ADVERTISING IT ALL OVER TOWN (huge eyeroll). Sometimes the stupid, it burns.

A couple of times, people waiting for the Metro have gone out of their way to avoid me, which I find equally hilarious. As an introvert, I don’t want to talk to strangers anyway. It’s as efficient as wearing a T-shirt that says “Jesus Loves You” and carrying a Bible.

I suppose that my baseball cap means more to me now than it ever has, because I feel like it says “I support the men and women of intel over our dumpster fire of a president.” Gina Haspel practically has to make a coloring book for him, and he still doesn’t get it.

Same goes for State, although I can’t find a cool baseball cap for that…. not for lack of trying.

And on that note, now I need to try doing my laundry. Wish me luck or send help. Either is fine with me.