Things I like

Okay, I’ve been thinking about these for a while, so I think I’ll just get it all out at once in a nice, clean format. I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory.

Three things I like:
The sun: remember? The great giver of light and warmth, and taker-away of wetness and paleness? The one that’s around from July to September? Well, I figured out where it goes the rest of the year.

People: not just people in general, though I’m okay with them too, but people *not* in cars, buildings, at work, etc. People just out milling around for the sake of it. I guess I can see now why train workers don’t want to work past 50… people actually do stuff here.

Hydrogenated oil and corn syrup: or rather the lack thereof. For some reason many foods sold in the US with these ingredients (Nutella and ketchup, for instance), don’t have them when “produced” in Europe. I can’t quite figure out why this is the case since on the whole I think people in the US are more “health conscious” than most Euros. Maybe it’s just the coasts though… I always forget about the red states.


Three things I don’t like:
Paying for stuff: especially the “pay to get in, pay to get out” kind. The quintessential example? Water. It’s impossible to find either a drinking fountain or a public restroom on a ride. The result? Fill up bottles in a fountain in Monaco, where the gold-plated pipes ensure its sterility, and pee in the bushes (but not in Monaco, the whole principality (could you find a more snooty word?) is under video surveillance). Hmm, maybe I should change the title of the blog to “interesting places I’ve peed, funny places from which I’ve peed, and different things I’ve peed into.”

Coffee: and I don’t mean coffee in general, just coffee here. Mostly it’s because so many euros have proudly told me about how great coffee is here compared to the US based on their experience with the coffee they drank at a Motel 6 just outside Tulsa. But on the whole the coffee I’ve had is quite stale, acidic, not very strong, and overpriced. I mean, four bucks for a cup of coffee at home is about three bucks more than I’d like to pay, but at least you get a liter of it and it’s free trade organic in a recycled cup and served by an unemployed PhD. And there’s free wifi.

Scooters: I was on the fence about this one because of the “at least they aren’t cars” argument, but I finally oscillated back the other way because “they could be bikes.” But apparently scooters are actually cool here, or at least their owners believe them to be. The fashion seems to be creating café racers by installing oversized scooter-racing tires (?), anodized motocross bars (yes, anodizing is also still cool), and stripping much of the “body work.” Not quite the same as Steve McQueen on a Norton. But hey, tell that to the kid wearing gold Pumas, jeans with a dozen zippers on each leg, a pink sweater with a popped-collar, and about 6” too much mullet coming out the back of his motocross helmet. I guess it’s the Euro answer to fixies… unmuffled two stroke engines vs. hipsters practicing skid-stops on capital hill? Toss up.


Three things I’m ambivalent about (aka, an insult sandwich):
Nutella: it’s so tasty, turns anything it touches into a delightful snack, and you don’t even have to refrigerate it. But it’s basically just margarine with hot chocolate mix stirred in. And come on, hazelnut spread? It’s the sixth ingredient and by your own admission makes up just 2% of the deliciousness.

Garbage: everywhere I’ve been there are dozens of little golf cart sized street sweepers rallying about cleaning, and the result is a nicely primped look to all public spaces. But now that I’ve started to look around I realized that in general people are much more careless here with littering. I mean, US cities on the whole have more visible trash, but that’s because there’s not really a system to pick stuff up, it’s just self-policing for the most part. For instance, there’s not even a communal “trash day” in the apartment, people just take out bags when they’re full, leave them on the sidewalk, and within 12hrs the trash fairy took them away. I guess it creates jobs, but it also creates sloppiness.

Rallying: street sweepers aren’t the only ones, pretty much everyone here rallies about. Sometimes it’s nice because you don’t have to stop for red lights or the stogy little red man staring deep into your soul and forbidding you to cross the empty street, but other times it’s not so nice because you almost got run over by some 14 year old punk on a scooter. Germany and Nice seem to be on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but both are better than Seattle where you can’t get away with anything on a bike but still almost get run over by some vitamin-D deficient a-hole driver in an Escalade juggling a 24oz. Americano and an iPhone.