the big three-oh

I spent today walking around Istanbul, just like I’ve done for the two previous days. Tuesday I saw the site of the old Roman Hippodrome with its 3,500 year old Egyptian Obelisk, the Sultanahmet Camii or “Blue Mosque”, the museum of the mosaics of Justinian’s Palace (6th century AD), the old great bazaar and adjacent market districts, the Galata Bridge (thronged with fishers), and finally the Galata Tower before riding the tram back to my hotel.

Wednesday I walked west past the site of the ruins of the forum of Theodosius, past Istanbul University, to stop in at the Kalenderhane Mosque which used to be a Byzantine church, then walked along the Valens Aqueduct (in used for over 1000 years until the 19th century), through another smaller market district and the Fatih Mosque complex, to the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople (the first-among equals among the heads of Orthodox Christian churches worldwide) in the Church of St. George, to the church of St. Mary of the Mongols (the only Byzantine church that was never converted to a mosque), through the (formerly) Greek neighborhood of Fener, past one of the Roman cisterns which now serves as a soccer stadium, to the still standing Walls of Theodosius, which are about four and a half kilometers from my hotel. I was able to mount a tower in a partially restored section of the walls near the Edirne Gate and enjoy a view of the city in every direction, it having spilled out of its old shell in the last century and grown thirty times in size. I walked along the old walls to a 13th century Byzantine palace, where I peered in the gate. The caretaker was standing nearby and told me that it was closed, but that he would let me in “special”. I got to walk all around the ruins of the grounds and the still-standing palace and tower, which are being restored and are due to open next year. That’s about all the information I could get from the caretaker, due to my total lack of Turkish and his very limited English. He wouldn’t let me take any pictures and refused a tip as I was leaving. From there I walked down to the waterfront along the Golden Horn, the famous harbor of the city. It occurred to me a moment too late to hop on the ferry that stopped nearby. I walked back towards the center until I hopped on a bus which went something like the right direction. After the bus turned away from my direction I still had about a kilometer walk through what turned out to be a luxury shopping district, with incredible displays of clothes and shoes down a semi-pedestrianized street. I was again quite tired when I got back.

Today I walked to the Hagia Sofia. After exasperating and costly confusion about the process for joining a tour group I ended up with a ridiculous, sleazy, not-particularly knowledgeable guide. Whatever it took to get in it was worth it. I spent about three hours in that wonderful building. All the things they say about it are true, the ceiling really does fell as though it’s floating above. You can feel the emperors and sultans in their, just as awed as everyone else. From the Hagia Sofia I walked through the great bazaar again and finished up my souvenir shopping. I walked up to the Suleymaniye Camii. It’s the second largest mosque in the city and generally considered to be the most perfect. I would concur with this assessment. After briefly visiting the tomb of Suleiman the Great I was fortunate to get into the mosque shortly before it was closed for the evening to visitors, and see the final light of the sun come in through the western windows. I walked down the hill towards the water, through a neighborhood of terrifyingly degraded old wooden houses. I bought fresh squeezed pomegranate juice for 35 cents and a kebab sandwich for 60 cents. Once I reached the harbor I hopped on a ferry, not knowing where it went. It was dusk, rush-hour, there were ferries going everywhere and I saw on the upper back deck and it was lovely. They served hot tea on the ferry for 45 cents. The ferry landed on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I had some trouble finding a ferry that went back in the right direction, and ended up riding back quite a bit north on the European side then catching a bus and the tram back towards the hotel. Another long good day.

I am exceedingly fortunate to get to spend my birthday in such a special place. This is my thirtieth birthday. A decade spent wandering comes to a close at the navel of the world. I have lived in many places, I have held many jobs, visited many cities. I have had a few lovers as well. It has been a restless ten years.

That’s how I wanted it. In my youth I spent my time thinking of far away places in old parts of the world (and other planets). When I read Kerouac it was so exciting partly because it was empowering: I could travel, simply, and take pleasure and learn from the simple things, the land, the buildings, the cities, the streets and buses, the music, the booze, the bus-stations and train terminals at the wrong hour of night.

I started travelling a little more than ten years ago when I took off from my house-painting job to go visit Calli in California on the train in July, 2006. A few months later I set out across the country, making it from Seattle to Boston by way of bus, train, rides with family and hitching, then flew home on the generosity of my mother. I spent the rest of that fall working at the grocery store, working at the coffee roasterie, delivering newspapers, baking bread, reading Walden, and killing English Ivy in the woods. (I played computer games and watched the Daily Show then too.)

The next summer I went to Korea with Calli and her dad, to teach English, learn to ride a motorcycle, visit Buddhist temples, and make out on basalt cliffs at dusk while the lights of the squid fishing fleet appeared one by one on the horizon.

The next spring I went to the Dominican Republic where I learned to speak Spanish, dance, and drink rum. I played chess with Andrew Shaw Kitch in the shade by the blue Caribbean water, and drank beer and rum, and talked about rock and roll, and danced in the shelter of overlapping awnings with Dominican women on a rainy night in Rio San Juan.
I graduated graduated from college and my father financed a trip to visit Erika in Cuenca, Ecuador. We ate mangoes and avocados and walked through waterfalls and then back to town in the warm night sounds of the forest while glow worms dangled from the branches. We hunted for mushrooms and then ate them on the side of a mountain, and got lost, and then found, and rode with a woman along crazy mountain roads in the real fog as we tried to remember who we were and how to speak Spanish and how we got to South America on the way back to the city.
I joined Americorps the next summer with other city kids and we went into the Oregon woods and learned to use chainsaws and got rained on and smelled bad and cooked for each other.
After our term of service was up I travelled south and east over land with a backpack like I had four years before. I ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I stayed with my old friend Brendan and met a young woman with beautiful big brown cow eyes.
I joined the Peace Corps towards the end of that winter and I went to Paraguay for the next two and one third years. I lived with families, had a house, built a wood stove, taught kids to read, fell in love, got run out of town, had a new house, built a new woodstove, and helped start a library. I got to know lovely people, got to feel at home in that country, and then I left and crossed the big Chaco wasteland, went up over the Andes and down the coast of Chile to Santiago before I flew home.
I came back to Vashon and slept in a comfortable bed, drank coffee, walked the beach and spent time around colorful people. I went to a wedding out East and saw New York city again and upstate and was with old friends from South America. I eventually found a job worth doing and applied to graduate school and didn’t really get in but started taking classes anyway.

I signed up for a study trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, where we ate non-hallucinogenic mushrooms in a mountain village and learned about old ways.
I got into grad school. I found a strange old warehouse to live in with other strange people. I decorated my room with a tie-dye lace tablecloth, an oriental rug, the words of Whitman, old shells and bottle caps and pictures of saints and a bottle of wine with a picture of a girl on it. I got a grant to come to Europe, where I got to do work that I thought was interesting and use skills that I felt good at.

These last ten years I have worked as an after school/summer-camp teacher, a community engagement coordinator, a pedicab driver, a Unitarian Sunday school teacher, a dendro-chronology lab technician and project manager, a freelance weed-puller and hole-digger, a Peace Corps volunteer (which is twelve jobs in itself), an Americorps member, a Salvation Army bell-ringer, a house-painter, a reading tutor, a groundskeeping assistant, an English teacher, a roastmaster’s assistant, a newspaper deliverer, a grocery bagger, a projectionist and theater cashier in something like that order. I love to learn how to do a new thing and to work in a new place. I have worked, but I have not earned my keep. I have amassed massive loan debt and relied often on the stability and generosity of others, especially my parents. If the measure of adulthood is to be able to cover your costs and more, I have yet to reach it.  

It's been ten years of movement and constantly shifting directions. I’m an unpredictable element. I am unattached; an unknown entity; a potentially dangerous free radical. At worst, I lose track of my own story, and it all starts to feel like just a bunch of random events. And an adult male is always a potential danger to others. An unattached one the more so, as he has less to lose. The male energy is vital, powerful, but without a direction and a purpose that energy poses a risk to others and to its host. These next ten years I hope to build. To build means one can’t always move around, try a new thing, slip off into the night. It is probably dull much of the time. Perhaps it is not! I do not know what my prospects for family life are but I know they are better if I am stable. I have as good a chance as one can ask for in life, if I can simply finish that degree and start that career. My own idiosyncrasy and my broad but strange work experience have not made it easy for me to find jobs in the past. When I find something either it is either temporary and ends or I head of to some other adventure. However, I feel immensely capable. I am somewhat unprepared to imagine a regular, long-term, middle-class job. Probably I should not get ahead of myself! But one must set goals and one must take steps to achieve them. I want to find work that is meaningful, challenging, and remunerative. I need to establish something stable, to develop long-term relationships, to build trust. This next decade will be the story of how that goes.

Borderlands

I've been enjoying thinking about the idea of crossing over borders during this trip. Linguistic, religious, sovereign, historic, there's a lot of kinds of borders and there's a lot of overlapping commonalities. I spent a silly amount of time looking this stuff up, but here are some maps with my route overlaid on top. Enjoy!

Europe during the Cold War.
Both Austria and Yugoslavia are colored white, but Austria was much more associated with the West and Yugoslavia with the East I believe. 

Linguistic Groups - Germanic: green, Romance: pale yellow, Slavic: dark yellow

Religions - Protestant: purple, Catholic: Blue, Orthodox: red, Muslim: Green.
It's hard to see on the map but my first stop in a majority Muslim place was in Mostar, Bosnia. 

The Roman Empire. This is interesting to me because it indicates how much experience cultures might have with organized, literate and bureaucratic government institutions. However, in the Yugoslavia and Turkey different populations and cultures have more or less displaced societies existing in Roman times, so perhaps that history doesn't carry any weight.

Europe in 1700. Ottoman Empire is real big, Germany is divided.

Europe in 1900. Austria-Hungary and Germany are bigger now.

aaaand here's a spreadsheet I made of these and other aspects of the places I've been visiting.

Fourth Leg: Dalmatian Coast

This morning I’m drinking Turkish coffee in Kotor, Montenegro. It has become clear that one can either try to cover the ground that I’ve been covering, or one can get productive work done while travelling, but it is difficult to do both. The last five days I stayed in Split (Croatia), Mostar (Bosnia i Herzegovina), and Kotor (Montenegro). I also took day trips to Stari Grad on Hvar Island (Croatia) and Dubrovnik (Croatia), the latter on the way in between Mostar and Kotor. These towns share a rich and complicated history. They end up on different sides of different wars and cultures in constantly shifting combinations. This is the essential theme of my entire trip. Hopping the borders between religious, linguistic, economic, and imperial boundaries.

I’m itching to make a big chart of all those variables, but at this moment that would disturb the flow of my writing and my coffee. Perhaps I’ll attempt a loose breakdown:

Split: Catholic

Illyrian > Greek > Roman > Byzantine > Venetian > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Croatian
Mostar: Muslim

Byzantine > Bulgarian > Ottoman > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Bosnian
Dubrovnik: Catholic

Illyrian > Greek > Roman > Byzantine > Independent > Ottoman vassal > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Croatian
Kotor: Orthodox
Roman > Byzantine > Venetian > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Montenegrin

Each of these towns has a small historic center of tightly packed stone buildings with narrow streets (or passageways rather). With the exception of Mostar each of these towns is surrounded by stone walls built (most recently) in the 15th-16th centuries. The walls enclose a surprisingly small area. I don’t know the historic numbers, but the population of Dubrovnik today is only 70,000, and the city encompasses an area much larger than the old walled segment.

Split is particularly interesting from morphological standpoint because it is a city that grew out of the ruins of a single Roman palace. In the 8th century the residents of Salona, the old capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia were driven out of their city by barbarian invaders. They took refuge on the nearby islands and in the ruins of the Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace, constructed near the city around 300 AD. Over the past 1300 years the city of Split has grown up within and around the old palace, the stone and walls of which have been used and reused to construct the dense, complex core of housing, shops, squares, and fortifications. It’s now the second largest city in Croatia, and so the old palatial core is quite a small part, mostly dominated by tourists, but it seems to retain some indigenous life, and forms part of a central area that seems to attract shoppers and strollers from all over the city. The hostel I stayed in, within the footprint of the palace, was an affordable family-run operation and was a refreshing break from the huge hostels I’ve been staying in in the capital cities to the north.

I visited the ruins of the city of Salona, then on a lark took a bus up towards a rocky outcrop that looked intriguing from down below. It turned out to be the fortress of Klis, a defensive post used since before Roman times. It has been developed over the centuries into a wonderful complex of walls, gates, turrets, which winds its way towards the summit, with an incredible view of Split and the surrounding land. It was just before sunset when I got there and the guard sold me my ticket about 20 minutes after the place was supposed to be closed. I was the only one there. The guard and his friend went home but left the front door (a massive wood and iron gate :) open for me. I ran around as a giddy boy in the most perfect lego-pirate fortress I could imagine. I even climbed across a tile roof to get to the highest observation point, the main access to which had already been closed.

The next day I took the ferry to Stari Grad (“Old City” in any Slavic toungue) on Hvar Island. I learned this is an old settlement, the town officially founded by greek colonists after they had displaced the native Delmatae. Unlike Split the town has not grown much since then so it feels more connected to those times. The fields behind the town are a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site (as are some part of all of these towns) because they essentially preserve the land division and agricultural methods of the ancient Greeks intact. I didn’t know that when I climbed up the hill next to the town to enjoy my lunch of pumpkin-seed bread, smoked sausage, hard cheese, walnuts, apples and mandarins, but they did look pretty, and unspoiled by the suburban sprawl that I have spent most of my life looking at. The island was predictably delightful otherwise, if somewhat empty at this time of year, despite the pleasant weather.

Mostar is in Herzegovina, the southern region of the country called Bosnia i Herzegovina, which is internally divided into three ethnic “republics”, one each for Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. (For what it’s worth these seem to be religious identities as much as anything: roughly: Serbs are Orthodox, Croats are Catholic, and Bosniaks are Muslim. The three languages are basically the same.) This arrangement is a result of the Dayton accords, worked through by the Clinton administration. It ended the war between these three groups, but created an incredibly complicated system in its place.

Mostar is a small city that was fairly prosperous and industrialized in Yugoslavia, but which was heavily damaged during the war, mostly during the phase of fighting during 1992 and 1993 between Croats and Bosniaks. There are still many buildings with visible damage from the war, though much money and effort has gone into rebuilding, particularly in the old town. The town formed around an impressive stone bridge commissioned by Suleiman the Great, the Ottoman emperor from 1520 to 1566. The bridge spans the Neretva river which is not wide but which is deep and swift flowing. The bridge is called Stari Most (“old bridge”) which gave the town its name.

The only tour I could find late in the day was called “The Death of Yugoslavia”. On it we visited an old underground fighter-jet hangar, one of more than a hundred across the former Yugoslavia, the former town square, once surrounded by banks, and grand buildings, which became the front line in the fighting in 1993, and a large monument to Yugoslav unity, which is now overgrown and abandoned.

While walking the streets I head the noon call to prayer. It was the first time I have ever heard that in my life. It came in stereo, at slightly different intervals from minarets in different directions. I was not expecting to be so moved to hear this. I’d stepped, just barely, into a part of the world which has been an enormous abstraction my entire adult life. It’s been the ultimate exotic foreign place, and perhaps the “Orient” is not the wrong thing to call it; the focus of angst and money and lives and fear and the proximate excuse for me having to take off my belt at the airport and the mass surveillance of my country by our government and the eviction of people from airplanes because they look or sound like a “terrorist”.

Mostar is a place where you hardly have to do anything, you can practically just sit and feel the waves of human history moving over you. Centuries of lives lived in prosperity and crisis leaving thier marks. On a sunny, cool Friday morning the main street was thronged with folks sitting outside drinking coffee at the numerous cafes. It feels to have all worked out well enough, for now. Right now, the painful feeling of the breakdown of trust among Americans is all over my body. That is a part of the roll of human history. To travel is to see how it has played out in other places. It is more pleasant to feel it play back while visiting than to be in the midst of it, I think.

Third Leg: Vienna to Zagreb

It's a strange practice we have of calling places by names different from those used by the people who live in there. These names are often based on something a Roman or Greek guy decided to call a group of people a couple of thousand years ago. Other times they are just latinized or anglicized or latinized and then anglicized versions of local names. The only advantage to these names is that they are easy to say and that centuries of use have given them a hollow romance. Very often they are so widespread that we have no idea what the local name, which by all logic should be the only name, for a place or people is.

City names are usually anglicized or latinized versions of local names. Copenhagen is germanicized I think. Of course regional names are latinized too.  

Wien > Vienna | München > Munich | Praha > Prague | Købnhavn > Copenhagen

Bayern > Bavaria | Austria > Österreich

Some regional names (especially for more exotic places) are just based on some guy’s name for a people.

Čechy = Bohemia | Hrvatska = Croatia | Crna Gora = Montenegro | Shqipëri = Albania | Hayastan = Armenia |

So earlier this week I was in Munchen, Bayern and Wien, Österreich. It’s the latter location that got me going on this line of thinking. “Austria” sounds like it’s derived from the latin for south: auster. That would make sense, because it’s to the south of most of Germany. Actually it’s a latinization of Österreich, “eastern realm”, because it’s also to the east of most of Germany. This bothers me more than it should.

On Thursday the 10th I took the train from München to Wien, by way of Salzburg. Wien, or Vienna, is an elegant city. It’s got this 19th century cultural refinement that I can only think is most like Paris. I was expecting Austria to be something of a poorer cousin to Germany, however it is just as, if not more, prosperous. Wien is more expensive than Berlin, at least. While I was there I walked and rode the trams and the subway all over. I went out to see the Danube, I was downtown, saw the cathedral, many of the palaces.

On my second day I went to the Albertina art museum (in one of the old palaces) where I saw works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Miro, Kandinsky, Chagall, and many others including an excellent Pointillist exhibition. I also went by the Secession gallery but it was between shows and most of the building was closed. I did see the strange “Beethoven Fresco” by Gustav Klimt in the basement, at least. My last day in town I took the U-bahn and a bus up to Kahlenberg - the hill overlooking town. It’s sides are covered in forest and vineyards, with fresh snow on them. I enjoyed the view from the top, then walked back down, joined by many Austrians taking their Sunday exercise. I picked up my bag from the hostel and headed to the train station, hoping to get an earlier train to Graz, so I could have more daylight to look out the window.

I missed the two o’clock train to Graz, so I got the three o’clock, just an hour before I would have left anyhow. I’m glad I got that train though. The ride south from Vienna on the Semmering Railway was exquisite, the most perfect train ride scenery imaginable. The rain climbed slowly along a steep-sided valley, working up one side and then crossing over great arched stone bridges to the other. The mountainside forests were freshly dusted with snow, while broad-leaf trees mixed in with the pines show off the last of their fall colors. We passed by villages and at least one castle. Each bridge offered a great view of the valley below. It was dark by the time we reached the peak, and I couldn’t see much of the rest of the route in to Graz. Of course, I did take the opportunity to ride the tram into town, hustle around the old center with my bags, and buy one last German Pretzel. The train for Zagreb arrived after just an hour.

I spent less than 24 hours in Zagreb but had a nice experience. The tram was easy to take from the station to my hotel, even at 11pm on a Sunday night. It was full of young people on their way home from a night out. The hotel was elegant and eccentric and faded. I couldn’t help thinking of the movie the Grand Budapest Hotel. The energetic concierge (the day-shift one) showed me a silver medal the hotel had received from an organization chaired by Donald Trump. He let it be known that the other people in at breakfast with me were famous Albanian singers. They did just start singing at one point, after breakfast. They sounded good.

After so many famous European capitals, it was a relief to be in a gritty, modest city. Walking the streets in the morning I couldn’t help thinking of Asuncion. The buildings were elegant but ragged, in need of repair and new paint. Everything seemed to be brown. Even the trees, which were still golden in Austria, were all brown. Zagreb has a charming historic center on the hill, however, with with nearly as many winding streets and charming buildings as Prague, plus a wonderful chapel in a gate tunnel on the road down the hill from the national cathedral. After I found my way to the bus terminal I boarded a bus for Split at three o’clock.  

Second Leg: Prague & Munich

I took the train from Berlin to Prague on Monday the 7th. There's no direct train running at the moment, so I took a train to Dresden, had a layover there, then a bus to Utsi nad Labem on the other side of the border with the Czech Repbublic, and finally a train from there to Prague.

Prague is a breathtakingly beautiful city. It has dense, interlaced blocks of baroque and gothic and neo-baroque buildings, woven together with tram lines and cobblestone streets and passageways and bridges. It has fantastic topography, with hills and bluffs and a river that runs down the middle and is bridged in a dozen places. The hillsides (those that were forested) were dressed in autumn colors and the sun came out so it was all lit up against the November sky.

It's an old city. It's a Slavic city, along with the rest of the Czech republic, and it was on the other side of the Iron Curtain for much of the 20th century. These historic forces are always compelling as I travel. In heading to Prague I hopped over the old border between the Eastern and Western blocs for the first time in my life. I also stepped into the Slavic world for the first time.

In Germany I can pick out many written words, partly by triangulating with English and the little Danish I can read, both of which are Germanic languages. The pronunciation of German is also much easier than Danish. It's linguistic territory that I have some stake in. Passing into the Czech republic that certainly went out the window. Every sign was a bizarre hieroglyphic, inviting the more intuitive senses to one's direction.

The legacy of the years spent under communism could also be felt and seen, not least because Kiel and I went to the dusty Communism Museum just after I arrived in Prague. I'm speak to the economic and social legacy of that system, except to note two things: there is a notable difference in wealth here compared to Germany (they did not benefit from the big economic boost of the Marshall plan), and that long, austere apartment blocks are quite common. Still, based solely on the excellent tram network, the government seems to function well.

Kiel and I had a great time walking around, drinking beer, riding trams, finding strange places, talking to Australians. After a distressing night and early morning, however, Kiel headed off to the Airport and I headed to the train station on the 9th.

I rode the train to Munich (Munchen), in Germany. It was a beautiful train ride, through the hilly country of Bohemia. I love these train rides. I love land, seeing it move, flow, the colors it expresses, the overlapping natural features and working places; forest, hill, stone, farm, stream, village, transitioning from one kind of thing into another. That we're at the tail end of the beautiful autumn colors, and that the first snows are beginning to fall, does not hurt one bit.

Munich is the capital of Bavaria (Bayern) and is a proud, hearty, bustling city. I stayed with my friend Andreas who is from the Bavarian countryside and has a sister living in the city. We went out to Haupbrauhaus and Augustiner Brauhaus, a couple of classic beer and sausage and oompa band beer halls in the old city. It was a hoot. Beer is meant to be drunk out of a 1 liter mug I think.

 

The next day Andreas and I went back into town and he showed me some more of the classic spots. One place we went was Dallmayr, a store and coffee roasting company. It's sort of like a supermarket, all indoors and with a beautiful wood, brass and glass interior, except every section is behind a counter, with uniformed staff, like in a proper market. There's a fish counter and a sweets counter and a tea counter, a coffee counter, a sausage counter and a cheese counter. We also went by the outdoor market and I bought a loaf of bread, fresh butter, and cheese. The cheese was good and cheap by American standards, but the bread and butter were unbelievably delicious. To have something so simple turn out to be so good, or have become so used to something good in a simplified, industrialized form, is revelatory.

After eating this cheese and butter and break by the river Isar during a sunbreak I hopped on a train to Austria. I decided to get an earlier train to Salzburg so I would have more daylight and get closer to the Alps. I got off the train at the wrong place so I had an hour to explore a little town called Traunstein on a bluff over a stream, with steep stairs leading down the bluff from the central square through and between buildings to houses below, which were built right up to the edge of the stream. I got back on the train after the sun had set and crossed the border into Austria, bound for Vienna.

  

Election Thoughts

Along with everyone else, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about last Tuesday’s election. The first results didn’t come in until around 2:30am. Kiel and I were staying in a hostel in Prague. We went back to sleep for an hour or so, but then checked again and it was worse. After that it became clear that we were really not going to sleep anymore that night; that the unthinkable had happened.

Shock, disbelief. I compulsively read political writing online. I’m in the sphere that would probably like to describe itself as progressive, but objective, fact-based, "reasonable". I read a lot of Vox and listen to a lot of NPR politics podcast. There’s also FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, occasionally the Atlantic. There’s obviously a political bias but we like to think we’re being fair. In this sphere there was no expectation that Hillary would lose. Every poll and every forecast put her ahead. There tends to be something of an echo-chamber in this sphere, especially as each newsroom gets smaller and smaller. Most importantly, our "reasonableness" makes it nearly impossible to spot fundamental changes in the system.
The devastation I feel from this election is all the more potent for my being a long-time Hillary supporter. I defended her, championed her, tried to convince skeptics that she was a winning candidate. I loved her appreciation for policy wonkery and for the messy business of politics. I saw her as the Hermione candidate, who works harder and is smarter than the boys but usually doesn't get the credit. That she was unjustly disliked (and hated) only endeared her more to me, the contrarian I am. I still think Hillary was the best candidate of them all to be president, but she may not have been the most electable. That someone like me was enthusiastic about her was an early warning sign (ditto for I-732). We don’t know what would have happened if Bernie Sanders had been nominated. There’s a decent chance that he could have beaten Trump, getting those votes in the great lakes states that Hillary lost. We already had enough support on the coasts, it was the Midwest that we needed. This would have been a good, exciting, and very unreasonable thing.
That said, anyone should have been able to defeat Trump. Ezra Klein made this point yesterday on Vox. Trump is unfit to be president of our country. A banana should have been able beat him. So then what?
I’m inclined to think it means our social fabric has rent to the point where we simply no longer have “common values” as a country. We work too many hours and live too far apart from one another and consume completely different information from people on the other side. So they become the enemy, so every political decision becomes a zero-sum fight, so all means are justified in opposition to the enemy.

The national system is rigged, however. It is rigged in favor of rural areas. This is a flaw that is revealing itself as the above phenomenon results in people moving to places where people agree with them politically. The cities become ever “bluer” and the rural areas ever more “red”. But the rural areas occupy a far greater area than the cities, and our system overwhelmingly favors size over population. The electoral college and the senate inherently favor rural areas. Democrats received 52% of the votes in senate races and only won 41% of the races. There is no perfect way to draw house districts, but it is probably both true that the concentration of democrats in small areas tends to lead to more Republican districts and that these have been manipulated to further favor Republicans. Finally, the electoral college is also just awful in many ways, meaning that winning the popular vote and losing the election may get more common if political self-sorting continues.

So now we have a government where every branch and chamber is controlled by the same party. That party has devoted itself for the last eight years to the failure of the sitting president, no matter what the consequences for the country as a whole. That course of action and it's ultimate success is disgusting and it is the sort of thing that makes even someone as knee-jerk “reasonable” as me question the legitimacy of our form of government.

Most of Obama’s policy legacy will probably be reversed in the next few years. It is going to be quantifiably bad for many people. And that’s just the Republican policy proposals. There’s also the looming threat of fascism. I suspect we’ll have more of a Berlusconi experience of incompetence and nepotism than Mussolini fascism, but that’s not shit you want to gamble on.  

The other reason Trump’s election is so upsetting because we have so little idea what he will actually do. He is totally unpredictable. He has barely sketched out policy proposals. One wonders, is he worse than regular republicans (like Mike Pence for instance)? Mainstream Republicans are awful because they actually have principles and these tend to be explicitly harmful for vulnerable people. Trump doesn’t have any principles apart from self-aggrandizement.
I can imagine a scenario in which he would quickly tire of congressional Republicans trying to control his office. I can imagine him actually eventually looking at the challenges that land on his plate and out of exasperation coming up with solutions that Democrats favor. He could be Democrats’ greatest friend in Washington (since democrats have no power there whatsoever now) if he starts fighting congress on their doctrinaire approaches to governing in favor of a more popular approach.
Clearly, though, Trump has changed the paradigm. We’re not in the post-war political universe anymore. That system held for the better part of a century. The country had already started to leave it behind when we elected Obama - but the parties didn’t come along until now. It is exciting in a way, if you disassociate yourself with the country you love or the people who will be harmed. If we were reading a book about the history of the United States, this would be an interesting chapter. There is room to write new things; there are new systems that need to be constructed.

A call has gone out already for people to organize and march and fight. I wish I could be there for the catharsis. I also know however that creativity works best with periodic bouts of intense work and then rest. We are all exhausted after this year-and-a-half-long shit show. We need to invent new ways for our political party and systems to function. For myself, I need to disengage, rest, consume art and other things. I will rest, and then I will come back to reengage. Clearly I, and the pundits and journalists I follow, have a poor understanding of how these fights are won. I will be more humble in my predictions and my preferences, and look more intently to those who seem to understand the spirit of the moment. We live in interesting times.

First leg: North Germany

I'm in Berlin this evening. I got here yesterday, arriving by train from Copenhagen around 4:30pm. That train goes through Hamburg, crossing by ferry from the Danish island of Lolland. I already took that train on my way to Gronigen, and it takes rather a while, so I might have flown except that I'd already purchased my Denmark-Germany-Czech Rep-Austria Eurail pass. The pass isn't cheap if you're over 25, but it does theoretically simplify travelling, and it gives you access to first class seating which is nice.

130 mph across the countryside from Hamburg

I'm doing this thing where I won't spend nearly enough time in any of the places I'm going. I've got several internal conflicting timetables, and this is how it's come out, que será. I'm heading out tomorrow morning to Prague, with a stopover in Dresden (really they don't have a direct train from Berlin to Prague??), which means today was my only full day in Berlin, a city of 3.6 million (metropolitan area 6 million) with more than its share of history.

It is beyond my means to form any overall impression of they city, but I have a few strands that I could almost weave together.

I took a walking tour today around the oldest, grandest part of the city this afternoon - I saw the Cathedral, the University, the Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, the Unden de Linden, the Fernsehturm (sort of a soviet Space Needle), and other spots both grand and old. These were all in the former soviet section of the city, and are mixed in with a lot of bland Soviet architecture. We also visited the former HQ of the Nazi Luftwaffe - according to our guide the only Nazi building in use in the city. The rest were damaged in the war, and occupying governments were happy to demolish them. The monuments listed above however were mostly heavily restored following the war.

In these places we've got the pompous, powerful, romano-phile Prussian kingdom, the destruction of WWII, and the occupying soviet government all layered on. We also visited "Checkpoint Charlie" and one of the extant portions of the Berlin Wall. The way the city was divided for nearly 30 years, with west Berlin a fortified island of western freedoms and capitalism amidst the soviet union is hard for a millennial like me to wrap my mind around.

It's just a tourist gimmick now. You pay money to get your picture taken with the "soldiers".

It also brings up the importance of the United States in the life of this city. Checkpoint Charlie was one of the access points into the American controlled section of West Berlin, which was also divided into British and French sections. It was upheld by the American military and the US presidents, especially JFK, had a major role in the protection of the enclave.

A part of this four-month sojourn to northern Europe has been about getting down to the old Germanic roots of my Anglo culture and language. The cultural, social, legal, economic structures that American inherited from Europe are a mix of a lot of sources, but a big one is the Germanic kingdoms of central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire. My current trip south from Denmark through old Brandenburg, Bohemia, Bavaria, and Austria is partly about getting a mental grasp on what this complex region of overlapping ethnicities and sovereignties is like.

Implicit in this dive into deep roots and old history is a distancing from modern America. It is striking then, to arrive here and realize how much a part of this city was an American colony so recently. This place feels so different from the states - the layers of history, the density of people, and of course my general incomprehension of what anyone is saying. It is hard to imagine thousands of American soldiers, from farms and cities and black and white and brown families, rolling into town and dominating the place.

The first night I was here I went out to meet a UW MUP classmate who is participating in a UW Architecture program here this fall. We met in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, one of the hip neighborhoods not too far from my hostel, which was part of the American zone of control. I walked there and could tell it was a lively part of town - many bars, restaurants, cultural venues, and various overlapping systems of rail transit. We got vietnamese soup, which is usually the best thing on a rainy November day, and good wine very cheap, and talked about thesis and what we are gonna do about it.

I hopped on the U-Bahn to go back to the hostel around midnight. That's their subway/elevated rail line - a great classic rail system that's probably been running for a hundred years. It was packed with young people in the middle of their night out, most had beer or wine with them on the train. We got to the end of the line and everyone walked off to head across the bridge over the canal. There's a connecting bridge that leads down to an S-Bahn platform, which is the light rail system that covers most of the urban area. Hundreds of people were walking to the platform - seemed like older folks were coming down from the Frederichshain neighborhood and younger folks coming off the U-bahn from Kreuzberg merging on the bridge. There were food stands selling beautifully arranged sandwiches, croissants, pretzels, and sweets and gyros and there was a man singing and playing guitar with a small amp. He was playing "ticket to ride".

The other element, apart from the overwhelming layers of history is this incredibly vibrant nightlife and cultural scene, which has been famous for a good century now. I can't imagine the creative forces that were pushing in on folks during the Berlin Wall era - but there certainly seems to have been a lot to react to. More broadly, there is a love for going out here that is not rivaled by many cities in the world I think. It helps that it is so much cheaper to do so than in other capitals in Europe. Tragically, I've nearly gotten used to $8 beers in Copenhagen, but $3 seems entirely achievable.

I love to see how much a part of the urban life and fabric going out and socializing (and drinking!) is. The ride on the U-bahn was not a break from the party, it certainly wasn't the end of the night, it was just another stage of the party. I compare than to our vast, echoing, empty, transit tunnel stations in Seattle where you can't get a ride much after midnight, and despair. We build these cities, for what? Why not build them to have fun in?

Lastly: tonight I ate a pretzel and then a bratwurst with potatoes, gravy, sauerkraut and mustard with a pilsner for dinner. This is very good.