Transience

I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of child-like wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are 5 years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
-Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There

It’s been a whirlwind, jam-packed, crazy past 11 or so days. I’m currently in Amsterdam, but in an hour and a half I’ll be getting on a train which will take me up to Denmark. It’s a night train, so I’m getting in tomorrow morning. This should be an adventure. I hope I’ll sleep… although considering how tired I am I don’t see how it would be possible for me not to sleep.

I got to Amsterdam on Wednesday, following a very tiring day of travel from Brugge (Bruges)in Belgium – I stopped for 5 hours in Antwerp and for 2 hours in Rotterdam and walked all over both of those places. I was in Brugge for 2 full days, and before that I was in Paris, where I started & spent 2 full days and another half day.

I finished Bill Bryson’s book Neither Here Nor There on the train to Brugge, and I really like the quote above, because it so completely describes what it’s like to travel, espcecially when you don’t speak the language. You really don’t realize how hard it is to cross a street until you have to do it in another country! And it feels a little like as soon as I get the hang of a place I’m on my way again. But that keeps life exciting!

I’ve done too many things to talk about, especially because I only have 12 minutes remaining on my internet time here. Probably the most amazing was visiting the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, around 10 pm. It’s right across from the Notre-Dame Cathedral, and it’s the coolest bookstore ever. I sat and read a book for a while downstairs, and then I went upstairs for a little to see if I could use the typewriter (they have an old typewriter that you can try using). Upstairs is really neat – the only books for sale are the kids books, and the rest is their “library.” They have a whole bunch of benches and chairs and things, and you can sit and read for as long as you want. There’s also a piano in one of the rooms. Anyway, I got upstairs and realized that the music that I had been hearing – really beautiful piano playing – was coming from the piano in the next room. A British student was playing really incredibly Chopin. So I grabbed the nearest interesting-looking book I saw off a stack of books (which turned out to be a poetry book by a guy from Cork, which was quite neat), and sat and listened for a while. After the Chopin, he and another British student started talking to each other about music, and they ended up playing some duets/singing. It was just a really cool and amazing place to be – sitting upstairs in a historic bookshop in Paris, listening to incredible music.

Other incredible moments have included: seeing the Eiffel Tower light show out of the window of the Louvre, meeting & hanging out with a friend from the internet in Paris, watching a Beatles cover band play in the medieval main square of Brugge, standing on the Muur (a famous hill) and watching the Tour of Flanders, wandering all over Amsterdam and trying not to get hit by a bicycle, some of the people I’ve met here in Amsterdam… there are so many more and I’m definitely forgetting many, many things, but I now have less than 2 minutes of internet time left. Time to head out.

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