Burnout

So, Nuremburg was both awesome and sucky. Let me try to explain that.

I had a great time there. There was weinerschnitzel and wurst and copious beer, so I actually could eat the food of the country I was in and enjoy it, in a way that I haven't been able to in The Netherlands. So, there were several very satisfying meals to be had while I was in-country. I met cool people at the hostel, and we went out drinking together and promised to stay in touch via the internet. I only got robbed a little bit. The weather was generally tolerable, and I could get around okay. I mean, it was a pretty cool trip. Here follows some pictures.





I mentioned in my previous post that I wasn't in Nuremburg for fun, my purposes there were scholarly. I guess I need to elaborate on that. Nuremburg was, during the reign of the Nazis, their rally site. This was a non-trivial thing. As part of the fascistic ethos of subsuming the many into one, they had fucking gargantuan rallies. We're talking an obscene number of people, all shipped in for a week each year for dancing and drinking and parades and music and etc. They would usually also announce new policies that they wanted adopted here - like the racial purity laws. New means of oppression were handed out like party favors. Pursuant to this, several megalomaniacally large structures were built - the parade grounds, the zeppelin fields, the Congress Hall (intended eventually to hold fifty thousand people for indoor functions.)

After 1945, this location is where the Nuremburg Trials were held. That's where a number of the high officials in the Nazi regime, as well as some influential civilians allied to it, were put on trial. A lot of them ended up being hanged. The building in the last two pictures above is the Congress Hall I mentioned. It was co-opted as the location of the trials. It is now a museum.

That's why I had to go to Nuremburg.

Now, I've been very reticent to talk about legal issues so far on this blog, and but I do promise I will eventually. When I do, the Nuremburg trials will be a centerpiece of the discussion. However, it is a topic about which I am passionate, and I'm just not ready to discuss it yet. A number of my most closely held ideals are put into conflict with each other by the confluence of circumstances in those cases - and they're very illustrative of problems we still face today. Or, perhaps, that we are still refusing to face today.

In any case, I'll tell a story and then move on.

The museum I spent most of this trip at is called the Documentation Center (in English. It's all one huge word with Zs in it in German.) It covers the rise of the NS Party, the use of the rally site at Nuremburg, touches on the camps, and goes through to the trial. It's a short but relatively thorough examination of the Nazi period with particular concentrations on those matters relevant to the site itself. One of those matters is Architecture.

Hitler had a favorite architect, named Speer. Speer was very, very good at building National Socialist buildings. The thing you have to understand is that from an emotional standpoint, the Nazis were subsuming the individual into the nation. This is a process of religious rather than political thought. Seriously. Nazism was a spiritual movement as much as an ideological one. Hitler was the fucking messiah. That's what a lot of the "Hitler is Awesome" propaganda was about. Similarly, the function of Nazi architecture was not that of efficiency or whatever goal you'd have with government buildings - these were temples to the ideological movement and the spiritual unity of the German people. Taken in this light, the style of architecture, with its big dominant blocky shapes, pillars, arches, high ceilings, and braziers, it all makes sense.

Anyway. Speer needed a whole shit-ton of rock for this job. Fortunately, he was given direct access to work camps. That is, he had a finger in the pie of the "annihilation through work" program, as he had his own labor force quarrying granite with which to face all these buildings Hitler wanted him to make. This is, incidentally, why he was on trial at Nuremburg himself: because he was directly responsible for making sure the appropriate number of people were worked to death, as a sort of "kill two birds with one stone" benefit to all the construction.

Anyway, there's an exhibit about this in the Documentation Center itself. I had not been aware of this information beforehand. So, in the midst of thinking critically about the legal theories used in the trials, I suddenly realized that a statistically-minded historian could put together a fairly accurate mathematical estimate of just how many people had been worked to death making the Documentation Center itself. So, yeah, I was standing inside a giant murder weapon.

It was not a great feeling. I'm getting over it, but, I'm now a little more apprehensive about this weekend. Tomorrow, I start my much-vaunted journey into the wonders of Eastern Europe, land of cheap tailoring, vodka, cute girls, and general weird shit. I'm going to Krakow in Poland for the weekend, and I'm going to try and buy maybe a couple suits and a briefcase, etc, see some of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites...and that also means Auschwitz.

Nuremburg

I made it here alright. Some few changes to my plans were a necessity. While my own purposes in coming here are of course purely scholarly, there also turns out to be some big music festival in town. If you take a moment to reflect on that, you´ll realize that it makes the lodging situation somewhat less fluid. In short, I´m staying in a Hostel, very nice, clean, in a room with eleven other people, in bunk beds. On the plus side, I´m very much under-budget.

More Later.

Miscellanea, Methodology

Okay. I know it's been a while. I've been slightly distracted. So, this post is going to be sort of a random conglomeration of all I've been doing over the past week and a half or so. I'm also going to explain how I make this blog, in order to give you all more of a picture of what it is I do. Okay, I carry my backpack around all the time. I basically don't leave the dorm without it. I'll go into this in more detail at a later time, but for now that's what you need to know. I generally have my camera in the backpack. Whenever I do something significant or interesting or see anything cool, I take pictures of it. I have a whole directory of photos on my PC. Whenever I sit down to make a blog post, I make a new folder in that directory, and upload all the new photos to there. They're automatically deleted from my camera when I do this.

The way I make the post itself is by going through that directory. All the photos I'll have taken since the last update are in chronological order. They kick-start my memory. I only upload the ones that I think are interesting, but sometimes even the ones I don't upload spark something worth writing about. This creates a feedback loop with my activity. If I'm doing or seeing something I want to remember to write about later, I snap a photo of it. Even if it's not a good picture, it functions to remind me to post later.

For example, this beer:
See, that's to remind me of the Final I had last Thursday. I need to write a more extensive post about my classes sometime [which will probably include a disclaimer that it's not especially worth reading for most people], but for now, what you need to know is that I get six credit-hours for being over here. Two classes, three weeks long, three credit-hours apiece. I finished the first class, which was about comparative legal systems. That was taught by Professor Alaka from Washburn, and Professor Soeharno from here. Currently, I'm being taught Comparative Constitutional Government & Human Rights Enforcement Professor Merkel from Washburn, and (mostly) Professor Essen from here. Our classes run from Monday-Thursday, four hours a day. So, last Thursday we had a final. It was solid essay, as law school finals tend to be. Afterward, we all retired to Hofman's, the pub that's like fifty feet from our classroom. The above is the giant Grolsch beer that I drank in order to assuage my jangled nerves.

The beers are badass over here. They all come in their own glasses, for one thing. The brand of beer sells glasses to the bars, which are all different shapes and sizes. They won't serve you beer in a generic glass. The great big Grolsch pictured above is very popular with my colleagues, so you must order it quickly - we've run them out of glasses a couple times, and then you have to order a different beer, or perhaps only a smaller size of Grolsch. My thumbs-up sign there is to both indicate approval toward the quality of the beer, and to give you a reference for the size of the glass.


After the beer, and some Falafel (man, I need to talk about the Falafel stand, too), I went to go see The Dark Knight. It's easy to watch foreign films over here, because The Netherlands is small and so they can't make all their own movies. Also, they divide the movies into grown-up movies and children's movies. Grown-up movies are subtitled, so I can watch American films in the theatre without learning Dutch. Children's movies are dubbed, because little kids can't read that fast. So, I can watch The Dark Knight and Hancock in the theatre, but Wall*E would be incomprehensible. Incidentally, go see Wall*E if you haven't. It's so cute it hurts. Also see The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger was every bit as good as they say he was. I hope there's an extended-edition DVD, or a director's cut, or something. The above photo, if you haven't puzzled it out, is the ratings system over here. You'll note that instead of giving movies a single rating along a continuum of "badness," they split up potentially objectionable content into categories. You should be able to puzzle out the meanings of those little icons yourself. I approve of this, because I disagree with a lot of the US rating system. For one thing, I think that depiction of healthy sexual relationships are far less damaging to children than teaching them to solve their problems with violence. Why shootings are more acceptable than boobs, I will never understand.

Dutch food blows. This is why I essentially never eat it. All the little walkup places are various brands of ethnic food anyway. However, the grocery stores, in some sort of misplaced national pride, insist on carrying TV dinners that I guess are classic home cooking for the Dutch folk. This is a serious mistake, as you can see above.

That's some kind of a salisbury-steak-like meatball thing. It's accompanied by probably 3/4 of a pound of mashed potatoes, which are turned green by adding a LOT of spinach to them. This probably does benefit their nutritional profile, but it doesn't add a lot of flavor. They don't have salt/pepper/butter in them like you'd be used to here, so they could have used some extra flavor. I had that for dinner Friday night. Fortunately, I was chemically enhanced at the time, so I didn't care too much.


That's a bunch of sheep. There's a big veterinary program at the University here, so that's why there's so much livestock around. They put them out in the pasture right next to my dorm the other night, so I was awakened around Six AM by a bunch of sheep happily bleating at the rising sun. I was less enthused about it than they were.

Incidentally, I'm sure a lot of you have occasionally compared the adorable livestock seen in children's cartoons or represented in stuffed animals, and thought the real thing was less cute. Well, the sheep and cows actually are really, uhh, happy-looking over here. Like, they're plumper and more animated or something. I was actually kind of freaked out about it for a while, because they seriously look like something you'd see in a stuffed animal shop, instead of the usual Midwestern reality of farm animals. Turns out there's a reason for that. The weather here is really mild, so there's plenty of grass on the ground for them to be out grazing for like ten months of the year. Even during the two-month off season, their diet is only supplemented, they can still graze. So, I guess they're better fed and pastured. That's why they're not as dirty and they don't ever have the bony aspect you'll see if you drive past a cow field in Missouri.

Seriously.


The Netherlands is like the world's leading exporter of Flowers. So, having flowers is a sort of national holiday. I pass at least one regular flower-shop every day, there's another at the mall, and every Market Day there's a huge open-air flower market right near the building where my class is. A bunch of merchants selling various kinds of flowers (and related items like honeysuckle, vases, shrubbery, etc.) all congregate behind the Janskerkhof (some kind of church) and set up their stands. I don't have a lot of room for that stuff in my dorm, but apparently having a vase of fresh flowers is a standard part of any Dutch home.


Anyway, last Sunday I went to Amsterdam. The trip was, to put it lightly, kind of a fucking Disaster. My friend Karen (who I've known over the Internet for like a decade) picked me up a the Train Station and off we went. I didn't have a lot of cash on me, so I went straight to the ATM once we arrived. The ATM ate my debit card. Without any sort of provocation, even. It had some kind of internal error. The local bank completely refused to help me out. Liz attempted to wire me money, bless her heart. However, when I got to the Western Union place, they wanted my Passport, rather than any other form of ID. Since I wasn't crossing a national border, I hadn't wanted to risk carrying it around, and so of course it was back here in Utrecht. Fuck. So, I ended up not doing much in Amsterdam, because I was broke. Also, completely infurated. But, Karen was okay with fronting me some funds until we got back to Utrecht and I could pay her back. Once we got here, she refused to let me reimburse her - I think she imagined my situation was a lot worse than it actually has turned out to be.
This is a shot of the house-boats that line the canal. Due to the space shortage of a few decades ago, this became a very popular way of living. Many of them have permanent power and water hookups, and could only theoretically move. Much like trailer homes in the US.

Okay. These Northern European types are crazy into design. There are cool buildings everywhere. Two of the buildings on my campus have won Nobel Prizes in architecture. I should really shoot more photos of "awesome buildings," but I sort of suspect most people don't care that much.





This is a (bad) picture of some cows I took from the window in the train. I'll try to get more of a close-up of some soon. I seriously want to back up my assertion that the livestock is happier-looking here. Also, I suspect Liz will appreciate that, because she's into cute animals or something.


Totally Tangential Note: I tried to get another tattoo right before I left, but ended up not being able to get an appointment at the tattoo parlor in time. I could have got it the day before I left, but I didn't want to fly with my whole chest sore. My plan was to get a Sacred Heart, right over my heart. For those of you not into the whole inking thing, that is going to be immensely painful, due to how close to the surface the breastbone is. And so, that will be my next tattoo when I return home. However, I think I just ran into the one I want to get right after that:
I'll probably have to get the artist to modify it a little for color, contrast, backdrop, etc...but I can't even tell you how much I am in love with that image.

Really Long Post

Preface:
This past Thursday, we went to The Hague. This should have been amazing, but our selection of activities was poor, and so it was lame. Poor organization. Also, that had to be the one day I forgot my camera. Shameful. So, no pictures of The Hague. However, I have Fridays off, and I decided to make up for it by getting up and taking the train to Maastricht, reputedly the most beautiful city in The Netherlands. I got there and found it enchanting. Between that and the fact that I could not get into the cave tour I wanted, I decided to stay another day. I did not have my laptop to update anything, but I DID have my camera. So, having taken two days worth of photos, I'm going to present a photographic account of the trip. I've picked just the best ones, and they are in chronological order. I highly recommend clicking on these photos to view the larger versions.


So, on Day 1, I landed in Maastricht in the afternoon. Kind of cloudy, but not raining. I immediately found that the bus system in Maastricht was less complete and more confusing than the one in Utrecht, so I just bought a street map and set off walking. The city actually isn't as big as it looks on the map, it's actually usually only a few kilometers to anywhere you want to go. So, I managed to get around on foot about as swiftly as I could have driven anywhere when I was living in KC.

The above are my first views off the bridge. I walked east from the station, and crossed one of the great big walkways that are scattered up and down the river, which I think is the Maas. So, fairly impressive view from the start. I kept moving at a pretty good clip, because I still hadn't deciphered my map completely, and I wanted to get to the cave tour.
This is a church I ran into while I was lost.
Some other ancient constructions I ran into whilst finding my way. Yeah, this stuff is EVERYWHERE in Maastricht. Even more so than Utrecht, you don't have to go anywhere to find stones piled upon another to make something that is actually older than my whole country. That stuff is everywhere, you just stumble over it. I passed some guided tours, but was still hustling to the caves, so I didn't try to sneak in on one.
Found my way again roughly here, where I recognized a street name. Also, people feeding diverse waterfowl.
That thing there is Fort Saint Peter (Sint Pieter). This was a big part of the impetus for my journey, as there are cavern complexes all underneath the whole area. Around 220 kilometers of them, at minimum. They date back to Roman times, and were both defensive tunnels and actually a sort of quarry. Unfortunately, I discovered two things: The tour in English departs from another site (seriously, 220 km of tunnels, there are several entrances), and I was too late for it. So, off I went back into town.


Still more or less lost at this point. I was looking for a restaurant that my guidebook recommended, called Ginger. Healthy asian food, primarily.

Being lost was pretty much worth it, though.


Figured out roughly where I was when I crashed into the Market Square. Bought a waffle from a street vendor. There is amazing waffle-technology here in The Netherlands, and I've bought some delicious things from streetside waffle-vendors.



I ran into all this stuff on the way to Ginger, the asian noodle place, which it turns out is right next to the University building. The food actually was fantastic (pretty much the best vegetarian noodle dish I've ever had in my life), although I doubt the place actually belongs in "Europe on a Shoestring." I otherwise recommend Lonely Planet's guide highly, but in this case they dropped the ball. I'm not going to go into how much I paid for dinner (it was worth it, I haven't really splurged since I got here,) but I will admit I paid the equivalent of 9 US Dollars for a bowl of Miso Soup to start with. Those of you who go to Japanese restaurants should know that Miso is cheap comfort food - three or four dollars here in the states would be kinda high.

As a side-note, restaurants here won't just bring you a glass of water - if you order water, you get bottled water, so they can charge you for it. In order to defray this expense, I have a big screw-top water bottle on the side of my backpack, which I don't leave home without. I obviously can't whip it out while I'm at the table, but I've found it relatively convenient to refill in bathroom sinks during my daily walkabouts, and this saves me a pretty serious amount of cash.Here's a shot of the side of the university complex, with a statue.


Stumbled back into the park from earlier in the day. Huzzah!


So, I loved the city, and I was disappointed I'd missed the cave tour. I consulted my guidebook, and looked for places to stay overnight. What did I find? The Botel.

This is a relatively inexpensive bed and breakfast that is precisely what it appears to be. Two boats attached together and permanently moored, with water and power and whatnot. The innermost one is a bar, the outer one has rooms below decks. They were so small I actually gave up trying to get a picture of them. However, I didnt' really mind, because I just needed a place to read for a while, and recover myself for the next day. it was clean, even if the bathroom was kinda weird (it was a metal closet with a toilet and a showerhead. There was not really any distinction between standing to urinate, and standing in the shower. I suppose I could have showered whilst emptying my bowels, where I so inclined.)

The only problem is that I hadn't planned to stay overnight. So, I wasn't supplied for such a stopover. This is Europe, so there are no 24-hour wal-mart type installations. Everyplace where I could have bought, e.g., deodorant, was closed by six or so, when I figured out I was going to do this. So, I had to get up the next morning, and run to the HEMA when it opened at nine. Then, swiftly divine which of the many dutch-labelled products were the ones I needed, get back, shower, and clear out of my room in time for breakfast and checking out. I made it just fine. However, I ended up with a green tea exfoliating body scrub. This is actually fine with me (luxurious, if the label is to be believed), but my head is shaved, so I generally just use whatever soap I have instead of shampoo. This resulted in me picking sand out of my scalp for the entire rest of the day. Meh.
But, I had a lovely breakfast, which strengthened me for the march back out of town, pictured above. They even served a boiled egg in one of those little egg cups, still in the shell, which I had to sort of reverse-engineer how to eat. I...probably didn't do it right, but at the end there was shell in the cup and no egg, so I'm going to call that sufficient for this barbaric Colonial. One of my professors was kind enough the other day to show me how to hold a knife and fork and use it properly, which I believe I am catching on to. It's sort of awkward at first, but I know I'm eating more slowly, so there are probably benefits other than just "not looking really rude."

Anyway, as shown above, I got back out of town, and then set off on a cross-country trek of maybe a mile or so to get to the correct site.



Found it! I had a really excellent tour guide. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to take pictures of a cave with a typical pocket camera. I'm hoping that against the black background, these show up okay. I had to exclude most of them as hopelessly obscured. The problem is that a flash just isn't going to illuminate a thirty-fourty foot high ceiling.

Essentially what happened here is that they mined out the stone, and just kept going. The scale is already cyclopean - and there's apparently another one in Belgium where the ceilings are about sixty meters high, they got in so deep. That's nearly two hundred feet. I don't know if I'll be able to make it there, but if I do we can pretty much give up on getting pictures.

There are effectively endless galleries of this. It's beautiful, in an austere way, but you do NOT want to get separated from the group. They also used to grow mushrooms down here, and sometimes make weird artwork.
When the US and Canada liberated Maastricht from the Nazis, there wasn't actually much of a fight. This place was kind of an afterthought, and I'm given to understand that there were a few sputters and then a surrender. However, the natives nonetheless all took shelter down here at that time. There was plenty of room, I guess. They constructed a church down there, for the times when they had to live here for a while. I couldn't get a good photo of the altar, but there were large stations of the cross done in charcoal, which won't dissolve when water seeps through the rock.


There was a girl who was born down there during the ten days, and she was baptized in that church. As a cute postscript, she twenty years later insisted on being married at the same altar.

Okay, that was day two. At this point, my feet where killing me. I nonetheless managed to dredge myself back to the train station and get home, where I have since been nursing a bumper crop of blisters. I suppose Nature will provide me with the necessary callouses very soon. In the meantime, I actually found myself missing Trixie while on the journey, something I thought would be impossible.