I've been there before and so have you, no doubt. You're at a show, perhaps even up front a few feet from the band, when two people next to you decide to hold a conversation. They're completely oblivious to the music and, despite the fact that they're shouting to be heard, are behaving as if they're passing time in a cafe. Their motivations are unknown and their reasoning is oblique. Where are they there? Why did they pay for a ticket and all the annoying fees that go along with it just to ignore the performance? Do they really, really need to bitch about their boss rightthatbloodyminute?

Either I'm a magnet for these people or they're far more prevalent than I've previously surmised. These chatterboxes have tarnished plenty of nights at the Crystal Ballroom and the Roseland. I've stopped going to acoustic shows entirely. There's just no point.

Is this just a Portland phenomenon? Is there something about the city's venues that work like the Blarney Stone?

My conclusion: nope, nope and more nope.

This strange behavior is also a common occurrence over here in the Netherlands. The crowd at a September Josh Ritter show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam was well behaved but a group of Dutch guys were so obnoxious during an acoustic portion of Delorean's set in Haarlem earlier this month that the lead singer cut it short. Tift Merritt, a singer/songwriter who opened for Iron and Wine last Tuesday in Amsterdam, became visibly riled by talkers during her set. She complained to Samuel Beam backstage afterwards. During Iron and Wine's performance, he demanded that the crowd apologize to her. "All together now," Beam disdainfully announced. "SORRY, TIFT!" The audience begrudgingly went along with this.

That's not to say that crap behavior at shows is limited to talkers. There's also people who spill beer all over the place and those who film everything on their iPhone with the screen as bright as possible. Oh, and there's my personal favorite: sweat-soaked, overly-affectionate stoned couples who dance salaciously while obliviously bumping into everyone around them.

Which of these categories do I fall into? I'll give you three guesses.

Here's a video from Iron and Wine's stint. Please, enjoy!

Labels: Europe, music

Portland band Dolorean is currently on their first European tour. I managed to catch their set at a club in Haarlem last Thursday.

No, that's not a typo. The name of the city is, indeed, "Haarlem," or so I'm told.

It was a solid set and the crowd, with the exception of two Dutch guys who would not shut-up during the acoustic numbers, was supportive. My friend Marie attended Willamette with a member of the band and she managed to talk with him a bit before they went on stage.

Between sets, I started chatting with a local promoter who is a huge fan of both American baseball and Neil Young. He had a few beers in him and was buzzing on both the brew and the music. Between sets, he told us about his goal to visit every MLB stadium in the US and the thirty times he's seen Young in concert. "I saw him do the Harvest Moon album in 1995, yes," he said. "It was a night in the summer months and the moon rose up over Neil Young. It was amazing! I say to my girlfriend, 'Look, it is a HARVEST MOON!'"

Anyway, here's the band performing "Beachcomber Blues" and dishing out some banter about ordering beers in France and English vs. Dutch:

Labels: Europe, music

Recently, I had the good fortune to land a pretty fantastic freelance gig. The assignment: go to Antwerp and find out what beers are currently popular among Belgians. Along with my friend Marie, I spent a weekend in the city touring pubs and drinking some of the finest brews in the world.

I consider the experience a chance of a lifetime. Here's the story, all 1900 words of it, over at The Good Life Report.

Labels: beer, Europe

Making a statement like that isn't going to win me any brownie points. Nonetheless, I was really looking forward to finding out what a foie gras ice cream tastes like after hearing a long-winded rumor that Le Pigeon was going to set up a cart to sell the stuff at the Pearl District's Bastille Day celebration last Saturday.

Why? Because I'm a terrible person with no soul and a crooked spine, obviously, and, well, wouldn't you be curious to try some too? The rumor proved false and I should have known better to think that anyone could get away with such a public display of wanton culinary recklessness in this town. At one time, at least, the east Burnside eatery had foie gras eclairs on their menu.

I made do with a much more boring and much less controversial ham and cheese crepe and a bottle of Orangina. French people were there or least wannabe French people. They spoke French. A lady who sold me a crosseant said "merci" as she handed me my change.

I don't know if actual French people living in actual France celebrate their independence by jumping into public water fountains, waiting 20 minutes in the hot sun for crepes, letting their kids fence, watching waiters run around in circles and listening to a hipster work his way through a cover of "Ziggy Stardust" on stage because he once played a few clubs in Paris but that's how these things are done in the Pearl District.

And I have no complaints. Except for the lack of foie gras ice cream. And the limited space set aside for food carts. And the fact that one of the organizers kicked a mime out of the waiters race. And that the mime didn't sneak back in at the halfway point to keep things interesting. The two waiters right up at the starting line were exceptionally skilled at speed walking with trays and they blasted away the competition.

Labels: Europe, the french

After a half-hearted six month search I finally consumed legalized absinthe within US borders a few weeks ago. In the weeks leading up to this, I heard rumors that bottles could be found at liquor stores around town. A trip to the Pearl Specialty Market last winter turned up nothing and I never got a chance to follow-up on a reader's tip that absinthe could be found at a liquor shop tucked inside the Garden Home Thriftway.

The opportunity presented itself at the Highland Stillhouse in Oregon City, a tavern that typically caters to all things Scottish. A few friends and I were sitting in the Highland's upstairs parlor when I noticed a chalkboard on the wall with a tell-tale green fairy drawn on it. The Highland has two different kinds of absinthe on hand, an 80-proof and 120-proof, if memory serves. We went with the 80. Because it's cheaper and I am cheap.

For $8 a head the bartender brought out a clear bottle, tumblers, sugar cubes, absinthe spoons, the whole bit. I've heard reports that the stuff that's now legal in the US is a bastardized version of what you can find overseas and that the level of wormwood mixed-in is supposedly lower. I'm no expert but I once embarrassed myself by ordering absinthe in a UK bar and, for me at least, the varieties available at the Highlands seemed to pack the same punch. Maybe the effects are psychosomatic but I'm convinced that absinthe offers a different sort of drunkenness than your average liquor.

None of us spotted Tinkerbell floating around afterwards though. Maybe she arrives sometime after a third glass but I wasn't willing to contend with a bar tab that would get me that far.

On a related note, I'm convinced the Highlands has the best bar bathroom in the Portland metro area. I don't think any other drinking establishment here can top its English inn decor. If only all public potties could be described as "cozy." Here's a cell phone photo that doesn't even come close to capturing the bed and breakfast feel of it:

Labels: absinthe, Booze, Europe

Click here for photos of gondolas, bidets, graffiti, Holy Grail cigarette machines, street art, St. Peter's feet and what both Pac-Man and Harry Potter look like on the Italian peninsula.

As for The Big Lebowski novel (?) above, I have no idea what that's all about. I saw it sitting on a shelf in a bookstore in Florence. As you can tell, the Dude abides, even over there.

Labels: Europe, The Big Lebowski

Venice is sinking...under the weight of Carnival Cruise Line passengers

The temperature doubled as we headed south from Munich in a train carriage full of elderly Germans. At a stop in Austria, I jumped off the train to buy a Kit Kat off a Russian snack vendor. The grand total of time I've spent in that country? Two minutes and I didn't even catch the name of the town we stopped in. As we dropped into Italy, the man across from me fought to control a floodgate of tears and memories, staring wistfully out the window the whole way. I still wonder what was going through his mind.

You already know the stories about Venice, about how the city is sinking and how foreign travelers have driven away the locals, effectively turning it into a clogged tourist swamp-trap. What you might not know is that when you walk out of the Santa Lucia train station you're right there in the middle of it all. The gondolas, the Grand Canal, the whole bit. We jumped on an overcrowded water taxi that dropped us off in front of a hotel with an inflatable, ten-foot tall gecko out front, both about a block down from the Rialto.

My sister Shanna and I were only there for a night but I'm convinced the city should be saved at all costs. Cancel the rest of the war and divert all those billions, whatever it takes, there's no other place like it anywhere. Oh, Amsterdam. I guess there's Amsterdam but it doesn't have the tiny alleyways and gondolas. No ancient glass shops or gelato stands or beautiful Italian hostesses that lead you down tiny streets to another hotel because the room you booked has a wall that could collapse at any second due to nearby construction. This is what happened to us and her hotel covered the additional cost of the switch to safer lodgings. A Bob Dylan portrait was hanging outside our room. The window inside overlooked a tiny courtyard. A tiny woman at least 80 ran the hotel's breakfast nook and spoke to us softly in Italian before screaming and throwing silverware at a bellhop who dared enter her kitchen in search of soap. She even yelled "MAMA MIA!" as he made his escape. What I wouldn't give to take up residency in that place for a month or five.

We spent the night going up the Campanile in Saint Mark's Square and wandering Venice's corridors with giant bottles of Moretti in our hands. Gorgeous people were laughing in courtyards around every 500 year-old corner. I went to sleep that night thinking Venice was a paradise, overpriced cafes be dammed. Millions flock here every year for a reason.

Then the next day we headed back to Saint Mark's and found it jammed to the walls with tourists. There were thousands of them, everywhere. Hundreds of thousands. All of them, all of us, like rats on the tail end of a sinking life raft. Two Carnival cruise ships had dropped anchor that morning and all those great little alleyways were jammed with hoards of Americans, all of them slowly waddling, staring at maps and avoiding eye contact with gypsy beggars. It took ten minutes to walk a block.

What little room was left in the square was filled with pigeons. Thousands of them, all scrambling to tear apart anyone who dared drop a Euro on a bag of birdseed. I watched one girl, maybe 12, scream in terror as a dozen of the feathered monsters jumped onto her shoulders, desperately driving towards the bag. Another tourist dropped to the ground for a gag photo and found himself covered in them. The hunger of the pigeons in Saint Mark's Square rivals that of an army of starving vampires.

If the rising water and pigeon poop don't destroy Venice, the tourists will. One July day a few years from now the main island will suddenly and spontaneously sink under the weight of one digital camera too many. At least there will be plenty of snapshots to remember the place by.

Frenzy in Firenze

On a boiling Saturday night we found ourselves sitting in a laundromat two blocks down from the tiny hostel where a man who looked and acted too much like Roberto Benigni was working as a manager. Two recent college grads, one from Toronto and the other from DC, decided to swap tales of travel woes with us in a game of one-upmanship. They were both unimpressed with our night on the train to Munich. The DC guy had spent the previous night on a freezing hillside overlooking Firenze (AKA Florence). He had hoped to sneak into a convent with a girl he met while gazing up at the schlong of Michelangelo's David. His plan was quickly foiled. A nun caught him at the main entrance and chased him off down the street.

The kid from Toronto made the mistake of flying into Paris and heading to the nearest bar. After getting extremely drunk, he missed the last subway of the night back to his hostel and made the wise decision to pass out on a bench. He woke up twenty minutes later with his backpack and his shoes missing. In socks, he headed off towards his hostel and found himself being followed. His pursuant kept drawing closer and closer until the Toronto kid whipped out a large hunting knife, the click of the blade ricocheting off a quiet street. His would-be mugger took off running. Never screw with a Canadian with a large knife.

He broke out the knife and flipped it open to offer a visual aid to his anecdote. Not that he needed it. He won this contest at "my shoes were stolen."

The museum workers of Florence went on strike the next day so no David or Venus on a Clamshell for us. Instead, we had to settle for the fake David with the huge hands in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (see above) and a chalk drawing of Venus created by a teenager. Shortly after I took a photo, he broke out a bucket and washed his art away. I'm assuming there's some sort of local ordinance that requires him and his fellow street artists to destroy their hard work at the end of the night.

We wandered the streets in the Tuscan sun, smashed a pair of sunglasses in the Giardino dei Semplici (long story), drank coffee at a cafe as a marathon passed us and ate pizza in the strangest restaurant I'll ever set foot in. In addition to a pizza oven made of clay, there was a side room with walls and a ceiling covered in newspapers. The men's bathroom was oddly decadent with Asian decor and a square steel toilet. Imagine an Italian McMenamins with owners that are nuts when it comes to selecting decor. I can think of no better place to eat Neapolitan-style pizza for the first time.

In a market near everything in Florence there's a statue of a pig. If you rub his snout and toss a coin at his feet, the powers-of-fate will grant you a return trip one day. I gave it a good rub. Florence, I want a rematch.

Zebra-stripped mosquitoes rule the Tower of Pisa

We decided to make a side-trip to Pisa on our way to Rome and somehow pulled the whole thing off. Pisa is a fairly small city but the tower stands on the opposite side of town from the train station. We walked the whole way. It took about 30 minutes and our route led us past disturbing amounts of anarchist graffiti. Red letter A's in circles covered nearly every blank wall. It was here that I spotted a "Yankee go home!" tag.

As we neared the tower, suddenly everything was bright and shiny. We each drank an Italian mocha for a Euro apiece. Over there, "mocha" means a shot of chocolate-flavored espresso served in a tiny cup. We waited an hour for a run up the tower by watching tourists from everywhere pretend to knock it over. As you climb up it, the tower seems to lean further and further, creating a disorienting effect as you head up those ancient stairs. At the top, everyone was hanging onto the railings and walking around like Captain Jack Sparrow.

The bumps materialized right around then. At first they were the size of dimes but later they grew to the size of a sand dollar. Shanna's legs were covered in them. Where did they come from? Who was responsible for these injuries? The swarms of black and white-stripped mosquitoes that apparently rule the top of the Tower of Pisa in the middle of the September. At one point, I found myself taking in the landscape by jogging around the top of the tower in circles. Bugs or no bugs, I was going to enjoy that view, dammit. Somewhere on Shanna's camera, there's a video of us discussing the bumps while I hummed the theme song to Super Mario Brothers for reasons I can't remember. No, you will never see it.

All Slow-Moving Eurail Trains Lead to Rome

The mosquito bites and the boiling temperature on the train to Rome resulted in an increasing level of naive paranoia that filled my skull as we headed along an impossibly gorgeous coastline. Twenty minutes from our stop, I read a lengthy entry in a Lonely Planet guide that had me convinced we would be torn apart by gypsies by the time we found the subway. So we whipped together a swift plan of attack. We would hustle straight to the train and to our hotel, pausing only when absolutely necessary. At one point I found myself yelling, "GO! GO! GO!" like a crazed platoon leader in a sweltering stairwell. What a sight I must have been, with my 60 pound backpack and an overpriced Fidel Castro-style army hat on my head. A cartoon of an American tourist getting assaulted by a robber on a monitor on the train didn't help my mood.

We calmed down when we discovered that our hotel was two blocks from a military base. Four hours later, we were drifting around the deserted streets circling the Roman Forum. The only people still out at that hour seemed to be teenaged goths. What do teenaged goths in Rome do on Tuesday nights? They hang around what remains of Caaser's old digs and drink liquor from poorly concealed bottles.

We missed our train and nearly found ourselves locked in a subway station. We eventually grabbed a cab. The gray-haired driver took the long way back, buzzing through Rome's tiny streets at speeds of upwards of 60 miles an hour while blasting Justin Timberlake's Future Sex/Love Sounds because I guess he thought that was the sort of thing two exhausted Americans would want to hear at that hour. At one point we burst out into a plaza with a giant fountain in the middle and crossed three lanes of traffic in a second flat. He could have had us back at the hotel in five minutes but it took fifteen. I don't care. No ride at Magic Mountain comes close. The very next night, the same damn thing happened after the subway mysteriously shut down three hours early.

A city like Rome tests your patience like a screaming toddler. The drivers don't care about you. Street peddlers attack you at every tourist sight hawking everything from roses to plastic screeching cockroaches that they will hold up to your ear with no warning. Gypsy beggars dressed better than you throw themselves at your hands in coffee shops or lay on the street like cancer victims struck by lightning, their shaking arms clutching cups. People in $500 outfits storm around the streets with complete indifference to anyone and everyone around them, their tongue's whipping over black cell phones and their eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. Supposedly, 30% of men over the age of thirty in Italy still live with their parents so they can afford high-priced living and fast cars.

I don't think the Romans are rude like the French are rude. I just think they're completely oblivious to their surroundings 95% of the time. In addition to all of that, if you do anything that could be perceived as slightly stupid or rude, a local will make a weird noise that sounds like "TSST!" It's the Italian equivalent of a sigh or an eye roll. I've never been worked over by a dominatrix but three days in Rome will leave you feeling something like that, I'm sure. It's all oddly pleasant but it hurts.

We missed a chance to see the Pope babble at his followers but we did spend a stormy afternoon touring the Vatican City. I sent a dirty postcard from the post office that isn't going to win me any brownie points with St. Peter. I got in line and rubbed the feet of his statue (see above) in the Basilica along with everyone else. I'm hoping that made up for the slight. The building is impossibly huge, an immortal testament to the overreaching power and pompousness of organized religion. I can say with some certainty that there is no other structure on the planet as epic and capable of pummeling a person's spirit into submission. The size of a dozen football fields and chock full of dead Popes and amazing architecture, no mere mortal can process a place like it. In the basement, people weep on their knees at the tomb of Pope Jean Paul. There's a section for them to do so, separated from a walkway by a velvet rope.

In a slow-moving battalion of physically-drained Italians, we made our way to the Sistine Chapel. It's a big room with not enough guards to scream at everyone for taking photos. Heading for the subway afterwards, I felt like all the planet's opulence had been shoved into my brain in the space of five hours. That night we ate pizza in the city's oldest pizza parlor, a place called Ricci's, where I discovered sardines ain't so bad.

Fun factoid: once upon a time, the Roman Colosseum hosted an unusual battle involving a gigantic mechanical whale, a group of gladiators and fifty live bears. The whale was raised from the floor and the bears poured out of its mouth, hurtling themselves at their adversaries. That would have been something to see. For reasons I have yet to research, the Colosseum is currently undergoing repairs. When we there, the walls of the upper decks were under construction. Even odder, someone is paying to rebuild the stadium's wooden playing field. While I don't know if I could get behind rebuilding the Coliseum, if they start staging battles like that again I'd buy a ticket.

Fifty bears flying out of a whale's jaws. Can you imagine a scene like that? Something else I learned: the aristocracy of ancient Rome would routinely get together for 15-course meals. Between courses, servants would bring them feathers and buckets to purge their guts and allow for more gorging. And Europeans think we're decadent and wasteful. These people invented gluttony.

Labels: Europe

Click here or on the photo above for snapshots of castles, stinky beer garden urinals and strange warning signs that discourage people from putting their hands in their pockets.

Labels: Europe

Lazy Train

You can always tell when someone has been working in the service industry for too long. Look for glazed-over eyes and slouched shoulders in waiters and strippers or an ear out for a robotic, monotone voice when you speak with someone in tech support. Lethargy, blank expressions or long hold times are almost always a dead give-away. I've been stuck in this line of work since college and I reached the "too long" point long ago. Only the most chipper, patient and hardy can survive a few years in the industry without succumbing to a level of bitterness that makes a person completely incapable of empathizing with "the public."

Despite my wealth of experience in the field and all the venom that now infects my soul, I'd never encountered the level of scorn that resides in the hearts of members of the European service industry. Case in point: a blond guy, around 30, that was working the English counter at the Gare de Lyon train station on a day when my sister Shanna and I were trying to get from Paris to Munich. I'm sure he had spent the entire summer dealing with clueless American tourists like us and he was in absolutely no mood to help us on any level. Our self-effacing humor, calm voices and large reserves of patience bounced off him like hollow-point bullets off the Hulk. Any question was met with a short, sharp answer. After a tense five minutes, we finally had our tickets and an afternoon to squander.

That evening we wandered back to the station. With 30 minutes to kill, we headed up to the loading platforms and gazed up at an electronic reader board listing the arrivals. Our train wasn't up there. After frantically hunting down an attendant we discovered that we were at the wrong station entirely. The blond clerk hadn't bothered to tell us that our train was departing from Gare de l' Est, a station halfway across the city.

We barreled down to the subway and desperately blasted up four crowded escalators through throngs of commuters and tourists to the platforms at Gare de l' Est. I remember screaming "SAVE YOURSELF! LEAVE ME! GET TO GERMANY! DRINK BEER!" at Shanna over the heads of two annoyed teenagers after I stopped to deal with an untied shoe. We missed our train by about three minutes. After another 30 minutes in line we received two new tickets on the last train out of Paris that night. Our seats would be in the tail-end of a "sleeper train" where we'd be sharing a tiny cabin in couch with four strangers. If we could last under those conditions for 10 hours we'd be in Munich at 8 AM the next morning.

So obviously we weren't destined for a Darjeeling Limited experience. There would be no cough-syrup fueled misadventures or fun with smuggled cobras on this journey. We found four men in our cabin: two backpackers from France that smelled like they hadn't bathed in days and two Middle Eastern businessmen who smelled like they hadn't allowed their skin to touch soap since 1993. After a few minutes of sucking down enough body odor to kill someone that gets paid to wash sumo thongs, I decided to spend the night in a large area in the back of the train typically reserved for bike storage.

Down there I found ten bikes and one middle-aged stow-away chain smoking cigarettes. He looked like the lead singer of Gogol Bordello but harmless enough. I was too tired to listen to my waning reserves of common sense. I slumped over on the other side of the compartment and threw on a pair of sunglasses to hide my closed eyes and to ward off any invasions of my personal space. I figured he wouldn't screw with me. Anyone stupid and pathetic enough to sleep in a cold bike locker with a guy like him wouldn't be worth the effort to rob. I switched my iPod over to Johnny Cash and somehow slept as "Folsom County Blues" and the sound of wheels rumbling over tracks blasted into my eardrums.

I woke up an hour later to find Shanna kicking me in the stomach. She's not above this sort of thing, especially when her male companions leave her alone on a train in a foreign country filled with strange, smelly men. We returned to our carriage to find the backpackers and a growing crowd sleeping in its tiny hallway, all of them avoiding intolerable scents in their own cabins. Inside ours the businessmen were stretched out across the seats, slumbering comfortably and fermenting in their own sweat. These guys were so stinky they'd chased off two full-grown French nationals! Six weeks removed from that foul night and their assaults on my sense of smell, I still want to kick both of these men in the nuts.

We picked two remaining spots in the hall. I threw my jacket over my head, put on an old trance album and settled in for a night of getting stepped on every ten minutes. I awoke at 3 AM as the train reached the French borderline. An old, cold sign yelled "STRASBOURG" into the foggy night. As the train rolled into Germany past trashbags and stone buildings covered in graffiti, I naturally felt an overwhelming sense of impending doom. The countryside looked like a nightmarish, bombed-out warscape typically seen in WW2 movies. I closed my eyes and prayed as the iPod filled my head full of DJ Shadow's Entroducing, a perfect soundtrack for a slow train ride to peril. I half-expected the lost German soldier from Saving Private Ryan to show up and start babbling about Steamboat Willy.

At dawn we crawled into an empty cabin for two hours of precious, uninterrupted slumber. At 7:45, a girl who looked not unlike the one Jason Schwartman boinked on the Darjeeling threw open the door and tore open our curtains. She yelled something at us in a foreign tongue before heading off to the next cabin to do the same.

So this is how they say "hello" in Germany.

Blitzkrieg Bier Bop

With Oktoberfest still three days away, Munich was a ghost town. The museum queues, squares and streets were empty. There were no surfers navigating the waves of the Eisbach. Our hostel was filled with bored backpackers chainsmoking in the lobby and glumly surfing the internet. Where was everybody?

At the bierpalasts. We went to two. The biggest and most overstuffed with Bavarian culture was a place called the Hofbrauhaus. First established in the 16th century, it was once the site of many of Hitler's propaganda beer blasts. Everything but the inn itself was destroyed in the second World War. Nowadays, thousands of tourists pour in there every night to suck down sausages, listen to oom-pah music and guzzle beers as big as six-month old babies. We briefly shared a table with a group of drunk Germans in their sixties. It had the only empty seats in the place and they quickly cleared out. With the exception of these guys and two British expats that made fun of us on the subway, the locals we encountered tolerated our American aloofness. On the other hand, we also spotted this on our way over to the Hofbrahaus.

More interesting was the Augustiner Keller, another popular bierpalasts. We headed downstairs to the enormous cellar were the owners keep gigantic (probably just decorative) wooden kegs. There we sat across from two men with mullets. Actual, full-fledged, real-deal mullets and not just shoulder-length hair that gets unfairly labeled as mullets in the US. Halfway through the evening, we heard a dozen local girls shouting drinking songs, their voices bouncing like Super Balls off the cellar's brick walls.

It was all coming from a long table around the corner and about a fifty yards away. Who knows why they were there cackling and singing the songs of their drunken forefathers on a relatively quiet Wednesday. It could have been a bachelorette party or maybe it's just what these chicks do on weeknights. The staff treated them like Gremlins, rushing over to the table to quickly remove empty glasses and throw down full ones before ducking for cover in the kitchen. The mullet-guys were entranced.

One jumped up. He could no longer resist their siren songs. He was 20 years older than every girl at the table but he dived in anyway. They welcomed him with open arms and plowed him full of German lager. He lasted about twenty minutes before staggering back to his table. After we payed the bill, I snuck past the girls to use the bathroom, fearing hassles and taunts in a language I couldn't understand. I had the sneaking suspicion they were up to something. At a urinal, I unzipped and began freeing myself of all the used ale in my bladder.

"99 LUFTBALLOOOOOONS! AUF IHREN WEG ZUM HORIZONT!"

It hit the bathroom like a bunker buster, all twelve of these women screaming out the lyrics to Nena's nearly forgotten '80s classic. I'm happy to report I didn't piss all over myself or have a heart-attack on the spot.

The Lard-Clogged Heart of Bavaria

I'd come to Munich expecting to find cobblestones streets filled with locals decked out lederhosen. Instead, Munich was much like any other city but with the occasional beer hall, Bavarian window display and a subway system with wood-paneled trains. We had another day to kill and Shanna, having already done Munich a few years prior, gave me two options: we could head to the Dachau concentration camp or Neuschwanstein, the big, lard-clogged heart of Bavaria. Sorry everybody, I picked castles and wienerschnitzel over a page out of the darkest era in human history.

And there I found all the lederhosen people. And countrysides full of adorable little houses and fields full of adorable sunflowers. And armies of adorable nuns on vacation. And adorable, plump German tourists acting all adorable. And gift shops full of adorable cuckoo clocks, Bavarian teddy bears and steins. And adorable, oversized beer mugs filled with beer that I sent straight into my beer-filled belly. And an adorable, uncompleted castle that cost a crazed Prussian monarch his life. And...not so adorable yellowjackets that kept trying to steal my schnitzel. There's nothing the Germans make that isn't more efficient than a stateside equivalent, even bugs. One of these vicious little ubermenschs chased me across a beer garden. If that yellowjacket had nuts, I'd totally want to kick them right now.

We walked all the way up the hill and didn't even stop for eis. After touring the castle we headed over to a nearby bridge. Written on a railing, further proof of how no matter how far you get away from the United States, its cultural droppings can be found anywhere.

Watch out, here comes the neverending influx of American culture. The Simpsons Movie: posters promoting it were all over the subway stations in each country I set foot in. I took of a photo of each nation's version. They can be found in the Flickr galleries via the links on the left side of the blog.

Labels: Europe

Click here or on the photo above for shots of the Louvre after hours, weird Parisian graffiti, Paris Disneyland, a McRoyal (McDonalds no longer labels them "Royal With Cheese," apparently) and the saddest French chick I saw loafing around Mont Marche.

Labels: Europe

London had set a few hurdles in my path but nothing too serious. Transit strikes aside, I had a great time there. Despite a summer of record-breaking rainfall, the weather even cooperated. Everyday was warm and, at one point, I found myself sunbathing and scribbling on dirty postcards in front of City Hall near Tower Bridge.

The good vibes London left me with faded as I made way towards Paris. Once my train popped out of the "chunnel," the sun was gone. Flat, grey clouds stretched over a long expanse of fields and graffiti-covered underpasses. I'd forgotten to buy a guidebook before I left Portland and didn't bother to exchange my remaining Pounds for Euros before heading to Liverpool Station. Paris' Gare du Nord train station: I would quickly learn to loath it. Almost completely unprepared and unable to speak more than four words of French, I was a moving target in the station's maze of corridors. It should come as no surprise that I had a pickpocket on my tail within minutes of stepping off the train.

He looked like Spud from Trainspotting. I noticed him following me as I wandered in circles hunting for an ATM machine. I headed outside, found one but he was waiting for me when I got back. When I stopped to grab a bagel, he leaned up against a wall around the corner, peaking over his shoulder every five seconds. So I did the only thing I could think of: I stared at him with the best evil eye I could muster. He finally took the hint and moved along.

Pickpocket # 2 was a fourteen-year old vulture that tailed me through a toll gate without paying into the Metro. He kept popping up as I struggled to get my bearings and even followed me into a subway carriage. I tried the stare tick but he only stared back. At my stop I pulled out a tactic I saw in a movie years ago. I waited for the doors to start closing before I jumped off at my stop. Sure, it was cheesy but it worked He kept staring as the train heading out of the station. Despite his hip-hop gear, he reminded me of the mute assassin in Sin City. A wolf could have attacked him on the subway but I'm sure he would have kept his eyes on his mark. Creepy little brat.

Bienvenue vers Paris, abruti

My hostel was located in what the locals were bent on calling a "Red Light district" about ten minutes from Notre Dame. It consisted of little more than a few blocks of crepe stands and old hotels mixed with sex shops and clothing stores blasting Snoop Dogg. Stationed at every intersection were Asian women with clipboards that would wander up to anyone who looked out of place and ask "do you speak English?" One of them even grabbed me on an arm as I struggled to find the hostel. I never did stop to speak to them or figure out what they were up to.

Exhausted and drowning in culture shock sprinkled with paranoia that everyone in the city was out to rob me, I discovered that the hostel had lost my reservation. They were booked solid, as was just about every other hostel in central Paris. A frantic Google search on a computer in the lobby turned up nothing. Finally, eager to be rid of me, the manager made a phone call. There was a room available at a hotel three blocks away. It cost me twice as much as I had planned on paying, the staff charged to use a communal shower and the elderly gent running the place was the epitome of French contempt. Somehow, despite it all, I loved the place. The view from my window was great, I was a block from a shop selling bottles of wine for $3 US and the room had a TV offering up such random weirdness as John Malkovich talking in broken French on a talk show.

After four hours of hassles, I headed for Notre Dame in the rain. In the courtyard the bells overhead rang and the showers stopped as a sunset ripped through the clouds over the Seine, casting a "breath of God" glow onto the cathedral that would have made a lesser atheist convert to Catholicism on the spot. Jennifer Connelly's breasts circa 1990 notwithstanding, there's few sights more gorgeous that I'll see in this lifetime. I tried to take a picture. Here's how it came out:

And that's how Paris made me feel the whole time I was there: like shit- shit for not speaking the language, for not knowing the ins-and-outs of its local customs and for not appreciating its splendors more. Is it the most beautiful city in the world? Probably. Even the graffiti is pretty (see above and below) but, like most beautiful things it has a sneering disregard for anything that isn't up to its level.

That night I spent $18 US for a cutting board of cold lunch meat in a restaurant and another $4 for an eight ounce glass of soda. Two diners sitting three feet away asked, en français, the waiter what I was eating. Two seconds later, they were all laughing and shaking their heads. How did I find myself in this situation? Because I didn't know what I was ordering or, really, how to handle Paris. I was on my own and clueless. Go there unprepared and you'll find yourself in that same restaurant, the butt of lame jokes in a foreign tongue eating something that tastes like dog food and waiting 30 minutes for your bill and another 20 for your change. I guarantee it. Paris does not suffer fools gladly.

Maybe it was because my attempts to speak their language were doomed to failure or maybe it was because my meek "please don't hurt me or spit in my food" attitude was pathetic, the Parisians I encountered lived up to every stereotype I'd ever heard about French rudeness. Here's my theory: anyone who works in the service industry in Paris once aspired to be something more: an actor, an artist, something else. When their dreams failed to materialize, they settled into a lifetime of dealing with moronic tourists but never grew to accept their lot in life. When you have to tell clueless idiots where Jim Morrison's grave is located no less than a dozen times during any given workday, in a language foreign to you, it's bound to inspire a substantial amount of bitterness. And because the people you're dealing with aren't on their home turf and can't speak the language, you can get away with being a complete jerk. Somehow, this sort of thing would never fly in the states.

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I woke up the next morning with one thing on my mind: vengeance. Vengeance, eating a Nutella crepe and getting to the Louvre but mostly vengeance. How would I make Paris suffer for dicking me around the day before? I would rent a bicycle and disregard every, single bit of bicycle-related decorum known to man.

Now this should have been as simple as wandering up to a Vélib kiosk, sticking in my credit card, grabbing a bike and buzzing off to ride the wrong way down the closest sidewalk. Vélib is Paris' new rent-a-bike program with outlets on every other block. The system is brilliant, well-used by locals and was completely unwilling to take my money. I wasted a good portion of my day trying to rent a bike, at one point even haggling with the owner of a shop. He wouldn't let the worst bike in the place go for less than 60 Euro- an old junker that wouldn't fetch $20 at a garage sale in Portland.

After wandering around in circles I found a rental shop a mere three blocks from my hotel. For a mere 6 Euros I finally had a Weapon of Mass Annoyance (see above) under the condition I would return it by 11 AM the next morning. Did I immediately start weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic? Yup. Did I ride on the sidewalks despite a local law preventing it? Yup. Did I buzz around the Louvre garden, at one point forcing a security guard to make a fruitless attempt to chase me down? Yup. Did I dent the bike's bell after not properly setting the kickstand and terrorize as many people as possible with its unintentionally modified, super-shrill "DING!"? Yup.

I even blasted my way through a healthy Friday night crowd on the Champs-Élysées. If Paris was going to treat me like an "ugly American," I decided to act the part. What had come over me? The "City of Light" had awakened a bike-riding Mr Hyde buried deep within my soul, a jackass with an insatiable thirst for what a former coworker once described as "scrumdouchery," the art of being a complete and utter douchebag. I should have been forced to spend a night in jail or at least bribed a cop for the things I did.

The Louvre stayed open late that night and I'd have to say that gazing at the Mona Lisa is a lot more enjoyable when you don't have 1,000 other tourists elbowing their way past you. Moments from closing, a mere ten other tourists and I had her room to ourselves.

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After hours in the Louvre, I conquered many of the tourist-sites between it and the Eiffel Tower. The Champ de Mars was chock full of people chugging wine on blankets and expats from distance lands trying to sell them more. Merlot-hawkers and others trying to unload dozens of glowing plastic Eiffel Towers on metal loops worked their way through the crowd like beer guys in a stadium. Under the tower I found a gigantic, inflated rugby ball and an electronic sign that read: 2007 Rugby World Cup. In London, I spotted several local fans dressed like Zorro wearing the UK flag as a cape. The fans I came across in France were all dressed in polo shirts and extremely drunk.

A gang of them was harassing a young guard when I rode up to the tower. Undaunted by the loaded machine gun in his hands, they formed a circle around him and started chanting a fight song. Then, somewhere among them, "she" emerged: a tall, hairy man in a viking queen outfit, presumably dressed as the Paris team's mascot. Somehow she coaxed a kiss out of the guard, leading dozens around us to cheer, including two of the guard's coworkers. Minutes later, the viking queen was on some poor Indian tourist and his daughter like glue. Babbling at him in French, the guy did what he could to politely turn her away. The viking she-demon would have none of it, demanding a kiss. Despite his near tears, she would not clear a path for him, at one point shaking her fake breasts in his face. These fans terrorized this man for a full three minutes before heading off to annoy the hell out of another guard standing in front of a jeep. Click the link below to watch.

Entire books have been written about European sports fandom but this wasn't what I had expected. When my sister Shanna landed in town a few days later, we ran into something much more cliched. We stepped off the Metro one night and ran into a small crowd of Scottish guys in kilts bugging random French commuters on a stairwell.

A block from our hostel, we heard the chanting. Around a corner, there they were: hundreds of Scottish fans in kilts, all drinking and hollering in front of a place called The Auld Alliance. They'd taken over the street, showering anyone who tried to pass through with insults. Like moths to a tiki torch, we headed inside. A football game was on the TV, Scotland was winning and I assumed all the celebrating was for their teams' inevitable win. Several men were shouting at the screen. Within seconds, one fan was babbling at us. "So all this is for the win, right," I asked. "Naw, this game is on-a tape," he told me. "We won this match last year."

I can't remember his name but Shanna bought him a pint and suddenly we were all pals. He lead us over to a group of his fellow fans for a crash course in rugby, their "army" and all things Scottish. Some things we learned.

- Rugby is life.

- But, then again, football is life. Somehow, they're both life. I'm still not sure how this works.

- Our new bud had lost substantial amounts of money following around Edinburgh's rugby and football clubs. His first wife left him over it. During a trip to Rome, he slipped down a flight of marble steps and severely injured his back. His extreme fandom may very well kill him but he didn't seem to care. He was having the time of his life.

- None of these guys had ever been to Paris. I asked them how they liked the place. One's response: "We've been here five hours, four of those have been at this here pub, the most famous Scottish bar in all of France. It's been pretty goddamn good so far, let me tell ya'."

- At that point in the World Cup, their team might have gone on to play in Iraq supposedly. Were they going to go if that came up? Nope, even their level of fandom had its limits. Another quote: "Are you kidding me? They wouldn't put up with our shit down there. They'd have us all skinned alive by the time we'd get off the train!"

A French chick had somehow wandered into the crowd. Within twenty minutes, she was drunk and riding around on a fan's shoulders, leading the crowd to chant, "DON'T BE SHY, SHOW US YER' PIE!" Convinced they were talking about someone else or maybe because she didn't have a firm grasp on English, she joined in the chorus. At another point in the evening, we found ourselves talking to a fan that looked like John Belushi and had an accent so thick I couldn't understand anything he said. Later, another fan turned to Shanna and said, "Don't worry, half the time we have no idea what he's sayin' either."

And then they all blocked a bus trying to get down the street so they could pound on the windows and spit taunts at the elderly Parisians inside.

I have enough random quotes and bits rambling around in my head from that night to fill another tedious, 1,000-word blog post but it's probably time to close this chapter of the European trip. In no mood to get arrested, we called it a night way too early and headed back to the hotel. An hour later, I stuck my head out the window. I could still hear them all chanting and shouting into the night. The match they had come for was still another 40 hours away.

The next morning we wandered past the Auld Alliance, dark and vacant, to find hundreds of smashed beer cups and cans in the street. I wonder if any of them made time to see the Venus de Milo or to bug the shit out of the locals with stupid questions about where they were keeping the Lizard King's bones.

Labels: Europe

Click here or the photo above for shots of weird art gallery displays, mummified cats, proof that the Rolling Stones have inspired a ballet, Cleopatra's corpse, anti-Napoleon propaganda and the best thing to happen to pizza since cheese-filled crusts.

Labels: Europe

Someday people far smarter than I will devise a new means of air travel involving catapults and/or teleporting, effectively putting an end to jet lag. Until then, Americans like me will bumble into foreign lands, bleary-eyed, confused and sure to piss off everyone they encounter.

I arrived in London early on September 3rd after being awake for 20-hours straight on the heels of 3 hours of sleep the night before. Like many before me, I was beyond fatigue but all of London laid before me and I couldn't check in to my hostel until 3 PM. Unconsciousness wasn't an option. My first real memory of Europe is a sign featuring a black silhouette stalking a thinner, chump-ier silhouette.

"BEWARE! THEY WANT YOUR POD!" it screamed.

What a warm welcome to London, the one European city where I wasn't expecting to deal with this sort of shit. Already on edge after a cheery British lady at customs warned me of the dangers of traveling alone, my paranoia level jumped another notch. Right then and there I planned to spend the rest of the trip with one hand firmly placed on my wallet. Did this plan peter out five minutes later? Uh, yeah.

Almost immediately I was getting on the nerves of anyone I dared speak with. I incurred the scorn of a cop, the guy working the desk at my hostel, the staff of a small diner and dozens of weary morning commuters in the Tube fumbling to get around my oversized backpack in a standing-room-only carriage, all within an hour of my arrival. Irritating EuroLocals is surprisingly easy when you're half awake and have no idea what's going on.

London- a city where every waitress is French and they serve you doughnuts on plates with a fork and knife. Where sushi can be found in individually wrapped packages for take-out and bored tour guides at Parliament who look and speak like Ian McKellen badmouth the art and shake their heads at centuries-old political procedures. Where a photo of Chevy Chase's fist hangs in the world's second (?) most famous modern art gallery and an oversized Ferris Wheel is considered a major tourist attraction. And where the Tube workers go on strike within hours of my arrival.

Everyone was talking about it and every London paper had some variation of the following headline in 70-point font "TRANSIT! STRIKE! STARTS! TONIGHT AT! 7 PM!" Despite being reminded of this every ten minutes, my mind was unable to process the information. When I get tired, I get even stupider than usual. So, after being awake for 30-hours straight it seemed like a great idea to dart to the opposite side of town to catch a Modest Mouse set at someplace called The Forum, transit strike or no transit strike.

I rushed over to Liverpool Station, working through throngs of commuters, businessmen who decided to deal with the ongoing melee by chugging pints in front of pubs and homeless junkies not above calling me "gubiner" as they attempted to sell me cigarette lighters in a town with a tight smoking ban. The crowds waiting to get on London's double-decker buses that night were enormous. Despite it all, everyone remained calm and chipper, a huge contrast to the drivers assigned to get the city through this crisis. I found myself in the back of a line getting on a bus towards someplace called Camden Town, chatting with a chick dressed up for a night of clubbing. When I briefly paused to grab my ticket before boarding, the driver slammed the door on my face.

I wound up in Camden Town over an hour later, lost in a deserted neighborhood filled with graffiti-covered shops and wet newspapers. I found a hipster couple waiting for a bus. I was four blocks from the Forum. They had walked out on the band's set, labeling their music "rubbish" and told me not to bother heading up there. So much for England's supposed infatuation with Portland bands. Pitchfork's been lying to me.

The band was playing their encore when I got there so I ended the evening at a pub wedged between the Forum and another club. The London pubs I drank in looked the same and all like something that better belongs in the mock version of the UK at EPCOT. They were so uniform they seemed like they were all apart of some sort of cliched London pub franchise. Same decor, same beer selection, same food on the menu. The only thing that separated them was the color of the paint on their walls and their interchangeable names, always "_____ and ____" Insert a mammal and a random noun in those blanks and you've got yourself a name for a London pub. One of my favorites: The Cock and the Clever.

A few of the Tube's main lines were still running so I wound up on a train with a few hundred local hipster kids heading home for the night. They look the same as Portland hipsters but what do they talk about? Rugby. I listened to a group of them arguing about the World Cup all the way back to the station at King's Cross.

On the verge of curling up in a corner in the subway, I broke down and hailed a cab. Three blocks later at a stoplight, we were surrounded. A gang of drunk goth girls wanted in the cab and they wanted in NOW. Beyond exhausted, I blubbered to the driver, "Dear, God WHAT DO THEY WANT?!" One's nose was plastered up against the window, smearing her makeup all over it. Another was slapping the Michael Caine-esque driver's side window. "I think they want to share your cab, mate," he explained. I stammered, the light turned green and he made the wise decision to hit the gas, leaving them standing in the street. Who knows what horrors the Tube strike had bested them with. Maybe they were in a Warriors-style battle to get across town. Maybe moments later they were attacked by a gang of teens in baseball uniforms. Or, more likely, they probably walked three blocks and got their own damn cab.

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This trip marked the first time I've ever gone on vacation anywhere by myself. My sister would meet up with me a week later in Paris. I'm sure when other people do this, they strike up conversations with strangers in pubs or try to hook up in whatever nightclub allows in tourists dressed in shorts and Nikes (Europe's all about Adidas). I'm too reserved and lazy for all that so I spent my first week overseas eaves-dropping.

At a Soho pub where a famous journalist supposedly drank himself to death, I decided to order absinthe. A bad move This immediately sparked a round of snide comments from a group of men in polo shirts at a nearby table. I could hear one of them mutter, "Probably spent the whole time waiting to get on the London Eye." "Naw, I spent the whole day at the British Museum, looking at all the loot your people outright stole from other nations." I wanted to spit this back at them but I kept my mouth shut.

The tiny Amelie French girl working my side of the bar looked confused. "What is....absinthe," she asked aloud. She wandered over to a gruff-looking bartender who rolled his eyes and dusted off a spoon and a bottle filled with green liquid that looked like it had been sitting on the top shelf for decades. She brought it over to me, telling me to step outside if I wanted to light up the sugar.

Years ago, a friend smuggled some absinthe back from London in a Scope bottle. One boring February night, we sat around his dorm room melting sugar and dipping it in glasses stolen from the university's cafeteria. I remember it making feel like I was floating and providing a pretty pleasant sense of euphoria for about fifteen minutes.

This was definitely not the sort of thing I should have been drinking in a pub filled with spiteful locals. I downed the absinthe, ordered a beer chaser and keep my eyes on the bar, listening to the conversation of two young businessmen next to me. One was drunk off his ass, lamenting a decision to hire "a bird" he desperately wanted to sleep with. The drunk owned a small design firm and the girl was later assigned to deal with two representatives from a store in the states called Target.

He and his staff had no clue what Target was when they were first contacted. Needless to say, she botched a deal that could have netted the company hundreds of thousands of pounds. The drunk struggled to explain what Target was to his colleague. "I think it's like Wal-Mart but the Americans don't protest against it. They like it more but there's fewer of them about."

The absinthe was tugging at my shirt-sleeve, imploring me to explain the Target chain to these two men but I kept my mouth shut. The drunk was still wondering if he should fire her when a dreadlock'ed bartender kicked us all out the door at 11:30. I read somewhere that pubs can now stay open late in London but, even in Soho, many of them still shut down early.

Unwilling to shell out another $25 US for cab fare, I hiked back to my hostel. The walk took an hour and half. Somewhere along the way I came around a corner and spotted a fox eating a hamburger out a Styrofoam container. On an empty street in a foreign land, half-drunk and dazed, it was the last thing I expected to see. I stared at the fox and it stared back before begrudgingly darting off into the shadows, annoyed that I had interrupted its meal. "Fucking tourists," I'm sure he was thinking. "Haven't you ever seen a fox eat a burger? Wooo! How exciting! Why don't you take a photo, wanker?"

And so I did.

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I caught two radically different Shakespeare productions in London. One night, after getting kicked out of the Tower of London for sneaking in five minutes from closing, by an elderly man in a Beefeater uniform no less, I wound up at the Globe Theatre. It's a recreation of Shakespeare's old digs located 900 meters away from the original. I had no ticket and that night's performance of The Merchant of Venice was sold out. While hunting for scalpers at a back gate, two drunk women approached me and gave me a ticket before wandering back to say, "Would it be terrible of us to ask you for money?" I gave them the 7 pounds and the $10 US in my wallet, all the cash I had on hand. They seemed happy to get anything for it two minutes from curtain call.

With the exception of electrical lighting, the theater is supposedly a faithful recreation of the original, right down to the hardwood seats. The audience on the floor has to stand, just like in the old days. By hour three, many of them were clearly weary, especially as the play drags on for another 30 minutes after a climatic trial scene.

While the play only had one guy dressed in drag, this was no stiff, "Shakespeare in the Park" production. All involved seemed determined to keep the show as lewd as it would have been in the 17th century. Any twist of verse that could be turned into a sex gag was, allowing the actors to hump the theater's columns and wag their pelvises around like Elvis during an epileptic fit. At another point, an actor fell over and puked fake vomit into the crowd. Despite the play's alleged subtext, I'm sure a deep kiss between Antonio and Bassanio wouldn't have gone over 400 years ago. On the walk back along the Thames, an elderly woman flagged down a girl on a bike. It was Nerissa, who was apparently heading home for the night with the Prince of Morocco. He patiently waited up ahead as the elderly lady repeatedly told her that the evening's performance was "brilliant."

Three weeks later before flying home, through circumstance, I wound up outside of a theater in Piccadilly Circus where Danny "Harry Potter' Radcliffe stripped down for a production of Equus last winter. I shelled out 20 pounds to watch Patrick Stewart star in a bloodsoaked Macbeth. While Captain Picard was probably too old for the role and paired up with a woman 25 years younger than him, he gave it his all in a twisted production that moved the play to a Bizarro World version of 50s Scotland overtaken by fascists. The stage was set in a mental ward. The Weird Sisters were portrayed as nuns, coaxing their prophecies out reanimated corpses in body bags instead of cauldrons.

Throughout, video projectors covered the walls in images of blood and marching soldiers and during one scene, a soldier flashed his penis at the crowd for some reason. Once the production rolled into act five, Lady Macbeth found herself contending with a water faucet spewing blood. As odd as it was to watch Professor Xavier brutally massacre a family on stage, it was even stranger to see him run around with an M-16 and shooting extras in the head. The show closed with him getting into a knife fight before a blood-covered Malcom returned to stage triumphantly holding his truncated head.

That's what I think Shakespeare in Love could have used more of: machine guns and beheadings.

Next time: Paris

Labels: Europe

I'm up to my pupils in photos and anecdotes from overseas so I guess I'll spend the next few weeks rolling them out. I'll try to shake things up with posts on other topics for anyone who frequents this blog and isn't interested in hearing about the night I drank absinthe and encountered a fox eating a Big Mac on a random street in London*. I know, I know, this is supposed to be a blog about Portland but I'm calling the shots around here and I wanna talk about wild animals in the UK who enjoy American-brand burgers.

Also: there will be Flickr galleries.

* If I did hallucinate this animal, well, now you're hallucinating too. Click here for a photo of the fox and his Big Mac. I wish this was a photo of 300 strippers flying around with 301 jet-packs but, hey, I had to take what London gave me.

Labels: Europe