Breakfast by Hunter S. Thompson

"I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked."

Hamlet's home

A view of Elsinore Castle from the ferry into Helsingør from Sweden.

Swedish meatballs

I'd had the Danish frikadeller and even cooked a batch one afternoon stuffed with Danablu. They were glorious. But Swedish köttbullar are something else entirely. Carrots, potatoes, pickled cucumbers and lingonberry jam on the side. Such rustic stuff, but exquisitely satisfying. The brunsås, or brown sauce, makes the dish. I had mine at a hotel cafe in Helsingborg by the bay, with a view across the Øresund at Helsingør/Elsinore and the castle on the coast where Hamlet used to brood.

Copenhagen Fashion Week

The Monocle's Tom Morris and Dan Hill think Copenhagen is becoming the world's "green laboratory", and here's a pedestrian street smack in the center of town with grass instead of asphalt. How cool would a neighborhood of streets like that be? I especially dig the outdoor cafe seating. Later that night, a DJ booth was set up at one of the intersections as part of Fashion Week and the street was filled with chic barefooted party-goers bopping their heads and swigging Carlsbergs.

Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen

In 1924 Werner Heisenberg began studying with the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, Niels Bohr. In September 1941 Heisenberg returned to Copenhagen to meet his old professor. He later wrote: "Late at night I walked under a clear and starry sky through the city, darkened, to Bohr."

They met at Bohr's home and took a walk through Ny-Carlsberg together. Heisenberg had come to talk to Bohr about "whether or not it was right for physicists to devote themselves in wartime to the uranium problem". Heisenberg was 39 then. Bohr was 55. Bohr was under German surveillance so Heisenberg only felt safe speaking in the vaguest of terms.

Unfortunately, this led Bohr to misread Hiesenberg and take all his foggy speech about nuclear weapons to mean that the Germans were in fact close to having one. Heisenberg could see what Bohr was thinking, but was too afraid to speak directly to clear the matter up. They argued about it for years, who'd said what to whom and what they'd meant and how it was taken. Later, historians inherited the problem.

I still like to imagine them, teacher and student, strolling down a dark Copenhagen alley and whispering about nuclear technology like a pair of spies.

Accomplishments by age

1: Christian Heinecken read the Pentateuch.
3: Mozart learned the harpsichord.
7: Fred Astaire performed on stage.
15: Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster.
17: Pele played in the World Cup final.
23: Keats wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn".
25: Orson Welles wrote and directed Citizen Kane.
27: Hemingway wrote his first novel, The Sun also Rises.
33: Emerson wrote "Nature".
37: Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel.
45: Foreman won the heavyweight title.
48: Umberto Eco wrote his first novel, The Name of the Rose.
54: Beethoven completed the 9th.
55: Picasso painted Guernica.
75: Hokusai painted 100 views of Fuji.
89: Schweitzer ran a hospital in Africa.

Dark dark Prag

When Milos Forman shot Amadeus he did it in Prague because, he said, "Communist inefficiency" had left the city as it was in the 18th century. It's also one of the best to survive WWII thanks to an epic defeat of the Nazis by Prague citizens and a deal they made not to drown the bastards if they left without damaging the beloved city. How to describe Prague?

It never lets you go, said Kafka, "this dear little mother has sharp claws." For Wagner, its beauty "left an impression...that will never fade". For Rodin, "the women of Prague, the way they walk and the way they are attired, so graceful and elegant, reminded me of Dante’s Paradise".

For me, it's a place best visited in the rain. The architectural splendor of Prague reaches the limits of beauty, but like Amsterdam this beauty comes with a sordid past. The darkness of the Jewish ghetto. Don Giovanni. Mucha. Kafka. Dvořák. Smetana. Freud. Husserl. Stoppard. Such exquisitely painful, frighteningly beautiful minds. What can one possibly say?

Nothing new comes from Prague now. Nothing I know of. Its buildings, its past, its music, are all untouchably lovely but utterly done. Prague is the world's prettiest museum, but who wants to live in a museum? No trip to Europe can possibly be complete without seeing a place as profoundly eye-opening and heart-rending as this is, but it isn't a place for a home. Not for me.

I went to this introductory program before my freshman year of uni and on the trip they took us to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and had us sit by a river and listen to Smetana's Moldau and then guess what it was about. I was the only one who figured it was about a river, but I'd never have guessed about the fairies and the hunters. It all sounded so sad to me. Seeing Prague, I get why. Even in a world of wonder, as Prague is, life is suffused with pain.

Mozart's Prague

"Meine Prager verstehen mich," Mozart once said. My Praguers understand me. According to Maynard Solomon's "Mozart: A Life", when The Marriage of Figaro opened in Prague after its Vienna premiere it was met with "unlimited applause". In Prague, he was beloved. His Prague fans even paid for him to visit them in 1787 to see the show himself. A week later he gave a private performance on 19 January 1787 where he played Symphony No.38 in D major for the first time. It became known as the Prague Symphony and Mozart considered that day one of the happiest of his entire life.

The Prague Symphony begins patiently. Such lazy starts were rare for Mozart's symphonies. Only the 36th and 39th share this. But you can hear echoes of the Don Giovanni overture here. The second movement isn't as tight as a typical Mozart, but the third slips in a flirty nimble flute. Anthony Hopkins (English composer, not the Welsh actor) said about the third movement that it "shows Mozart in an unusual mood, nearer to Beethoven's boisterousness than his fastidious taste normally allowed him to go."

The Viennese public was fickle toward Mozart. They hated him, they loved him. They loved him, they hated him. Allegedly when Emperor Joseph II heard The Abduction from the Seraglio, he said it had too many notes. But in Prague, no one questioned his genius. After Prague was absorbed by the Catholic Austrian Empire, part of the assimilation process involved requiring every teacher to compose and perform church music with their students. It not only helped turn them into Catholics, it made them avid musicians -- and lovers of the likes of Mozart. Plus, all the stuffy Prague nobles had left for the new capital in Vienna and what they left behind were a load of middle-class merchants who'd been musically educated through the Church but unlike their royal rulers, liked whatever was new.

But despite all the adoring fans, Mozart eventually left Prague. The musicians there simply weren't as good as in Vienna. Even the Praguers who could play well went to the new capital for work, and so did Mozart. But it was here that Mozart composed Don Giovanni in this very building. It's maybe the only one still standing in which Mozart worked, and performances of Don Giovanni can be seen here every night at 8PM. Kierkegaard adored Don Giovanni, thought it was one of the greatest works of art in history and wrote about it at length (and boringly, I find) in Either/Or. Flaubert said the three greatest things God ever created were the ocean, Hamlet and this opera.

Jan Hus

In the center of Prague a statue of Jan Hus watches over Týn Church. In the early 1400s Jan figured the Church should stop with the indulgences and Crusades. He wanted freedom for the Bohemian people too. The Church locked him up for a few years, then asked him if he still felt the same way. When he said yes, they burned him alive. Then to make sure he was really dead they ripped out his heart, nailed it to a stick and burned it again. Then they crushed his bones to dust. But too late for his ideas had already caught on and his followers, the Hussites, went on to profoundly influence what would become Protestantism. Prague was in fact one of the first Protestant cities. Interesting side note: while he was burning an old lady is said to have thrown a handful of sticks on the fire. Hus cried out "Sancta simplicitas!" or "Holy simplicity!" Czechs still say this, though in Czech ("Svatá prostoto!") when they see folks doing stupid things.

Alfons Mucha

Alfons Mucha (moo-ka) started as a humble painter and wound up a tool for Czech nationalism. In the end he painted bank notes, murals in government buildings, designed stamps, and his Art Nouveau style (characterized by floral, organic lines) is seen all over Prague today. For example the font of the Hotel Paris. Mucha was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and interrogated. He became ill and died shortly after his release.

My favorite Mucha lithographs are his 1896 ad for Biscuits Lefèvre-Utile and his 1897 Bières de la Meuse, which decorated my kitchen when I was in uni.

His style essentially founded Art Nouveau, which went on to influence Klimt and Gaudí as well as a number of Japanese manga artists and Cuban-American artist Joe Quesada, who did this image of Wolverine with Emma Frost and a katana.

Golem

Legend says 16th century rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezazel, the Maharal of Prague, made a man from clay and named it Golem. By writing the Hebrew word for 'life' on a slip of paper and putting it in the Golem's mouth, it came to life. Jorge Luis Borges described the Golem's awakening in a poem:

El rabí le explicaba el universo

"esto es mi pie; esto el tuyo, esto la soga."

y logró, al cabo de años, que el perverso

barriera bien o mal la sinagoga.

The rabbi explained the universe
"this is my foot; that is yours, this is rope."
and succeeded, after years, that the perverse
swept well or poorly the synagogue.

According to other tales, the Golem not only swept the synagogue but protected the entire Jewish ghetto. But one day the Maharal forgot to remove the slip of paper from the Golem's mouth and he went mad from lack of sleep, throwing Praguers into the river and tearing up the streets. The Maharal rushed out in the middle of a sermon and stopped the Golem.

Its large clay body was stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, the oldest active synagogue in Europe. Hundreds of years later, a Nazi officer crept into the attic to see if the stories were true. They found his crushed body in the middle of the synagogue lawn. Pictured here are the rungs leading to the door of the synagogue's attic.

The synagogue itself is simple, but pretty. They say it was built with stones taken from a temple in Jerusalem, to be returned again once the Messiah appears. Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

Prague marionettes

The Virgin Mary was possibly one of the earliest puppets used. They called it Little Mary. Or in French, Marionette. The Salzburg Marionette Theatre still does full-length marionette operas, but they're popular in Berlin and also Prague where the National Marionette Theatre does a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which was composed in the heart of the city. The current master of marionettes in Prague is Miroslav Trejtnar.

I loved this alley so much I spent my last day there for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It reminds me of a wonderful place in Berlin with a similar Bohemian feel. Real chill. It's actually a collection of separately owned Italian shops that operate together. The Italian cook was great. The shop actually looks like a boutique grocery store inside -- just a collection of the freshest ingredients, cuts of meat from a local Czech farmer, herbs and spices grown right there in the alley, everything else straight from Italy -- even the bread's brought in daily from l'Italia. There's no menu either. You simply order what you want, in any portion you please, according to how hungry you are or how much you want to spend. Absolutely fantastic. Directly around the corner from the Prague clock at Karlova 25.

Legends say 16th century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezazel, or Maharal, created a man from earth to help protect the Jewish ghetto of Prague. The creature was know as Golem. By writing the Hebrew word for life on a slip of paper and putting it in the Golem's mouth, it came to life. One day Maharal forget to remove the paper to let the golem rest and the Golem became so tired it went mad, throwing people into the Moldau and destroying the streets. Maharal rushed down to deactivate the Golem and its body was thereafter stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue. That's the door to the attic pictured above. They say a Nazi crept inside during the war to see if the stories of the Golem were true and they found his crushed body where it landed in the synagogue lawn.

Side note: the Old New Synagogue is Europe's oldest active synagogue, finished in 1270. The stones used in its construction allegedly come from the temple in Jerusalem, to be returned after the Messiah appears. Not a bad deal.

By rubbing these plates on the Charles Bridge it's said you'll return to Prague before you die.

Take a loaf and divy it into whatever size you please. Some of the Czech shops also sell bread rolls that are quite filling for 1.90 crowns (0.05 euros).

I find this very cool. It's a synagogue that look like a mosque. The reason is the Moorish muslims of Iberia were enlightened in their attitude toward other faiths, at a time when few other places made Jews feel safe, so the Jews that later came to Prague lived happily under the Caliphate of Córdoba
long enough to pick up a few architectural tricks.

Just beside the lame Prague clock is a doorway to the church that almost no one pays attention to by which I reckon has to be one of the coolest doors I've ever seen. Imagine that being the door to your house. Ka-BOOM! Welcome, fools.

Pražský orloj

Prague's astronomical clock is astronomically disappointing. People stand there for over thirty minutes to see it come to life and when it finally does, the figures' limbs shift all of two inches like broken Disney animatronics, the little rooster jerks its stupid wings, and you see the tourists who've been waiting all that time die a little inside.

The four figures along the top are the fears of the Church. There's Vanity, checking himself out in a mirror, as Vanity does. There's the Jewish moneylender. Death of course. Then on the end the Turkish muslim who lures you from the Lord with his sweet sweet songs.

The Náměstí Míru escalators

When I got in to Náměstí Míru I started running up the steps, excited to be here, before I figured either someone had drugged me on the train or this was the world's longest escalator. Turns out it's the third longest: 88 m. The first and second are in the Moscow and Kiev metros. 142 m in Moscow, with no bathroom breaks.

These old Soviet automobiles remind me of the kind of thing you draw when you're a kid: eight right angles with two circles whacked across the bottom. I hear they run like rubbish too. This one was parked outside my hostel in Prague. But I don't know, with some silver chrome and a red paint job...

There's a similar drink in The Bahamas called Vita Malt. It was my favorite as a kid so I was overjoyed to find this in the laundrymat in Berlin. Das Original.

A sunny afternoon sat by the park.

Berliner Graffiti

Berliner Mauer

After WWII Germany was divided between the Americans, Soviets, British and later French. Berlin was divided similarly, with the Soviets getting the eastern half, and at first this division only existed on paper. When people began leaving the city, the Soviets tried to prevent this by building a wall around the western border. In other words, they build a wall around the back half of the Allies' territory, but the Allied powers allowed it because then they had something to use in their rhetoric against Communism: "look what they do! They wall people in!" Then the Americans did something very sneaky. They made it known that any East Berliner who approached a U.S. soldier and looked him in the eyes with one hand over their heart and said "I hate Communism" would be given an immediate and free ticket to U.S.-occupied southern Germany. The population drain on East Berlin was sudden and severe. To try to stem the tide of emigrants, a wall was built in 1961 separating east and West Berlin.
At first the wall was only a knee-high roll of barbed wire. Many folks simply found a quiet section of the wall and hopped right over. A year later the wire fence was improved. In 1965 it was replaced by a much taller concrete structure, followed by a bed of nails that would either stop tanks or shred human feet right through their boots. Behind the bed of nails was a death strip, or stretch of open sand that made it easy for the guards perched at one of the 116 watchtowers to spot and pick off runners.

Not wanting to rule with an iron fist, Gorbachev came to power giving a bit of leeway to the eastern European states, and the first thing that happened was that Hungary and Czechoslovakia opened their borders allowing East Berliners to pass around and back into West Berlin by way of Prague. Something had to be done before East Berlin was completely empty, so the government decided to announce the wall would be opened to passport holders. This would give people something to hope for and less of a reason to flee, meanwhile the government could take its sweet time actually issuing the passports -- if ever. It was the perfect solution.

Enter Günter Schabowski. Spokesman for the SED Politburo and party boss in East Berlin, he stepped out to give a public address on live television on 9 November 1989. As he was taking to the podium, someone handed him a note announced the new government plan concerning passports. Günter Schabowski stood before the world and went on for some time about unimportant bureaucratic pablum, but then just as he was about to leave the podium, he withdrew the note from his back pocket and gave it a read. Doing a double-take, he announced that the wall was to be opened. Reporters fell out of their seats. Who would qualify? What documents would be required? "In my opinion," he said as he looked over the sheet of paper and found no further details, "none." The room exploded in confusion. When would this come into effect?! "In my opinion," he said, looking again at the unhelpful piece of paper, "this will come into effect...immediately." Just like that, the Berlin Wall came down.

Folks swarmed the wall by the hundreds of thousands and the guards, not knowing what had happened and faced with the cries of so many insisting a government announcement had been made granting full and immediate access, laid down their guns and let them through. When they got on to the other side, they took hammers and rocks and hands and feet and brought every blocks of the western wall down that they possibly could. The rumors are not true: it wasn't a Hasselhoff song playing over the wall that inspired the whole of East Berlin to tear down the wall. This didn't stop David from complaining when he came to Berlin later though: "I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie." I'd refer him to the pages of history but hey, no one hassles the Hoff.

One of the most beautiful spots in Berlin is right here, around the corner from the eerie stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It doesn't look like much, but take a closer look. The pale gravel. The splotches of grass. The oddly spaced linden trees. Underneath this plot of land lies the Führerbunker, where Hitler spent his last days on earth. As the war was ending he realized Germans weren't all he'd thought they were and so he decided that if he was going down he was going to take the German people, disappointment that they were, down with him.

He made it mandatory for all men of age to defend the cities. When they were all shot to death or hung from trees for failing to fight, he did the only other thing he could: he sacrificed the children too. Too young to wear helmet or drive tanks or even carry guns, the first regiment of children stood on this ground while Hitler handed them grenades and sent them off on their bicycles to battle the Soviet tanks.

Stories of the war often paint it black and white. Good and evil. But it wasn't so clear cut. When the Soviets entered the city they wasn't a fight to be had. Hundreds of thousands of men were hanging from trees and the women had gone into their closets for their weddings dresses or bed sheets or anything at all that was white and hung it from their balconies to indicate surrender and just like that, Berlin fell. During Soviet occupation around 80% of the women left in Berlin were raped by Soviet soldiers an average of 10-20 times each.

Today tourists can go to Checkpoint Charlie, one of the crossing points in the Berlin wall, to have their picture taken with people dressed as Soviet soldiers. How is this different than having your picture taken with some dude in Nazi gear? What's more, the idiots who dress up like this and dance around at Checkpoint Charlie are actually German porn stars. They do the Checkpoint Charlie thing by day cause they can charge tourists 5 euro to stamp their passports with a Berlin wall crossing point stamp. This stamp officially invalidates one's passport. So tourists are unknowingly paying porn stars 5 euro to render their passports useless, all while funding the grossly inappropriate behavior of these Arschlöcher.

But back to the bunker. After the war they were worried it would become some sort of shrine to Hitler so they tried blowing it up, till they remembered it was designed not to be blown up. What then could they do with it? They didn't want to build a museum, but they couldn't destroy it, so what then? Make it a car park.

It's brilliant really, and such a twist of history that the exact site of the end of World War II, the place where they entered Hitler's chambers and found him with a bullet in his forehead and a cyanide capsule in his mouth and knew the war was finally won, that this place, possibly the most important historical site in contemporary Western history, is nothing but a car park.

Brandenburg Gate has the goddess of peace riding a chariot on top and is one of the only statues of a clothed goddess in all of Europe because the king was worried people arriving from Brandenburg would be greeted by her divine ass. It was later decided to change her identity to Nike, goddess of victory, shortly before Germany lost both world wars. Oh, history how I love you.

Gendarmenmarkt

This is one of the most beautiful things in Berlin, the Französische Dom or French Cathedral, sitting on the Gendarmenmarkt which bears a French name in honor of the Huguenots who fled to Berlin to escape persecution. Berlin had a reputation for religious tolerance. The atheist King Frederick II built a Catholic church right in front of his home, now Humboldt University, just to show people were welcome to worship as they pleased. Jews from all over Europe came to Berlin to live in peace, and when the Huguenots came there were so many of them (they made up about a quarter of Berlin's population) that King Frederick said they ought to build a church to welcome their new guests. So, imagine this, all the Catholics of Berlin got together and built their Protestant guests this building. Then as if that isn't touching enough, the Huguenots returned the favor and directly across from the Catholic-built Protestant church stands a Protestant-built Catholic church, the Deutscher Dom. King Frederick the atheist then slapped a concert hall between them just to keep things balanced.

Humboldt-Universität

This is the Royal Library of Humboldt University. Founded in 1810 the main building was originally meant to be King Frederick II's home but he decided Potsdam, Berlin's Versailles, was much lovelier so he gave this to his kid brother as a wedding present. Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Einstein, Planck, Marx, Engels, de Saussure, Bismarck, WEB Du Bois -- all went here. Goebbels burned 20,000 books here in 1933. There's a library full of empty shelves fit to hold the books that were lost and a plaque bearing a quote by Heinrich Heine, also a Humboldt alumnus, with these prophetic words:

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen".

"That was only a prelude, where they burn books, they eventually burn people".

Berliner Dom

Mauer Flea Market

I spent the day at Mauer Park. Sundays have fantastic flea markets there. You could walk around for hours getting lost in the crowd. I sat atop the hill on a giant swing and watched some live karaoke -- there were actually loads of people there for it and more than a few of the singers were carrying a damn fine pair of lungs. In the evening there was Creole bluegrass band playing near the street and a Bohemian Reggae group jamming under some oaks. People were just crowded around stomping feet and clapping hands. Great vibe.

Berlin is amazing but sad when you're alone. The kids at the hostel have all been quite young, the guys mostly prowling for sex and the ladies keeping a bit to themselves. Heaps of Brazilians, everyone's plenty friendly, but meeting deeply cool people hasn't been possible. But of course such people are rare wherever you go, though can be harder to bump into when you're on the road.

Beautiful Berlin

Belgian fries

French fries are actually not French at all, they're Belgian. Belgians do speak French, so maybe that explains the confusion, but in the land where they're from folks call them frites and the best fritkot is meant to be Maison Antoine. I had mine with Andalouse mayo cause I'd read that was the local favorite. Actually, I prefer the frites I had in Amsterdam. They were Belgian style though. Not at all like regular French fries. The secret to the perfect frite is frying it fast enough to create a crisp shell that not only adds texture but traps just the right amount of moisture inside. Too much moisture and you get soggy fries. Too little and you get less flavor. It's an art, and the Belgians have perfected it. But far better than the frites are the wafels. I'd never had anything like this in my life. Crisp, chewy, feather-light. A delight to eat.
I spent the afternoon visiting cheese and chocolate shops. Belgian chocolate is amazing but actually not so impressive since it's available around the world. It wasn't anything I'd never had before, unlike the wafel or frites. Brussels is also famous for its mussels, so I went to Chez Léon for the city's best. Good, I must say. Not mind-blowing though. I saw next to two older gentlemen, a Pole and Spanish-German, both family men in their forties. We had drinks at Delerium Tremens after and I fell in love with the Rodenbach, a Flanders Red Ale, which beerhunter Michael Jackson (not the singer) called the world's most refreshing beer. But...
Then I went to Beer Circus, probably the best beer shop on the planet, housing hundreds and hundreds of Belgian beer, and had this little honey. What a gorgeous piece of work.

Korenveld met kraaien, Wheatfield with Crows

One of my favorite paintings in the Rijks is Thomas de Keyser's Group Portrait of an Unindentified Body. Rembrandt's best paintings were his self-portraits, but it's impossible for me to take any one of them alone. They all fit into one idea, the idea of a man trying to understand himself, and in the process he gives us something more than a series of paintings. He gives us a record of his soul as he gradually accepts that his life will never be what he wanted it to be. I know how that feels, and I find his vulnerability all so beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

De Keyser was one of the painters Rembrandt admired. You see the same darkness, but de Keyser's brushstrokes are cleaner and this gives such a power of expression to these men's faces. The texture of their skin. The exactness of their expressions. Above all, their profound eyes. What Rembrandt gave is more valuable to me, but I find this paintings more beautiful than any single Rembrandt. Another painting that touches me is Verner van den Valckett's Portrait of a Man with Ring. He's a ringmaker, proud of his trade, finely dressed. I like the white collar that frames his face, the blackness around that, the grey concrete windowsill.
It's simple, but not so simple. This was the 17th century. The British Empire would have an area greater than the surface of the Moon and London would rule it all, but before that the Dutch were the greatest colonial power and Amsterdam was the financial center of the world. All these paintings of merchants and guild masters by the great Dutch artists are essentially a celebration of colonialism. You can't divorce colonialism from its horrors, and Dutch colonialism was particularly horrible. All of Amsterdam's buildings too, also so beautiful and yet also products of the same wealth generated by colonialism. These are all the things that ran through my head while I walked through Vondelpark. I happened across an outdoor concert and sat for a while. A guy was playing his cello like it was a banjo while another fella sang in Swahili.
It was an amazing day. After the park, I went to the van Gogh museum and standing in front of Wheatfield with Crows is probably my favorite thing I've done in Europe so far. But again I thought about colonialism and how van Gogh was all about vividness. That was his thing. He was always trying to get the most powerful colors. He even moved to Arles because he thought the colors there would be as vivid as the ones from his beloved Japanese prints. Matisse once said that a bucketful of red is redder than a thimbleful of red. That's why he slammed on curtains of color and later gave up his paintbrush for a pair of ultra-long scissors, cutting shapes out of swaths of colored paper. It reminds me of van Gogh, but all his colors and color inspiration was again come from afar and wouldn't have happened if the Dutch weren't colonialists.

About van Gogh's wheatfield: I don't find it sad at all. It was painting near the very end of his life, yes, but when I look at it I see such striking color. Vivid blue, yellow, black, those gold wheat edges and pale blue patches -- and those breaking v-lines that cut the composition. It's like an attack. But then look: the clay path shines and there's a touch of blue there too. It's a puddle. The storm has already passed. Light is breaking through the clouds.

Barney's Farm

My favorite thing to do in Amsterdam is walk. Beyond the busier paths are quiet canal streets lined with elms and the faces of old buildings.

Amsterdam