Let's Get Trained

So, you've been hired by Macy's. You get a tiny break, since they don't throw you directly onto the floor. First, they throw you into a room full of computers and POSs (seriously – it stands for Point of Sale, but it has to be one of the most unfortunate acronyms ever conceived) and they make you wait. I've already run through a number of synonyms for dreary and dingy in my last post, but I managed to find one that I like better – seamy. The room is seamy. In keeping with the best Macy's tradition, you are left waiting, along with your other confused new hires, before anyone bothers to sort out who belongs in which training room (sales gets a different room from support which gets a different room from the Santaland folk). When they finally decide that you belong in the room, you get to sit and wait again as a clutch of HR personnel hunt down paperwork and comb through lists making sure that they made the right decision on whether they let you into the right room. Their original decision is by no means final.

Most of the fuss was over the sign in sheet and what to do with the people who weren't on the sign in sheet. For the extremely unlucky, it might be scheduling another early day at least a week later. For others it meant signing the sheet by hand. That required them to pass out a new sign in sheet, so everybody had to sign in again. Then there was the time sheet (which they insisted you sign before you had every clocked out, which is always a no-no in the real world – it's like leaving a signed blank check lying around. Not that Macy's cared). It took about forty five minutes to sort out the dos and don'ts of the two sheets and the members of your training party finally settles into a discernible pattern.

In the meantime, no one has given you anything to do, so if you are fairly certain that you are in the right room, you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs and watch the inefficiency and bureaucratic machinations unfold in slow motion. Once the ponderous decision making process has settled down into a semblance of certainty and lent the affair some stability, you begin. You begin the process . . . of filling out your HR forms, various bits of information organized neatly for various government authorities interested in your income (or lack thereof). Most of these forms are online, which requires a silly process of logging in to the system with your employee number (remember that white form? Well, you need it now. You needed to present it to get into the room and you need every time an HR person is confused about your existence or any question that you have posed to them). There are two astonishing facts about the process of filling out all of these forms. The first is that you have to do it at all. I have no idea what regulatory or legal walls exist between macysjobs.com and the internal site, but you have to give up all of the information that these forms require when you apply. So when you log in with your unique employee number, it is apparently ridiculous to expect all of those forms to have been filled out in their entirety and they await only your approval. But that didn't happen. Instead, you have to type your name and your social and your address several times to satisfy the bureaucratic monster at the center of these machines.

The second astonishing fact is that there remains one or two forms that you have to fill out by hand for no obvious reason whatsoever. And one of these forms, a classic bit of tax form obfuscation designed to confound and trap the unwary into making inadvertently false statements about their tax status. On top of that, if you use a ball point pen and you make a mistake, the Macy's HR people make you fill out the form again. Because, and they say this with a straight face mind you, that unless it is perfect the first time, if you so much as double up on one letter or number in the interests of clarity, the New York bureaucrat responsible for processing the form will assume that someone has tampered with the form and reject it out of hand (presumably Macy's and without even the thinnest glimmer of insight into why someone would tamper with a form in a way that makes it more legible). So you have to get it exactly right and without any problems from your ballpoint pen. I dare you to attempt the experiment. Take out a clean sheet of paper, write out your address, your phone number, and your social security number and see how many times a used ball point pen causes legibility problems. I'll wait.

The mistakes you make on those forms will follow you into the next session, which is a bizarre mixture of lecture and interrogation, but we will get to that special torture in a moment. There are too many people in the room to completely let them off the hook. The first thing that will strike you when looking over the room is that holiday managers are in the same room as you. That makes some sense when all you are doing is filling out forms (something that took about two hours for about twenty people). But when they follow you into the lecture on how to sell the Macy's way (which isn't strictly speaking different than selling things any other way, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself). There is a wide range of socio-economic levels and levels of education in the room. There are several people who are clearly college students or recent graduates and who simply need some extra money over the holidays. They are generally betrayed by their age and their quality of their clothing. Then you have the people who are hoping to turn this temporary position into something permanent with Macy's after the holiday is over. They are a little bit older by and large. Then you have the prospective managers and executives (yes, I said executives). They are obvious by their age or their deportment. And then you have the people who probably shouldn't have been hired at all. I mentioned last time that the most important characteristic that Macy's is looking for is not being a thief and a stated willingness to report thieves. One of the most important documents we were to fill out was the direct deposit form. Direct deposit is generally desirable, but in Macy's case, it is doubly so, since the only other way to get your check is to wait in line at a place ominously called the Vault during regular business hours (heaven forbid that anyone in human resources be around to help employees after six pm), a wait that our hosts inform us could last at least an hour every Friday (one piece of mercy of the Macy's system is getting paid by the week). At hearing what it requires to get direct deposit, namely a bank account, the woman next to me talked to me about how little she trusts banks. Didn't trust them at all. She was shortly to be flummoxed almost completely by the cash register, but that's tomorrow (tomorrow's training, not tomorrow blog time). To help us wrap our heads around direct deposit and speed that path along, Macy's kindly hosted a group of Chase hawking their checking and savings accounts and offering to open one on the spot, with a $100 gift card as a sweetener (I'll be taking them up on that one shortly). I would have thought such a presentation much more crass and insulting if I weren't sitting next to a woman who was completely unbanked, in the graceless phrase of the industry. When you take that into consideration, Chase and Macy's are doing the often poor people that Macy's hires a huge solid. It is one of the few things that Macy's gets right, though the flagrant salesmanship of the Chase team made it apparent that even when good comes of Macy's actions, it is always tempered by incompetence and inefficiency.

When it came to filling out all of those forms, which took far too long and presaged the maddening inability of the trainers to, you know, train, this woman was constantly stymied and needed help. I seriously doubt that she filled any of the forms out herself. You'd think that some kind of skills test would be the final arbiter of hiring because this woman would be a major drag on the sales floor (just wait until she is ringing up someone who is in a hurry and finishing up a shopping day with something that isn't from her area – a nightmare of customer service). But no, this woman had been hired by Macy's and would shortly hit the floor to terrorize customers already harried by the pressures of the world's largest and most illogically laid out department store.

It got much worse for her when Macy's revealed it's associate discount policy: you have to have a Macy's credit card to get it and your discount shows up on your bill, not at the register. It is veering dangerously close to company money. If you want the discount, you have to have some kind of Macy's credit card, either the line of credit (which that unbanked woman was not going to get) or a pre-paid card, which they discourage you from using. Since your discount occurs “back of house” (a phrase so meaningless that I didn't know what it meant for a long time), meaning your discount is applied to your balance, not to your purchase. For example, if you buy a $100 item, your balance will be $80, but at the register, it will look like you have paid $100. This is awkward for the pre-paid card, since you actually have to have the $100 on the card in order to buy your item. You will just end up with a credit. It turns out there is a trick to treating the Macy's card like a pre-paid card since you can make a payment at any register, as soon as you make the purchase. It's better than the pre-paid because you don't have to waste value on the card (which from Macy's point of view isn't a waste – based on my experience with the Bon-Ton, I'd say that employees of department stores are some of the most dedicated customer's of those stores). Macy's Credit Card will be the subject of another blog post, don't worry.

The best part about filling out all those forms is where you digitally sign the code of conduct. Every company in the world has a code of conduct, as does every school, and they all generally go out of their way to construct the document so that you have to read it before you sign the document that says you read it and agree to abide by it. I have no idea how legally binding that document is frankly, but I know that you could get out of any lawsuit that results from violating the Macy's code because you will be told explicitly not to waste time reading it; just skip to the bottom and say that you have nothing to divulge regarding past violations (meaning things done in the past which would be considered violations even though you weren't an employee at the time) and that you had read it. It was the real physical equivalent of skipping the licensing terms on software. You know the annoying part of installing any program, the part where it makes you scroll all the way down before “Agree” is highlighted as an option. It was a stunning admission on the part of the Macy's trainers that their code of conduct was useless. We were encouraged to read the 50 page document at out leisure. It is only available online through the employee website (InSite – get it? Yeah, me neither).

After hours had been wasted filling out forms that we should have only needed to rubber stamp, rubber stamping forms that required our signature, and generally waiting around watching the trainers waste time, I mean work, you will be herded into another room down the hall. In the computer room, you were told explicitly that you would not be allowed to eat or drink in this or any other training room. That made sense in the computer room. It didn't make any sense in what was essentially a converted hallway. Perhaps it just meant that they could give up all pretense of cleaning the room. It would save them the money it would take for a janitor to do the work. There were clearly double doors on both sides of the room and you could hear the raucous cacophony of the employee break room next door. In my case, the most immediately striking thing about the room was how cold it was. It wasn't hard to spot the broken window that was letting all the cold air in. This was our home for the next couple of hours.

In this room you will learn several things, almost none of them the lessons that Macy's wants you to learn. They do have a sales philosophy articulated by the acronym MAGIC. Meet and make a connection, Ask questions and listen closely, Give options, give advice, Inspire to buy and sell more(!), and Celebrate the purchase. But that's all marketing speak for “Be nice, be knowledgeable, remember what your job is, and make people happy they bought something.” The fact that it took hours to drill this into the new recruits (including the executives and managers, I might add, a soul crushing blow at the beginning of employment that would almost be enough to make me quit on the spot since it shows such dedication and care on the part of Macy's corporate). Much worse is the incredible incompetence of the people presenting the information. We were familiar with them from the enervating experiencing of filling out all of those forms, mostly since nearly everyone had that New York tax from rejected for some arcane reason or another at least once (three times for me). Their crowd management skills did not exist or if they did exist, they were never on display. When it came to the actual lectures though, their disinterest was palpable. They tag-teamed the presentation, the one seemed engaged at least, she stood up, actively sought responses from the dulled minds of her audience. But she was hampered by the fact that she didn't actually know the material very well and she was hopeless at warming the room up. Like most bad teachers, she defaulted to angry frustration far too often, though the next trainer took that anger and snarkiness to another level. “No.” “Wrong.” She was so bored by her work that she didn't bother to stand and she picked mercilessly on the crowd, passing a binder and cards along to be read by people who have no desire or inclination to declaim, let alone have any idea how to do it well. That should be the trainer's job. She was at least entertaining when she went off script and told us about the outrageous ways the customers and employees would steal and her shopping habits as a stewardess based out of Singapore.

Finally, the agony of that silly training was over and it is time to be subjected to another presentation, this time from the hilarious Loss Prevention personnel. I know that some marketer or PR guy decided that store detective or something along those lines said the wrong thing, but Loss Prevention is a soulless euphemism full of all the coded cynicism and distrust that corporations can muster, especially since the vast majority of loss prevention measures are aimed at employees. On that high note, the day ended and we could finally leave the building on a day that started at eight in the morning (or six in the morning if you had to commute like I did). The next day will be worse. It will be shorter, but that just condenses the horror.

Register training is both a sad necessity and a ridiculous task. Modern point of sale software, especially at the high level that Macy's requires guide their users through each step of the process. All you really have to do is read the prompts and fill out the requested fields. Macy's current POS terminals are NCR's top of the line RealPOS 80XRT (remember what I said about unfortunate acronyms?). I have a hard time believing that anyone needs a quad-core cash register, but it's available if you need it. Within two hours you can have all of the basic functions of the terminal down and they can throw you out onto the sales floor confident that you can handle that aspect of customer service, the easiest part. There are lots of other parts, especially knowing the practical running conditions of the store (how long breaks will be during what shift, what to do when you open, what to do when you close, where the stock rooms are, how to get in touch with a manager, etc). They don't bother helping you out with that. But that's another story.

Instead, register training, as well as the odds and ends of proper maintenance, lasts for over five hours. There is no description for the tedium of being chained to a computer via headphones doing the same thing over and over again without even the validation that doing it all on the floor gives you. The training lacks all focus or thought too. You are given fake checks and told to use the terminals nearby but then no one checks to make sure you have run the transaction properly. About a third of the time, the computer wants you to run through the transaction on the computer and not the terminal. You would think that this would prove you can do it, but the computer doesn't give you options; there's no way to get it wrong. The room is full of terminals that you are supposed to use, but there is only one trainer whose sole job it appears to be to hold the incompetent new hires' hands. There is no way to be unhired just because you can't use a computer, a sad state of affairs for the nice customers just trying to finish up their holiday shopping.

That would be horror enough to complete this epic tale of woe and degradation, but in my case, there were two more ridiculous affronts to my reason and attention. The first thing that happens after you complete training is that they give you your schedule. Except for me. In my case, they couldn't find the sched. They asked for that white piece of paper again, the one with my requisition number. They didn't say that I should bring it, but after all the “Can I see your white paper?” action yesterday, I knew that I wasn't going to be without it. They asked for it. After twenty more minutes, it turns out that I would not be working the next week, but the week after that. So I had been trained, but wouldn't be working for another week and a half. And then there was the tour.

There is no way to do justice to a ten story department store on a whirlwind tour trying to explain both the store and where each of the twenty people following you around is going to work. It took far too long to complete the tour and when I got to my first day of work, a week and a half later, it turns out that my tour guide had told me to work on the wrong floor in the wrong area. It was a great introduction to the next three weeks.

Welcome to the Assembly Line

I realize that my last post may have involved too many of the kind of geeky numbers that I enjoy immersing myself in, so I want to continue this series on Macy's with some of my personal experiences.

I started my time in New York looking to snag that elusive first internship, so Macy's was deep into hiring for the holiday season when I finally got around to looking for a real job to get me from getting the news about being a production assistant to actually being a production assistant. As with so many massive employers these days, Macy's begins their hiring process online (www.macysjobs.com if you are super curious). Macy's gets you to work before they even hire you by making you fill out an extensive application, including those annoying personality inventories which are meant to weed out the dumb potential thieves (though frankly, I am positive that the results of these questionnaires are simply ignored by an overworked HR department). It took me between forty minutes to an hour to apply. If that seems excessive, then you and I agree.

Eventually, someone makes an executive decisions and you get an invite. Macy's gives you a time to be at the Herald Square store. You are instructed to head to the 8th floor, which in addition to being home to Santaland, Au Bon Pain, and Ladies Outerwear, is also Human Resources central for the store (and possibly for the entire region). Your first trip to HR goes through the employees entrance on 7th Ave, a door that is easy to miss except for the crowd of six to ten people dressed in black sipping on coffee avoiding getting to work. The entrance to the store is a bad omen. The hallway is dingy and dirty. The exposed pipes are rusty and frequently dripping with some unknown liquid with clearly corrosive properties. The rusty cage protecting the stairwell up into the store proper is a sign as well. The uncomfortable truth of your future place of work is that the infrastructure of the store is clearly hurting.

Once you make it down the scary hallway and up the intimidating stairwell, you are immediately confronted with an ultra sophisticated security setup – another narrow hallway guarded on one side by a bored security guard who manages to look menacing and disinterested at the same time and on the other by the vendor sign-in window and the vendor coat and bag check. To the left, is a tiny alcove filled with crappy old chairs that serves as a holding area until an HR person comes to wave you past security without a pat down, search of backscatter scan of your person. The lesson of this is that they are more worried about the people leaving the building (that would be the employees). Your HR guide shepherds you into the elevator for the quick jaunt to the eighth floor via the back way. 

Once you get to the eighth floor, you are awarded with another dismal holding room full of chairs, though this room at least has the space for all the silent hopefuls staring at the Human Resources people beavering away in their glass enclosure. Their job is a mystery but it involves taking questions and looking like they are busy (knowing what I know now, I bet the company is giving them something idiotic to do that makes them simultaneously busy and unproductive). On the other side of the room is the computers for those who want to apply to Macy's in store rather than in their pajamas. The floor hums with activity as gregarious employees who have nothing better to do than chat with each other as they meander between the places they may or not supposed to be. At your first trip to the woman behind the glass (what is it about HR that makes it primarily female?), she has you fill out a few tidbits of information and then directs you to the security guard who prevents shoppers from accidentally wandering into the logistical nerve center of the region (or during the holidays, the home of an endless procession of children and parents waiting on line to see Santa). The security guard takes your ID and gives you a bright pink pass. Then you go back to the dreary holding cell and you wait. 

About twenty minutes past the time you were supposed to be there, you are invited into an interview room where as many as six prospective associates and managers are being interviewed at once. There is very little privacy in there and as far as I could tell, there was little of substance being asked for except to glean what I thought they wanted to hear about stealing - yes, stealing is wrong. Yes, I will narc on anyone I see stealing, etc. If you convince her that you are sincere about not stealing and committed to squealing on those who do, she will tell you to go back out into the awful sitting area and wait. Thank the Lord for technology because you will spend the next half an hour to forty five minutes surfing the net on your mobile internet device. No one reads actual books anymore.

Eventually, a different woman will bring you back into the interview room, and sketch the general shape of what to expect from being employed by Macy's over the holidays, things like what department you'll be working, dress code, and wages. Macy's has a theatrical approach to dress. Everyone (with a few exceptions, usually based on whether you make commission or not) is expected to wear black and for once, women have more options than men, because most men are expected to wear suit jackets.

And then there is the matter of pay. I'm searching for a word to describe the pay for an associate at Macy's. Only one word comes to mind: derisory (such a fun word, especially when you say it out loud). Eight dollars an hour. Eight. I admit to being a bit stunned by that. For one, burger flippers at McDonald's make 7.25, since that's the minimum and Macy's customers have a right to expect more service from their cashiers than from McD's cashiers. It's not entirely out of line with what other retailers pay though. I heard rumors that Express pays their employees minimum as well, which is utterly absurd considering the level of fashion expected from Express employees. Apple is at the other end of that scale. They pay fourteen dollar an hour, for essentially the same job, only easier because there isn't an Apple Store in the world that occupies nine stories of an entire New York City block. I would also like to point out that I was paid more than eight dollars an hour to work at the Bon Ton in York, PA almost six years ago. If there is a better benchmark for wage stagnation over the least half decade, I don't know it (it probably involves inflation adjusted purchasing power parity, but hey, that's not the kind of analysis that's we're doing here). 

Where was I? Oh yes, the woman had given you the down low. The next step is getting your ID back from the security guard (no one has ever explained why that security guard is in charge of my ID up until you get hired, but not afterward). Once you get your ID back, you are permitted to wait again, albeit in a different room. The eighth floor is a warren of cramped rooms that stretch your ability to come up with exotic synonyms for dismal and dreary. Let's call it utilitarian, since it is dominated by the desks and work stations of the HR managers (again predominantly women) who process the already copious amount of paperwork generated by hiring a temporary sales associate. The most important piece of paper is essentially a P.O. Or requisition and the product being ordered is you, which is (another) disturbing glimpse into Macy's inner workings. It turns out, that req number I had originally been given had already been used. That necessitated an additional wait, while they tracked down the woman who had briefed me (not the woman who had interviewed me) so she could sign the new form.

Your next bit of business is to choose two days for the completion of your Macy's training (I was surprised that they had any training at all, but that training session is a whole other topic, one that I can only address when I no longer work for Macy's). The whole thing was appallingly old fashioned, with these women dedicated to processing endless mountains of paper, stuck in this tiny room dealing with people and computers. Every. Day. Once you get that form, the one with the requisition number, the one that every HR person who talk to or even glance at or question during training (I need to go to the bathroom. Can I see your form?), you have been hired by Macy's.

During training, one of the HR people let slip that Macy's hires twenty five hundred, that's two thousand and five hundred, temporary employees for the holiday season at the Herald Square store. The entire set up, from signing up for your user id on macysjobs.com, to sitting with the HR ladies while they gossip and do your mindless paperwork, is a grinding machine, the kind of low power, high maintenance machine that passed for race cars in the fifties. You look at engines today and wonder what those guys in the fifties were doing only getting three hundred horses out of a V8 that big, when you should be getting six or seven. Here is Macy's with a huge HR department, 24 billion dollars in revenue and they still haven't graduated their HR procedures from the fifties and their IT department is stuck in the eighties. Macyjobs makes a good fist of things, but it's a giant database and the last thing that I or anyone else interested in hiring me should be doing is writing my name on a form, and yet that happened on countless occasions during the two hours between when I was interviewed and when I was hired. The Macy's I've been hired by is a relic, a hulking behemoth, that is lumbering under the weight of a bad business model and a terrible business infrastructure. It survives on its name, tradition, and the attractive ideal of a department store that offers a one stop shop for so many of your household needs (except wool socks). Macy's hires armies of underpaid temporary employees with overworked and unproductive staff. It's mass production in the age of just in time assembly. The Herald Square store is a time machine dedicated to the memory of the past in more ways than one.

Retail!

What do Skoda, Seat, Bentley, Bugatti, Audi, Lamborghini, and Porsche have in common? They are all designed, assembled and owned by Volkswagen, a major car brand in its own right. What do Ben and Jerry's, Bertolli, Country Crock, Knorr, Lipton, Popsicle, Ragu, Slim Fast, and Wish Bone all have in common? They all reside in Unilever's enormous stable of consumer goods. What do Guiness, Tanqueray, Johnny Walker, Bailey's, Jose Cuervo, Ciroc, Captain Morgan, Seagram's and Goldschalger have in common? Diageo or its subsidiaries distills and brews them all. Filene's (the non-basement portion, Shillito's, Burdine's, Rich's, Foley's, Sanger Brothers, Boston Store, MainStreet, Marshall Field's, I Magnin, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Famous-Barr, Strawbridge's, Hecht's, The Jones Store, Robinsons-May, Meier and Frank, and Kaufmann's? Since 2005, these stores have all been owned and operated by Federated Department Stores, better known since 2007 as Macy's, Inc.

I became interested in brands and the companies behind them when I noticed that the head of one of the minor global car companies (isn't that a crazy thing to say? But still Fiat is both global and minor compared to other global car giants) said that he expected only six car companies to be able to survive in a fully globalized car world. I was immediately interested in finding out how many car companies there actually were and discovered that there were really about sixteen major global car companies that make more than a million vehicles a year underneath all of the brand names we know (Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, PSA Citroen, Nissan/Renault, Fita, Suzuki, Daimler, Chana, BMW with Mazda, Chrysler, Mitsubishi nudging that number, but distinctly under it, if you are interested, I know I was). Since then, I have constantly been on the lookout for the information underneath the brand.

There are many reasons for the consolidation of the companies behind the brands and it's a process that has been in full swing since the 1990s at least. I wish I had the time and resources to explore the process that has led to the current landscape. I say that because the current state of the department store has a very interesting history. The most interesting to me is that the company you know as Macy's, the one that's been turning iconic department stores the country over into Macy's at a breakneck pace since 2005, isn't precisely Macy's. Sure, the stock ticker symbol is a nice big M and all of those stores call themselves Macy's (even if it's really, say, Marshall Field's). But it used to be called Federated Department Stores, a department store holding company founded in the glamorous city of Cincinnati, OH. They owned a number of famous stores, including Filene's (the upstairs part, the basement part has long since been spun off), Lazarus, and Foley's. FDS had some problems with takeovers in 1990, emerged from bankruptcy in 1992 and bought Macy's in 1994, just after Macy's finished it's brush with death. So, Federated has owned Macy's since 1994. In a huge buyout in 2005, they bought the May Department Stores, which included Kaufmann's, Hecht's, as well as Foley's and Filene's, stores they had bought off of Federated in the 1980's, and Marshall Field's (though May only owned Field's for a year). Following that merger, FDS bgean transforming every store in their stable to either Macy's or Bloomingdale's, the flashier half of Macy's and completed the transformation by turning itself into Macy's Inc, in 2007. 

Got it? Of course not. I still don't get it (I might draw a chart next week, if I figure out how to make Google's chart thing work - don't hold me to that). The more closely you look at the department store landscape, the more confusing it's history gets. Fortunately, thanks to all these buyouts and mergers, things are a little clearer today. Basically you have Macy's, Saks, J.C. Penney, Dillard's, Nordstrom's, the Bon-Ton and Sears for department stores, with Kohl's, Target, TJX (TJ Maxx and Marshall's), and the grand daddy of all retail Wal-Mart competing on the discount end of things (check out Google Finance for a snapshot of the industry financials). That's the state of affairs that I want to take a look at in the coming weeks. But I'm not just interested in business data, I am also interested in department store culture. I worked at a Bon Ton in York, PA and the parallels between that Bon-Ton and this Macy's are eerie, yet another reason that I started digging into Macy's financials (which are mostly a matter of public record thanks to being a publicly traded company and all).

Over the next couple of weeks, I am planning on thinking aloud, sharing the things I discover about Macy's, and writing about how Macy's Herald Square works (or, uh, doesn't work, as the case may be), from the perspective of a cashier (ok, sales associate). Next week? I think we will talk about getting hired.

First Impressions

New York City doesn't exist. If you ask the Post Office about it, they will correct you. Actually, they will make you feel like an idiot, if you are looking for a zip code and you use "New York City" in the form. You can try it on your own (use 83 East 4th Street for the rest of the address - I've been there). New York is not one unified place, it is many, much smaller places jammed into one geographical area. It's impossible then to discuss my first impression of the city as if there were only one. There's too much to experience, too much going on, for that to be even remotely true. This is the case with every major city the world over and "first impression" syndrome where someone offers a sweeping generalization of the city because they spent a couple days exploring the ultra-famous parts of the city is one of the most grievous sins of tourism (and I am just as guilty of it - I'm sure Amsterdam and Brussels had much left for me to truly explore). Most cities defy easy generalization and categorization, but some are more eclectic than others. Berlin, for example, offers a more varied experience of German life than Munich. Berlin isn't even properly one city yet, it is literally a collection of areas (though I understand they are working on that). But New York is easily the most diverse city that I have ever been to.

Truthfully, I have only experienced one borough of New York, a tiny sliver of it's metropolitan area. Jersey City, where I live, has several facets of it's own. I live in the part that is surrounded by the crappy and the run down. It sounds worse than it is because the rules of economics are slowly dictating a move into the area. It's fine. It's a bit of a dump, but it's fine. Then there is Hoboken and apparently a tiny bit of Weehauken (things run together here), which are trendy and solidly middle class (and just as predictably the food and bars are mostly overpriced). Pavonia/Newport is for people who want to feel like they are living in New York proper, but with a view of the city, and the prices and taxes of New Jersey. It sounds like it's a cheap imitation, but Goldman Sachs has an entire office tower not too far away. It's only cheap when compared to Manhattan.

Ah, Manhattan. That's the only borough of the five that I've spent any time in. I'm sure that I will end up in Brooklyn at some point, but the PATH trains only run to the World Trade Center or 33rd St. So no Brooklyn and no Queens just yet. It took me a couple of days to work up the nerve to cross the river and check out the city. I'm not sure why, to tell you the truth. Maybe because going over the river (or under it rather since the ferries are stupid expensive) meant that I was really here. I couldn't chicken out and bolt the city if I set foot in Manhattan. But the truth is, as soon as I saw the New York skyline in person, I knew I was hooked. I am sure that I will take pictures of it at some point. It's stunning and if it captivates you at all, then you know, you are in New York to stay, come hell or high water. Or that's how you feel if you are a little bit of a romantic. The whole reality of unemployment may indeed have something to say about staying in New York or not, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

Looking at the skyline though already demonstrates a truth you will encounter on that ground: New York isn't really one place. You can see the difference between the skyscrapers downtown, the vast and obviously residential area, and the skyscrapers in mid-town. The Empire State building dominates its part of the island, practically unchallenged. Downtown, the skyscrapers are thickly forested, competing with each other like jungle trees for the light of the sun. There will be a big boy on the block in the near future when they finish the new World Trade Center tower, but for now, there are no winners, just competitors.  It was unintentional, but my exploration of that gorgeous skyline followed the same path as my eyes from one end of the island to the middle (it's not the other end - I've made it to 50th St. and the island goes all the way to 216th St.).

If you get on a different PATH train, you will end up on Christopher St. instead of the WTC and it's a completely different world, the world of Greenwich Village. I was disturbed to find how easy it was to lose entire skyscrapers when you are actually among the brownstones and walkups (if those are the terms - Law and Order gave me the vocabulary, but I still use it like a tourist). In parts of the Village, you could easily go the entire day without ever knowing that downtown was even there. The parts that I walked through were gorgeous and I've seen quite a bit of it, though not enough to make unqualified judgments about the Village. It is always a surprise to discover major theatres just tucked into the buildings. Cherry Lane is literally tucked around a corner, the buildings so tight that even the sounds of traffic are significantly diminished. The Lortel is in an unassuming building on Christopher St. It's incongruous. In my world, these theatres are more important than the commercial giants on Broadway and around Times Square.

Yesterday, I got my first real taste of walking into that other, fabled, part of mid-town: Times Square. I had a few hours to kill before the concert I was to observe (the very same French Horn Rebellion I mentioned earlier), so I figured I would check out the Empire State Building. I was on 11th, it is on 33rd. That's not so bad. But then when I got to 33rd I thought, what's nine more blocks? So I ended up in Times Square, where I heard quite a few languages that were not English. New York reminds me of Europe in a lot of ways - you can walk large parts of it, it's packed with history, you hear all kinds of languages and accents all the time. But then I figured I would check out some of the theatres where I was trying to intern. I felt much worse about my application to Roundabout Theatre Company when I saw American Airlines Theatre. Roundabout is a LORT theatre company, much like the Alley, but on steroids. I am much more confident about New York Theatre Workshop where I was allowed to hand my application to an actual person. One who works for the theatre. Not one who works for the post office.

Finally, I thought I'm so close to Rockefeller Center that I will just pop over and then walk back. I was already at 47th and 9th, it's nothing to get to 50th and 6th (it's so easy to say those numbers like they mean something, but if you don't know New York, how much sense does it make?). After which I walked back to 11th and 4th. The walk back felt endless because I had somewhere to be at a particular time, so it was much more frustrating that you can only walk a block or two before you get stopped by a red light, even with jaywalking, even when you are traveling with traffic. I arrived at the concert venue and discovered that my feet hurt quite badly. I knew I had walked a fair bit, so I looked it up. If I had gone straight to Rockefeller Center from Webster Hall (which I most emphatically did not - Broadway is a kooky street that does weird things around Union Square and again around the Flatiron building), it would have been 2.2 miles. At first that number didn't impress me because I was so used to looking at kilometers. 2.2 km isn't that bad at all (it's barely a mile and a half). Then I doubled it because I had walked back and than I had to add another mile and a half to cover the walk to and from the subway stops (I say subway, but I have yet to be on the New York subway proper - just the PATH trains to and from Jersey). All told I walked about 8 miles yesterday. I can safely say after a stretch like that on the streets of New York that I still don't really know anything about the city at all.

What To Make of Brussels

I thought that I disliked Amsterdam. After my first day in Brussels, I realized that I didn't dislike Amsterdam; it was merely disappointing. It was not as charming as I expected; it was a little too cynically attached to tourism; it was just too rushed. But overall it wasn't so bad. Brussels on the other hand, is a nightmare, from top to bottom. The transportation system goes everywhere, but it requires two or three different connections to get anywhere (You Can't Get There From Here syndrome). There are three train stations of staggeringly different significance and levels of sophistication. Noord is a dung heap, there is no other other description for it, complete with the seedy street where the prostitutes appear in their windows (at 11 in the AM) running along the tracks. Apparently, they do exist in the wild and not just in the tame confines of Amtersrdam's red light district. Central Station is central only in terms of geography, though not in terms of significance. For most practical purposes, Central is basically irrelevant and out of the way. Zuid is where the action is, but it was also the farthest away from where we ended up staying.

The real problem with the transportation system is not the bizarre set of connections between places but the staggering incompetence with which the system is run. If you are lucky, on the major trains (like the subway or some of the trains between cities), they might announce the stations. If you are really lucky, the trains will actually stop where the schedule says they will stop. I discovered to my cost that this is not always the case. I wanted the Schaerbeek Station. The schedule said it was one stop away, a paltry four minutes. I boarded the train thinking that my travel day was almost over, a day that had begun at 1:00 AM (because I refused to be 24 euro for a reservation on the Belgian night train because the train would only have been in Belgium for an hour and a half - it costs 10 euro for all of Germany). The train passed through said station, but didn't stop for another 20 minutes in a place called Mechelen. I later discovered that this stop is halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. I took the train back to Brussel Noord and made no further attempt to get to that train station. Local transportation is much better at sticking to the posted script, but you will never see or hear what the next stop will be once you are in the tram or bus. No announcement, no monitor flashing the upcoming station, nothing (a stark contrast to Germany where every tourist who spends any time on public transport will have learned at least two German words "Nächste Halt . . .").

I can generally put up with a lack of information about stops and the like and I am always willing to walk if I make a mistake. If public transport runs regularly and is vaguely on time, I can make do. This is also not the case in Brussels. The very first tram my mom and I were on stopped dead in a tunnel a couple hundred yards from the station. After ten minutes, the conductor opened the doors and had the passengers hop down onto the tracks and over to the service path where we completed our journey  to the station on foot. We were on our way to the train station to catch a train to Brugges, which we naturally missed. We were already planning to go to Brugges so I could make the most of the last trip on my railway pass. What began as a normal day trip became a necessity after the first two hours I spent in Brussels were so stupidly obstructive and cack handed. If it hadn't have been Brugges, it would have been anywhere else: Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven (hmm, Stella), Liege, Waterloo . . . Anywhere other than Brussels.

Brugges turned out to be as picturesque and as medieval as promised, but it is also a tourist trap, not the thing most calculated to soothe anyone's mood, especially as quite a few of the cafes and bistros closed up shop between 5 and 6 PM, right about when Mom and I were looking for a nice place to grab a bite. Brugges must have a Rothenburg/Martha's Vineyard thing about preserving it's medieval character, including shunning tourists after a certain point in the evening. We eventually found a place to eat: Quick Burger, the equivalent of McDonald's and just as tasteless. It was at least inexpensive.

To the credit of Brussels, the rest of our stay was not as bad as that first day. Public transport proved more reliable, though no more informative. The major exception was rush hour, when using the system became positively oppressive. None of their trains were designed with accommodating very many people, a strange decision in a city of nearly 2 million people.

If it seems like I am fixating on public transportation at the expense of the rest of the city, consider it evidence of my ambivalence about the place. Despite the fact that Brussels has a long and distinguished history in the region and that many of the older (though not the oldest) buildings have been preserved, it does not present itself particularly well. Brussels is first and foremost a city about business and getting things done. It has provided ways for visitors to explore some of the past, but the past that is most open to visitors relates to the near past and usually to the Belgian monarchy which only dates back to 1830. The most massive and monumental buildings all originate after that time. Many of them date from the reign of Leopold II, the infamously megalomaniacal king who considered the Belgian Congo his personal colony, though the city has much older roots, on display in the stunning Grand Place (where you can find Victor Hugo's old place), and in some of them gorgeous cathedrals in the area. I just can't make any sense of the city. There are things to visit, there is some beautiful architecture, and even quality museums, like the Magritte Museum and the Museum of Musical Instruments (the museum dedicated to the french fry is in Brugges though - french fries originated in Belgium, there's your fun fact for the day).

The best way for me to explain the city might be to compare it with Berlin ten years ago. Not all of the benefits of re-unification had made it to the eastern parts of the city yet. Much of the city was dingy or covered with graffiti. It was in the throes of integrating an enormous new population. Germany's modern economic success had not completely taken hold (indeed many of Schroeder's most important reforms were yet to come). Brussels, despite it's importance as a commercial and legislative center, has not yet experienced the economic success that will help bring it the kind of vision that could transform the city or give it a cohesive sense of direction. This is a malaise that afflicts Belgium as a whole, actually. As of the writing of this post, Belgium does not have a national government. Negotiations for coalition forming have stalled since the election in June.

I can say without reservation that the hostel I stayed in was the best of the entire trip. Calling Sleephere a hostel doesn't do it justice. The owner, Karel Mondt,, a gregarious and generous host, prefers to call it a guest house. It reminded me of the boarding houses of the 19th century that I read about in Balzac and Dickens, though with significantly less drama. Or closer to home, the hostel my friends and I found ourselves in ten years ago in Budapest. Sleephere is the owner's 4 story house, with every room not dedicated to eating or cooking transformed into sleeping quarters. It is a quaint old house with creaky wooden stairs and the idiosyncratic decorations that can only come from someone's personal accumulation and not from any conscious attempts at interior decorating. It was authentic and unforced. My mom hated it, but she is used to factory sleeping, which is what so many hostels have become (that's Karel's phrase, not my own). StayOkay in Amsterdam, the Y in Basel, even Metropole in Berlin, they are all like the Southwest Airlines of hotels. They offer great service while cutting facilities and extras to the bone. They are hotels in spirit now, rather than hostels as I remember them - the kind of place that you look for when you arrive in a town without a thought for reservations. The internet has almost completely done away with the cute personal pension that you discover tucked into the Place St. Michel, steps away from Notre Dame de Paris. It was a positive pleasure that my mom had discovered this place, even if she didn't particularly like it. We spent the last night in Brussels in a hotel by the airport and while I enjoyed the privacy and amenities on offer, the soullessness of the place just reinforced what I had already knew - hosteling is about character not convenience. We certainly found it on 155 Landbouwstraat, Schaerbeek. The only part of Brussels that I enjoyed unequivocally.

Amsterdon't

I am Not Amsterdam

I knew Amsterdam was going to be problem as soon as I started taking a look at their tourist board website. My mom had suggested a series of museums, most of which I couldn't afford and then she mentioned the I AMsterdam card. It promised access to almost all of the major museums and a full ride on public transport. For 38 euro. For one day. If I spend 7 euro, I get the benefit of the public transportation (and that goes down on a per day basis the more days I buy - 4 days is only 20 euro). After my exhaustive efforts in the various museums that I have visited that to do museums justice you have to be willing to spend 2 to 4 hours in one, significantly more in the case of a good history museum. I spent 10 hours in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and managed slightly less than half the museum (which only cost 5 euro). Anyone who encourages you to spend that much money on a lot of different museums for one day is not encouraging you to spend considerable amounts of time in any of the museums. They want you to go there, follow the arrows around the exhibits, spend some time in the shop, and then leave. This is completely antithetical to nearly every habit I have been attempting to create. This did not bode well.

My arrival in Amsterdam did not make things better. The night train from Basel was inexplicably delayed for an hour in Mannheim (the worst of German service coming out in Deutsche Bahn there; they didn't even acknowledge that we were late), so we were practically shoved off the train into Centraal. My first task was to get to the airport to pick up my mother, who would be landing in an hour. It was going to take at least a half an hour to get to the aiport, assuming nothing went wrong with getting a train. Fortunately (and not at all thanks to DB), that went off without a hitch. There was a minor hiccup when I realized that I had promised my mother that I would meet her at baggage claim when of course that is off limits to the unwashed masses since international arrivals have to go through customs, but the architects of Schipol airport were at least aware of what usually happens at baggage carousels and helpfully set up a waiting area with a great view of passport control. The most time sensitive parts of our time in Amsterdam revolved around the airport whose thoughtful design made those tasks much easier.

Maybe Centraal will eventually be as well designed a transport hub as Schipol once the paroxysm of construction has passed over and through Amsterdam. Thanks to that very same construction, Centraal is a mess (and a centruy of design decisions since it was originally built). Beyond the construction, Centraal is a frustrating place because there are few and not particularly accurate and useful signs. While there were plenty of arrows indicating the direction of buses and trams, few of them bothered to point out that the office where you have to buy tickets for those buses and trams is across the street from the main train station, as though the local transit authority's remit stopped at the gates of the train station. Beyond this line, you shall not pass. The outlook did not improve when we went inside that ticket office and it was packed, an ominous sign of things to come.

Eventually, all our transportation needs were taken care and we had safely settled in at the hostel. I figured that we should avoid the tourist traps and museums and just take in the city on foot during our first day. That's when I discovered the horrible truth, or several horrible truths about Amsterdam in its current "under construction" state, the first being that Amsterdam is not a particularly pedestrian friendly city. Between the canals, the trams, the roads, and the bike paths, there is very little real estate for the lowly Fussgänger, often not enough for two people to walk side by side. Stray too far outside of your zone you risk getting run down by the scooters and mopeds traveling in the bike lane, never mind the wolfpacks of cyclists. When we finally arrived near the center of the old town at Waterlooplein, we discovered that even in those areas were tourists are expected to congregate, there is no such thing as a pedestrian zone. This was true even for the Dam square, the Red Light district, and the Centraal. If you can get there on foot, so can the crazy guys on scooters. You are never safe from them.

One of the purposes of walking on foot is to experience a city in a more relaxed way. It gives you time to process your surroundings. There is no better way to learn a city than with your feet, assuming the city is safe for such an approach (though that is also something you can learn by walking). I never felt that this was possible in Amsterdam. Even in late September, the middle of the city was crowded and pulsing with speed and movement. Everyone and everything was in a hurry or on edge or behind and trying to make up time. This edginess is exactly what you deserve if you are driving a car in downtown Amsterdam, but isn't something I generally want inflicted on me as a pedestrian (or as a flaneur really, since I had no particular purpose other than being there, which is not true of every pedestrian).

I think Amsterdam hates cars as well as pedestrians. It's not just the narrow streets and the ever present canals and roaming packs of cyclists. You can tell a lot about a city from its cars, not just things like median income level, but personality. Porsches are common on the streets of Munich (so are BMWs but you have to discount that since they are made in the city) because the city is full of trendy rich people who want to be seen and who enjoy the kind of ride the car provides, especially the stares and the envy, but also the speed and the cornering. Berlin is full of government types and Mercedes, sedans that are sober and luxurious, with just a splash of Ferrari red and British racing green to go along with the money and influence. Houston, with its oceans of oil money, features Bentleys, as well as plenty of Lexi or Lexuses or Lexus (like moose) to go along with that money. Amsterdam is full of Opels and ugly Renaults and older VWs. Most of the cars were dirty and unwashed. There are very few Alfas or Fiats or any of the other small cars that have the sense of swagger and cool that let people who can't afford swanky sports cars enjoy their ability to accomplish their weekly shop. Based on the cars I saw in Amsterdam, there is a decided lack of joy or interest in driving, certainly most of the cars aren't shown a lot of care. For some people, this will be a selling point of course, but for me, it was just more proof that the city and I would not get along.

This fact was confirmed over the next few days as my mom and I took in Amsterdam's museums, which I suspect are all designed for maximum tourist processing. They are always crowded even as late in September as we were there. They have precious few places to rest. And they never ever have any place where you can just contemplate the work of art or the piece of history on display. The Jewish museum is a bit of a breather, but it's also not particularly good at explaining or illuminating history. There will be plenty more on museum culture later, when I deal with museums from all of my travels. The verdict on Amsterdam is almostly completely negative. If I were handing out grades, it would get a D only because, to be fair, they do have some amazing works of art. You may or may not know this, but Van Gogh and Rembrandt were pretty good painters. The exception to this was the Hermitage branch campus. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg opened an exhibition hall in for rotation exhibitions in Amsterdam not too long ago (like the Louvre, but instead of dropping it in the middle of the Arabian peninsula, the Hermitage put it somewhere useful). The Alexander the Great exhibit was everything that the other museums were not. It was especially well lit, compared to the other museums. Bad lighting is a surprising problem for a museum to have when Philips, one of the largest lighting companies in the world, is a major sponsor.

An important caveat here is that Amsterdam is a city beset, plagued even, by a rash of renovations and construction projects. If you visit the city in the next two years you will run into a whole mess of renovations including (and certainly not limited to) the Royal Palace, the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk, the Central Station, the Maritime museum, the Rokin, and the road in front of the Jewish museum. If any of those places interest you, then you should put off your visit to the city until 2011 at the very earliest. I'd say you should leave it to 2012, if the world hasn't ended. I don't think I will like it anymore, but I leave that possibility open to others.

Where did that leave us? That left us very happy people when Mom and I parted ways. She was headed to a bus tour through Ireland (undeniably cool, especially since I have never been) and I was headed to Munich, the city that was really at the heart of my trip to Europe in the first place. I'm glad I went to Amsterdam. But I was much happier leaving it.

Pop Quiz!

Which of the following buildings is NOT a modern art museum? No cheating with Google images either.

Jeremy Clarkson would say, "No. You're wrong." The first one is the Museum Tinguely devoted to a guy who made awesome mechanical sculptures. The second is a building, designed by the same architect actually, originally for the Swiss bank UBS and now used by the Bank of International Settlements. The third is the Contemporary Art Museum in Basel. The fourth belongs to the Fondation Beyeler (designed by Renzo Piano, the man responsible for the Menil in Houston).

Basel is a town that is serious about it's architecture, which makes it even more of a shame that I couldn't afford any of their freaking museums (including the, well the architecture museum). Museums like this one:  

That's the Schaulager. It was designed by Basel superstar architects Herzog and de Meuron, who are most famous internationally for the Bird's Nest, the Olympic stadium used in Beijing. Fans of the beautiful game may also recognize some of their other work.

The Schaulager is located in a place called Dreispitz. All of the local tourist information says so. What they do not say is that Dreispitz is a 150 acre industrial park that you can't walk through and the tram stop called Dreispitz is on one end, while the Schaulager is on the other. It's a good thing that I enjoy walking or I might be bitter about the experience.

As I tricked you into noticing, everyone gets in on the modern architecture act in Basel or will be, not just the cool museums. Even Novartis, the pharmaceutical giant will be getting a new ultra-modern look after they are done tearing down their old industrial park.

I could have watched that crane tear down that building all day. It was the only thing a member of the public could do around the Novartis campus anyway, which is why there are no pictures of the rest of it.

I would have taken pictures of Frank Gehry's Vitra Design building, but I had already walked 6 or so km that day and needed to walk 6 more to get back to Basel since I was fairly deep into Germany at that point for a pedestrian. By the time I would have reached the Vitra, it would have been closed anyway.

The shame of all this ultra-modern architecture for me was that, unlike Berlin, I didn't know how to read the buildings, to understand their purpose and their place. The Fondation Beyeler is in Riehen, far away from Basel's city center. Vitra is in Germany as I mentioned. The bank buildings locations make sense - the one from Botta is located on one of the main squares in Basel, called Aeschenplatz and the other building, which actually the main building is across the trams from the main train station. It's also across the street from a five star Hilton. And it looks much cooler:

I guess my quest to experience the architecture of Basel without a proper guide was about the same as taking pictures of their beautiful mountain landscapes: I don't have any idea what it meant, I just liked the view. I like to understand the world around me a little more than that, but finding beautiful views was a great way to spend a week in Basel anyway.

A Return to the Scene of Several Crimes

I am not generally a fan of nostalgia. Fond memories tend to color and eventually alter reality completely if too much sentiment is attached to them. As such, I knew that a return to Munich, especially after ten years, would make a bit of a hypocrite out of me, because I would not be able to resist, at least for a day or two, indulging in a few misty walks down memory lane. I know that many of you are eager to hear about what happened in Basel over a week ago now and many of you may not have known that I spent a week in Amsterdam and I will get to all of that. Eventually.

Carrie was kind enough to lend me her U-Bahn pass and so I did what any JYMer who lived in the Studenstadt would do with access to the U-Bahn: I took a trip down the U6 (Carrie happens to live on that line already - just on the opposite side of town). Munich is in the process of upgrading it's subway cars, but  many of them are still the dingy blue and white ones we all know and love. It was just the cars that looked the same; somehow the U-Bahn has managed to smell the same as well. Truly, uncanny.

Even more uncanny was my arrival in StuSta. My legs were on automatic pilot. They took me right, down the hall, past the posters, up the stairs to the right and then a left, past all the recycling containers, followed by the sign and the crazy three dimensional bronze rendering of the map of StuSta which couldn't be more useless if it tried. I bore a little bit left aiming for the green, crossing Christoph-Probst and ducking into the little bit of greenery amongst all the cement of the StuSta. It was as though nothing had changed. The tall green house looked cleaner. The orange house was a bit dingier and Pot was advertising it's presence im Orangenhaus. TriBühne had just open for business, but with the hint of winter in the air, they hadn't bothered to set up the tables outside. I would have eaten there, but it was a bit early in the day for it. I contemplated taking pictures of the place, trying to fix it forever, as forever as digital bits can be, but I decide that there will be no pictures. The faceless buildings belong to us and our memories. It's nice that it hasn't changed (at least on the outside) since we were there, it validated my trip down memory lane in a way. I was not wrong to come here: the orange building practically begged to see if the elevator had changed at all. But I contented myself with the outward view of the buildings, ducked by the blue house, with a nod to our old haunt in Eric's room, took a left past the bicycle rack (which been placed in a front of a sign that says you are not allowed to lean bikes against the door) and straight out onto Ungererstrasse, with just one look back, and a good laugh at the giant Franziskaner monk smiling, toasting the road with his beer from the orange house.

The walk from Ungererstrasse to Münchner Freiheit and Schwabing is a long one and most of the time we took that walk it was late at night and we were not paying attention to the view, which really doesn't exist; it's not a street with a view, just great wide swaths of concrete to help you get where you are going. I was going to Leopoldstrasse to see which of our favorite restaurants were still there. Along the way, some strangers were accosted by a crazy person, which was also reassuringly familiar. I was momentarily lost looking for Parea, the great like Greek restaurant that served a grill platter fit to split the incautious diner in two. But I got my bearings back, went one street further down and found, much to my delight and surprise that Parea is, in fact, still in business. And still serving the grill platter. I am no longer in my prime as far as putting back the found goes, so there is no way I will test myself against that mighty platter during this trip, not without reinforcements anyway (it was all I could manage to get through an entire McDonald's value meal - an unfortunate necessity when Travelex traps your money on a credit card, which is a terrible terrible idea when you are going to Germany). Not only is Parea still in business, but Cafe Adria is still serving up Calzone, though considering the current exchange rate, it is no longer as günstig as it used to be (for you non-German speakers, that means good value for money, the exact english word is escaping me at the moment). Still, both places are now on my list of places to go while I am still here. We spent more time at the Adria, but we enjoyed Parea's food more, so I'm aiming for that one.

As I was walking back down Leopoldstrasse, I realized that with my camera now firmly digital, it would be time to visit that cemetery whose name I can never remember (der Altnördlicher Friedhof, which I always confuse with Westfriedhof for some reason). I've been wanting to film something here every since I stumbled on to it. I managed to take a few pictures before the raindrops forced me to put the camera away. Sadly, I didn't the ravens until it was too late. Now I have to go back. Can you imagine how awesome that picture would be? A shaft of light through the trees, illuminating a raven standing on someone's tombstone? In yet another validation of my first full walking day in Munich, this cemetery was exactly as I remember it, a beautiful solemn place in the fall just before all the leaves are stripped off the trees.

After my picture taking session, I headed to the JYM office and discovered much to my disgust that McDonald's still occupies it's accustomed place across the street. I didn't go near it, but a placard on a wall announced Subway's continued presence as well. The JYM door was closed (as I recall, we had not yet begun our classes at this point, so I was not surprised), so that will have to wait for another day. I ducked around the corner and down the side street to our favorite chinese place and I was finally greeted with disappointment: Der kleine Chinese had closed, though I suspect this is a recent development. The name was still on the restaurant and all of the tables and chairs were still inside. The little white paper attached to the window announced that it was for rent. I was mildly disappointed, but that did not last because my next trip was to Cinema where the Friday night sneak lives on (and hopefully I will be able to go - being at 11:15 at night always makes it an adventure to catch the U-Bahn home).

At that point, I was quite tired and I went, as I mentioned to McDonald's to get rid of the last money on Travelex's stupid card (I have never waited more anxiously for a card to say that the charge has been approved) and then I explored Marienplatz, another area of the city that has remained more or less unchanged. At this time of year, the whole pedestrian area smells like chestnuts and roasted candied almonds (the almonds are definitely on the list, but they didn't make any sense after McD's). The major change was the addition of an Apple store (a real one, from Apple and everything - have you seen the new iPod nano? Holy cow, it's cool), and a few churches are undergoing renovation, etc. One thing had changed - instead of a Planet Hollywood across the street from the Hofbräuhaus, they have an actual Hard Rock Cafe (which tells you all you need to know about the Hofbräuhaus, doesn't it?). I don't suppose that is much different.

My next task is to explore the parts of Munich that I never managed to discover before (and getting everyone up to date on the rest of my travels, I know, I know). I can only hope that will be as successful as today was.

Hmm, Basel

My stay in Basel began with my first experience as a Couch Surfer. For those of you who don't know, CouchSurfing.org is the Internet 2.0 version of traveling couches. In other words, it is no longer necessary to have met someone in person before agreeing to let them spend one or more nights in their place. I desperately needed to save some money on the Basel section of my travels, so I decided to give it a try for that reason, but I'm also not particularly suited to striking up conversations with the random strangers in my hostels (I will leave that to Mom). CouchSurfing promised a stronger personal connection with someone and a chance for some real conversation, something I missed.

I did not stumble on to this idea myself, Renee and Sarah introduced me to it when they served as hosts themselves. I know what some of you are thinking: how can it be safe for perfect strangers to agree to spend the night in a house over the internet? CouchSurfing is aware of the safety issues and allows people a chance to fill out quite a lot of information about themselves allowing hosts and guests to match each other relatively well and as a way of getting through places like Berlin and New York where there are tens of thousands of couches to be had. CouchSurfing also offers a couple of other safety features including references from past hosts and guests, as well as friends and address and rudimentary identity verification. It's not foolproof, but then neither is booking a hotel over the Internet.

I started out looking for couches in Berlin, but it turns out in CouchSurfing and in hostels, you still have to plan ahead; all of my prospective hosts were booked. I figured that was going to be true in any big that I tried, so I tried a smaller one in Basel and immediately got two hits. One of them fell through (he didn't have anything on his profile anyway), but the other was Anders Nättorp, a Swedish transplant who has spent 18 years in Switzerland (many of them in Lausanne). He was so generous, taking me out to eat in this ridiculously expensive city (McD's "value" meals start at 11 Swiss Francs, which is more or less at parity with the dollar. That's right, a Big Mac meal costs more than 11 dollars) as well as giving some great trips on what to do in and around the city. It was an incredible experience. Anders is a chemical engineer and he was able to fill me in on some of things I am missing out on thanks to that year in Germany. Very cool, for him as well, as I suspect most people don't geek out over his work at Nescafe or phosphorus cycles in Egypt, but I sure did.

The last few days in Basel, I have spent at the Y, which has made up for charging me that outrageous cancellation fee (excuse me, YMCA, but you did not lose the room - I cancelled before check in time, that is the worst excuse ever) by having proper showers, a less flaky than Starbucks internet connection, and a mobility card that makes public transport free. It almost makes up for the fact that breakfast isn't included. Almost.

There's lots more to say about Basel, but I figured a short introduction to my stay here would be a good idea. I came to Basel because of my great uncle Gerry, who went to school here. The city offers the deadly combination of being on the German border (and thus accessible by my Eurail pass), in Switzerland, and a reputation for art and architecture that it has certainly lived up to. It's also not that big a city, so a quick trip outside of the city leads to landscapes like the one you see below. In case you were wondering.

What's Gedenktafel got to do with it?

When you do something completely crazy, like quit your job and put off moving to a place where you can get a job so you can wander around Europe for oh say six weeks, there are times when you can't help but wonder: What the hell am I doing? Why am I here?

What do you do in those moments when it verges on panic and the only thing keeping you from panicking is the very real fact that you have absolutely no way to undo what you have done? 4000 miles don't untravel themselves. You are here to stay. So, you wander the streets of this foreign metropolis because if you are going to indulge in folly, you shouldn't go for half measures - do it all the way or don't do it at all, don't dabble. If you wonder what you are wandering around for, there is nothing to do but wander as resolutely and thoroughly as possible.

Berlin, as I mentioned, is a city full of history, but it's also in a country that is at times obsessed with history and with remembering history. Sometimes history means remembering the weighty and devastating events that shape a nation. Sometimes, it means remembering that Ukrainian nurse or the first German female rabbi. Gedenktafel are strewn throughout the city of Berlin. I had one particular Tafel that I remembered from my first trip here, but as I began looking for them, I couldn't stop seeing them. And I couldn't stop taking pictures of them (which will eventually show up here when I have a less flaky internet connection). Sometimes it was the sad state of the current building that drew my eye. Or it was the kind of chilling juxtaposition that is inevitable in a city with the dark secrets of Berlin: a memorial to two Communists murdered by the Nazis on the outside wall of McDonald's. I came to love finding these Tafel and making people notice them when I took a picture of it (nothing like taking a picture to draw people's eyes), even to the ridiculous and random, like the former site of the Berlin Aquarium on Unter den Linden.

There are of course copious amounts of signs of all shapes and sizes describing the Wall or the Nazi history of Berlin; it is impossible to walk down Wilhelmstrasse without encountering something that reminds people that the Nazis set up shop there. And one particular monumental and obviously government building had the good luck of being home to the Nazis (Göring himself), the Soviets, the leaders of the DDR (sorry, can't type GDR), and now the Bundesministerium der Finanzen. The building should be tiled with Tafel. Berlin remembers more than the Nazis of course, but the odds on favorites after the Communists and the Nazis are the Prussians. You can't walk down Unter den Linden without dealing with Prussian history and its Greco-roman inspired monuments to making monument.

But sometimes you are wandering through the city and the city is just a city and it doesn't matter where you are because your feet still hurt. Traveling has not changed your life or solved any of your problems. What happens then? For me, by sheer accident originally, I stumbled on a random building away from the main streets and places that Berlin wants you to see and you find a reminder of the kind of incredible history that has taken place here. A reminder of something that has nothing to do with Nazis or soldiers or Friedrich or Wilhelm or any combination of thereof, that has nothing to do with war or massacre, but is quite simply about changing the world. It might be a TV studio now, but in 1905 it contained the lecture hall where Max Planck introduced the world to quantum physics. I see a reminder like that and for a moment at least, it is a little clearer, exactly what I am doing here.

Why Berlin?

I started this blog because I had an epiphany while I was writing in my journal about the experiences of my day. The practical upshot of that is that I started the whole thing in the middle of a particular line of thought, most of which my audience was not privy to. In the hopes of rectifying that error, I think it's time to explain my itinerary, or at least Berlin, the first stop.

It all started ten years ago (almost to the day as one of my friends reminded me), I began my Junior Year in Munich experience, which would change my life forever. It's fun to be able say something that melodramatic and have it be accurate as well. I was supposed to be a chemist or an engineer. And I had done a lot of work and put a ton of effort into that whole becoming an engineer or a chemist thing. Turns out, at Case your junior year is when all of that really gets shaken out, sort of the meat of the major takes over. But instead of spending that year in a lab and cursing my clumsiness with partial differential equations in physical chemistry, I spent it in Germany studying about the nature of reading and Aristotle's poetics. That meant that I was never going to be able to finish my chemistry degree without adding another year to my schooling. Since I could not also add another year to my scholarship, I took the German degree and sort of ran with it. Ten years down the road, I have no degree in Chemistry, I do have another degree in Germanic Studies, and I work in theatre. Which all makes a kind of sense, to someone, I suppose. And now, in another attempt to change careers, or really to settle into the career I always wanted, but never really knew how to get into, I found myself with some time. It was time to travel.

My time in Germany with JYM didn't just change my life by accidentally altering my career path. I met incredible people and visited incredible places. After 11 months in Munich, I got to know it and came to love it (apparently, this is a difficult thing to do if you are just backpacking through the place). And I will be visiting Munich as well, of course during Oktoberfest, and hopefully for the twentieth Tag der deutschen Einheit. But for 10 days in February, I was captivated by the city of Berlin. Ten days didn't seem like enough and I always wanted to experience it in more depth without the pressure of class and a time crunch.

Berlin fascinates me in a way that few other cities have managed. Long before I became a German major, way back in 4th grade, I began to consume whatever information I could find about World War II, indeed the first book on the subject that I can remember reading is William Shirer's personal account of his time in Berlin called The Nightmare Years (I should probably read that book again . . . ). The book made me intimately familiar with much of Berlin's history during this time. One of the first memories that I have of the news, of the outside world, is of the Berlin Wall coming down. I distinctly remember Mom and Dad making me stop whatever I was doing so that I could pay attention to history as it was happening. Between those two formative events, I was primed to fall in love with Berlin after the fall of the wall, a little over a decade later. Millions of Americans are as well. I am annoyed to think that I came from such a cliched touristy place, but . . . well, I did.

It was the combination of the original ten days in Berlin, as well as the academic training that took the spark and turned it into a flame. Now I am armed with cultural training about the construction of monuments and the meaning of public spaces and how architecture speaks. Berlin is a deadly combination of all of those things, since its history is so layered with monumental architecture, awful things, beautiful redemptive things, and a culture that is attuned to that history and rarely makes big decisions without referencing or acknowledging the weight of the past, and that includes the more radical, creative part of the city as well. Looked at in this way, the question isn't why Berlin? The question is why would I go anywhere else? And for a long time, I thought about it, not going anywhere else, except for Munich which is indispensable, even if it wasn't Oktoberfest (still have never heard a satisfactory explanation of why something that starts in the middle of September and only ever has a couple of days in October, gets called Oktoberfest). But in the end, the draw of the new, of other places that I always meant to discover but never did (Basel and Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Brussels) was too much. I couldn't be that close to them again and not go. Again.

I was originally going to talk a little bit more about the fascinating history of Berlin, now that I have elaborated on the fact that I am fascinated by it, but I think I will save that for my next post. The last one that will be made from Berlin, though assuredly not the last one about Berlin.

The Berliner Ensemble

Now that I am in theatre, I have an entirely different evaluation of my original time in Berlin. Over the course of ten days, we were bombarded with information and theatrical performances. At least seven of the ten nights featured a trip to one theatre or another. I enjoyed it a great deal, despite not being able to understand the majority of what was being said. One of those trips to the theatre was to see a production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Uis) by the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company that Brecht helped to found in 1949.

Strictly speaking, the Berliner Ensemble is just that: the group of actors and designers who collaborate on the shows together. They are merely renting their current home, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, a neo-baroque (at least on the inside) place built around the turn of the century. The twentieth century. To be clear, it was built in the 1890s. When I think of Brecht and challenging experimental theatre, I have a particular idea of what the stage and the space will be like. It'll be a black box, or a multi-functional space, or anything other than a neo-baroque theatre that feels like a mini opera house. It feels tiny, even though at 738 seats, it has only slightly fewer seats than the Hubbard Theatre at the Alley. It feels crammed in because many of the seats, particularly in the upper reaches of the house don't properly face the stage, wrapping around the wall of the house. That includes the standing room place I watched the show from (a 2.25 hour production with no intermission and minimal air conditioning - good thing I layered). There are mirrors everywhere, walls are practically falling over with sconces, everything is gilded and just gaudy. And on its stage, Brecht and his Ensemble speak truth to power all the time, often in plays about the dirty and the poor, which are all the more powerful for the contradiction and the tension between the building and the work going on inside it. One of my favorite touches in the building is a red X that has been spray painted through the Imperial eagle. According to legend, Brecht climbed a ladder himself to deface it, the only part of the building that is deliberately less pretty than it originally set out to be (these days the building is under Denkmalschutz, so I imagine they could do whatever they want with it, if they phrased it delicately enough to the right people).

Naturally, I gawked at the lights as I was standing around and I couldn't but note some of the more interesting technical elements on display (hey, VL1000s, I know those pieces of junk), including the Niethammer EniZoom.One thing that struck me was that they use a ton of power. I don't think I saw a light with less than a 1000W of output and most of them were at 2000, easily.

There's nothing quite like seeing a Brecht show in his theatre and that made Arturo Ui special. Unfortunately, this time around I was not able to see a Brecht, though in a couple of days (sadly after I leave Berlin) they will mount a production of Mutter Courage. Now THAT would be a show to see in Brecht's theatre. The show that I saw is called Der zerbrochene Krug by Heinrich Kleist. I guess you would translate it into the shattered pitcher or the destroyed ewer or something (no, Wikipedia says it is The Broken Jug, which is nowhere near as evocative to me). It's a very interesting piece for the BE to do. On the face of it, the play is a simple farce about a randy village judge who gets caught by the district inspector. But of course, it's really about corruption and the choices that are necessary in order to stand up to corruption among the powerful. It's also hilarious (I understood 2/3 of it this time, including some of the sarcasm). It was also masterfully performed, which is hard to do when a third of the cast basically doesn't move from their position for half of the show. It is not an easy show for a director to do. I can't really judge the set or the lights since could only see about half of the stage what with the whole standing room thing (but hey, it was five euro, can't beat that). The acting really brought it all together. The Ensemble remains a great company and this production had a great director in Peter Stein. The production I saw featured Klaus Maria Brandauer who most English speaking audiences will know only from Never Say Never Again (he's the bad guy), which is a shame (he's a legend on the German stage and he's Oedipus at Colonus with Peter Stein is supposed to be incredible).  I may not have been able to see Brecht's company do Brecht, but I was very happy to see this show as well. I just wish I had the time and the money to see more of the great theatre that happens here in Berlin.

Let's Talk About Cars

I like cars. Anybody who has talked with me for any length of time will eventually be bombarded by a list of my favorite Top Gear episodes. If you have a TV, I have almost certainly asked you if you get BBC America, in an attempt to convert someone else. One of the more exciting aspects of getting to be in Europe is seeing some of the more incredible European cars up close and personal. You know, like the Bugatti Veyron, just in case you forgot:

So you can imagine how excited I was about seeing an advertisement for a Ferrari dealership (which I did not take a picture of. I figured I would wait until I got there). I was so excited about it that I took off once again into the Wild West of Berlin. I am averse to spending the money on public transport, so I walked (open that link in a new tab or a new window so you can keep reading). Yes, you saw that correctly. I walked 13 km (matching my highest total to date - and I haven't even gotten dinner yet.

I was prepared to take a lot of pictures when I got there, but that was just when I thought I was going to a Ferrari dealership. Instead, I found this: the MeilenWerk. It was a smorgasbord of cars, classic cars, exotic cars. It's an entire old train shed turned into a small devotional to the absolute best of the automotive sciences. There was a Jaguar XJ 220, another Veyron, several Dinos, an Enzo, a DB5. The Jaguar XJ 220 was on sale. On sale! Many of the other cars were for rent, and the rest were stored there, generously put on view by their owners. You could see the dirt in the grill on Veyron, proving that the owner actually took it out on the streets occasionally. I thought I was going to take pictures, but how could I do justice to the astounding cars around me. In the end, only one car deserved to have it's photo taken:

That is a Lamborghini. The Diablo, I believe.

And that's a bumper sticker. An enduring testament that having money has nothing to do with taste or brains (at least they support the arts - the worst offender there was an Aston that someone in Switzerland turned into a Kombi, a station wagon).

I couldn't bring myself to take any other pictures for the exact same reason that I don't really like going to zoos. It's not really any fun getting those pictures or being in zoos. It's much more fun to catch them in the wild. Obviously, the analogy is not exact; most of us are never going to see a polar bear in the wild. There is always a shot at seeing a Ferrari (or hearing one. I had the distinct pleasure of listening the engine of a 612 California purr it's way into the engine bay). And I cheated with the Veyron, which was in a show room. There are only 200 of them in existence (they cost 1.7 million dollars and it costs Volkswagen at least twice that to make them), so I don't feel so bad about it (like catching that endangered Asian something or other at the zoo).

By some miracle, the way home also featured the Audi showroom, the Mercedes Show Building, the BMW floor (that was on the way there actually), the Lambo show room (and the Vantage parked behind it), the Harley dealership, and the Chrysler dealership, which stood out in the same way the Hooters under the S-Bahn did. I guess I get it, but really, just why?

I've got a few other automotive surprises up myself (including an Aston DB-9 Volante and a vintage Bentley, both on the Gendarmemarkt), but today was a day devoted to cars and the lengths I will walk to visit them.