Oakwinter.com

So, Google Maps’ new “My Maps” feature is addictive like crack. You could easily waste an entire day playing with it. Evidence: one map of my Euro-travels and one map of all the airports I’ve been to.

This thing will suck you in and never let you go. Promise.

Some pharmacists across the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control and morning-after pills, saying that dispensing the medications violates their personal moral or religious beliefs.

The trend has opened a new front in the nation’s battle over reproductive rights, sparking an intense debate over the competing rights of pharmacists to refuse to participate in something they consider repugnant and a woman’s right to get medications her doctor has prescribed. It has also triggered pitched political battles in statehouses across the nation as politicians seek to pass laws either to protect pharmacists from being penalized — or force them to carry out their duties.

Pharmacists’ Rights at Front Of New Debate

The Church of England has backed the Catholic Church in its bid to be exempt from laws on adoption by gay couples.

Catholic leaders in England and Wales say its teachings prevent its agencies placing children with homosexuals and they will close if bound by the rules.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, have written to Tony Blair.

They say “rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning”.

The Equality Act, due to come into effect in England, Wales and Scotland in April, outlaws discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexual orientation.

Churches unite over adoption row

Over the past few years, a growing number of Somali taxi drivers in the Twin Cities have been interpreting Koranic prohibitions on carrying alcohol to include ferrying passengers with alcohol in their bags.

“If you are a cabdriver and a practicing Muslim, you can’t carry alcohol,” said Idris Mohamed, an adjunct professor of strategic management at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. “It would be the same for a practicing Christian trying to honor their beliefs.”

Some Muslim Cabbies Refuse Fares Carrying Alcohol

I remember when I first got back to Atlanta this last time, right before I fell asleep in the car, I said something about how I never, ever wanted to set foot on a plane, in an airport, etc ever ever ever again. All that died today on the walk to work.

I spent all day scheming my way back to Germany or Portugal or France or wherever, trying to figure out how I can finagle some kind of grad school or teaching position or something. Also, I would not turn down a marriage proposition from a wealthy Austrian heiress who is dead set on skinny American redheads. Hint hint.

I’m seriously considering finishing that German degree. Words I never thought I’d say…

Car’s in the shop, bike needs a new seat, what’s a lad to do? Bus it is, then.

For those in the audience with short attention spans, let’s summarise: the bus system here in Music City, USA, was designed by someone with a serious mental retardation. I don’t think this person even knew what a bus looked like before getting the gig. I’m happy to provide further libelous statements as needed.

Consider the following:

• In real bus systems (for values of “real” approximating “the ones in Switzerland”), they know exactly when the bus will be passing a given stop, down to the minute, and they let you know it; the schedules are phrased like, “a bus will stop here at :03, :18, :33, and :48 past the hour”. Except, you know, in four languages.

  In Nashville, the best they can tell you is the interval between busses. The intervals are usually something like, “a bus will stop here once ever 25-40 minutes”. Let me translate that: “we have no idea where our busses are”.

• In Nashville, there’s a bus stop at every street corner. Americans are apparently too lazy to walk to a bus stop, so busses end up spending more stopped, picking up passengers by the ones and twos, than actually moving. Real bus systems know to space the stops out so busses can actually cover some ground between stops.

• Bus stops aren’t covered, nor do they have timetables or route maps. You should just know. Fool.

• Every route in the city (save one or two) run through a central choke point in the core of downtown Nashville. I don’t mean a covered central station. We’re talking about a single section of street, one city block long, one lane in either direction. Busses end up spending about 10-15 minutes at a dead stop here, waiting for the busses in front of them to move.

• The only places to buy bus tickets are on the busses themselves, and you have to have exact change. Have a $5 bill instead of the $1.25 for a ticket? Well, you get your change back in bus tickets. Sucka.

• In places like Basel, you buy a ticket and it’s valid for a certain number of zones for two hours. You can take as many busses as you need within those two hours, so long as you stay inside your concentric zones. Here in Nashville, everytime you change busses, you have to buy a new ticket, even if you were only on the first bus for five minutes. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is so brilliant.

All this combines to lead to a bus system that is so colossally inefficient, I cannot figure out how it functions. Going the two miles from Centennial Park to 4th Avenue took 45 minutes. Two miles. 45 minutes. I walk faster than that.

Today was a strange day in America.

The whole country was somber today. The corporate media, the blogs and everyone in between spent the day deep in anniversary journalism — where we were, where we’ve been. NBC, ABC and others replayed their broadcasts from five years ago. CNN included the hour of coverage leading up to the first attack; they covered a fashion show in New York, some white girl gone missing, etc. One of my coworkers commented how shocking the contrast was, how silly and trivial the things we cared about back then were. He was clear to use the past tense: “silly and trivial…back then”. The more things change…

I remember someone saying, when it happened, that this was our generation’s Kennedy assassination. My parents — and maybe your parents, too — remember exactly where they were when they heard JFK had been shot by some lunatic in Dallas. The comparison is exact. I can tell you, without looking it up, that 11 September 2001 was a Tuesday. I was in my last year of high school, coming back from a class retreat out in the woods. We were crossing the river, back to the buses from our island, and it rippled through the crowd that someone had flown a plane into one of the World Trade Towers. No one had the facts — they had heard it from someone who heard it from someone who had heard the bus driver mutter something under his breath. We went around, trying to find someone with one more scrap of information than we had, trying to piece together what was going on back in the world. The whole ride back, the radio was at full blast. We sat in silence the whole way, listening to someone somewhere trying to keep it together when the Pentagon, then the Towers, then a cornfield in Pennsylvania disappeared.

38 years on from the end of Camelot, not much has changed. Like my parents, I have a picture-quality mental image from 9:30 AM on a Tuesday; the radio man bringing the bad news; and our madmen still come from Texas.

My country is dying, and we’re doing it to ourselves. It took Rome 500 years to take over the world and another 500 to lose it. America went much faster: what took us 60 years to conquer, we gave back in five.

I say we gave it back because that’s what happened. It’s not like we were desperate to have it, and the Visigoths came in and took it from us by force. No-one made us lose. The Huns came out of the east, kicked us in the shins, and we lay down, crying for mommy, terrified that they might do it again.

Our democracy is dying, and we’re letting it bleed all over the floor. Americans got comfortable. We forgot that democracy doesn’t take care of itself, that it only works if We The People care enough. You know how I know? Look at Iraq; we went in and thought we could give them democracy. What shit. You can’t “give” democracy — it has to be taken. Unless people are willing to die for it, to wrest it away and keep it healthy, democracy simply won’t work. Democracy is too hard, and autocracy is too easy.

I’d like to hope things are coming around, that the American public is gradually waking up and realising that we’ve been lulled asleep with shiny lies and pretty what-if stories. I’d like to hope that outrage will soon sweep this country, that we will refuse to tolerate any longer the reckless policies that are being concocted and carried out in our name, both at home and abroad. I’d like to hope that we will once again insist and demand that our nation comport itself in the spirit and ideals of our heritage and traditions, and that America would assert herself anew as vanguard and defender of Liberty and Freedom for the world.

I’d like to hope this, but I don’t.

When Americans support racial profiling to the point where simply wearing a shirt with Arabic script is enough to make you a suspect, I know that Freedom is dead. When Americans see no problem with the government spying on every phone call you place and every purchase you make, I know that Liberty is dying. When Americans want jail time for reporters who publish details of illegal government programs, I know that the Bill of Rights is burning. When Americans want to build a wall to keep the brown people out of our cities (but not out of our gardens), I know that somewhere, someone is remodelling the Statue of Liberty and in this new design, there’s simply no room for the Tired, the Hungry and the Huddled Masses.

A year after being destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still abandoned and desolate. Soon, Americans won’t have to go to all the way to Italy to see the ruined cities of a fallen empire.

Hey, Internet, I know we haven’t talked in a while, but that doesn’t mean I hate you ok? I just kinda got tired of writing about Europe and Paris and trains and self-imposed sleep deprivation and I figured you were probably pretty damn tired of it, too.

Can we be friends again, Internet?

I promise I’m going to finish writing about Europe, honestogod, just not right now. I really want to talk about Spain and Portugal (which you haven’t even heard about yet) and Ireland and England and the Tour de France, but not now. I’m more in the mood to talk about the trip to Portugal in March than the trips to Everywhere in June and July, but you’ll get it when you get it so just stop guilting me already, ok Internet?

In the meantime, I’m just going to talk about my house and my grass (*grumble* stupid lawnmower *grumble*) and my bookshelves.

XOXO,

Collin

• My original plan for Saturday (17 June) was to go see Edinburgh Castle and the Scottish War Museum there. However, when you find out that they want double-digit pounds for student admissions, you change your plans. Seriously, if you were to charge $20+ dollars for admission to a museum in America, you’d get shot. End of discussion.

• Highly recommended: Holyrood Park. Located behind Holyroodhouse Palace, the Queen’s official residence in Scotland, the Park is a huge sampling of the Scottish Highlands nestled in the middle of the national capital. Crisscrossed with pathways and capped by the peak of Arthur’s Seat, you can easily spend five or six hours walking around the park (as my feet can attest to).

  Definitely go up Arthur’s Seat, but be sure to take the steep way — the one on the city-side of the Seat (ie, not the Firth-side): the Firth-side path is easy-peasy stuff, while the city-side trail is a real climb. You will work up a sweat.

  At the top of Arthur’s Seat is a direction/distance marker, showing where and how far away various landmarks are. Up until reading this map, I had (for whatever reason) been under the impression that the Firth of Forth is north of Edinburgh; turns out it’s actually south. As a result, my mental map of Edinburgh is all turned around, and I have no idea what direction anything is in now.

• Sunday was spent being very lazy: played football in the courtyard with kids from Ireland, Australia and Wisconsin, watched football in the common room with 15 Polish kids. The Polish kids do not shut up, ever. Imagine a crowd of 18-year olds shouting constantly at the TV in a language you don’t understand and you have about the right idea.

• Did anyone else watch “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” when they were a kid? You know the song about Portobello Road and how everything and anything a chap can unload gets sold off the barrow there?

  It’s fantastic, for serious.

  So, it turns out that Edinburgh has a Portobello Road and, never being one to deny my childhood its whims, I decide to go see what this street’s all about.

  If you too love this movie, and you too ever find yourself in Edinburgh, and you too want to see if said street lives up to the hype, do not. Stay away. Portobello Road bears absolutely no resemblance to anything in the movie, save perhaps for the Hollywood backlot in which it was filmed. Kilometer after kilometer after kilometer of houses, gas stations and frozen food emporiums are lying in wait.

  And just in case you think that, even if the road is crap, you can still follow the road out to the Firth of Forth and at least see some of that long-awaited waterfront…well…

  (PS: When I set out, I couldn’t remember whether “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” was set in Edinburgh or not. Months later, Wikipedia informs me that it’s actually set in England’s West Country and that the Portobello Road scenes are supposed to take place in London. Stupid childhood memories.)

• So, Monday: the main point of today was meeting up with Internet Person Colin at a pub of his choosing. This, unlike Sunday’s many-kilometer misadventure, proved to be a rousing success, with both parties generally computer-nerding it up over pints of excellent ale.

  Before meeting him at The Cloisters (a nice little place, if ever you’re in the area), I went and walked around The Meadows, a long strip of, well, meadows. I sat for a while, trying to watch four cricket matches at the same time and figure out how the hell you play this game.

Part I: In Which Collin Returns to Germersheim

My train comes around the bend from Speyer and the first thing I see is the Studentenwohnheim building and that’s very, very weird.

The plan is to meet up with my friend Johanna, go to the American English conversation table, then leave again later that night. The plan stops at 10PM.

I spend the next two or three hours and a beer weighing my options. Plan #1 involves Ireland and Scotland; the bulk of Plan #2 is Italy. I’m having a tough time deciding between the two, primarily because I don’t want to do either one; I’m having trouble finding lodging in Italy, and the northern UK involves the extra expense of air travel. Fortunately, the ever-helpful Internet makes my decision for me.

A few weeks ago, I had a phone interview with IBM Ireland, and while researching travel options, I get an email from the same people: they’re interested in a second phone interview. Problem is, I won’t really have a phone number for the duration of the current Euro-adventure. I suggest we do the interview in person, they say OK; five minutes later, I have a €49 fare from Cologne to Edinburgh and a hostel in the same.

The plan is this: spend some time in Edinburgh, meeting up with Internet People while there, then make my way down to Dublin via Glasgow and possibly Belfast. This will put the interview about nine or ten days out, with time left over to go see some more of Ireland before heading back to central Europe.

I meet up with Johanna at 3PM, she makes me speak German for a few hours, then I get my revenge at the conversation table. Charlotte is surprised to see me (as planned). All is going according to plan.

Part II: In Which Collin Makes His Way to Scotland

The English conversation table finally breaks up around 11:20 PM and I head off to the train station, escorted by the lovely Johanna. The ticket machines are most willing to sell me a late-night trip northward, and we say our goodbyes next to the RegionalExpress 3862 to Karlsruhe. Change the locomotive to a propeller plane, swap small-town Germany for northern Morocco and we could make a run at a convincing Boghart and Bergman.

I guess the plot would have to be different, too.

I sleep all the way to Karlsruhe; upon my arrival, I am hungry. Given that the Europeans generally don’t go in for American-style 24-hour everything, I’m worried about being able to find food before my train leaves.

I have never been so relieved to see a McDonalds in my life. I elect to sample some of the more un-American items on their menu: the Big Tasty McChicken (which is indeed “big” and may well contain “chicken”, but “tasty” might be a bit much) and Farm Kartoffeln (Kartoffeln == potatoes) with sour cream dipping sauce.

At 1AM, there are no trains in the Karlsruhe Hauptbahnhof. Occasionally a freight line will blow through, and an ICE just crept by (yes, crept; we’re talking single-digit speeds), but otherwise the place is ganz leer, as they say. It’s very strange, seeing the Karlsruhe station completely trainless, given how busy it is during the day time. They’ve got a lot of the lights turned off or turned down, giving the place a distinct “imps are going to jump out and throw fireballs at you” feel.

There’s a surprising number of people here, most of them apparently waiting for the same train I am (the 1:34 ICE to Kiel).

It occurs to me at some point that this will be my second time in Cologne today.

GermanWings limits you to 13 kg of carry-on luggage, meaning that I’ve had to check my backpack for the first time. I tried convincing the woman to let me take 2 sub-13 kilo carry-ons, but she didn’t bite. This is the first time in a while I haven’t had my pack with me on the flight. I am nervous.

I am the only passenger in this entire wing of the Cologne/Bonn airport; I guess that’s what I get for arriving five hours early for my flight. I’m here so early, my plane isn’t even up on the big “what flights are leaving when” boards yet.

Killing time, catching up on blog entries (like this one). I’m trying to come up with a list of all the airports I’ve ever been in; here’s the first stab:

• America
• Nashville, TN
• Atlanta, GA
• Dulles, Washington DC
• Newark, NJ
• JFK, NYC
• O’Hare, Chicago
• Colorado Springs, CO
• Minneapolis/St Paul, MN
• Cincinatti, OH
• St. Louis, MO
• Europe
• Gatwick, London
• Heathrow, London
• Geneva, Switzerland
• Basel-Mulhouse, France
• Charles de Gaulle, Paris
• Frankfurt Rhein-Main, Germany
• Berlin Tegel, Germany
• Madrid, Spain
• Lisbon, Portugal
• Cologne/Bonn, Germany (today)
• Edinburgh, Scotland (today)

I think I’ve forgotten one or two. Also, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been in some of these, like Atlanta.

My laptop clock says it’s 8:03 AM CEST before other passengers show up. The place is still not what you’d call “full”.

Coming to you from the other side of passport control: I seriously need to get my passport photo updated. I’m tired of immigration officials spending far longer than is comfortable looking at my papers.

Part III: In Which Collin Arrives in Scotland

A country full of freckled redheads. This must be heaven.

Edinburgh is a very pretty place, much prettier than expected.

To kill time before I can check into my hostel, I go grocery shopping, grab a little picnic for lunch. The menu: little rucola + onion bhaji sandwiches, plus a banana and the most delicious potato chips ever. I was somewhat skeptical when the bag claimed a flavour of “roasted chicken with lemon and thyme”, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t managed to squeeze Thanksgiving dinner in there. Dining: al fresco, in the park below the Edinburgh castle.

I’m finally checked in to the hostel, after this ordeal: arrive in city center; hike to the hostel’s address; get told by a little guy from the Dominican Republic that I have to go somewhere else to check in, in a tone of voice that says I’m the stupidest person on God’s Green Earth for not knowing this; hike to the check-in place; get told that I’m too early; adjourn for lunch; come back to check-in place; exchange money for lodging; hike back to the hostel; find out they gave me the wrong bed assignment; wait while poor English speaker #1 argues with poor English speaker #2 about whose fault this is; finally get a bed assignment; drop stuff. All this, and the room smells like ass.

Intermezzo: go out wandering, make dinner, watch a World Cup game or two.

It seems that there are three couples in this room, and I’m not in one. I couldn’t begin to match the faces I see during the day with the beds that get used at night.

So, a bit of excitement today.

I get down to the train station early to buy that rumoured youth discount card.
I manage to purchase one (they’re significantly less slick than their German and Swiss counterparts), ending up with a ticket back to Paris in the bargain — meaning I need to buy another ticket during our 2.5-hour layover in Gare du Nord. (My parents are ticketted straight through.)

After making our way to Gare du Nord from Gard Saint Lazare, heavy packs and all through the Metro system ([1]), I queue up to buy my ticket. Thirty minutes later, I have a train ticket that leaves at the same time as my parents’ train, but arrives in Cologne an hour earlier. We all marvel at this, chalking it up to some magic inefficiency somewhere in the French rail system. We all go off our separate ways for lunch.

We regroup 15 minutes or so before the train is scheduled to leave. My parents’ seat reservations are in one car while mine are in another, so we split up to find our respective seats. At some point while searching for car 28 in a train where the numbers only go to 12, as I’m reading over my ticket for the dozen-th to see if maybe I’ve misread the car number, I realise why my train arrives an hour earlier: 3:50PM (the time now) is not 2:50PM, aka, when my train left. One mad dash in slippery conditions later, I’ve informed my level-headed father that he’s going to have to get to Cologne, feed the family and find the hotel — without the directions, since I don’t have enough time to get them out of my bag before his train leaves.

Dad says, OK.

I hop off, and their train goes in one direction while I go in the other, back to the ticket window. 45 minutes of standing in line later, I’m perched hawklike on the platform, waiting for my new train to Cologne; I am determined not to miss this one.

I arrive in Cologne 250 minutes later than planned. The guy at the information desk insists on speaking to me in English. He mangles the directions. After several S-Bahn lines and a good bit of walking, I find the place. My parents have checked into the hotel; this is good.

I knock on the door for what seems like forever before they come up behind me. They’ve been out at dinner, enjoying watching Germany’s victory in that day’s World Cup match. They’ve got beer in hand and have only returned to grab their daypacks so they can return to the market and stuff their packs full of booze and chocolate to take back to America. I grab my own rucksack, stockpile my own beer, then we all return to the hotel to swap stories about finding the place.

Despite the long day, I’ve no appetite. On the other hand, this is Germany, and if my time abroad has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t pass up beer in Germany. Thank you, beer.

[1] - When I first came to Paris, I spent a long time searching for the fabled Magenta line between Gare du Nord and Gare Saint Lazare. I finally found it on this trip; turns out it’s a lot easier to locate coming from Gare Saint Lazare than from Gare du Nord.

Plan du jour: my parents will go see the Bayeux Tapestry and then take a tour of the D-Day beaches while I head up to Cherbourg for an ocean-side picnic.

Following a lazy, sleep-in start to the day, the family Oakley-Winter makes its way to the train station with north-bound intentions. The son, who allegedly speaks something like the local language, attempts to procure the following:

• Two (2) adult round-trip tickets from Caen to Bayeux

• One (1) youth round-trip ticket from Caen to Bayeux

• One (1) youth round-trip ticket from Caen to Cherbourg

After conversing with the clerk at the ticket counter, the son ends up holding the following things:

• Three (3) adult one-way tickets from Caen to Bayeux

• Three (3) adult one-way tickets from Bayeux to Cherbourg

If you compare the list of “things to buy” with the list of “things received”, you will notice that they do not match.

So, the son goes and sorts things back out, this time with a different clerk. All is set a-rights. Trains are put into motion.

After showing the family around Bayeux a bit, getting them oriented as to where to find The Tapestry and its location relative to where their D-Day tour would leave from, I headed back to the train station just in time to watch the 12:48 to Cherbourg pull away from the platform. I honestly don’t know how an hour and a half got away from me like that.

So, to kill the 90 minutes until the next train, I join a dozen or so other American college-agers at the Bar de la Gare for a beer or two. I read my book in German, they read theirs in (what I can only assume to be) English, and some Frenchmen talk about how their World Cup team is going to kill the Swiss that afternoon — all is as it should be. At some point, I walk over to the train station to find out more about a rumoured youth discount card for the French rail system (a handy thing, that [the card, not the French rail system]); the clerk, realising that we don’t share native tongues, draws me a little chart to show that 25% is less than 50%. I thank her.

After sleeping through every single station between Bayeux and Cherbourg, I groggily head off in the direction of what I hope to be the ocean. Just as my picnic basket and I are nearing the beach, the clouds open up at firehose strength. Since I’ve cleverly forgotten my rain jacket back in Caen, I take shelter in a park under some trees. The trees start to leak just as I realise that the park surrounds a bombed-out church, and I spend the next two hours crouched in the doorway of what was once a 12th-century rectory (cheerfully bedecked with big “watch for falling stones” signs). Time goes by, I get hungry and my picnic turns out to be somewhat less oceanside that I had hoped.

The rain lets up around 5:45. The last train leaves Cherbourg for Caen at 7:24. Since I have no idea how far off the ocean still is, I suck it up, accept the defeat and head back to town. To warm up a bit, I pop into the first cafe I see with a TV, grab a cup of coffee, sit down to watch France play Switzerland in Stuttgart and prompty realise that I’m the only person younger than 45 in the whole place. 10 minutes into the game, I further realise that I’m the only one cheering for Switzerland. I decide to keep this to myself. The guy behind me shouts so loudly at the TV that I figure a Swiss fan might not be his favorite person this evening.

Currently: sharing this entire train carriage with a French woman in her mid-40’s. We both just got scared shitless when a train passed by our open windows going the opposite direction.

Of course, now that I’m heading back to Caen the sun has come back out and everything is pretty again. To quote Dick Dastardly, drat, drat and double drat. I just haven’t had much luck with the seashore this trip. Oh well, I can always come back when le Tour swings through Caen for stage five.